hello Rachel,
did you make it back to the u.s.a. or are you still wandering in scandinavia?
i have an image of you quitting the city life and living as a deer herder.
tell me i’m correct!
~i wrote~
Nigel my old friend! from the train of all trains
guess what? You’re weirdly correct, albeit by a certain stretch of figurativity:
i did get on my flight back to new york, and then i sat at home moping for a couple of days, and then i bought a one-way ticket to copenhagen.
i leave in may, and what i’m reading so far makes me think that denmark may not be the place to try to find work right out of the gate, so the new plan is to wander a little through europe and stop wherever i find gainful employment and a sense of home. do you know anyone who’s hiring herders? doesn’t have to be deer; any ungulate will do.
i am quitting my life for something new in europe.
the one-way ticket is to copenhagen, but i think i will not stay there.
the hope is to get work under the table if not over (visa?), and looking at the little mermaid statue does not present the kind of learning curve i seek in a professional undertaking.
also it’s starting to be baloney that i’m not proficient in a second language, and danish is probably not the one to invest in.
also i have been cold for fifteen years, more or less, since shortly after the arrival of that great letter from princeton, so probably i will make my way south to somewhere sweatier.
somewhere less prevailingly white.
somewhere that it’s okay for me to have a mustache.
Man oh man the job search of which you write is weird.
A little bit I don’t know what to write back to that, because it’s a problem I myself have been grappling with in my back-in-NYC life, or was starting to realize I’d eventually have to grapple with, and I more or less bailed on the question.
The dregs of this bullshit croque monsieur (DID THEY EVEN BUTTER THE BREAD??) on the plate in front of me, the eye I’m trying to keep through the front window on Kareem’s ex-boyfriend’s second-string bicycle, lent for the jaunt, the fact that I peed into some body of water from a tree earlier because they were charging €.50 for the WC in the train station: this is me bailing.
“If you’re a journalist, you’re either a whore or unemployed.” <— this from a Guillaume I met this morning over my grand crème at La Petit Mer and was initially very keen on but quickly lost interest in for how he seemed to be Someone Who Knows Everything, which at this point in my escape I have no use for.
When I interrupted to point it out, the guy from San Francisco whom I’d met because someone had to watch my stuff while I went swimming with the bandaids, whoʼd been telling me about abandoning the golden shackles in programming or whatever he was funneled from Stanford to do got culturally excited, too, which felt validating.
I guess it’s not the same as validation from a guy from, I dunno, Rio, but I’ll take it.
It was a little distance away but Iʼm pretty sure that what the baby was digging in the sand near was two strollers, not one, and I really really wanted to see the other baby so we could know if thatʼs just how those people dress their kids or if the g-string was that one babyʼs choice, an expression of its personal style.
