And the horse you rode in on

Funnily, I didn’t see Imade except for 5 minutes yesterday and didn’t see Chima at all! I was very busy and out of the house all day, and had a crash course in Ways Americans Annoy the English. I shall, in a moment, pass these on to y’all. Meanwhile Chima has probably contacted the embassy about our flat. Anyhow, here goes.

Yesterday afternoon I met with Sam, our British program manager. She works for the agency who does all the British-side logistics for our actual work internships. Sam obtained for me a job at New Statesman covering comedy (!), which I don’t start until Monday. I am beyond psyched. I’ve been e-mailing and Skyping her since January and was eager to meet her in person. She’s my age, which she’s said was kind of a relief as it’s easier to represent me than a 20-year old PR major.

I gave myself over half an hour to walk from my flat on Byng Place to the internship offices (the company’s called, generically, Access) on Bedford Square, but it only took me seven minutes. I’ve gotten out of the habit of walking everywhere. IN La I KNEW IT WAS A 15-20 MINUTE WALK TO usc, BUT I NEVER WALKED ANYWHERE ELSE. I AM SO GLAD TO BE BACK IN A WALKING CITY. Oops, typing mishap. I’ll leave it there ‘cause I like the weird emphasis. I MEAN IT! WALKING ROOLZ!

So in the extra 13 minutes I had when I got to Bedford Square, I sat in the park there and messed with my make-up using my iPhone video camera as a mirror. A very old man walking a small terrier looked at me strangely as he passed, but smiled stiffly when I looked up at him. British politeness. Or fear of the crazy.

Sam was taller than I thought she’d be. A lot of English people, seems to me, are tall. I feel short here, and I usually don’t. Because we’ve been communicating already and I felt I knew her, and because I am from Texas and recently spent time in LA I hollered “Sam!” and went to hug her, which I think scared her half to death, which only made me laugh. So right from the get-go, I seemed crazy. OK by me. Then she kissed me on both cheeks, which hadn’t happened to me in a long time. Fisch got some action! I forgot that the British do that.

So my meeting with Sam went like this: PDA, then a short slide presentation she’d made up about How To Be a Good Intern in the UK. which devolved into horror stories about American behavior, AND about English behavior. For one thing, we discovered we’re both Irish, which helped a lot. She’s from London but her grandparents were Irish, I’m Irish-American (plus) and lived there for a year, so we both relaxed visibly and started hatin’ and being all Irish-superior, which may not be cricket or some shit like that, but was fun. She informed me of the main differences between English people and Irish, some of which I already knew, but it was still funny. 

The Irish are much more chaotic than the British. When Sam sent her 12-year-old to visit family last summer, she put out a last-minute FB post asking who intended to pick him up from the airport. No plans had been made whatsoever (but someone got him). She got a call from him the first day, he was thrilled at running around outside with his many cousins, but had no idea at whose house he’d be sleeping (he was put to bed somewhere though). She’s pretty sure he wore the same t-shirt for the whole two weeks. He came back having acquired colorful new obscene language, complete disregard for authority and an absolute fearlessness about public speaking. She was really proud of this.

The English, she warned me, aren’t nearly as casual, laid back, funny, or “articulate.” 

“I think of the British as pretty articulate,” I said.

“Well, they’re articulate, but not as inventive. They’re much more by-the-rules.”

She told me that Londoners are very hard-working and can be very brusque, and a little stiff. Surprise. And of course this is a workplace behavior and not true of all English people, as the degeneration from Powerpoint to gossipping with Sam demonstrates. It’s just an exterior than American young people misunderstand, often. Maybe, in particular, young Californians.

Things I learned via Sam’s anecdotes: young American interns, especially USC interns, get very upset if not sufficiently praised, or if they feel ignored. USC interns also get grossed out at how grubby things are in England and complain about it, saying it’s not like Orange County (or wherever). They spend too much time openly cruising Facebook, tell people their feelings too readily and openly which embarrasses English people, are unreasonably optimistic and have a (to the English) bizarre “I’m a winner, you’re a winner” outlook. ONce Sam was in Los Angeles and got lost. A hip young Angeleno approached and gave her directions, but then ruined the pleasant exchange by asking Sam “are you an artist too?” 

“No!” she huffed at him, saying to me, “why would he ask about my line of work? What’s next, whether i”m menstruating?”

US interns aren’t all that great at meeting deadline or asking for extra work, and they’re expected (like any interns, anywhere) to do admin things like run copies and get mad about it it, plus they don’t admit when they don’t understand something and then fuck it up, and they don’t seem intellectually curious. Also, and maybe worst of all, when they are persuaded to make tea, they serve it to people with the teabag still in the cup. However, they have trouble writing critically and are too polite when they should be more pointed. One intern at one of the papers was given the assignment of covering some fatuous royal ritual observing the visit of the Queen of Denmark, and she wrote glowingly about how nice the function was and how “pretty everybody’s bloody shoes were.” British reserve is very real, but British writing is preferably irreverent.

She also remarked that American interns are obsessive about being on time and getting credit for being on time, which seems “silly. Just do your bloody work really well and be helpful, don’t expect a pat on the head for arriving before everybody else when nobody asked you to.”

So some British media companies are a hard sell in terms of taking on American interns. 

Also, there’s an understandable movement afoot to do away with unpaid internships completely, as the labor market is extremely tight here, with 59 new college graduates per job, though this is down from 89 two years ago.

Her advice to me was to be funny and pitch lots of ideas, be willing to go check out shows and be critical of the English in general, which they actually like a lot, and to take the damn teabag out. “I’m not worried,” she said. This was very heartening.

Yesterday morning, I managed to wrench myself from our flat to go out and ramble around. Mainly this was because it looked so damn promising outside; damp, grey, and cool, which is my favorite weather EVER. I realize I’m almost alone in this, but it’s always been true. I remember learning the term “sweater weather” from my mom Carol Fisch at about age 5 and feeling a great harmony with the universe. 

Seeing as how I grew up in San Antonio, this was not a convenient preference at all. I grew up sun-blasted and complaining. The first inkling I got that chilly and grey is my natural habitat was when I spent my junior year in Ireland, and felt about 70% of my DNA breathe a huge sigh of relief. It’s not just a genetic defect though; my sister Anna Fisch Hamlin, who has the same ethnic background as me etc., LOVES the heat. If it’s under 70 degrees, she looks for a blanket to wrap up in.

Anyway, I took a long walk around Bloomsbury yesterday, with a jacket on, listening to disco on my headphones, stopping in the parks, people-watching and feeling very, very grateful and happy to be alive. I stopped and had a sandwich on Tottenham Court Road, sat outside and watched a busy lunchtime crowd. I feel really at home here (so far); London’s like a hybrid, experientially and architecturally, of New York City and Dublin, cities very familiar to me and part of my mental landscape, so I think I’m not perceiving all the differences yet.

I went to Sainsbury’s, a grocery store, after walk and lunch. It’s nice in a way to only buy the amount of groceries you can carry, like in NYC and Dublin, rather than loading up your car like in TX or LA. Imade just now asked me if there’s anything like Costco in London, “where you can buy regular sizes of things. Did you see these juice boxes? I can go through this in a couple of days. In ONE day.” She does orange juice in the morning. No tea, no coffee. I keep imploring her to take up coffee. I don’t know why I want her to. Her mom does, too. It just makes mornings so much easier.

Back to yesterday. I got home with my Sainsbury’s bags and our classmate Chima Simone, the third in our trio of Annenberg grads doing a London internship, met me at the door, freshly arrived from Los Angeles. Whereas Imade and I had been drained and woozy after our flight (and subsequent trudge) on Sunday, Chima was energized — which is pretty much her natural state — and indignant. Her flight was fine – beyond fine, she remarked, as there appeared to be a crowd of “Ford model”-level hot guys on her flight. But our accomodations at Byng House are decidedly not up to her standards. AT ALL. And, as you will expect if you know Chima Simone personally, SHE IS NOT HAVING IT.

Chima and my mother are long lost soul sisters. Like Mom, Chima is, in her own words, “small, but mighty,” highly particular about order, cleanliness and organization, and unabashedly assertive. In this way she’s also a lot like my gay husband of 20 years, Wallis, whom some of you know. And like Mom and Wallis, Chima admits, a little proudly, of being “slightly OCD.” I’m highly ADHD, which is totally at the other side of the spectrum. I plan to be on my cleanliness game in our shared bathroom, though.

Chima arrived with about 10 pieces of luggage, including things she’d researched and purchased and had shipped here, because she likes certain brands of things, likes to be prepared for any eventuality (she brought many adapters, for instance; Imade and I had to go searching for one each and then MacGyver them with a fork).

She opened her laptop and showed me the photos of the flat advertised by Acorn, the housing vendor (I guess?), which I had never seen. As she pointed out, they look nothing like our flat. In the photos, double beds adorned with ample bedding rest on gleaming wooden floors, and hotel-worthy, amenity-heavy bathrooms entice with soft lighting. In real life, the bedrooms are tiny, the flooring is all bluish industrial carpeting of the indoor-outdoor variety, and Chima’s and my shared bathroom seems like something out of a neglected state park.

This is OK with me, see, having lived in various states of squalor in New York for almost ten years with a bunch of crazy roommates. Me, I’m just happy there aren’t rats actively holding court in the kitchen, that the ceiling isn’t leaking, and that there’s nobody who calls himself “Dr. Evil” wasted on designer hallucinogens in the living room bragging about his wall of nipple photographs.

Watching Chima assemble her list of grievances, I realized how far my standards have fallen.

I should add here that I get a huge kick out of Chima’s outspoken pickiness — Chima in general is a hoot. She has a completely contagious sense of humor; not one that lessens her outrage at all, but as she strode around our digs shooting evidence video on her phone and narrating it, I laughed like crazy. 

She kept threatening to go to the store and buy Clorox herself- she’s got near-impossibly high standards for cleanliness, but she isn’t afraid to “get down and scrub.” Like my mom and Wallis (my GH), she’s completely undaunted by tasks and seems to have an inexaustible energy supply. She’s hard-wired to be the way she is. She told me a story about how at three years old, she already had a reputation for cleanliness, order and good taste. A friend of her grandmother’s invited tiny Chima over to inspect her house. Chima told me “I got about five steps in, and just stopped. The lady asked me ‘What’s wrong?’ and I said, ‘I have seen enough.’”

Last night, Chima, Imade and I stayed up late in the living room, which does look a little like a day room for mental patients, and talked and talked. It was too intense, personal and detailed a discussion to go into now. Very bonding! You’ll learn more about them as time goes on. But among the things Chima pronounced was that she is looking for a hacker to aid her in some online activism involving the photos on the website we were sent, and those she shot yesterday. I close by sharing with you, verbatim, a FB post Chima made earlier this morning:

Chima Simone: “Oh, the places you’ll go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.” 
Your apartment will look nothing like advertised. Your valuables, you’ll hide. You may seek out hackers to post photos on the building’s website of what it really looks like inside. — in London, England.