Day 95: Sunday, November 27

Long Week? Welcome to the Real World

So, after another looong break from blogging, I hope I can play catch-up well enough to satisfy those of you who have been prodding me to write again (ahem, Victoria Collis).  The fact is, I am falling into the Korean concept of work, wherein you keep your nose to the grindstone and you lift your head up for air just in time to go back to work again.  To clarify, this isn’t a complaint –I feel very fortunate to be working in a profession I feel so passionate about and my coworkers and bosses are truly terrific.  If anything, it seems as though I am becoming accustomed to the culture in a very intrinsic way, and my tourist approaches to understanding a Korean lifestyle have fallen away to a more meaningful experience.  I see that hard work is a standard for most Korean people and I can certainly respect it enough to follow suit when it is asked of me. 

This past week, our regular number of seven foreign teachers was down to five and that left everyone picking up the slack.  At the same time that we were filling in the gaps, we were also welcoming four new people to replace a handful of veteran teachers.  Hectic to say the least, we were all losing our prep periods and I ended up working the majority of my days from 9am to 7pm with one 25-minute lunch break.  Long, tiring days are not the type of thing that recruiters tell you about when they are trying to persuade you to come here, but I strangely find them the most satisfying.  Even better, when I can leave at the end of the day, grab a quick meal (with my hard-earned won) and go home to mark papers and prep for reports, I feel like I have truly arrived in adulthood.

Rewinding back to my undergrad days, there was always a lot of talk about the “real world”.  Not the TV reality series, but the ominous world of work and adult responsibilities that were soon to come.  Being somewhat self-sufficient at the time, I remember thinking how silly it was for my elders to assume that I was not yet experiencing the “real world”.  I worked, I studied, I stressed and I felt as though I knew the meaning of money; surely, I must be a part of that allusive adult world they speak of.  Clearly, the members of the adult club were just being condescending, or elitist, or just plain cruel to tell me otherwise –or, at least that’s what the somewhat of a doofus, 21-year old Jenni thought.

Me, at 21 years old, trying to balance the weight of the world.  Wait, that's not the world, it's ice cream.

Then, when I graduated university and worked three part-time jobs, making ends meet in my basement apartment, I wanted to smack my younger self for thinking she had any idea what the “real world” was.  Though the life of an undergrad student can be stressful and demanding at times, it does not pose the same kind of gut-churning life pressures that the working class are privy to.  Naturally, I thought that I really had a sense of what adulthood was about.  Driving from one workplace to another in a car I paid the insurance on, making grocery lists and low-budget plans with friends, I had finally arrived in the “real world”.

Glamour grad at 23.  Being an adult is apparently all about looking fabulous.

Two years later, I feel it necessary to look back on my younger (less experienced) self once again and laugh a little at what I thought I knew in vast contrast to what the reality may have been.  In this case, those earlier jobs were stepping stones to becoming more responsible, but they didn’t require the same sort of dedication that salary work demands.  This week, being somewhat hellish, didn’t provide any clock-out sort of situations or regulated break times –just long days of blood, sweat and maybe a couple tears.  However, with every day that passed by and every  “to do” was checked off my seemingly never-ending list, I couldn’t help but feel that THIS is the “real world”.*

Present day: "Jennifer Teacher", remaining fairly sane on a field trip with Blueberries

*Being the realist that I am, I can imagine a point in my future where I look back at this epiphany and think that I still missed the mark, but for now, I would like to rejoice in feeling a bit like a grown up.