Picking up the pieces...

It’s not a breakthrough, nothing uncommon or extraordinary is going on, so why I do feel cut up? Maybe indeed when one stage ends it’s time for an overhaul, but what about being cut up? How to explain the mysterious dreams of death (five of mine this year and series of other visions haunting me since the beginning of July)? A call form above? A reason to be conscience-stricken?

Crisis – that’s not the explanation of course, but it brings me on analysing outlandish social phenomena around me. Many of my schoolmates, including me feel insecure. Some even in spring decided to laze away this summer, some, like me, reckoned that crisis wouldn’t affect us. We were a bit wrong, I don’t know if it’s the cause why some of us feel somewhat of fear of adulthood, a few thought seriously about gap year between BA and MA studies just to put off adulthood and prolong the partly carefree student’s life. In contrary I’ve always been determined to graduate as soon as possible, now I’m not so sure if this is the right idea. And what’s going to happen in 2011? We do everything not to end up in the low-paid position, we’re striving and aim higher, but if the crisis drags on, we’ll have to revise some of our plans created before its outbreak, when we began our studies. We’ll never come back to the times of extortionate salaries, in the worst-case scenario after greeting me Szanowny Panie Magistrze you’ll just add poproszę frytki – popularising showing respect to McDonald’s staff deserves my highest commendation. Warsaw School of Economics won’t probably turn into Redundant School of Economics (Szkoła Główna Bezrobotna). At least for me, by the way – today I took the competence test at one of the banks where I applied for a post of translator and… I realised I had forgotten my native language. I got used to doing what I shouldn’t do – translating into foreign language and when I tackled the documents in English to be translated into Polish I turned out that despite I understood them in one hundred per cent it was hard for me to find appropriate words in Polish. English is marked by simplicity, what can be described in English with two or three words hardly ever can be expressed in as many words in Polish. To all the foreigners who learn Polish – my congrats on taking up such challenge!

Hard to untangle – one bank where I worked last year had to suspend (unofficially) its internship programme, another bank looks for students to trim costs and gets rounds or bends its internal regulations to take them on and farm out task which should be executed by someone else – everything in the name of savings.

But tomorrow I’m heading for Suwalszczyzna, to Poland’s cold pole. I’ll get away from the whole mess, fish, swim, drink home-distilled moonshine and have a whale of time. And I can’t forget to contemplate the idiosyncrasies and absurdities of Polish countryside… That will also a week of computer dry-out, after which I’ll swamp with a photo coverage of the foray…