Gaudi’s Parc Guell
I started this summer with the intention of filling my spare time with things like reading for fun and updating this blog. This hasn’t gone to plan, and not because I’ve been procrastinating from procrastination, but because I became employed.
On my first day out of Uni, a mere week after my last post, I had an interview, got the job, and began training the next week. Although definitely very fortunate and exceptionally lucky, this employment hadn’t exactly featured in my summer plans of catching my breath after three years of rather intensive study… I wasn’t ready to enter the real world; to no longer laugh in the face of council tax bills, to go to a shop without flashing the NUS card or to have, and to openly justify, both day pajamas and night pajamas.
So, after an all too brief trip to Barcelona (the beautiful city above) and a very speedy Graduation ceremony (in which I didn’t fall over), both of which fit in the space between interview and first day, I started working full-time in the big smoke. It was quite the transition and extremely overwhelming. I know the shock was at first attached the novelty, but since those first few days I’m not sure it’s quite left me. The resonant shock, however, is also probably due to the fact that little over a month later I’m sitting in a strange house that’s monopolising most of my meager salary. I am living with strangers and appear to have moved into a joke house: you touch it, it falls off wall.
So it’s a case of ‘get with the program’ and a trial by fire in both work, life and living. I commuted for a month. Never again. Until you’ve been stuck for hours by various things on the rails, running out of polite conversation with the person you’re sat next to, you may not appreciate this sentiment. I did, however, morph into the stereotype quite rapidly…its amazing how quickly commuter life embraces you. Before you know it your watching recorded programs on a tablet like the best of them, reading the Metro religiously and getting irritated by those people doing normal, everyday journeys who are, most definitely, in the way. These few weeks did come with one major revelation: what I lack in being perfect armpit height I definitely make up in being able to work my way around people and onto a train. It turns out no-one questions the short girl who just appears in front of them, especially when paired with the nonchalant look I’ve been cultivating. It’s an art form.
I’ve always believed change to be a good thing, but it turns out what I really meant was change in moderation, which kind of negates the idea of change altogether really. I feel like I keep falling into new things – I’m not stepping into them, and I’m not being thrown into them…it is more of a stumble, a clumsy drift into the next step rather than any sort of calculated movement.
And so begins the next step, or the next stumble. I’m going to spend the next few weeks, or possibly months, working out if the job is for me, whether the corporate world is anything like the movies and finding my feet in the big city.
Sunrise to Starlight 