Speaking of accuracy, part the first: the continuation of the Monday entry, slated for yesterday, did not run in this space because I was preoccupied by one valued reader�s take-away from it that I had chosen the MBA course of action for the same reason that I had, in the past, toyed with the idea of going back to school for a BS in Computer Science and becoming a programmer. Don�t gag, please note: I never wanted to do that, about which you can refresh your memory here and here if you want; it was just when my life seemed so hopeless and filled with shit that no response but such a self-auto-da-f� seemed both sufficiently grandiose and appropriately nihilistic. So to me the two situations � nihilism vs. anarchy, hopelessness vs. kicking against the pricks � are (feel) so different that my head kind of exploded that anyone who knows me could see them as the same, and all yesterday I was feeling angry and dumbfounded and also bruised and tender about the possibility of writing and having meaning come out, so I could not do it. I will take that offline, however.

Still not fired yet. If I can make it through tomorrow, then not only will I be insured for my ski trip to the Okanogan over the weekend but my Monday and Tuesday off counted as vacation time.

Speaking of accuracy, part the second: I was talking to Vanessa last night on the diary tip and she told me how she covers her tracks in hers by means of such tactics as never naming bars, like I would write about the 611 or the Bad Juju. What do you do instead? I gasped, and I think I must have sounded horrified. I just write "a bar," she said, I�ll say "first we went to this bar and then we went to another bar." All of her names are aliases � I better still have my badass one � and all of her proper nouns are elided. It fascinates me (apparently my self-fascination is also still warm and just where I left it) how this is something I would never consider, how to me a recusal from specificity would change the nature of the narrative and make it� what? Something not worth telling? Something not mine? I am not sure. Something different. Then again, if I were writing somewhere that had my name on it, like Vanessa for professional reasons must never do, how much of Monday�s entry would have seen the light of day?

So here�s my tentative � anarchical � plan w/r/t an August-ish departure from Seattle. This is the good part. I�m thinking that once I get canned, I�m not going to look for another office job and that until I leave I�m going to take classes, study German, sew, work on projects, go running, and pick up some part-time retail gig. I�ll put my cards on the table here and say that I can afford this � I won some money on a game show. Don�t dwell on that, keep reading. It would not be fair for me to take a professional, career-track-type position when I knew I planned to quit it after only months (and to get to the point of being offered one would take months in any case). I�m not averse to the idea of temping a few days a week, but for one thing unless you dance exactly the steps the temp pimps want you to you will soon find yourself abandoned at the edge of the floor and for another I want to be free to take classes, which includes the daytime. It sounds so decadent and selfish that I am embarrassed to admit that I want to and that I can � I mean, not lavishly or anything, no trips to the Riviera and I�ll have you know I still roll in a �93 Accord, but if I go on a budget and practice living like a student, I won�t have to sit behind anyone�s desk except my own for as long as I live in Seattle. Wouldn�t I be sorry if I didn�t do that? Wouldn�t I love to go running every day and buy a used sewing machine and get some regular volunteer shifts at the blood bank and work my way through the exercises in "Pants For Every Body" and take chemistry and calculus and Abnormal Psychology and never wear anything that has to be dry cleaned? How many millions of joy units would that be? I could even try to pick up an internship somewhere that would look sexy on my resume and stand me in better stead for post-school employment: hi, I will work hard for you and you don�t have to pay me, what do you say? What�s scary to me, scary *because* this all sounds decadent and selfish, is that the officeless option is looking like the default, the thing that will happen if I don�t take any action to prevent it. And normally that�s my strategy for the self-sabotage by which I deny myself the things I want: just sit there and don�t do anything and soon the opportunity to have had it will have passed, and I can watch it recede with my normal one part regret and three parts relief because I don�t really know how to deal with gratification anyway and the prospect makes me panicky. This will make no sense to anyone except my sister, but take my word for it, that�s how my sick little brain works. So I know, for instance, because one of my comrades here has told me, that there is a contract position available to do low-level admin work in a division where I currently work with one of the program managers, and that people here would put in a good word for me if I applied (and I don�t know whether it was tacit on said comrade�s part that their sympathy for my downfall � ha, that�s pretty good � would further incline them to hire me or I am projecting my own irrational shame at having to be seen felled). It would be money and insurance, it would mean not having to justify myself to anyone who might call me out for being decadent and selfish, including you-guessed-it myself. But I cannot bear it. The thought makes me as miserable as Project Programmer used to. The two higher-level admins in that division are smug and officious slow-moving public-service lifers in bulky, whimsically appliqu�d acrylic cardigans; I cringe at their very e-mail subject headers, and they would be my supervisors. The one PM is bracingly competent and has a guileless way of speaking one doesn�t often encounter around here, but instead of sitting in meetings with her I�d be cleaning up the coffee cups and donut detritus after the attendees file out of the conference room. And � does this matter, at this point? � I�m not sure I�m down with that division�s whole charter. Saying so probably rings hollow plus makes me sound like I�m grasping at straws and am also a coward for wanting to hide behind some stupid swaggering ideology so as, again, not to have to be seen as decadent and selfish. Whose permission am I asking for here?