employed now. sort of

i should be drawing birds and plants right now. but i feel like writing. so. some stuff that's happened:

my friend moved in. i have a roommate now and he is my best friend in the whole wide world. this, as you may sort of know if you've paid special attention to mentions of the topic on here or if you know me beyond this blog, already happened in mid-august. in fact: 1 month of us being roommates yesterday! but it feels right to reflect on it with a little bit of time having passed. it's been great. i love having him around, i love being around him, and living together feels really natural. the big reason why i've always felt hesitant about living with flatmates is that i have a hard time really relaxing when i know someone's around, and especially after (counts on fingers) five years of living alone, i've developed my routines #myroutines that i get at least somewhat irritated about if they get disrupted. so having roommates would mean 1) i'm always kind of "on alert" and 2) i don't get to continue my routines like i'm used to and have to plan the day together with someone else. both of which are usually energy-draining. but! with my friend, it's fine, actually. 1) in the beginning, i did feel very aware of his presence, but that went away more quickly than i expected. and i know i don't have to hide myself away from him, so just being myself is really easy even with him around. 2) i think i'm still figuring out. it feels like we haven't really had time to sit down and have an organisational conversation about things, but so far we've been doing okay without a guideline, too. the net-time we spent actually being roommates has also only been like two weeks, though, so it's been more like a long hangout, where some deviation from routine is okay. but even for the future, i'm not really worried about this aspect. he knows i'm not trying to be difficult when insisting on my routines. i know how to plan things with him. and we usually find a plan to agree on very quickly. so i think it'll be fine.

most of all, i'm just crazy happy to get to spend some more time with him after we only really got to hang out twice over the past year. long-distance sucks when you became friends in person.

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same overall theme: i moved back in with my parents. i think i probably mentioned this, but i'm doing my internship for uni in the area i grew up in (and where my parents still live), which is too far away from where i live to commute every day, so the practical thing for me to do was move back into what was once upon a time my childhood bedroom. and, well. it's been something.

i feel like this is gonna sound mean. living with my parents is exactly the experience i'd been worried about about having flatmates. it's almost kind of worse. the house is old-ish, you can hear and feel when someone opens a door, you hear when someone goes up and down the stairs. i'm just slightly too aware that there are other people in the house to fully relax. idk. and my parents have their routines and they are quite different to mine but i'm the guest so i have to adjust (this is nothing that's been said explicitly. just kind of happened this way). and i'm not so close to my parents that i love hanging out with them all day. so idk. it's just kind of whatever. not awesome, not terrible. i'll be fine. but my room is a guest room now and none of the interior is mine except three pieces of decor i brought with me. i miss my own bedroom. my own everything.

good thing is that during the week, i'm mostly at work or asleep. and on the weekends i wanna go back to my own place as much as possible. next weekend will be the start of that, and i can't wait.

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the internship. i've started the internship. i'm at a bookbindery, a little workshop on the edge of a neighbouring town to where i grew up, and i work from nine to five except on fridays where i work until four and i bike half an hour to and fro every day. there is a little old dog who lets you pet her and barks at delivery people. there is the male boss who is...well, he's a man. knows his stuff. bit of a dusty sense of humour. we don't need to be friends. there is another boss, his daughter, who is nice. some other employees, who are nice. two bookbinders in training, who are also nice. i feel like they are all very much a different type of person than me and my classmates from uni. idk what it is. people who don't know (or care) about jk rowling. sigh. but they're nice. sometimes, some guy who is a friend of the workshop brings cake for everyone. the other intern, who was my favourite colleague, has sadly already had her last day.

bookbinding-wise, it's really good so far. i was immediately included in working on real orders, which felt good, and it's really cool to see how it all works on a professional level. i learned the manual way to do (the standard method of) thread-binding and now i'm thinking of building myself a Heftlade (there must be an english word for this thing but i cannot find it rn, sorry. but it's a construction to help with through-the-fold thread-binding). it being a workshop, it sometimes gets rather loud but wearing earplugs (or unplugged in-ear headphones, because i don't have dedicated earplugs) is no issue. mostly, work is non-stressful. in its own, each task is very repetitive, but there are so many, it's not necessarily like you're only doing one thing all the time. and everyone there does do everything, mostly. i like this a lot, i like the security of many small, simple tasks that are individually easy to learn. and some of it gets rather meditative when you do it for a few hours. through-the-fold binding books could be something i'd do to relax while watching a stream or youtube or whatever. only tough thing is you're on your feet the entire time. and some tasks put particular strain on your wrists and hands (two weeks into this, my blister counter is two, and my pin-prick-wound counter is stopped counting). but standing more is probably good for me. and being away from the puter.

the background to my choosing a bookbindery for my internship is to see if i wanna do this for a job. do a whole additional job training after uni to become a bookbinder. because rn i don't really see turning what i'm doing at uni into a sustainable career. but making books? feels more secure, despite what people love to say about how books are dying. most of what we do isn't even books, initially, it's magazines, bound together into collections for university libraries. and, maybe most importantly for me, i'd be more likely to get properly employed instead of having to freelance. so anyway. i might yet become an artisan. only thing is the school-part of the training sounds soooo unbelievably boring and infantile. subjects like german and gym class and (checks notes) religion and politics?? okay. what am i, fifteen years old? seems a bit....unrelated. idk, i kind of get it, you wanna have those subjects for people who leave school at 16 for the job training, to continue that education a bit, but like. i'd sit there at 26 years old with a whole bachelor's degree doing what? going over the same things i learned in highschool? writing essays about Nathan der Weise? debating ethics? sigh.

idk. i think i really wanna do it though. i love making things. i love predictability and tasks that will always stay the same. best case, i get to do 2 years instead of 3 because of my degree. rhyme. and maybe i don't have to move back to my childhood home to do it.

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yeah, i think that's it for today. now i really have to draw birds and plants. for next years calendar. which will be all about birds and plants.

i hope you get to be with or talk to someone you love today. or pet an animal.