The day I escaped from work

So I bailed out of work this afternoon.

It was a beautiful sunny day with little breeze - or, at least, a change from the hurricane-style swirls we experienced yesterday. I was sitting at my desk with an assignment - the assignment I finished yesterday. You can only frequent BabyNames, People.com and every shopping site on the web so many times. World news wasn't happening that fast, and I don't count Paris Hilton going back to jail.

Don't you think that's a little ridiculous? I'm not getting paid by the hour. In fact, I'm not getting paid at all. My time is precious! I could be sleeping, for God's sake.

My boss left for somewhere, cheerfully as always. My two co-workers headed out the door for lunch, without saying anything to me. That was enough. I scrawled a note and dropped it on my boss's laptop. The note said, in part, that "I have an appointment this afternoon." Yes, I thought, wryly, as I escaped into sunshine, an appointment with SOMETHING BETTER TO DO.

She tells me a lot that she wishes I had graduated so that she could hire me. Maybe, I silently think to myself, you could start by paying me. That might put us on better terms.

I'm really frustrated. I'm frustrated with the 8:30 to 5 schedule, the 25-minute commute. I'm frustrated with cement and I'm frustrated with finishing supposedly 2-day projects in 2 hours. Mostly, of course, I'm frustrated with myself for being so passive. What I SHOULD say is that I'm too overqualified to be an unpaid intern, and that unpaid internships are perhaps the cruelest job ever. Do you know that I lose money by just getting in my car every day and driving to work? Oh, you're inviting me to grab lunch with you? That's nice. Well, let me just spend $10 today to do all your stupid work and stare with glazed eyes out the window to freedom.

As my boss walked out the door today, on one of her many trips into the sprinkles of sunlight, she motioned to the handful of teenage boys wearing neon yellow shirts and carrying dust pails, and said, "Hey! You could be doing that this summer instead." And I smiled, just like I should, but inside I was thinking, "I'm 21 years old and I can write better than you - no, I wouldn't be picking up discarded trash in front of the Capitol. BUT EVEN IF I DID, I would be getting paid for it. Beast.

So hopefully I can work up enough courage to tell someone to jump off a cliff. Or just do it myself.

I made the most of my afternoon. I stopped by the library and mingled with the elderly as I continued through my summer reading list. Charles Dickens was painful. I had forgotten since high school. After that, I came home and enjoyed my free lunch, compliments of our kitchen. Then I went out to mow, almost severing Midnight with the lawnmower. I had hopped on and started the mower, and Piper jumped out from underneath. I was like, Holy crap! That was a close one. I paused for a couple of seconds and then turned on the blade, which sounds like the apocolypse in an iMax theater. And then MIDNIGHT jumped out. What cat doesn't move when a LAWNMOWER starts?! He only decided to get out of my way when he realized the blades were about to make him our latest cat fatality.

Sigh. And then Julie drove her new car into a ditch tonight. Not quite the surprise that it should be.

I have a longterm plan for my life. Well, two plans actually. The first plan, which I'm sure I've discussed before, is to buy a beachhouse in North Carolina and live there with my sister Amy and our two dogs. We will be life partners. NOT SEXUALLY, obviously. I'm sick of how people's futures center around their sexual partners. 'You are cordially invited to our wedding,' aka, I Would Like to Announce that We Will Be Having Sex Together for the Rest of our Lives.

Anyway, if that falls through (with Amy bailing on me), or if by some chance I become more enchanted with the idea of marriage, I have picked my wedding party. My MOH will be my sister Amy, and my bridesmaids will be my sisters Julie, Lyndsey and Lexie and my niece, Whitney. My nephew Holden will be the ringbearer, and my best friend Carly will be the 30-year-old flower girl.

In a completely unrelated funny story, I was in the kitchen with Scott the other day, when he said, randomly, "You know, Amy eats whatever you eat. If you told her to eat cat food, she would." I considered this. I will admit that I had noticed a pattern - that Amy would casually ask me what I had for lunch, or what I wanted for dinner, and then when I told her, she would fix it for herself. So I brought it up with her a few days later and mentioned what Scott had said. She laughed at herself, in good Amy fashion, and then paused, as if she were thinking hard about it. "You know," she said, slowly. "I think I would eat cat food if you told me it was good for me."

THE POWER.