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apropos of Easter (well not really but anyway) -- i'd like to announce how glad i am to know two incredibly smart, super-knowledgeable-in-their-respective-fields professionals. and am more than glad (am damn-straight-lucky) to be able to turn to them for advice through the continuing saga that is My Italian Work Permit Adventure. note that the word "Adventure" is being used euphemistically. very euphemistically.
anyway, the two professionals are (and this is not in order of preference, more like in order of how i called them this week to blub about this new round of Most Interesting Complications):
1 *my immigration lawyer.
bless him, saint him, knight him -- i don't care. i owe him a document/client/case management system and he *still* calls me back. and he still knows more about Italian immigration law (otherwise known Bureaucratic Hellfire) than any five people i know put together. at the risk of sounding like a commercial endorsement (not a very high risk though -- i think this is still a humble enough blog that i know most people reading this, and am pretty sure i would know if any of them were considering immigrating to Italy; something tells me they would have let me know...) -- his name is Papperini and boy does he know what he's doing.
2 *my as-yet unremunerated accountant / commercialista.
this man is past making me wonder why he's so nice to me. now i just try not to think about it too much in case i jinx things and he decides he has better things to do with his time than advise a twenty-something extracomunitaria with really specific (and not-altogether-unchanging) tax and legal circumstances.
both of these men are living proof that the phrase "Italian professional" is not -- after all -- an oxymoron, and that here too, you can find individuals who not only know their fields and are almost-unfalteringly efficient in the ways in which they treat and deal with you -- but that there are people here who approach, analyze and react to problems with the idea of finding solutions to them.
wow.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giordano Bruno, Roma]
[mercoledì 30 marzo 2005 ore 22:01:13] [¶]
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Easter was quiet. well, as quiet as it can be when you share a metro stop with the focal point of all Catholicism. am beginning to worry about when tourist season *really* starts...
walked through Trastevere and saw an exhibition of the New York Photo League. there is so much in that town that is black-and-white magic. there has always been so much. i don't think there is any other city, that can claim a piece of photo paper the way New York City can, the way it always has. it's like the Marilyn Monroe or the the Jackie O of urban photography. for them too, it seems that all you had to do was point and shoot, and you had a frameful of something eternally indescribable, unmistakeable.
who was it -- MGM Studios? -- that invented the phrase, "star quality"?
no other city i know, has star quality quite like New York.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giordano Bruno, Roma]
[martedì 29 marzo 2005 ore 22:11:02] [¶]
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so. when you feel like your project may not quite come in on budget, and that this may be the end of the world (or worse -- when your client tells you this *is* the end of the world), here's a little daily perspective in the shape of what a friend of mine is well, "doing for a living" -- at Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC.
talk about the challenges of measuring success...
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giordano Bruno, Roma]
[martedì 08 marzo 2005 ore 21:41:44] [¶]
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sitting in my new-and-tiny apartment.
it gets a little chilly in the mornings but i am damn well not going blame it on these beautiful stone floors. they are this funny pale-pink color (and you know they must be okay if i am speaking pleasantly about pale-pink). like someone rubbed wine into them very carefully a long time ago, with a sponge. or maybe Max Factor 76. or maybe not.
anyway. so it is a little chilly in the mornings, but that likely has way more to do with all this freak weather we've been having (minus four... minus FOUR!!!) and hardly anything to do with the aforesaid slightly-flushed-looking stone.
tomorrow morning i will be able to open my bedroom window (if i am mad) and look out into the courtyard that comes with my new-and-tiny apartment. i have to share this courtyard with other tiny-apartment dwellers, but you know what that's fine because this courtyard, it has palm trees in it. whoa.
and for days like these when you can't quite shuffle out into the courtyard to sit under a palm tree in your slippers, you have your exposed-stone and marble bookshelves and your Proper Writing Desk and a fixed telephone line (Internet! even if it's dialup! Internet!!!), and your Very Comfortable Easy Chair With Footrest. (a writer apparently lived here before me. i am grateful for his chair and for the left-behind Michelin guide. but am not quite so sure about all the Terry Pratchett novels, and the need for nineteen saucepans -- all mostly of the same size.)
i like that i am five minutes from the Ottaviano stop, and five minutes from Hubbub and Mayhem (and TWO minutes from the very large and extremely cheap Roman flower market) and smack-dab in the middle of nights that are as quiet as Cortona.
actually quieter, because there's no really really bad drum band practice at 10pm.
i like it here.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giordano Bruno, Roma]
[venerdì 04 marzo 2005 ore 22:06:19] [¶]
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