quite a pickle

"Wherever you go, there you are."

Have you ever had someone say that to you?

People who say this always make the same face when they do it. Head tilts a little. Mouth stretches and thins so that the lips dissappear. Eyebrows raise. They shake their heads. Sometimes they shrug their shoulders. Often this statement is preceded by "Well, you know ..." And then you want to smash their face in, right?

Typically someone provides such sage advice on the heels of some story of yours about how crappy your vacation was or how you keep dating the same person over and over and over again. Or about how you leave one awful job and manage to get a new one that's even worse.

While you're feeling depressed or frustrated or annoyed or all three, this asshole in front of you is acting enlightened and being smug. They're essentially saying that it is your fault. You're the one causing all these problems. I've heard many people put it this way: "You've had all these problems with ______ . What's the common denominator?"

You pause for a second and then answer, "Shit, man, I don't know."

They make that face at you - that punch-worthy, "get with the program," smug-ass face - and say:

"You."

Fuck you. Seriously.

That said, I'm in a quite a pickle. I've hated my job for fourteen years - minus the eighteen months I had no job whatsoever and was in a state of pure deee-light. In those 14 years minus 18 months I've had 30 or 40 temp jobs and 12 "real" jobs, mostly as a technical writer. So far, every time I've left one tech writing job for a new tech writing job - really, every time - I've realized very quickly that the old job was ten times better than the new one. Every time. Every time. Every @#$, $%^, ^&* time.

I'm so sick of it that when I think too much about it, it makes me want to wreck my cube. A great(1) gorilla inside me wants to howl and thrash and pound things to pieces. But of course, I really don't want to go from crappy job to mental institution, so instead of destroying things, I'm going to consider the possibility that "wherever you go, there you are" actually means something useful and might really shed some light on my dilemma.

Maybe.

(1) great (Pronunciation: 'grAt, Southern also 'gre(&)tFunction: adjectiveEtymology: Middle English grete, from Old English grEat; akin to Old High German grOz large) a : notably large in size : HUGE b : of a kind characterized by relative largeness -- used in plant and animal names c : ELABORATE, AMPLE