Creative Writing Story 2

So I guess my blog posts are all going to be either about my newfound love for Oatmeal or a story for Creative Writing...haha.
Anyways, here is the second story I had to write. Our goal with this story was to encorperate the idiosynchratic detail (see a couple posts ago) along with scene and summary. What is the difference between the two, you might ask? Glad you did.
Scene is SPECIFIC. A specific thing happening to a specific character at a specific time in a specific place...you get the idea. Summary is like the backstory. Which is better? Neither. Both. Whichever way you want to look at it. Both are effective, and both add to the story. Enjoy!

Here it is:

Gretchen found her liberation at lunchtime. She put her feet up on her desk, pulled Elizabeth Kostova’s newest novel out of her bag along with her lunch and watched through the slit window in her door as her coworkers scrambled around the office while she ate food and read.
The first time she had chosen to bring her food and eat at her desk instead of going out with the rest of her coworkers she had felt awkward, like she was drawing a line between herself and them, but now she relished in that line. She relished in the fact that she was eating proper portions of the right number of whole grains and fresh fruits while they laughed over the appetizer special at Applebee’s and had no idea that it bloated them with more salt in one pre-meal snack than they should eat in two days. She relished in the fact that while they gossiped she read best-sellers.
She couldn‘t say when she had adjusted to office life. Somewhere after her senior year in college the summer job that had meant to give her something to do before joining the peace core had turned into her life, draining away 30 years before she even knew that they had disappeared.
Her father had died that summer, and his passing had destroyed her mother and her future in one fell swoop. At the same time her friends took off in the plane headed for rural Indonesia to build schools she had stood in a cemetery next to her mother, wearing the obligatory black dress with shoes that looked nice enough for calling hours but had heels that didn’t sink into the moistened ground around the grave.
At that point in time, she had still wanted to change the world. Her enthusiasm for life still was focused on doing something that would improve the lives of people everywhere, that would give little kids drinking water and a chance at an education. Living at home for another year was just a minor setback, a chance to earn some extra money while she stared at the plane ticket taped to the bathroom mirror next to pictures from graduation and bought clothes that would last in places where you wore the same thing for two weeks straight and no one looked at you strangely.
Then one day Gretchen got up from her mother’s kitchen table to rinse out her oatmeal bowl and head to work, finishing her rant on how corrupt the office was and how she couldn’t wait to “change the world” when her mother told her that while changing the world was a wonderful thing to do, sometimes simply surviving in it was enough.
That was what she was doing now, sitting in her swivel chair watching her boss and other workers pass by the door. She was surviving.
After that day her enthusiasm for life became focused on smaller and smaller things. First it was on her husband and her wedding, then on her pregnancy and then on her kids. Now it was on her lunch.