A reprieve from pharmacy

Sorry I've been so remiss about this blog, but with my son home, in that neverland between camp and school, and our family actually pulling off two cheap vacations--biking in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, then a week at Laurel Lake in the Berkshires-I'm pretty well spent. It should have been two straight weeks away, but I tried to fit it around my pharmacy job and kept popping in to do my 8 hour shifts. Speaking of shifts, something did shift. I felt it immediately. Maybe it's a bit of the absence makes the heart grow fonder, but when I walked into Acme Drugs I felt like I was back in high school, the clerks all smiling and yelling "Hi Marsha!" down the aisles. Even Sally smiled at me. I basically just looked at her and said " I had a great vacation," which prompted her to ask where I'd been, and before you knew it, we were talking about vacations. Wonder of wonders.

But still I do wish I could make my living this way, by writing, instead of standing for 8 hours straight which actually turns into 9 and gets me home from my night shift at almost eleven.
I know, I know, I should be happy to even have a job in this god forseen economy. I guess now is the perfect time to put it out there... I'm spoiled. But I spoiled myself, by my own devices, carving out a working life that allowed me to stay at home and put in two to three hours a day. That was my print broker business, in my thirties, when I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and spent mornings cold calling design firms, or visiting a client, then the afternoons reading, often at the Mozart Cafe, or watching some obscure foreign movie at Lincoln Center or The Quad. Looking back, it truly was magical. Control over one's time will always be my mark of success. I just don't know how I could ever replicate it. Did I do something wrong? How is it that such an on-my-own-terms life has morphed into a frantic serving up of pills to 350 people, and that's on a quiet day. This economy really fucked things up. Or was it your basic industrial-age wipeout by the internet. My two loves- writing and my small, little print business-no longer viable.