And on the employment front...

I finally met another American in Norwich. And guess what she told me. When she and her husband first came here, they had a very hard first year. She submitted 57 CVs/applications and got not a single interview. Which is both bad news and good news. On one side, it tells me where I should put most of my available make-a-living energy, and on the other side, it tells me that those energies should probably not into submitting further applications. Which is the bad news. I guess I'd better figure out how to provide myself with a good living on my own.

So, how do I do that? Today I went to an introductory meeting for WEETU. It's a Grumere Bank (spelling my be wrong) type local organization that gives local women the training and information and connections they need to start small businesses, and also, once you've completed the training, there are loans available. The training leads all the way to your having a business plan and a qualification that is valuable in applying to a bank for a loan.

I'd deffinitely like to take it further, but their funding is only certain through March. This next round of training may be their last for a while. And until March, I really need to devote a certain amount of hours to the AA2A residency, and I still need to earn a certain amount one way or another, the way I now put it together from the temp job, selling the jewellery I make, and tutoring math and chemistry. The training takes about 10 weeks, about half a day 2 and then three days per week.

I've got some thinking to do. Any comments from the peanut gallery?

Knowing that it is so hard for an American, even a highly qualified one (It turns out the other American's qualifications are in editing, as are some of mine), to find employment here makes me feel angry. And anger about a social issue doesn't die down until I do something about it. Just for this evening, this is what I'm doing about it. But believe me, this is not the end. When I do have my business, I may well go out of my way to hire emigrants.

Singing out loud, among other things

I may have turned a corner. Then again I may have finally lost my marbles. I blame it on the day-light bulb we've put over my chair at home in case that might cure my recent down feelings. It has been getting darker and colder.

Today, as I left work and walked the half mile to the bus (and remember that this is the same boring data entry work), I sang out loud. "Cockeyed Optomist", "Small Pleasures" from Oliver, and my favorite old folk ballad "Black Jack Davy". I sing well enough that whatever negative reaction there might have been, it wouldn't have to do with bad singing. It was dark enough that I don't know what people thought of it. Light may not have helped. The Brits might not show what they thought of it. I figure the most likely thing they thought, considering that it was near 7:00 was that I had stopped off at the pub after work. Actually, I don't drink at all, a psychological residue of being raised by parents so serious about teetotaling (sp?) that my dad and mom wouldn't even drink a toast of champagne to a bride and groom for whom he had performed the marriage an hour before. They always requested ginger ale. i just don't like the taste of anything alcoholic.

Tomorrow the teachers of the school where I work go on a strike. When I read the e-mail about it directed by the school head at the strikers, I was amazed. It was almost threatening. Something like: If you're going to strike, you should know that you are violating the terms of your employment. I would imagine it puts the teachers in a real bind.

I came from an area in the US where the unions were life-savers for the coal miners. I know what the conditions were for them before the unions were organized and how fierce the fight was that won them decent working conditions. And over my lifetime I have watched the anti-union propaganda sold to the people of the US to the point that many are very anit-union. It is no coincidence that this has happened at the same time as the minimum wage has fallen to about half a living wage, and the weekly hours worked has gone up and up, the benefits and vacations down and down. I'm pro-union.

So I asked my co-workers how others responded when a group went on strike here. What's the norm? In the US, crossing a picket line requires stopping to think about your decision whether to do it or not, at least for me and for lots of others. This is true even if you don't work at the place and are just doing business there. I guess another part of my pro-union attitude is having actually known individuals involved in Solidarnosc in Poland and heard their individual stories.

For my fellow workers in an administrative department, it seemed to be a no-brainer. If it wasn't your union that was striking, then you went ahead and worked and thought of the record-keeping of who worked and who didn't as an inconvenience. I wish I knew more. It bothers me to cross a picket line, but if such a decision would be considered totally outside the norm, then I guess I'll do it.

On the other hand, it violates one of my guiding principles. This one comes from my favorite book of all time "The Greening of America" by Charles Reich. I have never gone without owning an extra copy of this book that I could give away since I read it the first time. It explains how to live your life so as effectively cause changes of the type you want. And it works. The principle is simple: "Reveal options by living them." What that means is make the decisions that others may believe unfeasable and, by the lack of horrible consequences, give others the courage to also make such decisions. If you think about it, all the great influencers of change did that. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the Suffragettes, the first gays who came out, Ghandi.

Even my moving to the UK is a part of it. Like John said "Imagine there's no borders." If you can find a way to do it legally, choose the country you will live in. As for doing it illegally, I have mixed feelings. It violates the Golden Rule to turn folks away when if you were in the situation they were in, you'd want to be taken in. I can't condemn someone for making that decision. I certainly couldn't turn in an illegal. But I wouldn't actively aid anyone in doing it either. Or I think I wouldn't. If it came to that, would I violate the Golden Rule or help. Luckily, I haven't been put to the question.

Golly, this posting took a turn I wasn't expecting when I started writing.

My daily life here, and whatever else

On weekdays, we set the clock for 6:30. We're still sleeping on the blow-up bed we got when we first got here. It's not bad at all, tends to favor togetherness as we sink into in and end up rolling toward each other. My husband has to get to work at 9:00 and leaves about 8:15 to catch the bus. The bus that goes near his workplace comes about every 30 minutes. I'll take just a moment now to brag about my husband. He get's out of bed and goes to hold my robe for me to put on. He has already set up the coffee maker and the cups. We have shortbread fingers with our coffee, which I prepare and bring to him. Then he has a bowl of cereal with some of a banana and brings me the rest with some vitamins. I stay out of the way while he gets ready for work, usually checking my e-mail. I get a daily list of arts jobs, but so far, most of them seem to be in London, very few near Norwich, and quite a few are volunteer jobs.

I wish I could volunteer. Before things went nutty with Steve's original job, I had begun to network my field by volunteering to make an embroidery piece for a 17th century room in a local museum-house, Strangers Hall. I also had essentially "auditioned" to volunteer as an embroiderer with the Norwich Cathedral embroiderers. Both of these fell by the wayside when I needed to get work, any work. It seems that I'm not meant to volunteer for a while yet. About two weeks ago, I went to a local theater to volunteer a morning a week to work on costuming. The very next day, I got a new student to tutor who wanted me to tutor in the morning. I had thought that I could spare one morning a week for the networking benefits, but I need the student and her fees more, so that volunteer thing had to be put aside.

Anyhow, after Steve leaves, I do the dishes and take up any other household tasks that need done. One morning a week, I go to the grocery store. I take a wheeled carry-on bag down with me to wait for the bus, take the bus to the store, do the shopping (We love trying the different butters and cheeses and other things that are new to us, and we try to find substitutes for the things we miss from home, like A-1 sauce, russet potato chips, bacon [called streaky bacon here;just plain bacon is more like ham]), load the groceries back into the cart, load up the carry-on with as much as I can, haul it back to the bus stop, ride the bus back, and climb the hill up to our place. The sidewalks on our street are very rough, and green. Sometimes I think back to our first day in the UK when I asked what kind of tree those were along the road, the ones with green trunks and branches. They were the same kinds we have in the US. They just had so much moss on them that thier trunks and branches looked green. Well, that's why our sidewalks are green, and the moss is why they are rough. I put the grocery store groceries away, make any calls that need made, and head for town, by bus again.

There are usually a few errands to be run in town as well, some things we buy at Norwich's absolutely wonderful outdoor market. I go out of my way to buy from the vendors there because I believe it's worth it, even if you pay more, to patronize locals. A bank run. Something the Poundsaver has good prices on. Something needed from Boots, which is almost a generic word for pharmacy here, even though there are other drug stores. Something to be delivered or picked up from one of the galleries selling my work. A meeting with a friend. I only really have one here so far. Getting around by bus and having such an intense schedule makes it harder and making friends is not one of my best skills, though the ones I make seem to last.

Then I go to the Norwich School of Art and Design and work on my project for as much time as I have before I need to leave at 1:00 to go and eat lunch and be at the bus stop to go to work at 2:00. I miss pizza by the slice, which I had every day in New York. Here, I often have a Pret (a-Manger) sandwich or a distinctly Brit snack like a pasty or a "steak bake", a pastry stuffed with some meat-vegetable combination. I think it will take a long time for it not to grate on me to have to pay more for my sandwich if I intend to sit inside and eat it rather than carrying it away. It's cool enough that I pretty much always prefer to sit inside these days, though it's not as cold as New York. We still haven't had a freeze here.

By about 2:00, I'm at the bus stop, and I'm usually at work around 2:15. Employers don't seem so clock-bound here. Originally my job was set up for 2:30 until 6:30, but I soon found out that if I didn't leave before 6:30, I;d miss the last bus for an hour. They didn't bat an eye when I told them I need to work 2:15 until 6:15 instead. Almost everybody else leaves at 4:30 or 5:00, and then I'm by myself. I'm doing data entry for a school, getting paid peanuts, and I am not happy. It's mind-deadening for me. All the job advice writings tell you to take the job you have and find a way to apply your strongest skills to it. I'd like to know how you are supposed to do that with this kind of job. I finally managed to do an element of that on Friday, writing down the method I had developed for doing a routine rechecking of the database after getting frustrated by everyone doing it differently and by the basic fact that you either trust your data base data or you don't. Hiring people to go along behind your database checking on it basically negates the whole reason for having it in the first place. It was supposed to save labor, I assume, and you aren't going to get valid results if everyone does it differently, either. I used to be known for my experimental protocols, the set of instructions for an assay or a technique. I put in all the details that made it work and why. Writing instructions is something I'm really good at, though I'm not formally trained in it, and formal qualifications seem to count for everything here, at least until I manage to network.

I leave at 6:15, walk about a half mile into the center of town and catch a bus home. I get home a little after 7:00. By the time we have made and eaten dinner, there may be an hour or so to blog, work on a new jewellery piece, prepare for a tutoring session, or - and here's the hard part - apply for a job that suits my skills more closely.

I run out of energy before I get around to doing the type of thing that might lead to a better way to put together an income. At the moment, with the part-time job, three hours tutoring (walking or taking the bus to and from their homes), and selling some jewellery that I make in galleries, I manage about what the full-time job paid and manage to put in less than 10 hours per week at the school of art.

"Invigilator" and other thoughts

I started another blog, Artist Access to Art Journal, to document the progress I'm making with my mini-residency and I've been posting a lot to that blog lately, but its time to return to this one. Every once in a while, I google to see if either of my blogs comes up at all. So far, I haven't found either of them. However, yesterday, I found another blog called Gone Away about emigrating in the other direction from the UK to the US. The URL is www.britblog.com/directory/interest/emigration.html . Or at least that address will get you there. That blog also includes fiction. I haven't read the whole blog, but I think it would be interesting to anyone who reads mine.

I picked up a brochure yesterday about a poetry contest and was thinking about writing one about emigration to counter the attitude toward immigrants that I see so much. I think folks just don't realize what it requires to successfully manage to do it. I just wrote a new CV and I put the three international moves of an entire household I have done as significant management and organization experience.

The poem would start out:

Immigrant.
Try the word on.
But first.....

followed by a few lines on how suddenly you wear different sizes in everything! And some of them have different names. I still haven't figured out at which point a knit top becomes a "jumper". What do Brit's call a sleeveless dress designed to be worn over a blouse? You might need a whole different wardrobe. My working wardrobe has always been jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. As a low-paid office worker here, I need to wear "smart casual" wear. Never mind that I'm not really sure what that means. I've figured out that most people here could put together a basic office wardrobe from the elements of their school uniforms. As I've said before, it's a very boring wardrobe we're talking about. Suits. Ugh! Conservative lines and dark colors. This is especially grating for me because I adore this year's gypsy styles, color and glitz and fluttering lines everywhere! I have almost no money for clothes, so it's a real frustration for it to be necessary for me to spend that little bit, which so far has added up to about £30, on boring stuff. What has that bought me so far? Two slightly less boring than "normal" skirts and a pair of black non-jeans. A robe to wear now that the mornings have become cool, and so that I can quickly change into it before dinner so as to preserve my tiny working wardrobe. And a trenchcoat-style raincoat. Thank god for charity shops. My only comfort is that next year perhaps the gypsy clothes will be in the charity shops. I won't care if they are out by then. By then I'll really be a practising self-supporting artist (and slightly excentric tutor perhaps) and be able to wear what I want. And the heels! Why do all the office women wear heels! Boring heels. I WILL NOT wear both boring and uncomfortable shoes! It's my Birky's for me, and socks over my hated tights to preserve them, because I've always resented having to buy stockings in any form.

If I can get all worked up about that, imagine what the following sections of the poem will be like. What I want to say is that the slightest things in life cannot be assumed. Your assumptions are so often turning out to be wrong in this new culture, even this one that speaks my language, that you end up allowing extra research time for almost everything. Anything new you set your mind to do starts with: But first....

And now for "invigilator". I LOVE that word! I saw it in the internal vacancies list of the school where I am presently doing data entry. (A moment to Grrrrrr about still doing data entry when I could easily teach the chemistry or math or textile classes if they would just accept my credentials! A waste, I say! A waste!) Apparently it means examination proctor, which I did as a part of my role as a professor for medical student, but we Americans don't go around documenting and getting credential certificates for every single thing we've ever done, so I can't prove it. When I think of it as being an "invigilator", I see myself wandering the room carrying a huge ostrich feather with which I tickle any student who dares to look away from his or her own paper. That or something more sexual and kinky.

And for now, that's what I say.