The trouble is I don’t know where I belong. When I first got back to Ireland I kept repeating the phrase to friends that I was ‘back in reality’. But then when I spoke on the phone with my friends in Ghana it was pretty obvious that that was reality too. And then there are my wonderful friends in The Netherlands, continuing their real lives in the lowlands without me.
Without a job and living in a town where I know nobody apart from family I spent huge chunks of my time pouring over photos from my travels. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my travelling life felt more real to me than trawling through the Irish job sites every morning. Why can’t my reality consist of hiking through the Andes, feeding monkeys on a rooftop in India, gazing at the Moai statues on Easter island trying to figure them out, attempting to establish if the ‘vegetarian intestines’ on the menu in China really were vegetarian or shaking fins with a shark in the deep ocean of the Galapagos? A line in book I read recently summed it all up perfectly:
This is what happened when one left one’s home – pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the places left behind.
And then I figured it all out. All I need to do is have enough money to do everything – be everywhere and with everyone. I closed the browser, reassured that I didn’t need a job after all and I happily sauntered into town to buy a lotto ticket. A modest investment to furnish me with the life I wanted. Why on earth hadn’t I thought of this earlier?
In my head I began making lists of where I’d go and what to bring. Which places would I go back to and which were worth sacrificing for the sake of discovering the new. At 8pm I checked the numbers to be certain of what I knew had to be true. Remarkably by some enormous cosmic cock up something had gone radically wrong. Not even one number? How was this possible? I had decided what was reality and now it turned out it simply didn’t exist. But then again maybe it was merely behind schedule. Maybe reality would start a week later, after next week’s draw… that must be it.
But just in case I checked the job postings again. In fact I had just received an e mail with a ridiculously exciting title. We have found your perfect job. Hurray I thought – if the job title isn’t ‘lotto winner’ then surely it will be something that will get me out of Tralee and enable me to pretend to be a real person again. Who needs reality if you have a super duper fulfilling job?
I opened up the e mail and instantly closed it again in utter shock – clearly I had read it wrong. On my second attempt I realised that the computer hadn’t lied. Recruit Ireland had decided that my perfect job would be as a ‘Beef de-boner in Norway’.
Seeing as I am a vegetarian and find any temperature under 10 degrees a major challenge I decided that Recruit Ireland were finding the concept of reality just as challenging as I was. Anyway why on earth can’t the Norwegian beef eaters deal with the bones themselves?
So now my reality involves desperately searching for an interesting job, interspersing that with diving into the comfort of my photos and trying to wean myself off my newly established weekly gambling problem. One of these days I’ll have to get back to wherever it is I belong.
In the meantime, I wonder how bad can de-boning Norwegian beef really be…
Conortje 
