My sabbatical, let me share with you it

Frankly, I just needed a break. Work is work – if fills the day in the way that meatloaf and mashed potatoes will get you full, but imagine eating the same meal every day for nine years. Sometimes you try some carrots, sometimes you try some peas. Maybe the tomato sauce gravy, maybe the flour gravy. Ohhhhh. Did they use crackers instead of breadcrumbs this time? Was that a jalapeno? But it is still meatloaf.

And you're still sitting there, watching incompetent idiots be promoted around you, despite the fact that you've played the office politics game correctly, stroked the right egos, worked the crappy shifts, done the special projects and worked 18 days in a row during Christmas and New Year's for a crappy bonus that wouldn't even make your car payment. Meatloaf. And mashed potatoes. Is that a garlic roll? Woohoo!

I spend at least an hour and a half driving back and forth from work now – time that I can't be doing anything productive as far as writing or creating goes. The only plus side is that I'm becoming an aficionado of NPR & classical music, but that's not a major entry on the credit side of the ledger.

The commuting gives me time to think and to reflect. As much as I still like the concept of "Twenty-One Minutes," I don't think that it is workable as a long-term project in the way that "Behind the Counter" was.

Quite a few people – QUITE A FEW PEOPLE – let me know that they thought it was boring, repetitive and lifeless. For the most part, I actually tend to agree with the "lifeless" part of the statement. What made "Behind the Counter" so compelling to so many people was the point of view I afforded, coupled with the common experience of shopping inside the world's largest garbage heap.

Unfortunately, if I remove myself from the action, a certain quality gets lost. No matter how snappily I write – I can't truly bring a scene to life if I'm just describing it, am not part of it and have no control over it. The last ten days or so that I did update, I did try to make "Twenty-One Minutes" more personal, with more of a point of view.

I am not comfortable moving forward on this particular road. While I personally have no qualms opening my life up for you, I have zero desire to be "Dooced," as it were. What I do is a big part of my life – and I simply cannot and will not risk my professional future on a project I am now increasingly ambivalent on.

So where does this leave us?

Well, last Sunday it left us at a crossroads. I was depressed, moody, mopey, hungry and alone – all this on my birthday too. I was going to update "Twenty-One Minutes" with a "My sucky birthday" post and then just decided to go to bed.

I had a crappy week, filled with copious hours of unpaid overtime – because that's what "salaried employee" actually means – and was gone from my apartment for more than 14 hours each day. There are only so many variations on "My cubicle, let me describe you it" that I can do. When I was home – the bastards at CrumbCast saw fit to again throttle the tubes of my Internet. When I attain power of any sort, I will literally render ComCast into its component atoms. Piece by stupid piece.

Problem #1, I deduced, is time. Commuting sucks up a good chunk of the free time that I used to have to essentially sit around in coffee shops and smoothie bars and write. I need to create something that I can either write at work, thus taking advantage of the company's high-speed Internet, or write a bunch of posts at once, like I used to do with "Behind the Counter."

Problem #2 is that it needs to have a point of view, but it can't be about me. So you're all going to have to settle on a slightly fictionalized version of me. Good chunks of "Behind the Counter" were my internal monologue anyway, so maybe the tough critics will like this new series of insightful, ground-breaking and thought-provoking essays better. If you didn't get it, that was a joke.

Here's the deal. We're still going to call it "Twenty-One Minutes," at least for now. I still like the structure it provides for the whole "slice in time" post. However, I'm going to take the things that happen to me in my daily life and put my peculiar spin on them – saying all the things I wish I could say – while still spraying fashion commentary like a bulldog with its leg raised.

So, without further ado, I would like to introduce the new author of "Twenty-One Minutes," Miss Charanda deKristeaux.