Robert and I
are about to embark on a home-improvement project. We are going to paint my office and the
adjoining bedroom (aka my now-adult daughter’s old room), remove the carpeting
and have hardwood floors installed, and have more built-in bookshelves
built. The end result will be an
office/library. I’m excited to start.
But I have a
theory.
My theory,
developed after years of watching friends endure the agony of home
improvement—entire families living in hotels, eating take-out food for
months—is that people put themselves through this misery to distract themselves
from other life problems. The reason I
think this is true is that many of the people I know who have done this didn’t
much like their spouse or their job or their children before they started
building a family room, and hated them after it was finished. And then started on the kitchen. I found it staggering and mystifying.
So, as is my
wont, I’ve given our project a lot of thought.
Am I distracting myself from something unpleasant? Do I prefer the discomfort and limbo of
having my office torn apart to something else?
And here’s
what I’ve come up with: 1) I really need to fix up my office, and 2) I hate my
career right now.
Okay, “hate”
is extreme. I love writing books. But I hate working on a manuscript for over a
year and then finding out that no editors want to buy it. I hate devising perky, chirpy 140-character
sales promos for my books on Twitter in the hope that a few of my followers
will actually want to buy them. Most of
all I hate making the switch from full-time writer to part-time writer
/part-time entrepreneur. I don’t want to
be an entrepreneur. (If I did, I would
have put my MBA to good use during the eighties, when it was actually worth
something.)
So yeah, in
the spirit of brutal candor, I must admit that I am looking forward to the
diversion that comes with matching paint chips and gesticulating madly at
non-English-speaking carpenters.
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