Restless and ambitious, hungry for the world

I still spend my weekends trying to figure out what my next step in life is. Sometimes I wonder if I'm rushing things as usual, and if I shouldn't perhaps just sit back and let the next opportunity avail itself, but what can I say? Commitment issues. The only thing I really love at the moment is where I live, and that's only because I created every square inch from the bare walls up, and when I come home to nap on the couch after a long day of earning money and being everyone's go-to bitch, I know I'm home. This weekend I mostly read about the CIA, clicked through their website for career options for about an hour, drew sugar skulls and contemplated a possible new tattoo, and walked around the neighborhood collecting stories. But I'm not organized enough to be a tool of the state, I think my everyday-business boss is sufficiently fed up with my visible tattoos as is and wouldn't appreciate me sporting a colorful new skull, and all the stories are kind of personal and I'd prefer to keep them to myself... so I am back at square one.

After work I decided to commit to 5 serious sugar skull pieces, planned out a general theme, and hit the art store for micron pens, color markers, pearl paper and paint pens. Then to Green Apple Books for an adequately rustic home for my sugar skulls - either the pages of an old copy of a novel I really like, or an old medical science journal, or, if I'm really lucky, an old illustrated volume of natural history. I rummaged all three stores, feeling paper and flipping through pages, and left with two different sizes of illustrated local plant guides, but I never got around to using them because I also left with a copy of this:

And I haven't put it down since. Work - what work? As cliche as it feels to say this, this writer gets me, and in her memoir she addresses every single concern I could ever have - as well as every fascination I've ever had - with the Company. Now I doubly, triply don't know what steps to take further, because her memoir is both encouraging and discouraging in equal parts. I'm only half way through, but I already have a million questions I'd want to ask Lindsay, starting with whether or not, ultimately, it was worth it. I anticipate the answer would be a firm yes for the sheer experience, and that in the end, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something really extraordinary.

My biggest reservation is that I really don't enjoy making sacrifices in my personal life (of which there would be plenty), and I think I am much more of a "see the forest for the trees" kind of person than a "see the big picture" person. But the comfort of my stable, warm personal life is growing more and more outweighed by a total lack of real adventure.

Enough about me though. This woman, Lindsay, addresses all the romanticised ideals of the Company which, unfortunately, yours truly somehow managed to grow up on, but still insists on going through with it despite the harsh reality that a lot of Company work is unexciting, unfulfilling, and very woman-unfriendly. She describes it as an itch. It is an itch. And itches need to be scratched.