Getting a Life

I have made a momentous decision. I am admitting that I have taken on way too much, and it stops now. For almost a year I've been busting my butt with study and extra-curricular sucking-up-type stuff in the hopes of scoring a government graduate position with one of about three different departments I've had my eye on, which means that, especially with moving house and everything else that's been going on, I've had very little time for me.

In the shower this morning - where all my momentous decisions are made, it seems - I realised I was utterly exhausted and I'd only just got up. You remember that Hoodoo Gurus song - "So Tired of Waking up Tired"? That's me. I'm stuffed.

So the government can go jump. I'm not going to try to go to Canberra. I'm a captioner, and I'm going to make the most of it. I fought hard to get this job and I'm going to keep it. I'm going to stick with a workplace for more than a year and see what opportunities there are. I'm not going to lose my Italian. I'm going to be able to say yes the next time the Dante asks me if I can teach a class. I'm going to get my translation certificate and do some _real_ subtitling. I'm going to finish my editor's training (which I started yesterday) and be taught to be a news captioner. All this I can do in the organisation I currently work for. Down the track, when I have a few years experience, I can work as a subtitler in any English-speaking nation I choose. I'm going to appreciate the fact that I have a well-paid, different, not particularly strenuous job which I'm good at and which gives me the mornings off. Most of all, I'm going to be true to myself - I'm not in it for the money or the prestige, I'm not a natural bureaucrat - I'm a dag who loves language, and I'm going to hang around with other people who feel the same way. So there : )