Saturday, March 10, 2007

I want adventure in the great wide somewhere
I want it more than I can tell
And for once it might be grand
To have someone understand
I want so much more than they've got planned


Those are a portion of the lyrics from "Belle (Reprise)" from Beauty and the Beast. It just kind of popped in my head. Mostly I think the first two lines pertain to me as I have been feeling a little trapped on PEI lately. I know I can just get up and leave, but I almost feel guilty about wanting to leave. So many people like it here, why not me? I almost feel as though leaving is either me A) giving up, or B) being a snob and thinking I'm above PEI. I haven't given up on it yet, but I'm getting close. I am also definitely not a snob. I was thinking about it today in my mind's chain of random thoughts. In a job interview about a month ago I was asked to describe myself in one word. I should have been prepared for such a question, but I wasn't and definitely said something stupid. (Regardless, I still made it through to the next round of interviews?!) Before my interviews last Tuesday (the third of the previously mentioned and one for a server at the Delta) I came up with a good word to use. I then promptly forgot it minutes later. Today I thought of a word, again, but this time remembered it. It actually may have been the same word I previously thought of, but I cannot be positive on that.

Curious.

Yup, that's the word I came up with. It kind of developed from "discovery", which isn't an adjective thus cannot describe me. ("An adjictive describes a noun." Thank you, Mad Libs.) But I like discovering things. Discovering new places, new people, new adventures, new languages, etc. I think this is a solution to the "problem" - my curiosity. I like knowing how people got to "where they are". I like talking to people about their jobs, finding out what they do and what that job title really means. I like talking to people about their hometowns.

To sum up a bit of my current problem and relate it to the previous paragraph, I have discovered nothing since being in Charlottetown. (Relating to the town, not people.) I know Charlottetown. I went for a walk last weekend and discovered nothing new. I remember on nice weekends in Edinburgh I would just walk... or hop on a random Lothian Bus, hop off, and then walk. Usually I had an idea where I was as I knew the bus system ridiculously well. If I was ever stuck I could just scan the sky line for Arthur's Seat, the Castle, Calton Hill, the Walter Scott Monument, etc., and determine my approximate where-abouts. When all else failed, I would just find a bus stop and work from there. I really don't ever remember getting lost, and if I did, I had a mobile and, sometimes, a map.

This week was a good week. I worked part-time at Junior Achievement and part-time piloting the 2007 Tourist Exit Survey (TES). I don't really care for surveying people, and I quite hate bothering people but most people are good about it and it has quite a high response rate. I think I just don't feel very productive doing it because there are so many Islanders at the airport. Of the many people I talk to, very few are even eligable to fill in the survey. At JA I'm doing .... let's make it sound fancy! "Database administration." I have to do 100 hours over the span of five weeks. I am temporarly filing in for someone who is one a leave of absense for, shocker, five weeks. She was a part-time employee working twenty hours a week hence my time obligations. I plan on working more than twenty hours a week, and once the TES is over I'll be able to put in more hours than I put in this week (twenty seven).

On Friday afternoon I wrote the ... I can't remember the of it, but a government test required for a position I applied for back in January. The test itself was quite easy. Hee hee, I just looked at the job description again (which was very vague) and the language requirements are "bilungual imperative" with a pretty high standard for French (C-B-C). I wonder if, provided I get through to the next round, will I have to write a French test? Oye. I may have to consider myself out of the running if that's the case, although I *do* listen to the radio in French so that's a start. Also relating to the test which I found interesting, all the people writing it were female. Curious!

Ooh, time to hop off, I think Jannie is home from Victoria =) And I have to run to the toilet. AND I'm thirsty. AND I need to brush my teeth. Wow, busy times.

1 comment:

Shannon Courtney said...

I just wrote a message and now it's disappeared.

Anyhoo - just so you know, I was the static on the phone Friday night - service in South Australia sucks. More specifically service on a vineyard in SA sucks, but the copious amounts of alcohol make up for the lack of mobile communication.

Was just calling to see if you were still on PEI - hopefully you can hang in there for the summer - I am really looking forward to coming home now (especially after reading the last few months of your blog, which are so positive about PEI!), but am hoping there'll be more familiar faces this time around and hope yours is one of them!

Take care,
Shan