Job hunting

The bright sparks amongst you have probably guessed from the title of this post that, finally, after many months of denial and procrastination, the time has come for me to decide What I Want To Do Next.

Oh, those six dreaded words. This question, while I was at home and being clouted over the head by it at every turn, made my heart constrict and my natural ebullience wilt, before the questioner had even reached the inflection at the end of the sentence.

Now, however, as I sit here in Parbs, I see the long, dark years stretch out before me, rather like the road does in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (think nuclear winter, with a bit of cannibalism thrown in for variety), and I know that attempting to answer this tortuous question is infinitely preferable to living in Leicester for the rest of my life.

I suppose I hadn’t realised, until the possibility of extending my placement here was torn to shreds, set alights and the embers danced upon by a thoroughly ridiculous decision (I’m not naming any names, before you ask), how much that possibility had been cocooning me from facing this depressing prospect. It was only when that particular rug was whipped out from under my feet that the need to Find A Job hit me square in the jaw.

Unfortunately, I’m no closer now to knowing what I want to do with my life than I was when I arrived here. Convinced I was going to have an epiphany in a Bangladeshi village, I quietly pitied my university friends, all madly applying for jobs the summer we graduated. And now, here I am, not so much closer to The Answer than I was when we took off from Heathrow back in 2008.