Jim was having a bit of trouble placing Madison mentally, knowing where to put the pushpin on his larger map of the various kinds of people he'd encountered. Often a question about goals and dreams was enough to figure things out in a rough sort of way: frustrated artist, practical type, bookish, ambitious, contented, lost, uncertain. Maybe she'd just been through enough that any kind of stability seemed like a good deal. But it was kind of nice, actually, to know that at least one person at a call centre was happy enough to keep working there. "Really? That's good, I'm glad it doesn't get to you much. Other people I know who work in those places, it drives them nuts, a few months and they're like, 'Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.' You're obviously made of sterner stuff."
Her question in return was a more familiar one, though. "Well, if something had gone wrong in the process and the Oblates had rejected me, I would've gone with teaching, probably. Languages. But I love what I do, everything else is a pretty distant second. I like not knowing where I'll be in five years, it's all the benefits of being shiftless and flaky but you still get to seem respectable. So in that sense, getting dropped into some new place and being told 'you live here now' doesn't seem that weird." And in another, more accurate sense, it was completely balls-out weird. "Maybe, I don't know. How are you dealing, has it sunk in for you yet?"