workworkwork

work, apartment and more

Lazy weekend. Spent lots of time reading, some time practicing guitar, some time writing, some time apartment shopping, and a bit of food shopping. Relaxing or boring weekend, take your pick.

Highlight was finding what I hope will be apartment from July-August. In Brixton, the formerly dodgy now up-and-coming Jamaican area the south bank of London. 1 minute from brixton tube. Top two floors of a 4 story brick buildings, on a busy street, one large room w/ en suite bathroom but can hear city noise at night, two quiet medium rooms with bathroom in hallway. Large open-plan kitchen/living room. Good soundproofing, lots of bars around. 30 tube for westminster and FT for me. No microwave or internet.

finally

A team I was cheering for actually won! Well, not quite, but the US tied Italy in an almost surreal match.

On another note, I can't stand the rank, patronizing artitude of English commentators towards Ghana, Cote d’Ivoir, etc. “Oh, the African team can be proud of themselves. They’ve played with much courage and energy, but in the end they were outclassed by [European team X]’s superior skill.” Oh, those brave, brave Zulu warriors!

tres bien

oh that was dreadful

Poland just lost to Germany in 1-0 in the 91st minute. After holding them off all game, the last 15 minutes man down. Fucking hell - this is what I hate about cheering for teams that I'm not on, the feeling of being powerless. Not a damned thing I can do.

shopping, exhausting

Today:
I took off to do the shopping, but then upon reaching Covent Garden (close to Wow Retro), I realized that I had forgotten the Topshop shirt I meant to exchange. So back I went, costing an hour and 1.5 pounds for nothing. Picadilly line is closed on weekends which makes getting to Covent Garden a pain. Anyway, take two: Got there, explored wow retro, found a Indian collar blazer I liked but it was marginally too big (will ask mom whether alterations could solve the problem). Fairly expensive (for used clothing) too -- 35 pounds. But very Matrix-chic.

Then onto Topshop. Got there, got distracted by browsing, and finally made it over to get the shirt I wanted to exchange for (the S instead of XS), and then watched in horror as the guy in front of me, looked at the last shirt, grimaced, looked again, and decided to take it! The bastard! As he walked off, I saw that it was an S too.

So, rather than giving up, I decided to stalk him. The guy took forever...For almost an hour, I watched this indecisive indie-kid shop, idling quietly behind him a rack or two, aimlessly wandering in circles behind him. Had anyone noticed me, it would have been very wierd; I didn't really look at anything seriously, I just wandered staring at this random dude.

Finally, he went to the fitting room, and then I sat outside like a mother waiting for her five year old, except more anxious. Would he take the shirt or not? Eventually, after another eternity, he emerged and put the shirt down on the rack. I promptly jumped up, practically snatching the shirt from his hands, and ran off to do the exchange.

Also picked up a black shirt and a couple ties, one with small pink flowers and skinny red one.

Two days ago:
Daytime did some shopping. Only bought one shirt, but tried on lots of super-skinny jeans. Desperately needed advice (ooh, do these make my thighs look to big?), but so goes...Anyway, might come back with some ultra-tight jeans. We'll see.

Vaguely disappointing night spent traipsing around Southwark, a Baltimore-esque stretch of south bank London, in search of a squat party (illegal parties in abandoned warehouses etc.). Darkened streets, no lamps, got lost. Didn’t exactly have the greatest directions.

Also, Poland lost their first world cup game against Ecuador. A weak weak showing…

Off to Farley

Visited Juliet's parents at Farley hall today. Had a wonderful time. Basically arrived, had nicest lunch I've had since here, watched the world cup game with them (well, actually, watched most of the first half, then talked with juliet until the game ended) then went waterskiing, then had the best dinner I've had since getting here. Waterskiing was great...Got the hang of it in 15 minutes, was crossing the wave multiple times (and dealing with the slightly tricky slow down when you turn around) before fucking up.

Her parents are quite interesting; I like both of them, but in very different ways. Her dad because he's very intelligent/knowledgable, worth talking to in a way that few people are (although he is slightly awkward in terms of interaction with others). And her mum because she is genuinely nice, thoughtful and makes conversation easy because she's relaxing to be around.

Good day. Now off to practice guitar. And lament the polish loss yesterday with sorrowful dirges.

I don't like the FT

The bus/international/national news coverage is fantastic, but the life/style sections irritate me like none other. It’s a certain tone of privilege that is grating. It’s the “How to Spend It” section that says (paraphrasing) “at 120 pounds per wineglass, this is not particularly expensive, but connoisseurs buy multiple sets…” Oh, of course, 120 pounds – pocket change. Or the smarmy “when Mr. M called me from Live 8 and asked me were I was, I told him that I at the Henley, where we had already made poverty history.” Insert snide laugh. Far be it for me to criticize coverage of expensive toys and desires, but the FT doesn’t cover that stuff the way the NYT/economist/Forbes/etc. do. Instead, the FT covers it with a certain conscious cultivation of ‘we are the wealthy writing for the wealthy’ attitude that is infuriating.

Also, this kind of coverage sells papers. The FT was losing money until ~2 years ago, when they launched a raft of such lifestyle coverage, and are now back in the black, with this stuff selling better than usual business coverage.

whingeing about...

More work-related rockiness: So, I was invited not to go to work on Friday. I’m not sure if this is because, as she said, most interns don’t work Fridays, or if it was because there’s no work to do, or if it was because she wants to minimize my time in the office. Strange – getting time off from work irritates me. It is bothersome because I want to be working, doing things – relaxed pace doesn’t suit me. Also, the hope is that doing well with menial tasks will lead to more interesting tasks (even though I find it quite difficult to excel at a menial tasks – I mean, typing up stuff or filing things is hard to fuckup, but also hard to do conspicuously well). I probably came into this too ambitious; if I readjust expectations/goals, it’ll be fine.

In other news, one of the apartment buildings en route from tube to apartment is strange. Always filled with a number of young people milling about, and I’ve seen an absurd number of people there fixing their bikes just outside somewhere on the street. I’m going to investigae…

Fantastic

This is what oped writing should be like. John Derbyshire is amazine. A book review of a collegue's book:


The word “polemical” needs emphasizing. Some people would say that a writer who refers to embryos as “the young,” to Mrs. Schiavo as “disabled,” or to the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment as having carefully pondered its implications for abortion, is just plain dishonest. There are matters of taste involved here. In the case of this reviewer, there is some fundamental transatlantic disagreement, too, I think. A great British opinion journalist once described his skill set as “the vituperative arts.” This attitude, which I share, is widely held across the Pond, but is not very popular here in what Florence King calls the Republic of Nice. Personally I don’t mind rhetorical sleights of hand in a polemical work. They keep you on your toes, which is where you should be when reading a book like this. Readers of a more nervous disposition, or too much afflicted with the middle-class American terror of strong opinions, might take offense at them, though.
...
In fact, Ponnuru has nothing to say at all about the monstrous character assassination, carried out by utterly unscrupulous RTL propagandists, of a decent man who coped humanely and well with a terrible life calamity. Well, not quite nothing: “It cannot be denied that pro-lifers were guilty of some excesses,” Ponnuru murmurs. Some excesses? I would say. Here the author sounds like nothing so much as a Soviet Communist Party apparatchik, circa 1960, offering a grudging admission that Stalin and his cronies might, just once or twice, have been a tad over-zealous in dealing with class enemies. Perhaps I should add here that after reading three (Schiavo, Schindler, and Eisenberg) of the above-mentioned five-or-so books, I came away more convinced than ever that Michael Schiavo is a good man criminally traduced by brutal, unprincipled RTL fanatics, from whose number, on the evidence of this chapter, Ponnuru cannot with certainty be excluded.
...
"Party of Death” makes pretty free use of slippery-slope arguments, to varying effect. Not every slope is slippery. Most of our social taboos are in fact surprisingly robust, even when perfectly arbitrary. Anglo-Saxon cultures are, I believe, in a minority in having a taboo against the eating of horseflesh; yet our regular consumption of pork, lamb, and beef does not seem to be pushing us down a slippery slope towards hippophagy, even though nobody much (except Bo Derek) would care if it did.
...
For RTL is, really, just another species of Political Correctness, just another manifestation of the intellectual pathology, the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality. that has afflicted our civilization this past forty years. We have lost our innocence, traded it in for a passel of theorems. The RTL-ers are just another bunch of schoolmarms trying to boss us around and to diminish our liberties. Is it wrong to have concern for fetuses and for the vegetative, incapable, or incurable? Not at all. Do we need to do some hard thinking about the notion of personhood in a society with fast-advancing biological capabilities? We surely do. (And I think Party of Death contributes useful things to that discussion.) Should we let a cult of theologians, monks, scolds, grad-school debaters, logic-choppers, and schoolmarms tell us what to do with our wombs, or when we may give up the ghost, or when we should part with our loved ones? Absolutely not! Give me liberty, and give me death!
...
America would be a happier and freer nation if the accursed intellectuals would just leave us alone with our lives, our blunders, our tragedies, and our deaths.

so I thought that yesterday was bad

Today I overslept work by 2 hours. Fucking am/pm difference on alarm clock. Got there in 30 minutes (and the tube takes 20). It didn't seem to be a big deal, but it couldn't have made a good impression.

first day of work...

So work started off nerve wracking. Basically, I showed up in the UK without having any contact with the person who offered me the internship for over a month. Then I tried to contact her for the past 4 days and didn’t get a response. So I was more than a little nervous. Compounding the problem, I had to pick up my suit from the drycleaners in morning (couldn’t get chocolate/something stain out with water), but I had lost my ticket, then raced to change in a mcdonalds but the stall was broken so I just changed in the middle of the bathroom (luckily no one came in). Finally got to Westminster only a touch after nine, called her office, no one answered. Tried her cell, no answer. Waited for over an hour.

Then miracle of miracles, she showed up.

Work itself was okay, neither thrilling nor particularly disappointing. Not sure what I expected, but the pace of life in a bureaucracy is just a bit slow…it’s strange. Interesting work: trying to phrase questions for PMQs. Uninteresting work (bulk of time): typing up notes. So, relieved but vaguely disappointed. At least my director-esque lady was very nice, and she + the people I talked to at lunch (from other offices) were quite smart/interesting. So discussion was also good.

After work chatted apartment owner for a while. A great example of mom’s beloved instinct/first impression being completely wrong. He’s a smart guy, nice, well-read, knowledgeable and likes good music. Interesting guy…

Got very frustrated yesterday. Combination of things—tired from shitty sleep (bed sucks), worry about internship, frustration with how fucking expensive everything is, frustration with having to arrange everything for my friends (every trip, every event I do, I’m almost always the one that puts it together. In general, from when I was 5 and we organized capture the flag games, I’ve always been the one to put things together. I’m usually okay with it – in fact, suits my minor control freak tendencies – but sometimes you just get tired of it all). And without anyone here to talk to/do things with, frustration, aimless anger just coils up…

For dinner Reheated 2 day old overcooked pasta last night. Probably my culinary low point thus far—certainly worse than the bread+nutella dinner of yesteray. . Not sure if I can sink much further.

wolf parade

Listen to wolf parade -- like clap you hands, but better.

I've realized that I am throughly flummoxed by the task of feeding myself. Food shopping for ~50 dollars worth of food took literally 2 hours (part of this might be the fact that they had free samplers by the bacadi company, and I tried everyone before breakfast. I also took home a cocanut I have no use for -- can't open it).

Yesterday, I attempted my first stir fry by pilling everything into a too-small pan. Then I learned that things cook at different rates, and I wound up with a pile of uncooked mushrooms, burnt spinach, and some crunchy mini corn bits (I forget what those small vegies are called). The spinach had absorbed all of the oil, so it tasted like olives. I threw some soy sauce on it and it all tasted pretty soggy and miserable.

Take two was cooking pasta. I couldn't find a cover for the pot, so I steamed up the kitchen, but I successfully cooked it. I then managed to pour pre-made tomato paste successfully ontop of the pasta, and it was okay.

The best part of each meal was the delicious M+S juice that accompanied it. It was also the most expensive part of the meal, and the part that I had no role in creating.

Anyway, cooking advice much appreciated. Do download wolf parade -- try track 4 or the single Disco Sheets.

also, address

Contact me!

Contact plan:

Anyone can contact me anytime with my cell number: 07804547917 - free to receive international calls. The only exception is right now because it is dead because I have no us-->uk style plugs to charge it.
I contact rest of the world using either phone cards or skype, depending on if I have internet access.

Today was a fuckup because I spent the day on US time until I got kicked out of a store arguing that it was 1pm when it was really five pm. Accomplished nothing except for getting some food -- feeding yourself is a daunting task. Not sure if I will manage.
Tomorrow: a) find plugs, b) arrange internet, c) get haircut, d) get some clothes drycleaned