mari-ogawa
This is a short story I wrote a couple of weeks ago, in Spanish

Exploring new job possibilities

In the 1980's there weren't so many advertising agencies to look for that I was aware of. Let's continue supposing that after any number of visits to big, middle and small agencies I got interviewed at some of them; some would have openings for receptionists, some for salespeople (ew...), some for beginners at the production desks; and still some of them would demand everything combined for a minimum wage. I would have been to be ready to take anything that might remotely link to my new chosen career path, even to take over some all-terrain jobs -which wouldn't seem such a bad idea, since it would be in fact aligned with my desire to learn as fast and as much as I could – if I could manage to live by the meager pay, that is. My mother received a better pension than the average of pensioner, but it was just enough to support her and her growing medical needs; as many people her age -she was 65- she suffered from heart disease, was diabetic and had atherosclerosis, all of which had to be regularly controlled.

I kind of imagine me getting a job as a receptionist at one of the smaller firms; I would really try to endure it a few months in order to meet the significant people and get the opportunity of helping them, thus working my way through till I landed at the designing desks. I have no trouble picturing myself in this sort of situation, it is not that different from the time when as a lawyer for the Bariloche communal government I developed a very good working relationship with the systems people (a field that I was too eager to command, too), getting even to be friends with some of them, which got me everything I needed from that particular area -software or hardware alike- if it was within their range to provide it; that is, almost always. At that time I had no real desire to switch jobs, even if I frequently fantasized about working in networking or as a sysadmin, because the one I was performing was fascinating and had a better pay than the ones I would be able to carry out there; but I believe that if I really wanted to, I would have been able to go over to systems. In this alternate future, with a great desire to switch jobs, it would certainly be the case: with some background preparation I would eventually get to aid at design, maybe at first without changing nominally my status; that would give me some experience while going on with my studies as well. I'd like to think that from then on my career would be steadily uphill, but I cannot honestly be sure about this, since on the other hand would have required a very different personality...

For one, I still barely felt at home in Buenos Aires, my heart still longed for other places, for other sensory experiences: a colder place, the icy touch of snow, the feathery appearance of cherry trees, the chanting sound of Japanese, the distant warmth shown by my various acquaintances, the soapy sweet smell of the o-furo, the full and round flavors of nabe and tonkatsu and yakitoriyas in winter. I hated the heat and the wetness of this rude city... And I still missed my one and only love, not being able to see other men even as temporary surrogates, no matter how desperately I tried. Not the best mood for a career, was it? I don't know if I would have ever overcome these feelings if in the real future I hadn't gone to Bariloche. Supposing that I had, would I have been able to recover my joy for life? Or would I have become a dull and grey person, one of those many people dragging their feet through their life, doing what they assumed the society at large expected, never daring to ask themselves what they really wanted?

On the other hand, I remember that I enjoyed so much my time at the atelier of Mara Sanchez -what a wonderful artist she was-; she made me feel highly motivated; she encouraged me to go on, she even saw some talent in me. When I was at it, I felt again alive. So, maybe it wouldn't have turned out bad, going into graphical advertising. And maybe I would eventually even get to something theatrical, be it regie or costume design, if not as a job, as a hobby. But that, if at all possible, should have to wait. I had a little son whom I loved beyond words -I don't know if he would know, I wasn't very good at showing people how much they mattered to me. That was the case especially with infants; well, I wasn't very fond of infants in general, only my son arouse such awe in me, that everything else seemed unimportant, and I wanted to give him everything. Only, I didn't know how to be around him; I reckon that I wasn't a very good mother, normal things like taking him to the park bored me enormously, I didn't know any games either. Watching that time from the present perspective, I can see that I sort of deemed him some kind of intellectual freak – he being not over 3 years old!- for whom watching cartoons (Thundercats, He-Man and the like), Star Trek and playing with action figures would be the most enjoyable thing to do (well, in fact he did enjoy it). I wanted to get him every possible action figure, funny gadgets and so on, without noticing that he was a little child and he deserved to play and get dirty at the park. Now I can see that I was the freak!

Had I stayed in Buenos Aires, eventually he would have gone to kindergarten and to school there; that would have been a step towards adaptation, if nothing else. It seems safe to assume that in time I would have been forced to notice him more as he really was and less as I imagined him to be... So, maybe all this mess would have turned into something possible, into something real. I, with a job I liked enough, my soul returning slowly to meet my body, my son growing up in a city he liked...

What the Twilight Saga means to me

More than a year ago I watched the first of the Twilight films; it was a lousy copy with a bad translation but it somehow managed to catch my attention. Rob Pattinson's white face and stiff smile were so enticing, that I wasn't able to tell if it was the actor or the character I was attracted to (time showed me that it was, in fact, the character).  I promised myself that I would watch it again as soon as I could lay my hands on a decent copy in the original language. I forgot about it during a while.
Then, at a time when my feelings where all messed up I remembered about the saga; I dismissed my interest as foolish and naïve; I had spent several weeks doing barely more than watching films in search of whatever it was that eluded me, so it would be no surprise that this, too, was an escape. But nonetheless some of it still crept occasionally in my imagination; at the same time I was aware that the films had been an enormous success, drawing fans all over the world. Being it so I began to think that there had to be a reason for this, that the story must somehow speak to an unconscious craving of the spirit; it made me curious enough as to try to decipher what it might be.
I searched for the films -I was decided to postpone watching until I had the complete saga- and then I remembered that it was based on a novel; so I got the four novels AND the partial draft of Midnight Sun. As the character that interested me the most was Edward and I had a rough idea of the events in Twilight proper, I began reading Midnight Sun. It literally blew my mind as I took in the tangle of feelings that twisted Edward, I felt so identified! Of course, with its 264 pages it was not enough, I needed more; I wasn't much for reading Bella's point of view after having been so thoroughly moved by Edwards cogitations but on the other hand I really, really needed to see how it went on, step by step.
This way I spent about a week immersed in my reading, wanting nothing else than going further into the novels, paying as little attention to everyday matters as I could without letting my surroundings collapse, forgetting sometimes even to eat (those who know me will fully understand what this amounts to).
When I was done with the four and a half novels I had to begin again; I didn't seem able to set aside the world of Edward Cullen and his freaky, wonderful family. I was undoubtedly disturbed by this, it didn't seem at all normal to be in such a trance by a teenager-oriented novel or collection of novels; I loathed myself somewhat. But then I remembered what my motivations had been in the first place and found exactly what I was looking for. All the while I was aware of the intense feelings that accompanied each piece of reading, feelings that arouse from far in the past, from a time when I had experienced precisely those same feelings. Feelings that were so overcoming that I had buried most of them in a hollow chest.
They resurfaced with incredible force making me feel alive again. A sudden surge of creativity swept over my whole being, I felt full of energy -even if I spent the most of it on reading until crazy hours-, I had a couple of significant dreams pointing me in an altogether different direction as the one I had been heading to, I felt an urgent need to write about my feelings, about those emotions and events that had led to my present state; I began to practice again the piano excercises that I had long, long ago tried with the deepest pleasure and where as profoundly forgotten as the emotions that where resurfacing...
And then I knew that the value of Twilight does not lie on the story itself but on the way it expresses and manipulates feelings. The plain story might be construed as a rather shabby description of an abusive relationship; but there is more, much more to it; but the most important contribution of the novel can only be acquired -as far as I conceive it- when one sees it as a description of internal processes, of an eternal struggle between opposing poles, between the forces of nature and of the intellect, all pursuing a higher conscience. With that in view, the human girl might represent the barely conscious everyday mind that tries to blend in all the archaic elements of nature (the sun, the beach, the heat) with the distant elements construed by the intellect (the cold, the overthinking, the restraint), making an unbeatable whole where body, soul and mind are all one.
So, summing up, I am really grateful to the novels and their author for giving me one more chance to rethink my life. Finally, I would like to comment that I found at least one other person that made a similar reading raid, who finished all the four books in a week and had to start again as soon as she finished. Her account is here; she justified her second pass telling herself that she was analyzing the writing technique; I told myself that I was improving my English. But all in all, we seem to have fared quite similarly in that respect ;)

Interleaved alternate futures - 2nd. part

In the previous post I toyed with the idea of imagining an alternate future where I stayed in Buenos Aires instead of moving to Bariloche, trying to figure out what would have happened if I had decided differently. To do this I tried to sum up the state of mind I was in at that time.

In this post I will go on from that point, assuming that I decided against relocating...

“No, I don't want to leave. My mom needs me, my son needs my mom”, would have been the responsible attitude. I still struggled to find a job; I still recoiled at the idea of working at a lawyer's office. I wanted to be an artist; or rather, an artist with scissors, although anything graphical suited me; I wanted to design clothes, I even designed a rather funny looking raincoat, which I obviously was unable to sell. Being this so, relocating to some distant place where there would be apparently more opportunities and also a loose family web as my would be husband suggested didn't seem to be such a bad idea, which is why -among other reasons- in the real world I moved.

If I had instead stayed in Buenos Aires, I would have surely begun to look for jobs in some branch related to my new interests to meet the need of a steady income. I had no experience whatsoever in the clothing industry, so I knew that at most I would only be able to get beginner's jobs at any workshop; and even those wouldn't be guaranteed, since there were many people more suited to them and more in need than I was.

Working as independent designer was out of the question, I knew no one in the industry and even if my designs where sellable -which they were not by a long shot-, nobody would have known; getting past those limitations would mean a great deal of time and investment, which at that time I couldn't afford. So maybe I would be able to get some job at a factory --ew-- and from there on get trained and eventually go to design. Not very realistic, it seemed... Better start looking another direction.

Would I have been strong enough to go through what made me happy but was really hard to do? I don't believe so; but let's suppose for a moment that I was. I wanted badly to go artistic. Designing clothes would be one possibility; designing theater clothing would rank first place in my list. After being shown that there existed something like costume design by a talk held by Roberto Oswald & Anibal Lapiz for the Graphical Design students -at that time a branch from the Architecture Faculty- explaining their respective jobs as scenographer and costume designer for the Teatro Colon opera theater, I liked to picture myself as an apprentice at its costume workshop, led by Mr. Lapiz himself. I still remember how the talk made me feel, it sent my heart thudding as if I were flying! The apprenticeship thing would mean no money and a lot of work but would have as an advantage that I would be swirling around so many fascinating materials – leather, plastic, an unbelievable amount of fancy cloth and designs and whatever Mr. Lapiz might come across!

I was deeply moved by the possibilities luring in that talk, feeling immediately that it was what I most wanted to do for a living. It's a pity that I never made it to the end with that student year nor tried earnestly to apply for an apprenticeship, it might have changed things...

Had I held my own then, things might have fared differently. But it was no easy thing to do. That must have been around 1986, the last year I worked at the Senate. I was getting more and more anxious about my next job; I was pretty sure that one wouldn't last past the end of the year and that I also didn't want to have much to do with politics (this seems to be a repetitive pattern, I'd say: trying to push myself off government affairs but at the same time being attracted to them like they were a magnet, as noted previously....)

Anyway, returning to that specific point in time... I had decided that failing the apprenticeship thing I had fantasized about I would like to make a living in some field related to visual arts; I had been attending an atelier, and I found I had some talent. That year I had begun the Graphical Design studies. It was not easy to keep up with it, since I still had to take care of my duties at the Senate, which weren't enormously complicated but involved strange working hours, and I wanted to take care of my son, too, who at the time was barely 3 years old; sometimes also of my mother, who was aging and not too healthy; on top of it all I didn't want to leave my Aikido practice...

Would I have been able to do it? Mmmmm, it's rather tricky to imagine the situation... Usually my fellow students got on my nerves - “I can't stand it any more, these barely-out-of-school teenagers!” -I was 31 at the time- was a recurrent resentful thought as I tried to complete my assignments in the first of our introductory courses. Remembering that I had so little time left over and that I didn't particularly like drawing squares, they really irritated me with their babbling and petty tensions that led nowhere. It was rather difficult to grasp exactly what was expected from us, why we should repeat once and again squares and rhomboids and triangles and figure thousands of different graphic textures – I wanted to paint!! Well, in fact the reason of the assignments was quite obvious, but still I rejected them.

The teacher wasn't very helpful either, she gave the assignments without much explaining nor giving us other material to compare. “I will stand it, I will make it to the end”, I repeated myself every time I lost my patience; as it turned out, I could not manage it. What if I had been able to put away all the non-essentials that bothered me so much and made it through that course?

It would be fairly reasonable to expect that I would limit my different activities somehow, not without feeling some guilt; for instance, as my distant possibilities at making my job at the Senate permanent steadily fade away, I would try to have a more normal schedule at work instead of the one from 8:00 a.m to 11:00 pm with breaks I had been doing up to then; maybe I would also try to content myself with doing just what was specifically asked for without trying to give much more. It would also be necessary to quit my Aikido practice or at least diminish a lot the time I devoted to it, since the assignments would become increasingly demanding; if I could make it through the whole of the 1^st year introductory courses I would be well on my way to start studying the real thing – or so I should believe.

Although I would try to be accepted at the theater costume workshop, I can hardly imagine that it would be possible. But on the other hand I figure that if I managed to get through the whole introductory course at Graphical Design it would have given me some skills to use in order to look for a new job, probably in graphical advertising. I would have begun my search even before the end of the term, throwing CVs onto the prospective employers' desks. I would have to be extremely careful to hide some of my skills, since nobody wanted overly competent employees; as it has been and to some extent still is the norm, businesses want people with just enough skills to fulfill their duties, disregarding those with additional abilities. It might be okay to state that I could communicate both in English and German as well as my native Spanish, may be it would be also okay to hint at my most basic Japanese skills; but it would definitely be out of the question to state that I was a graduated lawyer. Would the fact that I was a mother of a three year old infant be a hindrance? Surely. But on the other hand, serious employers would be required to know in order to comply with the laws governing labor relations. Well, I would deal with that when I had to...

(next installment: Exploring new job possibilities)