Life Bumps

The other day I was waiting for the subway to come when a guy suddenly started laughing. He struck up a conversation with some other guy and proceeded to hand him a cola he had in his bag. He then said: 'I expect nothing from you other than that you'll drink it.' The man then walked away shouting: 'Cola, everyone should drink cola!' This scene made me confused about several things. First of all why did he hand out a free drink? Second why cola? And third what is in it for him? The bag he had seemed to be a cooling bag to keep drinks and food cold. If he was just in a good mood then why was he so prepared? Why carry a cooling bag just to hand out free drinks? I'm sure that if the guy isn't just odd or illogical there must be a reason behind his actions. I wish I had the capability to deduce the man's reasons like Benedict. I'm sure he would've figured it out right away. For me it'll forever be a mystery. But what's life without some mystery. I wonder if that's why Sherlock Holmes did cocaine and never took a case below his means. He understood too much and therefore had too little mystery in his life and had to think of other ways to enrich his life. Maybe all drug abusers have this problem. Maybe they're all secretly geniuses but you can't tell because they're constantly high. I guess that's statistically unlikely. In the world there are apparently about 130 million people considered geniuses according to Mensa. And There are about 230 million drug abusers in the world that have used drugs in the year 2011. So maybe my theory was off by just 100 million people but still according to statistics about 2% of the population is a genius. If we take the 230 million people on drugs there are still about 4.6 million genius drug abusers. Although I wonder how that number is influenced if you take into account people who were once geniuses but their brains started to deteriorate because of the drug abuse. It's such a pity. I'm sure that even if they aren't geniuses there would be some kind of talent or potential in there. Some people say that when your kid is growing up you shouldn't praise it too much because if you do they'll expect too much from life and eventually feel like a failure. What if that was your family's issue and you raise all the children in your family to expect great things. It's like everyone expects to go to buy their first wand and be told that great things could be expected of them. But then somewhere along the line they find out that they're not Harry Potter but just Neville Longbottom who does some impressive things but never enough to be remember throughout history. And then what? You accept that you're just normal. Not exceptional. You try to fit in with society as best you can and settle down and lead an uninteresting life.

I realised reality was harsh when I couldn't get a place to stay for ourselves or get a decent job. This brings me to my own issues. My mother and I have never been exactly close. I have always resembled my father more and had inherited most of his sense of humour as well which made my mother and I slightly incompatible. Not that it made me love her any less of course. It's just hard to have a long lasting conversation without me getting annoyed, mainly because my interests are so different from hers and she doesn't quite understand what I'm talking about a lot of the times. She had been unemployed for a while when I moved in with my boyfriend which meant that she was home most of the time. It was only a one bedroom apartment so she slept in the living room while we slept in the bedroom. My boyfriend started looking for a job and I started studying. Things were ok except that it's not exactly ideal to stay at home all day with you mother-in-law. Weeks past. Months past. My boyfriend finally got a job but it was an hour and a half away from home, the pay was bad, travel costs were not covered, they wouldn't provide him with a visa, and his boss was a dick. My mother's health deteriorated. One day she was hospitalised and it was quite a scary time for me. The whole situation happened right when I was doing exams for university and I was emotionally and physically drained. My boyfriend's job was getting worse and worse and his boss got angry at him for not friending any of his colleagues on facebook after being there a week. I kept telling him to hold on and that he really needed this job but he dreaded going to work every day. His boss specifically told him that although his contract stated that he should work for 40 hours a week he was expected to work about 55 hours a week and he wouldn't get paid overtime. He was home late every day and things were going badly with me at university. Although I found Cultural Anthropology very interesting my emotional state was not allowing me to enjoy my studies. Eventually one day my mother told me she wanted us to move out and move in with my father. She was emotional and intoxicated but I took it hard and called my father to come pick me up. The same day my boyfriend got fired from his job and I had an emotional breakdown. Since getting a job was needed to get a visa to stay with me it took our hope away for him to be able to stay in the country. In order for me to keep my boyfriend in this country I had to earn at least 1500 euro a month and have a year contract – even if we got married. With only a High School diploma it would be hard to find a job with pay like that but I decided to quit university anyway and try to find a job. I felt like a failure. I was living with my father and his wife and her children in a house with six people, my father and his wife were sleeping in the living room in order to have enough space for us. Since we decided to move out of my mother's place completely we brought all the boxes filled with our things and ended up surrounded in a small room with boxes of our stuff. We were in a dark place. I felt things were never going to get better and the smallest things made me burst out in tears. I once missed a tram and started crying. 

So I did all I could do and searched for a job. Since neither of us had jobs we couldn't possibly afford any place to stay so my first step was to make us financially independent. I didn't have much experience in any one thing but I had done a large variety of jobs including sports photographer, tele marketeer, corporate box server, pawn shop employee, and a few small hospitality jobs. I had also done a barista course in Australia but didn't have major confidence in my coffee making skills. I applied for everything I could find and thought I could do. There were days when I applied for at least 50 jobs online same for my boyfriend who applied without end. I had different cover letter for different positions that I could alter slightly for certain jobs. But I got only a few rejections two interviews and the rest didn't reply to me at all. One of the interviews I remember as the worst interview in my life. I tried to do some research about the company but couldn't find much I tried to find out what the position essentially entailed but didn't quite understand what it really was. So when I got there after being lost for about half an hour I felt incredibly unprepared for what was coming. The reason I applied to the job was because the ad said they wanted someone who could speak several languages and had commercial experience. Since I had been a tele marketeer and could speak 5 languages I thought I was a decent candidate. I couldn't have been more wrong. I couldn't answer any of the questions adequately and felt greatly incompetent. A few days later I got a rejection over the phone and I wasn't surprised.

All this time there was one branche I hadn't applied for yet because I didn't want to work in hospitality but realised I didn't have any choice. I even applied for McDonald's and when they didn't even invite me for an interview I felt that there was no way I would be able to get a job anywhere. Finally -after a few weeks in desperation- I got invited to my second interview which I applied for because I was desperate and they were looking for a Barista. I pretended I knew everything about coffee and even ended the interview with the question: What type of bean will you be using? Arabica? Which just suddenly came to me I couldn't remember the other type of bean (Robusta) and decided to just ask it. She gave me a story about how the blend was being specifically made for the café and ended the interview on quite a positive note. I was ecstatic when I found out I got the job the very same day. Something good happened. Improvement. I decided to start looking for a place to stay because we were suffocating at my father's place. To this day I am greatly thankful to my mother and father that they were willing to take me and my boyfriend in – without ever having met him before. I was 21 years old going on 22 and they accepted us without question.

Moving In with him

Usually you move in with someone because you've known them for a while, you are engaged, have been together for a while (months, years) or you want to take it to the next step. And then there's moving in with someone out of financial trouble, necessity or just because it seemed the logical thing to do.

Moving in with someone you only met the month before might seem a bit rash but to me it felt like moving in with someone I had known for a long time. After talking to each other for over a year we decided to take the risk. At least that's how it feels like in hindsight. At the time I had no idea what I was doing. Things really just happened. I was starting to run out of money and I had been trying to get a job. Staying with my newly acquired boyfriend seemed the logical thing to do. Suddenly months past and I was starting to get really desperate to find work. I quite literally - literally? Yes. Literally. - called up every café in Brisbane I could find online and asked if any of them were hiring. Then I would go to the ones that said they were and hand in my resume. None of them responded, sent me an email or called me. Eventually I ended up getting a job which I found through a recruitment website (seek.com.au) at a pawn shop in one of the dodgier areas of Brisbane. Or as the Australians would call it an area filled with bogans. It was great working there. Even though the hours were long and it was a 45 minute drive every morning and evening, the pay was good and the people were friendly. I didn't have that much trouble fitting in. I knew how most things worked and was actually the number two salesperson from when I started until I quit. 

My boyfriend had all the while started on his third job in Brisbane which was unfortunately only a contract job and had no possibility of growth within the company. Being quite young he had his university degree but barely any experience so he couldn't get a graduate role and no one would hire him for a senior position. So although the job wasn't stable he didn't complain.

When I left for Australia I had every intention of going back. I was always planning to go to University and even bought my ticket home before I left. My boyfriend lived a six hour flight from his family and didn't have many close friends in Brisbane and even his job was something he wouldn't be doing long term. Taking all this into consideration and the fact that we are madly in love with each other it didn't take him long to book a flight to Amsterdam with the intention of moving with me. Living together and having a job was so pleasant I nearly forgot that my reason for coming to Australia was to travel. So I housesat in Alice Springs for two weeks, I went to Cairns to dive in the Great Barrier Reef and went to Tasmania to visit a far removed family member that I'd never met before. As a final destination we went to Perth to meet my boyfriend's family and say his goodbyes before we left for Amsterdam. More than being sad at the idea of a family member moving to the other side of the planet my boyfriend's family was happy that he had found someone to be with.

The plan seemed simple enough. I would start studying Cultural Anthropology and my boyfriend would first have 3 months to find a job that would sponsor him and if that didn't work out he would apply for a working holiday visa so he could stay for a year longer while he continued to look for a job that was willing to sponsor him. We would be staying at my mother's place because I was still living with my parents and finding an affordable place to rent in Amsterdam is extremely difficult. 

In case you didn't know what Cultural Anthropology was.

The current (social) renting situation in The Netherlands is that in order to be allowed to rent in a certain city you must be in some way connected to the city or area by work or school. Then there is a priority system in place where the waiting time for an apartment in Amsterdam is at least nine to eleven years. There are possible emergency transfers possible for extreme cases like being pregnant and being kicked out of the house by your abusive drug using father. Anything less will not be seen as an emergency. There are of course student housing but they're mostly small rooms, with sharing bathrooms and legally only one person can live in such a room. 

Or rent privately but then the only thing we could afford was a parking space...

So we decided that staying with my mother - My parents got divorced when I was five. My father married my stepmother a few years ago and she brought her two children to the household. - was the most practical thing to do.