Small Hands
Summers been going on for a while and I’ve picked up a few jobs to keep the money rolling in while building my resume for the future. The jobs are all pretty fun and engaging (hate waking up early for internship though), but really this whole experience is opening my eyes to things I never really considered until recently.
I work at Epitomics. It’s a start up company, so there aren’t too many employees, but its very quaint and everyones pretty nice. Only weird thing is that I’m the youngest employee there. Being only 18, I found myself immersed in a predominantly adult environment where the next youngest employee was 24. Day to day activities are very routine and mostly I just work in the lab, shadow other workers, and study for next semester in my cubicle.
The most interesting parts of my day are usually my interactions with the adults there. It’s a relatively new experience to me talking to them on a more casual basis, especially when they begin to talk about their spouses and kids. But one thing I find most frightening about my experiences with adults is that they have settled. Many of the workers have been doing the same thing for years. I know its mostly because Epitomics is a mainly customer service based company so there are protocols on all procedures, which bring tedium to every day activities, but I cant help but look at all these adults and see in them something I have always feared. The end of the road. School is filled with so many opportunities and avenues to explore. Discovering and rediscovering oneself. But at the point where many of the adults at work are, they’ve already found all the things theyre meant for. Theres no more excitement or innovation. I feel as though this is it for me. Schooling will be great and exciting, but in the end I’ll end up just like these adults: stagnant.
But thats not the only work I have. Another big part of my money making comes from tutoring. Particularly, I look over my cousin for my uncle and teach him piano, math, and any other subjects he needs help in. My cousin is only 6, so its actually pretty difficult to keep him in check and concentrate on any one subject for more than ten minutes. Honestly, I probably spend about 45 min teaching him material and the other 1 hour and 15 min just entertaining his whims. But through our interactions, I feel as though I’ve rediscovered something that began to ebb away in my work at Epitomics. The first word that comes to mind is hope, but that’d be so cliche. Its more of a grasp of the novelties in life. Andrew (my cousin) is so young, and everything is so new to him. He is learning things every day and he looks genuinely happy almost all the time! Its amazing how he really inspires me sometimes. I cant help but smile when hes doing his best to wrestling me down on the couch. Its as though he has no concept of limits. He tackles every problem saying “Oh its not hard. I’ll get it.” and no matter how much he struggles in the beginning, he finds a way to the solution eventually. Today we competed to see who could do more reps on bicep curls (3 lbs). We would take turns to see how many we could muster before letting hte other keep going. He started out with a whopping 100 curls. I continued with 101. He rose the bar to 300. I matched at 301. He continued to 350, but at this point his grandma forced him to stop. But regardless, I was amazed. His resolve, his strength, his limitless capacity to keep pushing through the pain I saw in his face really left me speechless.
I guess this will be a reminder to myself in the future. Limits don’t adhere to us because we cant keep going. It is because we lose that drive to keep going forward. Something is lost in our struggles towards adulthood. That naivety which is often discarded carelessly may be what keep us looking towards the limitless sky instead of the cieling of an office. I hope that I never lose my drive to keep spreading myself out, trying new things, appreciating the finer details in everything, even through all the shit that keeps coming at me as a premed BME student. I’ll never lose my inner child.
