what a week!

Between finishing off the report for the CEYE and tackling Youth Week with the City, I’ve put in 46.5 hours so far this week, so I’m taking a well-deserved Friday off, especially considering I’m working at a conference all day Saturday. Good times!

I am happy to say that I’ve finished my piece of the CEYE report. Yay! I never want to write another literature review again. And if anyone ever asks me to do an annotated bibliography I will vomit in his/her face. You’ve been warned.

On a non-vomit-related note, I am totally and utterly obsessed with my new job (even though I’m still not 100% sure what my job is). The other Youth Coordinator, The Drop-in Guy, is all kinds of fabulous, and I can tell we’re going to get along very well.

Here’s what my week was like:

Monday: Meet with my boss and get overwhelmed with information and paper. Get the super deluxe tour of City Hall from The Drop-in Guy and get overwhelmed with even more information and paper. Get paraded around the 7^th Floor and introduced to EVERY SINGLE PERSON on the floor who was either in their office or walking around. Go out for lunch (to my favourite Thai restaurant!) with my boss and The Drop-in Guy and realize that my boss and I both always order the same dish each and every time we go there and that The Drop-in Guy always orders my runner up (are we going to get along well or what?!). Have a meeting with the staff at the DCC (I don’t work out of City Hall, I work out of a community centre in the downtown core) and get overwhelmed yet again with information (no paper though…score!). Get introduced to my office (which was apparently being used as a storage room…I have everything you could ever imagine in there right now… You want a cooler full of basketballs? I got it! You want THREE old computers? I got ‘em! You want a huge box full of games? I got it! You want many, many books that the last guys borrowed from random people and never gave back? Oh, have I got ‘em! Clearly I have to make some time to clean it up so that I can actually move around in there). Get tour of the DCC. Go home and rest for a couple hours. Attend Mobile Skate Park opening (we have a bunch of ramps and rails that fit in a trailer so that youth all over the city can have access to a skate park during the summer, even if it’s just for a week) at one of the community centres and meet staff, hang out with young people, eat pizza, be the official “stuff holder,” have a blast, and, for the first time that day, enjoy not being overwhelmed by my job.

Tuesday: Go to a meeting re: how to include young people with disabilities into the City’s Youth Services. Parade around the 7^th Floor with a button on my blouse undone…and not just any button, oh no, THE BUTTON…apparently I think flashing people is how to gain popularity…I’ll let you know how it works out for me. (Word to the wise, what you don’t want to hear from your boss on the second day at work is, Hey, before you leave my office, you might want to do up that button!) Spend time in my office trying to gain some sort of insight into what the last Youth Coordinator was doing based on the files that were left in the office. Go to evening community-based workshop on the 40 Developmental Assets (which, if you’re working with young people right now, you HAVE to know) and unleash further awesomeness by spilling water all down the front of my blouse (which remained done up throughout the entire presentation, thank you very much!) during the talk.

Wednesday: Have the most amazing meeting ever with my boss (the stuff she envisions me doing is SO EXCITING). Go get my photo ID card (my picture is so awesome…I’m really not sure how my hair got so messy) and learn about my benefits (cha-ching!). Meet with my boss again and get her so excited about what we’re talking about that she forgets about her next meeting. Attend a staff meeting. Help prep for the youth awards.

Thursday: Youth awards madness. Get an orientation re: how to use the phone and computer in my office (it honestly took about an hour and I still can’t access my voicemail…why must things be so complicated?). More youth awards madness [sweet corn was there a lot of youth awards madness…but it all turned out amazingly well. We had well over 100 people attend, the mayor stayed the whole time—which is a pretty big accomplishment, me thinks—and some of the award winners were so excited about winning that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And the young people who helped us plan the awards just totally stepped up and ruled out there…I was so proud, and most of them I had only just met that day (although some I had met almost 2 years ago when I was doing youth focus groups for my practicum placement in the first year of my masters…I was so honoured that they remembered me!) By far the best part of the night was getting to meet and hang out with a bunch of really cool young people (I even got told there was a consensus that I was “pretty cool for someone they had just met.” Yay!) My experience with the awards, more than anything else I did this week, got me so excited about my job that, even though I was both physically and mentally exhausted from the whole week and the 11+ hour day of doing nothing but the Youth Awards, I couldn’t sleep at night, because my head was just overflowing with ideas of what I would like to see happen in the city over the next few years…I honestly can’t wait!]

So that was my week in a (really big) nutshell. You’re now officially up-to-date.

I have to say that everyone I've met so far at work has been super amazing and supportive and I'm so excited to work with them and to get to know them all better... In case you can't tell, I'm so on excitement overload right now. And I hope it never stops.