Well, first things first: I probably should have mentioned in my last post that when I whine and moan about wanting to run off to Spain and leave my dreary Welsh life behind, I have no intention of actually doing that. I got myself here and it doesn't make much sense to leave now, especially with the Eisteddfod--the one thing I've really been looking forward to--only about a week away. And in any case I bought my plane ticket here on a cheap-ass discount ticket site that won't let you make any alterations, so I'd have to buy a one-way ticket back to the US outright and I simply don't have the funds for that sort of nonsense.
My updates for this week start with the gripping tale of encountering my first giant resident spider. Actually, it was more like the giant resident spider association took a vote and they all decided to reveal themselves to me at once. Friday night around midnight, just as I was getting ready for bed, I noticed a really freaking enormous spider hanging in the space between my desk and my wardrobe. The next hour of my life was spent in a state of frozen terror. At first, I thought maybe the spider was dead, because it wasn't moving, but while its body was small, with its legs it was roughly the size of my palm, and I figured there was no way a spider that big had been there for the past two weeks and I hadn't noticed it. So I was forced to wage an epic inner battle: to act against my non-meat-eating conscious and kill a spider that I knew wasn't actually going to hurt me (which would also mean getting close enough to kill it and risk getting dead spider gunk all over one of my shoes or books or whatever), or to try to find the courage to go to sleep with a really freaking enormous spider only about six feet away. I went downstairs at one point to try to find a flyswatter or something, but turns out I was so paranoid about spiders that I didn't want to touch anything lest there be spiders hiding behind it. I even thought about calling my parents to ask them what I should do. Around 2am (no, seriously, I spent two hours stressing about this spider) I told myself it was just a spider, it would stay in its web, I was going to go to bed and deal with it in the morning.
Then, of course, I slept terribly all night and woke up in the morning...and the spider was gone. Lovely.
That morning I also found another giant (though slightly smaller) resident spider in my bathroom.
Long story short, my landlord came to my rescue and caught the spiders for me--didn't even kill them! Just caught them and put them outside. And then he showed me where the vacuum was so that I could deal with any future resident spiders on my own. And he also asked Bethan, the cleaning woman, to vacuum out all the dusty corners of my room, so I now live in a certified spider-free residence.
On Saturday I went to the Nantgaredig festival with Frances & family (after sitting around my house for two hours...Frances said she'd pick me up at eleven; she didn't actually come to get me til around 1:30). I got to meet the headmaster of the Welsh-speaking primary school, and also an American family who are friends of the magazine and were visiting the area for a few weeks, plus a few of Ed and Tom's friends. It was Ed's birthday, so there was lots of cheap beer, and cake, and a bunch of guys who came over and spent the afternoon shooting air rifles and teaching me how to fire a gun. That night I went out in Carmarthen for a bit with Ed and his friends, and it went about how you'd expect it to go with one American female out drinking with a group of Welsh guys. It was fun, but I made the very smart choice to have Frances come pick me up around 11:30 instead of staying out all night and crashing on some stranger's floor at 6am. So Sunday morning when all the guys woke up hungover halfway to death, I was very happily in my own bed.
Sunday I had dinner with my landlords, which turned into a two-hour-long affair featuring intense discussions of American and British politics.
Monday I accompanied Rhidian's elementary school on a trip to the beach. Of course, it wasn't nearly warm enough to swim, but at least it didn't rain, so it was a pretty good trip. I had a herd of twelve-year-old girls following me around all day asking things like "What do you call trousers?" and "Say 'tomato!'" I helped Rhid's team in the sandcastle competition. I had an autistic eleven-year-old boy ask me a barrage of questions--"what's your name? what's your mom's name? what's your dad's name? what color is your mom's hair? what color is your dad's hair? do you have a car? what is your car's name? what is your mom's car's name?" and so on and so forth--then tell me my name was "Prince Emily" and ask to marry me. Little kids are exhausting! By the end of the day, I was covered in sand and ready for bed.
Tuesday was work. Cataloging and answering phones and generally just wasting my time.
Wednesday I went to the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show, which was especially cool because I got a fancy press pass that got me into just about anywhere I wanted to go. Basically the Royal Welsh was like state fair meets flea market meets food festival, so I spent the morning wandering around looking at Welsh things to buy, and the afternoon looking at the livestock (do you have ANY IDEA how huge cows are? Cause they're HUGE. And TERRIFYING). I got a seat in the bandstand to watch the sheep dog demonstration, and also saw part of the "dancing diggers" show, which was about a dozen of those giant tractor-bulldozer-thingys driving around in synchronization while music played and using their hydraulics to lean forward or backward and shoot colored smoke out of their exhaust pipes. Sounds dumb, but was actually pretty cool. In the evening I met up with Ffion, who I'd met at dinner with my landlords a week or two ago, and one of her friends, so we checked out the camper van display and the pigs and the goats (side note: goats are totally awesome) and the food exhibit.
Thursday Frances passive-aggressively made me go back to cataloging, which made me angry because if we were in the US, I could sue her for making me do bitch work all day without paying me. Internships are supposed to be learning experiences, and I'm pretty sure putting 993 lines worth of catalog information into an Excel spreadsheet doesn't really count as learning.
Thursday I also became so fed up with the lack of professionalism, amount of inconsiderateness, and degree to which I've been taken advantage of here that I actually understand the sensation of being so angry you start to see red. What finally pushed me over the edge was seeing the proofs for the latest issue of the magazine, which has been due to come out about every day that I've been here and still hasn't been published. This issue contains not only at least one full-length article that I edited, but also a couple short blurbs that I either edited, or wrote in their entirety, by which I mean they are completely original and 100% my intellectual property. Despite that fact, I'm not credited anywhere on the articles. Fine--they often don't credit authors right on the articles, and it'd be strange to credit an editor on every single article she worked on. But what really got me is that I'm not even credited on the staff page at the front of the magazine. Yeah, that's right, I've spent eight hours a day, five days a week doing menial tasks for that magazine, not to mention the numerous articles I've edited and the few that I've written in their entirety, and my name appears nowhere in that issue. That's beyond under-appreciation. That makes me wish I was in the US so I could sue for the rights to have my intellectual property at least credited to me.
Anyway, I'm going to stop talking about it there, because once I get going I have trouble refraining from long, heated rants on this particular subject.
This morning Frances was twenty minutes late picking me up. Didn't even bother to call to say she was going to be late. And this comes right on the heels of Wednesday night, when she was fifteen minutes late picking me up at the train station when I got back from the Royal Welsh, despite the fact that I'd told her hours beforehand when the train would be in. It was also raining very heavily and there was no shelter on the train platform.
I'm also peeved because the Dylan Thomas photo shoot fell through and Frances hasn't made any plans for the Dylan Thomas house visit yet, I was supposed to go on the architectural salvage trip today but it's now been postponed til tomorrow (even though tomorrow is Saturday and I really, REALLY don't want to be doing magazine work on the weekend), and I haven't heard a word about the rescue mountaineering article I was supposed to do. Whatever. Three more weeks and I'm done.
I'll end on a happy note: it's not raining today! Huzzah!
No comments:
Post a Comment