when you breathe, i want to be the air for you

I had a reasonably enjoyable day at work today, although I have a lot of work to do this weekend that I intend to put off until at least Sunday. After work, I met up with Claudia, and we drove to Millbrae to have dinner at Peter's Cafe. Yes, we love that place enough that we drove the 3oish minutes each way just to have diner food. I had a steak and a baked potato, and I tried to eat the half-ear of sweetcorn that came with it, but it tasted like death. I'm sure it would have tasted fine to anyone else, but I just cannot abide by the sweetcorn here - it cannot compare to even the bleakest ears of my childhood.

After dinner and much catching up, we came back to my apartment and watched 'The Devil Wears Prada', which had been sitting on my tv stand for a month and which I had wanted to watch ever since it came out in theatres. Watching it was a mistake. For one, all of the talk about how size-6 girls are fat made me feel hideous. For another (and this was much more devastating), the movie, albeit hilarious, essentially highlighted to me that I've completely sold out and betrayed my earlier ambitions, and that even though I know that I've sold out, I don't have any intention of trying to redeem myself. This realization was building throughout the movie as I watched the main character being seduced by glamour, and came crashing to a head towards the end of the movie, when it was pointed out that she was turning into the devil herself. The awful realization I had during that scene was, regardless of what she did in response (I won't ruin the ending by saying what or whether she did anything), I probably wouldn't have taken it as a sign to change my life - I probably would have acknowledged it and kept going.

And that, my friends, is devastating. Life is essentially one fast slog towards death, and what does one want to take along on such a march? Versace sunglasses? Luxury spa treatments? Or a sense of adventure, an awareness of life and humanity, and an ability to see all the beauty in the world before one's life is snuffed out? I'm in the process of choosing Versace, of bleeding all of my creativity and desire into a corporate job that I despised four years ago, of betraying the girl I was by embracing the seductive allure of the fast-paced, comfortable, California life. And the problem is...I'm okay with it. And given how long I've brooded over this, you would think that I would be happy to have some sense of peace over the choices I've made, but now I'm just ashamed of myself for being happy with the fact that I turned my back on who I was and what I wanted.

Then again, you know me, and I can be rather melodramatic. And there is a lot to be said for using your talents to achieve things, and while I may be ignoring certain talents while in a corporation, I am exercising several others to achieve a lot of great things. It would be easier if I was a one-trick pony, but right now my analytical/managerial side is trumping my creative/academic side, in a way that is challenging enough to keep me engaged.

So I'm pretty committed to staying in my current position for awhile, but it's the 'what comes next' that scares me. It doesn't help that I've whined to my friends for years about how I don't want to be a sell-out, so now they ask uncomfortable questions about when I'm going to quit, or suggest that I should be applying to schools, and it just makes me sad. Perhaps I deserve it. Anyway, now that I've fully brooded for one night, it's time to go to bed!