On cool people and cold beer equalling satisfaction

Is this the kind of tiredness that people associate with a good day's work? When I would come home from the restaurant, I'd be sad and drained and just slump into bed and sleep like the dead, but with this job I feel different. I came home today, tired but still feeling pretty envigorated. I cracked a beer, I opened a pack of okonomiyaki flavoured ramen snacks and was just happy with pretty much everything.

The trinity of stuff dreams are made of.

Now I'm just hanging around waiting for my rice to finish cooking so that I can have some dinner before hitting the sack. I feel really good about things today. No weirdos or nothing. I got at least one booking out of the work party on Saturday - a big, kindly otaku who works for a publishing company and loves to attempt to speak English, but kinda can't. At all. He came in, apologizing for having a cold and making sure to ask beforehand if it was alright that I see him even if he had to wear a mask to keep the germs off me. He then proceeded to talk loudly and enthusiastically in completely broken English about food and work related trips. I really like that guy.

Other noteworthy individuals of the day included an English literature professor with an extremely tenuous grasp on spoken English but an impressive knowledge of Shakespeare, which led to a conversation about translating Shakespeare to Japanese and an almost obsessive desire to now go see a Shakespeare play somewhere in Tokyo; and a very friendly and soft-spoken psychiatrist who seemed very much in love with his wife and more than happy to shower his best friend with praise when I asked him to describe him to test his description vocabulary (before trailing off on a rather unrelated but very entertaining story about how his friend the physician had introduced him to a French man whose only health problem was that he was an alcoholic, and how he'd taken a whole hour out of his day as opposed to the usual fifteen minutes per client to talk to this man just because he was unsure of his English abilities. "I was so nervous!" he said, and I went 'squee' on the inside, because nice people make me happy). I was doing a review lesson with him, and I think the moment I caught his attention for sure was when the task asked him to compare two celebrities, and in a moment of sheer brilliance (I mean, being humble as always and so on) I asked him to compare Freud and Jung and why he preferred one over the other, which set him off on a long monologue on psychoanalysis and why Freud is more relevant today. Before leaving, he even told me to my face that he'd book me again soon. I want to high five myself for being totally awesome.

Even though I find the idea of a job where people, mostly men in their thirties and upwards, choose me from a picture and a brief profile and then pay me to talk to them for forty minutes, while I have to try to make myself as interesting as possible to get them to book me again and keep bringing in money, rather questionable, I can't say that I don't enjoy it. I even think I'm pretty good at it. If you tap into them correctly, at least most people have something interesting to say, and the ones who don't are few and far between. I haven't even been doing this a week, and I already feel like I'm really getting the hang of it. It could be because I'm new and everything's rosy, but I think I have a serious case of some job satisfaction going on. I know what I'm doing (sortof, at least the majority of the time), I'm good at it, I'm helping people and I'm exercizing my mind, all at the same time. Now, if I could just feel less frumpy in my work clothes, I'd be set. Cheers and goodnight, silent readers. Today has been a good day.