My work, in progress
It occurs to me that my life could sound very impressive if I wanted it to.
Not all of it, of course. No matter who you are or what it says on the business cards that are apparently being ordered, it’s hard to be impressive when you’re leaning against a telephone pole, betting on whether or not the bus will manage to arrive before your feet fall off.
The rain didn’t help; between my pulling myself out of bed and my trudging to the bus stop, the overcast sky gave way to a miserable sort of drizzle that turned everything a sort of dreary grey. (This, in marked contrast to yesterday’s weather, the blindingly sunny sort of warmth that immediately makes every public building fear for its sanity, air conditioners uniting in frigid glory while I alternately shivered through my reports and melted on my lunch hour. I have the sneaking suspicion it may all be some form of highly sophisticated psychological conditioning.)
The bus, in what seems to be an attempt at slowly sorting itself into consistency, didn’t take too long to sweep me out of the fug - although when I stepped on, I almost wished it had left me in the rain; it wasn’t my bus! It looked like my bus, and it acted like my bus, but the pleasant white-haired man who smiled at me every morning had been replaced by a gloomy thin man with a horrible moustache, and I will not be fooled. Almost a week in, I apparently have started clinging to any small bit of familiarity I can find; and I was fond of my bus driver.
My passengers were missing, too, which is less an affront and more puzzling; I still can’t figure out where they could have gone, it isn’t like there was another bus, unless they all decided that they wanted to be forty-five minutes earlier for no good reason.
Well, stranger things have happened.
And it’s sort of difficult to feel significant or enviable when the entirety of a morning consists of the same things that have filled the last three days: reading, of things, with no real idea of what I’m supposed to get out of them or why they’re being given to me in the first place, much less what I’m supposed to do with my knowledge or when. I was meant to go to the library tomorrow, to do more targeted research on a subject I actually know less about, and discovered to my relief that the woman at the research desk is away and that I will therefore be having to do all of this next week, by which time I may have managed to glean some scrap of information, as to why anyone is sending me in the first place!
It probably has something to do with the job title, really. ‘Legislative assistant’ sounds wonderful, but since legislature is rarely in need of any direct help, at least of the sort that I could provide in an eight hour work day, the description doesn’t really give me much to go on.
Apparently, though, it gave me enough to warrant a trip across the street, to have the most expensive tiny lunch I’ve ever eaten in a room where Prime Ministers and Other Important People have come and gone, and where A apparently likes to kill lunchish time between meetings. I learned may things that meal, including the cost of an orange (five dollars, apparently, if you’re me) and the right way to eat grapes (highly complicated, involving pulling little bits off and then apparently stuffing them in your napkin or hurling them into the nearest potted plant which is, apparently, the polite way to eat), and maintain my impression that this entire summer is just one very long job interview, everything I say or do noted down on some mental checklist.
And, since I was out of the office anyway, it was suggested that I might find it interesting to go watch the Senate.
I have to say, it was interesting to watch part of my nation’s political process at work - though not, perhaps, for the reasons that A might have thought. A lot of incredibly intelligent people sitting in a room speaking according to formula about issues which, if I remember from my Canadian government class, they have very little power to do anything about. There seemed to be two running undercurrents: the feeling of how very important each and every one of them was, and the simultaneous continuous reminder that they were also humbled and vaguely impotent. It must be a rather confusing position to be in.
I should consider myself lucky, only having to deal with the latter.
An hour and a half of pontificating was all I felt I could really spare (“oh no, I couldn’t read that report, you see, I was at the senate!”) and then back to work, without the benefit of my cup of coffee to bring my reports to life. Fortunately enough, by that point it was already three, and since no one really focuses much on work by the four thirty, the rest of the day was mostly manageable.
My mothers are both incredibly musical, which makes sense, since I had to have picked it up from somewhere. One clings to the piano as a metaphysical life raft, the other to her cello, and every summer for the past several years, they’ve gone off to music camp to learn how to do it all a little bit better. Every year they come back with stories, blisters, and new friends, and every year I smile and nod and am happy for them, now can I please go back to my internet?
One of these friends lives in Ottawa, and has been the subject of stories here and there, most of them sadly forgotten. My mother was excited about her, she was excited about my mother, I was excited at the prospect of a piano and human-contact-that-wasn’t-also-my-boss.
And so, though my tiny lunch was slowly burning an undoubtedly-expensive hole through my stomach and my brain felt about ready to wrap itself up in a blanket and retire for the year, after work I took my pretty new (waterspeckled) heels to Tim Horton’s, fortified myself with long-overdue coffee, and flagged down another bus to take me to meet this women, who I have emailed once or twice and spoken to (at?) once. Either we’d get along, or wet wouldn’t; either way, from what I could tell, there would be free food. To the part of me that still thinks it’s a student, that’s all I need.
It wasn’t all I got.
V (who picked her own moniker, knows about this thing-in-progress, and therefore becomes the second person by whom I may at some point be held accountable) is at least as eccentric as anyone I’ve met, including my mother, and I’m not simply saying this because I know one or both of them will at some point read it. Her apartment, unlike some, is bright and airy and full of life, and is home to an extensive sheet music collection, a string quartet, and an electric piano with headphones! Also to the internet, which at this point is still feeling like some sort of rare and treasured commodity, to be used and appreciated lest it get angry and slip away.
Which I did, with all due respect and praise, then helped V make the salad that was our dinner (imparting as I did the correct way to eat grapes, lo, I am a humanitarian!) while she made the best apple sauce I’ve had and slowly tried to make heads or tails of the way I talk at the end of a long and serious day.
At the end of it all, having managed with no small difficulty to wrench my painfully-unpractised fingers away from her piano (one would think that all this typing would help but alas, it seems the skills are not transferrable) and her conversation, I think I can safely say that I’ve made a friend. She drove me home, relieved me of my steel pan and my flute, and left me to my intriguingly-patterned couch, where I now have every intention of passing out.
Not all of it, of course. No matter who you are or what it says on the business cards that are apparently being ordered, it’s hard to be impressive when you’re leaning against a telephone pole, betting on whether or not the bus will manage to arrive before your feet fall off.
The rain didn’t help; between my pulling myself out of bed and my trudging to the bus stop, the overcast sky gave way to a miserable sort of drizzle that turned everything a sort of dreary grey. (This, in marked contrast to yesterday’s weather, the blindingly sunny sort of warmth that immediately makes every public building fear for its sanity, air conditioners uniting in frigid glory while I alternately shivered through my reports and melted on my lunch hour. I have the sneaking suspicion it may all be some form of highly sophisticated psychological conditioning.)
The bus, in what seems to be an attempt at slowly sorting itself into consistency, didn’t take too long to sweep me out of the fug - although when I stepped on, I almost wished it had left me in the rain; it wasn’t my bus! It looked like my bus, and it acted like my bus, but the pleasant white-haired man who smiled at me every morning had been replaced by a gloomy thin man with a horrible moustache, and I will not be fooled. Almost a week in, I apparently have started clinging to any small bit of familiarity I can find; and I was fond of my bus driver.
My passengers were missing, too, which is less an affront and more puzzling; I still can’t figure out where they could have gone, it isn’t like there was another bus, unless they all decided that they wanted to be forty-five minutes earlier for no good reason.
Well, stranger things have happened.
And it’s sort of difficult to feel significant or enviable when the entirety of a morning consists of the same things that have filled the last three days: reading, of things, with no real idea of what I’m supposed to get out of them or why they’re being given to me in the first place, much less what I’m supposed to do with my knowledge or when. I was meant to go to the library tomorrow, to do more targeted research on a subject I actually know less about, and discovered to my relief that the woman at the research desk is away and that I will therefore be having to do all of this next week, by which time I may have managed to glean some scrap of information, as to why anyone is sending me in the first place!
It probably has something to do with the job title, really. ‘Legislative assistant’ sounds wonderful, but since legislature is rarely in need of any direct help, at least of the sort that I could provide in an eight hour work day, the description doesn’t really give me much to go on.
Apparently, though, it gave me enough to warrant a trip across the street, to have the most expensive tiny lunch I’ve ever eaten in a room where Prime Ministers and Other Important People have come and gone, and where A apparently likes to kill lunchish time between meetings. I learned may things that meal, including the cost of an orange (five dollars, apparently, if you’re me) and the right way to eat grapes (highly complicated, involving pulling little bits off and then apparently stuffing them in your napkin or hurling them into the nearest potted plant which is, apparently, the polite way to eat), and maintain my impression that this entire summer is just one very long job interview, everything I say or do noted down on some mental checklist.
And, since I was out of the office anyway, it was suggested that I might find it interesting to go watch the Senate.
I have to say, it was interesting to watch part of my nation’s political process at work - though not, perhaps, for the reasons that A might have thought. A lot of incredibly intelligent people sitting in a room speaking according to formula about issues which, if I remember from my Canadian government class, they have very little power to do anything about. There seemed to be two running undercurrents: the feeling of how very important each and every one of them was, and the simultaneous continuous reminder that they were also humbled and vaguely impotent. It must be a rather confusing position to be in.
I should consider myself lucky, only having to deal with the latter.
An hour and a half of pontificating was all I felt I could really spare (“oh no, I couldn’t read that report, you see, I was at the senate!”) and then back to work, without the benefit of my cup of coffee to bring my reports to life. Fortunately enough, by that point it was already three, and since no one really focuses much on work by the four thirty, the rest of the day was mostly manageable.
My mothers are both incredibly musical, which makes sense, since I had to have picked it up from somewhere. One clings to the piano as a metaphysical life raft, the other to her cello, and every summer for the past several years, they’ve gone off to music camp to learn how to do it all a little bit better. Every year they come back with stories, blisters, and new friends, and every year I smile and nod and am happy for them, now can I please go back to my internet?
One of these friends lives in Ottawa, and has been the subject of stories here and there, most of them sadly forgotten. My mother was excited about her, she was excited about my mother, I was excited at the prospect of a piano and human-contact-that-wasn’t-also-my-boss.
And so, though my tiny lunch was slowly burning an undoubtedly-expensive hole through my stomach and my brain felt about ready to wrap itself up in a blanket and retire for the year, after work I took my pretty new (waterspeckled) heels to Tim Horton’s, fortified myself with long-overdue coffee, and flagged down another bus to take me to meet this women, who I have emailed once or twice and spoken to (at?) once. Either we’d get along, or wet wouldn’t; either way, from what I could tell, there would be free food. To the part of me that still thinks it’s a student, that’s all I need.
It wasn’t all I got.
V (who picked her own moniker, knows about this thing-in-progress, and therefore becomes the second person by whom I may at some point be held accountable) is at least as eccentric as anyone I’ve met, including my mother, and I’m not simply saying this because I know one or both of them will at some point read it. Her apartment, unlike some, is bright and airy and full of life, and is home to an extensive sheet music collection, a string quartet, and an electric piano with headphones! Also to the internet, which at this point is still feeling like some sort of rare and treasured commodity, to be used and appreciated lest it get angry and slip away.
Which I did, with all due respect and praise, then helped V make the salad that was our dinner (imparting as I did the correct way to eat grapes, lo, I am a humanitarian!) while she made the best apple sauce I’ve had and slowly tried to make heads or tails of the way I talk at the end of a long and serious day.
At the end of it all, having managed with no small difficulty to wrench my painfully-unpractised fingers away from her piano (one would think that all this typing would help but alas, it seems the skills are not transferrable) and her conversation, I think I can safely say that I’ve made a friend. She drove me home, relieved me of my steel pan and my flute, and left me to my intriguingly-patterned couch, where I now have every intention of passing out.