2003-10-17

You guys, I am freaking out. Somehow, somewhere, someone I used to work with got the idea that I�m a super-keen employee and they made a recommendation to someone, and the next thing I knew there was a flurry of phone calls and interviews and two days later I have a new job as a communications officer. In the fucking MINISTER�S OFFICE.

How did this happen? What�s going on? Why are people always giving me jobs? Seriously. I�m not ambitious. I�m hardly industrious. But people always seem to think I�m ten kinds of competent, which amuses me. I think they�re mistaking my air of pure, distilled apathy for supercilious self-confidence: this is wrong, people! It�s not that I am self-assured and above it all. It�s that I don�t care. I�m blissfully inured to the smallest concern about the outcome of any work-related happening. I�m Zen, but without all that ridiculous �enlightenment� stuff.

Somehow this gross misapprehension has led to me moving quite suddenly up in the world � literally so: I�ll be working on the top floor (that�s where the magic happens!). I might even have a window in my office � hopefully conveniently situated at appropriate throwing-oneself-out-of height. I�ll be taking calls from journalists, processing media lines, and doing about eight million things I have no idea how to do. Oh, and I may have given the impression that I�m a tad more fluently bilingual than I am.

I go through life with an overarching notion that everyone around me is somehow privy to information that I don�t have, and is generally more capable and more qualified to deal with jobs/relationships/life as a whole than am I. Right now that feeling is kicking into overdrive, and I�ve got that sinking �at school in my underwear� anticipatory dread of immanent exposure of my flaws and subsequent ridicule. I am obviously an interloper and have no right to this job, and it�s only a matter of time before that becomes painfully clear.

Another odd notion I have is that �work� is not �life�. Work is something that I do in order that my life not be plagued by irritating exigencies like homelessness and starvation. I�m not one to throw myself into my work (I�m not one to throw myself into anything, really, or at or out of anything either, for that matter, except the odd window: see above). This new job will entail working ten-hour days and longer, relegating my life to a mere pit stop in preparation for, and recovery from, work. My work will become my life. My whole world is topsy-turvy!

But, you know, inevitable misery and doom aside, this is a great opportunity and will be a huge benefit to my career plans (career? When did I get one of those?). So, to sum up, I am feeling very insecure about myself, and yet still somehow contemptuous towards humanity as a whole. The status quo prevails. Return to your homes, people: there is nothing to see here.