Oh wow, wow, wow. What a change of pace. I don’t start semester until Monday, so this week I’ve been working at my real job, but today I had my first day at my internship. Talk about a change of pace. I walked in at 9:00am and 15 minutes later I was on the motorcycle running down to the post office. Then I got back and I’m calling agencies, then covering a desk, and then, and then, and then… I’m surrounded by movie talk and scripts that no one is allowed to talk about. And despite being stressful and tiring, just being in this office is almost enough of a reward.

I get pretty nervous when I start a new job. I’m not that great at absorbing a ton of new information at once, and I’m nervous about that, so I’m not really listening when things are explained, which makes me more nervous, etc.

And since my hands shake all the time I am always afraid people will notice and think I’m so anxious I’m shaking. Which makes me anxious.

One of the assistants whose desk I was covering asked me to unplug a cord from under her desk. So I go under the desk and have a flashback of my first job in college, when I was asked to do the same thing. I had been pulling on the plug but it was stuck so I put my fingers on the sides of the power strip to pull it out and I hit the power strip reset. All the computers in that room went off, including the one on which my boss had been writing a very long email. To his credit, he didn’t get that mad and I didn’t feel awful after, and the computer had saved his work (thank you Jesus).

So I was all nervous about doing that, so I wouldn’t touch the power strip, because I’m pretty sure one of them would have thrown me out the window or shanked me, it seems like an intense place. Instead I accidentally grabbed the sides of the plugged and heavily shocked myself. For those of you who haven’t been shocked as frequently as I have: It feels like someone is slapping you everywhere, on all surfaces of your body, at the same time. I want to use the word electrocuted so you know how much this hurts, but according to wikipedia that means you died in the process and then you wouldn’t get to read the story at all.

I just got up and pretended like nothing happened while the muscles in my arm were spazzing. Luckily I don’t think she’d have noticed, although she probably would have just thought I was a stupid intern.

One of the other interns is from Spain. I told her that I had studied abroad in Argentina and she said we could practice Spanish. It took about two seconds before she was correcting my accent, which is clearly Argentine, in favor of the lisping dialect of Madrid. I’ve now had Spanish teachers from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina, California, and Spain. The accents are starting to mush together a bit in my head, so all foreigners will have to excuse me and not insist that I speak their particular type of Spanish.

I feel like I’m really busy already and my semester hasn’t even started! I only have time to do this because class hasn’t started yet, and I somehow have to clear out my head from all the stuff that going on. So I’m working a job, a 20-hour internship, 16 hours of class, and the basically full-time job of producing this movie, which is getting bigger and bigger by the second.

My life has all of a sudden been taken over by movies. In my spare time we are working on choreography, or arrangements, or production details for Life is Not a Musical, and the next moment I’m sitting across a desk from the very people who have the power to take a script and make it a movie and their talking about this writer and that company and this script. So intense.

I bounce around between any of the bagillion things I’ve considered as a career, but I think things are finally starting to clear up. A few things are dropping off, which is actually a pretty sad feeling, but at the same time I know it’s for the better as I get closer and closer to what some very lucky people call a “calling.”

At least I’ve always been able to cross out a few fields, like oh, say, anything with numbers.

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