My Words Trickle Down

Back in the days when the Internet was young, and Web 2.0 had yet to be named (I still don't get that one, anyway -- it's the same Internet, ya know?), there was a lot of hemming and hawing among local news anchors and Parents with Children and people like that about what effect The Internet was going to have on the Socialization of Our Youth. They were worried that kids who spent too much time online "instead of socializing" were going to end up all developmentally stunted and socially malformed.

Of course, that didn't actually happen. The latest consensus, according to my magpie selection of internet psychology articles, is that social interaction on the internet shares a lot of the same qualities as social interaction in meatspace; although, at least one of them claimed, it can intensify existing tendencies by making social butterflies even more social (e.g. spending all their time on facebook) while allowing loners to further isolate themselves. I've no idea if this is true, but it makes sense to me. And me? I have social anxieties -- so the internet is just a whole new realm to be socially anxious about.

Facebook is the worst of all for this. It was always going to be, but when it first started it wasn't substantially different from, say, MySpace or Friendster. Same weird politics of "adding people", but nothing particularly new. Then it started adding features. Most of these are just annoying gadgets, and I won't go into how irritating they are, simply because the topic has been discussed at length, many times, and often offline. It takes up too much thought as it is. Two of the newer features really bug me, though.

The first is actually pretty old now, I guess, in internet terms. It's that little box of "people you may know", that shows you friends-of-friends on the off chance that you may know them, and decide to add them as a friend. It's actually pretty useful, and a good feature if the whole world were happy and everyone loved each other and no one built up crazy anxieties in their heads, but for me it is often troublesome. Because I keep seeing people in that box that I know I used to be face-friends with (and, in some cases, actual friends). But people grow apart, and some people actually take facebook seriously and only want to have their actual, current friends on their friends-lists, and that's okay. I guess. I mean, it's the same politics of de-friending and whatnot that existed before facebook -- only now, instead of finding out incidentally when you go to look for them and find that they're not on your list (which, if you have genuinely grown apart, you'd probably never do), you have a good chance of having it shoved in your face as soon as you open the home page.

Now, that box isn't even called "people you may know" anymore. It's been helpfully re-labelled "Suggestions", and displays one person you might want to 'friend', and another with whom you are already face-friends. This is where it gets creepy. Beside the picture of the person you already know, it suggests that you use some face-features to interact with them. Maybe I only find this particularly creepy because the first time it did that to me, it was to show me the face of a middle-school crush, with the message "Reconnect with him. Write on his wall." Um, excuse me? But that wasn't even the worst of it. It's also started to take it upon itself to remind me when I haven't spoken to someone on facebook recently, again inviting me to write on their wall. It's all fine and ignorable if it's some random acquaintance, but when it's actually a close friend (or, in the case that spurred this rant, my cousin), who I feel I actually ought to be talking to more than I do, I just feel like I'm being judged by robots. Robots that can just fuck off now, thanks.

I woke up at 6 am today. I have no idea why -- I think I fell asleep around 1 -- but I'm awake now and I've been enjoying my unexpected extra hours of morning.

I guess my life is pretty good, generally speaking. I live in a cool flat with interesting people, I'm doing an internship about Genuinely Important Stuff, I have a job that is flexible and pretty fun, and I'm not working for anyone evil.* This is, upon reflection, pretty much exactly what I want to be doing with my life, at least for the time being. At least, given the paths I've taken so far; I am trying not to be wistful about the others. Besides, I think I'm finally recovered from getting spooked in April and falling into ennui after graduating, and am starting to ease myself back into activism. I'm not doing much (read: any) organising, but for now I'm happy enough just to be a body on the ground when needed.

Despite all this, I still often find myself tussling with an illogical, baffling melancholy. (So apologies, friends, if I am distant.) I'm worried about the onset of winter, and the ever-shorter days. At least I will be awake for all of it today, but I will spend most of that time indoors and out of the actual sunlight. I'm hoping that this winter will be easier than the others, but I have my doubts.

*There is a fantastic recurring sketch on the radio show 'That Mitchell and Webb Sound' in which various people are called in to have the usefulness of their jobs assessed by committee of little old ladies. The "workers" must explain what they do to the committee, which almost invariably finds them to be totally unnecessary and suggests that they go and open a little shop (with the exception of a plastic surgeon, who leaves with many apologies and the assurance that he will go and become a proper doctor now). Well, I do work in a little shop. It is quite nice!

Today, as I was walking into town, I noticed what appeared to be a small spider eating a tiny leaf that was caught in its web in the hedgerow. "No," I thought, "even a spider can't be that stupid," so I leaned in closer to look.

What the spider was actually doing was attempting to cut the leaf free of its web while repairing it at the same time. It was caught about midway down, in the cross-threads between two of the lower spokes of the orb. The spider sliced out the top part of the leaf and it fell downward, and the spider laid a few hasty threads behind it as it followed the leaf down. I was impressed. But before the spider could free the leaf entirely from the web, it fell a little further down and got caught on some more of the sticky fibres. The spider had it on a little reel and chased along after it, in an agonizingly slow dance, down and down, trying to spin out a patch behind it but finding it didn't have quite enough legs to manage it.

After a few minutes of this, the spider dropped the leaf (still clinging to the web, now a bit lower and with a long blank space above it) and ran to the centre of the web, where it twanged violently on the spokes. I don't know whether it was trying to vibrate the leaf away or merely checking for newly-caught insects, or something else entirely; mostly it just seemed frustrated with the failure of its efforts. Then it returned to the leaf. It carried on its dance, cutting away the leaf and carefully dropping it down, only to lose control and have it fall into a lower section of the web. This went on for a few more minutes, with the spider seeming more and more agitated -- and leaving, periodically, to go twang its spokes from the centre -- until it eventually gave it up, and went to sulk behind the leaves around one of its anchor threads. The leaf was still in the web, and in trying to remove it the spider had made a hole roughly eight times the size of the leaf itself. (If at first you don't succeed...)

As I turned to walk away, I noticed another spider in a similar predicament. This was a much bigger spider, a different species, with a much bigger leaf in its much bigger web, though similarly placed. I watched it scuttle down to the leaf and cut it away, quickly and skillfully. It had a minor moment of panic when the leaf fell into one of the anchor strands below the web (it was a holly leaf and so quite heavy) but it managed to catch it and remove it from the anchor strands without damaging them, and so returned contentedly to the centre. The leaf had left a small hole, but for now the spider left it as it was.

I am female. This means that for as long as I can remember, people have inquired about my intention to procreate. I recall being asked at the age of about four how many children I intended to have, and being encouraged to seriously contemplate the question. And I did, too, as did my sister.

My brother did not. It didn't matter. I mean, obviously if a male child discussed the issue, it was seriously discussed with him (my cousin Alex used to say he wanted 12 kids), but the matter never seemed to be pressed on them if they didn't bring it up.

As I got older, the messages started to change, for a while. The topic of procreation became more about how it worked and how to prevent it, and for a while it seemed that we females were on somewhat equal footing with the males; our bodies were different, but it was impressed upon us that we had equal responsibility for preventing unplanned pregnancy (a stance that older feminists inform me is a recent one).

... But a few years later, as the conversation turns towards the question of having kids rather than preventing them, all the weight is shifted back onto the women. Women are encouraged, at every stage of their fertile years, to think about their potential to have children, and the consequences thereof. In particular, we are asked to consider how to "balance" this with our desire for a "career". Countless articles are written about it, ranging from go-getter encouraging to pessimistic and downright demeaning. And, of course, we talk about it with each other.

A (nominally feminist) message board I frequent, which is about 98% female, and mostly teens and 20-somethings, discusses the issue with some regularity. It's not like we talk about nothing else (like, to another woman, about something other than a man), but childbearing comes up a lot. A recent thread included the serious suggestion -- discussed at some length! -- that women should start thinking seriously about this around age 16 or 18, when they are deciding on what life-paths to take, career-wise, because some professions are much more compatible with child-rearing. Within the safe space of our discussions, this is a valid and potentially helpful point to make. But a part of me still wants to shout "COME ON, MY SISTREN! Do whatever you want with your uterus! Have your kids then let's fight like hell to make sure you have the opportunity to continue your career if you want to! To make sure that your partner is equally able (and feels equally obliged) to bear half the burden of caring for them! To achieve a gender-equal society!"

Because, honestly, while a small part of it all makes sense, biologically speaking -- women are the only ones who are physically obliged to take at least some time off work to accommodate the actual birth of the child -- there's no reason why all of the intellectual labour of pondering these questions should be done by the ones who incubate the foetuses. When was the last time you heard a group of young men discussing the relative merits of different career choices based on their potential to accommodate any hypothetical future children? Where are all the op-eds telling young men how to plan their lives around their reproductive capacities? A google search for 'men career children' first asks if I meant 'women career children' (and gives the top two results for that), then shows a whole bunch of pages about how the career-vs.-children issue is an issue for women and not for men. Big news there. I mean, I know writing this isn't going to tell anyone anything new, either; but I'm not informing, I'm just ranting.

By way of further research, I asked a male housemate if anyone had ever asked him to consider the potential effect of children on his career. It was a small sample size, I know, but the research was purely rhetorical; of course no one had. To be fair, he said, 'career' itself was not much of a consideration for him, either -- which is about the answer you'd expect from an anarchist. However, it gets to what I think is the real root of the problem: that we, not as women but as people, at least in the time and place these words inhabit, are encouraged to think of "careers" as the be-all end-all of identity. Not just what we do but who we are. If "careers" were not hierarchical, and if "advancement" didn't matter so much, then it wouldn't matter so much if someone -- male or female -- decided to take one or three or fifteen years off to raise their families, and return to them later. Obviously in something like research there'd be some catch-up work to do, but in most cases it would simply mean that you ended your 'working life' with a few years' less experience than your peers. Is that such a bad thing?

Unfortunately, I think that kind of paradigm shift is going to be a lot harder to achieve than simple in-system (but still necessary!) steps like paid paternity leave.

I'm in London -- or rather, Loughton -- visiting Harry at East 15. He's in classes from 10-4, and for what feels like the first time in my life, I have literally nothing I need to be doing. (Apart from looking at jobs websites, of course, but I check those at least every other day anyway, and new vacancies are not going to disappear within 24 hours of being posted.) But no reading, no coursework, not even any activisty things, since I'm still new enough on the Edinburgh scene that I wasn't able to take on any of the recent tasks that needed doing, since they all required some local logistical knowledge I don't yet have.

Sadly, freeing though I suppose it is, I'm just a bit bored. Not that I haven't been feeling the same listlessness up in Edinburgh -- that's primarily why I haven't been posting much -- but at least up there there are always minor life details that need attending to, so I am seldom so completely at a loss. Here, I would walk in the forest (beautiful beautiful Epping Forest, old lovely REAL deciduous forest! Trees like I've missed with the whole of my being) but it's been too rainy. It was sunny on Sunday, and Harry and I took a little walk through the edge nearest his house, but we had to cut it short to head into London to catch a play.

I've a book I could read, too, but that feels lonely, and I crave at least imagined interaction. Hence my coming to the East 15 computer lab to suckle onto the warm breast of the internet. Such was my intention, anyway. In reality, as I write this, I'm sitting in Harry's room on his internetless laptop; I'll USB the file and upload it when I go, but for now I'm waiting for the rain to die down. For most of the morning, the sky had been clear-misting in that funny sort of way where it's not really raining but everything gets wet (there's a Scottish word for that -- of course there is -- but I've forgotten it), but about five minutes before I meant to set out, it started really pouring. I suppose it's a good thing, since otherwise I'd have been caught in it, but it still places me here and dry rather than wet and online (to be honest, I'm not sure which one I'd prefer).

The other option, of course, is to be writing something. I'm writing this, of course, but I mean writing creatively. Or at least thoughtfully, in some structured way and for more than a few paragraphs at a time. Lately the only writing I've done has been on message boards, and since that's usually spontaneous and discursive, it tends to be less structured and less well thought-out, and thus has only served to make me hyper-aware of all the flaws in my style, without necessarily highlighting any way by which I might improve it. That is, I can see what I'm doing wrong, or over-doing (and I can see it here!) but short of picking throuh every single sentence, I'm not sure how to improve it. I use far too many linking words; while I believe in beginning sentences with conjunctions where appropriate, I do it all the freaking time. I think I've been using it as a crutch, and I'm tiring of it. I also include far too many parenthetical asides, right there in the sentences rather than tidied away into their own sentences -- and I write, with or without these asides, such long and unweildy sentences. Seventeenth-century sentences, or maybe Eighteenth, sprawling out along the page, so over-gorged with clauses they can barely stand on their own twelve feet.

What, though, can I do to stop myself? (And you see that 'though' is another of those not-strictly-necessary linking words, stitching up my prose with a complex overlock, when all it really needs is a little tacking to hold it together. And there again is that unnecessary 'and', which is two faults in one; and there again, and here. And this whole three-sentence point is itself parenthetical.) Do you notice it, Dear Readers*? Or have you suddenly been made hyper-aware of my flawed prose, like I am? Are you now looking over this whole passage thinking 'oh yeah, I see what she meant there, oh and there she did it again'? Or am I just whinging into an overly self-critical void, and making myself boring in the process?

The sun's come out. Maybe I'll go take a walk in the forest after all.


* A pretentious (if ancient) convention in itself, though in this case a self-conscious one. I like it. It helps me to simultaneously imagine that vast numbers of unknown people are reading this (thus making it worthwhile) and, by its very over-the-top pretentiousness, that my entire audience is actually imaginary, despite all evidence to the contrary, thus making the whole exercise of writing this journal unintimidating enough for me to actually do it candidly.

1)
On the last warm day I spent in St Andrews, Debbie and I went swimming in the sea at West Sands. It was a warm day, but the water was cold cold cold. Still fun, though. And even though West Sands is relatively bare, I found a little bit of floating seaweed, and on it was a little baby crab!

It was probably the most adorable thing ever. It was tiny and round, like a ball bearing with legs (and about the size of one, too). It was also completely transparent, except for a few little dark specks of organs inside it, and huge, opalescent turquoise eyes. It crawled around on my hand for a while, but as I brought my big myopic face close to get a better look, it started waving its tiny transparent claws at me in the aggressive manner of an adult crab (see photo).

2)
As I was walking home last night, I saw a little grey tabby cat trotting quickly in the other direction, coming towards me. It slowed as it neared, and then came right up to me. I bent down to stroke it, and since it was so affectionate stayed there for several minutes, petting it. Then as I tried to walk away, it kept butting in front of my legs. I would pet it again, and step around it, and walk on, and it would repeat its actions. Once it started off into the walkway of a house; I think that must've been where it lives, and it was under the impression that I would let it inside.

It kept following me, though, for a few hundred metres down the street. As we crossed a side street it paused for a long time in the middle of the road, looking up as if confused. I watched it there, confused myself and a little concerned for the safety of a cat so absentminded it would stop in the middle of the road. Eventually it crossed over, and I knelt to stroke it again. It batted at my hand in that non-clawing, reprimanding way that cats do, then flounced away huffily, back the way we'd come.

3)
I really hope I got a little bit of cat smell on me, though, because our flat is overrun with mice. They are everywhere, and really bold! They just wander out, even when we are sitting around, not even cautious enough to wait until we've gone to bed. It's pretty disgusting. Rumour has it that one new flatmate is bringing some cats with her when she comes, and I really hope it's true.

I am trying to align my ducks. Life, roof, relationship, food, friends, visa, job, life. Not necessarily in that order.

It's 2:36 am and I can't sleep again. I can never sleep, except in the mornings. It's frustrating, because Harry is as diurnal as a fucking songbird, while I am more like a moth with a computer, hypnotized by the glowing screen, and so between sleep and work I hardly get to see him. And we are moving away to different cities soon. Phooh.

I've been working all the shows this week at the Byre, which is actually all the same show, and has been the same show all month. It's been running through my head and invading my thoughts. This post contains numerous references.

I have escaped, though, a little. I am moving to Edinburgh in a couple weeks, and I've been back and forth a few times, for the Fringe. I always mean to talk about the stuff I see, but mostly the description in my head is an incoherent babble that doesn't seem worth committing to writing. Instead, here's a bare list of my recommendations, in the order in which I saw them (no guarantee they're still on, but hey): The Grind Show, Zeitgeist, The Diary of a Mad Man, The Rap Guide to Evolution, The Rebel Cell.

I am officially a hipster now, though, apparently, because some trendy-looking guy asked to photograph my bag with all the badges. But I'm also officially a nerd, 'cause later on at the Amanda Palmer concert, her supporting band sang a song which said [something along the lines of] "This is the last great statement ever made by rock-and-roll" and all I could think of was Francis Fukuyama.

Hell, I'll own 'nerd'. I finally saw 'Twilight', only because it was overdubbed by the guys who do Mystery Science Theater 3000. Hi-larious. Almost as good as this, which having actually seen the film now allows me to appreciate:

I am so, so angry. Feeling helpless, too, being an ocean away from the source of my anger. Embarassed for my home country.

WHAT the FUCK is going on with the right-wing oppositions to Obama's proposed health care bill?

You can probably guess that I would like to see some sort of NHS-style universal health care system brought out in the US, and this plan falls far short of that. So why are the problems of the NHS and Canada's system being trotted out as arguments against it? ... But that is the least of what I'm angry about. I'm sure from a right-wing perspective there are some legitimate issues with the bill, namely the funding of it (despite general support for limitless pointless war spending, but nevermind), but any legitimate discussion of issues -- you know, the kind that might actually lead to some kind of resolution and mutual understanding -- is being stifled by the MOUNTING WAVES OF CRAZY.

My friend Luke wrote a facebook note proposing some Yes Men style actions at town hall meetings, countering the crazies with satire. It'd be a great idea, if those people weren't already saying stuff that is so over the top that I'd be laughing if it weren't for the frustrated crying.

I want to get out there and counter protest. I want to scream it into the streets. But instead I am here, in placid, health-secure Britain, where coverage of the US healthcare debate seems to amount mostly to head-shaking and tut-tutting. What can I do?

There's this old parable I heard once. I don't know how old, actually (and it might have come from one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books my mother used to be so fond of), but it goes like this:

A storm out at sea has washed thousands of starfish onto a beach*, and a man is walking along the beach, picking them up one by one, and flinging them back into the sea.

"What are you doing?" asks an incredulous passer-by, "You'll never save them all! There are thousands of starfish on the beach, and you're only one man; you'll save maybe a hundred, tops. You can't possibly make a difference!"

The man doesn't stop, doesn't even look up. He just picks up another starfish and tosses it into the sea. "I sure made a difference to that one," he says. Boo-yah!

But ... what if storms like that are totally uncharacteristic for the area, but are becoming more frequent (and thus likely to kill many, many more starfish) due to global warming, which is contributed to, in part, by, say, offshore oil wells near these folk's seaside town? And all of this is allowed (and even encouraged) by their government? Wouldn't it be more productive for citizens to spend their time lobbying their government and campaigning against the oil drilling, rather than throwing starfish into the sea? Or at least for that man to say "Hey, I'm gonna handle these starfish right here, why don't you go fight the oil companies?"

Okay, maybe not in this particular instance. A storm is, after all, a one-off event, and the man only has a limited time to throw the beached starfish into the sea, after which he can go campaign and lobby and whatnot. In an acute crisis, charity is crucial and probably a moral duty. But what if the crisis is protracted? What if it's not a one-off natural disaster, but a protracted famine caused by economic instability? What if there's a much more direct cause or set of causes to follow and fight? Then where does one best direct one's energies?

What if, for instance, the UN World Food Programme buys food for impoverished people in poor nations, while, due to a right-wing consensus among economic superpowers, the IMF and the World Bank "strongly discourage" those nations from setting price caps on anything, including vital staples like rice, as prices have more than doubled in the last two years? The left hand giveth, and the right hand driveth more people into poverty.

I've been meaning to make a post along these lines for over a year and a half now, ever since someone linked me to www.freerice.com, a "vocabulary-game" website that donates 10 grains of rice for every correct answer you provide on their game. It's basically like a less-fun, solitary version of The Dictionary Game, except that the "synonyms" they provide are often not technically synonymous, being either examples within a category or in some cases only loosely related words. This led to exasperated ranting on my part (e.g. 'Lynx' does not equal 'wild cat'! A lynx is a type of wild cat!)

Pedantry aside, though, a lot about the website just bothered me, in the same way that similar sites where you click on things to donate things all bother me. I think it's the self-congratulatory ethos around them. I dunno. I mean, I guess it's always a 'good thing' to donate money to any particular charity; that the work that any particular charity does is always good, in particular for the people they help -- in the same way that it's good for those hundred or so starfish that get thrown back into the sea. But the implication of these websites seems to be that, by generating donations by clicking on things, you are somehow solving the problems they are set up to address.

And that's just... not true. No more than music can save the world, throwing money at problems without implementing structural changes seldom solves them. Granted, the UN WFP's website indicates that they do do some campaigning, but as the limp left hand of Worldwide coordination, they are doomed to be forever thwarted by the dextrous IMF and World Bank.

I... I thought after a year of mulling I would have a better way to finish this -- that I would have come to some sort of succinct, easily-verbalised conclusion. But I don't think that's going to happen. Instead, I'll leave you with someone else's frustrated wisdom:

"When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food , they call me a communist."
-- Dom Hélder Câmara


*Incidentally, the picture of the crab there was taken after just such a storm -- West Sands was covered in various clams, debris, and little thin-armed starfish, among other creatures. Though, by the time I went down to explore, most of them were long-dead, and the rest were soon to be eaten by seagulls.

I guess I've fallen out of the habit of updating LiveJournal. I guess it's probably another of those lost habits that I never gave much thought to, but turns out to have been good for me, like reading for pleasure or eating regular meals. But... what do I write? My mind feels full and empty, like a dusty attic: piles of information all packed away in half-organised trunks and boxes. Overfull. Inaccessible. I stub my toes trying to get at things.

It has been raining for two days now. I've been living inside the internet, checking from the underside for the tendrils of What Next -- flats, jobs, internships. I've been hunting and hunting, but only applied for a few. I need to stop taking it so personally when they turn me down, to see each rejection it as a "learning experience". I'm reading Overqualified to console myself. It's helping, a little.

I'm in Brugge, on a congratulations-on-graduating holiday with my mother (who also just graduated, finished her MBA), and my little brother. Enjoying the hell out of the weather. There's been a heat wave all across Europe, which in Scotland translates to t-shirt weather (mostly) during the days, and not-so-chilly-as-usual at night. But here in Belgium, it's actually properly hot, and I don't even need a coat at night! I have been trying to buy a pair of sandals; I've lived so long in the cold that I don't even own any anymore. Still haven't acquired them though, since as usual I fail at shopping.

I'm loving the sights as well. The medieval architecture, yes, and the canals, but also the cultural elements. I have seen several fantastic beards and moustaches, so many that I am wondering if there is some sort of convention happening. We took a touristy boat ride, and the French tourist across from us in the boat had an excellent handlebar moustache, and, as though to emphasise it, wore a shirt featuring a silhouetted longhorn steer. Yesterday we passed a sex shop on the high street, and then a few doors down saw an apparently unrelated chocolate shop whose window display featured three sets of life-sized chocolate breasts.

At the Groeninge Museum, they had a special exhibition about Charles the Bold and the 15th-Century Burgundian court, where I marvelled at the ideology in the information plaques as much as at the displays and artifacts themselves. The descriptions of the extravagant clothes and jewelry were almost more anthropological than historical, describing how the nobles used extravagant displays of wealth to 'legitimise' their power. Most of the descriptions were subtly critical of the legitimacy of monarchal rule in principle, though I'm not sure I could explain precisely how. In a way it seems like that's what one should expect from any modern display of late medieval artifacts, but most that I've seen have simply celebrated the splendour.

The whole thing reminded me of a D&D campaign I've been playing lately, in which the DM is a medieval history scholar and has set our party in Eastern Europe in the same period. We are a party of nobles, and our character alignments ranged from Neutral to Lawful Good (I am playing a Paladin) -- but the whole campaign has emphasised that the life of the nobility is inherently characterised by evil acts. Our characters have been sent out on campaigns to sack towns (on Christmas Eve!) and murder whole monasteries, and thus have grown steadily more Evil until we were railroaded into becoming vampires. In our splendid clothes and shining armour. Oh yes.

www.toothpastefordinner.com

My family arrives today, which is 'yay'. But my house is a mess, which is 'boo'. I'd meant to be doing a lot of packing and cleaning and such during my unemployment, but searching for jobs eats up a lot more time than I thought it would, and cleaning up after other people is dispiriting when those people aren't likewise cleaning up after you. *sigh*

At least I got a bit of wardrobe-purging and possession-organising done -- except that now my room is covered in clothes, and so many of them are "maybes" that I don't know whether to pack away, put away, or give away. But, on the even-more-of-a plus side, I came home yesterday to find that, for the second time in the year that I've lived here, someone else had mopped the kitchen. Amazing. Now I just have to clean the shower, a task done by not-me all of once in the last year, and that time poorly. And tidy and sweep the living room, and maybe a bit of the kitchen (but lovelovelove to current temporary housemate[s], who actually keep the kitcen reasonably clean).

Then more of the WTDWTROML. My phone was uncharacteristically busy yesterday afternoon, ringing like every 20 minutes all through the afternoon. One of these was a local book-and-stationary shop telling me they didn't need emergency holiday cover after all (which was nice, jobs like that don't often call you back); another was People & Planet telling me I didn't get their internship. At least now I know.

Current plan B is to move to Edinburgh? Maybe? My thinking was that if I moved to Southend with Harry, I wouldn't know anyone and would only be there for a year, whereas if I went to Edinburgh I at least already know several people, am semi-involved with local climate activists, and could realistically live there "forever". But now Harry's course has moved to London, where I also already have several friends (albeit more spread out) and there would theoretically be more job opportunities, even for things I might actually want to do "forever". But... it's London. Ugh.


p.s. Meme from aberwyn. I gave up memes but I think this one's sweet:

"If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal."

...And I guess it's time I started clambering back on.

Don't get me wrong, I've been here -- quietly watching, reading yer stuff, occasionally even commenting -- but I seem to have left off the whole 'generating my own content' part. I see I've made exactly one LJ post in the last month, and no public ones since April. I've been scarce around the message boards, and I've pretty much stopped facebook-updating and twittering (which is a shame since, as most of you now know, the Revolution is on Twitter).

I guess I've just found myself with nothing to say. I've been living in a hazy, hungry, lethargic daze since the end of exams. I spent a while trying to find another temporary job, since my current one somehow has less work for me now, despite losing half its front-of-house staff for the summer, but have given up on it. Nowhere wants to hire me because I'll be leaving town in September.

Even so, beyond 'somewhere else' I don't know where I'm going, or What to Do with The Rest of My Life. I had an interview with People&Planet, and am now waiting on tenterhooks for their reply "sometime this week". It's super-competitive, though, and the hunt for backup plans is not going well. I've been trawling through the "ethical jobs" websites, but their content is mostly so disorganised that it takes hours just to find things I'm eligible for, let alone actually fill in the applications. It's dispiriting.

There was a little while where I had a vague plan for my life. If I didn't get the P&P internship, I was going to move down south and "find a job" doing whatever until I could get one I really wanted, or use the day-job to finance art or writing until I could support myself doing that. I've been moving through 'when I grow up' dreams with all the fickle intensity of a 6-year-old -- although actually, when I really was a 6-year-old I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a research zoologist. I held on to that for over a decade (apart from a brief period when I wanted to be a vet, but that was curtailed by volunteering at our local vets and finding out what it was all about), then dropped it midway through high school for reasons I no longer remember. Then, as long-time readers will know, I came back to it midway through university, after it was Too Late.

So now I am drifting. A few months ago I wanted to write webcomics, but have found I have no particular story to tell with them, nor am I particularly funny. I have a long-term pipe dream of being a newspaper columnist, a professional opinion-haver, but I'm not sure quite how to break into that, and besides the whole field is being overtaken by blogs (like mine). Giving it away for free.

*sigh* Anyone know where I can look for Zoology or Environmental Masters Degrees with conversion courses?

Spam knows what we really want. I mean, not me personally, but we as a society. Mine's finally given up on bank scams, and now mostly tries to sell me a degree or an "elevated bed experience". It seems to come in waves, and changes like the tides -- and is apparently now responding to the news. A day after the swine flu paranoia started, I started to get the subject line "Absolutely effective respiratory pathogens treatment".

Advertising of all sorts does this, really. It appeals to the desires we don't want to admit we have: the shameful, base, lazy and cowardly and shy. There's an instant food company here called 'Batchelors'. I thought it was a little blatant, but never gave it much thought until a box of powdered "soup" packets appeared in our cupboard. How they got there is a mystery in itself, since my housemates are vegan and they are not. In any case, they were named 'Slim a Soup', to indicate their capacity to effect self-improvement. The powder they contained promised to materialise into "chicken noodle & vegetable", a stereotypical comfort food. The more interesting promise was in what appeared to be their slogan: "a great big hug in a mug" -- thus replacing not just the cookery of the prototypical wife, but the wife herself.

At least a wife is something generally considered desirable, though. Today I was shocked to find a crisp packet proudly proclaiming the environmental destruction (probably) wreaked by the farming of its contents: "This particular type of Cassava Root has been sourced from a unique 1,000 acre plantation in the volcanic highlands of Java." Yaaaay monocultures in a sensitive ecosystem!

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that almost all of our food comes from environmentally destructive monoculture. But it's one thing to know it, and another to print it on the back of your packaging as a selling point. Not to mention reminding your customers that your product travelled half the world to get to them, while trying to promote it as an alternative to normal, potato-based crisps (which can be grown and processed entirely within the UK, even if they aren't always). Apparently this adds to the perception that they are "healthier". Uh-huh. You can read the rest of their self-congratulatory wanking here.

I turned in my dissertation on the 17th. I turned in my final essay last Wednesday. So while I am not quite free as a bird -- I still have classes and tutorial readings, of course, and later there will be exams -- I am not nearly so stressed as I have been most of the year. Also, my sister is visiting, and we've been going to Halfcut and plays and things for the last few days of the On the Rocks festival.

The days have been gorgeous, too -- today is chilly, but I will forgive it. The weather is always a bit changeable at this time of year. Spring here seems almost as long as winter, brimming up in fits and starts in late February then dipping and wandering up and up until we pass the equinox, and the weather begins a slow but steadier warming turn. Right now we're entering yet another phase of blossoming. In our scruffy little garden this means another flush of daisies, along with phlox and something thick little bell-shaped things that may or may not be some sort of bluebell. Elsewhere, lilacs have started blooming, joining azaleas and violets and big red tulips, and several other garden flowers I can't identify. Along the burn, the trees have all turned white with blossoms and are dropping petals everwhere. Yesterday morning I saw a pair of ducklings nestling under their mother, the first I've seen all year.

On which note, you should all check out this comic, which is the sweetest thing I've read in a long while.

Having gone a long way towards uglifying University Hall during the refurbishment process, the university now seems to be turning its uglification tactics onto its academic spaces. Yesterday morning I saw that the black iron fencing outside St Salvator's quad was being painted a hideous rust-coloured brown. I am hoping it is only the base coat for another coat of black paint.

More irritating, though, are the aesthetic crimes happening on the other side of town. As a Philosophy student, I don't spend as much time in St Mary's quad, since it houses the amusing combination of the Psychology, Medical, Biology and Divinity departments, but I do pass through it sometimes on my way home. It's much prettier than Sallie's quad, with more plants, a few trees, and buildings that are not so stark and imposing. It also has some stone ruins in the centre of it, the crumbling remnants of an old gate. They are beautiful too, in a shambolic sort of way, and add to the general grace of the quad itself. It's no wonder that the university should want to protect them, but for most of the past year it has done so by surrounding half the lawn with one of those orange plastic temporary fences sometimes erected around building sites.

I was delighted, then, when I cycled past it a few days ago and saw that the orange fence had been removed, and was being replaced by a short, tasteful black metal fence erected just around the ruins themselves. It's a shame that there should be a fence at all, of course, but at least this one is not so ugly. Or rather, it wasn't, until they finished it off and added stark plastic signs warning "CAUTION: FALLING DEBRIS" and "DO NOT ENTER!" As if a locked fence did not already imply that the space should not be entered! *sigh* And all of this, the construction and the subsequent ruining-via-signage was visible even from the side-road where I cycle past, because the top of the hedge was lopped off at a random (and varying!) point, with too much of the branch exposed to allow the poor bushes to recover.

Enough of this complaining, though. I must return to my essay, which is also about the appearances of things external to the self. That is, about the objects of perception, and whether they are what we think they are, given the possibility of illusions and hallucinations. Oh, philosophy. (But, on a better note, I handed in my dissertation on Friday! Now it is just this final slog to finish this last essay...)

I cut my hair the other day. I was frustrated, I guess, and wanted a change, so I decided to trim it back from shoulder-ish length to about chin-length, and put in some new layers.

...Except that, somewhere in the new-layers phase, things started to get uneven, and I had to keep chopping and slashing away -- and now my hair is really, really short. Like, doesn't-cover-my-ears short. Pixie short. Boy short. Cold-neck short.

Harry really likes it (and we all know it's what your man thinks that really matters!), and a few have complimented it, but I am not so pleased myself. I have nothing against short hair in principle, and had idly considered this style of cut on a few occasions, but I always decided against it. This was an accident. And it isn't me.

That's the real problem. I don't look like myself anymore. I keep catching myself in the mirror, and my shoulders are too broad, and my face is the wrong shape. My neck feels chilly all the time, and my ears look naked. I can almost feel the absence, like a phantom limb. It's never been like this before. I've had several drastic haircuts in the past -- I chopped about 2 feet of it off just before coming to uni -- but they've always been considered and deliberate. A concious shifting from one sort of intentional projection of image to another. This just feels like an injury, a casualty of confusion and mirrors and scissors, and haste.

I hope it grows back quickly.

About 48 hours before writing this, I was being dragged away from a line of peaceful protesters, having been torn from their ranks by riot[ing] police.  Totally anonymous under their helmets, about half of them in balaclavas, all with their numbers covered up.  And yet they dare to question why so many anarchists would want to hide their faces!  You'll probably have already seen several news reports about all of this already, and maybe even read a few personal accounts.  This is mine.

At 12:30 pm on Wednesday, Climate Camp in the City was set up peacefully and surprisingly easily (that is to say, with little if any resistance from police) when a few thousand people 'swooped' in from various directions onto Bishopsgate in London, in front of the  European Climate Exchange.  We were trying to make the link between economic systems and environmental destruction -- that the same people and structures that caused the financial collapse had also caused the catastrophic increase in the average global temperature.  The idea was to give a glimpse of an alternative sort of world, so between our banners and barricades we set up a small tent city and had a street party in it, complete with bicycle-powered sound system and composting toilets.

While other protests -- specifically those at the Bank of England -- were deliberately aggressive affairs, the Climate Camp was entirely peaceful.  (Though, on a sidenote: no matter what the papers are saying, "violent" masked anarchists did not infiltrate the Bank of England demonstration or the Climate Camp -- they organised them.  You can't 'infiltrate' your own demonstration!)  Yet the police reaction to the wholly peaceful Climate Camp was the same as to the more destructive demonstrations at the banks.

At around 7 pm, police in riot gear showed up to try to clear away the camp.  I didn't see their initial approach, as I'd been reading in my tent at the time (hippie or not, there's only so much of samba drum circles I can tolerate at once), but I heard the call for reinforcement and went running for the southern blockade.  The cops were shoving into the crowd with their riot shields; in response, we held our ground as best we could while holding our hands in the air, shouting "peaceful protest!" and "this is not a riot!"  They continued to shove.  I moved forward and forward, filling the gaps, until I was right up against the line of cops.  One or two of the protesters around me punched into the riot shields (the shields, not the police themselves), after which the police started punching into the crowd.  One punched a man beside me in the face, knocking his head back into my own face and giving me a black eye.  Apparently in other parts of the camp at this time, they were batoning people in the stomach, but I didn't see that where I was.  What I did see was a frightening-looking metal battering ram, glinting behind the wall of shields.  Then someone behind me caught my eye, and with a little relief I let him take my place against the wall of shields, falling back out of immediate danger.  Seconds later, we sat down, and the police stopped beating on us.  For the next five hours there was an increasingly tense standoff.

It wasn't too bad at first.  We maintained a human barricade at either end of the camp, sitting down in front of the police lines to protect the space.  At my end, at least, it was almost jovial.  We recited poetry and sang songs -- pop songs, showtunes, disney songs -- and maintained a visual sort of banter with some of our comerades who'd climed onto a rooftop just outside of the police barricade.  They'd set up a plywood wall that made their setup look like a stage, so when the police spotlight was on them they did comical dances to the strip-tease music, and when the police showed up on the roof we shouted "They're behind you!" as though at a pantomime.  I never found out what happened to the roof-sitters, though, since before they were cleared away the police had moved our line back out of sight of them.

This happened at two intervals, both supposedly to condense the camp into a more defensible space, since police numbers seemed to be continually mounting and those in the centre were getting more and more scared.  I didn't quite understand the rationale at the time, and in hindsight I still don't, but that was what was given and, although gestures were made at making it a 'consensus' from the whole camp, in the end I suspect it was simply that (tactically incompetant) decisions were being made by frightened people in the centre.  But twice decisions were made, and twice we on the southern blockade agreed to stand up and move back.

With each move, tensions between the protesters and the police mounted, and the police became increasingly impatient and violent. They prodded the backs of our heads with their knees and riot shields, shouting at us to get up and move from the moment each retreat decision was made. The first retreat was carried out fairly calmly, but in the second, police shoved protesters hard with their riot shields, shouting and forcing us to move faster and ignoring us when we said that doing so would cause us to trip on the debris being hurriedly gathered by litter-picking protesters behind us. Ignoring, too, our pleas that they not shove us forward when to do so would cause us to trample someone who was already lying on the ground below us; that particular stand-off ended with a whole clump of protesters, held together by our linked arms, being pushed down on top of her.  Still, we sat down again, but this time the police would not allow another period of tense stalemate. They shouted that they were armed; they punched some of those seated until they bled; they held their gloved hands over the faces of others and shouted “what would it take to get you to move!” Then they started ripping people away, pulling individuals until they broke the chain of linked arms, then dragging us off one by one.

I was one of the first ones dragged away from the line, so I didn't see much of the carnage that followed.  (I wasn't arrested; I was manhandled over to a side street and told that I would be arrested if I dared to return.)  I understand that it was pretty brutal.  When we met up afterwards, Harry showed me where his clothes had been cut open -- he'd been knocked out by a riot shield, totally unprovoked, and had to be revived by police medics.  Another friend, I'm told, was actually pinned to the ground by riot shields and then kicked by police officers.

Still, the thing that sticks in my mind the most, and most sickeningly, was not actually their violence towards the protesters.  Rather, it was the totally wanton, riotous destruction of property by those supposedly there to "keep order" and protect [rich bankers'] private property.  Specifically, at one point when the cops broke our line, I saw them surge towards the stereo-bike.  Four or five of them leapt onto it, arms flailing, tearing into it like crazed animals.  Tearing it limb from limb.

It was the sheer hysteria of it that bothers, me, I suppose, and the wantonness; but also the hypocrisy.  This sort of rabid destruction from those who had so violently opposed the more-or-less premeditated destruction of bank property earlier in the day.  These are the attack dogs of the state, a neoliberal state which values private property above all else.   But when it came to the possessions of the protesters, this seemed to be of no concern.  Those who were kettled out from the beginning, or who were dragged away, like me, were not allowed to return to collect our belongings.  Fortunately for me (and for Lukas and Megan, who got locked out), we had friends who'd been nearer the centre who could gather up most of our stuff for us, towards the end when the police stopped dragging people away and most of those remaining had fled.  Everyone else's tents, bags, sleeping bags, etc., were apparently simply cleared away and skipped.

All this was allegedly to prevent 'obstruction of the highway'.  More plausibly, to intimidate us -- the marches the next day were noticably less well-attended than predicted, probably because so many people were at home nursing their wounds.  But they were still attended -- they still took place.   Then today (or, by now, yesterday), there were simultaneous protests against RBS at their headquarters in London and at their AGM in Edinburgh.   They can intimidate us all they like, but they can't stop us.

 

Hey folks. I'm off to the big anti-G20 actions in about... 21 minutes (action itself begins tomorrow). Just updating with breakfast, to ease my nerves over potentially missing the bus (I won't).

You can read stuff about some of the stuff here: http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/g20