Guerillas in the Mist

Entering a corporate career at this... aherm, advanced life stage has a very odd feel to it. It's life, and it's work, and I've been alive and working, in some professional sense, for the last 4 years. It's different though, like a long-lost and extant branch of some common ancestry, reminiscent but alien. I imagine it's a lot like observing apes in the wild--you can see a functioning and capable social structure there in the brush, and a lot of gestures are the same, but it's the output of a vastly different evolutionary process and fitness function.

In other words, if you speak Spanish and you're marooned in Italy, you've actually gotten pretty lucky because you already know all of the grammar--you could have washed up in Libya. But you wouldn't say life was easy, because you still don't know any of the vocabulary or diction.

And the idioms. God help you, the idioms!