"With a shred more abandon, she could have flung herself onto the happy path of least of resistance. Unfortunately, she cared just enough to make her life difficult.
Obsessive attention to detail regularly brought her into conflict with supervisors, gridlocked interdepartmental relationships, and stalled projects. She was too honest, too much her mother's daughter, really, to refrain from challenging myopic choices or criticizing pedestrian aesthetics.
On a good day she fancied herself a minor prophet, the last neon warning before a precipice of professional mediocrity and organizational stagnation. Most of the time, however, she felt the way eyes feel when they start to glaze over.
At night her skin crawled. She imagined infinitesimal brown mites with highly developed exoskeletons devouring her cell by epidermal cell. She wished they would hurry up and finish her off; living was becoming so tiresome, so time consuming..."