Much better day

8/1/09 8:16 PM

I feel a lot more successful today. I went to four employment agencies and left my CV (resume, for all you American-speakers) at each one of them. Two weren’t very friendly or helpful, but two were extraordinarily warm and friendly. All four said that things were slow and this was a bad time to be looking for a job—tell me something I don’t know!—but that you never know, there might be something there anyway. The two nice ones actually took the time to sit down and talk with me, and they were both very impressed with my resume. “You’d check all the boxes,” one said, “if we only had boxes to be checked.” He had a lead, though, perhaps a charity called the Trussell Trust would want me. No promises, he said, but he’d give the head guy there a call and ask him to look at my CV.

I also made a major purchase today, a mobile broadband dongle so I can connect to the internet from my laptop wherever, without needing to fuss with cords. It’s expensive, but it’s pay-as-you-go instead of contracts, and it supposedly has enough credit on it for a full year’s worth of use.

Of course, the salesman said, a full year’s worth for a low-usage person. For me, it might last the whole six months. It might not, but then again, it might. It was twice as expensive as the other option, but it’ll last longer before I have to top it up again, and top-ups can get expensive. We’ll see how it does.

So, let’s see… I went to employment agencies today, went to Carphone Warehouse (their salespeople sucked, and I left without buying anything because they couldn’t explain why one dongle was better or worse or even just different than another), went to Phones 4 u (their name sucks, because that’s not how you spell ‘for you,’ but within a minute of stepping in the door I had a very friendly salesdude asking me how he could help and explaining my options). Phones 4 u got my money, and I got their dongle.

Heh. Dongle. Another funny word.

I wandered around in the cathedral for about an hour as well. It was so wonderful in there, peaceful, soft… it was like the outside world was muted by those stone walls. I spent a lot of time just looking at their new font. It’s a fantastic piece of art, really. I have a picture, but pictures are hard to get onto Mother Ann’s computer, so you’ll just have to wait for it. Let me try to explain.

Take a… 5-foot? 6-foot? square, and push the sides in so they’re rounded, and now you have a 4-pointed star. Now extended that star down to the ground from a bit above waist-height, and taper it to a much smaller star. Balance it on that. Now take the four corners at the top and tug them down just enough so they’re curling toward the floor.

Now fill it with water.

The font in the middle is so flat that you can see a reflection of the ceiling above, or of people walking past, or the angel faces statues (more on that in a minute). The water seems still, but it’s moving, it has to be. Because the corners are all curling down, the water flows off of them and gently arcs to the floor, to drains that have padding in them to muffle the sound of the water hitting it. The centre, though… it’s so flat, with just the barest hint of a ripple to suggest movement. A guide told me that one man actually mistook it for marble and set his camera on it while he dug in his bag. Oops!

For the cathedral’s 750th birthday, an artist created 7.5 giant angel faces out of stone. Just the faces, though, they meld back into to craggy rock, usually around the hairline, and the stone’s flaws are visible. Their expressions are simultaneously serene and sad and contemplative, and the more I study their faces, the more I like them. There are four of these faces around the font, and those four have names: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. In addition to the faces, around the font a sound system was installed, and there’s sometimes a very quiet instrumental piece playing. It sets off the area of the angels and the font from the rest of the cathedral by sound alone, and it lends to the serene nature of this space.

Elsewhere in the cathedral is a large Christmas tree, and I stood outside the library door for a while, wishing Suzanne would open it even though she didn’t know I was there. I walked around the entire building and studied carvings as close as I could get. I smiled over the obvious typo (and attempted correction), and I walked out into the cloisters and the graveyard in the centre there. I found one grave that I had to take a picture of, but, again, no pictures while I’m using this computer. It’s a weathered old stone, though, and in the engraving where the letters are, moss has grown. It’s all grey, with a greenish hue in some spots, but the letters stand out in bright green moss. It’s the easiest-to-read grave of its age, and I thought it was quite lovely.