Done.

Well it ain't pretty but the European Union grant application I have worked non-stop on for the last week is on its way to Brussels. In the end I was like one of those students who runs out of time and gives half-ass answers but hey, maybe I'll get an easy grader. At any rate, I've come to believe that steely determination can get you through most things...that, and amazing people who can step in when you melt away in despair.

Because friends, I was almost defeated by paper. Yep, paper. It turns out that all that EU grant stuff has to be printed on A4 paper and today, deadline day, I learned that no one in this country knows what A4 paper is. A very sweet lady over the phone at Kinko's kept trying to steer me towards their large format printer, convinced I wanted something bigger than 11x17. (A4 for the record is 8.27 x 11.69 inches.) But eventually I managed to get someone on the phone who told me I could give them the dimensions and they'd cut it down to size...all 5 copies of the 70 page application (like 350 pages in all but what are my options at this point?)

Anyway, I hop it to Kinko's relieved that the package will soon be off my hands and I can put a big fat check mark over the whole affair. I was relieved you see because I have not been to Kinko's in years.

I had forgotten that Kinko's is an understaffed copy center full of highly stressed, highly caffeinated people who are all simultaneously printing their resumes, and hoping to God to save enough money to be spared the indignity of communal computing.

I'd also forgotten that Kinko's is a slow-mo PC world. (Third World Girl has "gone Mac and never gone back" since 1999 and breaks out in hives when she has to deal with anything DOS related and all that gosh-darn initializing.) And when I finally did get Word opened up, I spent a good two minutes just staring at Office XP thinking, did the application accidentally swallow Corel Draw or something? The program has shuffled around the old interface so much I couldn't even figure out how to adjust the paper size. When I did, or I think I did, I hit print and made my way over to the printer where a blinking red light next to the start button said, "Ha, ha Third World Girl, you're a sucka. When Office XP said it was printing your page, you didn't really think it was printing your page...right?"

After heading back to the computer, fiddling around some more and enduring the antagonistic stares of the unemployed clutching their flash drives and waiting for empty kiosks, I hijacked one of the three workers who was in the service center and demanded she come help me figure out the task. She was pleasant enough but it took her five minutes of checking and unchecking menu boxes, changing the printer's bypass tray, reloading the paper, checking for paper jams and punching "resize" keys on the printer's key pad to get a single test page of my 70 page document to print. I could tell she was relieved when that one page purred out and took that as her cue to flee. "You'll figure out the rest," she said returning to folding and trimming behind the service desk.

Needless to say I did not. I sat there battling the Properties Tab in MSWord and watching the time mount on my credit card and I thought, forget this. Screw you EU. This little Third World filmmaker has given it the best she can. All I had but it just wasn't enough. Then hubby called and of course he told me to snap out of it and fixed everything with his connections cause he's just a super people person and always knows the right dude who can print and copy your stuff and cut it down to A4 size for nothing. (No, you cannot have the connect.) And so at the end of a very long week, I've learned that hard, focused work can get you a long way but most of the times you can't finish the journey without a whole lot of help.

And I got to say the EU's crazy, obtuse questions helped me discover a couple things about the documentary and the grant's fixation on having you identify partner organizations made me form alliances I didn't have a week ago. So even if we don't get a cent, I think it's been a net gain. Plus, I did miss the entire Republican National Convention because of it!


And now, excuse me, I have to crawl in to bed and get some well-earned sleep.