work

my new address is 345 collins road. please come visit me. okay, that is not where i live it's just a reference to something one of my friends said to me. he told me i worked so much that i basically live there. i, of course, protested and said that i did not, but truthfully, at the time i did. now i work one to two weeknights and saturday and sunday. it's roughly 15 hours a week, 30 hours per paycheck. oh shoot, i forgot to pick up my check. i'll get that one of these days.

i like work. it's not hard work once you know what you're doing. i have worked since school started so for 8 months at the end of april. but my favorite part of work is the people i work with. when i first started i was the only one from my school that worked there. then over the holidays kate got hired and we're the two kennedy kids. my first day was a scary experience, i do not like being thrown in to situations where i know no one. but now that i have been there for eight months basically, i'm glad i knew no one when i first started. it forced me to open up and meet new people. strangely enough, i love meeting new people but it's not something i like to do. if that makes any sense. let's try this, i don't like being in a group and not knowing anyone and having to make all the awkward introductions but in the end meeting new people is one of my favorite experiences.

i have made some of the best friends i could ask for at work and if it hadn't been for work i wouldn't have known them or made friends with them. a few of them i probably wouldn't have talked to if i knew. here is one specific example, we will call him larry. larry goes to metro high school. for those of you that don't know, metro is the school where there are plenty of drug addicts, public school drop outs, pregnant teens, those who flunked out, and those who had attendance problems. i do not normally associate with people like that. i used to see that they went to metro and immediately stayed away with them. why was i so quick to place a label? because past experiences had all resulted in that label so it was easiest to lump the whole school together. meeting larry has been an eye opening experience for me. he was originally sent to metro because he never went to school when he was in the public school system. for the final trimester of his senior year, he is taking half of his classes at wash and the other half at metro. larry is nothing like the kid i expected him to be after i heard he went to metro. i'm very glad i was wrong about him, i wouldn't trade his friendship for the world.