Chantal - Have Laptop Will Travel

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November 30, 2004

Shoulder

Why should there be anything wrong in caring deeply for those in need? For choosing to empathise with those forgotten by others, or simply those who need someone to turn to?

I’ve spent most of my life caring for and helping people in need; a few years ago I made a conscious decision to do something concrete about it, and chose to do what I could to help women in abusive relationships. I’ve done a huge amount of research, I have a comprehensive library; the more I read, the more adamant I have been to do all I can to stop women in those situations from going it alone.

I gave it up a few years ago, when I got too burnt out, although from time to time, friends of mine still turn out to be in similar situations, and I can’t help but get involved, any less than I can stop caring for them. Very few friends of mine know about these women I help, apart from my mentioning them in the context of friendship; very rarely do I get so affected I need to talk more openly about what’s going on.

Maybe it’s something to do with my leaving Network Rail and still trying to adjust to being away from my friends there, and adjust to working somewhere where nobody in my office talks, except for one woman whose mouth I long to stuff with teabags so I never have to hear her voice again. My closest friends are invariably those I see and hear from on a daily basis, completely independent of the fact that none of them are particularly close friends in the normal sense. That doesn’t make me care any less for them, and by their presence, makes them far more important to me than those I only hear from sporadically.

I’ve not heard from Ana since I left work today – about 45 minutes late, as I couldn’t stop sending ridiculously silly jokes to Fill, the systems admin guy, or receiving yet more from him – I’ve texted her twice, and tried to phone her once, largely out of concern, but also out of generally missing her. The flat seems so quiet and empty without her, leaving me to mull over the various reactions I’ve had from friends over the years about my counselling work. I specifically chose emotional abuse because of the grey and largely ignored area that it is, but what I don’t expect from my friends is their complete aversion to the subject. Surely what matters is not the illogic behind what these friends are suffering, but simply the fact that they are suffering, and largely doing so in isolation because their friends are so uncomfortable with their situation. Ana doesn’t need to be told to leave her boyfriend; what she needs is a friend who will stand by her till she gathers the strength to finally make a stand for herself, who will be patient with her throughout. Yes, it’s a complicated situation, but not one which necessarily condemns Ana to struggle through this alone because those around her aren’t able to be openminded enough.

I’m fairly sure she knows that she’s the youngest woman I’ve ever helped, also the one in the most extreme relationship I’ve come across. I spent last weekend, while she was here, remembering the other women I helped over the years, all of them older, most of them with children, but most importantly, how much their contact enriched my life.

This isn’t nearly as long as I’d like it to be, but I’m so very tired. Caring for people is what I do, regardless of what they’re going through, regardless of who they are. I may not be a traditionally trained counsellor, but it’s still one of the things I do best. The downside, if that’s what it can be called, is that the only way I can be of any use is if I invest myself completely in the other person’s situation, leaving me entirely drained and upset when things go wrong, but all the same, I couldn’t imagine, much less justify doing anything less for those who are so important to me, or even simply those who could do with my help. Maybe those who are my friends can justify ignoring friends of theirs in pain or in difficulty, but if that’s the case, those are probably not people I want or need to be friends with.

Posted by chantal at 11:41 PM | TrackBack

Mexican Mouse

Generally, the first thing people comment on when they meet me is my accent. I’m beyond fed up of the questions, of their analysing my accent when it wanders on a minute-to-minute basis, but all the more so when I’m told that I can’t be Mexican as I don’t look like the Mexicans on TV. I always think back to my Guatemalan friends back home, all far paler than I am, despite how much warmer it is there. I’ve fought hard to lose the Spanish accent I used to have – being called Mexican Mouse by Nick and Linda on a regular basis is an enormous incentive in doing so. It comes back from time to time, although I’ve only just noticed that my French accent remains firmly dormant.

Yes, I went through a phase twelve years ago when not only did I try to become as English as I could, I also set myself a photographic project to define Englishness, which involved asking everyone I knew exactly what being English meant to them. Those who know me now know that neither of those two ever amounted to anything, and that I’ve settled for being me, a mostly-foreigner but not pretending any more. At the time, I concluded that it boiled down to Monty Python, but it still strikes me that I nevertheless had to undergo that to try to understand the culture I’d been living in for most of my life.

Maybe it’s the time of year. I always go back to Guatemala for a month over Christmas and New Years, and would never consider spending it otherwise. I haven’t booked my flight yet – Ana has seen to that, for now – but I already feel that I have one foot over there, and that I’ve overstayed my time in London by so long, it would be so much easier not to return to London afterwards. Returning is so hard anyway, so hard to recover from, it’s long past time I decide not to inflict that on myself any longer. Three years ago, I bribed John into extricating me from my usual January misery, but I don’t have any such contingencies any more.

I’ve written about Central America from time to time – in San Pedro Dreams, when I was mulling over a random but compelling memory two years ago, then a week and a half ago, when I was recovering from a night in a horrendously overpacked bar in Waterloo. I don’t know if I can do the region justice, however, if I can truly convey the reality of being there, of adjusting to the lifestyle there without question, feeling at home for the first time since I was last there. I don’t like who I am when I live in London; I miss the person I am when I’m home. I can’t say that strongly enough.

When I was at university, I would return to France and Holland on a frequent basis to distance myself from the London lifestyle; once I had the chance, I would return to Central America as frequently as I could, not only to drink in how wonderful it was to be back home, but also to remind myself of what was actually important in life, and that the accessories which may be so important in London are not even worth thinking about once back there.

It’s been a hard few days. I’m completely drained by the few days Ana has spent here, and that that, as well as other background stuff, is probably why I’m thinking so hard of Central America these days, and that, regardless of the political problems and crime levels, I just really need to be back in Mexico, Guatemala, Nica or Pana, just somewhere where I don’t have to fight so hard on a day-to-day basis.

It’s the foreigner thing which always gets me, in the end. Bad enough for me to be so far away from home, but worse still to live in a country where I’ll never assimilate into the culture, never stop being made to feel foreign because of how alien the people I meet are to me. Even the ones I care deeply for are still going to remain alien, at the end of the day – but as they’re on their home ground, my foreignness will always be all the more of an issue. I know that my accent singles me out first, and my personality second, but what I learned twelve years ago is that I’m not prepared to choke myself so that I fit in. Unfortunately, I’m isolated from the Latino communities here in London, which leaves me without a space where I can truly relax and be myself without being overly conscious of whichever unspoken social codes I’m breaking, probably without even noticing.

Okay, so the main thing I appreciate about London is how multicultural it is, and how someone like me can live here and somehow fit in, whereas the other capital cities I know are too segregated to make that as possible. On the other hand, the communities it accommodates aren’t the ones I want around me; if I’m to stay in Europe, I want to be in Paris where I can at least immerse myself in the culture I’m most enamoured of, even if living there means accepting the cultural segregation and hostilities which would be harder still for me to adjust to.

But it’s not the same. Catacamas. Dirt roads, Maseca signs, the three-quarters empty supermarket on the plaza, but I never once questioned whether or not I felt at home there. I had my peones, but was criticised for wanting to buy them presents to thank them for all their hard work when the project came to an end. It’s because of all of the people I met then – the locals, not the ones on my team – that I gave up being an archaeologist, making me aware that their lives were of far more interest to me than those of their ancestors, and that I felt so much more connected with them than I ever have while living in London.

I’m sitting cross-legged on the rug I call my ‘Mexican God’ rug. I wrote last night about creating families for ourselves out of the people around us, but with Ana leaving, I’m feeling that I’ve given all I can, that I’ve done all I can, that I don’t have any more affection to give, and am not particularly likely to receive any back; and that, as an Australian friend said years ago, I have nothing left to prove by staying here. Also, as I wrote last night, accumulating family members is my way of establishing links with those I care about the most, however I know I have a whole extended family awaiting me anxiously back home.

I want to go home. I want it so much more than anything else – although I don’t necessarily know if I could stay if I did. I want to be where I’m on the same wavelength as those around me, where I don’t have to constantly justify or validate myself, or be forced into pretending to be someone I’m not. I’ve lived in so many countries, I’m used to making myself comfortable wherever I am, I know I could probably continue doing so indefinitely, but for me, life is too short to waste so much of it hiding who I am and trying to adjust to people who don’t adjust to me first.

My brother’s as much of a hybrid as I am, but at least he comes from a different background, not that it’s one I would have ever chosen for myself. We barely speak to each other, but at the very least, I don’t want him to have this geographical confusion I have. He’s never been to Central America, never lived there, would probably loathe it if he tried, but, like me, he’s picked the nationality which suits him the best and thankfully for him, it’s one which is so much easier to reconcile his everyday life with.

Maybe it’s just me being really horribly homesick. But I feel so strongly that the last few months have shown me that I don’t need to do the London crap any longer, that I don’t need to spend my strength caring for people who don’t know where I’m coming from, much less spend my days with people who can’t ever be bothered to say hello to me in the mornings. There may be so very much I dislike about being in Central America, but then all I have to do is remember being back there, and contrast that with walking home to my beloved home here in a part of London I hate bitterly.

When I was at uni, I had an English boyfriend who took all my complaints about England completely personally, but never realised what I was really saying: that I’d given this country everything I had, but at the end of the day, it would still kill me in the end. Out of the last five years, Ana has learned so much more about me than I’ve ever considered telling anyone else in the past years. As I implied last night, I would far rather spend an evening with Ana dissecting our lives than doing my best to kill time elsewhere, but maybe the main reason for that is that, for all I value the British tradition of discussion, it allows for at least as many boundaries as I have again discussing anything even vaguely personal. Christ, I want to take a sledgehammer to the brick boundary, but I just don’t know that I could count on anyone to be there on the other side once I’d finished fully working up a sweat.

I thought that my current job was my dream job. It’s not. My mother would love for me to buy a one-way ticket and settle for the best. Apart from Ana and Sammi, the people I care the most for are my Network Rail friends, and we’ve established over the last two months that we can stay in touch over email on a very frequent basis, regardless of where I am. I’ve lost interest in my garden, so the only thing still holding me here is my flat. Yes, it’s pretty much all that has held me here for the last four years, but when I think about returning to Calle Chipilapa, it doesn’t stand a chance. Fill wants to leave RCN; I just want to leave this godforsaken country.

Posted by chantal at 12:42 AM | TrackBack

November 29, 2004

Family

Family

Galway, August 1994. One night in particular – a night which was determined not to end. Family holidays are probably always difficult at the best of times, but all the more so when you don’t particularly know the family in question, where the mother is determined to be unhappy, and ensures that her sons are too. As soon as we arrived in Galway, Jacob disappeared and his mother promptly disowned him; Joel took up with a travelling musician, and I joined in too.

Out of the pastiche of my memories, I’d probably spent the day looking for Jacob, following his wanderings through the town, and returned to the hostel to find a huge crowd nearby surrounding Eric, with Joel at his side. It’s possible we all congregated in the lounge late at night – I remember that happening, but not when, suffering from collective insomnia, more likely that we went from the street corner to a disco, then pub, then wandered from there. I have a photo of an inocuous shop front, with an old lady bending down in the shelter of the roof, but the night before, we decided to camp out there, listening to the Pink Floyd CD I’d picked out, and talking. Some time later, a homeless man joined us, and joined in on the conversation; as I suppose anyone does when meeting three people like myself, Eric and Joel, he asked if Joel was Eric’s brother. Eric was thrown by that question, not knowing how to answer; the homeless guy settled it for him by saying, ‘Oh, a brother by another mother.’

Sammi started texting me about a week ago, and since then, it’s been in my head every night before I go to sleep.

Sammi’s 16. I barely remember 16, but through our emails and texts, she’s sort of become a younger sister to me, and I’ve been trying to remember what it was like to be that age. Given I’ve not yet met her, I often feel embarrassed by acting like an older sister, but what I feel, above all else, is the desire to give her some guidance and help her to live the best life she can. I never spent much time bothering to be a teenager at the time, so maybe I’m the last person to be advising her, but I want her to know that there’s so much more out there awaiting her in a few years’ time.

I remember having a choice between two high schools, one which was nearby, but where they piled the pressure on excessively, and another, further away, where the reputation was higher and the pressure was more subtle. Having attended a primary school where they’d had to scratch around for extracurricular projects to keep me occupied, and let me skip as many year groups as needed, all I felt at the latter school was a profound lack of interest in my classmates. During my A-levels, I eventually chose my subjects based on the relevant teachers, and spent the rest of my time teaching photography, or working. As soon as I finished my exams, I flew to Holland for a few days, then on to France to work.

It’s two and a half weeks later now, and 2 o’clock in the morning. I spent nearly an hour on the phone to Sammi earlier, and chatted to her a few times earlier in the week. I’ve suggested she put herself up for auction on the Fuerteventura Forum, as I get concerned about her home and school situation, but maybe it’s simply that she’s a different type of teenager from when I was her age, and that the generation gap is simply too large. I’ve often discussed with friends over the years about the differences between what was available when we were growing up and with present-day kids and teenagers, and she truly brings it home to me.

So I’ve become her surrogate big sister. She’s the age I was when I met Katie, who took over a lot of the mothering my mother wasn’t around to do. I remember asking Katie a few years ago what I was like when she first met me, as I no longer remembered; though I don’t remember what I said, I have a vague memory that I was busy rediscovering the world and London in particular, whereas Sammi is stuck in a village outside Sherborne and hating it.

I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks how I’d develop this piece, and I figured it’d be advice to the teenager that Sammi is, to the teenager I was who is still somewhere out there.

Anybody who knows me knows I dislike my grandmother – for who she is, for how she treated my mother, and lastly, for her feelings towards me – but when I was 14, I heard some valuable advice from her, not that I particularly appreciated it at the time, only now: ‘Don’t be in such a rush to grow up. You’ll be grownup for so long, enjoy being young while you can.’

Over the years, I’ve reminisced over my school and university years, kicking myself violently for not appreciating them more at the time. I’ve chatted with Sammi that, yes, I disliked most of the girls at my high school, but rather than get involved with their petty obsessions, I ignored them. I had so many friends in the years above me that nobody was that sure which year I was actually in. But as my family knows all too well, I’d happily blank anyone I disliked. It may have meant that I left with few ties, but at least I was able to give myself the freedom to be friends with those I chose, as and when I wanted. I was also lucky to have a near-full-time job outside of school, and I fast built up friendships with my colleagues and the customers there, to offset the daily teenage angst I never had any time or patience for. Sammi’s assured me that there aren’t any ‘outsiders’ to hang out with at school, but I’m hoping that, in time, they’ll emerge, and she can find healthier friends to spend her time with, those less obsessed with the petty minutiae that constitute the teenage world, and those too involved with their pain.

She’s bored with me nagging her about considering university, but I accept that that’s part of where she is now, and that not going to university in 2 years doesn’t necessary mean that she’ll never go. She’s so disillusioned with her life as it is now, and what it has to offer her, that I want her to understand that two years of working hard, really trying, opens up options for her and would give her a shot at leading the life she wants to lead, as opposed to an extension of the life she’s living now, and is clearly dissatisfied with. Not only that, but university is a wonderful experience, something that she would fully deserve after 18 years in Thornford, or whatever her village is called. The world consists of more diverse people than the ones in her high school, village, Sherborne and Yeovil, and it’s overly shortsighted to assume that that constitutes the entire world. Maybe university does represent an enormous amount of hard work to attain the necessary grades, but as she knows, I don’t believe that any excuse is acceptable in selling oneself short just to save themselves the extra effort and work involved. We all have dreams; I find it hard to believe that anyone could dream to end up a receptionist in Yeovil, at best.

I think what I miss about high school and university, besides not having to worry about rent and bills, was the freedom I had to explore anything I wanted for free, the opportunities which were on offer which I ignored, always expecting I’d take them up the following year or once I’d finished studying. Not all schools or universities are as well-funded as mine, I accept, but at least there you could get a head-start on what you enjoyed the most, so that you could continue after graduation with a hefty background behind you, if not an advantage over other candidates, at least a wealth of positive memories. Whether it was photography, acting, journalism, music, dance, (or extreme sports), they were there for the taking – as was an open-handed ‘Yes’, as opposed to the ever-present ‘No’ that London specialises in. It’s too easy to take those opportunities for granted at the time, if only because we believe that they’ll always be there. I’m old enough to not expect a world where rent, bills, catfood, cat litter and unexpected debts don’t exist, but, for all the holes in my memory, I won’t forget the days when none of those mattered, that the money I earned was my own, and that the endless stalls at Freshers’ Week seemed superfluous.

Finally. Sammi’s read my piece ‘Wallflowers’, so she knows how I feel about people experiencing the world they create. There is no need to hate the world you are in, unless you genuinely want to; the only thing or person to be affected is yourself. If there are elements which hurt you or which you dislike, then discard them. If that’s not an option, then reconcile yourself to them in whichever manner it takes to leave you at peace and somewhat happier. If it’s the overall situation, then do what you can to make the most of it, to take from it what you can, and to prevent it from hurting yourself too much. Nothing is forever, not living at home, bitchy friends, problems at school, crappy jobs – it’s up to you to decide what you want and how you want to achieve it. But when you get bogged down by the little things, you reduce yourself to the only options available to you at that level. If that’s what you want, then so be it, but it’s a shame, as life is too short as it is to waste it by selling yourself short. Apart from crappy recruitment agents, the main thing holding us back is ourselves.

Okay, so that wasn’t quite ‘finally’. Eckhart Tolle wrote that most of human dysfunction is based on too much focus on the past or future, and not enough of appreciating the present for what it is. I’ve never managed to read too much of his book – some tasty fiction luring me away every time – but there’s also a danger of becoming too immersed in the present to the extent that you can’t envisage any future. Or allow yourself to dream of a future other than the one you’re currently building for yourself. The days of job-for-life are over; everything is short-term – school, friendships, plans, dreams. So put your energy into that which matters, that which makes you happy, and avoid the toxic elements which are there for temptation. Think about what’s good in your life, and about what you want, and don’t let anything tell you you can’t do it.

Posted by chantal at 12:50 AM

November 21, 2004

Another Week

Managua, July 1996. Or maybe I should backtrack beyond that, to when I worked in Catacamas, Eastern Honduras before I got the job in Managua.

Catacamas is about three and a half hours north-east of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and is literally the end of the road – beyond Catacamas, there is only a dirt track leading to the town of Danlí, after which there’s the expanse of the Mosquitía jungle reaching across to the Caribbean coast. We had set up camp in a hotel on the outskirts of town; we would head into the mountains in the mornings for work, in the late afternoons, after returning and showering, I would head to the nearby Texaco station or to the town centre for chocolate etc, sometimes with Cindy or Chris, or to the Hondutel office to make our phone calls home; in the evenings, we would head to the As de Oro, a restaurant which seemed to have few customers besides our team which gradually reached about 30. I was a vegetarian at the time; it wasn’t very vegetarian-friendly.

A few weeks later, I was in Managua, thanks to a conversation I’d had with someone in an Honduran border town, specifically in a warehouse selling pseudo-pre-Colombian ceramics, several of which are sitting on my windowsill to my right. Managua may be a completely bizarre capital city, but also about the only one I have any fondness for. I was promptly installed in a house in Barrio Centroamerica, one of the more prestigious areas, in the south of the city. Besides the main roads, which were paved or tiled, depending on their location, most if not all of the residential streets were unpaved dirt and bumpy. A friend, Amanda, lived a few doors down from me, so we’d wait together in the mornings, along with our other colleagues, on the other side of the main road, to be taken to somebody’s garden in which we were busily excavating an ever-larger trench, having discovered a large number of burial urns over the weeks. Children would play in our spoil pits; locals would set up chairs around the edges in the afternoons and watch us while the houseowner offered them lemonade.

Saturday mornings, I would rise before dawn and cross the rubbish dump to catch the first bus of the day to the Costa Rican border, to visit my friends in San José, returning late on Sunday nights, again via the rubbish dump.

I was summoned back to London rather abruptly while working there, and ever since then, I’ve had large difficulties with being around crowds. This hasn’t been helped at all by spending two years or more working and living in relatively unpopulated areas, taking half-empty buses or trains to work every day until two weeks ago. When I met up with Martin and his friends on Friday, I’d assumed that the bar would be somewhere to hang out until the rush hour dissipated, never anticipating that the bar could supercede public transport in its complete crowdedness. I’ve probably never appreciated my flat as much as I have done in these last two days for its complete absence of other people. I’m also enormously grateful for my boss having finally relented and agreeing to me working 8am – 4pm again, meaning that although the commute will still be painful, it won’t be nearly as traumatic as it has been for the last two weeks.

Whatever else I could say, at least my new job is not looking as bleak as it did a week ago; though I may still have an extremely low opinion of it, at least I have a clearer idea of what to expect, even if it’s Nothing. I now have a partial colleague, Filipe, even if his replacement starts next week, and his boss, Paul, who at least provides me with moral support if not much else. The only real contact I’ve had with my boss over the last two weeks has been him asking me every few days what I’ve been working on so far, only pausing to say, ‘Good’ before he walks off; a few times before I started, he elaborated on the Master Plan of where he sees this project going, but apparently I’ll never get any further clarification as to my role, much less of how I fit into the said Master Plan. I missed out on meeting up with my predecessor on Thursday, Martin; just as Sophie contacted me last summer to ask how I’d survived working at Red Cross in the role she then held, I’d dearly love to know what Martin has to say on his eight months here. I know he was unhappy about the absence of management, the ban on doing any programming work despite being hired as a programmer, and the lack of training opportunities. On Monday, I asked Filipe and Paul what Martin had worked on, in the hope that that might give me some clue as to what I should be doing, but apparently, Martin never found out either.

As I’ve probably said before, I know which environments I work best in, and in no way does this one meet any of my basic criteria. I have been given two and a half weeks to produce one set of basic statistics. Nobody seems to know anything about the existing databases, much less how to extract necessary data from them, nor does anybody seem to mind that I’ve wasted one week so far looking through everything of potential relevance on the network, having been given nothing else to do or work on otherwise, and another week of scouting around the available databases – which I’ve only had access to since the end of last Monday – trying to identify how on earth the data pieces together, much less meets our needs. I find it hard to believe that despite owning several key databases – logging internet, email, phone, mobile and helpdesk usage – there is absolutely nobody who knows anything about any of them, nor that there is not even any basic documentation or explanation of how any of them work.

The only other thing I’ve found out is that, although I’m the only London-based member of my team, the other Cardiff-based members – who I’ve had no contact with at all – are frantically trying to arrange transfers into other teams. I’ve yet to hear a single positive comment about my boss. On Thursday – on my way to the pub, as I wouldn’t survive the day otherwise – I again had my weekly chat with the administrator, asking if I was settling in well and if I was enjoying myself. She may not have asked this time if I’d be returning next week, but I could still only offer evasive and neutral replies. I’ve taken to referring to my office as the morgue, and to the people in it as corpses. When pressed, I admit that they’re starting to smell a bit.

Away from my office, the people aren’t so bad. The main bonding point seems to be the lift, a guaranteed subject of spontaneous conversation. Six floors, about 350 staff, one lift. Glass on three sides, one side of which has only an unbroken glass-panelled wall between it and the foul weather outside. The women unanimously stand with their backs to it, the men take the other wall. Managing to grab the lift before it decides to relocate to another floor instead is considered to be a huge prize. Most people grumble that they need to set aside ten minutes in the evenings just to get out of the building, but although there are two flights of stairs somewhere, and another lift hidden deeply away, nobody seems to know the location of any of them. I rarely recognise anyone I’ve chatted to in the lift, and the extent of my human contact seems to be when Filipe phones me over something or when we share a cigarette outside the building. Although my current task is to compile statistics on email usage per division and region, I only finally started working on Friday around lunchtime when I eventually checked the daily stats and found that I’d both sent and received the most emails all day (Martin, who I was meeting up with that evening, was number 5 on both lists). I fully justify it by the complete lack of conversation in the office I’m stuck in. I can manage about half an hour without music in the mornings, but already, I’m rapidly getting bored of my favourite CDs of the last few years – whereas normally it would take me all day to get through anywhere near two whole CDs, now I’m listening to around five. Filipe and Paul suggested I move into their office – there’s a spare desk, after all – as my predecessor did, but my boss’s boss has said no, I need to be in the same office as my boss for contact with him. When I told them that my office was driving me mad, they laughed and said they’d heard that plenty of times before.

So my birthday is on Tuesday, my deadline is for Wednesday, rent is due on Thursday. Although I was not warned beforehand, this job requires highly sophisticated psychic skills, which leaves me two days to figure out Access’s aversion to calculating averages, given that my boss’s boss has completely failed to let me know which format he wants the stats in on Wednesday. After that, I have the joy of playing with either of the two other databases I have access to (internet usage and helpdesk logs). If any of the SQL Server databases were actually of any use, I’d like to be able to produce the full set of stats by Wednesday, if only to show that I really don’t like not having anything to do, and that I don’t cope very well without being busy. The only problem with that is that it took me a day and a half to realise that the main email logging database is completely worthless and unusable, and I don’t know if I can get enough information from the other two to produce the stats needed. It doesn’t help that I’m expected to be satisfied with sample data extracts and templates in lieu of actual live data.

This job is turning me into a hot chocolate junkie. Until two weeks ago, I’d not drunk hot chocolate for years – I probably last drank it the last time I met up with Helena in the Charing Cross Borders several years ago, happily slurping away the whipped cream and marshmallows. I gave up my sweet teas at the start of the year, and since then, apart from the odd Cola when I’m feeling rougher than usual, I’ve not drunk anything sweet which didn’t involve rum. I had five hot chocolates on Thursday and two on Friday morning, after which I felt ill. But they’re all I can think of to keep my mood even vaguely sweet, to stop me from grabbing my bag and jacket and wandering back to the tube station, back to my flat.

My supposedly hands-on agent is anxious to resolve this situation, to arrange meetings with her boss, me and my boss to clarify my job description and his expectations, so that I’m not left dangling between one task and the next, with no real overview as to what I’m likely to be doing for as long as I last there. I’m starting to get the impression that all I’ll ever be expected to do is run Access and SQL Server queries to interrogate the existing data, and continue to work in isolation, especially after Filipe leaves, taking with him anything even vaguely resembling relevant knowledge or support.

This was meant to be an Oracle job, the job I’d been hunting for over two years. The closest I’ve got to it was spending two and a half days working my way through an Oracle Discoverer tutorial, bored to the point where I was bordering on homicidal. I had been booked in on a ‘SQL for Morons’ course last Thursday and an ‘Oracle Discoverer for Complete Morons’ course last Friday, both held in Cardiff, but I turned both down as I didn’t gauge myself to be a moron, much less view either course as sufficient reason to be away from my flat for any length of time. Yeah, I could have met up with Mat, but given I’ve not yet contacted him, I’m sure that can wait.

The week ahead. Getting through another week at work will be challenge in itself, as will be trying to find a flatmate before rent is due, despite six weeks of advertising the room. After last Friday, I think I’d far rather hold my birthday drinks at home, however I know that the main way I’m going to get anyone to turn up is if it’s on their way to their commute home, somewhere nearby so they can stop for a quick drink and catch the next train home; failing that, somewhere easily reachable. I don’t want my Lewisham and non-work-related friends to be put off by the sheer numbers of ex-Network Rail colleagues I’ve invited, much less by the travelling involved to get to Network Rail home ground. I don’t think I’ve ever invited mostly work friends to share my birthday, so I can only hope that it works out, that those I care the most about can make it on the day.

The longer I spend in London, the more painfully I am aware of being away from my family, and of how important each passing birthday is in terms of who I spend it with. Even if those I’m fondest of can only make it for one drink or two, I’d far rather settle for that than yet another quiet, anticlimatic evening at home.

And talking of things working out, I tried to cadge a job off Martin’s boss on Friday night. Fingers crossed he likes the idea. First email would be to Chris Bentley to sign up for more healing and Indian Head massage sessions, second email would be a group one to all my ex-colleagues to say ‘Hey again!’ Ideal situation and all that…

Posted by chantal at 11:23 PM | TrackBack

November 20, 2004

Sahra

I've only just realised that when I resurrected this site earlier this year, I lost all the ad hoc postings which never made it to Angelfire. So maybe there weren't so many, but given how I spend all my time at work now desperately listening to music, as two years ago, I've got a particular song in my head. And like two years ago, I've just done a websearch on them, as well as for a version without random numbers dotted about:

Hadi hobbab il leela rani andihom waah
Nebghi adoo yaay adma wedali gowwedeh waah
Nebghi adoo yaay yama weedoor fizzeneq waah
Willi gharou minna eedirou keefna waah

Sahra bled irramla, sahra bled il temra
Sobri sobri ya layli taay farraj rabbi

Ma tebki matshafeeni konti tkhemmi waah
Aayit feek nsa3ef hatta raayeetinif waah
La3bou beek oo biya issil3a inneksa waah
Ki ma bekeeteeni lyoum gla3ti li lihmoun waah

Sahra bled innakhla, sahra bled il tamra
Sobri sobri ya layle taay farraj rabbi

Posted by chantal at 10:50 PM

November 18, 2004

Birthday A-Loomin'

All I’ve ever wanted is to spend my birthdays with my friends. Two things conspire against that: that I invest far too heavily in my colleagues above my friends and, with the exception of last year, I always change jobs in November and never know my new colleagues well enough to spend it with them.

I started my current job two weeks ago. There are three people I could vaguely call friends; I had my first non-work-related conversation with one of them at the end of today. A year ago, I spent about £35 on two luxury cakes for my colleagues, despite it being years since I’d last thought of or wanted to eat cake; the reward was Dan’s expression of complete ecstasy while eating his first slice of chocolate cake.

After my trip to Fuerteventura in July, I had assumed I would return there for my birthday, to spend it amongst the sun, oleanders and the friends I’d made over my last two trips. But then I lost my job, was out of work for a while, started a low-paid job then finally, recently, a higher-paid job, and though it was probably largely due to the manner in which I left Network Rail, I’ve realised that the people who matter most to me are those I spent nearly two years with there, and the friends I made in my few weeks of transition at Lewisham.

When I was a kid, as you entered the kitchen, there was a bookcase to the right, and somewhere on one of the lower shelves, there was a book which listed every day of the year, and every imaginable reason to celebrate each day. When I thought to look for that book again a few years later, it had gone, but I’ve never forgotten it; it seemed to inform much of my mother’s upbringing of me and my brother – trying to instill in us an ability to enjoy celebrations for what they were, to value them as a reason to celebrate something out of the ordinary. Twenty years on, I wonder if it was some kind of Holy Grail – something to remind us that, no matter how bad things get or look, there’s always something to be positive about, to celebrate, to inspire optimism. But twenty years ago, all that it – and she – left me with was an overdeveloped need to celebrate certain occasions.

My birthday’s at the end of November. I was meant to be born a month later, but a fallen car bumper decided otherwise. However, for me, the academic years have determined the changes in my life far more than my birthdays ever did; in September, the seasons are still changing, and there are still possibilities. By the end of November, habits and patterns are set until Spring, or at the very least, until my return to Guatemala a month later, and then until I recover from my return, and at best, it’s only ever a half-hearted attempt to celebrate myself, if mostly because I won’t allow it to be anything else. November has only ever meant the start of a new job, and a rapid countdown to a long return home. And a traumatic return to London a few weeks later.

Yes, in an ideal world, I would spend my birthday in Guatemala, where it truly means something, where I’d be with my family and extended family. Where I’d wake feeling I was at home, that the day truly meant something, and that even being able to walk across the plaza would be an enormous gift. My mother’s friends cannot understand how she can live so far away from her children, nor me so far away from her and the place which is my home. Though I would dearly love to spend my birthday in Antigua, at the lake, in Ram-Tzul, at Hacienda Tijax, in Mexico, gorging myself on tacos and enchiladas, that bumper didn’t do a good enough job of allowing long enough between my birthday and Christmas for that to ever be a feasible option.

While I was at Lewisham, I have a nasty feeling that I talked non-stop about Matt, Jenny, Ian, Simon and the Furball; I also talked lots about Rahat, Predict, and all the others I’d become close to over the years at Network Rail. I emailed a Lewisham friend today about not wanting any poison dwarves, furballs or Jabba the Huts etc at my birthday party, and I can only hope he remembers the context behind those names and not dismiss me as a complete nutter. It’s only been a few weeks since I cried out, ‘The Hamster’s having her leaving party!’ or something like that. That may make complete sense to Matt and I, if not to that many others.

As I’ve said so often, Network Rail was the ideal job for me, where I created most of my own workload, and could work my way through it it near-complete independence. Where I had so many close friends, and ultimately, where they (and my salary) were the deciding factor in whether or not to quit. Seven weeks on, I now commiserate; I’m fully aware that there’s a far healthier life out there than that which the Project offers, but that doesn’t stop me missing it, my friends there, or urging my remaining friends there to leave for somewhere less draining or blatantly unhealthy. From what I’ve heard – besides the Furball’s demotion and transfer, if not would-be relocation – it’s not somewhere to be unless you don’t have a choice, however I can’t help but feel for Laura, Jenny, Matt, the Ians, Sarah and all the others caught up in it and unable to leave. A hard choice: to be there with them and suffer alongside, or to move on and make the best of what the future has to offer, without them.

Maybe if my leaving party hadn’t been such a shambles, I’d have had fewer hopes for my birthday party next week. I really wanted it to be everything that my leaving party wasn’t, but already Laura can’t make it, neither of the Sarahs can make it, Simon has t’ai ch’i and Dominic is recovering from dental surgery, and hasn’t yet responded to my suggestions of large quantities of tap water. Just as I never allowed non-dance friends to intrude on our post-dance class and post-dance rehearsal pub sessions, in two years I’ve never mixed non-PSU friends with my colleagues, so next Tuesday will be a gamble.

I’ve just left a voicemail for Rahat, and texted Myles and Nick. I phoned Brendan last night, although he’s in Galway (lucky bugger) for the next few days. Theoretically, by choosing the Wellington, my PSU colleagues don’t have a credible excuse to not turn up. Catford to Waterloo, however, is a far more disputable situation, but I can only hope that Zak, Dominic and Stacey can sufficiently brave the journey, that my few short weeks with them can justify it. I would so very much hate for two weeks ago to be the last time I’d ever see any of them. Or more specifically, I would not have invested so much energy in them had I imagined I would not see them again. I may be a homing pigeon, but the only other thing I care for are my friends.

Maybe what birthdays are about is evaluating how far you’ve come socially in the last year: who you can count on to spend your birthday with versus a year ago. Maybe more importantly, who you want to spend it with, even if you can’t count on it happening the same way in reality. But just as I can’t imagine Katie’s world revolving every April, nor does mine every November; all that ever seems to happen is my assessing who I care most for and frantically hoping they feel enough of something to want to spend that evening with me.

I sent The Email out a day and a bit ago. It’s been two years since I last had to send out any such email, and given I had just said goodbye to all my friends, moved to Dublin then hastily returned, I didn’t have very high expectations at the time. A year ago, I went to Amsterdam for the weekend, to spend it with my sister rather than with friends who may or may not have wanted to be there.

Heart on sleeve, and all that crap. I drew up the list of invitees a week and a half ago, specifically based on those I missed the most and who I most wanted to be there on my birthday. But as I’ve said, I’m torn between wanting to turn it into a non-event, and wanting for it to be a really wonderful night, whatever it takes. Each year, I can only hope I’ll be in Paris the following year, which makes me want to make each birthday all the more special. And if Paris doesn’t happen, it’ll give me the sustenance to survive another year here. But heaven forbid I should actually admit that to anyone….

Posted by chantal at 10:31 PM

November 15, 2004

Neverending Sunday

I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. I know that the longer I stay up, the more I’ll suffer now, the more I’ll suffer tomorrow. But at least I won’t notice the day as much. I’ll notice shivering outside during each cigarette, but hopefully the day will pass quickly otherwise.

I’ve worked for enough companies to know what is normal and what is not. I can truly say I’ve never ever worked in an office with 9 other people who rarely ever speak to each other. I’ve never sat so close to a manager who is so averse to basic communication.

But I know that I hate it. I was completely miserable – on Friday I escaped to the pub in my lunch break for the first time in about three years, and even then didn’t feel fully up to returning to the office.

The thing about having worked for so many companies is that I know how and where I work best. I know that this job seems like a dream job, but nothing about its reality supports that. I know that I need to have friendly chatty colleagues around me to break up the day, I need to have a clear work plan and deadlines and above all, I need contact with users to make my work real. I don’t have any of that. My father asked if I’d brought any plants into work yet, completely oblivious to the fact that I’ve not settled in enough to bring in more than mugs, tea and music (mugs for water and tea, herbal teas because I don’t drink coffee or black tea, music because the complete silence is driving me mad). I’ve not settled; I don’t see how I can settle without basic human contact. And I don’t see how I can get that, how I can compromise sufficiently to finally accept that this job isn’t that bad after all.

After going to Morocco 5 years ago, I’d muse about how someone could spot a bubbly, lively person and think, ‘I want to suppress that’; similarly, my new boss apparently liked me for who I was, and so forced me out of the job I had at the time so that he could seat me at a desk surrounded by empty desks and people who don’t speak to each other, with an unspoken sense of urgency but no indications as to how to meet the necessary deadlines without access to something so basic as the databases I’d need to work with. I’ve spent a week trying to keep myself vaguely busy, and although I’ve just emailed myself various (Palestinian) websites to read in further depth, no matter if I have no work at all to do any more – I’ve exhausted all the options I’ve already come up – given that the project I’m working in specifically snoops on email, internet and phone usage – milking email and internet usage seems far from the most ethical way to spend my time. I justify it by thinking that if nobody will talk to me, then at least I’ll email those who will, even if I completely sabotage the statistics for my team. Employment these days is about teamwork, not about sitting in isolation with a manager who won’t talk, and if that manager has problems with retaining staff, then surely he should look into the reasons and circumstances, rather than employ yet more people who will be completely miserable with the working conditions.

My father suggests that my problems are due to my experiences at Network Rail. Yes, I adored my circle of friends there, and at least I can stay in contact with most of them without having to be physically there and suffering the hell that they are undergoing. Perhaps Lewisham was a more harmful experience, allowing me to chat and bond freely without pressures of work; had my new job been similar, perhaps I would not have minded.

But the whole situation makes me miserable, more than miserable. I’ve not had to commute by tube for over two years; I’ve learned that the only way to survive it is with a copy of Metro in front of my face, obscuring the sight of the crowds ahead. Whether I catch the tube at Canada Water or at London Bridge, I won’t get a seat until Westminster, or a copy of Metro until soon before then, depending on when some commuter decides to ditch her copy. I’ll anxiously check my email for friendly words, then reboot, in which time I have to force myself to sit at my desk and not bolt back to Bond Street station and home – yes, I’m being paid a lot of money to waste my time so blatantly, but I can think of far easier and kinder ways to make myself miserable.

I guess the only leverage I have is the amount they’re paying me. They want me to stay; they need me to stay. The person I’m replacing left on the spot as he was sick of the complete lack of management, and I’m starting to think that my only option is to go in with an ultimatum: either they give me access to the information I need, or I grab the next job I can find which is not there. I was thrilled to get an Oracle job at last, but maybe, after the last week, I’m starting to understand exactly why they were so desperate, why they would take someone without even the basic necessary experience. Five years ago, I was turned down from a job as the manager in question felt that I would be perceived as too young and too sweet; my manager and his boss will be in serious trouble if they so much as dare to think of me like that.

I don’t want it to be tomorrow. When I was back at Network Rail, I’d avoid going to sleep for as long as I could, dreading the day ahead so much I couldn’t bear to face it, and would stay up as late as I could physically manage. That’s how I feel now. Yesterday was taken up with my father, essentially leaving me with only one day of weekend, which I don’t want to end, as, when it does, it’ll be Monday and I’ll have to be back at work, back at a desk where I have my back to the rest of the office, and though I sometimes put whichever music I’m listening to on pause when I hear voices, I learn quickly that it’s not worth listening to anyway. What I want is to wake tomorrow and find that it’s Sunday, all over again, and possibly for the day after that as well.

I know that there are only two selling points to this job: the salary, and the Oracle experience. But I also know that Oracle experience in itself is meaningless unless I have about 2 years’ experience of it, and given I can only contemplate another month of this at the most, I have no idea how I can deaden myself sufficiently to last that out. I don’t even want to contemplate what I’d be like at the end of those two years; spending each day without speaking to a single person is hard enough as it is; after four days there, I could barely stomach sitting at my desk and propagating the pretence of being a semi-happy employee on Friday.

My father asked if I could ask to return to Lewisham. I’ve often thought about the supposed urgency in my current job, versus how very little I’ve done all week and how much happier I’d have been if I’d been able to spend the week at Lewisham, whilst the new company got its act together and was even vaguely prepared for me when I finally joined. Of all my colleagues there, Dominic knew best how grumpy I was about the set-up there, but at least at Lewisham, I had (potential) real live access to actual databases, actual work to do, actual people to interact with. And however intangible the data was there, at least it didn’t have the ethical issues of snooping on colleagues’ email, phone and internet usage. On Thursday, I scrolled through the list (as I emailed Matt in a panic, my optical mouse has a roving eye – I have to keep wrestling it back from the far left-hand corner of the monitor) of accessed websites, reminding myself not to add to the statistics by checking out most of the websites to see what they were about. After Google and Hotmail, one of the most popular was Madonnalicious.com, and I can only speculate about its content.

My back is to the room; I don’t care what they see. I don’t even care any more about what they think. On Thursday, I spent most of the day reading all the online newspapers I could think of for further details about Arafat and his death. My boss was baffled the first time he saw an Outlook popup notification of new email; I’ve since calculated that I’m averaging 32 incoming emails a day, roughly one of which is work-related. I’m relieved beyond words that the Network Rail system isn’t junking the emails I send to my ex-colleagues, also that the RCN system isn’t junking their emails back to me.

I look at the plants hibernating in my living room and I think back to the emphasis companies place on being a team player. The only people who are designed to cope with complete social isolation are hermits, and although I may much resemble them in my free time, it’s only because I get my full socialising fix while at work. Take that away, and I’d rather be paid less to work in a more humane environment, where I don’t get off one train at London Bridge and be too tempted by the train on the next platform, which will take me back to my lovely home, my garden, and the full delights of daytime TV.

I know that next week has to be better than the week I’ve had, but the past week doesn’t fill me with much confidence. The isolation and lack of work aside, the commute and vertigo are sufficient reasons to unplug the alarm clock and never think twice about returning.

Posted by chantal at 01:04 AM

November 13, 2004

Later

I’ve spent hours watching the news, spent hours reading all the online newspapers I can find. Yasir Arafat was buried yesterday in Ramallah, and yesterday evening I finally accepted that the news channels had nothing left to say. All the same, in South-East London, a half-Mexican woman is sobbing over the death of the Palestinian leader, for all that he’s left behind, and for all that he strove for but never had the chance to see. And for his absence from the world to come. No matter how ill he was, I still lived in hope that he would recover.

Yesterday, I finally found something resembling the statistics I’ve been searching for for the last few years: over 4000 killed in the last few years of Middle Eastern crisis, 75% of the fatalities being Palestinian. So for every Israeli killed out of desperation, Ariel Sharon kills at least four Palestinians, with the aid of far more advanced technology than that which is available to the Palestinians, yet still manages to persuade the world that he is innocent, that only the innocent Palestinians he is annihilating are terrorists. For how long can the international community support him without question; for all that Arafat was viewed as an obstacle, for his circumstances, for his absolute insistence on an uncompromisable homeland for those who the Israelis had displaced, can the Israelis maintain their position as a woefully sabotaged and victimised nation? Tonight, I watched on BBC2 footage of Israeli soldiers systematically destroying the bones of Palestinian children. That only supports the stories my Red Cross buddy, Gert, told me of his experiences in Israel and with the savagery of the Israelis, essentially describing them as soulless savages bent on revenge for imagined acts of violence.

I tried to find books by Edward Said – how strongly he is missed in the wake of Bush’s reelection and over Arafat’s death. As the most intellectual, and currently most widely-published Palestinian, this is when we need him the most. He contributed a few quotes to the BBC documentary tonight, but I am sure he never foresaw the death of Arafat, much left that which would follow, which that which I can but watch unfold each day as it comes.

The problem with England, the problem with the West is that figureheads are only temporary. Beckham left Manchester United, and our culture is that of politicians, not personalities. There isn’t the room for someone who, however erroneously, devoted everything he had to recreating even a slice of the homeland his people had held prior to the Israeli invasion, someone who was uncompromising in the conditions his people needed to regain their homeland and way of life despite the autonomy of an occupying nation which felt no remorse at all at displacing the land’s inhabitants in the name of a millennia-old claim.

Everything I have seen since Arafat’s sad death has only confirmed my opinion of the Israelis as relentless murderers immune from justice. Pinochet is being held to trial for the genocide committed during his rule; let Sharon be investigated for the same, for overseeing his share of the 3000+ Palestinians massacred in his attempt to establish rule over a land which is not his own.

I may not have bought the Edward Said books I want to read, but I’ve seen and read enough to confirm that every Israeli who has contributed to the death of a Palestinian should be subjected to a War Crimes court, that even though Israel has managed to amass so much land to date – 80 % of that which was formerly known as Palestine for two thousand years – and no matter how much impunity the Israeli nation has managed to accummulate over the years through international guilt, I can only wait for the day when Sharon is held in court to answer for the genocide and assassination charges he has authorised over the last few years.

Last night, I watched the press recording of Bush and Blair, in which they stressed that they would have supreme control over the upcoming Palestinian elections to ensure that democracy would be upheld.

How, under any warped logic, can a Christian Western nation presume to control the elections of a Muslim, hotly-debated state? Bush only seems to know three concepts: Democrac, Arabs-are-Evil and Space-Exploration-Is-Good-If-Pricey. It’s not up to Bush or Blair to determine the outcome of the Palestinian elections; after all, Bush’s government has done all it can to distance itself from the Palestinian situation, to the point of ignoring it outright, and he has frequently urged for Arafat to be overthrown so that a puppet can be installed who will be more amenable, no doubt, to American influence.

I can’t stop missing my Lewisham colleagues, If Arafat had died while I was still working with them, then probably a whole day would have been set aside to discuss his legacy and its implications on the future. I cried out as soon as I read the news online on Thursday, but spent the rest of the day reading all of the news stories I could find online, from Western to Latin and Israeli, just to find something which resembled the truth.

I’m too busy grieving to accept the fact that Arafat is truly dead, that he is no longer a player on the international diplomatic circuit; that in all his years of effort, he was never able to secure an established homeland for his people. Yet, despite all his faults, had he not tried, had he not given all he had in those 40-odd years, his compatriots would have simply become forgotten people inhabiting refugee camps in neighbouring states.

Like the Mastercard ad, hope is priceless. And what he gave his people, despite all that I don’t yet know about him and his people, is hope. And now it’s gone. I’m a translator, counsellor and database programmer. And if any Palestinian charity needs me, I’m there. I cannot and will not support the claims of a nation which displaces a nation in the name of a millennia-old right without regard for the land’s inhabitants, and which proceeds to annihilate those with a superior claim than to their own to the land which they are occupying.

But as I’ve been accused in the past, I don’t have a Western perspective. Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday, but what of the Central Amercan fatalties in US-sponsored civil wars? What of the Native Americans wiped out in the settlers’ desire to establish themselves in their new homeland? What of the 3000+ Palestinians killed in their desire to return to the only home they’ve known? Israel may have the full backing of the US administration, but not of me: I call them the same names they have called Yasir Arafat over the years: murderer, assasin, terrorist, perpretator of genocide.

Posted by chantal at 11:34 PM

November 12, 2004

Little Deaths

My plan for this evening had been to read up more fully on Arafat and the Middle Eastern crisis, but having spent nearly two hours glued to the news, it’s realistic to say that that won’t happen. Instead, I’ve spent the last 15 minutes writing something to submit to some of the news sites I’ve read today, and possibly some newspapers too:

I only found out that Yasir Arafat had died when I arrived at work this morning. I spent the next hour reading everything I could find online, and another hour at lunchtime reading Al Jazeera, BBC News, the Guardian, the Jerusalem Post, the Washington Post, Prensa Libre (Guatemala) and several Palestinian news sites – to cover as many opinions as I could, also reading all the quotes and comments I could find.

The Israeli posters have seemed unanimous in their venom and hatred, blinded by their conviction that anyone who who stands up to the wholesale annihilation and degradation of their people is automatically a murderer and terrorist. But it seems that all that distinguishes Sharon from Arafat is international backing and funding, not to mention some warped logic that they have supreme rights to a territory which they have only managed to occupy by force through displacing its inhabitants.

From what I’ve read, the Israelis are rejoicing at the death of their officially designated Public Enemy. The less bitter of the 90% or so of the world are generous in their acceptance of Arafat’s life struggle, and supportive of extra efforts to achieve what he never managed to secure in his lifetime – the return of a sovereign and autonomous homeland for those who were displaced when Israel sought to take over their land.

It’s particularly poignant, that despite the threats Sharon made to assassinate Arafat in recent months, despite the assassinations of the key Hamas leaders in the same time frame, and the lack of clarity over the cause of his death, only one solid fact has been offered: that the Israeli government effectively killed him by enforcing him to endure substandard living conditions during 2 ½ half years of house arrest. Nevertheless, that’s still not enough to allow him the burial he chose and deserves.

So, having not done the research I had wanted to do, I still want to say what I can. My primary thought all along has been: if only Edward Said was still alive. When Bush was reelected, when Arafat fell ill, and now when he has died: Said was the most intelligent, objective voice in publication. I never read more than the first few chapters of ‘The End Of The Peace Process’ (a library copy), but now I want to go to Waterstones at lunchtime tomorrow to buy copies of every one of his books that I can find.

The little I did read elaborated on how the Oslo agreements were doomed to fail, and how none of the peace discussions to that date would adequately meet the Palestinian needs and demands. A lot of what I have read today has consisted of criticisms of Arafat’s refusal to accept the Camp David agreements, even the Oslo agreements, but surely, when an alien nation is occupying your land and failing to acknowledge the rights of its inhabitants, then compromises are not acceptable. Israel may have superior firepower, financial and political support, but even if the Zionists ever held a moral high ground a century or more ago when they first set their sights on Palestine, every deliberate militant attack in the last few years, every settlement demolished, every homestead annihilated has surely significantly diminished that, if not in the international perspective, thanks to the everlasting support of Bush and his blinkered administration.

There is no doubt that Arafat has been the Israeli Public Enemy; how else could any nation support, much less justify the excessive military operations of the last few years in retaliation to the odd suicide bomber, or the odd stone-thrower. But we have an interesting parallel – the combined UK and US forces decimating Falluja in its need to drive out militants, while at the same time, Sharon is fully supported in doing the same to the the people his people has displaced, without repercussions. Even the wall, separating Palestinians from their fields, work, basic economy, education has managed to pass without too much criticism.

I am basing this only on what I have read from time to time over the last few years, and on my historical knowledge from a hundred years ago, when Herzl and Weizmann sought to purchase the land of Palestine from the Ottoman Sultan. It wasn’t until the Second World War that the Jews had sufficient moral ground to manipulate the necessary foreign powers into supporting them, but having an overview of their history, which seems to have been solely based on military dominance and emotional manipulation, and a collection of a Red Cross former colleague’s recollection of the savagery of the Israelis, I cannot but feel that without the political lobbying of their American cousins, they would be as vilified as Arafat or Saddam Hussein for the viciousness of their actions over the years.

Still, the basic fact remains, that the Israelis continue to treat the inhabitants of the land they are technically illegally occupying as trespassers, having supreme control over aspects of their life which they should have no right to have access to. Israel is a parasite of a nation – surely anyone with eyes and a brain would agree – and despite it being their ancestral homeland of several millennia ago, you don’t see the Welsh asking to reoccupy England, or the Scots to reoccupy Ireland, their homelands of 1500 years ago. The Americans have successfully reduced the Native American populations over the last 100 years, and enforced strict restrictions on the lives of those who remain; of all countries, how can the States even start to comprehend the issues at stake here, rather than settle for the easy option of one parasitical state bonding with another.

I have no doubt that Bush and Sharon are overjoyed by Arafat’s death, though several questions have been raised as to whether or not Sharon will support his claims that Arafat was always the obstacle to peace discussions (as in, not supporting the Israeli demands), or resort to creating further imaginary obstacles in the road ahead. My greatest fear at this point in time is that the two will conspire to install a puppet president, someone who will gamely agree to the American and Israeli demands without sufficient considerations for the Palestinian struggle. As with Osama Bin Laden, I’m aware of Yasir Arafat’s background and motivations, and I have no doubt that the issues he fought for at all costs were worth the sacrifices, having witnessed the loss of so much, and the growth of so much hope in his lifetime. But it seems unlikely – Sharon, for all that he is surrounded by Arab nations, is as Arabphobic as Bush, and out of the current PLO administration, it’s hard to imagine that there’s any potential clear successor to Arafat who could stand to achieve all that he did, and more – especially the peace that he fought so hard for.

American democracy and meddling is not what the Arab world needs. America’s war on the Arab world seems specifically based on its refusal to acknowledge or understand alien cultures. The war in Afghanistan is far from over, and those behind the forces in Iraq seem incapable of assessing the reasons for the resistance to their presence. It’s personal, too – the last I heard of my cousin Jacob, he had signed up to the Army around the outbreak of the Iraqi war, and his brother shares two names with a Mexican killed during the attack on the Twin Towers – but it can’t but seem a drive towards world dominance by a superpower led by an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s confronting.

One of the last times I remember hearing from my brother was 2 years ago; I’d asked various friends if it would be considered a security violation for me to be ‘caught’ listening to Arabic pop while in American airports. My brother replied, only if I appeared to enjoy it, in which case they’d deport me to the country I’d least wish to be in.

At the time, it was Ireland; now it’s America. I know that certain friends, such as Paula, don’t have that much choice, but for me, I want nothing to do with a country which would sanction the murder of such a historic freedom fighter, blatantly ignore the issues he had dedicated his life to, and at the end, continue to embrace his enemy – who, if anything, is the murdering terrorist Arafat has been accused of being in his death.

Posted by chantal at 12:23 AM

November 11, 2004

Arafat

I only found out 45 mins ago that he has died. I'm devastated and heartbroken - though I knew it was imminent, I held out hope that he'd somehow recover; he is such an integral part of Palestine and its struggle, how could anyone possibly replace him, or take over.

I've spent the last 45 mins reading through BBC News, so I should probably start working, or at least find something to do which resembles work. I've got Prensa Libre, the Guardian, Al Jazeera and the Jerusalem Post open for now to read during odd moments; I'll try to write something longer this evening.

But for now, I'm in shock and mourning...

Posted by chantal at 09:51 AM

A Few Days Later

So it’s meant to be my dream job. The one that made being out of work for 2 weeks worthwhile, the one which I’d been waiting for for two and a half years. An Oracle job, despite my barely being able to remember a thing about Oracle, and paying what I’d been getting at Network Rail. Behind Oxford Circus, so right in the heart of the West End, and only a block away from the other side of Regent Street and my old stomping ground. The people I’ve spoken to there couldn’t imagine working elsewhere; the perks (32 days’ leave) and people are wonderful. An email buddy downstairs has been there for two and a half years; the only person in my office I’ve had anything resembling a conversation with has been there approximately 15 years. Each time she thinks of leaving, she gets pregnant. Her third child is due in 4 months.

I’ve now been there for three days. Yesterday I was painfully tired, still recovering from an extremely long leaving party on Friday, so was more despondent than usual; though I was still tired today, the job seems harder to bear when I’m more awake. My mother emails me to remind me that this job is a godsend and to treat it as such; she’s aware that the personalities of my brother and I are a little too strong, and she doesn’t want to see me jeapordise this job in any way, or to repeat patterns of past jobs, generally involving pissing off certain women and losing my job soon after.

Yes, especially after over a year of fighting with the Furball constantly, it’s been gratifying to hear that my last boss liked me – enough to overlook the fact that I spent more time chatting than actually working – and that my current one hired me on the strength of liking me, regardless of my actual skills. But liking me, and then plonking me at a desk surrounded by empty desks, in an office with people who rarely talk to each other, and skimping on instructions or information seems a huge contradiction to me.

I know that most of the people who’ll read this are those I’ve worked with in the past; Matt, Jenny, Simon and Ian know how hard it was for me to even contemplate not sitting with them day after day, chatting, bantering, bonding, spitting about the Furball. Even though I was usually too busy to chat too often, I’d still feel their absences very strongly when they weren’t there, and avidly look forward to their return. Though I was closest to our Furballed Crowd, I still also cared deeply for my regular visitors, as well as those who phoned or emailed from the other offices. On the day that I heard that my contract extension hadn’t been renewed, I spent an hour or more with Laura at the other building, and returned glowing. At Lewisham, I finally got to spend time chatting, without the usual intense pressure of work, meaning that it seemed I’d spend most of my day chatting with Dominic, and what was left, with Zak, Stacey and Joe.

So I get strongly attached to my friends at work, I get very fond of them. The Project was probably very much a family substitute for me, and Lewisham a Project substitute, but it doesn’t mean I care for any of them any less. I’ve developed such strong homing pigeon instincts since, and because of joining the Project, that it’s maybe easier for me to let work become my life, and let the rest of my friends become peripheral due to their absence from so much of it. When I’m at home, my time is my own, whether or not I spend it chatting to friends or emailing them; during the bulk of the day, I’m missing my PSU and Lewisham friends.

All the more now. I’ve spent three days wracking my brain for things to do to pass the time, and loathing the silence in the office, even counting the number of words I exchange with people as they’re so few. I joke that, as I’m surrounded by empty desks, I can hardly chat with them, but given my work habits, it’s deathly for me to have nobody to chat to from time to time, no conversations to join in on, not to mention no clear instructions on what I should be doing, much less how to do what I’m meant to be doing. Jeff (who sits behind me) at least smiles whenever I walk past; Sam, our administrator, generally ignores me. I shared a cigarette earlier with Liz, the pregnant closet smoker, and that was the longest conversation I’d had with anyone so far. She told me that my boss had lost the two London-based members of his team due to lack of management and instructions, which doesn’t really encourage me to believe that things will improve any. Most of his team is based in Cardiff, which means that for now, it’s just me, him, and two empty desks. And when work has been the focus of my life for nearly two years, it’s hard to summon the strength to turn up in the mornings, hard not to simply give up during the course of the day.

Oh yeah, the commute. I often gloated at Network Rail about how much I loved my commute – 15 mins in the morning (seats on both trains), 10 mins on a direct train in the afternoon. It would have been 10 mins by train to Catford, but I got sick of waiting on trains which had no intention of arriving. One day, when the bus home was completely full of schoolkids, the bus apparently broke down soon after leaving Catford; as soon as all of the schoolkids had gotten off the bus, the driver turned the engine back on again and sailed off.

I was looking on the internet earlier, and actually found the technical term for crowdophobia. Would masochism-averse do instead? Getting off the train at London Bridge, and seeing a neverending sea of people ahead of you, all trying to get out of the station ahead of you? Getting down to the Jubilee line platform, and it’s so crowded, that even by walking to the far end of the platform, you can still only carve out a small space for yourself on the second tube which comes along. Getting off at Bond Street station, and the crowds for the escalators are so huge, even shuffling along slowly is too fast. It’s about three minutes from the station to the office. It takes 15 minutes to get from the platform to the office.

I shouldn’t be despairing this much, after only three days. At least yesterday I had the excuse of being horrendously tired, which always makes the world seem worse, and although the emails I get from Network Rail make me grateful not to be working there any more, this really does seem a job so badly suited to me. If nothing else, I’m meant to be working on a project to monitor email, internet and phone usage. After 3 days, my Inbox now has over a hundred emails (today was a quiet day), as does my Sent Items folder. I justify it by the lack of conversation – if nobody present’s going to talk to me, then I’ll bloody well talk to those who aren’t there.

I was going to write two separate pieces, I don’t know, maybe I’ll separate this one sometime soon.

The other thing on my mind is Relationships. For someone who’s avidly avoided anything beyond friendship for the last few years, it’s … I don’t know. I guess my emails and conversations with Ana remind me of the days when it wasn’t just me, my laptop and two harps – something I’m feeling all the more, I suppose, with the lack of flatmate, and not having anything warm-blooded to return home to besides the odd spider, and mouse with a migraine. Not that I mind at all, but our lengthy emails have become discussions of her current relationship and my past ones; whenever Sammi texts me with a relationship crisis, I’ll phone her straight away.

It’s been so long since I was 16 or 20, I don’t remember what it’s like to be windowshopping or trapped in a relationship at those ages. At 16, I was too busy rediscovering the world; at 20, well, there was a lot of other stuff going on. I’ve researched and counselled enough to know well what Ana’s going through, but at the same time, being single has taught me that it’s something too valuable to give up lightly, for just anyone, that my time spent alone is worth more than spending it with someone I’m not likely to still like in a few days’ time. Or with someone who doesn’t justify the loss of quality time spent on my own.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe I don’t have so much patience for people any more (when I went to the corner shop earlier for cigarettes, a guy came in claiming he was a gangster. I was far from polite towards him, and after he left, I asked if I could thump the customers). I can’t even start to comment on teenage life and hormones, but I know that Ana and I are different enough, that though I can support her in her relationship, there’s no way her boyfriend would survive were we to swap places. As you can tell, I hardly have a fear of being alone, yet I’ve also had to support various friends through bad relationships because they couldn’t bear to be single, that they’d just hold in there till something better came along, or till the situation got so bad they’d have no choice.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t exactly thought this bit out too well. Partly it’s the irony of me, of all people, becoming a relationship counsellor again – or even just someone female friends turn to about their relationship stuff. Also the bizarre situation of so much of my life being so caught up with relationships, when none of them are my own; my friendships of the last few years have been so important to me, I’ve barely noticed or cared. But I guess, with all that I try to reassure Ana that her current boyfriend isn’t the only guy out there for her, with a job that’s not lived up to its promise, I’m starting to wonder if there’s someone out there who’s amused by my wandering accent, my offbeat humour and cultural holes. Maybe it’s that time of year, maybe it’s that the intensity of the last two years has settled into nothingness. Or maybe….

I should get to bed. I don’t know who’ll read this, though at least I don’t have to put up with endless spam in the comments section any more. Tomorrow has to be better; I’m hardly living in hope of some direction from my new boss, or a mass epidemic which restrains all other commuters at home, and I can hardly expect Ana and my Network Rail buddies to email me every few minutes to compensate for the deafening silence (alleviated slightly by Hossam Ramzy, Bowie and Faudel). Although I didn’t exactly leave Network Rail, and though I did leave Lewisham, surely my absence from both, and my friends from both places has to be worth more than isolation, killing time, and trying very hard to not go anywhere near the glass outer wall of the building given we’re so very high up.

Posted by chantal at 12:32 AM | TrackBack

November 03, 2004

Election

I’m deathly tired, so just a few words before I collapse into bed.

I – and a colleague – have been on tenterhooks all day, frantically awaiting updates, and hotly discussing the possible outcomes when there’s nothing new to read online. I’m eligible to vote, but I’ve been advised not to so as not to get caught up in the taxation system etc. I reassure myself that my single vote would not make much difference as it is.

Since I lost my job at Network Rail, I’ve not read Prensa Libre, the Guatemalan newspaper I normally read daily. I read it today, however, to see their opinion on the elections; they saw it as a referendum on all the things Bush had failed to achieve in the last four years, however I also know that a large number of Americans won’t be caring about politics or achievements, probably just maintaining the status quo due to lack of information.

I’m about to go to bed, but I quickly checked Sky News, and found on their teletext:
- African-Americans are being told that they do not need to go to the polls
- Those with unpaid traffic tickets cannot vote
- The actual election date is tomorrow
- They can vote by phone as they are ‘such faithful voters’
- The main states affected are Pennsylvania, Winsconsin, Ohio and Florida, the last two of course being two of the key swing states
- A complaints hotline has received over 5,500 calls a day.

A friend at work has made comments about how the Florida votes – despite those already ‘lost in the post’- have to support Bush or else, given the events of four years ago.

It’s so neck and neck, it’s hard to be optimistic, but I swear, if the world wakes up tomorrow to find itself subjected to another four years of Bush, there will be many people crying.

Posted by chantal at 12:22 AM | TrackBack

November 01, 2004

Braver New Job

So now my time at Lewisham is coming to an end. Matt, Jenny and Simon know me well enough to know that I’d turn into my latest nickname, Harpy, within days if this role was to be long-term. On some level, I’m sad to be leaving – I’m fond of most of my colleagues there, but grateful not to have to withstand too many more dialogues with Zak, who I’m still convinced barely understands database design, much less suffer yet another team meeting or conversation with John. From the conversations I’ve overheard, the team seems riddled with Furballs, it’s just a case of ignoring them the best we can. At least none of them sound like they’ve swallowed a pedigree cat.

My jobhunting has gone so badly, I’d managed to convince myself that I’d be happy to stay on, gain the SQL Server and Crystal Reports experience, wander over to Tesco every day with Dominic except for when I’d rather go on hunger strike than subject myself to yet another pathetic-excuse-for-a-sandwich from Tesco, chat with him for most of the day, then feel mild guilt at how little work I’ve done, just before leaving, just before being detained by John, Chief Furball, for about half an hour. I’ve learned quickly that the train is never going to turn up, so it’s a far better waste of time to stand outside the office at the bus stop, and to elbow my way on before the several dozen black women bulldoze their way on.

But at least it’s only temporary. If I’d not had any other options, then I’d have been happy to play with SQL Server etc, if only so I could put them on my CV, and continue chatting with Dominic, Stacey and Anthony (frantically avoiding germs from the latter). I’ve worked so bloody hard for the last two years, working in somewhere so laidback and unpressurised is up there with winning the lottery. Dominic commented on the complete absence of all managers on Friday, so as a result, we chatted for most of the day, and I caught up on email. I ended up having to stay half an hour late – thanks to the painfully awkward John (Furball Mark II), whereas Dominic realised he had an urgent, immovable deadline around 4pm. Stacey and I left together. I’d really hoped we’d go to the pub together – though Matt’s on holiday for now, if I’m going to celebrate my new job with anyone, I want it to be with the Furballed Crowd, not with short-term friends based in a part of London I never want to have to visit again.

It’s ironic, that after nearly two years of working for Network Rail, I’d sooner take the bus to work, no matter how long it takes, rather than subject myself to a predictable stream of excuses for my train’s absence, generally either ‘delayed’ – no ETA even attempted at – or just simply cancelled. I guess that summarises well my current job – an interim role to help me disengage from Network Rail and my close friends there, to be able to email them frequently but not miss them as painfully. To bond with new colleagues, to settle into a new role, but still to always squeal or smile when I receive an email from an ex-colleague.

It’s been a long week. It started with Rahat’s leaving party, ended with Ana returning to her boyfriend, and included way too many late nights in between. And all the while, I stink of fox repellent. Yuck.

I’ve always said that I’ve never worked for any company like Network Rail, never got so personally involved, except for some excavations I worked on in France 9 years ago, where I at least had the choice to return after I left. Maybe the purpose of this current job is to absorb the anecdotes, meet new people, new working practices, so that I’m at least in a better shape professionally when I start my new job. Though I’ll never stop missing Jenny, Matt, Ian, Simon, Laura and the rest, at least I can keep it to myself from now on. At least I can vaguely try to be committed to the company, rather than constantly keeping my options open because they’re not paying me what I’m worth.

So that brings me to the new job. A job from heaven, a job which I could never have dreamed of getting – and one which I got on the basis of my character and personality alone. It’s in a fantastic location, too close to a Waterstones for comfort, stunning building, probably a healthy IT infrastructure at last – and it doesn’t feel in the slightest bit real.

But it’s a Real Job, at the very least. Like in Network Rail, where I lucked into my job as I vaguely had the skills and they were under too much pressure to be too choosy, this is a job I’d be stupid to turn down, to choose friendly colleagues or the nightmare of badly-programmed SQL Server over the future I’ve been wanting, but never expected. At the back of my mind, there’s always the unspoken rivalry with Khilan, who I’ve only heard from infrequently in the last two and a half years; both of us have been very cagey about what we’ve been up to in the interim, but I never stop feeling the pressure to try and upstage him, or at least be on an equal footing when we finally drop the pretense and admit what we’ve been up to in the last few years.

It’s been two years since I last let myself chat with a friend at work, and I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying the dry humour, the opinions, the sporadic conversations. Sylvie – the Elsa of Hackney – would shout at me that I had no sense of urgency, but currently, no matter how behind or disorganised things are, neither do any of my colleagues, and it’s a healthy transition environment after the frantic pace of the Project, and the absurd working conditions we were expected to endure. I find the lack of pressure or guidelines unsettling, and frequently worry about how little work I’m getting done, but at least, for the first time in nearly two years, it’s healthy. Nobody in their right minds – apart from Matt – could have ever described the Project as healthy.

It’s still ‘we’; it’s still present tense; I imagine it’ll take me far longer yet to stop feeling so untimely ripp’d, but at least emails can make up for not sitting next to the Furball (and wincing visibly with every hacked-up hairball). But at least by the time I start this elusive new job in a week, there will have been a whole different job and set of colleagues between it and the Project, hopefully enabling me to start on a far fresher note and not always looking back. In a way, it’s good that I’ll be starting at the bottom – after nearly two years of the benefit of Matt’s Access skills, which were only ever called into question whenever I faced yet another baffling error message or glitch he’d never seen before in the eleven years he’d worked with Access (I was so relieved to hear my PC was being put out to pasture and not being inflicted on him), constantly doubting, questioning and occasionally ranting about Zak’s database skills isn’t a situation that can last. I sincerely hope I’ll not come across another Zak – nervous twitches, bicycle bits, bizarre interpretations of naming conventions and all – but a mentor, much as Matt has been, and I’ll never have to look back except for the occasional Furballed reunions. Robyn’s back; we need to set a date.

Anyway, it’s late, and given how strong this sweater’s smelling, at least I can sleep safe in the comfort of knowing that there’s not a fox for miles around.

Posted by chantal at 12:41 AM | TrackBack