| 7:00p |
Just call me Jack
Guess what, dear readers?
I'm cured! I mean, my heart isn't totally broken anymore! No, I didn't end up getting back together with my sort-of-boyfriend, though how you can get back together with someone you weren't really going out with is confusing in itself. What I mean is that I'm not completely miserable anymore. Last week was the worst. I did manage to work, but it was only through God's strength that I managed to put on a brave face. Every day, I'd come home and cry a lot and write in my diary. I felt like I was completely defeated. I wanted to give up in every single area of my life. I don't know if you're the same, but I always feel really devastated when my heart is broken. Like, I can't think about anything else, and I just feel such utter despair. Anyway, on Sunday night, I just snapped out of feeling sad all of a sudden. It was so cool. It was when I was at this family reunion thing- just being out of the house was good. Anyway, I started to remember things my friends had told me, and things that I had read in the Bible, and I didn't feel so devastated anymore. It was so awesome of God. I'm so grateful. I've learnt so much about life and God through this hard time, so I feel very blessed to have had the privilege of the experience. "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." (Proverbs 13:12) "I can do everything through him who gives me strength." (Philippians 4:13)
Anyway, I looked through my latest entries, and I noticed that my past few updates have been really sad. That is obviously because I've been sad, but I think that you guys are in need of some good-hearted and old-fashioned Carla stories. So here is the update of my latest adventures as a Girl Friday, or as a Jack of all trades.
I got a new job at a daycare centre! Isn't that cool? God is the best. He always provides for me. So anyway, that makes four jobs that I have now- Myer, illustration tutoring, the freelance thing and now this daycare job. I'm just trying as many different careers as I possibly can at the moment. I just love kids. I feel that often, children understand me better than adults do- like, they get my jokes about aeroplanes talking to each other and that sort of thing. Today was my first day there. I love how the kids just come up and sit in my lap- I love how they love so freely, easily and instantly. I want to be like that. The kids help me to understand why Jesus wants us to be like little children before him. Anyway, the kids at the centre are really, really young- from zero to five years of age. All I really have to do is play with them! They have the best play-dough equipment there- like all of these groovy things that you can make noodles and worms out of. I think that that job is enough to make even laid-back hippy-girl me become a germophobe! I don't think I've ever washed my hands more in my life than I did today! I changed my first nappy! It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Though that's probably because the kid hadn't done anything in her nappy. I couldn't bring myself to look in the nappy, though, so that's not for sure. Anyway, changing a nappy is mostly like cooking- you just shake stuff onto the baby and then wrap it up and stuff. I don't have the moves down yet, though! Like, you have to lift the kid's legs at the right times, and things like that. And I even wiped this kid's nose today! I don't know if you know, but kid booga is sooooo much more disgusting than adult booga. And some kids just smell like poo. I don't know any adults who smell like that. So straight after I finished my four-hour shift, I went and bought a whole heap of anti-bacterial hand-washing products.
I spent last Saturday at my Myer job, writing people's names on Easter eggs like a crazy woman! It was so totally stressful! I felt really awful, because I got pretty cranky on the inside towards a lot of customers. You would have thought that some people had never seen chocolate before from the ways they were acting! In a nine hour shift, I wrote on fifty-four Easter eggs. After that, I vowed never again to EVER write anyone's name on anything, ever, but I have since realised that such a vow is actually quite problematic. Like, I can't address letters to people as "Hey" forever. Anyway, some of the things people wanted me to write on the eggs were really funny. So many people wanted their partner's cutesy pet name written on the egg. I wrote "Bubby" on two eggs, as well as a "Baby", a "Sparky" and a "Punkin" (because the girl's boyfriend was a Punk). So it was pretty impossible to meet that dream Christian boy of mine while I was doing the egg thing, seeing as all of the boys who came by wanted eggs made up for their girlfriends. I wrote quite a few "I love you" eggs. Hey, say it with flowers, not eggs, people! There were some other really cool names that I wrote, like "Lily Honey", "Miss Zammit" and "Maddison". I even wrote on one egg in Hebrew, which is pretty weird when you think about it.
And how was it that on Sunday night, I found myself up on a stage at Auburn RSL, presenting part of an academic paper on Chinese Australian history? Considering the fact that whenever people ask me where I'm from, I sometimes tell them that I was born in the bottom of a garden in Northern England as a fairy, but ended up in the mortal realm because I sacrificed my immortality for this guy from the mortal realm that I ended up breaking up with. Just because it seems like too much of a long story about my Dad coming from Indonesia but not actually being Indonesian, and my Mum being born in Australia but being Chinese but not actually speaking that much Chinese, etc. My mum's family had this reunion thing, and they held it at Auburn RSL. We heard all of these talks about our heritage, which were pretty cool. Anyway, my aunt Helen was presenting this paper on Chinese country people living in Sydney, and I ended up being her overhead projector girl! I felt so important and special to be up on the stage, as though I had been part of her research from the very beginning. So I made sure that I laughed at all of her jokes at the right moments, and that I smiled winningly at certain times. That is probably what the "Wheel of Fortune" girl is thinking when she's spinning those letters.
Hopefully, more adventures to update will be coming up soon.
Signing out,
Cheshire Cat Carla |