New Levels of Intimacy

My new best friend at work is Mail Guy number 2 (I'll just call him MG2). Mail Guy number 1 (big, black sweetheart, who looks like an oversized first-grader) is also my friend, but his shift is in the morning when I tend to be more committed to working and we don't usually have conversations. Mail Guy number 2 is a short, brown-haired, light-skinned Chilean engineer, who (after working for over a year at various construction sites illegally) won a green card and now has the privilege to use his engineering degree from Chile to push around a cart with annoying lawyers' internal mail. (There was an article in The New Yorker Magazine about how green card winners end up working in menial jobs for which they are totally over-qualified for years). MG2 goes to school in the morning to improve his English, where his teacher is a certain Mrs. Szabo, an old Hungarian woman, who has lived here for decades (and probably still has a shockingly strong Hungarian accent, which, apparently, makes her good enough to teach English to South Americans). He works the late-shift over here and, predictably, is bored to death doing it, but he plans on getting out eventually. I found all of this out in the course of many 3-minute conversations and I'd say that with an approximate total of about 2 hours of pure personal conversations he is the person that I know best at the firm. Such friendships have many benefits - just now he dropped off two giant chocolate chip cookies and a brownie (I ate that already) from a birthday party held in the nether regions of our wonderful skyscraper.

As to the lawyers, I still only talk to two people: the two that I work with. M., the woman I shared a deal with, has invited me out to lunch once already and I also know that she has been married for a few years to a former law school classmate and that she lives on the Upper east Side. I gathered that she is Jewish from a passing comment on Passover and that she made her husband take her name in exchange for taking his (this latter piece of information is about the most interesting thing about her). S., the man that I currently share a deal with is probably the least WASP-y person here (aside from the occasional Jew and the Asians, of course): he has dark hair, dark, slightly almond-shapes eyes and olive-colored skin, but I can't determine his background and up to very recently we only talked about the deal. Now he talks to me about basketball and baseball and I asked him about his girlfriend, a pretty, short latina girl, whose picture is on his desk. She is "on the bar scene," which means that she is an ex-bartender-turned-doorman(girl?) and they live together in Queens. None of the others have spoken to me, but I have not tried to talk to them either.

As for the partners, the door-man called me "kiddo" today. Now that's a new level of (bizarre) intimacy.

Becoming a real person...

...here is not easy. I am lucky enough to have obtained a social security number back when I was a student so at least I didn't have to deal with that. I rented my apartment through Craigslist from the Italian lamdlady, where being European worked to my advantage for a change. Getting a credit card in this country though is a whole other story. I applied for one at Citibank with detailed information on my employment, including my ridiculously high salary. I got a standard letter from them stating that since I have no credit history they cannot give me credit, which, of course, is pretty silly because how does one build a credit history if one is not allowed to get credit based on other factors such as earnings and - god forbid - a stellar credit history from the United Kingdom. Well, evidently that all doesn't matter. I even got rejected for some stupid thousand-dollar overdraft protection on my checking account, which is truly ridiculous. Of course, Americans are born with a credit history so it is unfathomable for them that one (especially if, like me, that person doesn't sound foreign after a few sentences) should not have one.

Here comes the beautiful part of the story. After speaking to various people about this I got connected to some kind of "specialist." By that point I was highly irritated so without letting him say a word I went on a diatribe against banks in general, Citibank in particular and first and foremost Americans and their insular worldview and how outrageous I found it that my UK credit history is of no value here. The man listened to me politely and then said with a clearly distinguishable, but not incomprehensible Indian accent that he undrestood my frustration but that's just the way it was and then gave me some suggestions (all pretty lame) as to what I should do. At this point, I started blushing from embarrassment and we closed our discussions as follows:

ME: Where are you from?
MAN: India.
ME: And where are you now?
MAN: India.

I could not have felt any more ridiculous. Here I am, a Hungarian woman telling off an Indian man because an American bank doesn't give a shit about English credit card companies. Oh, the joys of globalization are many!

Door & More

Last night David and a friend of his went to a presentation at the Museum of Television History on a video game, which (from what I understood, because I only got to this event five minutes before it ended) is a simulation exercise in how to solve political, ethnic, etc. conflicts in a non-violent manner. The event was held in a hidden-away conference room just next to the public parts of the museum and it was harder to get into it than into the Hungarian Parliament. Perhaps sixteen people were there, but (strangely enough) I happened to know one of them. Of course, it's not that strange that he would be there because the guy work in the Human Rights Defenders Program of HRF (where I used to intern) and this video game is aimed (in addition American high school students) at freedom fighters and "activists" around the world. (I wonder, of course, how someone in Darfur for example would be helped by logging on to a simulation of non-violent conflict resolution right after she narrowly escaped being raped or having his head chopped off by a couple of savages...I might be too cynical though.)

The HRF guy asked me what I was doing and whether I was missing HRF. My answer (NO) came a little too quickly. I also felt compelled to add that the reason I was NOT missing it despite my long hours, etc, was that my former boss was so incompetent. The moment I said it, I regretted it, especially because I could see that it made him slightly uncomfortable (though he essentially agreed with me).

The strange thing is that it was true. I am not missing that place at all. In fact, the longer I am in my current world, the more I despize and resent them. I can only remember the bad things: how they are so hypocritical and up their own butts; how they are rude and incompetent as far as handling personnel issues goes; and how behind the holier-than-though attitude there is all this petty political maneuvering going on (not to mention, in the case of most women there, a rich lawyer or banker husband who provides nicely for Park Slope life and private school for the kids). I decided not to do any (more) pro bono for them and work for Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts instead. I never read their emails and I don't "take action" or even consider ever giving them a penny of my hard-earned money. But in my more sober moments, I know that this is not all true, or even if it is true to a certain extent it is not the whole truth. I am painfully aware that I need to believe all this because it makes it so much easier not to despize what I am in right now. If I can convince myself that not only is the grass not greener, but that there no grass at all on that much talked about other side, then I will feel more content or, at least, less frustrated about what I do, even if I am being told not to shut doors and have to be here until 10-11 pm at night at least three nights a week.

Weekends

I guess I could also write about my weekends, which tend to be so filled with cultural, social and other engagements that I am exhausted by the time I start work again on Monday. It was the same in London: I feel that I need to spend every single minute of a weekend doing something other than sleeping or watching TV because the five days that follow seem so ominous from Saturday's vantage point. Of course, I sometimes have to work on weekends. The tricky part this weekend (quite like the other night) was to figure out whether when the partner says that he will be in the office all weekend then I am actually required to work or expected to offer that I will come in and/or work from home, or (and this is what I usually opt for) just pretend that this does not affect me. It is a hard line to navigate, especially because the partner in question tends to get to his point in a roundabout way. As he was explainig me about his (our?) weekend obligations he also told me a long convoluted story about different firm "cultures" regarding "door-policy" and I practiced my usual technique of tuning out until I suddenly understood that he was actually chastizing me for closing my door...In fact, I do close my door, but only when I am on a conference call or when I eat my lunch in front of my computer (a thing so pathetic and depressing - not to mention not particularly attractive - in itself that I would rather do it in private with just me and the New York Times online present. Oh well. Policy is crucial I guess. As is culture.

On the weekend we enjoyed culture in an other sense. Saturday night David drove us to New Jersey for the second time to see Kretakor's second performance. And I'll pause here again for a second. Not only did we enjoy Culture as provided by the amazing actors of this Hungarian alternative theater (www.kretakor.hu) but we got to breathe the fine, cold New Jersey air; delve into the New Jersey mind, a topic regarding which our friend Buk Miki had a lot to say. His less than flattering, but seemilngly accurate recurring remarks on the Jersey mind sort of served as the underlying theme of our evening; and enjoy the culinary delights (burgers and shakes) of a real Jersey diner. The next day, Aron and I went to see Cate Blanchett as Hedda Gabler at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (www.bam.org). The contrast with the Seagull performance of Kretakor was huge. The acting was fine, Blanchett had good stage presence and clearly perfected her performance, but there was not a single moment when I could even remotely feel her angst and frustration or when I cared about it. And that certainly is not Ibsen's fault. As with Chekhov, it doesn't (or shouldn't) really matter that these plays were written over a hundred years ago; the themes are still pretty relevant and a good performance (like the Hungarian one) makes you feel for the characters and yourself in the process.

Well, well. I got a little carried away. AND I am wasting my time...I have spent the entire morning compulsively rating movies on Netflix and buying kitchen appliances from Target. Gotta work. WORK!!! (Ugh.) Perhaps I should go see the Three sisters soon...