I Am Going to Sell This House Today
At the moment I'm reminded of a scene in Sam Mendes' film American Beauty in which a stylish but, we suspect, underperforming real estate agent in the form of Annette Bening enters an empty house with a “For Sale” sign out front. She organizes the interior perfectly, then looks in the mirror and recites repeatedly the words, “I am going to sell this house today.”
.
After a month of half-hearted hot-and-cold job hunting, I have decided that “I am going to get a job tomorrow.” I have emailed the CV that practically every company in London has by now and couldn't give a damn to the head of Human Resources at Paperchase, a popular British chain similar to Hallmark with a library card, citing not one but seven nearby franchises that list current vacancies for part-time sales assistants and my desire to fill one of those spots. Despite that proactive operation, tomorrow morning I will don my dress khakis, black shoes (which, until now, have been sadly neglected in my sparsely filled wardrobe) and Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and march into each of the seven locations with a crisp hard copy of my CV and I do not plan to leave until I have spoken to the manager and delivered the CV into his or her very hands at the very least. I will no longer accept a mere “Do you have a copy of your CV? Leave it with me and we'll give you a call” as an invitation to thank them and go along my merry way. This unemployed American is going to make sure that he is employed in the United Kingdom by the end of Monday, October 23, 2006, or as close as possible to it.
.
As an indication of the renewed zeal with which I pursue this endeavor (what a horrid word, teetering on the edge of cliché but not even common enough for such an insult), I offer the following fact. Not only have I written down the names and addresses of each of the seven stores I intend to visit, but I have used my A to Z to chart out the day's agenda to conform to preferences in location and reputation of the specific franchise.
.
Lest someone think that a self-proclaimed academic like me is pursuing a rather facile category of employment, consider the following. First, I acknowledge that my dream job under my current circumstances would be to work in the front of house (i.e. usher, program seller) at a West End theatre. However, I have tried that path and it led to any one of several dead ends: my admittedly minimal course schedule renders me unable to work Wednesday matinee day, which most London theatres celebrate; also, even in cases where the former obstacle is moot I was expected to work eight shows a week, or roughly 28 hours, whereas my visa only allows me to work 20 hours per week without getting a work permit. Secondly, as I discussed with my father and grandmother, as each day passes without income it becomes more important for me to have it, and therefore I must by necessity take what I can get. Finally, I argue that I spent almost the entire four years of my undergraduate study in three jobs that placed sometimes exorbitant demands on my time, mind, emotions and skills, and although not the only culprit, I argue they took a toll on my academic performance. As I explained today in a letter to my undergraduate thesis advisor, my MA program demands of me an unprecedented amount of intellectual, emotional and physical focus, as one would expect from a renowned Master's program. If ever I deserved to perform a mindless, repetitive job in a casual, comfortable and relatively unchallenging environment, it is now.
.
But enough with rationalization. I had a nice conversation with Tea today...via Gmail chat but welcome nonetheless. She had sent me her most recent short story to peruse, and I asked if she wanted my comments, with the understanding that both she and I know that I am no expert, although I do read a lot and have as good a grasp of the written language as one might hope at my age. In fact, I was thinking on my way home from the corner shop a few minutes ago about this: I do not overstate when I say, and I do, that I am the number one fan of Tea's short fiction, but even, or perhaps especially, between two people as close and as similarly intelligent as we are there is bound to be some professional rivalry just below the surface. This is probably more on my part than hers, since I can understand how someone might be able to restrain himself from envying my ability to analyze long-dead texts about medieval sex lives and star-crossed lovers. Envying the ability to write fiction well, and I mean expertly, on the other hand, is perhaps more comprehensible. What made a temporary peace in my mind on my rainy walk home was realizing that what separates Tea and me as writers are our ideas. I could, and I compliment myself greatly here, probably write with a similar degree of control of and insight into the English language as Tea does, but I do not share her talent for creating ideas necessary to produce good, believable, profound fiction. Instead I choose to draw my ideas from life in a different, more concrete way, using more tangible inspiration written on paper or buried in stone. And thank goodness for that difference: without people like Tea (and there are few) who write from their heads and people like me who write from others' remains, the conceivable putrid stagnance of language would cause the living to envy the dead.
I digress, although not idly. I have read Tea's work for years and I certainly have my favorites. Until yesterday I worried that perhaps the praise I have so often bestowed on her might, due to its constancy, have the effect of diluting itself through repetition, somewhat like how a person whose every other word is a four-letter word has nowhere relevant to turn when he finds himself in a situation that actually does warrant profanity. It is never easy to perform a critique of the work of a loved one, even when the educated opinion is that the piece is decidedly meritorious. The reason I asked is that any opinion other than whole-hearted raving is somewhat pointless if the piece is, say, already sent to a publisher or graded or otherwise deemed complete by its author. I would trust Tea to edit my doctoral dissertation, and I was relieved to find my comments were not only well-received, as I expected they would be, but that they were also, in effect, hers. My mother says that great minds think alike. Sometimes it just takes a bit of reassurance that we are as mentally cohesive as I like to think we are.
Perhaps I over-analyze, although I would argue, after four weeks of learning literary criticism at the velocity of the Concorde, that that would be impossible. But my concern about this matter as detailed above does serve to hint at one aspect of my London experience to those of you who wonder why you have read this far. As I said to Dr. Bitel, this MA, London, this whole experience is not what I expected. Do not misconstrue this as a statement of regret or dissatisfaction, but it is the truth. This experience, which dozens of my friends and relatives opined was a once-in-a-lifetime one, is certainly full of excitement, stimulation and other fuzzy-glove terms, but it is definitely no walk in the park. I see now that it is naïve to assume or even hope that relocation offers unlimited opportunities for growth, change, and sanctuary from a place - city, state, country, I can't remember anymore - from which I felt I needed an indefinite break. I have only been in London for a month, and I am certainly not about to make any decisions or commit to a general sense of belonging or lack thereof, but instead of frolicking in the advantages London offers I find myself retrospectively appreciating the advantages of a city I not only love, but my absence from which has made me realize is my home. Perhaps I will allow myself to mentally settle into London when I get a job, fulfilling the last of my unfinished business, but I cannot count on it.
Therefore I am going to experiment with a somewhat different tactic. Instead of allowing myself to feel like a foreigner (and let me tell you, Londoners HATE foreigners) and try and compensate by assimilating, I will instead embrace my American-ness and everything else about me. I will accept the fact that I get annoyed when waitresses pretend not to know what I mean when I order potato chips (from a deli...they don't even make fries). I will try beans for breakfast, it won't take, and that will be the end of it. I will not try subtly and ineffectively to disguise my American accent at the pub to avoid incidental eyerolls from the bartenders. I will make up for my upbringing neglecting me of an intrinsic understanding of post-colonial ideology and a history degree that felt no need to teach me literary criticism by doubling my efforts outside of class. I will pretend not to notice that the course director spent five minutes raving about Dartmouth, one of my classmates' alma mater, as being a pinnacle of American education, directly after my admission that I went to USC. Sure, I'll assimilate to the extent I must; I'll learn to look right instead of left to cross the street, and that when someone asks, “You alright?” they are not suggesting I do not look so, as it is their version of the rhetorical greeting. I'll join them in their snobbish glances at brash American tourists shoving into Westminster Abbey and standing on the left side of the escalator out of the tube. And finally, when a drunken man spills beer on one of my three American classmates at the Founder's Arms, our post-theatre pub stop, tries to apologize by starting slurred conversation, then asks if we're on vacation, I will proudly say, “No, actually, I live here.”
I am going to get a job tomorrow. If not, I may have to begin an affair with Peter Gallagher.
.
After a month of half-hearted hot-and-cold job hunting, I have decided that “I am going to get a job tomorrow.” I have emailed the CV that practically every company in London has by now and couldn't give a damn to the head of Human Resources at Paperchase, a popular British chain similar to Hallmark with a library card, citing not one but seven nearby franchises that list current vacancies for part-time sales assistants and my desire to fill one of those spots. Despite that proactive operation, tomorrow morning I will don my dress khakis, black shoes (which, until now, have been sadly neglected in my sparsely filled wardrobe) and Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and march into each of the seven locations with a crisp hard copy of my CV and I do not plan to leave until I have spoken to the manager and delivered the CV into his or her very hands at the very least. I will no longer accept a mere “Do you have a copy of your CV? Leave it with me and we'll give you a call” as an invitation to thank them and go along my merry way. This unemployed American is going to make sure that he is employed in the United Kingdom by the end of Monday, October 23, 2006, or as close as possible to it.
.
As an indication of the renewed zeal with which I pursue this endeavor (what a horrid word, teetering on the edge of cliché but not even common enough for such an insult), I offer the following fact. Not only have I written down the names and addresses of each of the seven stores I intend to visit, but I have used my A to Z to chart out the day's agenda to conform to preferences in location and reputation of the specific franchise.
.
Lest someone think that a self-proclaimed academic like me is pursuing a rather facile category of employment, consider the following. First, I acknowledge that my dream job under my current circumstances would be to work in the front of house (i.e. usher, program seller) at a West End theatre. However, I have tried that path and it led to any one of several dead ends: my admittedly minimal course schedule renders me unable to work Wednesday matinee day, which most London theatres celebrate; also, even in cases where the former obstacle is moot I was expected to work eight shows a week, or roughly 28 hours, whereas my visa only allows me to work 20 hours per week without getting a work permit. Secondly, as I discussed with my father and grandmother, as each day passes without income it becomes more important for me to have it, and therefore I must by necessity take what I can get. Finally, I argue that I spent almost the entire four years of my undergraduate study in three jobs that placed sometimes exorbitant demands on my time, mind, emotions and skills, and although not the only culprit, I argue they took a toll on my academic performance. As I explained today in a letter to my undergraduate thesis advisor, my MA program demands of me an unprecedented amount of intellectual, emotional and physical focus, as one would expect from a renowned Master's program. If ever I deserved to perform a mindless, repetitive job in a casual, comfortable and relatively unchallenging environment, it is now.
.
But enough with rationalization. I had a nice conversation with Tea today...via Gmail chat but welcome nonetheless. She had sent me her most recent short story to peruse, and I asked if she wanted my comments, with the understanding that both she and I know that I am no expert, although I do read a lot and have as good a grasp of the written language as one might hope at my age. In fact, I was thinking on my way home from the corner shop a few minutes ago about this: I do not overstate when I say, and I do, that I am the number one fan of Tea's short fiction, but even, or perhaps especially, between two people as close and as similarly intelligent as we are there is bound to be some professional rivalry just below the surface. This is probably more on my part than hers, since I can understand how someone might be able to restrain himself from envying my ability to analyze long-dead texts about medieval sex lives and star-crossed lovers. Envying the ability to write fiction well, and I mean expertly, on the other hand, is perhaps more comprehensible. What made a temporary peace in my mind on my rainy walk home was realizing that what separates Tea and me as writers are our ideas. I could, and I compliment myself greatly here, probably write with a similar degree of control of and insight into the English language as Tea does, but I do not share her talent for creating ideas necessary to produce good, believable, profound fiction. Instead I choose to draw my ideas from life in a different, more concrete way, using more tangible inspiration written on paper or buried in stone. And thank goodness for that difference: without people like Tea (and there are few) who write from their heads and people like me who write from others' remains, the conceivable putrid stagnance of language would cause the living to envy the dead.
I digress, although not idly. I have read Tea's work for years and I certainly have my favorites. Until yesterday I worried that perhaps the praise I have so often bestowed on her might, due to its constancy, have the effect of diluting itself through repetition, somewhat like how a person whose every other word is a four-letter word has nowhere relevant to turn when he finds himself in a situation that actually does warrant profanity. It is never easy to perform a critique of the work of a loved one, even when the educated opinion is that the piece is decidedly meritorious. The reason I asked is that any opinion other than whole-hearted raving is somewhat pointless if the piece is, say, already sent to a publisher or graded or otherwise deemed complete by its author. I would trust Tea to edit my doctoral dissertation, and I was relieved to find my comments were not only well-received, as I expected they would be, but that they were also, in effect, hers. My mother says that great minds think alike. Sometimes it just takes a bit of reassurance that we are as mentally cohesive as I like to think we are.
Perhaps I over-analyze, although I would argue, after four weeks of learning literary criticism at the velocity of the Concorde, that that would be impossible. But my concern about this matter as detailed above does serve to hint at one aspect of my London experience to those of you who wonder why you have read this far. As I said to Dr. Bitel, this MA, London, this whole experience is not what I expected. Do not misconstrue this as a statement of regret or dissatisfaction, but it is the truth. This experience, which dozens of my friends and relatives opined was a once-in-a-lifetime one, is certainly full of excitement, stimulation and other fuzzy-glove terms, but it is definitely no walk in the park. I see now that it is naïve to assume or even hope that relocation offers unlimited opportunities for growth, change, and sanctuary from a place - city, state, country, I can't remember anymore - from which I felt I needed an indefinite break. I have only been in London for a month, and I am certainly not about to make any decisions or commit to a general sense of belonging or lack thereof, but instead of frolicking in the advantages London offers I find myself retrospectively appreciating the advantages of a city I not only love, but my absence from which has made me realize is my home. Perhaps I will allow myself to mentally settle into London when I get a job, fulfilling the last of my unfinished business, but I cannot count on it.
Therefore I am going to experiment with a somewhat different tactic. Instead of allowing myself to feel like a foreigner (and let me tell you, Londoners HATE foreigners) and try and compensate by assimilating, I will instead embrace my American-ness and everything else about me. I will accept the fact that I get annoyed when waitresses pretend not to know what I mean when I order potato chips (from a deli...they don't even make fries). I will try beans for breakfast, it won't take, and that will be the end of it. I will not try subtly and ineffectively to disguise my American accent at the pub to avoid incidental eyerolls from the bartenders. I will make up for my upbringing neglecting me of an intrinsic understanding of post-colonial ideology and a history degree that felt no need to teach me literary criticism by doubling my efforts outside of class. I will pretend not to notice that the course director spent five minutes raving about Dartmouth, one of my classmates' alma mater, as being a pinnacle of American education, directly after my admission that I went to USC. Sure, I'll assimilate to the extent I must; I'll learn to look right instead of left to cross the street, and that when someone asks, “You alright?” they are not suggesting I do not look so, as it is their version of the rhetorical greeting. I'll join them in their snobbish glances at brash American tourists shoving into Westminster Abbey and standing on the left side of the escalator out of the tube. And finally, when a drunken man spills beer on one of my three American classmates at the Founder's Arms, our post-theatre pub stop, tries to apologize by starting slurred conversation, then asks if we're on vacation, I will proudly say, “No, actually, I live here.”
I am going to get a job tomorrow. If not, I may have to begin an affair with Peter Gallagher.