Here are some things to know:
- I'm moving from Scotland to Canada in January
- I'm working in a local restaurant/bar at the moment (which shall henceforth be known as The Restaurant)
- I graduated from Edinburgh University and then fell ill for about 3 months
- I am learning how to be a human being again
I've come to learn that work in The Restaurant is 50% food and 50% flirting. Customers flirt with staff. Staff flirt with customers. Staff flirt with staff. And so on. It's incredibly nice because I have spent the greater part of these past four months hanging out with my parents and my dog, being wholly unattractive and kinda depressing and smelly in general. To finally be around Cute Boys on a regular basis and being able to let my eyebrows wiggle suggestively 40hrs a week and getting paid for it is like a dream. I just love being an active, alive person.
This weekend marked the beginning of CHRISTMAS. I'm not talking about the holly-jolly, Doctor-Who-TV-Special kind of affair, I'm talking about Christmas at The Restaurant. From what I've experienced so far, this mostly consists of endless plates of pre-ordered turkey and a lot of internal screaming. I had been forewarned of the complete warzone that The Restaurant was going to become in December ("You won't even remember your own name," one of the chefs remarked), but I never really grasped it until the other day.
In essence, Christmas service is easy, if a little manic. But yesterday I could feel myself seize up because the starters. were. so. important. and I found myself nearly in tears over the fact that there were twenty of them and I couldn't carry them all out by myself. I don't know why I was panicking over food, but I was just aware that I had just begun to magnify things ridiculously. It was a weird sensation that I was familiar with - I can remember in my third year of uni walking out of the library around exam time and just feeing my chest tighten with the stress of oh my god absolutely everything i had to do. Sometimes I feel like everything rests on my shoulders, like when I'm in an airplane believing that it's only my willpower keeping us all in the air.
So I sat drinking lemonade and made little whiny noises and felt the colour simultaneously rushing in and out of my face. And then I got sent home.
Sometimes I muse that some aspects of this month will be harder than life in Canada (I might be completely wrong about this, I expect). I'm no longer ill but I'm still recovering, and it feels like life is awarding me with Girl Scout badges for Real Life People with Real Life Problems: stuff I didn't have to worry about when I was ill because all I had to do was hide under a blanket and listen to Disney soundtracks. For example, things would be a lot easier right now if I wasn't suffering from a nasty winter cold, but I'm glad I have it because it means that I am dealing with it. Make sense?
One step closer to making my life a Wes Anderson movie.
At the moment I like to pretend I'm living the "Scottish lite" version of a Romanticised Struggling Young Artist's Dreamworld. These are the difficult formative years that I like to imagine all notable creatives have slogged through, and mainly consists of these things:
- working a menial job with ridiculous hours
- constant crippling self-analysis of one's art and work ethics
- dubious physical health
However, there are a few things which I would have to quit:
- living with my parents
- sleeping on an actual bed
- a stable income
And some things which I would need to acquire:
- a tiny, dirty studio apartment in a cosmopolitan city
- a torrid love-affair, preferably one which is frowned upon by conservative society
- a drug habit (sorry, Mum)
And only THEN would I finally manage to ascend the METAPHORICAL STAIRCASE to the GREAT HEIGHTS of ARTISTDOM. I'll be like Bowie in Berlin! Allen Ginsberg in his post-Columbia years! I'll be smelly and poor and miserable and everyone knows that without these things GREAT ART can NEVER BE ACHIEVED!
This delusion was partly what I had in mind when I wrote the song, Toronto. For some reason history likes to focus on how madness and misery leads to genius, which in turn encourages many to completely over-romanticise sadness and poverty. I'll be honest, I'm guilty of it as well (but perhaps not to such an extent).
But hey. Struggles are struggles, and I'm just getting back into the swing of managing everyday difficulties (not drug habits) - and I'm proud of myself for doing so! *adheres gold star to my jumper*
This has been a ridiculously long first blog post, but hopefully that will deter People I Actually Know In Real Life from reading the whole thing. You've done well to get this far, weary traveller! Expect more from me weekly (or maybe even bi-weekly if I'm feeling a bit adventurous).
Until then!
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