What do you do when you come home from work? Is it a 9 or 8:30 to 5ish? Are you exhausted? Do you feel like your mind and energies have been put to good use? Are you fulfilled by your day?
My mind is put to disintegration, or at least it did feel that way the majority of the year. I think the numbness and lack of stimulation made the dwindling connections between my neglected little neurons palpable -- can you feel yourself get "stupider"? Oh yes, I definitely think so. Filing, counting (or "auditing" in office bullshit lingo,) spreadsheet concocting, mail handling, email composing, phone calling, and last but as it turned out for me, most horrible of all - proofreading. Not that after much time and rumination I didn't discover that I was learning something from my experiences, that being spit in and out of various parts of the corporate machine as a strange, versatile little cog called "temp" could be a valuable insight into what so many people "do." It's all much less of a mystery, and now I understand what it was about corporate life that I so badly wanted to avoid. It's the painful repetition, the long hours in which nothing grows and everyone sits in their farty little gray cubicles all day, you get up to get a coffee, to use the john, and that's the majority of your movement for the day. It's the sessile existence of a plant -- you are planted in front of a PC or a Mac and there your buttocks shall stay. Of course, my experience is skewed because my jobs were usually not the most exciting ones in a place - temp work is usually not exactly orgasmic. The people, lovely and nasty, also are of course the soup in which you as a temp, get to stew for a while (yes I'm eating pumpkin soup, a good source of nourishment as well as inspiration,)- I met plenty of fantastic and not-so-fantastic individuals: Pakeha (white kiwis/New Zealanders), Maori, Brits, South Africans, Pacific Islanders, Europeans, South Americans. This is one aspect that I have loved about New Zealand - the incredible diversity of this new immigrant nation.
For example, last night I went out with a group of beautiful girls spanning five continents. The eight of us covered: Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Germany, Taiwan, and then there was I with my Ukraine/US background. I think I felt at home in the way the protagonist in L'Auberge Espagnol(great flick by the way, see it if you haven't yet,) feels at home, his own cultural confusion reflected by the situation, comfortable in cultural friction.
Speaking of comfort: it takes so long to get comfortable any where. Here, I'm just beginning to really have fun and I'm about to leave. It's sad, but it's also OK, because I think I will settle down some where eventually (more so, anyway,) and my life won't be so arrhythmic. Figuring out where, how, what, not easy - what makes a home, any one have an answer for that? Maybe part of the issue for me is that usually home seems to imply ONE place whereas because I've lived and grown attached in various ways to different locations and usually more importantly, the people in those locations, "home" is a number of places which I love and miss and which give me that fuzzy I need-to-be-there feeling. "Coming home" to people you love, perhaps that's the most important point? Although there is more to the feeling of being "at home," (like culture, language, experience, etc.,) and there is more to identity, but being loved certainly doesn't hurt.
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