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 1st
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)
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