should i stay or should i go?
turns out i am having a cultural clash. a massive one.
sometimes things dont go as expected. well, most of the times.
this is what life is about, i guess.
it’s just that there are moments where you can handle it and others where you can’t go over it.
i came here for the job and i dont like my job.
well, i am liking it more than before. i dont have blood and tears in my eyes anymore.
but i dont really like the people i work with.
i think what disturbs me the most it’s the condescending tone.
‘you don’t know, here in Australia…’ they use to say.
bullet points and to do lists in excel sheets. they hate confrontation. but they love gossip.
‘you dont understand, here in Australia’, and every time i listen to that phrase, i remind myself this person never left Victoria state.
L. and M. came home. it’s summer now. we took the chairs outside, as the sidewalk, and life, belonged to us.
M. put the the wine in the freezer. meanwhile L. asked me ‘should i end my relationship with him or should i give him a second chance?’.
pisces season in the making, i thought.
he came back. ‘why is your freezer empty? why there is just a glass jar with a paper inside?’, he asked.
so i told him that sometimes i freeze people. and this time is a coworker.
before i was ashamed of recognising it.
but when life is just asking you to trust the process, sometimes the process needs a little bit of help to progress.
i was explaining him the thing about why i freeze people. and a bunch of bats overflew my place.
because here in Australia, we dont have pigeons. we have bats. my freezy-red hair just added up.
‘they are condescending to me as well’, L. said. ‘but might be different from you’.
she is brown. and this is a racist country. well as almost any country nowadays.
‘do you consider yourself white?’, she asked me. i never thought about it.
and the fact that i never had to think about it, made me understood in a new way what white privilege is.
somebody told me once that people, here in Australia, they work to live. and in Europe we live to work.
i guess this is another kind of privilege. here in Australia, unemployment is 3%.
you take things differently when basic needs are granted.
i was attracted to the work life balance when i accepted the job.
but somehow you need to have some respect to what you do in your nine to five.
no attachment. no excitement. because ‘it’s just a job’.
there’s no excellence, or passion. what i am experiencing is just lots of arrogance, insolence or indifference.
i texted L. to have some news. she called me right away. ‘do you have a van that I can burn?’, she asked me.
god i miss having my friends with me, i thought. i might be missing big personal stuff when freezing people is not enough that now burning vans is the new norm.
‘it’s for the new tv show i work now’, she told me. ‘but if you dont have one i should run, i need to manage to have a burning van before midnight’.
this is passion and engagement for your job, i thought.
next day i was walking with P. in the north of the city. she told me that i won’t make it here if i am not able to thrive my work life.
‘Ça fait partie of who you are’, she said. ‘in the 4 years i worked with you in Paris, you tend to have unrealistic expectations from people. so not even meeting expectations, comment te dire, ça va pas le faire’, she said.
felt like she throw an ice bucket of water in my face.
waiting for the traffic light to turn green, we saw a guy walking barefoot.
‘il est pas mal’, she said. ‘il est hipster’, i answered back. ‘oh bah non, il est homeless’, she concluded.
our sex and love life might need a little revamp if now homeless are in our radar, i thought.
‘at least you thrive your personal life’, she said. that’s true, I thought.
L. came home to have dinner. after the third orange wine bottle, her situation ship called.
‘there is a gap between i want to blow you all night and i need some respect in my life’, she said on the phone.
i should open another one, i thought. ‘Gomez, can i be your bitch?’, she said right after hanging up on him.
Gomez is the new love of my life. he is my 4 months dog.
sometimes i wonder if i just came to Australia to buy a dog. ‘you should stay’, she said. ‘you haven’t made it until here to allow a Karen make you live in fear’.
I had lunch with R. to share my last cultural clash. ‘this karen goes twice per week to the salon to blow dry her hair’, t’imagines?
‘i guess she has a hole in her payslip’, he said. ‘i guess she needs to blow something else’, i concluded.
‘i feel you’, he said. ‘j’ai bessoin d’un adaptateur chaque fois que je fais le fer a repasser’.
sometimes the simple tasks can be annoying as fuck.
it’s like the system sending you friendly reminders that you dont belong and you are just passing by.
we were having some drinks at the Royal Oak. M. said i should fight. ‘tu vas la niquer’, she said. But P. answered back saying life should be something else that fighting back all the time.
i am very confused. somebody tried to hurt me. and managed to do it.
i can’t project how to stay if i know people can be so mean that they shoot you to kill.
i started this blog about the journey of starting a new life. might be that the new life was just an hiatus to come back.
or maybe the new life is about thriving in my personal space above anything else.
read the other day somewhere that sometimes things go wrong to get us right.
I have 3 days to decide.
should I stay or should I go?