general gibberish

unemployment, books, wookey hole

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:39:54 -0400

One boring afternoon in April 2011, I was writing an essay about post-communist economic reform of the Eastern Bloc. Not for fun of course, I’m not mad, it was for a university course I was taking. Anyway, whilst researching for this essay, one particular book mentioned that “Looking for a job, particularly if you are already out of work, is one of the more stressful, frustrating and potentially demeaning tasks that accompanies life in a Western market economy”. I had a three month stint as a finance monkey for Somerset County Council before I left to volunteer in the Maldives, and now I’m unemployed again I gotta say I agree.

Or maybe unemployment perhaps isn’t all bad - I try to steer clear of Jeremy Kyle though I will be guilty of occasionally watching The Wright Stuff. I’m trying to read more, currently I’m halfway through Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and have been reading it for like, forever. It would be a total lie to say its unputdownable, its incredibly difficult to read - but some bits have been utterly stunning, I particularly enjoyed the way it deals with the ethical debates concerning the existence of God in “The Grand Inquisitor” bit. Secondly I found a pristine copy of Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat in the Blue Cross charity shop and foolishly I started to read it before finishing the former book and it is about ten times more readable. The book, which details the world famous neurologist’s experiences with various patients who had bizarre neurological disorders, such as people who have lost their memories or are no longer able to recognise people and common objects, is pretty great so far. The book is so much more than just medical notes, its beautifully written and somehow incredibly sad and hilarious all at the same time. You must read this book.

Let’s not exaggerate the time I spend reading, I’m not some sort of genius here. So that I don’t get some sort of stay-at-home cabin fever I try to leave the house too, y’know, dog-walking, bike rides, going to Morrisons way more than is strictly necessary and maybe even deliberately “forgetting” to buy something just so I have an excuse to go back there. Yesterday was my brother’s birthday and of course, my unemployed self was free to celebrate with him by going on a day trip to tourist attraction Wookey Hole Caves, a delight he could also afford being self-employed. The Caves are “formed through erosion of the limestone hills by the River Axe” and are noted “for the Witch of Wookey Hole – a roughly human shaped rock outcrop, reputedly turned to stone by a monk from Glastonbury” - thanks Wikipedia. Of course there isn’t just caves at Wookey Hole Caves, that would be too simple. Other features include a fairy garden, big fibreglass animals (including dinosaurs), a house of mirrors and a circus exhibition.

On a side note - I cannot get over film photography, I am stupidly addicted to what is essentially a dead art-form which confuses many of my peers who seem to think that I am so stupid I have just neglected to notice that digital cameras have been invented. Anyway, I bought some faulty polaroid film for an eye-watering price, especially for an unemployed loser like me and Wookey Hole seemed like the perfect place to test it out - results below.

These are pictures of my favourite attractions - the fibreglass animals and most amazingly, fully functioning machines at the Victorian Penny Arcade. You can change your money up and £1 buys you exactly ten Victorian pennies to use on penny falls, grab machines, fruit machines and various arcade games and even fortune tellers, one of which “read” my palm and told me that my hand denotes that I have a great ability for business details and lots of other nice things which are “definitely” true.

So I would definitely recommend a day out at Wookey Hole, with a quick stop-over in Wells on the way back for a visit to the biggest fuckin’ cathedral I have ever seen. I’ll leave you with a picture of this nice cat who seemed to live at Wookey Hole. End.

pretentiouslittlefuck's volunteer experience

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:38:55 -0400

Who hasn’t wanted to volunteer abroad at some point? It’s a chance to justify the self-indulgence of travel by saying “I want to help the developing world.” I kid, I kid - regardless of motivations, volunteering abroad is surely a good thing, although Daily Mail “journalists” might try and have you believe otherwise.

However, when we think of people volunteering abroad, we think of super gung-ho, over privileged “gap yah” style early twenty-somethings. “Giving something back” is a luxury that the rest of us can’t usually afford and so we feel doomed to be uncultured philistines forever more. Well this isn’t always the case - I secured a place on the now defunct International Volunteer Programme co-ordinated by the “Friends of Maldives” (also now defunct) which I didn’t have to pay for and actually provided a living allowance to twenty-something volunteers to travel to the beautiful archipelago to teach and “get involved with local projects”.

I arrived in the Maldives on the 29th December 2011 after the longest flight I’ve ever been on to see a country which was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Maldivian school term started on the 8th of January and we were advised to arrive a few days early for a poorly organized “orientation” consisting of, among other things, a Dhivehi literacy class (where we learned nothing) and attempting to open a bank account (we didn’t manage it). On the itinerary was a meeting with the president, yes, the president! Boasting on their blogs and facebook statuses, the other volunteers were clearly super stoked to have met the president; but whilst we may have felt like great big British diplomat superstars the Maldives has a population of 300,000, which makes our Maldivian political engagement somewhat comparable to meeting the mayor of Scunthorpe. Oh. He did promise us a trip to his island where we could utilize a variety of luxury facilities, but it turned out just to be president talk.

I’ll be the first to admit that I had never considered teaching before, nor did I think I would be any good at it. But this was volunteering abroad, I thought it wouldn’t matter that I was unqualified and hated school myself when I was in it, these children would love us; we have come a very long way to help them learn a useful language! However, they hated school just like British kids and I’m sure I’ll remember for a long time a 10 year-old child giggling and saying to me “You’re going to hell” in response to “Will you get back in your seat, please?” The other teachers were generally not too welcoming, with the exception of the other expat teachers who were generally from India and Sri Lanka, who also suffered from some degree of ostracism from the Maldivian people. When being interviewed for the position, the interviewers lit up when I mentioned I play guitar saying that the kids would love it – but I did not bother presenting my would-be rockstar self to these children as it would have no doubt produced cringe-worthy moments and confirm that I am nowhere near as cool as I appear in my head. Although, I doled out high fives to some of the younger children when they got correct answers and on the way out of class, sometimes there would be a small queue forming to slap my hand, which definitely felt kinda awesome.

One notable point about the Maldives is that the religion is pervasive in politics, which had an influence on a variety of factors but most relevant for young people is the legal status of alcohol. Initially I had planned to brew some prison wine or “pruno”, which I thought was worth making just to follow this hilarious write-up alone. However, I realized that lucidity is not the horrible nightmare we might believe it is, although a gin and tonic upon my eventual return to the UK was greatly received. Lo and behold, good conversation outside of the pub does exist.

There were some good moments. Some children were just great with such fantastic imaginations and I probably would have left after a week of volunteering if it hadn’t been for them. It certainly was an experience and I’m glad I did it. And of course, the Maldives is an absolutely beautiful country with the most amazing beaches I have ever seen. The sad thing was that I didn’t feel like most of the children had been taught to respect foreigners or women and that my volunteering was lost on them. And so I left an 11 month placement 3 months in not only because I did not find teaching in the Maldives a particularly pleasant experience, but also because of an unstable political situation, feeling unsafe generally (we were broken into twice), and because I felt like there wasn’t room for an English volunteer in the Maldivian school system, especially as the International Volunteer Programme is no more since political changes.

Unfortunately we don’t even get to say we met the president since he was forced to resign, allegedly by gunpoint, just “former president Nasheed” which sounds nowhere near as good in conversation. But I did get a killer tan.

okay i get it, you're nonchalant

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:37:00 -0400

This entry is just a couple peel-apart polaroids taken with a Colorpack II, because I feel like it.

First one was the view from my window when I was at university in Birmingham, and the second and third were taken in Deritend (also Birmingham). That’s all.

blogger's belief

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:38:31 -0400

I started this blog over a year ago after seeing that “an impressive personal blog or website” was a pre-requisite of getting on a highly competitive internship for the Guardian newspaper. It was the summer holidays before my final year of university and I was worried that if I did not start dragging out my major selling points I might end up another statistic on the dole register. I’d always been keen on writing, I thought, so why not start a blog? I did realise at the time that I would probably not be good enough to get on a Guardian internship, but I belong to a generation where anything mildly impressive which could possibly added to the CV (ie blogging) is hard to resist. So why did I never update? A bit of laziness, but mainly not wanting to be like the millions of other freaks xeroxing their worthless opinions.

I started writing my first entry, other than the introduction entry, many moons ago. I spent ages with this little file on my desktop, blogentry.doc, tweaking it every now and then, trying to make it as humorous as possible. Opening it now I realise just how hard it is to write something that is what I wanted it to be. That is, not something that looks borderline psychotic whilst attempting the ever-so-difficult-to-pull-off anger-ridden comedy style characteristic of Bill Hicks or Sam Kinison. You know, we’ve all seen it, the friend who has the blog with an angry rant injected with humorous wording to make it seem jovial, but it still makes for uncomfortable reading whilst we sit there grimacing. How did Hicks or Kinison do it? Something to do with how relateable their rants are - divorce, holier-than-thou non-smokers and religious people, I suppose - no matter how amusing you are as a person, people are not going to be laughing with you if you look like a lunatic on the fringe ranting about stuff whilst everyone else fails to understand your motives for hating it. Though 9 times out of 10, you know these people don’t really hate this stuff, they just have no material and are trying to force the funny.

Attempting to have a mildly-humoured political blog - the aforementioned entry was on why I think the left-right debate is somewhat meaningless. And I still do, but since I don’t really have a readership I’m not entirely sure how detailed I need to make it- heaven forbid I end up patronising people as if they were Daily Mail readers. At the same time, I have no desire to appeal to the stuffy uptight “intellectual” types. It’s important to write something of substance which is easily understood, not just bullshit which uses several impressive sounding adjectives and far-fetched analogies which keep you nodding sentence after sentence, then as soon as you finish you think “What the fuck did I just read?”

Prior to finishing university, people would ask me “What do you plan to do with a degree in Politics?” and I would joke “Go on the dole.”
But yeah, I’m not laughing now, as I am indeed on Jobseeker’s allowance so I have plenty of time to warble on about nothing in particular as I have appeared to have done in this entry. I’m trying again to write in this thing, but I’m setting my standards high.

So still no politics as of yet, I promise I’ll post some in future. Although I’m not really sure who I’m promising this to. Is anybody there? Hello
?

you suck!

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:10:15 -0400

really?

i hear they have the internet on computers now

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:16:00 -0400

Dear readers, if any. Hi.

Coming up is a series of nonsensical political and general gibberish thoughts/ rantings which I will no doubt think sounds intelligent for three hours of my life until someone points out a hole in my argument, at which moment I shall retreat into my bedroom corner and think about how I was made to look stupid on the internet, quietly mumbling to myself “oh the shame” every two minutes.

But seriously, I’ll write some ideas, and you, the more educated person, can exchange your thoughts and help me refine my idiocy. It’s a damn sight cheaper than the £3200 a year I’m paying for the BSc in Politics and International Relations I’m currently studying. I change my mind a lot, but I sit on the left side of the political spectrum, although I’ll explain in a later blog entry why I think the whole Left vs Right shebang is really not that useful. For argument’s sake, let’s say I’m currently a “Social Democratic Capitalist”, so whilst the Tories can say I’m a bleeding-heart liberal for my views on povvos, I also think a strong market is important.

Sure I could start a fashion/photography/what-have-you blog, fill it with scans of Polaroids I’ve taken, Polyvore collages, thought-provoking quotes from the most dreamy films I like, finished off by recounting my day with each sentence crammed with 3 or 4 adjectives, in a fashion most sophisticated.. so fanciful, so delicate. This is what every other girl my age’s blog appears to be - but why pretend I’m anything other than a foul mouthed, scruffy, pint swilling malcontent?

Perhaps this is the start of my metamorphosis into an overweight 38 year old spinster/single mother World of Warcraft addict who derives pleasure only from feeling superior to people who have less general knowledge than myself on internet forums, and motivational posters featuring cats and bad spelling and grammar* which, for some reason, is “ironic” and therefore “okay”. You know the sort, as someone with too much time on their hands, I’ve observed a lot in the blogosphere.

I’ll finish on a quote from Homer Simpson that I think describes the blogosphere quite well - Now there’s a thousand freaks xeroxing their worthless opinions. Only without the xeroxing part. Enough of that.

Is it customary to sign your name at the end of a blog entry? Who knows. I’ll do it this once.

Emma

* http://icanhascheezburger.com/