To my loyal readers, I offer my sincerest condolences. It has been an incredibly short summer filled with a dizzying fast pace, which appears to be continuing in perpetuity.
I'm preparing to leave for the University of Kentucky once again on Saturday, at which time I anticipate the W.T. Young Library will become my new home. I admit that I'm excited, but of course the brilliant confusion and newness of the collegiate life has long since passed.
This summer was certainly a learning experience in general for me. My first internship at a local small business, Pro Communications, occupied my time from the middle of May to the beginning of August. When I was younger, summer meant getting up whenever I wanted, and putting on denim shorts and a t-shirt. Having a professional job meant rising bright and early Monday through Friday, putting on a respectable ensemble, and driving into downtown Louisville, which is quite a task at rush hour. From then until 5 pm, I gained valuable experience in the field of marketing and public relations by writing press releases, gathering necessary supplies for client projects, and effectively communicating with anyone who called or emailed me.
Indispensable lessons: 1) Maintaining professional relationships with clients is very much about being respectable, responsible, prompt, and above all, memorable; 2) It's all about who you know; 3) To a working woman, coffee is worth its weight in gold.
While my internship taught me many things about the work force, time management, and a new set of social skills, my most profound realizations came to me in what now seems like a dream: my visit to America's largest city, New York, NY.
I could never have even imagined such a perfectly ugly place. New York is both unforgiving and inviting, blatant and detailed, too much up-to-date and reminiscent of a finer time, all at once. I felt like a modern day Alice in Wonderland. New York itself surrounded me with all the fixations of a barely believable place of creative indulgence, where I found a White Rabbit in the map glued to my hand, which I constantly found myself compelled to follow, Tweedle Dees and Tweedle Dums in the street vendors that always wanted to tell me something, a Mad Hatter in the cab driver that took me to La Guardia airport, and a Caterpillar, of course, in no other form. On my first day there, a neon yellow caterpillar made itself known crawling up a tree a couple of feet away from me in Bryant Park. I have never felt so small, yet so filled with potential at the same time. Everywhere I looked, there was something to look AT. I miss New York, though I would be a fool to say it misses me. The Big Apple is a cruel wonderland, indeed.
I feel very lucky to already have a sense of how overwhelming and alluring the workforce and the world truly are, respectively, at the tender age of 19.
