Sunday, July 19, 2009

The many plagues

There was no plan B for what had happened, I was supposed to stay in Israel for at least a year and a half according to what was said in my interview. We had no place to stay neither in the UK nor in Brazil. The way out was to extend their stay in Brazil with her relatives, I was lucky enough to get a freelance job in Cardiff, Wales in a company where I had managed to build a reputation.

After that I went to Brazil for a month before the apartment in Glasgow vacated. There I discovered that my mother had lost a lot of money in the stock market and now was asking me and my sister to help her out. My sister and her husband had been sick and both been recently operated so the situation wasn't brilliant for my her either. I then managed to fall out with and old friend who was now really well off and had wanted to start up a CG course with me until then. Paralel to this effort I tried to set other things up in Brazil but despite a lot of effort and travelling up and down nothing seemed to work out.

The best solution was to come back to the recession hit UK and try to sort myself out here with the contacts I already had. After a few rejections in places I had taken as certain an oportunity came up to work in helping in the pre visualisation of a hollywood film "Gullivers Travels". But the dark powers of 2009 continued on their rampage, I fell sick with a very inconvenient and painfull thing in my back hole (seriously). At the same time I was never so poorly treated in a job. My immediate boss was an insecure novice girl who chose the guy with a wierd accent to show her "leadership" skills. To my "luck" the company owner was working on the project in the same room as both of us making this the perfect opportunity for her display of arrogance and insecurity to take place with no possibility of answering back.

During this entire period what kept me sane was the writing of my book "The Real Thing" about my wild youth in Rio de Janeiro. I advanced a lot with it during that month because I stayed in a convent next to work, the only available place in the outskirts. It was dead silent at night. The closest commerce was about a half an hour on foot from there. It was litterally in the middle of the countryside, no tv, and no other possibility of distractions. My writing and the pain in my backside were probably the liveliest things going on...

In the middle of the job a friend of mine sent me an e-mail saying that a job I had helped to pitch while I was in Cardiff was going to happen. I decided to leave the more glamorous job and go for this one for several reasons. The first one was because of the abuse I was getting, the second was because it was the promise of the beggining of a more enteprenerial way of placing myself in the market and thirdly was the commuting. Because of the credit crunch I decided to commute to Pinewood Studios by bus. The only thing I learned from thisis that National Express is the worst bus company I ever used. Intercity buses in Brazil are infinitely better. It was a night one where the lights could not be turned off and there was a retard "host" who imagined he was a stand up comedian because of the bus's microphone. He tried hard to amuse the passengers throughout the night with his "refined" humor about the toilet and the ethnic minorities in the bus.

It was due to him and the microscopic chairs that I could not sleep neither on the way there nor on the way back. I would end the weekends worse off than I ended my weeks.

Meanwhile we were already back in the apartment we had rented before leaving for Israel. Coming home was worse than expected, the relationship became unbearable. I wasn't welcome back, my wife wasn't working, there was constant bickering and the financial situation just made life hell. In the background there was the looming prospect of having to pay a lot of money to the British tax man. This would be a ridiculous amount when I was employed at full steam, now it just added definition to the nightmare.

In the middle of my new project, which I did at home, I received the news that my mother fell sick. She had never had anything in her entire life, and a cancer was very worrying. My sister was still passing through her hellish period and my presence was absolutely necessary. I had to go back to Brazil with little money coming in and no prospects in the horizon despite the frustrating fact that companies where I had worked (and done well) were hiring.



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