I work as a medical secretary. Eight hours of each day I sit by a phone and field calls and make charts and transcribe dictated tapes and chat with the very nice but dull woman with the patient of a saint (and how she needs it) who sits beside me and try to distract myself with web surfing and reading and adding more and more bells and whistles to my web page, because if once I started thinking I wouldn't be able to stand it anymore.
I read an account of Clarion West yesterday. Clarion is a six week intensive sf conference that costs more than I can afford and I cannot possibly go to, because I promised my boss (a smart, nice doctor who actually respects my mind which is tremendously difficult to find when you're a secretary) that I'd stay till September. She has a new baby and a new job and is tremendously overworked and I like her and I need the medical insurance because I may be hypothyroid and I can't afford to find out on my own. Mostly though, I'm staying because I promised her.
Which is basically ridiculous, because however much she likes and needs me, once I'm gone she'll get a temp and perhaps another and another till she finds one she can live with and sure, she'll be thinking of me until then, but eventually and probably in not too long I'll be only a faint memory (that smart kid who created fantastic-looking memos, not that I needed them, and wanted to be a writer and who the patients thought were very pleasant and who spends too much time doing strange things on the computer instead of answering the phone and who gave a red jester's cap to the baby for Christmas, and what *is* that Gregory has in his mouth now?!).
But I promised her. And I'm scared. And that, basically is the story of my life, which I could have told you at the beginning and saved you and me a lot of time, instead of starting in the middle.
(Write to me. Tell me you loved it. Tell me you hated it. Ignore it entirely because you only read the first line. This is what I want to hear, all of this, which is why I'll never be a writer. Though this at least, I think, is true. I'll probably delete it tomorrow.)
The End