Perhaps the ball, it has started to roll?

Wow, I just floated off and feel asleep like a newborn after cooking up some Shepherds pie last night. Waking up in my clothes at 3am, in front of a sketchbook while sitting in the den, was bizarre! But then I find that having to wake up to go to bed usually is.

ANYwho, okay so Sunday was a little raw with frustration over having done so much job hunting this year, but then Monday really made up for it. Having to get up at a specific time with an actual job to go to felt great and despite the early hour, I felt really energized by it. Checking my London A-Z on the train into Paddington, I was pleased to learn that Tottenham Court Road is (oddly) not in the actual area of Tottenham (which is in turn far to the north and slightly west of central London, AKA a pain to get to from Paddington). It's actually in central London and the company was at the south end of the road, right where it meets with good old Oxford Circus.



Remembering the data entry job I did just before coming over, I expected a kind of grungy farm (in that the facilities would resemble a barn) with several discount lunch tables all in a row, their clumsy joints straining under the weight of old computers and tedium. The building itself was in a rather depressing business park, a ways down the road from my old job at the Shoppe.

But lucky for me, it turned out that this wasn't some data entry farm but a small company which works in what I was told is a new sector in English business - the third sector, or "Social Enterprise", something which straddles the grey area where government and the public sectors intertwine for the purpose of charity. Thus I got my own bloody desk with a decent chair, nice computer etc. in an open concept office which was extremely pleasant and had a decent kitchen on top. True, I only dealt with them for three days, but I'd like to go out on a limb and say that the people were also very pleasant (though lacking kitchen facilities, as we all do unless we engage upon some truly radical surgery).

Though there was some copy and pasting, I actually got to type! OOOOOH. That may sound absurd, but at that last job I just used a word recognition tool over images of addresses on envelopes. I could go hours without using my left hand or 99% of my brain. Lord, if it hadn't been to save money for coming to England...

ANYwho, I found the office easy enough as it lay just to the right of this craven idol of Freddie Mercury. Another fun fact about England, or at least London to be sure, is that musicals are way more popular here - at least judging by the amount of press, posters and musicals. The world of English musicals also bears a passing resemblance to the world of Japanese advertising in that it is a sort of elephant graveyard for American celebrities past their prime. Do you miss the wild, clay-molding-while-dead antics of Patrick Swayze? THEN COME ON DOWN.

To my immense good fortune, there was a power outage around fifteen minutes after I got back from my lunch break on the first day. The company was told it would be hours before energy was restored, so I got to leave early while still being paid for a full day. The setback in work was also definitely responsible for my being asked to come back a third day - so I guess I can thank either faulty wiring or the first worlds wasteful attitude towards energy use for a chunk of extra cash. The following two days went smoothly and though I was pretty beat at the end of them, it still felt good to be working.

As for the third phrase, I kept thinking it would fit seamlessly into this update but now it seems a bit forced. I'll press on though, for you dear reader!.

The nut of it is that the first day was nearly sabotaged by my hunger for a snack. Right beside the buildings main entrance was a hot dog etc. stand that deserved the descriptor "hole-in-the-wall" more than any I'd seen before. Feeling oddly peckish and with a few moments to spare, I decided to buy a pastry. The Armenian behind the counter kindly offered to warm it up. I guess in Armenia "warm" is their phrase for "searing" and thus when I bit into the pastry I was treated to a molten chocolate ejaculation straight into my limp, salivating maw. I can still feel the oddly textured burn all along the right side of my lips. This wouldn't have been so bad, except that a strange car-collision of half-formed jokes about what was going on at that exact moment came into my noggin'. So the sound I made was a strange hybrid of yelping in pain, choking on food and laughter. For the rest of the morning, stupid, nonsensical porno film titles kept popping into my head and I can only hope that I wasn't grinning too stupidly. Ah well!

Finally, I saw this odd thing during one of my lunchtime walks. I suspected some kind of crazed, holistic institution but it turned out to be a large building firm. Huh!