For all you shatter is our seeming, And in breaking we are free

So today, for my birthday, I got: some lovely well wishes (thanks all!), a Harry Clarke colouring book (shush, I love his stuff), a slice of lemon cake, and, oh, a job interview and an Irish oral exam. Because.

I think it went well? It went better than my last interview anyway. I was shitting bricks about the Irish, because I haven't used the language since school ten years ago basically, but the Irish examiner was incredibly friendly and he actually calmed me down not just for the Irish but for the job interview as well. We ended up talking the entire time about languages and quirks of language and Irish connections to Europe and the difference between colour words in different languages and dialects of Irish we've heard, all in rather pidgin Irish on my part with large sprinklings of English and the occasional bit of French when my brain short-circuited on me, but I think it went well. He told me I actually have a good base of Irish, it just really shows that I haven't spoken it in ten years and if I started using it more in everyday life that I could improve an awful lot. I have no idea if that's good enough to get me the job, but even if it doesn't I think I feel really good about myself for having done it, and it was genuinely a really fun conversation. If I see that man again, I'm giving him a go raibh míle, míle maith agat, because he seriously made the whole day better for me.

And then when we came out of the exam, he spent ten minutes talking to my mother (she'd given me a lift down) about knitting and Donegal and types of boats and how absolutely appalling some of the local accents are. By the time I made it into the actual job interview, I was calmed way, way down. Heh. He was a nice man.

Okay, so apparently that interview went just fine. I got a call today. I have a part time job, 19.5 hours a week, starting next Monday. It'll only last a year, but it can go on my CV and I will have that little extra money and I will be working. I will be doing something. I got the job and passed an interview.

I am going to sit down and watch silly things for a while. Yes. I'm gonna go ... be happily in shock for a while. Heh.

How bad is it that I can spend three hours of a careers seminar in a ball of stress and nerves because we're talking (just talking) about interviews and interpersonal skills and how to present yourself TM, and then I can be presented with a surprise maths test and I relax completely? Well, basic arithmetic, really, it was the standard verbal/numerical/spatial abilities aptitude test. I could do those things all day, not a bother. I felt genuinely relaxed and happy for the first time in hours.

Just. Conversation and self-presentation: ALL THE STRESS. Sudden maths test: calm and happiness. This is why I keep failing interviews.

I'm not surprised, mind you. I know this is a problem for me. I'm great in a written medium, and I can answer direct questions and figure out concrete problems until the cows come home, but sit me down in front of an actual, physical person and I am ... not good. Introverted aspie hermit over here. I'm ... I'm working on it. Trying to. Ah, sod it.

It just struck me as a little funny, I guess. Surprise maths tests calm me down. I don't think it's meant to be that way around. Heh. Today was me in a nutshell, really.

I did not get the job. I am still jobless. I have consequently scheduled tomorrow to be depressed and hermit-like in, and am spending tonight being very silly.

On the upside, I think I may have passed my first aid exam. Hopefully. So there's that.

To distract from my RL failings right now, have some random fanvid recs?

So my contract was always limited to a year. I've known this was coming all along, but it still feels so weird.

Yesterday was my last day at my job. The past month has been crazy, trying to figure stuff out and get things organised. I had a job interview, which fell through, and I've been tying up loose ends, and all that stuff, but essentially ... essentially I am now, once more, unemployed.

And I was just getting good at the damn thing, too.

*sighs* I'm gonna be maudlin for a while. I've pencilled that in on my schedule. Even when I know it's coming, I hate it when things end, especially things that've been giving life structure and challenge and reason. It goes and it goes and it goes, and then it stops, and I just have to take a little while to be depressed about it.

And, also, find another job. Joy of joys.

*rubs face* Someone recommend me a fandom, to take my mind off things? A new one, I mean. I've been watching bits of Poltergeist: The Legacy and a few random things, but I think I want something current that I might feel inclined to write for. If anything springs to mind?

Okay, so I found out about this on Wednesday, and I thought I'd have gotten to grips with the idea by now, but I'm still sort of terrified. I'm having a bad week.

My boss told me that I'll be doing one of the big, scheduled tours next Tuesday. The ones with upwards of forty people, the ones that require three guides between two sites. The ones where you have to tailor your tour to fit the timetables of the other two groups. The ones where you have to swap groups after the first round and do it again for the second.

I've never done a tour for more than about a dozen people before. I've never had to time my tour against two others happening simultaneously. I've never had to come straight off one round and head into the next one. I have never, ever done a tour for a group this large before. I've only ever done the smaller, people-in-off-the-street tours.

I am legitimately, full-on nausea-style panicking right now, and I have been for pretty much the past four days. And I will probably do it, and it will probably be fine, but right now my stomach hurts with how scared I am.

I hate crowds. I hate big groups of people. I hate how noisy the big tours always are in the small spaces. And I'm going to have to stand in the middle of it, and figure out how to make myself heard, and be the person everyone in that space is looking at. While on the clock and having to make sure I get them through in time to swap groups at the end of it.

I have no idea how I'm going to get through this. I would really, really like my stomach to stop cramping about it, though.

Because sometimes life drops little gems into your day. I had to photocopy out a 70-odd page booklet for work today, a 1979 short dictionary of one of the local dialects circa the 1790s and where the words derived from. I was idly browsing through it as the pages came out of the printer, and one of the words caught my eye.

You remember in The Hobbit when Bilbo is taunting the spiders of Mirkwood? He goes:

Old fat spider spinning in a tree!
Old fat spider can't see me!
Attercop! Attercop!
Won't you stop,
Stop your spinning and look for me?

Old Tomnoddy, all big body,
Old Tomnoddy can't spy me!
Attercop! Attercop!
Down you drop!
You'll never catch me up your tree!

For some reason, I always thought 'attercop' was just a random word thrown in to make the rhyme. But apparently it's actually a word derived from Old English which means, naturally, 'spider'.

... Given Tolkien, I really ought to have known, oughtn't I -_-;

*scrubs face* Sorry for being slow and spotty again lately. Between work and hospital, there hasn't been a lot of time. Or energy, more to the point.



Could just be I'm tired, though. Yeurrgh. I'm scrambly, yes? *mauls face*



And I'll leave you without a dozen other cuts, I think. *shakes head at self*