Income

As I’ve stated before, I work as a checkout chick at a supermarket. That’s right, I was a straight A student in high school, honour student at university and scholarship recipient to study in Japan, yet here I am scanning groceries.

In some ways I’m satisfied and in other ways I’m not. I like the fact that I’m not tied down to a set schedule every week that is the 9-5. In this way my life doesn’t become predictable. When I was working at the social security centre, and indeed at the bed and breakfast, I would always resent the last day of my weekend off having to go back to work for that long slog for 5 days in a row.

I also like the fact that I’m not working a long day every day. My shifts range from 3 to 5 hours a day which suits me fine.

With that being said, the amount of shifts I get is not enough to live independently off of. I’m still living at home with my parents but I want to be making my own way. I don’t want to be one of those spongey Gen Y-ers, you know? I try to pay my fair share of everything so that I can prove that I can live by myself, just I’m not in my own place.

What I need is more hours, or more guaranteed hours. One time the night fill manager offered me a shift and said that it may become a permanent weekly thing if I want. I’ve figured out that if I can get 2 night fill shifts a week then that will bump up my hours to around what I need in order to get the money I want, so that is an avenue I am going to go down hopefully.

It’s always a matter of the grass being greener on the other side. I want the security of stable income, but if I get that then I give up the freedom of flexibility. Oh decisions, decisions.

A relationship is my life goal

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Many people aspire to do or be something in their lives. Many people use their career as how they define themselves. Indeed it is encouraged in society to contribute through one’s job. Some people take up a noble cause, to end poverty or save the animals.

I feel as if I don’t fit in with any of these things. Perhaps it’s because I’m young and I haven’t enough world experience to figure out what I want in life. I guess I feel strongly about the injustices in the world and I would like to help fix that, but I don’t know how.

However, one thing I do know, I want a life partner. I want someone to whom I can dedicate my life to making happy. If I can bring joy to the heart of my loved one then I feel satisfied and whole. This is what I want out of life, and I feel that anything else I do is just on the sidelines.

Perhaps you might be thinking that it’s silly of me to put my happiness in someone else’s hands, or it’s silly for me to be so dependent on a man. But I feel strongly that I am a traditionalist and I blame feminism for much of what is wrong with relationships these days.

Sure it has liberated many women who felt trapped by gender stereotypes and wanted more out of life, but on the other hand it has given people who were fine to begin with a whole lot more stress and burden. Say what you want about gender differences in the domestic domain; in most cases women still do the majority of the housework while also working fulltime jobs.

But I digress with my distaste for feminism. Basically what I wanted to say in this post is that I feel I am in the minority for desiring a fulfilling relationship as my life goal. I wonder does anybody else feel this way?

I also wonder if I will get trolled for the things I’ve said against feminism…

Tumultuous week

I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster this week so haven’t had time to prepare a blog. Hopefully I can post about it later.

In the meantime, I will post a motivational.

I compiled a pile of them the other day, but silly me just copy pasted them to a word document, so I don’t have the links or the page numbers to what they are and can’t link to them here. Oh well, I’ll have to do that later too.

Career aspirations up until now

During my internet travels I once stumbled upon this website by Steve Pavlina. It definitely intrigued me, and I definitely related with it while I was employed under a contractual basis. I am currently trying to figure out ways to create passive income to supplement my checkout chick wage (along with everyone else in the world.) Let me detail my career aspirations up until now which have paved the way to how I think about working in this world.

Towards the end of my primary school years I became interested in Pokémon and subsequently Japanese. This fascination with Japan led me through high school and by now I had decided that I wanted to be a translator; my ultimate dream being to go on exchange to and eventually gain employment there as a translator.

After graduating high school I went straight on to uni to major in Japanese and Linguistics and I accomplished my dream of going on exchange to Japan. This trip really opened my eyes to the world and I don’t regret going one bit, however through the exchange I learnt that I didn’t want to live and work in Japan. While this came as a revelation to me, having completed my lifetime ambition I was now back to square one as to what I wanted to do with my life.

When I came back I stumbled upon a job as a live-in host for a Japanese style bed and breakfast out in the country. This seemed to be a perfect job for me as I wanted to move out of home after having tasted independence during my stay in Japan. However, the job was not all I thought it would be. The live-in aspect did end up forcing me out because my friends and family were at least an hour’s drive away and I didn’t like not having a clear definition between work and home.

I was then lucky enough to find employment with a temping agency not a week after resigning from the live-in job. This was as a customer liaison assistant at the welfare office. I was earning good money as a fresh graduate and I liked this job at first because I assumed I would gain permanency after my contract was up with potential to move into the immigration side of things. However, along with the uncertainty of not having a permanent place I could not handle the sometimes violent customers we dealt with, and I resigned.

After many months of unemployment and hundreds of applications all ending with ‘we have decided to go with someone more qualified’, I’m now working casually at the local supermarket as a checkout chick which I’m finding quite pleasant at the moment. I’m still feeling urged to find alternative employment ‘because you shouldn’t waste away as a checkout chick after going to uni,’ but it seems everywhere you look you need specific qualifications and I’m reluctant to return to uni because I don’t want to go into even more debt over gaining a qualification in something random that I have no passion for just to get another entry level job.

I’m using this time in order to hopefully find myself and what I want to do for the rest of my life. Not just career-wise, but as a whole. I’ve come to the conclusion that pursuing an interest as a career greatly takes the pleasure out of it so I’d rather keep those two parts of my life separate. Frankly speaking, I don’t mind being a checkout chick. I get the satisfaction of being of service to my fellow man and I don’t feel a constant pressure to exceed last week’s sales or anything like that associated with high flying careers. Hopefully I can just stay where I’m at now and work my way around learning about all the different departments and discover what makes me happy.

First Entry

So, after much deliberation, because that is what I do best, I have finally decided on pursuing my interest in writing a blog.

My goal is to produce something creative in this world which could possibly pose as some value to another person, while also attempting to learn more about myself and the way the world works. I would also like to encourage my readers to make discussions in the comments and maybe we can figure out the world together. Of course it would be lovely to be able to make some money on the side as well

Let me explain a little bit about the background of this blog. Thinking over what I do in my spare time, I really don’t have a hobby. I’m an introverted person, have battled with anxiety and depression, and am overall quite the worrywart. For leisure I used to play games; Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, but I either grew out of them or simply just lost interest. I used to draw when I was much younger but my perfectionism killed that. Then there was learning Japanese, but I will leave that for a different post.

Nowadays I don’t seem to do anything that could be considered a hobby, but I do read. And read and read.  I will spend countless hours on the internet reading articles, mostly to do with personal development, and society and culture, so I guess reading could be seen as my hobby. I have also recently taken up writing in my journal and have discovered, or rather rediscovered, that writing out my thoughts is indeed very therapeutic and helps me come to terms with what I perceive in the world.

In addition, I am an avid over-analyser in my own life. Oftentimes I end up reading these articles on personal development and the like because I have been analysing my own life or actions I have recently taken and I want to know why I acted the way I did. I often mull over this instead of being productive with my time, therefore I have decided to combine my love of reading internet articles with therapeutic writing by creating this blog as a newly created hobby of mine.

Anonymity and confidentiality are very important to me, (me being a worrywart and all); therefore I will be using aliases for everyone who appears in my blog. I want to be completely honest in this blog, because one cannot delve into one’s deepest recesses without being completely honest, and I don’t want to have my real identity associated with this exploration online. So I have taken on the name ‘Rachael Corbie’, pleased to meet you