I’m about to commence my Miltonesque descent from the dizzying heights of the 20th floor, a disgraced angel shorn of wings and unceremoniously booted back into the real world. A lil’ corporate Lucifer. Tomorrow is my last day, and if anyone asks, particularly the man who makes my coffee, whom I am convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, will miss my only-slightly forced beaming at him every day in an attempt to elicit something of a repartee which, I was assured, is part of this whole corporate shindig, I jumped.
I am on a never-ending noble quest in search of the Real World. Picture Indiana Jones in a pair of battered ankle boots instead of a hat being pursued by an enormous accumulating debt instead of an enormous rolling boulder and having poison darts shot at him by office workers instead of pesky natives and you get the idea, or maybe you don’t if you’ve actually seen the movie, which as I just made abundantly clear, I haven’t.
I was pretty sure, after somersaulting out of school and making a perfect tuck-turn pike (don’t know much about diving, either) into university, that I would find it there, somewhere between the library and the pub. Unfortunately, between the library and the pub was a liquidated, dysfunctional Student Union, sleazy Young Laberals (my affectionate name for the drones that sign up to either the Labor or the Liberal party at university. They are one and the same. They go on trips to the Murray River together and play paintball against each other. Jolly Hockeysticks!), flighty academics and an inept bureaucracy. I found myself running round naked out of disillusionment and boredom, more than anything else, or maybe just because I like being naked.
This, I decided, was not the Real World and not somewhere I should spend much of my time. I would go around pontificating about the obsolescence and meaninglessness of the majority of academia, how these stuffy old bastards’ feet didn’t touch the ground and decided that 0sitting in an office studying Literature for the rest of my life would be a tragedy. Great. What now? I decided to defer my quest by deferring my degree and working in an office and a backpacker hostel. Not exactly the Real World, I’ll grant you, but it bought me thinking time.
I returned to university with nothing but a desire to get it done. I went on exchange, the antithesis of the Real World, where you run around with no responsibilities except to have fun, Get The Most Out Of It and scrape through the remainder of your academic career. This was, incidentally, when the giant debt-boulder started rolling.
So having decided that university was a sham to be completed but not valued, I was back in what many would call The Real World. Two jobs, the main one in a corporate office, and the required dose of social activities (dance class, trivia nights etc), a sizable debt to pay off, a dog to feed and walk, a long-term partner. It is the life that they’re all talking about when they say “ho ho ho, wait till you have to live in the real world, the 9-5 world, then you’ll see that life isn’t one big party” (they being anyone over the age of 25 who is doing the career thing). They are right about a few things there. It is true that when are a 9-5 city drone, you do not have the luxury of making merry as and when you choose and thus your fun time gets compartmentalised into small, manageable and socially acceptable portions:
Lunch with friend in city: Monday 1- 2
Trivia night: Wednesday 7-9
Friday drinks: 5.30-9
Football: Sunday 2-5
Marvelous.
What they’re wrong about it the whole “real world” part of that equation. These corporate lemmings have their feet even further above the ground (in this case 20 floors above) both metaphorically and physically. This is a world where stationary is of the utmost importance, where a missed phone call is a danger so great that they require the phone to be attended non-stop for nine and a half hours everyday and thus think it’s reasonable to ban the receptionist from ever leaving the desk for anything, where which cup you use matters, where sunshine is a reward for sitting in the same place for 5 hours straight and ultimately dispensable in the case of having Too Much On. Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure Shakespeare and Keats are more important than all of those things.
So I’m high-tailing out of here. Not back to university, not in search of the Real World any more. To the remote Northern Territory, where sunshine is a given, and where things are about as ‘unreal’ according to ‘them’ as you can get – no supermarkets, no offices, no transport other than 4WD, no bars, no cinemas and where, I’m hoping, stationary is of little to no importance. Fingers crossed.
