Ritter looked like Brad Pitt, well, then things might have been different. That wouldn’t have been such a hardship —more of a win-win situation. People always complained about women who used sex to get ahead, but my motto was Use what you got. Sort of.
Unemployed or not, I was lucky. I wasn’t completely without options. One of my friends sold Mary Kay and had been afte r me for months to become a representative. She was trying to meet a quota to earn a car and kept telling me how easy it was to get women to buy things to make them look better. Another friend of mine was a restaurant manager and would probably t ake pity on me and give me a job, even t hough he knew perfectly well I was a klutz and that having me as a server would lose him more customers than he’d gain. While both were interesting proposition s, somehow I couldn’t really see my self aspiring to drive a pink Cadillac or wait tables .
What I really h ad a passion for, ever since I was a freckled little girl, was writing. This was prior to wanting to be a ball - busting CEO. I received my first diary as a present, on my twelfth birthday and found great enjoyment in filling up those creamy white pages with scribble —insignificant to anyone but me. I wrote every day after school for years , cherishing my diary, filling it with my private thoughts, and later, stories I lost my self in. It was the one place I ever felt I could truly be honest. As the only girl, I had grown up with a wild and vivi d imagination. At age eight, I thought the Incredible Hulk lived in my closet and was there to protect me. At age fourteen, I was convinced I would be the next great American novelist or at least a great romance writer. Sneaking my mom’s Danielle Steele books and, later, Jackie Collins, taught me a lot — even if I didn’t understand a lot of what was in those books then or now . That c ould be why my last boyfriend told me that my expectations were too high and that life was not a romance novel. Screw him I thought, he should have been better in bed. I desired the romance-novel scenes.
Being a writer or working at Kentucky Fried Chicken (as that was my favorite restaurant as a little kid ) were my goals as a young girl . In light of recent events, maybe Kentucky Fried Chicken wouldn’t have been that bad. At least there, you probably got free food and I couldn’t see the manager wanting sexual favors — who would want to work there so bad that they’d do sexual favors?
I still wrote a lot as an adult, but had neve r been brave enough to share my writing with anyon e else. It was too personal. I was always too afra id. That’s why I was completely shocked last week when, at happy hour at Muldoon’s Pub, my friend, Trevor Jameson, who just happened to be the editor of a new online magazine called Our World , offered me a job to write a column for the human profile section of his magazine. Each month the magazine did a story on someone, as he put it, “ of interest. ” Personally, I described it as a piece on someone in the headlines that would attract readers. Even though Our World was supposed to be a serious magazine, people liked sensationalism. That’s what helped attract readers. Of course, I would never say that to Trevor; after all, he was my friend. Trevor told me that the column’s writer told him she wasn’t coming back from maternity leave , and he needed someone right away. At the time, I la ughed it off, telling Trevor I wasn’t possibly qualified to write, and the column didn’t pay enough to allow me to quit my day jo b, although secretly inside, I was just dying to take advantage of the opportu nity, if only I didn’t have such a bad shopping habit that kept my credit cards maxed out. Was that why I snapped today? Since last week, all I had been thinking about was Trevor’s offer and how frustrated I was that I couldn’t take it. I became increasingly unhappy at work and less tolerant , spending more time trying to figure out