Means to an end

So, the good news: for anyone who doesn't already know, Slinky has returned to the world of the gainfully employed, thus allowing the government yet again to deprive me of literally hard-earned money and winning my eternal enmity.

Why work instead of play? Short answer is that I can't play without a car and unless I start selling my body, I can't pay for a car as well, what with petrol prices being what they are. Plus, I need to pay for the time that I'm back home as well, which constitutes a good third of every year where I'm not receiving any income.

So after much grumbling, I managed to pound out an updated resume, cut and paste suitable portions from a cover letter I found online, and sent it off to a promising clinic that I'd heard good things a lot. (Can I say at this juncture how much I hate writing resumes and cover letters? I hate having to talk myself up. I feel like such a CV whore.)

Much to my surprise, they got back to me after two days (given the inefficiency of their bus system, I wouldn't have been surprised to find that they would have gotten back to me in three months or when I had finally starved to death, whichever happened later.)

To cut a long story short, I now have job as a trainee veterinary nurse, which I'm paid relatively well for, and which I can fit into my uni schedule. They've called me back after my first day of work to tell me that they were happy with what they've seen so far and that they were impressed with my intelligence (I shouldn't have laughed when they said that, bit of a giveaway, that)

The first day went well, save for when one of the nurses asked me to take a bin out back.

What she neglected to tell me was that the door leading out back didn't open from the outside.

I did as instructed, noting a big sign on the door that said, "Fire door: keep closed!"

I dumped the bin as the door closed behind me, turned around – and found out that the fucking door had no handle on the outside. The same sign was pasted on the outside, mocking me.

Now, this normally wouldn't be an issue, save for the fact that the bins are located in a gated enclosure behind the clinic. And the gates were all locked. And the walls and gate were about ten feet high.

"Fuck!" I hissed. "FuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckityFUCK!"

It was a cold winter night and I was only wearing a thin sweater. I had visions of myself being found two hours later, frozen to the bars of the gate.

I tried knocking on the door. No dice.

I peered through the bars of the gate and concluded that unless my head miraculously shrank to the size of an orange, I wouldn't be able to squeeze through the bars. I debated scaling the gate and walls before deciding that it would be less embarrassing to be found locked outside and frozen than to be found screaming in agony from the broken leg I got when I fell.

After hamstering my way frantically around the enclosure a couple of times, I finally found a small gate which had been hidden behind the dumpster bins. Praying fervently to the god of ignorant asian undergraduates, I tried the handle. And it turned.

Giggling hysterically from relief, I sprinted out the gate and around to the front of the clinic, slowly down only so I could stroll nonchalantly through the front door. The branch manager gave me a bit of an odd look but only asked me where the other nurse was. "Oh, I think she's behind somewhere," I said airily, trying not to betray the hysteria that threatened to bubble up and say, "Hey, guess what just happened to me!"

This is why I burst out laughing when they said they were impressed with my intelligence.

My second day is tomorrow, and hopefully this time I won't do anything too bloody stupid.

They haven't confirmed my schedule yet, although I think that will be finalized some time in the next two weeks. Neither have I been confirmed into their permanent staff, given that they have a three-month probation period. But I'm getting paid for something I quite enjoy, so that's good. And I hadn't realized how stressed I've been about my finances until I got this job, when I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders after I got the phone call. I'm not used to not working, and to not having some source of income. And for the first time, I was able to go grocery shopping and buy things without feeling slightly guilty. For the first time since I've been here, I bought steak instead of mince. It's the little things, I think.

Yet, the idea of work makes me feel terribly tired, and some part of me dreads having to go to work.

It's not so much the physical tiredness which I find off-putting, although leaving the house for class at 7:30 a.m., having classes til 11:30 then running down the clinic to work until 7 pm, and reaching home at 8:30 p.m. leaves me feeling pretty wiped at the end of the day.

It's more of an emotional tiredness. See, part of what is so tiring about being here is not so much that everything is new. It is more that you hardly get a chance to be yourself.

You're constantly meeting new people, and unless you really don't give a flying fuck, you're always going to have to be on your best behavior; you're always having to be social and friendly, and more than yourself. It is frankly tiring, trying to work the social dynamics, having to lay the groundwork or future friendship or at least civil relations. There's group work to be done in two out of the four units that I'm doing, and due to a cock up, I'm doing all of them with people I don't know. Every week, I spend time having to work closely with strangers, which requires exerting one’s social skills rather more than I normally like. Sure, you could just speak as necessary in order to get the work done, but the awkward silences make me edgy. Hence, the effort required to get along. It makes working easier.

There are people in the course that I would call friends, like NotRobin, Small C and The Token Malaysian. But after three months or so where the main form of socializing is during lectures, it hasn't yet reached the stage where I can be completely myself. Making friends is tricky business, much like dating. They don't know you, so your guard is always up and you're always having to watch for cues on behavior, on what's desired or appropriate. You crack jokes to ascertain what kind of sense of humor they have and play to that. You laugh at their jokes. You're on your best behavior. You rack your brain for conversational gambits to keep the conversation flowing, to come up with something interesting to say. They don't know your history, the people in your life, who you are, where you come from. So your conversations are limited, and you need to lay the groundwork for future conversations, for greater honesty or disclosures. You don't have the level of comfort yet where you can say what's on your mind. It's dating without the sex, and it's done with several people at the same time.

That's one of the things I miss most about home – the emotional support group who I know and trust and whose level of comfort is such that I never have to be guard, I can just me.

All of this is terribly tiring sometimes. I'm not a social person. I need quite a lot of space, and after a long day I'm happiest when I'm doing my own thing. Being social takes it out of me, and sometimes when I'm feeling homesick and tired, I need to be left alone to recharge. But working demands that I need to be Social Slinky for another seven hours, so that working with the other nurses, the vets, and the clients is easier. So that there are no awkward moments when work is slow and everyone slows down and stops to chat with each other. So I have to juggle a new working environment, try to take the initiative, try to remember what I've learned and what I've done, as well as be sociable, to be me but more, the Technicolor Slinky. All of this outside of uni, where I'm also doing much of that. And it leaves me a lot less 'me' time which I can use to recuperate from having to bring it on all the time, as well as to work.

But needs must.