Watch Her Climb

Good Aussie girls living on the other end of the world like to reconnect with home in little ways. So whether that's listening to Hamish and Andy podcasts on the subway, dancing insanely whenever Jet comes on in a Brooklyn bar, waking up at unearthly hours of the morning to watch AFL footy, or keeping The Age on our home page, we do it.

This means that at times, we get overrun by Aussie news stories that have no meaning or place in the scheme of things (did you hear the Bronx zoo found their lost cobra? And yeah, there's still stuff going down in Libya) but mean a lot to our family friends left at home, and provide opportune Facebook status discussion points.

Clarkey is the new cricket captain? Oh, really. The Gold Coast Sun debut this weekend? I wonder who's flying down to Brissie. Coles have taken up arms against the rest of the universe over their quest to own the heart, soul, blood and guts of every Aussie housewife? Okay, old news.

But this one has been clogging my RSS and Facebook feed just that little bit too much. It's something I sure as hell don't want to see now.

Aussie dollar, little battler? Up to $1.04. Projected UP TO $1.08 IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

And that's when I bang my head against the desk. Twice, for good measure.

Educational Disparities

This weekend was a momentous occasion for me.

Sure, I passed said momentous occasion by sitting on my couch (read: futon) with a glass of Pinot Noir and this month's Vogue (damn, Rihanna is hot, and awesome, and I love her, and I shouldn't read fashion magazines for a reason - in fact why do I read them? I don't actually look at the fashion) because I was too sick to leave the house all weekend - but no, the momentous occasion was not having my first ever Friday night home alone, though that's a pretty big deal too.

No, this past Saturday, in a tiny industrial town in the Victorian region of Gippsland, at a university campus that has been the destination of many half-faxed essays and panicky emails over the last five years - I was awarded my university degree.

Actually, that's degreeZZZ, bitches.

Turns out - and I had no way of knowing this, as the good folk at Monash don't believe in sending you emails once you graduate, which makes me presume they would've had to send me an old-fashioned postal notification of this fact - that my in absentia graduation application was granted - for March 26 or thereabouts. Meaning lucky I hadn't hinged on doing the old cap and gown thing during the April session if I'd made it home for a visit - as clearly the Monash grownups had other plans.

Either way, I'm hoping the cardboard cylinder containing a concoction of blood, tears and chocolate crumbs along with the pieces of paper that will somehow determine my life are on their way to my parents' address in Melbourne. Because after keeping 7-11 in business with that much chocolate and shedding that many floods of tears... well, you'd kinda hope I got something out of it.

Which brings me to the New York translation: Apparently, in this side of town, undergraduate degrees just don't go.

The minute university studies are mentioned, especially for someone above the age of 22 - it's automatically assumed to be a masters. Forget the stress and robbery of adolescence that is VCE; the relentless academic rigor that is Australian universities: All of a sudden, in the big city, your BA is equivalent to whipping out a Certificate II from Sunshine TAFE (though of course not to shun the high educational quality of Sunshine TAFE and environs). Even a lady like me with my BA and BBusCom (read all those letters, please, kiddies), is suddenly missing the M and the A and a whole lot of qualifications.

So, here it is, New York. My fancypants Monash University degreeZZZ will be on their way to these shores momentarily. And I dare you to tell me I need to haul my ladyness back to school for another piece of paper, because that's not happening for a while yet.

Other expats to the shores of the USA, I'd love to hear from you: Have you struggled to translate your Australian or European qualifications to American standards? Leave me a comment below or throw me a tweet @rishegee. 

Soundtrack to New York Subway

Have you ever watched a music video and watched some insanely pretty girl, hair half mussed up to show she is "just like us", sitting and staring blankly on a subway car, at some handsome stranger on the platform/in the next car/ in her imagination, or at the scenes of her life that have just gone by, with nary a care.... Oh wait, just got totally distracted there. Um, yeah.

So you watch these video clips, and all of a sudden the girl gets up, her weirdly-cut-but-supremely-fashionable swingy hair swinging in just the way it's supposed to, eyes all darkly made up looking very soulfully at the camera, and strutting through the subway tunnels in her impractical spikey heels that I can't imagine ever spending a day wearing in New York City. She keeps staring soulfully all the way through the dank, festy tunnels and never slips on the wet concrete. She strides up the stairs, pushing her way through commuters; and never has to stop and let a fat woman with a trolley full of groceries go through, nor does she end up in the inevitable commuter crush when everyone else is going the opposite direction. She makes the subway her kingdom, this woman does, and she does it all with the most beautiful music playing.

It's almost like the entire place can hear her secret soundtrack because they're all responding to her whims.

Well, the other day I was heading to the Lower East Side. Despite its proximity to the edge of the Island, where you would assume Brooklyn is just a stone's throw away, it turns out the subway situation is messy and complicated and requires a mere three transfers for me to get to my mate's place. Turns out the three transfers gave me ample time to practice my subway strut, and what do you know?

I was totally in a soundtrack of my own.

Ludicrous! I tell you.

Today, I spent a total of 40 not-cheap minutes (out of my sadly limited 600-minute-per-month-T-mobile plan) on the phone with the behemoth, those evil corporate souls that cause me to tear my hair (and those of my workmates nearby) out in frustration...
BANK OF AMERICA.

Now I'm sure some Online Reputation Manager is seeing this right now and going, oh dearie me, how do we win this customer back? And as per my conversation with the lady today, the lovely Lori, my associate, and her supervisor the lovely Laura, I will say: It's not their fault. Lori, Laura, they did their best. But goddammit, herein lies the issue, and I will try to be brief:

THEY HELD MY PAYCHEQUE.

And they didn't just hold it, for, shall we say, a decent period of time. For example, 24 hours. Honestly, I'd prefer it to be just an overnight hold, available next business day, but, okay, let's pretend they're really incompetent (because they are). 24 hours? Fine.

But no. The bastards are holding on to my paycheque (and I WILL persist in calling it a cheque rather than an irritatingly stupid check spelling, as if I can't pronounce the q...) for nearly THREE WHOLE DAYS, from this morning, when I casually strolled across the sunlit boulevard to wait in a smelly ATM  queue (that I called a line, even to the man who didn't understand it when I asked him if he was in it) to deposit the cheque during the workday so it might have the chance of being cleared early... . until FIVE PM ON THE 3RD, that's Thursday, biatches. A full two and a half days away. So I'm calling it three.

Ludicrous.

I did also mention to the lovely Lori and Laura that I have experienced banks in other countries, over Europe and Australia (I failed to mention Israel, where the situation is way beyond the realm of imagined retardation) but indeed, in Oz where something like this would NEVER HAPPEN. NEVER HAPPEN, I TELL YOU!

Seriously. The hold is beyond insane, and I was supposed to pay my rent tonight. Sorry, roomies.