Two months and 23 days

I am here. It is today two months and 23 days since I moved here and it is nothing like what I could have expected.

I feared living here, but I thought that it would be great work-wise. I don't know how many times I already thought of quitting and go back to I don't even know to what, since there is nothing I could go back to.
I am sleepless. I work non-stop for zero reward. I have never met students on average so uninterested and so ignorant. But it is the lack of interest that strikes me more and upsets me and makes me feel frustrated. I spend sleepless nights preparing the classes, not being able to do anything else in my life beside working to prepare the classes and for what?
I have to do it, I am paid for it, but it is so frustrating.
And I have none to talk to here. No friends, no acquaintances with whom sometimes to take a break from all this craziness and do and talk about something else. I have been working hard in my life before. I had a crazy PhD time. But I had the olandesino and I had friends that made life worth, that gave me a reason, something to look forward.
Since two months and 23 days I am on a survival mode. Counting the days until the end of this semester, hoping that during the summer I will be able to recharge and not think about my non-life here, hoping that I will be able to spend time with my friends and family. I feel so disconnected and lonely here and I keep asking myself what really is the point of doing all this.
I moved here to be closer to my husband. But we still don't live in the same place, who knows when and how we will, since any attempt to find a job for him here has been unsuccessful so far, and when we see each other, which fortunately happens more frequently than before, I am always so down, so nervous, so busy preparing the classes and working, that I am not even able to fully enjoy the time together.

I miss my previous life, when I had a life.

I felt lonely in Portugal, but nothing compared to how I feel here. I didn't have close friends there, but I had people to do things with. I had people whom I could call if I wanted to. I had the ocean and plenty of time just for myself. And money to save.

Life is too short to be wasted and I really cannot see a point in wasting mine working so hard to receive zero appreciation and feel constantly stressed, unhappy, and nervous. I had to finish this semester and then start to seriously think about maybe moving again if things will not change within the next months. What is the point of being here if I have to be so lonely and work all the time to not have a life and have such a low salary that I constantly worry about how I would get to the end of the month if my husband wouldn't help me with the expenses.

It is not the place, it is not the people. It is all together. On average very bad students, too much work, extreme loneliness, not having time for myself, feeling isolate, feeling far from family and friends and not having enough time to dedicate to them even if it was just to talk to them on the phone.

I have something like two more months to go and I can't wait to get to the end of this semester and hopefully get a life worth living back.
There are really too many beautiful things in this work to spend all my time working....and working for what?

Friendly? it's the South

I am in the South......and in a South that feels even Southern of Portugal.....I mean. Geographically it is. I just didn't expect here to be this way.....

This way how?

Southern......

Slow, disorganized, messy, but also with warm communicative people, great food, nice weather (at least so far...no hurricanes or tornadoes).

Am I in the US? except for what concern all the documents that a non-American person needs to fill to do anything here, for the rest it doesn't look like anything of the US I have experienced so far....but I am in the US.

There is Starbucks....but well, there is Starbucks also in Paris....so that doesn't count.....

My beginning here is not going as I expected. I thought that it would have been difficult. I just didn't expect it to be so difficult. I guess that largely has to do with the fact that until now, any time I moved to another country, it was always to follow my work dreams. This time, my decision to move here was dictated by wanting to be closer to my husband and still have a job I love. Moving here was basically the only option we had.

But I didn't move for my work... so my work here doesn't keep me going and motivated when things get difficult. I moved to be closer to my husband...but I am still alone most of the time, as we do not even live in the same state for now....we are closer and communication is easier, but it is not like if we were in the same place....

I don't even know from where to start writing down all the absurd things I experienced here so far....Maybe I could start with something quite unbelievable, something that I found funny.

Last week I had to get the documents for the apartment insurance. My husband and I go to the office where to get the documents and we are welcomed by a very friendly woman....very friendly....signing the documents took us not more than two minutes, but we stayed in the office for about an hour.

First, here I am very exotic. No matter where I am, as soon as I open my mouth someone asks me where I come from. 

So, we started the conversation from there. As I said, everyone is extremely friendly here and chatty....in a few minutes, and I don't even know how, we ended up with her telling us that she was 40something and that she met someone and she thought he was the one, although they went out only three weeks before he died in her arms...so after that, she thought she would never find anyone else, but she did. She met this guy, divorced with three kids. The oldest kid is a bit difficult to deal with, but she leaves the dealing with him all to her partner...anyway, what were we saying??? yes, she is with this guy...do my husband and I think he could be the one? no, because she likes him. He is good, he is good to her....but still, could he be the one? now? him? you know, things are complicated, the kids, the ex-wife. But he cooks well, oh, yes, he cooks well. And the oldest kid spends all his time watching TV or on the cellphone or with these things. He is not mannered. But she doesn't want to get into that...no, his kids are his kids. But the youngest one is so nice. He is a teenager, but so well mannered. He is all yes ma'am, no ma'am. So, do we think he could be Mr right for her?

....She didn't tell us about her sex life, but I felt that giving her a little bit more time, we could have gone there....

I mean, lovely person. I liked her. But we were standing there, my husband and I, ready to leave and there we remained for another hour listening to this.....

The thing is that she was not an exception.....I had a colleague of mine coming to my office to welcome me and talk about office and lab space and he ended up telling me about his headache and the medications he had to take and how they make him feel and for how long he has to take them and all that.....the whole conversation last two hours at least, if not more.

I had a guy at the supermarket telling me about his dream to visit Germany to see the Bayern Munich playing (this because as usual, to Americans my English accent sounds German) and the woman at the cash register telling me about her trip to Germany and what she saw and where she went..... and who cares if there were other people in line after me.....

I had a waitress telling to my husband and I that he mother passed away as well as her grandfather to explain us why she spoke German and so on (her mom was German.....but we didn't ask her why she spoke German....only if she spoke German after she told us that she was half German....again because of my accent)....

We had a waitress sitting at the table with my husband and I to chat with us while I was looking at the menu.....

I had the person in charge of computers at the place where I work coming to my office to set up the computer and ending up telling me all about one of her daughters and showing me videos of her singing and telling me how much her daughter likes nice dresses and that they got her a credit card and that she baby-sits so that she can learn the value of money....all this during working hours, while I would have had to rush from one place to another for all the bureaucratic papers and forms I have to do here (this is going to be another post, because this never ending story is still fully ongoing).....but no, you can't do anything here without ending up with talking to someone for at least an hour.....

I mean, these people are all nice and I appreciate them being so friendly.....but first, I really do not need to get into personal details of their lives. Second, I have so much to do that I have a hard time to find any time for myself ....listening to someone talking about his/her life for an hour and then going through the same with the next person I meet is not my ideal now.....

Is a common practice here to share personal details with whomever already at the first encounter???

I must look very reserved to all of them then, as I certainly don't talk very much about my things.....

Decision taken.....was that a good decision?

Months ago I took the decision to move again, back to the US.
Now it is about time to move and I am down here, where I will be moving, looking for a place.
I saw lizards, I saw birds, the weather is warm and I can go around just wearing a t-shirt, the trees are beautiful and the forests and nature look amazing.

But I can't find the way to be excited about moving. Every time I moved some place else, I always had mixed feeling about it, but I have always also been excited. This time, I do not seem to find a way to have one thing, at least just one thing, to look forward about this new change in life.

People tell me to look at this as at a new adventure.
Honestly? I don't need any adventure now.
People tell me to look at this as a moving forward in my career.
Honestly? how do I know that this will actually help me to move forward in my career?
People tell me that if it too bad, it can just be a temporary thing.
But honestly, why a temporary thing should not be enjoyable as well, especially at my age?

For sure work-wise I am not happy where I am right now and I have rain pouring in my apartment every time it rains, and I have my ex-boyfriend living next door and I have a lot of things for which I am not necessarily happy about and for sure a change was needed.

What bothers me is that I keep asking myself if this is really the change I needed......only time can answer to this.
I just wish I could find one thing to be excited about for this new life and to look forward to.

Persistence, resilience, adaptability and crisis menagement

I was just reading an article on the National Geographic about the importance of failing and learning from it.

This year is my failure year, undoubtedly, in terms of work. I failed in supervising a MSc student, giving her way too much assistance and help, I failed in all the applications I sent to obtain some funding for the projects I would like to work on, and so on and so on....I definitively see this working year, 2013, as a huge failure.

Am I going to learn something from these failures? hopefully so....I especially hope to have learned A LOT from my frustrating experience with the MSc student I supervised, because she wore me out and sucked my energy and enthusiasm of having students this year.....My fault, absolutely.

In any case. The article I was reading was highly inspiring. And I especially loved two sentences in there. One is a citation from S. Beckett "Try again. Fail again. Fail better"
The other was "Persistence, resilience. Adaptability and crisis management. All are key themes in exploration, as in ordinary life. Keeping things in perspective helps too".

I certainly have persistence and resilience. I am not 100% sure about the other two things and especially about my capacity to keep things in perspective......maybe I will learn how to improve this short-coming of my character. I certainly hope to learn from the the various work failures of this year!

I am an immigrant

I am living abroad, away from Italy since 10 years. It is a long time. I have been living in a lot of different countries and only in few of them I didn't feel that I was different, not belonging.

Here in Portugal, despite the cultural differences, none ever made me feel like I was "different" because non-Portuguese. People in general are doing a lot of efforts to understand me in my mixed mostly-spanish-a-bit-of-Portuguese spoken language...well of course, except for my landlord....but I can live with that. This until this morning.

I went to the farmers market as I do every 15 days on saturday. I love going to the farmers market here, it is one of the things I love more of living in this small Portuguese village. I like chatting with the people there, they all know me by now. They even remember my mom. They know what I like. It is a familiar environment. I really enjoy it and since there is only every 15 days on a saturday, I always look forward to this regular appointment.

However, this morning I had a not too pleasant conversation with one of the vendors. He was telling me that just a bit before me there was a Spanish girl who bought something and that he was surprised that there are so many foreigners, Spanish, Italian, etc living in this small village, because we are not here just for the holidays. I told him that we all work together in a research center nearby. He was surprised, but not pleasantly surprised. I like to state here that this guy is normally extremely nice and friendly, so it was not that he is rude or anything like this.

The first thing he said was:
- I hope that the money to pay your salary come from abroad or from the European community.

I stared at him......and only said "sorry?" I was not sure I understood well.

- I mean, why should Portugal pay someone who is not Portuguese? and even more, why should Portugal pay so many foreigners?

I understand that this may be a difficult concept for people who are not familiar with how the research world functions and that the foundations of our work are based on shared knowledge, independently of the nationality or race of the people doing research. I understand that with the current economic situation people are less tolerant. But the thing is....I have a salary, I live in Portugal, I pay my rent in Portugal, I do my shopping in Portugal, my life is in Portugal.....so, it is not that someone is paying me to bring the money to Italy and spend it there. I am part of this economy, I am part of this country until I work and I live here.

I don't understand this growing intolerance toward giving a job to a foreign person. I am not talking here about an illegal immigrant. I am talking about a person who is legally allowed to work in the country, who lives in the country, who may even pays the taxes in the country, etc. It is not that the money that the country invests on me are thrown away.....I just don't get it.....

The guy actually only chilled out when I confirmed to him that yes, a large part of our salaries come from the European community......

I am not very favorable in general to globalization, but local and narrowed thinking is a very dangerous thing, I feel.

Being bullied

If I should define myself in a couple of words, among the first ones coming to my mind there would be "determined", "responsible", and "just".

Now, not having worked in Italy or in countries where things work similarly to how they work in Italy (meaning that hierarchy is extremely important, much more important of what it is right or of working things out together), I am not used anymore to not be able to discuss things in a civil way with people who hierarchically are "above" my status. Not only I cannot discuss things in a researcher-to-researcher way with someone who is "above" me in the research center where I work, but I should just zip my mouth, as I have been invited to do.....

Basically the way things are currently working is to spend as less as possible, to invest as less as possible, to not care about safety and safety rules, and in general to do things "alla carlona" as we use to say where I came from.....It is not my way of working, especially when I am responsible of someone's else work and I have to set up the good example.

Because I asked to organize things in the lab so that everyone has some space to work and store things and because none of the people who should be in charge of this organization and cleaning got back to me or did anything and because together with other people after spending 5 months politely inviting the people in charge of this to do their jobs nothing happened, we decided to clean and organize things by ourselves......the result has been that instead of someone "high up" thanking us, one of the someone "high up" has been complaining openly about me stepping on other people feet and doing things that should not compete to me. The thing that disturbed me is that instead of telling me his complaints straight on my face, he went to tell this to students...so he didn't even have the gut of coming to me. And this was one.

Then, I tried to organize a space to do something with toxic reagent in a way that none could have to breath the toxic substances. Of course, someone else, still "high up" went straight to the responsible of the group where I am working here and complained about me wanting to change things....I just arrived and I am so arrogant to change everything.....well, for safety reasons, yes...especially considering that this guy sits at his desk and doesn't even know what he is talking about.....fortunately, the person with whom I am working and who is responsible for me working here, is an intelligent person and basically told this guy to shut his mouth since he had no clue of what we were talking about....again, none said anything directly to me.....only complains to others.

Today I got an email from the secretary of our research center saying that the second person in charge of the center wanted to see me. As I was not there at that moment, I contacted this person to know when we could meet and of course, he ignored me as he has always done when I tried to discuss with him the cleaning and the safety measures to do our work.

As if this was not enough....It is three months that I look at the fight between my landlord and the man in charge of the building where I live on who should pay the reparations to avoid that every time it rains, I have the kitchen full of water....it is obvious that because these are expensive reparations, none wants to pay for them. The end result is that my landlord who is a judge decided that he will file a legal complaint to the tribunal against the condominium for not doing the reparations....thing is that legally he could do whatever he wants and file a legal complaint etc., but as I am paying the rent to him every single month, even if this problem is going on since forever, he should send someone to do the reparations and then deal with the condominium on who will pay what....of course, at the end the one who is losing instead is me.....and if I leave, my landlord will keep the deposit.....

Lastly, they renewed my contract for another year and without saying anything they decided to cut 700 euros from what it was established on the original contract. Of course, this is also illegal, but they did it....not just to me, it is not just me being unlucky....

I feel that any of these things mentioned above is just ridiculous and I am bullied around because I am none at work and I am a foreigner here......I hate this.

My mood and the music I listen to...

After many articles telling us that we are what we eat, now also that what we are depends on when we eat...I can make my own motto, which is I am what I am listening to (in terms of music, of course)....

....it doesn't really work this way, but for sure the music I feel like listening to is highly correlated to my mood at that moment and what I am doing...

I am a music addicted....meaning that one of the things I couldn't live without is music. I am into discovering new singers/groups and I love to share my discoveries with others (and that others share their discoveries with me). I recently met an extremely interesting person during my stay in Montpellier. He was completely taken by Gretchen Parlato. It is not the kind of music I am used to listen to, but she has a wonderful warm, caressing voice. Little by little, I am trying to appreciate also the arrangements of the music she is singing on.

Anyway, in my always looking for new music to discovery, I just visited the blog of inkiostro, which I always find very inspiring and entertaining, and I found this very nice post taken from another blog, on the most indicated music to improve the productivity at work/work better. I did it...I mean, I followed the signs to discover the most appropriate music for my work. Beside that my work is quite atypical as I sit in front of the computer most days, but it is also a creative job, but I don't work with numbers and I am not a programmer....anyway, I looked at the music suggested according to these different options....but I think that I will stick to my playlist as if I would listen to classical or jazz music I wouldn't be able to concentrate and think properly (come on, this is not a background music! this is a music to listen to), if I would listen to ambient music, depending on which kind of it, I would feel like I am in the waiting room of the dentist (which of course wouldn't make me feel any productive in terms of work), if I would listen to polka I would feel like moving and dancing, etc., etc. The only music I actually listen to most of the time, which is indie-rock, is not considered in any of the working categories closer to what I am actually doing....

I think that I will keep my productivity at work as it is and keep enjoying the music I like, no matter of the final results...work productivity is not everything in life after all!

jumping contact lenses

My current week started in this way:

- Monday. After one month and a half we got the decision about a work we submitted.....more, much more work is still needed...considering that this specific work has been started some years ago...well, it is a never ending story.

- Tuesday. I received the response to a job I applied to and for which I strongly hoped to at least make it to the interview. I didn't. My previous boss wrote me to say that he cannot imagine what was wrong with my application that I didn't make it to the interview....neither can I.

- Wednesday. Today. I woke up to find water in the kitchen and a lot of water in the living room. The water in the kitchen was to be expected, as when it rains with wind, the rain leaks inside the windows and accumulates on the floor. I have this problem only since two months now....which I guess for Portuguese standards is too little time to deserve to be fixed. The water in the living room instead was a new entry. I was lucky enough to have a lot of water but which didn't got to touch the furniture, which are all in wood of course.....So, my morning started with drying the water here and there and moving the furniture in the only place with no windows where for now it seems to be the smaller risk to have rain also there.....The landlord came to my place, got angry at the person who did the work with the windows recently (15 years ago??? 20 years ago???), made many phone calls and solved nothing before leaving again.....

- Wednesday. Still today. Around 10.30am I got an email from a collaborator of mine. The subject of the email was "bad news". Just what I needed. Apparently the experiment that he was setting up for our work went very very bad...none fault. Actually, the poor guy was feeling very sorry. But it was not his fault....just bad luck....

I would say that so far the standard of bad news that one can get in a week is already pretty high.

To cheer myself up, I went for something that I want to do since very longtime, but I was actually too scared to try until now (and I am still too scared). Trying contact lenses. I don't mind wearing glasses, but I like my eyes and I wish I could show them more. But this is not enough of a reason to push me to try the contact lenses. No, it is the b-boying course I started. Even if I suck so far in b-boying, I enjoy it a lot and I want to continue it. And doing that with glasses is a nightmare. So, I forced myself and I went to try the contact lenses. I didn't succeed. I am just too scared of damaging my eyes and I can't stand having anything remotely close to my eyes....I tried to put them in for about 5-6 times and then I decided to take a break and try again another day. My approach to the contact lenses is to get them on my finger and close enough to my eye, but not too close and hope that something will happen (like my eye sucking the lens in???) to put them in place. After trying this strategy many times without actually any success, I decided that my stomach was already upset enough from the whole effort and to call it a day for now.....

Can someone invent some jumping lenses that op! can fit directly into the eye with the minimum effort and without nothing having to get too close to the eye and op! same thing for removing them???

running running biking biking

I am doing a lot of sport. Push ups, biking, walking long distances, push ups again, abs.......

and this is not because the summer season is getting closer.

I just need to get rid of my anger, frustrations, sadness, whatever negative feeling I have at the moment. Why? because here is beautiful. I love my apartment (still with problems of finding water on the kitchen floor...maybe one day they will manage to fix that). I love the ocean. I love walking along the ocean, on the sand or just staring at it. There are many many loving things. But I don't get the mentality. Every single day it takes me an incredible amount of energy (which I honestly feel wasted) just to manage to get things going. Anything I may need from someone else takes ages, with many meetings, many opinions exchanged, many meetings again to get nowhere and start again......some days I really feel it is the never ending story and it will go on like that forever.

How can people work here without feeling frustrated all the time is something that I still don't know. Maybe you have to be born with the right DNA to be able to deal with this system of doing (or better doing only after long long time) things.

As if this would not be already hard enough, I feel very lonely. I do like spending a lot of time alone. The week ends for example are just for me. I like to have them for me. But this doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to have friends to do things with when I would like to and especially to have people to whom I feel connected too.

My ex-boyfriend lives very close to me. He totally ignores me. He doesn't even try to keep it polite. He acts as if I would be invisible. Saying that this hurts me incredibly, especially considering how much I like and admire him still (as a person, not for his behavior toward me), is a very little expression of how I feel about it.

Then the working environment, the one in which I work most, is composed by a small group of people with some leaders. And I don't mean leaders in terms of bosses. I mean leaders in terms of some dominating characters. I unfortunately seem to have stepped on the wrong feet, as clearly one of these leaders, who is a girl, doesn't like me at all. I have no idea of what I did to her or what provoked her behavior, but it is like that. And when it comes to her to decide or to organize something, of course I am not going to be invited. Considering that unfortunately I still know a very limited group of people here and that most of these people belong to just one group to which this person belongs too.....well, it is not a nice feeling at all.

It is a new experience for me. I mean of course there have been people who didn't like me also in other places, but her aversion toward me is out there, very open, very hostile. Not when it happens that we are already all together in a group. In these occasions, she is instead extremely nice and acts totally normal. She just makes sharp comments or keeps me out of things when she has the occasion.

It wouldn't be a big deal at all if I would know other people, some right people, with whom I could talk to openly. Some close friends to talk openly. Instead everyone here is best friend of someone else and so I find myself all the time walking on eggs to avoid hurting someone's else sensitivity, to not say the wrong thing because since everyone talks a lot about other people business, I am always afraid that anything I say can be misunderstood and twisted.

I am a very sarcastic person. I don't think that Portuguese people in general are big fans of sarcasm. I am not sure that it is part of their culture. So, often, they just don't get me. This is definitively not the first time in which I move to a country and sense of humor is so different that I have to measure what I say and how I say it (which is a very difficult task for me).

I am a very enthusiast person. Translation: I am arrogant.

and so on and so on....Some days it can be so frustrating that I feel like just being by myself, not even going to work, because I feel lonelier there than at home alone. I hate this feeling. And it keeps happening, because I move all the time and I keep getting to places where there are already hierarchies, networks, groups, etc. And I am the outsider.

On top of this here I am a disturbing outsider. Because all the girls here have a boyfriend and I don't. Because a lot of them also have kids and I don't. Because despite all this, I am even older than them. I just often feel that I don't fit and I don't have so much in common with them.

Today is my feeling negative day. It is normal to meet people who don't like me. I just need to balance that with people who really like me and with whom I can just be myself!

What a jerk

I know. Jerk is not a nice word to use in a blog. And it is not a nice definition for a person....but what can I say? I met someone recently who was a real jerk.

Let's start from the beginning.
I just got back from the USA. I am totally under jet lag effect. I do really bad with jet lag....and I can't afford being lazy and recover my normal biorhythm because I have a coming deadline for work.....

Being in the USA, in my old lab, meeting my old boss, etc. brought back a lot of memories and mixed feelings. Did I like to be there again? I liked to meet some of my friends who are still working there. My ex boss was very nice to me, which was a good thing since when I was there she was not my biggest fan. We may manage to start collaborating again for work, which I guess it is another good thing.

anyway, good things and bad things....

What I didn't like of being there again was the arrogance of people who think of being on top of the world, to best the most knowledgeable in the world....I like to discuss about my work, I like to collaborate (with people I like), I like to discuss about scientific subjects and possible projects. What I don't like is people looking at me and talking to me with arrogance, listing me all the amazing things they did and how good they are and how amazing is their work and what they are planning to do and how useless my work and my knowledge are. Of course, not everyone there is like that. But I would say that the average level of arrogance is much higher there than where I work now.

The top of the whole thing has been a Brazilian guy who was there for a short work visit who offered me a job in Brazil. The whole thing went like this:

Him: I may have a job for you in Brazil, if you want it.

Me: A job? which kind of job?

Him: A permanent position there. I am going back there and I can find you a position.

Me: to work on what?

Him: vector diseases (or something like that, I don't even remember, as it is not at all my field of expertise).

Me: but I know nothing about it. It is not my field at all.

Him: well, you can change.

Me: how can I get a permanent position to work on something I know nothing about?

Him: Brazil is the future. We are growing. Our GDP is very good......and so on praising Brazil.

Me: Yeah, I heard that despite the world economic crisis Brazil is doing quite well. But I just read a book in which the author highlighted that the GDP is not really a good measure of wealth of a country.

....and here he got very angry at me and he started saying that I don't understand anything because GDP measures the wealth of a country and I don't know anything about Brazil and that I shouldn't talk about things I don't know, etc.

I tried to explain to him that my point was not about Brazil, but that it was just a comment about something I recently read on the GDP. It is true that I don't know anything about GDP and economy and Brazil. I was not making a statement neither about GDP nor about Brazil. It was just because I finished a book on the plane in which the author pointed our that use of the GDP as a measure of how well a country is doing may be misleading.....that's all.

The whole conversation was already quite weird and it didn't end very well....I couldn't understand why with all the people looking for a job someone should offer me a permanent position on something which is not at all my field of expertise and not even close to it........

Things got clearer the next day when I spoke to a friend of mine who was present there during the whole conversation.

Apparently, after I left the room, the Brazilian guy started complaining about me, about how unpolite I have been with him, saying bad things about Brazil (which not only I didn't, but anyone who knows me also knows that it wouldn't be at all in my character to say bad things about a country I don't know. I was actually telling him that I know someone who works in Brazil and he is very happy......), insulting his country......

....but the most amazing part of the whole thing is that apparently he offered me a job to show himself off to me, to show me how powerful he is to be able to get me a job if he wants to. He wanted me to admire him and to think of him as an influential and powerful person.

Not only I didn't realize at all that he was trying to impress me (I am very naive....btw he is also married), so his attempt was completely unsuccessful, but I also didn't realize that he felt so badly offended by me.

...what a jerk.....there are still men in this world who think that they can impress a woman just by showing some power.....well, he certainly picked the wrong person for that. Too bad that I am sure that he didn't learn anything from the whole thing.

......just to conclude with a note about men......

I was sitting at a Starbucks working and a guy started flirting with me. This time it was a nice guy, fortunately. Very nice and very mannered.....but come on, I am there just for two weeks....what did he hope for when he invited me to meet for a coffee later after his work (invitation that I refused)?

.....he said that he has rarely met someone so interesting as me......

come on......lame attempt.....but at least he was a nice guy to talk to for a bit.

Honestly.....can men really get some women with so little such as showing some power or by flattering them???? maybe I am too cynical, but certainly it does not work with me......

this way...or the other

I spoke to a friend from France this evening. It was nice. I miss hanging out with my girlfriends so much. That was a nice thing that I had in Montpellier and that I came to strongly appreciate and highly value in the last months I have been there.

I also went rollerblading with my IPod and some good music in it. The wind was strong and so I got a very good exercise. I needed it. My mood is really on a roller-coast....one second is up, one second is down. I am trying to find new things to do here, so that I can meet people outside work. The town/village where I live is nice, very nice, but a bit boring for a person of my age. I found an hip hop school in Porto, where they seem to have all sort of classes, from "normal" hip hop to bboying, to other styles. I hope to make it to try one of their classes this week.

But I have no patience lately and I am easily irritable. Thing is that in this economy, I know that I have a salary this month (and it is not even a good salary if we look at European standards considering my position and my experience), but who knows if I will still have it in three months from now...so I just moved here, I am restarting my life over, I feel pretty lonely here so far, I am struggling and all this maybe for having to move again somewhere else in some months....so a lot of investment for what? and of course...all of this always on my own, thing of which I start to be pretty sick of.

The other way to look at things is to live day by day and take the best of every day. I had a friend visiting me for few days and even if he thinks a lot and he has a lot of paranoias, overall I think that he is quite able to live a lot on a day by day base. I envy him for this capacity. I am not saying that I would like to be just like that....but it is also true that I analyze everything from every single angle. Maybe I am too of a scientist and I apply this to anything in my life.....I have a system, a situation or whatever, and I look at it from every possible angle (generally in a biased way toward the more positive or negative angle depending on my mood), until I find out how to deal with that (or not deal with that at all and escape it) and move in some direction. But before that, I stress and wear myself out over any possible consequences that could come out of the situation I am looking at and any possible causes that generated the situation itself.....

This friend of mine who was visiting me just told me that I analyze things too much, and he said as a negative feature of me. I guess he is quite right. Now I probably do it even more because I am unhappy with my current life, but it is really a typical feature of mine....and I don't necessary like it.....so, how can I learn to look at things, at least sometimes, in another, possibly lighter and more based mostly on the present, way?

In search of happiness

Organizing this new moving is making me crazy already. I am scared of the change, I have many things to prepare, I am not mentally ready to move and I am not mentally ready to move to Portugal more specifically (why the more I want to move North and the more I keep getting jobs in the South???), I am not at my best. Plus, my current job is stuck (exactly the right timing to get stuck, as I have only a few months to finish the projects I am working on) and so is my personal life (this latter more precisely seems to go down hill....).
It seems the right moment for a change, certainly.
I am just not ready.
I am a slowly adapting organism, even if it doesn't seem so.
Biologically speaking...I don't have the best surviving strategy. I waste a lot of energy and I don't get anywhere.
Since I have to change, I was looking for a change that would fit me better, like getting a short-term teaching position in some tropical place where when I don't have to teach I can go scuba diving....so far, I got only "picche", which in Italian is a way to say that I only got negative replies....
When there is air of change, the first thing to go are my hair....this time they are still there...I think that the older I get the more allergic to drastic changes I became...or maybe I have to face already enough drastic changes in the next months that I don't need anything additional.

I was looking at some older pictures...how come that my face looked much much happier till about five years ago and lately I can't even manage to have a picture with a full happy glowing smile??? I am aware of the fact that I spent some years being totally down, where even a tight smile was a big job to achieve, but still.....now things are better, overall....but I still don't feel in a good place in my life. Just an example. I travel a lot, but I don't have even the time to enjoy it that I have to go somewhere else. It seems that I have to have another marathon of a traveling for my job, this time to London. I am so much trying to avoid that.

Let's say that I am trying to change what can be changed in my life, to improve it and hopefully find again my glowing, happy smile. For the rest, I guess I have to learn to accept things that I can't change.....

I guess that something that can already improve my mood at the present is either bike or rollerblade to the beach. I am also reading the Bill Bryson's book "Down Under". He is just a brilliant writer.

A solo trip postponed

My coming month off is not going to be a month off.....
it always happens.
This time for good...I hope...

I very recently received the news that I got a 3 years grants to work in Portugal. It is a great news, even if currently my mood shifts from being worried about starting over again in a new place with a new language, and being totally excited for a new place to live, a new language ect. This past friday I was so worried and in a such a bad mood that my company was certainly very unpleasant.

Anyway. This is the biggest news of this month so far. I didn't accept the grant yet, as I am waiting for the results of other two things I applied to....but of course now I have to organize myself like if Portugal will be my next home. So, there is a grant deadline in February to which I have to apply to ask the money for my project (the grant I got is for my salary). This means that I can spend some much time traveling in February and that I will have to work......but it is for good anyway...

How do I feel now about the news? still scared and excited at the same time.....

I don't do well

If there is something that makes me very uncomfortable is when people compliment to me for something.

I am not used to compliments, especially if they are honest, said without a second reason. I am not used to niceness. It makes me feel I don't deserve it. It makes me feel I have to perform well to not disappoint someone who has so much faith in me or thinks highly of me.

So, today I got two open reference letters for a fellowship I am applying to. The letters were wonderful. They were more than I could ask or hope. They were both just too much from my point of me. They left me speechless, they left me uncomfortable, they left me happy, they left me nervous, they left me as if I would have steel something from someone, they left me like I tricked the people who wrote them, because I don't feel all the nice things they wrote about me.

I mean. I make a lot of mistakes in my work and there are so many things I don't know and I should know. And I am intelligent, but not incredibly intelligent. My strong points are for sure that I am very good in organizing my time and the things I have to do (which is I guess an incredible skill for an Italian), that I am trustworthy, and that I am almost always in a good mood at work. But what they wrote was not just limited to this, which I could accept and feel I deserve. There were many more nice things about my abilities and my skills at work. Things that I honestly wish they were true, but I am not convinced they are.........

Isn't silly to feel so uncomfortable and guilty because someone wrote something nice about me????

It is good that there is the week end, and I don't have to go to work....because now I just feel like hiding......

On the move again

I got back from my trip across Europe. I had a great time (beside the horrible weather in Slovenia and Hungary) and the work seemed to be successful (I have to wait for the results to know that for sure).

I slept very little and now I am crashed. Totally. I have a job interview tomorrow and between being very tired, not in a great mood shape, and being quite nervous about it, I can't say that I am ready for it.

Then I will travel again. I feel I am living with a suitcase. This time I have to go to Italy. And I write I have to go because if it was just up to me, I would spend the coming week end biking to the beach and sleeping either on the beach or here at home. Instead, I have to go. I have one of these things that I have to do to not disappoint a good important friend for me. I am sure that she would not understand if I will say that I can't make it because I am behind being tired. Then after this trip, I will have to go to Marseille, to Spain and to Perpignan. For work, of course.

I wish I could disappear in some place with no computer, no internet, no phone, nothing and just sleep and recover without being worried of not finding a job after that. I am so tired!!!

PS. Out of topic, but very good news! Elio Germano won a prize at the Cannes film festival. I am very proud!

Heading to Hungary

Getting ready for the next work trip. I am traveling all the time and when I am at home, it is often so short that I can't even feel home (nor find the time to do the laundry without rushing and leaving again with half of my clothes still wet).....

When I saw the movie Up in the air I felt very empathetic toward G. Clooney...even if I really like to be at home (chez moi) and spend some time just by myself, for myself, pampering myself.

Before this new trip, this morning I decided to pamper myself with a facial mask. Facial masks are cool, but I don't know how anyone who lives with someone could still treat herself with a facial mask....I would honestly feel ashamed in going around the house with a green tick mask on my face knowing that someone could be around or could enter in the apartment and seeing me like that......

One of the luxuries of living alone I guess......

traveling, traveling, traveling

I am currently in France, but traveling all the time. Meaning: one day or two I am at home, the next I am somewhere else for a couple of days (just a couple of days), then back home, then travel again and so on.

All this for work.

It is quite nice to travel and I like it....but I feel a bit like a person scattered all around that as someone who is just traveling. Some days I wake up and I need some minutes to figure out where I am and what I should do that day. Plus, I am often traveling with other people for whom I am responsible.....not that easy, not always. For the last two weeks, I mostly moved here in France and I got to see some nice place and I got to have some very nice experience.

Next stop: Hungary. I am looking forward to that. We will go by car and our plan includes one day stop in Italy and one or two days stop in Slovenia (I love Slovenia!!!), all this to sample different animals. Then 4-5 days in Hungary and then back.

After that (4 days later), I will be on my way to Italy for a couple of days.

Then to Spain and I still don't know when.....

In less than a year I crossed Europe by train mostly I have no idea how many times....one days I should write all these adventures down. Everything happens so fast! Last sunday, even if the weather was very nice, I just got on my bike, visited a friend and had a long afternoon of tea, a bit of cake (a lot of it actually) and a lot of nice chat...I really needed to do something that would not have required too much moving.

I can't say that my life is boring...On the contrary, actually. But I do have a lot of responsibilities and sometimes (like yesterday for example), I feel overwhelmed.

A good day

France, evening

I have to say that when a lot of good things or nice news happen all at once, I can't believe that any of them happened for real.

I am just not used to have many good news, and two in a day certainly make it a big day. I am incredibly tired. I guess that feeling relieved that I can cross out some things from my "still in the process or to do list" resulted in me crashing a bit right now. It is only 7pm and I feel I could go straight to bed.....which I think I will do very soon.

My good news are all work news, something I was dealing with since either some years or some months. And I have to say that in the last months I had many good work news, after years of struggling and incredible misery. Nothing that would change my life, but some little good news that certainly improved my mood.

Today, when I got the first news, I was so happy that I even started dancing and jumping in the office, for the amusement of my office colleague. I couldn't restrain myself from being incredibly happy.

are we really so much happier???

France, evening

I went to a doctor this morning. For my new contract I have to get checked by a physician. I know the doctor since a year and half by now, and she has been very helpful during all the story of my arsenic intoxication. Anyway, we were chatting and she told me that a few days ago, she had a patient like me: foreigner, around my age (34), far from her family and long term friends, with a short term contract, who keeps moving from one place to the other to hopefully find some kind of stability and keep doing scientific research. The doctor asked me how we manage to not collapse and get crazy. I easily answered her that I don't know about this girl, but I am quite sick of this life and that if it was not because I like what I am doing so much, I would seriously think of changing to find something else (not that it would be easy with such a specific skills like mine).

Again, as I wrote already, I like my work and I generally like my life. I traveled a lot, lived in a lot of cool places, seeing many things, done a lot of cool other things, etc. What I have every year more and more difficulties to deal with is the instability in any single part of my life. Apparently this girl had the same problem, since she got into a depression. And I know many other scientists with a temporary contract, especially the ones who find themselves living in a foreign country, experiencing depression at a certain point of their lives because of all this instability. To make short what it could be too long, our situation is to pass from one short contract to another short contract or a grant till the day we hopefully get a permanent position. However, since there are not that many permanent positions, someone is going for sure to be left out and everyone in this business is aware of that. How to try to not be one of those left out? working like crazy, forgetting the meaning of week ends, holidays, etc. On top of this, if you add that in some countries, like Italy, it is almost impossible to find a job in a fair way (read without knowing someone who knows someone, who knows someone else who is very very important in the system), you have an even clearer picture. Let's add the fact that if you are a woman, and you have passed your 30th, it is not a good idea to hire you, because probably once you will have that permanent position that you were waiting for, you will start to procreate or around those lines.

I got a job interview this summer for a permanent position. One of the guy in the commission asked me if I was married, if I was living with someone, etc. Of course, he was technically not allowed to ask me that. But he did it anyway.

Consequence of this type of life is that either you find someone who doesn't mind to follow you during all the movements from one country to another to gain more experience or go where the funds to keep working are (and this if you are a woman let me tell you is very, very difficult to happen, as men often expect a woman to invest on them and not on the other way around), or you try the long distance relationship (which after a while can became a nightmare because all what the relationship is based on became an idea of a future together and long talks in the present, but very little of anything else), or you just decide to stay alone till the day you will settle in some place (which may happen when you are around 40), or you decide that since you will very likely end up suffering becoming attached to people and things since you probably will have to move again, you may just have fun trying out different guys that you may like and not allowing yourself to actually feel any bond to anything and anyone.

I have met any kind of the above mentioned people and none of them for one reason or the other is happy. If someone invest everything on you and then he is not happy too, you will feel always responsible. Distance relationship, especially for long time are just a nightmare for me, more painful than anything else. Not getting attached to anything and anyone may be ok for a while, but at the end makes you feel very lonely.

Why did I get into this kind of thinking today? for various reasons. The chat I had with the doctor, some of the people I spoke to in these days, and a book I started to read. The title is "deep economy" by Bill McKibben. I just started, so I can't write too much about it. But the point is that we live in a society based on growth, and income, and while this some time ago helped us to have a better life, now these same things do not necessarily make us happier. The economy is based on what "produces" and so people have to adapt to do something useful and that would give the highest production in the shorter time as possible, in a way to have a good profit. This fact doesn't take into account a lot of other small things that we would need (for sure I do) in our daily life.

For me there is not such a thing as valuable as family and friends close by, the possibility to have green spaces (and not artificially made green spaces) to walk or bike around, the chances to grow my own vegetables (even if for sure I would kill all of them considering that I am not able to keep any plant)....I am very much for small daily things. I loved the familiar nucleus in which I grew up for example, with grandparents, parents, parents of my friends, friends, relatives etc. all being part of my life. Instead, now everyone has to be scattered around to increase the chances to find a job, which would allow to possibly have a decent life.

Does all this growing makes the quality of our lives better? I don't think so. Of course, our life style is better than in other countries, where people are actually poor. But when I was a child we were not poor, but we were not rich either, we were part of that middle class that now is disappearing. We had less material things that I could have now, but for sure life looked simpler (maybe also because I was looking at it as a child....)....

Anyway, I will keep posting about the book, as it is a topic that really interests me. Any thought is more than welcomed!!!

First day of school

France, morning

I can't remember how I felt the first day of school. For sure I was not too happy and for sure I was a bit nervous...at least.
I feel the same today. It is not my first day of school, of course, but it is my first day under a new contract and a new boss. Why is this that different from the past? Because until today I always had a very precious thing characterizing my work: INDEPENDENCE! which I love.

Independence to work on what I like, on a project that I wrote and thought and for which I found the money. Now, I will be working on something someone else designed, about which I know nothing and he will pay me for that. Of course, it is in some way less stressful, but I value independence a lot and I consider it one of the best parts of my work. It doesn't matter how much I have to work (well, lately it matters more to me), if it is me to decide. Until now, I liked to sleep in in the morning to get to work not before 10- 10.30am. None had anything to say. This morning I had to put an alarm to get there at a decent time.....I hate alarms.

Of course, most people have a normal job, with a normal daily schedule, for which they get paid by someone else. But my work, until now, has been different and I feel this as a big change. I really hope to like what I will work on. My future, actually current, boss fortunately seems very very good and very very nice.

My mom told me that on my first day of school, my father walked with me to the school.....today I am alone, but still quite nervous :-(