Full Circle - Manhattan to Ljubljana and back again!

New York has kept me wildly busy, more busy than I could have ever imagined. I wear many different hats working with many different organizations, but one of the jobs I recently took on is as contributing Blogger for Slovenian - American startup Zemanta. Last week posted my first piece; it is an interview I did with my boss, Tin Dizdarevic. Incidentally, Tin, who was born and grew up in Slovenia and Serbia until he was a teenager, first met me when he was visiting family in Slovenia last year, and the reason he knew of me is because of this very blog. Full circle, huh?

Click the pic above to read the interview!

Cities and Ambition

source

Most of the time when I try to talk about what frustrates me about living in Slovenia, it just comes out in a big blob of anger and resentment towards the country and its inhabitants, but that's not really what I want to say. What I really want to express is what programmer and essayist Paul Graham writes about so eloquently in his piece "Cities and Ambition".

*

An excerpt:

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?
............................

No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

The Climb

For a while now, I've had this silent agreement with myself and now I think I'd better make it public so that I will have extra eyes on me, making sure I keep to it. Here it is:

I will not take a job teaching English.

Slovenia is a tough and uninviting place for a foreigner looking for a job. Just like America, if you are from south of here, the country will open its doors to you if you want to do the tough and yucky stuff, join a road crew, clean toilets, work the late shift on an assembly line.

If you are from due north of here, then you're probably coming from the home office in Vienna or Dusseldorf. A two year assignment and a cushy corner office.

If you are from anywhere else, it is a pretty tough slog. But if you come from a country with a popular language, then-- you're in luck! -- your brain and your tongue are your ticket to low waged and insecure day labor! Yes, you can be paid a couple euros an hour to better the lives of Slovenian business men and students, to watch them step on your head as they climb their career ladder, while you dangle on the bottom rungs. Yes, you!

Look, I'm sure teaching English has its charms, and for full disclosure I will say that I spent a month or two tutoring a friend in the language, so I am a bit familiar with how it goes and know it isn't the worse thing ever. But, howsabout if I just want a normal salaried job? What then?

I know of a tiny few foreigners who have normal office jobs, and while I was happy for them that they were in the right place(being married to the right people to bring them in to the organization) to get such positions, I wasn't envious because I was content to keep on freelancing while I patiently waited for my own "career" or interesting position to come around the corner. However, after two years of being here, I'm beginning to get skeptical and am starting to set my sights lower. After all this time, I'm beginning to think I'd be happy to be neatly folded into a company, with a punch card, regular payroll, water cooler chats and whatnot. Oh cruel irony, Slovenia, what I dreaded most in America has now become my greatest aspiration.

I am trying not to be bitter and hold anything against this place. I don't think the founding fathers of Slovenia ever had any lofty ideas of this country being a place where people could come from other places and make their fortune. Heck, I don't even think they want it to be a place where the natives have much of a shot at making their fortune. This is a place that lives on workplace discrimination. A place where someone at a job interview told me "It might be nice to have a black person," knowing full well I had no legal recourse.

So what's in order? Social change! How do we get it? By activism, marching in the streets, signing petitions, and maybe -- and this is where I can contribute -- by refusing to teach English.

Andrea Lee: Today's Summer Reading, Tomorrow's Lifestyle?

Andrea looking gorgeous, probably in some fabulous villa

A friend recently told me about the Black American expat writer, Andrea Lee, who moved first to Moscow many years ago and now lives in Torino, Italy where she is married to an Italian count(!). She has written a number of books (both fiction and non-fiction, which seem to range from classy to trashy) about expat women, and she has also been a contributing writer at places such as New York Times and Vogue. My friend told me that this might be something for me to aspire to and it all sounds good to me!

Check out this interview with her here on NPR, while I hunt down her books for some good summer reading and a little inspiration.

Invisible Inflows

Two Latin American women who've been living in Spain without papers - Source

We recently had some family visitors from Germany, and at one point I was asked how life is here in Slovenia for immigrants.

This is a tough question. I gave a few anecdotes about poor pay, about other people of various backgrounds and their experiences, about how I get the sense that the Slovenian market doesn't really seem to know what to do with immigrants unless they are uneducated Bosnians here to do manual labour. All in all, it is very tough to say exactly how things are. It is one thing to talk about The Erased, but yet another thing to talk about The Invisible -- those who do not appear on public register, and even when they do, they cannot materialize on the social register. The immigrant experience is so very personal in so many ways that I would never be able to (and am not really interested to) comment on. But on the public scale, I rarely see immigrants on television except for the few times that the cart out some fortunate (usually European) foreigner who has triumphantly learned the language. So it's all so tough to say.

Today I came across this fantastic survey of immigration in Malta, Cyprus, and Slovenia. It is only 17 pages and certainly worth a read. Very illuminating.

"Where Slovenia is defined as a country of immigration there is an implicit understanding that this refers to mainly European migrants. People from outside of Europe (i.e. ‘Asians’ as defined in the table) are deemed at best to be a transient population, on their way further west to Italy, France or the UK. The experience of 2000 served to reinforce this perception. Asians, it was suggested during one of the interviews, are not attracted to Slovenia because of its image as a ‘communist’ country.

The distinction between the two migrant groups is problematic for two reasons. There is first and foremost the risk of racially profiling migrants. It is the non-white population who seem not to form part of the Slovenia’s immigration profile. In the case of some Asian migrants residing in Slovenia, this has led to questioning their motives for being there. The recent growth in the number of Chinese migrants, who work mainly in Chinese restaurants, has become a source of intrigue and suspicion. There are doubts over the economic viability of the restaurants, and an assumption that the businesses are simply fronts for illegal activities."

Read more here.

Fruition Times Three

7.11.2007 Ljubljana, Slovenija. Trije Janezi Janše pred Etnografskim muzejem Slovenije.FOTO:JURE ERŽEN/Delo

I thought it curious a few weeks ago when I received an email from Slovenia's Prime Minister Janez Janša. I was still in California at my mom's house and I didn't have much time to dig through my email. The Captain always jokes that "Slovenia needs me", but an email from the Prime Minister, this just couldn't be....or could it?

I responded to the person telling him I was still in the States but would be back by week's end and should be able to help him. As soon as I got back here to Slovenia , I rechecked my email and and realized it was Janez Janša from Maska, a journal that I do work for. I remember seeing his name listed as Publisher in the previous copy but didn't think much of it. I just thought it was an odd coincidence...

...turns out it wasn't. My emailing Janez Janša is, actually, part of the new (and rather mysterious) art group Janša, Janša, Janša, a group of artists who'd recently changed their names to that of the Prime Minister for reasons which they would not divulge to the public.

So, excited to be part of such an intriguing project, I busily set about doing the work for them at break neck speed. They were under an impending deadline for an end-of-the-month performance at Berlin's Transmediale Festival. Well, I got all the materials to them at the zero hour and they raced over to Berlin where it turned out half of their performance (the Signature performance) had been cancelled for what has been termed "judicial and legal reasons" and "the personal ethical concerns of the curator" (source, in Slovene only). Why the curators waited until the last minute -- when they knew full well what was to go on -- is not known and the artists have called them out onto the floor to give a full explanation.

In the meantime, you can watch the super art-tastic video of the first performance, Signature Art Context, (in which they walk through and create their own signature in the holocaust museum) here.

(Thanks for the tip, Dr. Fil)

Back In The Saddle Again

I'm baaaaack!

After crossing too many time zones and packing almost too much I finally slid into the Schengen (it's so spooky driving through a border that is no longer a border, I didn't see a soul!).

Now, for a little matter of getting into a regular line of work...anyone know of any big evil corporations that needs a sweet little black American girl as a minion?
Or perhaps you know a villain in need of a henchman? Either way, do let me know.



Kisses,
C

Road Trippin

Off to Trieste (my favorite Slovenian town that is sadly not a Slovenian town)



and then Novo Mesto....

The Hugeness

Yesterday's trip to Postojnska Jama was a lot of fun and yet another opportunity to face my fear of heights. The place was incredible, vast and just surreal. It was hard to believe we were standing in the middle of millions of years of rock formations, stalagtites that take decades to grow mere milimeters, there is no way to fathom it. We stared, mouths agape, in between the times when we would joke or our tour guide would quip about certain rock formations' similarities to items and creatures we knew in our daily lives. She'd shine her flashlight on a "bunch of hanging bananas", a "giant lizard", something more accessible to grab hold of to make this all make sense; it's funny how the brain demands that, simple bite size pieces so as not to overwhelm.

Alas, taking photos was prohibited and while I coulda totally gotten away with it, I didn't think mine would really top the thousands of great ones (like those above) taken by scores of pros over the years.

*

With The Captain off from work for a few days, it was great to be able to just up and go on a whim like that. Of course, I really do have that option every day, as these days, my time is 100% my own. Projects I thought would be getting off the ground by now have not come together the way (and in the shorter time frame) I imagined. So I am more free than I've been in ages and frankly, it's a bit much.

I have been working consistently since I was 16, and I have come to the slow realisation that I like the way that a steady job structures your time. It is important to have places to be, tasks to accomplish, people to answer to. Years of working in mindless temp jobs turned me into a taskmaster, I can create lengthy to-do lists in the time it takes others to find a piece of paper and a writing implement. I can create work out of thin air, elaborate project ideas out of mindless quips, due diligence lists for the vaguest daydreams. I am worker, hear me roar. And so it is, that finding a job soon is moving up on my list of priorities. However, the questions now are the same questions I've had since college graduation what? where? with whom? what is my time worth? There has been no easy answer. I've worked for so many people that sometimes I forget until I pull out an old paystub from a file or glance at an old email. Weeks and months of my life, gone forever and I don't remember it, and they don't remember me or my works.

Part of the plan of being here, in a new place with new opportunities and ample time to sift through them, would help me sort all this out. I am still very hopeful, but I must admit, the hugeness of it does overwhelm....I guess I better get on those bite size pieces...