Got a job.

No, not a 'real' one yet - let's not get ahead of ourselves here. ;-) Just a weird little part-time job, doing unspecified office help stuff that, oddly, for the most part seems to consist of putting women's fitness equipment up on ebay, for now. :D

Also, it's in the back of beyond, more than an hour away from where I live.

With no lunch opportunities whatsoever anywhere near. I am ridiculously worried about how to feed myself there. I know it's ridiculous, I'll probably survive just fine on sandwiches. I can still cook occasionally in the evenings, I suppose, if I really want to have something more than sandwiches on a given day.

For the next week and a half, before my internship starts, it'll be more or less full-time - though I've begged off one day this week to do some urgent stuff that needs to be taken care of before the internship, and another to work at the other job, the "Mini-English" one (which I'm probably going to have to quit when the internship starts, because there's just no way I can combine two part-time jobs *and* an internship - none of these are on the weekend. I hope I'll get paid for the Mini-English job despite this rather short duration of my work relationship with those people... I'm kind of worried, though, because I'm not sure I even have a proper work contract with them - there was some confusion there.)

Strangely, the thing that worries me most, next to "how am I going to get food???" and "dammit, there goes my attempt at catching up with friends before the internship starts", is "frell, and I was *just* beginning to get back into making jewellery!"

I'm weird.

Time/Money

I had a discussion with my dad today about the sad fact that, with the way society and the economy are set up, you basically have to accept that you have to spend your entire adult life working *a lot*, often at something that isn't very gratifying, and having only a tiny bit of time and energy (if any) for friends, hobbies, political activity etc, - or you can choose to organise your life in a way that gives you more freedom to do the things that you love (including spending time with people you love), but, in that case, you have to accept that you'll almost certainly be relatively poor during your working life, and *really* poor in your old age.

(Of course, I'm still very skeptical that there'll be anything like our society or the economy or money still around when I'm old, but let's ignore that for a moment.)

Now, none of this is news, of course. But I'm still finding it hard to accept that option A, the "decent money and no time" option, is supposed to be the more desirable of the two. I'm finding myself leaning more and more towards the "be poor & do (at least some of) what you want" option. Although I'm really scared of being poor when I'm old and may need help that may be expensive.

But the idea of not being able to make jewellery, not being able to write, not being able to participate in fandom, not being able to keep working on ecological issues, even just not being able to cook for myself at least *reasonably* often.... depresses me *deeply*. As does the option of choosing, say, one of these activities to keep, and discarding the rest.

(ETA: The issue of spending time with friends is not listed among the activities in the last paragraph because I'm already being absolutely crap at managing that, even without a full-time job etc.)