Archive for November, 2009

It’s been a weird feeling, these last few days of being in Boston. I’m getting the rest of the week ready as I have about a billion errands to do the second I get up tomorrow morning, resetting my phone up to work in Canada after basically having to erase every money-inducing feature of it while roaming in the States and fixing up a little to-do list for the next phase in my life.

I’ve also realized that my fixed expenses for every month has taken a turn for the worse and it looks like I’m going to be returning to “three-job-emilia” to keep up as a part of me is a bit apprehensive over what the heck I’m going to do, especially with the Christmas season coming. The other part of me wants to go …. Relax, like usual, it’ll all work out because it always does.

Perhaps I just begin to feel like this because I tend to listen to nostalgic and depressing music while I wait to board my plane. Habit. But what are you gonna do?

The thing I know is, I can’t believe how much I learned while on this trip. Not only about being a sales person, or an event coordinator, or even a planner. I learned so much about the United States, and if anybody knows me, they’ll know me as a 100% Canadian supporter and very skeptical of anything US related (whoops, did I say that?). The thing is, after being here for five weeks, not touring one specific city but actually experiencing the workforce here, albeit a tiny glimpse, I have a bit of a changed view. The amount of people I spoke to, the information I received on how their own people view others in the same country proved to be half-patriot and half-separatist. I found it extremely interesting.

I also found it amazing the vast amount of metropolis cities and realizing that, coming from a country that basically has three or four major cities that people can immigrate to and actually make a decent living, my view on the US was a bit biased. Okay, I already knew that, but my mind was opened a tiny bit. You really can go anywhere you want and start from scratch and make it. You have about a billion choices. Fifty choices, actually, because every state has a major city with a “headquarters” of some sort, a division and it’s probably roughly a two to three hour drive from the neighbouring state, and cheap to fly to.

It surprised me. I even have a new view on the health care system. Don’t get me wrong, it still is ridiculous that more than 11 million people don’t have health care but, boy was it interesting to see the difference in opinion depending on what state I was in.

I learned a lot of things from a lot of people on this trip. I didn’t learn all of them on day one, or day …. thirty three? I learned them from those close to me, far, ones I’d just met – everyone.

And that was pretty exciting and scary. And really, extremely … humbling.

It’s always tough, realizing that so much time has gone by and you’re nearing the end of an important time in your life – to look back and see that you’ve basically accomplished close to nothing on your big “to-do” during the time until the impending deadline of said to-do list.

I like to look back on the things I’d set to accomplish before my journey started. Usually, I have a to-do list I try and follow to keep me on track but have recently come to realize that sometimes, you just can’t plan everything. Life usually gets in the way. This to-do list I’ve often dictated out probably has about two things checked off and a lot of hopes and new additions. But I can always guarantee that I learn something, as life happens, and I learn from it.

Sometimes I like to revel in how young I am, and then promptly get scared at how fast the time flies and pretty soon it’ll already be time for my 26th birthday. It scares me just thinking about it and I’ve got ten months to go. See? Ten months! That’s already scary because just I felt it was just yesterday that I got a beautiful eight-diamond necklace from my boyfriend in front of my closest friends in Calgary at dinner for my birthday.

It’s been less than two months and already so much has changed at this point. Now I’m lying in my twentieth different bed I’ve been in over the last few weeks realizing I’ve created a habit of playing with the dangling pendant and wondering when and if I’ll ever choose to take it off.

Earlier this evening I opened my notebook and saw the to-do list I’d written on my first flight out of Toronto in October. Even though as I look at it now, not much is checked off, but I’ve done a lot. I didn’t have as much free time as I thought I would because somehow along all the hustle and bustle I realized that life got in the way of my hard-set plans, as it usually does, and I was forced to re-organize.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t learn anything on this trip, and I’d be lying if I said some parts haven’t been disappointing. My eyes and ears are open to taking the new experiences in while challenging my pre conditioned notions about business life and meeting people and working with strangers who quickly become family when you all meet together so far from regular lives.

I’m not entirely surprised at where I sit right now, alone in a hotel room, writing to myself instead of sending my usual end of the day messages to my person; but I’m a bit surprised it happened so quickly. There is that saying again, however – life happens. And you can’t change things because they don’t fit into your plans. I guess you just learn to deal with them and figure things out as you go along.

swimming around in the baltimore waters

When times seem tough and you don’t seem to have anywhere to go. Just remember, just keep swimming.