Saturday, February 28, 2009
Fab quotation from 'The News Quiz'
"The private sector is just incompetence combined with greed. At least the public sector is well-meaning incompetence."
Friday, February 27, 2009
Sleep
Oh dear lord, I am SO TIRED. I had been having difficulty sleeping again, but that appears to have lifted for the time being (*hammers forcefully on wooden table*) and now the accumulated sleep debt of 24 1/2 years appears to have hit me all at once. I have been in bed by 10 every night this week and asleep usually by midnight and habitually woken up about 10 minutes before I'm meant to start work. And I'm still constantly tired. Argh.
Meanwhile, Nik has turned into Mr Sprightly, and woke me up this morning by bouncing on the bed at 7.30 and saying cheerfully, 'I've just been for a 6-mile run!! I've been up for an hour and it's a lovely day and now I'm going to go and pro-actively do lots of useful things!!'
In fairness, it is a lovely day, but that's still no reason to be unneccessarily chirpy.
Still, this peculiar role-reversal has upset the balance of forces in the universe. I find it deeply unsettling to be the one who goes to sleep first and gets up second. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, Nik has turned into Mr Sprightly, and woke me up this morning by bouncing on the bed at 7.30 and saying cheerfully, 'I've just been for a 6-mile run!! I've been up for an hour and it's a lovely day and now I'm going to go and pro-actively do lots of useful things!!'
In fairness, it is a lovely day, but that's still no reason to be unneccessarily chirpy.
Still, this peculiar role-reversal has upset the balance of forces in the universe. I find it deeply unsettling to be the one who goes to sleep first and gets up second. Hmmm.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Self-indulgent Bob Dylan-fest
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
An Open Letter
Dear institution at which I was 85% certain I would be studying next year,
When you offered me a place last week, your tuition fees for the coming academic year had not yet been finalised. You kindly enclosed the fees from 2008/9 to give me an idea of what I might be expected to cough up and I was reasonably confident that if the money I am expecting to inherit had not come through by then, I could liquidate my savings in anticipation of said funds, pay for the masters and reimburse myself later.
This morning I received a letter advising me of your fees for 2009/10 and I notice you have spontaneously decided to create a separate category for MAs in Anthropology, which means I will be paying £1000 more than if I were studying Linguistics, Music or Small Melanesian Island Studies and approximately £1000 more than I have saved, which I would not have had to do last year.
I will spare you my rant on the failure of the education system to promote social mobility in general and MA funding in particular, but I can sort of, maybe, at a pinch see the justification in charging more for things like Law or Economics which offer a much better return on investment than Gender Studies with Zambian Literature. I can even, at a pinch, see why cinema/media students might be charged more as they probably need to use expensive audio-visual equipment and, well, if I had to pay to insure stuff I was routinely lending to students I'd probably pass on the cost if I could too. I am sure you are, as you claim, 'synonymous with intellectual excitement and academic achievement' and there may, in fact, be an enormous array of employers waiting to entice Anthropology graduates with offers of astronomic salaries and fabulous benefits, but, as a prospective student, I have done a small amount of research into this matter and failed to find evidence that it is anything like as lucrative as, say, Law or Economics.
I will not project any issues about how I should have had the courage to do something funky two years ago instead of rotting in suburbia onto you, nor take out on you my slight annoyance that my parents are willing to pay stupid money for a wedding while adamantly refusing to support me, even morally, in moving into the career I want (gift horses, mouths and all that, not to mention that it means we won't now have to feed our guests baked beans off paper plates just because my MA is costing ££££ more) but, still, YOU SUCK.
Yours sincerely,
She-who-is-furious-yet-grateful-she-is-neither-an-international-student-nor-doing-International-Relations
When you offered me a place last week, your tuition fees for the coming academic year had not yet been finalised. You kindly enclosed the fees from 2008/9 to give me an idea of what I might be expected to cough up and I was reasonably confident that if the money I am expecting to inherit had not come through by then, I could liquidate my savings in anticipation of said funds, pay for the masters and reimburse myself later.
This morning I received a letter advising me of your fees for 2009/10 and I notice you have spontaneously decided to create a separate category for MAs in Anthropology, which means I will be paying £1000 more than if I were studying Linguistics, Music or Small Melanesian Island Studies and approximately £1000 more than I have saved, which I would not have had to do last year.
I will spare you my rant on the failure of the education system to promote social mobility in general and MA funding in particular, but I can sort of, maybe, at a pinch see the justification in charging more for things like Law or Economics which offer a much better return on investment than Gender Studies with Zambian Literature. I can even, at a pinch, see why cinema/media students might be charged more as they probably need to use expensive audio-visual equipment and, well, if I had to pay to insure stuff I was routinely lending to students I'd probably pass on the cost if I could too. I am sure you are, as you claim, 'synonymous with intellectual excitement and academic achievement' and there may, in fact, be an enormous array of employers waiting to entice Anthropology graduates with offers of astronomic salaries and fabulous benefits, but, as a prospective student, I have done a small amount of research into this matter and failed to find evidence that it is anything like as lucrative as, say, Law or Economics.
I will not project any issues about how I should have had the courage to do something funky two years ago instead of rotting in suburbia onto you, nor take out on you my slight annoyance that my parents are willing to pay stupid money for a wedding while adamantly refusing to support me, even morally, in moving into the career I want (gift horses, mouths and all that, not to mention that it means we won't now have to feed our guests baked beans off paper plates just because my MA is costing ££££ more) but, still, YOU SUCK.
Yours sincerely,
She-who-is-furious-yet-grateful-she-is-neither-an-international-student-nor-doing-International-Relations
Monday, February 23, 2009
Yes, this post is about boobs...
A lot of the photos in the Bravissimo catalogue, it must be said, are rather twee, but I can't help feeling there's something deeply appealing about them nonetheless. So much underwear is advertised by pictures of women with heavy eye make-up, teetering on the boundary between 'sultry' and 'drugged', who are, quite clearly, sending us the message that we should wear this underwear because it will make us attractive to men and help us conform to some unrealistic idea of beauty. Somehow Bravissimo's marketing doesn't scream 'sex' at all, it just shows loads of women who look like they're having fun on the beach with their friends, or hanging out in their bras feeling fabulous about their bodies. As you do. Which is, paradoxically, much sexier.
And their pants are sexy without being annoying and uncomfortable. And I really want this dress. I could not buy it in purple, to go with the purple shoes I'm not going to buy.
And their pants are sexy without being annoying and uncomfortable. And I really want this dress. I could not buy it in purple, to go with the purple shoes I'm not going to buy.
Musings on Facebook
I have huge respect for people who aren't on Facebook, almost as much as I do for people who don't have a television. To be honest, if I didn't live with the boy, I wouldn't have a television, no question about it, but I have fallen hook, line and sinker for Facebook. I know I'm essentially typing all my details into a massive database, that potential employers could see all the photos of me poncing around in posh frocks with numerous glasses of wine (mostly one at a time, though) and read my unbearably pretentious status updates, that adding any of those silly applications gives my data to some corporate sponsor and that the whole thing is funded by pernicious targeted advertising - if I didn't have Firefox's adblocker, I'm sure I'd have been seeing nothing but weight loss adverts since I got engaged. (More on the wedding industry another time.) And rationally, it is better that Clairol don't have access to information about me than that I can play some silly game called 'Geo Challenge' and feel smug that I kick arse at recognising countries from their outlines without seeing them in context. But... I just can't resist...
After they shut down Scrabulous, I almost took all my information off there with the intention of using it as a tool to get in touch with old friends, who could then contact me by message and subsequently email me, and wrote a post here about it. I ended up not doing this, largely because it seemed silly to object to having my info on Facebook and then post it on a blog (a Google blog, no less) as if that was making some kind of point, and it sits in my draft folder to this day, but this is what I thought, and still think, about Facebook's usefulness purely as a medium of communication:
Recently, though, I've started taking some information off there, a little at a time. Last week I purged my friends list, mostly of friends of the boy's that I was trying to get in with when I came back from Africa, but whom I never really knew and whom he doesn't speak to much any more either. I've been trying to publish an article or two under my actual name and while this hasn't been an unmitigated success, the process of it made me more aware of what is in the public domain and attached to my name. (An egotistical self-google reveals little connected to me - the bad adolescent poems have fortunately been taken down and even the Facebook result is some person in Tulsa with the same name as me.) It's also made me conscious of who I freely and willingly allowed to see all this info through Facebook - as it turns out, a lot of people I don't know very well at all!
I suppose fundamentally, I see Facebook as trivial and frivolous - I use it to keep in touch with friends, share photos and not for self-promotion or professional networking - and when it intersects with something that is serious, I don't know how to handle it yet. Someone I knew passed away last year, and I find it incredibly freaky when her picture pops up in the 'friends in common' box, or to know that she made several incredibly self-deprecating remarks about some of the most recent photos of her.
Like much of the internet, the curious juxtaposition of transience and permanence has yet to settle down. I suspect people my brother's age will grow up absolutely fine with it, whereas people of my parents' generation (and particularly those who share my mother's technophobic leanings) just think the whole thing is bizarre, and there's a bunch of us in the middle torn between, 'Wow, that's really weird,' and, 'Wow, that's cool.'
Why am I thinking about this now, particularly? We were having lunch with Nik's mum yesterday and she decided to join Facebook! I think my complacency about Facebook privacy is largely because I don't think there is anything particularly incriminating on there, but nevertheless I had a quick scan before allowing her unfettered access to my profile.
In other news, I saw the film of Brick Lane and they managed not to totally obliterate the wonderfulness of the book. It was close, though.
After they shut down Scrabulous, I almost took all my information off there with the intention of using it as a tool to get in touch with old friends, who could then contact me by message and subsequently email me, and wrote a post here about it. I ended up not doing this, largely because it seemed silly to object to having my info on Facebook and then post it on a blog (a Google blog, no less) as if that was making some kind of point, and it sits in my draft folder to this day, but this is what I thought, and still think, about Facebook's usefulness purely as a medium of communication:
Back in the days before mobiles and internet, I used to be able to remember people's phone numbers, I used to ring them to chat, I used to write proper letters. Then, communication got compressed into 180-character texts and short emails, but at least I used to email people. Since all-you-can-eat broadband and 'social networking', however, I don't seem to do that any more. I have the illusion of connectedness - I feel constantly in touch with hundreds of people, yet I spend less actual time maintaining relationships than I did before targeted advertising made any of this worthwhile.(The draft also ended with an invitation to people to visit me in my actual house and play with my actual Scrabble set. This offer still stands, with the caveat that I actually know you and you give me some warning.)
Recently, though, I've started taking some information off there, a little at a time. Last week I purged my friends list, mostly of friends of the boy's that I was trying to get in with when I came back from Africa, but whom I never really knew and whom he doesn't speak to much any more either. I've been trying to publish an article or two under my actual name and while this hasn't been an unmitigated success, the process of it made me more aware of what is in the public domain and attached to my name. (An egotistical self-google reveals little connected to me - the bad adolescent poems have fortunately been taken down and even the Facebook result is some person in Tulsa with the same name as me.) It's also made me conscious of who I freely and willingly allowed to see all this info through Facebook - as it turns out, a lot of people I don't know very well at all!
I suppose fundamentally, I see Facebook as trivial and frivolous - I use it to keep in touch with friends, share photos and not for self-promotion or professional networking - and when it intersects with something that is serious, I don't know how to handle it yet. Someone I knew passed away last year, and I find it incredibly freaky when her picture pops up in the 'friends in common' box, or to know that she made several incredibly self-deprecating remarks about some of the most recent photos of her.
Like much of the internet, the curious juxtaposition of transience and permanence has yet to settle down. I suspect people my brother's age will grow up absolutely fine with it, whereas people of my parents' generation (and particularly those who share my mother's technophobic leanings) just think the whole thing is bizarre, and there's a bunch of us in the middle torn between, 'Wow, that's really weird,' and, 'Wow, that's cool.'
Why am I thinking about this now, particularly? We were having lunch with Nik's mum yesterday and she decided to join Facebook! I think my complacency about Facebook privacy is largely because I don't think there is anything particularly incriminating on there, but nevertheless I had a quick scan before allowing her unfettered access to my profile.
In other news, I saw the film of Brick Lane and they managed not to totally obliterate the wonderfulness of the book. It was close, though.
Monday, February 16, 2009
A surfeit of wit
Well, the good news is that I managed to complete all but three clues of The Times crossword in under two hours. The bad news is that I'm still an insomniac.
The snow lingered for a while, but has now gone. Nik went ski-ing, but is now home. While he was away, I threw myself into madly socialising to distract me from the fact that I'm still a little edgey about being in the house on my own. There was, I am pleased to report, only one morning when I woke up at 4 a.m. and heard someone opening the front door through the letterbox and moving around downstairs. And that was only in my imagination. Huzzah.
In other news, I taught my friend Helen how to knit and she was very good at it. I made an enormous shepherd's pie and didn't cook anything else until Friday when my Oxford friends descended en masse. I trekked to Ascot in the snow and had a v sophisticated evening with Nicky. I thought the frisson of underage drinking was over once I could wave my ID at the folks in All Bar One and successfully buy pomegranate juice, but this place had an over-25's policy and I felt that illicit thrill and slight terror* all over again. The Oxford massive was also great fun, and tried their best to clean me out of tea and cake as usual. (But I have too much tea. And put my foot down about the cake.) It really was like a wonderful grown-up sleepover: classic girly squealing and gossiping and talking about sex and periods and all that, only with roast lamb and a decent bottle of red or three instead of pizza and Coke. And we didn't stay up till 5 (though we did sit around in our pyjamas until mid-afternoon the next day).
I don't know if I'm just noticing it more, because something in my head is going, 'Omg, you're getting married, you won't be able to have all this girly fun any more!'** or if we were all just on particularly good form in this particular week, but it seemed like I had even more fun than usual with these various people.
I also watched epic quantities of The West Wing, courtesy of Livvy, and thanks to that and the fab ladies over at Kvetch I have been indulging in a true surfeit of wit. So... much... wit... Now Nik is also hooked. (On The West Wing.)
Things seemed a bit more humdrum last week, with no snow and less socialising. My job currently consists mostly of helping big multinational companies sack people, which is rather dispiriting, and my weekend largely involved making soup. One of them was bright orange though.
* I have a morbid fear of getting into trouble. Christ knows what my parents did to me...
** Not sure quite why this would be the case, but my subconscious is a strange place.
The snow lingered for a while, but has now gone. Nik went ski-ing, but is now home. While he was away, I threw myself into madly socialising to distract me from the fact that I'm still a little edgey about being in the house on my own. There was, I am pleased to report, only one morning when I woke up at 4 a.m. and heard someone opening the front door through the letterbox and moving around downstairs. And that was only in my imagination. Huzzah.
In other news, I taught my friend Helen how to knit and she was very good at it. I made an enormous shepherd's pie and didn't cook anything else until Friday when my Oxford friends descended en masse. I trekked to Ascot in the snow and had a v sophisticated evening with Nicky. I thought the frisson of underage drinking was over once I could wave my ID at the folks in All Bar One and successfully buy pomegranate juice, but this place had an over-25's policy and I felt that illicit thrill and slight terror* all over again. The Oxford massive was also great fun, and tried their best to clean me out of tea and cake as usual. (But I have too much tea. And put my foot down about the cake.) It really was like a wonderful grown-up sleepover: classic girly squealing and gossiping and talking about sex and periods and all that, only with roast lamb and a decent bottle of red or three instead of pizza and Coke. And we didn't stay up till 5 (though we did sit around in our pyjamas until mid-afternoon the next day).
I don't know if I'm just noticing it more, because something in my head is going, 'Omg, you're getting married, you won't be able to have all this girly fun any more!'** or if we were all just on particularly good form in this particular week, but it seemed like I had even more fun than usual with these various people.
I also watched epic quantities of The West Wing, courtesy of Livvy, and thanks to that and the fab ladies over at Kvetch I have been indulging in a true surfeit of wit. So... much... wit... Now Nik is also hooked. (On The West Wing.)
Things seemed a bit more humdrum last week, with no snow and less socialising. My job currently consists mostly of helping big multinational companies sack people, which is rather dispiriting, and my weekend largely involved making soup. One of them was bright orange though.
* I have a morbid fear of getting into trouble. Christ knows what my parents did to me...
** Not sure quite why this would be the case, but my subconscious is a strange place.
Monday, February 02, 2009
snowsnowsnowsnowsnow!
Up and doing rather earlier than usual this morning thanks to concerns that the snow would prevent me getting to the meeting I was meant to be minuting. They rang earlier and I get to stay in bed for a bit longer and do it over the phone. Hurrah for teleconferencing.
News stories I have been obsessively overanalsying are:
News stories I have been obsessively overanalsying are:
- Childhood is harder now than when children had to work in factories or up chimneys and might have died of innumerable diseases. Wealth redistribution is too complicated and politically loaded, so we'll just have to blame women instead of trying to solve the problem.
- The south-east can't do snow. Again. Nor can the internet. Not only are all the rail networks down, their websites are also overloaded by people trying to check whether the rail networks are down. John Humphrys was particularly amusing just after the 7.00 headlines: "Now, I wonder if we're going to get the usual complaints: 'a few flakes of snow in London and everything grinds to a halt and it's national news'. Let's have the impact on travel. We'll have the broad overview first. Actually, let's have the London report first, because that IS a problem."
Sunday, February 01, 2009
No mushrooms this week =(
Well, judging from this week's veg box it looks like the menu for Friday might look something like this:
I wonder if I could whip up an exciting swede-based cocktail to begin with...
In other news, Nik has departed for ski-ing with much enthusiasm. If I didn't know better, I'd take it personally. I am feeling rather dejected, not because I'm incapable of entertaining myself without him (I have two series of The West Wing, three scheduled social events, an array of interesting books and the whole of the internet) but because I'm still a little funny about being in the house on my own since the burglary. Rationally, I realise this is silly (and, furthermore, it's impractical for future life and I should just get over it, so it's probably just as well that I haven't buggered off home for the week and am instead learning to be a normal person) but, well, meh...
I am currently occupying myself with gratuitous wedding-porn-viewing. Amusing results from googling 'spring weddings' include (but are not limited to):
Starter
curried parsnip soup
Main course
something from the freezer with root veg mash/gratin and a.n. other green vegetable so as not to get scurvy
Pudding
carrot cake
curried parsnip soup
Main course
something from the freezer with root veg mash/gratin and a.n. other green vegetable so as not to get scurvy
Pudding
carrot cake
I wonder if I could whip up an exciting swede-based cocktail to begin with...
In other news, Nik has departed for ski-ing with much enthusiasm. If I didn't know better, I'd take it personally. I am feeling rather dejected, not because I'm incapable of entertaining myself without him (I have two series of The West Wing, three scheduled social events, an array of interesting books and the whole of the internet) but because I'm still a little funny about being in the house on my own since the burglary. Rationally, I realise this is silly (and, furthermore, it's impractical for future life and I should just get over it, so it's probably just as well that I haven't buggered off home for the week and am instead learning to be a normal person) but, well, meh...
I am currently occupying myself with gratuitous wedding-porn-viewing. Amusing results from googling 'spring weddings' include (but are not limited to):
- pastels, pastels, pastels (bleurgh)
- instead of rice or confetti, ask your guests to release butterflies (?!?!?!?!?!)
- calling each table after a spring flower instead of numbering them.
- dress your bridesmaids in yellow dresses and get them to carry Easter bunnies instead of bouquets (bleurgh)
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