So It Goes

It's only been a few days since I started a summer internship and already I feel like channelling Kurt Vonnegut. Working 9 to 5 for the first time is a bit like being back in high school, yet it somehow doesn't suck. The hours are longer but still less exhausting than sitting through seven classes every day. Not having chemistry every day helps too.

The days don't feel that long, and week goes by pretty fast. Either I'm speeding up or everything in the world except me is slowing down. Back in high school, every day, week, and month was an eternity. I'd keep trudging on by trying to take it a day at a time, especially when it was a Monday. Don't even think about Friday. That's how I got by during the beginning of the week. Just survive another day. Somehow.

College is much freer, a tremendously welcome relief to the monotonous hell that high school was. Difference classes each day, sometimes none on Fridays, and if you're really lucky (I happen to be really lucky), you wind up with a schedule where you only have twice a week. Bliss. If high school is hell, then college has to be some sort of heaven.

But where does that leave the real world? And what is the real world, exactly? Before I got this internship, I never had a job, never worked a day in my life. I had some sort of concept of this so-called "real world," a place where what you did actually mattered, where you can't survive on bullshit like you have all through high school and college (although I do have a theory that success in life is dependent on how expert a bullshitter you are).

No, out there in the real world what you did mattered, and what you did was somehow elevated above anything else you've done. I believed there was some sort of system, that life didn't simply mirror how you got around in high school, that it was some wild, fascinating adventure. I'm not sure I can adequately describe what my expectations were, just that I thought I couldn't possibly comprehend anything until someday when it would just click.

I guess, in a way, this is that click. After working in a real job for a few days, it appears like there's no great secret to the real world, and it's not something that I'd learn after graduating college. Rather, I stay with the same approach I've always had: you do what you can, whatever you can, and when it's done, it's done. So it goes.

Until next time, Orange Hat Guy