these precious few hours

It is amazing how much energy is suddenly generated at the thought of not having to go to work tomorrow… even if the alternative is waking at an unearthly hour (far, far earlier than I’d have to for work) to catch a 7:20 am train to Stratford-upon-Avon, for an interview that will only yield yet another problematic unpaid placement if successful!

At least I get to speak with some RSC people. That’s quite cool, right? And every future contact, even if in an interview context, is a precious precious one - a fact I am fast learning in this industry.

*

To dredge up a very old cliche about every big city, I feel like London has two faces, and most people only see one. There is beautiful, glamorous central London, the London of Harrods, Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, the British Museum, the West End… I could go on forever but you know what I mean, the whole world knows what I mean. It’s the London everybody knows even without having been here and the London everybody sees first when they do come here. Even less shiny locales such as Camden, Greenwich, Borough and Portobello Road Markets, have all been subsumed into the sprawling, mythic umbrella of London’s exoskeleton.

And then there’s the other London. It’s almost Neverwhere-like, maybe, in how screamingly obvious it is yet also so easy to miss. There’s the London where people live and work and buy their groceries and pay their bills, where the pavements are sparsely littered with small, dense, dimly lit 24-hour convenience and grocery stores selling vegetables in boxes outside, where I catch the same bus 5 days a week and hurriedly take my coffee along the way because I’m always running too late in the mornings to drink it at home. My neighbourhood is about as untouristy as you could possibly get in London (nobody, but nobody, would come here unless they lived or worked here), and there is a delightful gritty earthiness about it all. There’s no hint of the grand or the legendary, no hint of historical significance, no dizzying cultural heights or glitzy lit-up shopfronts… just a bunch of everyday people going about everyday things.

This is the London I’ve been living in and slowly getting to know over the past month, and a part of me is growing strangely, bizarrely attached to it. On the whole, I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m only passing through this city, that it isn’t really home because I’ll be leaving it one day, that it’s only a pitstop in the journey I’m taking. But there is an undeniable charm and real, raw, honest vigour about this London when you set it beside the other one. I never thought I’d say this of this city, but I could really grow, if not to love it, then at least not to dread it entirely.

0 | +1?

looking up?

Got a 4-month internship offer today from a youth musical theatre company in London. It’s unpaid (lunch+travel expenses only), but the work sounds very exciting and I can see myself getting really into it if I take it up.

There are a million and one things to think about right now. I’m still waiting on the results of another job interview, and there’s one more scheduled for next week (though that, I can do alongside the London internship I think); I have to think of where to stay, how to move all my stuff down, when to move, how much I can afford to pay for rent. I’m not quite on my last legs financially, but I’m getting there. It’s a whole other world of stress.

But I am grateful for little things, for Nic and Jake who are so kindly letting me stay at theirs, for Steffy who furnished me a whole plethora of makeup tips before my interviews last week, for En Qi who has been unstintingly and generously helping me search for a room in London, for my dad who talked me through interview preparations, for Louis who told me it was okay to keep trying for what I want even if I hit some snags along the way, for Wee Zi who’s always believed in me and kept me company via phone calls, and - for this job offer, which I thought would never come!

One thing, one thing at a time…

2 | +1?

thorns

Life in point form:

• Still internetless at home (nearly 3 weeks and counting)

• Still jobless
• Still missing my family incredibly
• Exhausted from job applications and interviews
• Know I owe emails but am too tired/internetless to send them sorry to Wanyun and Wey Ren specifically, I love you both!
• Still visa-less
• Still, foolishly, stupidly, optimistic
• despite erratically flagging spirits

0 | +1?

can’t take it in

i’ve got to make room for this feeling
so much bigger than me
it couldn’t be any more beautiful
and i can’t take it in

- imogen heap, “can’t take it in”

Lin popped by today for a chat this afternoon, because she’s leaving for Cali tomorrow and who knows when we’ll get to see each other again. And the more we talked, about our experiences, our post-graduation dreams and aspirations, the more I realised that I really don’t want to go back quite just yet. There’s so much more here waiting for me to discover outside my academic bubble, there’s so many more opportunities, not just here in the UK but in the rest of the world, and I can’t shake the feeling that this is the time to take advantage of it all. I’m ideally poised, on the cusp of leaving uni behind me, I have a good degree, the next two years are a sprawling, empty landscape to be filled in. I can’t help feeling that it’ll just be so unfulfilling if I go back to Singapore now, take a safe desk job that earns me S$2.5K a month, get an apartment, maybe a secondhand car, settle back into life there. I’ll go back, after a couple of years - that’s as long as the post-study work visa will let me stay, at any rate - but not now. I’m not ready yet.

And it’s just that much more aggravating, thinking of all this, that the only job prospect for me right now is back at home. I’ve got till the end of September for something really magical to pop up here in the UK… and oh, how I hope it does. I’ve always - whenever people asked - expressed a vague interest in staying here to work for a few years, but now I genuinely do feel it. I really do want it to happen. I feel like there’s something more for me in the future besides going home right away to a government-prescribed path of stable job and sheltered existence… and I can’t even explain it, because it’s not like I’ve had a particularly exciting life so far, certainly not anything to make me think that something special should be waiting for me. But - this is the point in my life, isn’t it, when I can do anything? And I’m gonna do it, somehow, whatever it turns out to be. Fingers crossed.

0 | +1?

frustration is…

…spending your whole morning rushing a last-minute application for a UK job that sounds ideal - arts marketing, one-year fixed contract, PAID - mailing it off at 12:17pm, feeling extremely happy and satisfied with the personal statement that you laboured over, and - receiving an email one minute later, telling you that the deadline, which you stupidly neglected to take note of in the small print of one of the millions of documents relating to the job spec, was in fact noon.

Ah! I could just die!

0 | +1?