State of Play

Dear reader,

Well. Things have not precisely gone as expected.

For one, I started working at a corporation where perfume in the office was not exactly banned, but certainly not encouraged. The mix of coworkers at the office changed too -- I was used to like-minded people around my age, and suddenly found myself the youngest member of a team full of married workaholics. It was also a corporation where I sat 9 hours a day at a desk, staring at a screen, and feeling as though my soul was steadily being drained dry. And did I mention that it qualified as a "finanical", aka the corporations that were particularly damaged in the economic collapse? Going to work got to the point where it was like reporting for detention... or an execution. When you're at a job like that, it has the effect of bleeding everything else in your life dry too; you come home and have no energy to write or cook or think or do anything more than slump in a chair and watch cable news or crime procedurals. You lose all sense of perspective, and it all gets rather unhealthy.

And so it went, for 10 long months. And then? Then my company downsized, and I was unemployed. Strange, isn't it, that it took losing my job to wake up?

So now I'm back. Luckily, I wasn't in a total coma over the past year; I managed to amass quite a range of samples, as well as a few local perfumes that are truly a breed apart (not always a good thing, though always interesting). So I'll be able to start posting sample reviews pretty swiftly. Now that I have time to kill and need to save money, I'm also posting on a slightly more off-topic blog, Hobo Kitchen, which is about budget cooking. Make of it what you will.

Check in when you can, and I know it's a tough job market out there and people have all sorts of responsibilities to keep in mind, but -- man. I can't tell you how much better my mental state is now that I'm not at that job anymore. It wasn't my choice to leave, and I miss the income, but it might have saved my mind.

Eliza