THE PRESSURE IS ON TO BE PERFECT

Ok, so I've always been a shining example of wasted potential. Of disappointment. Of underachievement.

When everyone around me is shooting for the corporate stars, buying property, doing respected degrees like law and economics, getting married, having babies and leaving their mark on the world, I've packed up my sociology degree and have exiled myself to the ass-end of the continent. I'm renting in the most affordable city in the country, about to take possession of my second dog and doing a job that requires neither intellect or dynamism. And for which I am earning roughly $10 000 LESS what I was earning in Sydney this time last year....

I've got the career trajectory thing ALL WRONG! Like some dumb suburbanite on The Price is Right with Larry Emdur getting the "Higher or Lower" game at the end of the show ALL MIXED UP! I'm not even in the ballpark, baby. And Larry is MOCKING ME with his Macleans Ultra White Smile set to SMUG!

Here I am dicking around doing a blog while others of my generation are cleaning up in the showcase game - investing in shares and hosting dinner parties with cloth napkins and matching chairs that didn't come from St Vinnies. As lacking in ambition as I am, I WAS hoping to move out of the undergraduate faux-poverty interior aesthetic. Then we got a bloody Staffy.

I always kind of wished I was more ambitious. Though ambitious people invariably bore the crap out of me. You know the types. The ones in high school kissing post-pubescent ass to get on the Student Council or the Yearbook committee (including the bitch who dated your ex-boypal, deliberately left your photo off the front cover out of spite then made sure you didn't actually receive a copy of the darn thing and so are left with a photocopied replica kindly provided by a mate). The ones with resumes stuffed full of extra-curricular awards from Maths competitions and First Aid courses and volunteer work with elderly dementia patients who have lost not only their minds, but their bowel control as well.

I was going somewhere with this. See, I've been nominated by Nick for Best WA Blog in the 2005 Australian Blog Awards. Like a cat coughing up a furball, it's brought up all my repressed insecurities about being crap. Best WA Blog? Best WP Blog, maybe.... That's Wasted Potential, for those of you I lost back there in the second paragraph.

Kind of makes you nostalgic for the dirty tampon anecdotes, doesn't it?