Waking up doesn't seem to be taking this morning, so it won't last. Yesterday brought news that I've been shortlisted for the job in Berl1n I wrote about a few weeks ago that was just so, so me. I was so excited I could hardly sit through the rest of the day, and my body, unaccustomed to such good and validating news, was exhausted by nightfall. Yesterday I decided to indulge myself fully in dreaming about it; started looking at apartments, looked at the tefl.com cost of living guide, tried to work out what the right neighborhoods to live in would be, being sad the cute mayor is gay.
Mostly I just enjoyed feeling validated by the thought the first place I applied to on this blitz is taking me semi-seriously. Right now I'm pursuing a policy of only applying to jobs I really really want alot, so - well, it makes me feel good. But now I'm still sleepy. And when I wake up, I'm just going to try to forget about it and keep applying for other jobs I want.
venerdì, gennaio 12, 2007
giovedì, gennaio 11, 2007
Ode to restless joy
Ugh. Mornings are getting grosser and grosser, and work getting less and less inviting . . . I've been trying to coast on yesterday's 'good news' that I'm not not in the running for a place at Eur0pol but that's not cutting it. My mum came through town from England last night and I gave her some re-assurance about the crazy lifestyle decisions I'm about to make, which was a good exercise for me - I ended up reassuring myself as well as her - but we were both left with the wish things would just fucking work out, like, tomorrow.
Anyways, it was good to spend some fun time with the kids at the family dinner last night. I suppose if most of my money starts coming from working with them, the fun won't be there in the same way, and once in a supervisory capacity all those young bones I've been so cheerful about picking up and throwing around in a jolly aunty type way are going to suddenly seem so much more fragile. So I'm enjoying that while I can.
Must dash and catch up on all the work I haven't been doing. Before I do, there was something else I wanted to point out - blue cheese and green grapes make the most intense flavour combination. Like, some good sweet green grapes - organic (which does make a huge taste difference here, since grapes are so watery and artificially fertilizing them might make them bigger and more inviting, but also dilutes the taste fatally until they're just pale sugary blobs) - just stuck and covered with a creamy, rich, stinky blue cheese. A tear came to my eye while I was eating it. A tear of joy. The last time I cried with joy was when I was slathering fresh foie gras on to fresh baguette after eating 24 fresh oysters, and that was almost a year ago now. So run; run to the cheese/organic produce store. Run. I'll make you an emergency phone call to get you out of whatever situation you're in that doesn't involve eating blue cheese and green grapes.
Anyways, it was good to spend some fun time with the kids at the family dinner last night. I suppose if most of my money starts coming from working with them, the fun won't be there in the same way, and once in a supervisory capacity all those young bones I've been so cheerful about picking up and throwing around in a jolly aunty type way are going to suddenly seem so much more fragile. So I'm enjoying that while I can.
Must dash and catch up on all the work I haven't been doing. Before I do, there was something else I wanted to point out - blue cheese and green grapes make the most intense flavour combination. Like, some good sweet green grapes - organic (which does make a huge taste difference here, since grapes are so watery and artificially fertilizing them might make them bigger and more inviting, but also dilutes the taste fatally until they're just pale sugary blobs) - just stuck and covered with a creamy, rich, stinky blue cheese. A tear came to my eye while I was eating it. A tear of joy. The last time I cried with joy was when I was slathering fresh foie gras on to fresh baguette after eating 24 fresh oysters, and that was almost a year ago now. So run; run to the cheese/organic produce store. Run. I'll make you an emergency phone call to get you out of whatever situation you're in that doesn't involve eating blue cheese and green grapes.
mercoledì, gennaio 10, 2007
Just shooting into the jungle
The F-word is working two jobs and I'm - as I am. We're shit tired whenever we see each other, and prone as possible. Last night when I got home around ten he was upset about U.S. strikes on Somalia. I was upset too, but figured the best way to distract him from his tiring outrage (because now, we dream - beyond dreaming of sleep or rest - of not fucking being tired anymore) was to talk about how stupid it was from a strategic point of view, how excessively and appallingly stupid it is to think you can target some few dozen people usefully with an aeroplane.
Because once the moral outrage takes over it's too easy to visualize what's happening to Somalians for the worst possible reasons. Getting invaded and then blown up so some peice of crap administration in a poorly educated country far, far away can still have the cosmetic appearance of pursuing the group that blew some of its shit up in 2001. Even talking about the crashingly stupid uselessness of it all is demoralizing, though; there's no way the decision-makers involved weren't fully aware of that stupidity and uselessness and decided to go ahead anyways. So cynical, so cosmetic, so fucking evil. Luckily we were tired enough last night to avoid thinking about that.
I've never really reckoned myself a pacifist, but the posing aspect of war - the bit, to be frank, that would not be allowed if women ran the world - makes me hate the people who wage it. And I'm not talking about what you have to do psychologically to the enemy, I'm talking about what you have to do psychologically to your own people and to your allies to keep them convinced you're on the right track. Churchill keeping Stalin in the war by having all those Canadians slaughtered at Dieppe, for example. The United States dropping nuclear bombs on a bunch of beaten Japanese to make Stalin play nicer in the division of the Western Front. Getting popular support for the invasion of Iraq by pretending it had nuclear bombs and international terrorists.
If Americans fall for this one too, they're putting themselves right into Stalin's class. And then the velvet trap of America-hating I somehow managed to avoid despite years of seeing them as tourists in Paris (surely one of the least flattering ways to see any nationality) is going to be irresistable.
Because once the moral outrage takes over it's too easy to visualize what's happening to Somalians for the worst possible reasons. Getting invaded and then blown up so some peice of crap administration in a poorly educated country far, far away can still have the cosmetic appearance of pursuing the group that blew some of its shit up in 2001. Even talking about the crashingly stupid uselessness of it all is demoralizing, though; there's no way the decision-makers involved weren't fully aware of that stupidity and uselessness and decided to go ahead anyways. So cynical, so cosmetic, so fucking evil. Luckily we were tired enough last night to avoid thinking about that.
I've never really reckoned myself a pacifist, but the posing aspect of war - the bit, to be frank, that would not be allowed if women ran the world - makes me hate the people who wage it. And I'm not talking about what you have to do psychologically to the enemy, I'm talking about what you have to do psychologically to your own people and to your allies to keep them convinced you're on the right track. Churchill keeping Stalin in the war by having all those Canadians slaughtered at Dieppe, for example. The United States dropping nuclear bombs on a bunch of beaten Japanese to make Stalin play nicer in the division of the Western Front. Getting popular support for the invasion of Iraq by pretending it had nuclear bombs and international terrorists.
If Americans fall for this one too, they're putting themselves right into Stalin's class. And then the velvet trap of America-hating I somehow managed to avoid despite years of seeing them as tourists in Paris (surely one of the least flattering ways to see any nationality) is going to be irresistable.
martedì, gennaio 09, 2007
Road not taken, volume one
I can blow through a crappy Martin Amis novel or most fiction for that matter (including early Victorian sentence-marathoners) in shocking time, but when faced with non-fiction I huff and puff. I enjoy it, don't get me wrong, enough to take advanced degrees in international relations and military strategy. But sometimes I wonder if it would have made more academic sense for me to have continued in literature studies, like, say, EVERYONE thought I would and some people wanted me to.
But then - then what? In the final year of my undergrad, when I was getting all excited about comp. lit., something snapped at the end. The body of work on comp. lit., even my own work, seemed to be all about exploring the context in which literature was produced. And lord knows I love context. Nothing better . . . but that was also the problem.
Since all I produced was a 40 page paper about how John Donne had more in common with Thomas Wyatt and Petrarch than people think (so there!) - I never felt like I obfuscated or over-complicated. That in fact, what I looked at was a way to limit obfuscations and over-complications. But how long could that have lasted? If I had invested my time in a comp. lit. masters or doctorate . . . how long before I would have been trying desperately to prove some post-post-modernist bullshit to propound my emotional beliefs about the context of a writer's work?
It's hard to say what I mean, but I'll try summing up numerically:
1. I'm 28 and I'm already feeling defensive about the academic choices I made
2. I still believe continuing in academic literature studies would have meant the end of me as a writer, although I can't yet produce evidence for any sort of literary career resulting from me going into international relations instead
3. I think there was an element of cowardice in me not continuing with lit. studies because I was never quite sure I was good enough to not end up teaching highschool English
4. Even so, comp. lit. involves poisonous argumentation in a rarefied atmosphere which can't escape irrelevance considering how seldom it adds to that literature in comparison to how often it unconsciously but fatally reflects the emotional state of the individual academic - and I love literature too much to do that to it
5. Whatever my profs thought, at the end of my undergrad I would have been totes unprepared for a career in exploring literary context since by any objective standard I was a retard. I'd be better at it now, but now I care about money more
And finally . . .
6. I haven't found a new fucking job yet and still don't know if I can get pogey while I nanny, so this sort of thing is driving me NUTS today.
But then - then what? In the final year of my undergrad, when I was getting all excited about comp. lit., something snapped at the end. The body of work on comp. lit., even my own work, seemed to be all about exploring the context in which literature was produced. And lord knows I love context. Nothing better . . . but that was also the problem.
Since all I produced was a 40 page paper about how John Donne had more in common with Thomas Wyatt and Petrarch than people think (so there!) - I never felt like I obfuscated or over-complicated. That in fact, what I looked at was a way to limit obfuscations and over-complications. But how long could that have lasted? If I had invested my time in a comp. lit. masters or doctorate . . . how long before I would have been trying desperately to prove some post-post-modernist bullshit to propound my emotional beliefs about the context of a writer's work?
It's hard to say what I mean, but I'll try summing up numerically:
1. I'm 28 and I'm already feeling defensive about the academic choices I made
2. I still believe continuing in academic literature studies would have meant the end of me as a writer, although I can't yet produce evidence for any sort of literary career resulting from me going into international relations instead
3. I think there was an element of cowardice in me not continuing with lit. studies because I was never quite sure I was good enough to not end up teaching highschool English
4. Even so, comp. lit. involves poisonous argumentation in a rarefied atmosphere which can't escape irrelevance considering how seldom it adds to that literature in comparison to how often it unconsciously but fatally reflects the emotional state of the individual academic - and I love literature too much to do that to it
5. Whatever my profs thought, at the end of my undergrad I would have been totes unprepared for a career in exploring literary context since by any objective standard I was a retard. I'd be better at it now, but now I care about money more
And finally . . .
6. I haven't found a new fucking job yet and still don't know if I can get pogey while I nanny, so this sort of thing is driving me NUTS today.
lunedì, gennaio 08, 2007
There ain't no tits on the radio
Last night I had a dream about teaching Ourson his first word. I won't tell you what it is here, but it was an absolutely lovely word, and three syllables long. He's such a clever baby. We're thinking we may make the nannying thing work. The money seems like it will be okay. And I've been feeling so whiny about child directed products from my job it's probably time I started, you know, trying to be a positive influence on children.
By the way, check out this grossness Jiri uncovered.
I read the new Martin Amis novel this weekend (yes, I did some work on my apps, but I needed lots of rests) and I have a feeling it wasn't that good. I swallowed it whole in about five hours but the older I get the more I realize that's not necessarily a mark of quality. At the moment (bearing in mind I slept excessively poorly last night as I contemplated the possible revolution in my lifestyle) it seems like an artless mash-up of Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro, which makes it better than Milan Kundera but doesn't give us a reason to not read Kazuo Ishiguro instead. Fortunately, the review isn't wanted until next week so I have some time to make sure I'm not just being cranky.
By the way, check out this grossness Jiri uncovered.
I read the new Martin Amis novel this weekend (yes, I did some work on my apps, but I needed lots of rests) and I have a feeling it wasn't that good. I swallowed it whole in about five hours but the older I get the more I realize that's not necessarily a mark of quality. At the moment (bearing in mind I slept excessively poorly last night as I contemplated the possible revolution in my lifestyle) it seems like an artless mash-up of Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro, which makes it better than Milan Kundera but doesn't give us a reason to not read Kazuo Ishiguro instead. Fortunately, the review isn't wanted until next week so I have some time to make sure I'm not just being cranky.
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