The Beginning, Part II

So here I am in Colorado. I arrived 12 days ago, and it has been a bit of a whirlwind. The trip out here was a lot of fun. My friend Chelsea came out with me and we made just enough stops to make the long days of driving bearable. Roanoke, Nashville, Memphis, Kansas City, and finally Boulder on day 5. I spent most of my first week here getting organized: moving all my stuff in and figuring out where to put it all, buying furniture and house supplies, registering my car, getting to know the area, etc etc. I started looking for a job last Tuesday, and by Wednesday I had been hired full-time at one of my favorite pubs in Boulder. I just happened to stumble in the day before a big group interview, and the managers I interviewed with the next morning liked me enough to hire me on the spot. Since then, work has pretty much been my life. Tonight was day 5 of training. I have two more training shifts and then I'm on my own. It's all a bit overwhelming, but I think I'm handling it well. Everyone has been telling me what a great job I'm doing and how I'm one of the best trainees anyone has ever worked with. I'm not sure I have as much confidence in myself as everyone else seems to, but I'm certainly feeling worlds better about my performance than I was on day 1. I guess that's all I can really ask for. That and free beer, which I'm getting. Ah, the perks of working for a brewery.

I guess I'll talk a bit about the restaurant itself since that has been my world for the last few days. There are three pubs all operated by the same brewery: Southern Sun in South Boulder (which is where I work), Mountain Sun in downtown Boulder, and the Vine Street pub in downtown Denver. At any given time, we have about 16-18 of our own beers on tap and 2 or 3 visiting brews from elsewhere in Colorado. Basically, we serve burgers and beer, but people will come in on the weekends and wait an hour and a half for a table just for the atmosphere. We all work as a team, so even though we all have our own "sections" of the pub to serve, we pretty much take care of everyone. What that means is that everyone is in on the tip jar. Servers, kitchen staff, everyone. That might sound like a crappy deal, but it really isn't. For instance, last night the closers each made $135 in tips. You work damn long hours (I'm already nearing 35 this week and I still have two nights to go) and you work your ass off in manual labor opening and closing the restaurant, but I love it. The energy is infectious. We all dance around to blaring music and scream and yell for peoples' birthdays and down beers in front of customers at the end of our shifts and generally roughhouse with each other and our patrons, and get paid for it.

It's a ton of fun. I'm just hoping I'll be part of the furniture within a few months' time. You'd probably never know it, but breaking into a new group of people has always been one of the hardest things for me. Externally, I'm doing a great job of being outgoing and sociable, but I'm always fighting the urge to hole up and shut out the world. I gave into that feeling in Australia, and to a certain extent when I moved back to Rhode Island after college, but I'm fighting it pretty hard this time. I know this move was the right thing to do, and now it's just a matter of getting past myself and learning to sink my teeth in.

I think I just need some time. Hell, I haven't even been here for two weeks yet. Driving home from work tonight, it struck me as odd that I actually live here now. Heading north, seeing the streets pass by: Arapahoe, Canyon, Walnut, Pearl. Streets that I've traveled often enough in my past visits that are now, in a sense, my own. I still feel like I'm living in someone else's house. Or in someone else's life. This is totally a cliche, but I literally looked in the mirror while I was on my break at work today and didn't recognize myself. It wasn't so much that I looked different. It was more like I was meeting myself for the first time. And of course all these feelings are normal, but this is a whole lot of change all at once. Luckily I have friends at home who are making the transition a bit easier. I'm also fortunate enough to be living with one of my best friends. I'm having a great time here and everything is going right. I feel more free than I ever have before. I'm just waiting to feel like all of this is mine.