07.04.2022 / 12:35am
I feel so insignificant tonight. I'm slouched on the bus back home. It stopped raining but I wish it hadn't. The bus takes an alternate route tonight, so that a brief panic overtakes me when I open my eyes from an attempt to relax. Instead of endless road I see buildings and traffic lights. I remember this has happened before, and I panicked so much I asked a drunk girl sitting beside me if we were on the bus route [insert number here]. She replied "yeah it is, I'm not drunk enough to get on the wrong bus." I replied, "I'm sober but I would do that," which is true.
Its such a large world, but it is also so very small. My dad told me that in some places, you feel like a small fish in a large pond, and in others, you feel like a large fish in a small pond - and to seek out the former. I'm definitely in a small pond, but I wonder if I'm a large fish. I wish I could conjure up respect from others. Even basic flirting is lost on me. I can't get anyone to give a shit about me; not my family, friends, colleagues, or people I want to give money to. Its just my mother and me in our castle of solitude where I am the princess of everything and nothing. At every job I do I feel like a pushover. Is this what being a young woman is? Older women are embattled and bitter, those of us just starting to figure out working life - are we cursed with years of doormat treatment? So that we can eventually grow to be cold to everyone else?
I know its cliched, but wealth really does solve these problems. If I was wealthy I wouldn't need to work - I could just join a group of other wealthy young adults and smoke cigarettes and pretend to be poor and wear expensive streetwear and not need to feel respected, anyway.
30.03.2022 / 11:27pm
Tonight was a good night at work. I feel that my journals over the past years focus too much on the bad, or in my case, the whinings of a first world citizen. However, today I find small treasures at work. Talking to people comes much easier, I am a deer in headlights quite often, but I am also becoming more purposeful and simply getting things done rather than asking for help. Obviously this will come with time. Though I have always felt, in every workplace, like a question-asker rather than answerer. One day I should like to get up to that coveted rank. I have made a promise to myself I will stay at this workplace at least a year, if I’m still living in Sydney.
But anywho, today I got a taste of confidence in my work when I met a new girl. She is also a hostess, though not even the legal drinking age. She has worked two shifts prior where I have worked three, and that shift has established the difference between our capabilities. Not saying she was bad, but in comparison, I glided across the floor and busied myself and got the job done. Not saying I didn’t have my fuck ups, too. I definitely seated the wrong table tonight. But not even that could get to me; having someone less experienced than me - even by a shift - made me feel so confident. And I hate myself for it.
I suppose hospitality is somewhat like this. There’s a reason staff hierarchy is so tall in a restaurant; we need someone to lead who feels as though they know what they’re doing. The latter comes from the respect of the runners and waiters, and the guidance they need. The questions they ask. So the questions themselves become indicators that they respect management - they want to play by the rules established by the leadership. Even giving guidance is a form of flexing power. The intention seems honest; bettering the service and customer experience thus increasing tips, but its also somewhat telling. You know who is in power because they can and will criticise your work, teach you something, offer you a more efficient way of working, or all of the above. I did this to our new girl tonight. Something as simple as showing where newly folded napkins go or how to carry a dray of drinks and dirty napkins in one hand... This gave me power and I don’t like that it did.
I don’t know. Maybe its not workplace psychology that made me feel confident tonight. Maybe its just the fact that I got my hair done.
28.03.2022 / 12:46am
My mind is constantly diving off the deep end, into whatever pool I can find, desperately, like I can’t wait to get into that icy water. Like the shock of hitting the pool’s surface is addictive. The rush, the fall, suddenly I’m surrounded by what I so desperately craved. When my toes touch the tiled floor, though, they recoil, because I need air, I need a different pool. So I clutch and claw to get out, and find another diving platform, forever and ever. Committment is difficult for a wandering mind.
16.03.2022 / 5:58pm
I can’t decide what to do anymore.
I don’t know what I was thinking, thinking I could make it in technology. Sure my degree had me swimming along comfortably but I had relied on the work of my peers to get me through. I cheated sometimes. And still, I graduate with Distinction. And really, I could get a desk job easily enough (or so I thought, no employers seem to be responding to me anymore). I could even call up my old boss and get him to take me back. But what would be the point of it all? Money? What is a career for, if not money, if not comfort. But why sell your soul for comfort? If I were to do that, I may as well have everything I could ever ask for, not simply comfort. Where do people find these jobs that they can be passionate about - truly passionate, and not just convincing themselves of it?
I think about Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy a lot. What did she do about it? She chose a path and burned her skull in an oven. I feel so old. Maybe I have time to explore options, but then again I feel like time is running out so quickly, like sand between my fingers. If I don’t start somewhere now, I’ll never get anywhere. I just can’t shake this feeling that I am lost in purgatory.
14.03.2022 / 11:34pm
What do I do?
The front of my head feels heavier than a pile of bricks. Its a throbbing pain that settles at my permanently furrowed eyebrows, which, no matter how many times I try to detach them, always find a way to glue themselves together. In the back of my head, a piano croons. Its a late-night jazz bar, its a devolving scene in noir, with silk dresses that caress the hardwood floor.
Darkness feels brilliant; bringing relief and solace. The weight lightens, but my soul is always heavy. Decisions plague me. Isn’t the world so ironically cruel that we as privileged citizens of modernity have so many choices at our fingertips; so many fish in the sea, that it becomes a problem which fish to choose, until we starve just like those who have no fish. In the end the human experience will always be the same. Computers and fine foods are simply illusions to convince ourselves that we have ‘progressed’; from what? Ourselves? We have already failed by attempting to progress. Human beings are damned, by their very nature. Pride, ego, id, submissiveness, gullibility, optimism, greed, all remain from the moment we invented the car engine to the moment they become obsolete.
Words are nothing but tools to persuade people to buy things or feel things to enable the aforementioned purchase. Words stopped being art a long time ago. Words are a postmodern critique of some man made vice that we forget about everyday. So words become tools.
What will become of me, should I accept a life of mediocrity. What isn’t a life of mediocrity; is this even possible let alone attainable. Those who are career-minded may say it is he who loves his job and earns lots of money from it that is not living a mediocre life. Those who are relationship-minded might say marriage, a healthy group of friends, connection to your family will avoid mediocrity. But the career-minded misses the relationships that make life meaningful and the relationship-minded misses their could have been career, their chance to change the world. Or at least, bragging rights.
I am falling asleep; all I do is lounge around. What do you do all day? I frequently get asked by my childhood friend who talks a lot about her personal life and tries to convince herself her decisions are correct, though they seem to make her dig deeper holes. I cannot reply since I truthfully do not know. I could be staring at the wall, keeping the house, reading an article but its difficult to produce output that could be tangible and shared. That would imply that I would want to do this. Blank pages. That’s what I do, produce blank pages and canvasses to one day be painted upon. I keep waiting for that one day, thinking I’ll take a plunge and change, but every change leads me back to square one. Following your heart is hard, knowing what its saying is even harder.