me-centricity.

I aim to strike a balance between celebrity-/entertainment-/bizarre current events-centric things and exclusively me-centric things...there are BILLIONS of exclusively author-centric blogs out there, I keep up with plenty of them, but it seems for every post I read that's genuinely entertaining, there's another "day-in-the-life-of" blog that's sooooooo ridiculously dull I read it and swear I'll never subject anyone to my own "day-in-the-life-of" details because - frankly - my life these day is not conducive to particularly witty dialogue.

THAT SAID, it's a sunny, Friday afternoon and I'm one of the few people still stuck sitting inside trying ("trying" being a sort of fluid, amorphous term interchangeable with other words like "pretending" and "avoiding" and "resenting")--TRYING to get a little work done.

And that's where the trouble begins. The work. The bookkeeping. The bean-counting. The number-crunching. The accounting.

I was a smart kid in the school days (well, the school days are still intermittantly in-progress as I find secret stashes of money or secret pockets of motivation or unexpected boosts of ambition--boosts which usually come on the heels of particularly frustrating weeks at work), but in the "we-tell-you-what-classes-to-take-and-you-take-them" days of high school, I could never quite snag STRAIGHT "A's."

Because they forced me to take math classses.

I have hosts of sad, pitiful little stories about being embarassed over my math deficiencies that start at the age of 7 or 8 and continue right up through gradution - stories of being forced to perform long division assignments straight through the lunch hour, stories of teachers asking me in front of other students, "Do you remeber HOW TO ADD?" things like that.

So it seems to me like a vicious, cruel, ironic twist of fate that I've spent the last several years refining my accounting skills--professionally. It wasn't planned. I didn't encourage this. I never thought, in those days spent sitting in a classroom in college in San Diego that I'd end up paying rent by dealing with nothing but NUMBERS all day. I figured I'd snag a broadcasting degree or a sociology degree or a business and management communications degree. Didn't quite happen that way. School had to take a break, and I had to get a job, and since then I've bounced from job to job to job as circumstances necessitate, each time landing in a more-accounting-specific position than the last.

It's at times like these - meaning quiet Fridays in the office when the AC is blowing straight down on my fingers and toes and my to-do list is filled with wonderful things like client billings and change orders and payroll taxes and quarterlies and excise reconciliations - that I wonder what to do to set myself more on track with plans and ideas and visions and expectations and aspirations that I've let sit on the sidelines for the past six or seven years...

It's not that I'm afraid of change (except that it terrifies me for the most part) or that I'm unwilling to take risks to set myself back on course (except that risks are definitely something I avoid the way I avoid movies starring Rob Schneider and avoid chocolate anything and avoid shopping for new jeans) or that I've lost some of that critical fervor that previously compelled me back toward school when times got rough (ok, who am I kidding, the fervor is lukewarm, tepid, atrophied), I just feel like I've been looking at my professional situation from the same frustrated position for so long I'm incapable of thinking creatively anymore.

I see myself seven more years down the road in a position just like this one, I hear myself muttering the same, "Gotta get back to school" sentiments to myself...and on days like today (when the last few people have taken off and I'm still trying to figure out how to make this customer statement balance) I wonder what it'll take to kick me back into passionate, empowered, ambtious gear.

I change my mind constantly.

One week I'm planning to head back to school and snag a psychology degree from UW and head straight to grad school.

The next week I'm thinking, "why don't I just finish school with a finance degree (I figure The Employer would be nothing but supportive of some sort of academic measure that suggests I'm interested in sticking around and being a better Employee) and then start thinking about an MBA...that seems reasonably aligned with the current track I'm on, and wouldn't require me to start from SCRATCH in an entirely new field, with NO practical experience and ZERO connections...

then the next week I think, "Hey, what about culinary school! You love to impress people with your cooking!"

and the week after that, "Heather, kiddo, you've been a writer since you could hold your Crayola, nothing makes you happier than that adrenaline rush from a finely crafted sentence, why would you let that slip away...why would you ignore what you're most passionate about just because the challenge of starting over in a new industry seems frightening...shoot, COMMUNITY college seemed frightening after 5 years away from school and you ACED that establishment like nobody's buisiness, what's to be afraid of????"

I don't know.

If I were a cartoon character, I'd be walking around with a big, glowing, beautiful, can't-miss-it Question Mark over my head these days.

There's no easy solution.

Just a very long me-centric tirade with no simple answer.