A Pirate's Life For Me: A Year Later

If you scroll back to Feb 2007 (Feb 9) to be exact, you'll find this post below. I have been feeling melancholy and pissy and weepy and all accounts depressed.

I'm also been feeling a need to dust off my resume and move somewhere far away.

Funnily enough, a year ago I felt the exact same way. Only, I don't want to work in retail...and I don't want to go back to school. I'm not exactly cut out for office work, where I'm currently miserable; and the more I try to write, the more I think maybe I'm not cut out for that either.

How do you figure out what you're good for?

As I sit at my desk, trying to get out of doing folders (story of my life), I look down at my little desk companion, Captain Jack Sparrow Bobblehead, and I think, God, what I wouldn’t give for a Miami Vice right about now. (Miami Vice being the name given to a Carnival Cruise drink that was a layered drink of half pina colada and half strawberry daiquiri. Rum is a beautiful thing.) *taps Jack’s braids and he agrees with a bobble nod*

If I had my druthers, I would be sitting on a beach in Grand Cayman with my Miami Vice and my bobblehead doll (the real Jack Sparrow is temporarily unavailable), and I soak in the warm delicious sunshine, blind fellow beach combers with my pasty white skin, and dream about being a pirate.

No, not the scurvy, short life expectancy parts. The interesting parts. Rum, wenching (can men be wenches? I mean I know they can be bas…oh, well, men-wenching), and freedom. I long for the dissolute life. Probably because I’m so damned Amish. The Other Side calls to me…Freedom calls to me. Bobblehead Jack agrees. Well, he should, he put the idea in my head, after all. He said it, tapping his rum bottle to Miss Swann’s, when they were toasting. “To Freedom!” Aye, to freedom.

And I admit there is a lure there. It cannot be denied as I sit at this desk, staring at folders, watching my single, all-I-need-now-is-a-damned-cat life unfurl before me as I continue to do folders and people please and defer. Not Jack. Not if you’re a pirate. You please yourself—and you make every moment count because you’re not going to live long enough to need a damned cat. (Though they do make good companions. Don’t get me wrong.) And you don’t even bemoan the fact you’re single and rootless, without family—because you have friends who are like family—and you have all the bed companionship you want once you hit port. Well, at least if you’re Jack. I imagine I could do all right if that’s what I sought. Show up naked and bring beer—I could have all the companionship a girl could want.

Plus I’d get to sail a ship and live on the ocean…and being a Pisces, that almost holds more lure than having all the rum we can handle, and I assure you, Pisces are horrible alcoholics. Where’s my rum?

If you could do anything else right now? Rock star, Vegas show girl, oh, hell, school teacher—what would it be—and why? How DO you figure out what career you should be in?