After work today I went for a walk around Markham's downtown. Well, I'm guessing it was the downtown, at least; Toronto and its suburbs have a disconcerting habit of sprouting clusters of imposing high rise buildings more or less at random, so it's hard to be sure. All the buildings in this pseudo-downtown area -- office buildings and apartments alike -- had a glossy, corporate shine to them. Close-packed and elegantly organic, they reminded me of a coral reef made of glass and steel. Everything there was astonishingly clean, almost antiseptic. Beautiful and at the same time subliminally repellent, like a city caught in the uncanny valley between reality and disneyworld.

I sometimes feel a little bit the same way about my new workplace. It's gorgeous and fun and loaded with interesting perks and clever people, but at the same time it's also so very, very corporate that it hardly feels real. It's simultaneously a marvelous playground and the strictest, most adult place I've ever worked. I think it may be trying to steal my soul. I think it may be succeeding.

Adding to the unreality of the whole experience is the fact that, weekends aside, I've only seen sunlight through the windows of the office building where I work. It's dark when I arrive and dark when I leave. I feel like I've gone nocturnal, though of course the exact opposite is true.

I don't know if I would want to work in a job like this for more than a handful of months at a time. I don't know if I could. But for now it's shaping up to be a very interesting co-op term indeed.