Bess Levin is a blogger at financial gossip site, Dealbreaker. Once, she wanted to be so much more. This is the first in a series of columns on disappointment.

There is this Monster.com ad that aired back in 1999 that really speaks to me. Loudly. You know the ad. I know you do. And, I think, this is telling. Telling that a commercial for a job search engine would be the gripping, defining bit of thirty second multimedia space that has staked out a rather significant plot of my psyche like some kind of pioneer in a great land grab race. But then, I am a member of the creative underclass. Of course the likes of Monster.com would attempt to connect with me through the dark wisps of early disillusionment, showing us short clips of young children announcing, "When I grow up, I want to file... all day." Another beaming young face, "I want to claw my way up to middle management." A third, "Be replaced on a whim." "I want to have a brown nose." "I want to be a 'yes man.'" These children touch me me. Deeply.

You see, when I grow up I want to scan the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the FT for stories that illuminate what a bunch of douche bags that work in finance. I want to spend a year and a half developing a reading technique that frees up my schedule for more cerebral pursuits like Set (it's the family game of visual perception) . I want to make an art form out of basic equations like losses = moron. Inability avoid detection of fraudulent trades = idiot. Mass layoffs = loser. Actual scandal = four distinct posts for distribution throughout the day? When I grow up I want to be stricken with the need to flee to the heart of Africa, where I won't be burned with the shame of not really knowing exactly what a hedge fund is. The jungles of Burma. The salty outskirts of the Kingdom of Tonga. To attack finance professionals I've never even met, just because I don't like the looks of their faces that I've never seen. Which is to say, I've arrived.

Lately, things have been devolving. I've been putting a lot of effort into being forwarded pictures of guys who work in the field and will be attending an upcoming speed dating event for "rich older women and hot young men," uploading their headshots and waiting for my readers to tell me what I think. I also sometimes send readers who seem to have struck up a rapport in the comments section out on dates and then IM with one of them for about half an hour about how it went and copy and paste the conversation. Sometimes my AIM quits unexpectedly and we have to start from the beginning, and in those cases things take a little longer. Completely ballparking it, I'd peg it at about 45 minutes. Fifty if I need to grab a snack halfway through. Over over the last several weeks, I've spent a good deal of time building up a whole saga of posts just about one CNBC anchor being a stereotypical guido. So when it's suggested that I export my talents to something like watching clothes walk down a Bryant Park runway and write up my reaction for sister site, Fashionista.com, I can't help but feeling a little bit ticked off and a lot a bit insulted.

The whole thing is an affront to my status as a serious blogger, this idea of me discussing the draping of a shearling vest, and how it exudes some sort of Civil Rights-era vibe. It's also a reminder of my Dante-style fall as a reporter. This is now my second annual involuntary trip to the Miss Sixty. So what do I do about it? I bitch and I moan and I e-mail the editor about how I won't be able to attend due to family obligations, remember myself and e-mail her back 5 minutes later with something like "it turns out those family obligations are over at 7 so I'll be able to make the 8 o'clock show" and then doing nothing (literally, and more on that later).

The first time I went to Miss Sixty, I got backstage, took pictures of the models getting dressed, and stood within six inches of Jessica Stam. This year I arrived late and didn't turn off my iPod while waiting in the line to get inside. I don't flatter myself that anyone would give a shit whether or not I removed my headphones in the presence of Fashion, but I personally find it to be one of the ruder things you can do so it felt like the fuck you gesture I was looking for. I'm sure the girl who didn't make eye contact with me while checking names off a clipboard picked up what I was throwing down. Then I sat in my assigned seat (an upgrade from last year's standing room ticket which probably had less to do with my non-efforts than the success of the site, though it felt like I'd earned it, being a veteran and all) and acted put upon for being forced to look at clothes when my time could be better spent mocking the dating profiles of one hedge fund manager or another.

For a brief few minutes at the beginning of the show I got upset that my camera was producing grainy photos unsuitable for sharing. Photographs of clothes were going to be the main thrust of my story. (I knew I wouldn't have anything to actually say about the clothes but damn if that was going to stop me from producing a high-quality blog post.) The kicker is that I didn't even write the story, or make mention of how things went back at the office on Monday (the editors were out at Fashion Week and I was feeling used/dramatic/lazy. Plus, as I said, no usable pics). No, that's not true. The actual kicker is that no one gave a shit, and nothing came of my lack of production, except for this neatly exportable piece of passive-aggression. Which is helpful, because it's not as though I can afford to not do this (I usually hand stories in, the Miss Sixty deal was an aberration), monetarily-speaking and also in the sense that I have no other skills. Though I do sometimes daydream about making my scratch working in an office while maintaining a site on the side that reprints the Q&A section from 'Parade,' without commentary. It's a fantasy that I'll probably never have the courage to act out, but I have grabbed paradewithoutcommentary.blogspot.com. So, we'll see.