Monday, 24 July 1995 11:19am

S,

Christ, I’ve got to get out of here Sis. I’ve got to leave work.  I’m so sick of it here, I’m at the point where every little daily injustice outrages me to the point where I feel like my moral soul is being massaged by a cheese grater.  I can’t fucking stand it anymore. If I had a job to go to tomorrow, I’d do it.  I haven’t overcome my fear of entering a new workplace, I just want to escape this one so bad.  I know that I’m relatively unskilled, and I’ll probably have to take a pay cut, but I just can’t abide the boss here.  He makes me shrivel inside, I don’t know how to convey the repulsion I feel around him.  God, it’s like he’s unnatural or something, with his cool, rustling dry skin, and glinting rat eyes. I need to escaaaaaaape.

I don’t know what sort of job I’ll go to, I guess ideally I should go to uni, but it’s so expensive, a three year course costs about $8,500. You don’t have to pay it back until your income reaches a certain level.  This really holds me back, I hate the idea of being in debt.  I guess I could pay it up-front, but then I think of how hard I’ve saved over the last three years and to see it all go poof like that, I think my heart would surely break.  You’d hear it all the way in England.  I’m not sure what sort of degree I should even go for. Journalism I’m kinda turned off. I’ve seen the competition, and it’s so fierce, freaks with 190 IQ’s scratching their peers’ eyes out for shitty sub-editing jobs at The Herald-Sun.  It’s not very dignified.  And it’s a short-lived job, journo’s are generally thrown out with the trash once they get to forty.  Maybe I should get an MBA and join the ranks of middle management.  Yeah, like that’s any less internecine and undignified than journalism. Christ, what am I gonna do? I’d always sort of thought that I’d be like a professional student, you know?  Racking up degree after degree, strolling around campus in baggy fawn corduroy trousers and hounds-tooth scarves, the chilly Winter air nipping at my nose as I head to the warm, woolly library to read some fascinating work by some fascinating author to make myself  even more fascinating at cocktail parties.  Oh – I’m living in dreamland Sis, and now I wake to find the hound of reality with its jaws planted firmly in the wobbily expanse of my ass.  I don’t wanna live in the real world. Shit.

Same day, 12:25pm

So I’ve just been over the road to Collins Place to buy some food, and I’m walking along looking at the people in their fifties and I think “God, I’ve got to keep getting up every morning and keep breathing for the next forty or fifty years”, and I see life stretching out interminably. And then I’m served my food and I think “Christ, imagine doing that 8 hours a day” and I think how my job’s not so bad. Then I get back to my desk and think how I’ve gotta keep pounding away on this very keyboard for those forty or fifty years so some pin-striped despot can go on his $6,000 a week wilderness retreats with “no radio, no TV, no phones” and think he’s some fucking Robinson Crusoe until he gets back to his workforce of Man Fridays. And all this time most of the world is so much worse off than me. Is it just part of human nature to be unhappy with what you have, no matter how good it is? Shit (again). It’s no use, I’m havin’ a bad day. May as well get resigned to it sisters and brothers. I’m gonna be a wet blanket all day. I keep listening to Oasis’ single “Whatever” and singing the lines. “I’m freeeee, to be whatever I…….” and thinking how bitter Old Man Irony can be.

Are you gonna write back or what?

Love

J