the reason why annual reviews drive me to the bottle

Decidedly, those who call ourselves writers are a weird bunch.

I sit here, angsting over whether or not I have “met expectations” over the last 9 months.  Expectations outlined by me, by others, by the business world.

The expectation that I really want to meet doesn’t pay the mortgage.  It doesn’t whittle away the balance of my student loans, many of which paid for classes that were enlightening but not necessarily applicable to writing assessment questions at a 5th grade level for a group of adults who just learned how to negotiate higher payments from the man who is unemployed, divorced and about to go bleed out in the bathtub.

Weird, that I get paid to do something I love, and something that I don’t understand.

And, weird that what I find pure and good and beautiful and infinitely complex and profound can also be twisted into something perverse and mundane and simple, something that can be objectified by an Access Database and four measly key result areas.

I am the artist who revels in creative genius and doubts my own in predictably regular intervals.  I am the designer who recoils at the mention of effective project management and strives whole-heartedly to achieve it.

I write succinct, profound, elegant prose.  I write instructions on how to key a memo into a DOS-based computer system.

I get up at 3 in the morning to write lyrics to songs and scribble in eighth notes on blank lined music sheets.  I get up again at 6:30 to put on mascara and respectable khakis and sell my soul for medical and dental coverage.

I find aesthetic pleasure in the unlimited potential of an unmarred spiral notebook.  I find myself at a loss to reconcile myself to the tower of Post-it notes and cube wall-papered in Excel spreadsheets it sit in 40 hours each week.

Where does art and reality intersect?  Am I just questioning my existence, my place in the corporate world and my fit in the realm of lasting art?  When will the writer and the breadwinner reconcile?