Another job, this one much better

Hallelujah, I found a job in the literary field that took me out of the doldrums of the job I last posted about. I'm two weeks into this new one, and it's a lot more responsibility, but a more laidback environment and back in the not-for-profit centre. Excited to get settled and into the rhythm of things.

Also taking some courses in counselling as part of my slow exploration of a new career field. I'm a bit stressed with managing school and work, but I think I can do it. I was thinking of applying to do my master's in B.C. in the next couple of years, so the thought of making a move to a raw land with a smaller city, majestic mountains, oceans and forest and perpetual drizzly gray skies is a little daunting. What do you do, wear red raincoats all the time to cheer yourself up? Drink lots of coffee and find a hair style that won't explode in the humidity? These are the types of questions that swirl in my mind when I try to envision a life in British Columbia. One of my best friends lives there, so that will likely be a godsend. Also my boyfriend's brother lives there as well. We shall see!  I've been in Toronto so long, I tend to suspect every other part of Canada (save Montreal, of course) as backwoods with twanging banjos belonging to racist people. Being Indian, I've had uncomfortable experiences in smaller towns (endless staring, etc), so I like sticking to the cosmopolitan v. the rural, but I think the rural beats out the cosmopolitan in B.C. I've never been to Vancouver, and I understand it's nice, but I've been told it's quite small and sort of lacking in character, but rich in surrounding landscape. We shall see!

It's turning into fall-- grey weather, freezing nights and that strange limbo of not knowing whether a cardigan will cut it or if you need the heavy coat. I've been hermiting a little, being somewhat reclusive on nights and weekends, focusing on school, feeling a bit drained by the unexpected change in jobs (even though it's good fortune) and trying to stay positive about the future.

Another Recession-related job

I just took another job that wafts of the recession. Because my last job was so unsavoury, I was chomping at the bit to begin this one, but here, post-day 2 of the new job, I am just tired.

I've been looking into grad school options for hopefully next year, but will have to do a year of prerequisite course (if I am accepted to do these courses). Woe! I'm not sure about this new career path, but the one that I've been on, which is an arts/literary/not-for-profit path, has led me to an overwhelming place of gloom and vocational despair. I'm complaining, but it's because I'm fatigued. The nature of the jobs I've been doing are all admin, requiring a pleasant-sounding telephone manner and I'm frankly sick of it. I hate not being able to afford the office clothes that I'm expected to wear and then sinking further into debt to be able to accommodate the clothing requirements of these jobs. I hate smiling widely and falsely at CEOs and assorted pompous men and women in suits with crisp white hair. I feel most connected emotionally to the cleaning staff in all of the jobs I've had lately, they seem to share the same air of feeling beaten down and generally downtrodden. Downpression (as oppression is referred to in Jamaica)!

I would love to fashion an escape, but from what I can understand at this point, there is no immediate one. I have to find a way to shape my mindset to accept scurrying between desks with faxes, rushing to answer bullshit phone calls, having Charlie Brown low-carb lunches of solitude in the lunchroom and systematically trying all of the different hot beverages the machine at work has to offer (espresso has won as the beverage that tastes most like its name, "latte" was a hot, salty milky cup of bile, "fresh coffee" the same as "latte," but with more water and "choco milk" was a slightly more milky hot chocolate, which at 3:55, with energy and blood sugar levels flagging, I welcomed). 

I just want to feel like I'm on a path to something worthwile, not just making pitstops at every joe job along the way and then discover I'm middle-aged and still saddled with student loans. 

Melancholy and the Infinite Saturday Afternoon

It's a late Saturday afternoon and I'm procrastinating writing an article that was due today. I might add that it's raining and that I've just accepted a job that I would never have considered were we not ankle-deep in a recession/ downturn/general economic cess pool. 

Here is a quote from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, his letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, written while in ruin in prison. 

If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as any one can get.

If that wasn't tear-inducing enough, here is another:

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Now we shall move in on, in a multimedia tour of the morose and maudlin...

Concert footage of Morrissey singing "Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together


The Smiths performing "That Joke Isn't Funny Any More" in 1985.


And lastly, The Smiths performing "Still Ill," quite assuredly one of my best go-to songs for any malaise of the soul.

The afternoon is shifting into a evening, still marked by a day of rain and unproductivity.