Old Enough To Be Set In My Ways??

Here I am in my third (technically fourth, but I took a week long vacation in LA last week) week at my new job, surrounded by entirely new people.

For five years at Dartmouth, I worked to shed my reputation as "The Little Blonde Girl Who Tells Really Awful Stories That Usually Have No Relevance And Almost Always Have No Real Ending." I'd gotten pretty close, too. I thought carefully about most things I wanted to say before I said them, and I always thought about whether or not those thoughts were even worth sharing in the first place. Ok, maybe not always, but at least a lot more than when I was a freshman.

This morning, the 7 of us were eating our bagels, making coffee, and generally shooting the shit before starting real work when it got quiet. In the quiet, I thought out loud "Man...I've really missed bagels." Because, seriously, it was a cinnamon dutch apple raisin bagel from Panera with plain cream cheese and it was just exactly what I needed. I haven't been eating breakfast, either, in my struggle to actually get through 35 minutes of traffic and BE at work by 8:30 in the morning. Plus, in the last 3 weeks, B has been feeding me, but I leave before she gets up. I continued "I guess Chinese people don't really do bagels" because I haven't seen them in the apartment, and come to think of it, I haven't ever seen her eat one.

My immediate supervisor gave me a weird look and I shared the silent, informational parts of that thought with him and he said "Oh, I was waiting for you to take us full circle..."

Another employee, a Harvard Business School student doing marketing work for us, said "I was going to be alright if that's where the story ended. It was Allie, after all..."

I'm shocked. In less than three short weeks, I have successfully reproduced my entire college identity to an entirely new audience. So much for being a grown-up!