I am 30 something…

I am 30 something…

And I am fired!… unfortunately up to this point I have no thriving career to show for, neither can I claim I have been thus far well-paid for all my long working hours…

(By long, I mean well-productive, efficient working hours… otherwise, generally speaking I know looots of people who “work” long hours…

It’s one of the major marketing rules that my generation exhaustively bachelor-ed, master-ed and Ph.D-ed on:

If it takes you 5 hours -minimum- to describe that one can go from point A to point C in a logical sequence containing point B, congrats you are an executive!

If you are an A-B-C, straight-to-the-point, job-swiftly-done kind of person, congrats you are an executive assistant with a 700€-something monthly salary, whose efficiency is eminent –in all of your boss’s work!! But that’s hardly my point…)

I am 30 something …

What I started out with was taking my degree in English Literature, getting certified and becoming an EFL/ESOL teacher, working in various language schools for several years… in most of which, I had to beg both for my social security benefits and for more teaching hours.

So maybe I should explain here a couple of things about Greek private language schools: Public schools are an only option in our country adding up to an impressive 97% (not an official statistic data, merely my own estimate) in all major cities throughout Greece.  Parents send their children to public schools and often resort to private tutoring for further “assisting” their children’s studies when it comes to “hard” subjects like high-school Math, Ancient Greek or foreign languages… and that’s how private language schools, slowly but surely, became a thriving business in Greece over the past 30 year.

So, business as usual, it is rather typical, that a “new” teacher in such a school (new as in a newcomer to the specific institution, not inexperienced!) will be assigned very few teaching hours, in the same time that “old” teachers (old as in owners or co-founders of the schools) are loaded with more and more classes each semester, building up to well-paid “overtime” totals of more than 33-37 teaching hours per week. I guess you can infer that one gets paid per teaching hour… …

Newcomers are by tradition assigned junior classes which do not add up to more than 8-10 hours per week (a modest work load, equivalent to a “semi-decent” salary, paying just my rent and bills would add up to 22-24 hours per week!) and when I say junior I mean junior, pre-school, never-mind-your-expertise-in-assay-writing toddler “classes” and don’t you go nagging about it, everyone loves working with children, it’s sooo revitalizing…

Well, what a whole lot of $% @ **! (Excuse the language, I often get told I have a dirty mouth!…)

Of course I was an awful teacher…

• Because I could not smile and lie to my students’ parents’ faces…

(“Why, of course George is a good student, he’s just easily distracted but it’s nothing to worry about, it will only take a month’s intensive summer tutoring and he will catch up with the rest of the class”)

• Because my grading system never agreed with the school’s grading system …

(a D is absolutely prohibited, a C is promptly scaled to a B, an alleged A-student will sit certification exams and fail them… statistically and for no other apparent reason!!!)

• Because I used to assign copying little paragraphs and learning little poems by-heart as homework and this, I was told, was no descent contemporary teaching method

[meanwhile, a student easily distracted would not raise any worries for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), anxiety, depression, stressful events, emotional trauma and other conditions affecting concentration often confused with learning disabilities, should not be my (or any other teacher’s) concern and learning disabilities themselves would go by un-noticed, un-diagnosed and un-treated for… all in contemporary compliance!!! !!!]

My only boss dash school owner who did not seem to think I was a complete failure as a teacher, was a family friend whose teaching methods and approach to children were entirely different and well ahead of our time –or should I say country?…

Oh, I can even think of one more boss who however, one lovely spring break, took every single penny from the cashier, shut down the school and fled the country, leaving all teachers unpaid and all students astonished so I am guessing her opinion doesn’t count!

I am 30 something …

Useless as an English teacher I changed careers…

…and started working as an executive secretary, in a renowned advertising company… which was accountable to its international headquarters in New York… which is in the US… where as everybody nowadays knows, recession begun in 2008 in the real estate sector…

Thus the layoffs rolled on…

Oh yes, you read me right…  layoffs started in 2008 … … (and I can’t even begin to describe how annoyed I got when all of a sudden(!!!)  all were astounded by “current “ critical events in 2010!)…

… From this advertising company I was ultimately fired too. By choice mind you(!) because I refused to be transferred to the reception desk (to replace another gal soon to be dismissed and I don’t know if one can tell from my narrative but I was announced her dismissal well before she was!) without giving up my executive assistant duties to one of the CEOs… Now, I know I’m good at multi-tasking, hell it features the top line on my resume, but multi-tasking in two different floors simultaneously… I don’t know… I guess I was not cut for it! Of course if I were to undertake it all, I was promptly reassured that I would not suffer any salary cut-backs at all and I that would get to keep my ol’ good amount of a salary… !!! … of course!!!

Ungrateful and lazy as I turned out to be, I was laid off leaving the worse possible impression to the administration like I was promptly reassured (once more)!

I am 30 something and here I go again. Sending out resumes, with all my degrees neatly listed on an A4 page…

I am 30 something …

A few months before we became solely preoccupied with the infamous statistical dispersion spreads, the Private Sector Involvement rate and the forthcoming critical elections I was worrying about… my garbage!

I had “3 something” huge, black litter bags, filled up with all my carefully separated, compressed/folded, emptied/rinsed containers meant for recycling, waiting among flowerpots on my balcony for Attica’s landfill for domestic waste to re-open…  I’m not even going to attempt to begin a discussion about waste management in Attica, or in Greece for that matter, but what I can briefly explain is that the landfill is old, poorly designed-poorly managed, not compliant with the Waste Framework Directive of the European Union and subject to its workers union strikes…

I think there you have it, but I’ll explain some more…

Whenever the landfill closes down, the city is overflown with garbage for weeks at a time…   One of the (least serious, I’m sure!) side effects, is that people start using street recycling bins like regular disposal bins, “contaminating” their content and rendering it unfit for any recycling treatment whatsoever…

Nowadays however, during their electoral campaigns, many of the political parties have presented their green growth strategies for achieving sustainable development… I never heard, not one of them all, talk about de-growth…  I’m pretty sure they are not even familiar with the term…

Then again these same people, during the aforementioned strike, suggested the solution would be to have the army collect the garbage workers refused to!

!!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!!

I am 30 something …

I am trying to carry a tune in my head most of the times…

Strange how when you listen to a song you like your mood shifts: garbage mountains disappear from the streets of Athens, there are no illegal immigrants or Roma* kiddos selling tissues at the traffic lights, a small rain does not turn the road into the stream that it was before it got built upon, the city center is not paralyzed by demonstrations (and even if it is, Mass Media will not use this to undermine the meaning of the demonstration) and the driver in the car next to me is NOT pissed off!

I am 30 something…

This year I got married…

In my favorite pair of jeans, in a small town hall, with no diamond ring, no huge wedding cake, no themed reception…  by choice (thank God!) not by necessity.

At 30-something according to experts my “eggs” are getting less-er and frail-er!…

I am not getting one bit anxious about it because I don’t want to have any children.

But what if I did?… WHAT IF…???

What can I tell to other women out there, like me who do get nervous because they want to have children (although most of them admittedly already have and try to raise them against all odds, amidst absolute chaos)?

Should I tell them children can be raised with a 400€-something monthly unemployment aid that the state assigned to me for the reassuring duration of one, single year after my dismissal?

Should I tell them children can be raised with just one partner’s salary (which is nowhere near the average European one for, it goes without saying, the same position, years of experience, education/qualifications) as our only income?

And please, oh please don’t take me to that sweet good-old-clichés place…

…where, in all good intentions and thoughtfulness I know, friends and family usually blur out the following:

“When a baby comes somehow, something happens and you find a way”…

“We are Greeks and Greek families, aka grandparents, always help (financially as well as… physically!) raise their grandchildren”…

…or, my favorite one, “children only need love”… Cue the “All-you-need-is-love” tune…

So now I know I’m being bitch-y about it but all the above sound both delusional and scary –to me [need I stress that more?  My stream of thought is no universal truth and hale alleluia for that, the world would only be a crazier place!] :

I need to know precisely where I stand… literally most of the times plus psychologically, mentally and foremost financially before I start planning a family…

… and planning being the operative word I am, for better or for worse, not much of a bohemian so I can’t let go to the famous spur of the moment. Sometimes I even think I hate the sonof%$** (here’s some more dirty language for ya!)…

Plus, at 30 something, I’m crazy selfish too and I would like to be able to rely entirely on my own… pockets!

What the hell, when 18 we thought at 30 we would be kicking some serious a$$… financial independence was a sine qua non!

However, here I am at 30 something all truthful to Greek-standards, still supported by my dad…

I guess, on top of it all, I’m spoiled as well!

I am 30 something …

In a country “Titanic-ally” sinking (we’ve crashed on an iceberg all right!) expecting a currency we harried to “euro-replace” in the 2000’s, now to become an answer to all our problems…

An old friend once told me that I’m merely a system gear… because I graduated from a private college (truth be told, I was too lazy to study properly to sit the state university exams but 20 years later I’m still not sure if that was a mistake!) and I was complaining about a down-town demonstration that had forced me to walk some good miles to get to work, since all public means of transport were at a halt. Back then I felt angry and offended, now I can only give him justice… not because I accept the criticism of someone who lived in an upper-middle class area and worked for a multinational advertising company (sorry D.!) but because as a generation we are all completely politically illiterate:

We know very few, if any history at all (nobody taught us properly and we didn’t care enough to do some research on our own!)

We were not given any moral principles to follow (obviously, one should possess some to pass them on to the next generation!)

Any “ideology” we may have formed over the years stems from a system distorted to the core!

…eventually, how we voted for our governments involved either an inherited family trend and a deep belief that this “faithfulness” should come in handy some day or a “revolutionary” reaction to the family “tradition”, so we would usually go for the “opposite” party to our father’s choice… if or when we even bothered to go vote at all…

So there you have it!  All “but oh, why’s” explained thoroughly!!!

I am 30 something …

Living in a country with virtually no tomorrow…

I’m neither depressed nor pessimistic…

(Recent statistics show almost four million people are suffering from depression in Greece. About half of them, specialists say, are diagnosed with a reactive type of depression that occurs due to external factors such as the recent austerity measures)

… these are only simple and/or simplistic thoughts, you can guess I’ve got much free time for reflection, unemployed and all!

I am 30 something…

I do not despair (okay, sometimes I do!)…

I do not want to migrate (okay, sometimes I do!)…

I believe in positive thinking, good auras, balanced chakras and all…

I am not ashamed I’m Greek (okay, sometimes I am!)…

Nor do I feel like I have to “apologize” to my foreign friends about our social pathology…

-You see, my foreign friends live in foreign countries but still, even though economies are global so that they may be facing similar problems, for some inexplicable reason, only contemporary Greeks sound un-serious and clueless…

I am 30 something …

I need to keep on dreaming…

I need to keep on making future plans…

… and bear the consequences of my actions at the same time, in full accordance to Mr. Pangalos’s famous opinion… (you know which one I am referring to, please don’t make me repeat it…)

I am 30 something …

I keep calm…

I keep my sense of humor without —hopefully!— becoming bitter…

I am a little cynical… but I think I’ve always been so, recession regardless…

I am 30 something!

I am 34 as a matter of fact…

But then “I am 30 something” sounded like a much better title!

*Roma is a designated name for the branch of the Romani people with historic concentrations in Eastern Europe & the Balkans & those residing in Greece have been registered Greek citizens since the 1970’s