Out with a whimper

Today officially marks my last day at this internship. I have avoided remarking on my work and the FAO up until now mostly because it has been rather lacklustre. I sit in an office, work on a computer, occasionally attend meetings. My supervisor and boss are both wonderful professionally and personally, but they both left a few weeks ago for vacation. Most employees here have actually departed for August holidays which has left the labyrinthine halls of this office building eerily quite and empty.

I have been moderately pleased with the internship, mostly because it has allowed me to be in Rome for the summer and has put little pressure on me as far as workload. I'm not sure how much professional development it has helped me with, however.

I would be more pleased with the end of this whole thing had I not received an absolutely confidence-shattering email from someone outside of FAO criticizing the report I have been working on all summer and basically questioning my knowledge of agricultural systems and policy. Since I have been debating whether this is an area I am qualified to work in or even interested in pursuing, the email hit a sensitive spot and has cast a pall over what otherwise would have been my neutral-to-positive feelings over this internship.

I don't mean to say that I am leaving with ill-will or bad feelings. It's just that I have been putting off thinking about my educational and career choices for much of the summer and now I am reminded that this hasn't been a perfect fit for me. I am trying not to let my wounded pride over this email color my desire to finish this degree, but it does touch on some of my misgivings and insecurities about my lack of passion about this subject matter and my relative inexpertise.

But I will have time to consider all of that when I am back in the States. Until then, I have lunch plans to bid farewell to friends at FAO, dinner/drinking plans with friends after work and then a weekend in Pompeii followed by a week in Croatia. Wish me well on my travels and I'll see you back in the U.S. of A.

Adult life Italian style

Okay. Sometimes I just need a reality check with the whole "Am I a grown-up or not" thing. A conversation with an Italian friend this weekend provided just that. I should probably clarify that this guy is married, does his share of the housework, is great with taking care of his young daughter, and in general is a non-machismo type of regular dude. Our conversation went something like this:

HIM: My brother [who is in his early 40s] still lives at home with my mom. I think he is reluctant to get move out because my mom does all his cooking, cleaning, laundry.

ME: Your mother doesn't mind having to take care of him?

HIM: That's the way things are here. In Italy, everyone just lives with their parents until they get married at whatever age that might be and until then our moms take care of everything. I had never washed a dish, cleaned my own clothes or made my own bed until I got married. I really liked ironing for the first few months of our marriage because I had never done it before. The novelty was kind of fun.

ME: Right. And your wife had to teach you how to do all of that stuff?

HIM: Oh, yeah. Still to this day, my mom does all of the cooking and cleaning when I visit her at home. She makes my bed every morning, cleans my room, puts socks on my feet when I'm sleeping so I won't get cold. It's great to have dinner made for you every night and then just get up when it's over and not worry about cleaning up.

ME: And this doesn't bother you?

HIM: No. I like knowing that my mom loves me so unconditionally.

ME: This doesn't undermine your self-image as an independent, self-sufficient adult who is capable of functioning in society without the help of his mother?

HIM: What now?

ME: Never mind.

Mid-Summer Crisis

I'm having a bit of an adult-life crisis right now. It all started last week when the woman with whom I am staying commented that I get along so well with her daughter that I could be her older sister! This kid is one and a half. I thought to myself "Hell, I could easily be this kid's mother." Which made me think that I am probably about the same age as the woman and her husband which then led me to start pondering the meaning of being an adult and the social indicators that make people treat you like an adult.

I know that part of my existential crisis stems from the fact that I am resolutely in my late twenties and I am back in school and doing an unpaid internship, which is frankly beneath me given my job experience and skills. As a student (and an intern), I tend to get lumped in with the younger demographic, but even in my professional life I still got grouped with all of the other twenty-somethings who were either single or partnered-but-unmarried. So many people in our generation are marrying later or not at all and may not be choosing to have families but we lack any social mile markers for becoming an older and wiser adult other than marriage and kids.

I am feeling this acutely because I am spending so much time with people in the early twenties and like I said people treat us as being in the same life-stage. But we're not. I want and need different things, especially out of a job, than I did when I was 23. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel if I was married or had kids, people would treat me more like the adult that I am (even though I am very aware that having a spouse and/or children does not in any way make you more of a grown-up). Since I am not interested in getting married or birthing any babies right now, are there any other social short cuts to separating myself from my younger colleagues, co-workers, fellow students?

Perhaps I am being paranoid about this whole thing. What do you think about all of this? How are you treated at work/at school/by your family? Does turning thirty help?

Ex Libris

It has been hot in Rome. The temperature has been hovering between uncomfortably sweaty even when not moving and mind melting (actual temperature is measured in Celsius which I have not quite mastered yet). This has made me and the rest of inhabitants of Rome very irritable.

After a particularly trying day of standing in long lines in the sun to get into the Vatican and being crushed by tourists in the Sistine Chappell, I snapped at my very sweet but ever-present Chinese roommate. I was attempting to get some peace and quiet by suggesting that he do some summer reading and he responded with "I don't read." Now, this guy has a master's degree from an English university so I know he is capable of reading (in multiple languages) so that isn't the problem. He just doesn't see the value.

Since he seems to have a lot of time on his hands, has a woeful ignorance of anything Italian or Roman despite the fact that he lives here, and is constantly asking me to teach him English swear words, I convinced him that he could solve all of these problems by simply reading. I browbeat him into taking a Complete History of Rome, a gory crime novel, and Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" into his room with him.

I feel a bit bad that I was clearly impatient, appalled, and perhaps a bit condescending about his lack of reading. But really. Reading is one of life's greatest pleasures and in the heat of a Roman summer there is no better distraction.

The visuals

Here are a couple of photos of me. First one is my friend Cara and I at the opera. Below is me bike riding on the Appian Way. Note that I am actually on a dirt path besdie the Appian Way, because the Romans paved the thing with huge boulders which are not so fun to ride your bike over.

I *heart* Roma

Okay, Rome, I think I have a crush on you. It's hard not to fall for such a historic and lively city and I know everything looks better in the summer. Still I thought I could resist. I still have a thing for Chicago and I was just starting to see Boston in a different light.

Rome has a certain inherent romance that is impossible to ignore in the summer. It's not that I get to eating gelato in an old square. It's that I am eating gelato in a square where a theologian was burned at the stake for speaking out against the Christian faith. I don't just read a book in the park, I read a book underneath fragrant orange trees in the shade of an 8th century church in a park overlooking the city. A leisurely bike ride outside the city is actually a bike ride along the Appian Way past the catacombs and farmers' fields of ancient Rome.

Rome is also the most welcoming city I have ever visited. It is a small but important thing that I get asked (in Italian) for directions almost every day. I am not singled out or shunned because I look northamerican. People seem to think I belong in this city. And they don't mind so much that my Italian is broken and that I subsitute Spanish and English for anything I don't know in Italian.

It also doesn't hurt that I am tan and relaxed for the first time in ages and that I have effectively put the stress of my schoolling and career on pause for a few months. This is the much needed vacation after an unfullfilling and emotionally draining year.

Do I miss some things from the States? Of course. Do I wish certain people could share this wondeful summer with me? Definately. And maybe this summer wouldn't be so great if I weren't returning in the middle of August.

But, right now I am content to love this city.

Milan

I travelled to Milan this weekend to visit with a friend from grad school who happened to be passing through. These are my impressions: Milan has a lot of banks, an obscene number of high fashion clothing stores, too much kissing in public, and sidewalks too small for outdoor seating.

The only other tourist we saw were in frightenly large groups (30-40+) and I've decided that I should coin a term for tourists who travel in packs. Similar to a pride of lions and a murder of crows, an annoyance of tourists are groups of foreigners numbering more than 6 who travel, often on a chartered bus, to other countries armed with cameras, fanny packs, and sun visors who can be distinguished by their inability to speak the native language, their excessive pointing at monmuments, and their strange habit of following an umbrella or flag wielding leader.

Best moment of the trip: the guy in front of me waiting to get into the big cathedral was turned away because he was wearing (ugly) shorts. In Milan, even God has good fashion sense.

Warning: Heated Rant Ahead

The immigration bill has once again flopped in the Senate. I am very upset for a number of reasons. Yes, the bill was flawed. Yes, it was probably doomed from the start because it was a Bush agenda item (a point driven home by the NY Times headline: Immigration Bill Dies in Senate; Defeat for Bush). I am upset because we desperately need reform on this issue and we, as a nation, are not going to get this reform because the debate around immigration has spiraled so completely and illogically off path.

This should never be about reward and punishment. The debate should be about economic and social effiency. It should be about creating an effective system to codify and legitimize what the free market has shown us is most economically expedient (namely, immigration of a wide range of laborers including unskilled workers). It should be about acknowledging that our previous laws were fundamentally flawed.

Bear with me for a metaphor. It is as if Congress had set an arbitrary speed limit for a busy highway at 30 mph. Yes, it is safer, but it is inefficient and so everyone speeds. There are a few traffic cops that sometimes ticket people, but for the most part people drive 50 mph so that they can get to work on time. They are technically breaking the law but only because the law was poorly designed. Congress now talks about changing the law. Logically, they would just raise the speed limit (by how much is debatable) and yes, they probably would need a few more traffic cops to ensure that once the speed limit was raised that the new law could be enforced. But the debate instead of being about by how much the speed limit should be changed it is focused on punishing the people who have sped on this highway. First of all, impossible. Second, pointless.

Likewise, it is retrogressive and senseless to talk about punishing people who "broke" immigration laws. It is widely acknowledged by anyone who is more than superficially familiar with the system that current immigration laws have some huge and glaring gaps, that illegal immigration has been effectively filling those gaps for twenty years, and that our economy and the economies of many other nations have benefited from the violation of the current laws.

In conclusion: Not doing anything does not make this problem go away and focusing the debate around this distorted law and order rhetoric hamstrings the progress towards viable solutions.
This is a complicated issue, America, let's put on our capitalist hat, cut the crap, and actually get this done.

It has finally come to this: blog as a tool of procrastination from work

I am finding it a bit hard to concentrate on work today because a) there is some sort of very noisy protest or celebration occurring on the street right outside of my office and b) I hit my head on a window frame. Both of these things are making me excessively cranky as the horns and shouting from the protest are making my headache worse. What these people are protesting (or celebrating), I have no idea. They are carrying banners and flags but the words are printed in light blue against white and I can't read them from the fifth floor.

Instead of continuing my research about energy consumption in agriculture, I have decided to update my blog. I thought it would make me feel better to talk about gelato, so here we go.

Flavors that I've eaten: apricot, coconut, coffee, toasted almond, cream, wild strawberry, rose, chocolate truffle (ohmygod), chocolate orange, baklava, poppy seed, flower of milk (no idea), fruits of the forrest (but really raspberry), watermelon, and cantelope.

If you think that I'm being obessive about gelato, let me tell you that everyone here talks about and eats gelato all the time. Two of my friends actually got into a heated debate about gelato versus granitas and we interrupted our evening plans to trek all the way across town for a showdown. People take their gelato eating seriously here. (The granita-gelato war was a happy tie as passionfruit granita and chocolate cinnamon gelato are both food of the gods and no one goes home unsatisfied after sampling both).

Get scared, get very scared

I justed edited a report a FAO about the future of food securtiy looking at issues of climate change, energy use, and population growth. This is some terrifying shit.

• By 2050, the global population will grow to 9.2 billion people and all of that growth will occur in developing countries (that's in our lifetime).
• In the next decade, the majority of the world's population will live in cities.
• Agricultural production will have to increase by 80% in the next 40 years to meet growing food need and global climate change, water scarcity, and increase climate extremes will present new challenges to agricultural production.

Add to this all of the scary things we already know about climate change and the fact that biofuels (using agricultural products for energy, such as corn for ethanol) have recently exploded into the global sector and it becomes very complex and frightening.

And solutions? Well, I guess that's our job to figure out how in the hell we are going to deal with this.

Italian: not actually Spanish with more hand gestures

Living in a country where you don't speak the language can be problematic at times. I tried to order a beer the other day and to the waiter's(and my own) frustration, we couldn't seem to accomplish the simple task of communicating. Turns out that after I order un bierre that I was then called upon to decide bottle or draft, not exactly the first lesson in my Italian phrase book. Sometimes just saying the Spanish word with the right inflection works well--like for directions. I'm a pro at asking directions. I do it just because I can even when I know where I'm going.

With most other things, Spanish helps a little but there is a reason that Italian is a different language. It also helps that Italian is the first accent that we learn to imitate and to the untrained ear, it actually sounds a lot like the sterotype. There are also suprising things in Italian, like a lot more 'g's in places I wouldn't expect them. Gli is an actual word that I'm supposed to be able to pronouce. So, I'm muddling through with a little help from Gianpietro, my Italian tutor.

Luckily, Gianpietro is the only Italian I've actually met so far. Almost everyone I work with is from somewhere else. The store owners, internet cafe operators, money changers, and just about every random person on the street is a foreigner. Italian is the common language, but even I recognize when it is spoken with an accent. Ah, Rome, the international city. Che bella sono.

The Authorities

This weekend was hopefully the closest I will ever come to living in a police state. Our Dear Leader (Prez Bush) visited Rome this week and created a huge hullabaloo in the city. First, there were the street closings and ramped up security measures. Then, because of the anti-Bush/anti-war protests and demonstration, thousands of police descended upon the city. I am staying right near the Colessum and thus right in the heart of the main through-fare for presidential sightseeing tours and protest routes.

I came out of the metro station near my apartment to find the street closed and no less than thirty five police cars, buses, armed vehicles scattered about and hundreds of young, excited police officers dressed in riot gear. It was totally surreal especially because the area is already packed to the gills with tourist of every ilk (all of whom blithely ignored the heavily armed police and continued to get their pictures taken with the Roman “gladiators” and go about their touristy business).

I walked up the blockaded street for almost a mile, encountering more police armed to varying degrees (a few with assault rifles, most with billy clubs and pistols). A group of them obliged my picture taking and chatted with me briefly. They told me to be careful since protesters at the beginning of the march had been throwing rocks at the police and there might be some violence. The protest actually was quite peaceful, though I read later that some protesters were dispearsed with tear-gas.

Despite the extra vigilance because of the protests, the police still had time to conduct an immigration/selling of illegal goods raid on the road leading up to the Forum on Sunday. As I took a short cut through the ruins of the Forum, I noticed a group of men running through the tourist throngs with what looked like bed sheets over their shoulders. At first I was confused, but then I saw the Bangladeshi man with whom I had chatted with the other day and I realized that I was witnessing an immigration raid. The men, all Bangladeshi immigrants who sold fake Prada handbags on the street near the Forum, had piled their wares into the sheets that they used to display them and were running from the police. Sure enough, a police car pulled up and a policewoman started chasing the men on foot. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to distract the officer and let the men escape. I am always curious to see how different countries deal with their immigrants. I know that the U.S. is not perfect on these matters--not by a long shot--but we do fairly well compared to most other nations.

For more on immigrants in Rome and the black market, check out this article: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8450228

Dove sono le verdure?

When I had been in Rome for four days, I realized that though I had been eating well (and constantly) I hadn't consumed any fruit or vegetables since I arrived. A crossiant for breakfast, pasta with bread for lunch, pizza or pasta or meat with a side of pasta for dinner, gelato for dessert. Italians don't like to muck up their pasta or pizza or lasanga with any veggies and I suspect that gelato, while often fruit flavored, does not actually contain any real fruit.

Now, I am not a health nut, but I did just finish a year at a nutrition school and the whole lack of vegetables unnerves me a bit. I find myself thinking "Are olives vegetables?" "What is the nutrient content of a zucchini flower?" "How I am going to get the necessary vitamins, antioxidants, and caratinoids?!" I have forced myself to forgo the pasta every other lunch and have what is inevitably a lacklustre salad. This is the problem with being forced to take nutrition classes; it is preventing me from properly enjoying what was to be my summer of gluttony.

Luckily, a glass of good wine usually quells the nutrition-school induced panic and so, for the most part, I've been eating splendidly. Zucchini flower pizza with surprise anchovies (see above), porchini mushroom ravioli, some really knock-out bruchetta, barbaqued pork ribs, and mountains of gelato.

I know that you all have been waiting with baited breath to hear all the flavors of gelato that I've tried thus far (plus I need some documentation for when I break Sarah Borron's record of 42). Here we go:

bisccotto (which may be cookie flavored)

crema di limone

plain yogurt (my fav so far)

hazelnut and chocolate

pistachio

melone

champagn

I also saw a nun order crema di cardinale (scandalous!)

Where to send those letters

Send mail to:

FAO Headquarters
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
Room B-567 Attn: Jodi Ziesemer
00100 Rome, Italy

All mail must be marked PERSONAL (unless you want UN officials to look through it first, which I don't).

Also, I promised Pope-related exploits: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19063769

A life not my own

There are some aspects of my life in Rome that are quite glamorous: the apartment where I am staying is less than a block from the Colessum, I ate gelato the other day while sitting by a fountain over-looking the Pantheon, I have an office with a window at the FAO and my very own UN pass.

I do feel that I am living someone else's life. I am staying at the apartment of a school acquaintance while she is in Africa for a few weeks which means I am surrounded by another person's furniture, pictures, personal items, but without that person. Starting work so soon after arriving here means that I don't feel like a tourist, but I don't really feel like I belong here either.

The weather has also been weird the past two days. Last night I got caught in a hail storm followed by a downpour and I had to stand beneath an overpass for almost an hour before it passed. And today I tried to have a solitary lunch at the Circo Massimo but I got rained on again.

I hope this weather and the funk that I'm in both pass soon.

Transit

To get from my (new) apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts to the place that I am staying in Rome I had to take the subway, a bus, a cab, two planes, a train, and the metro. The bus was late arriving in New York (where I flew out of) and I had less than an hour and a half to get to the airport. Luckily, I hailed a ride with a recent Indian immigrant taxi driver who managed the hour drive in less than 40 minutes (by driving on the shoulder of the road at various points, speeding over 90 mph on New York surface streets, weaving dangerously in and out of traffic, and for four white-knuckle moments, driving with his knees while he untangled his cell phone cord). Needless to say the trip from there was a relative breeze.

Rather stupidly, I arrived in Rome with only the phone number of some guy I had never met with whom I was supposed to call and arrange a meeting so that I could get the keys for the apartment where I was to stay. This involved me changing money to Euros, finding a payphone, learning how to operate said payphone, and hoping that this dude picked up his phone. All in a foreign country, while sleep deprived and jet-lagged, and in Italian (a language I don't speak).

The panic really didn't set in until my plane landed in Rome and I began to image all of the ways this might possibly go wrong. And for a few hours it did. It was pouring rain when I arrived. The only payphones in the metro station weren't accepting coins, the phone card I purchased was hopelessly enigmatic, and my cell phone wouldn't even turn on. A French couple mercifully helped me out even though my French is horri-blah and they didn't speak any English. The guy answered the phone the third time I called and even showed me around the neighborhood a little after giving me the keys.

Thus begins my European adventure....stay tuned for photos.

Just the Basics

Welcome friends, family, countrymen,

I have finally bowed to the 21st century technology as it is an easy way to keep you all apprised of my goings-on through a blog. As you know, I will be spending this summer in the Eternal City: Rome. While there, I will be "working" (for no pay) at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, but I really plan on dedicating my summer to eating as much gelato as possible, becoming addicted to Italian espresso, and learning as much as I can about the ridiculous Pope history.

I will be in Rome from June 3rd to August 18. Visitors welcome.

My work address (at which I believe you can write me care of the Organic Agriculture Department):
FAO HEADQUARTERS
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
00100 Rome, Italy

Email is always welcome: jodiziesemer (at) hotmail (dot) com (my school account is apparently iffy abroad so use this one instead).