An Unnecessary Distraction.

Coffee on things

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:55:36 -0400

I now have enough free time to start trying to write here about proper, important things, but this is really all I could come up with.

I don’t know why there are coffee stains on:

my desk
my windowsill
my hairdryer
my bedroom door
my carpet
two blouses inside my wardrobe
my MA dissertation

I don’t recall any of this happening.

Photo

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 07:27:25 -0400

drinkyourjuice: Sometimes you’re 24 and scrolling past something with 97,000 notes for the sixth...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 04:55:36 -0500

drinkyourjuice:

Sometimes you’re 24 and scrolling past something with 97,000 notes for the sixth time on your dashboard today and growing slowly homicidal in the way where no one’s death is immediately imminent but where maybe one day you’ll be 45 and drive your children into a lake.

One joke that will never stop being funny

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:23:34 -0500

Is taking a thing that is obviously not yours and saying it’s yours from home, like this:

The only videos I could find of the specific clip were in German and there were about 15, but all only in German, WHY?

Stuart Heritage: HOORAY! IT'S PANCAKLENTINE'S DAY!

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:21:53 -0500

Stuart Heritage: HOORAY! IT'S PANCAKLENTINE'S DAY!:

stuartheritage:

Note: Pancaklentine’s Day only occurs on the day between Pancake Day and Valentine’s Day. For the day between Valentine’s Day and Pancake Day, and the day when Pancake Day and Valentine’s Day occur simultaneously, please see Valencake Day and Vapanlencatineke’s Day respectively.

…

I am a successful and functional adult.

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 08:13:00 -0500

Over the past few weeks I’ve watched all of the episodes of Scrubs (apart from ‘season 9’, if you’ve seen it you know why.) I’ve compiled a list of the funniest clips from Scrubs, as decided by me.

I’ve genuinely spent ages on this. Don’t pity me, I’ve enjoyed it.

It’s a hip-hop world son

Best comment on a YouTube video ever:”Its a particularly disturbing scene for me. One of the few times we see blood actively coursing through a wound.”

Guy Love

Ceiling Fan

;

Mango Body Butter

Sam and Izzie

Sanford and Son

BRAIN FREEZE

STOP FINISHING MY AWESOME JOKES

Jermaine Stewart’s Classic Ode to Platonic Love

I suppose that’ll do for now. But I might feel compelled to do a volume 2, you never know. Watch this space.

When my friend tells me that married people have different priorities

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:46:13 -0500

myfriendsaremarried:

SNOW BLOG

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 08:23:00 -0500

Just to continue the theme of writing about nothing of any importance, here are some questions I have about snow.

Does today’s snowfall justify taking pictures of other people’s houses or is that still unacceptable? I don’t want to, but I have seen other people do it and I was wondering.
Can I legitimately take a picture of a snow covered postbox and compare it to a snowglobe I made for my Grandad?
How am I supposed to check the water meter now?
What is it about snow, specifically, that makes people send pictures of snow they have seen into news stations?
What sort of disposable society do we live in, if people are panic buying because they don’t have several weeks worth of food and drink frozen and tinned, and industrial quantities of shower gel, toothpaste and laundry powder stored in case of apocalyptic weather/zombie conditions? Like I do?
If HMV has closed, Lance Armstrong has taken performance enhancing drugs, Tesco is selling horse meat burgers, and snow is causing some sort of meltdown (freezedown?) of human sentience, were the Mayans a couple of weeks off in their calculations, or is it wrong to assign some sort of cosmic significance to things that aren’t in the least bit surprising?
Should I currently be finishing off my PhD applications instead of writing this?

I know the answer to approximately one of these questions (it’s the last one).

Suggestions if you're stuck for a New Year's Resolution

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:12:00 -0500

A lot of people make New Year’s Resolutions. It usually involves giving up something you enjoy, such as smoking, sitting down all day, shovelling salted butter down your throat or murdering hitch-hikers. The thing about resolutions, though, is that they’re doomed to fail. It appears that the reason for these pledges, is to try and extend your lifespan a little so you can spend your extra decade or so hating yourself for enjoying yourself, then hating not enjoying yourself.

I made some crushingly simple New Year’s Resolutions last year, which I made no meaningful effort whatsoever to follow. As a result, I’m not really any better off, so I’ve reassessed the need to make an actual effort to improve my life and well-being, and come to the conclusion that there’s not an awful lot I can (be bothered) to do. This year, instead, I’ve made some resolutions for the rest of humankind to follow, to make my life considerably less awful. Since they’re resolutions, they’re bound to fail, but hey, it’s something to think about.

Stop putting Emeli Sande on everything. I appreciate that people like her and I have absolutely no problem with that, but I keep coming home and expecting to find her singing in my kitchen while the votes for what I should have for tea are being counted.
Fewer cupcake shops. Please. Combined with the “Keep Calm and…” apocalyptic uber franchise, it makes me want to commit genocide. I don’t really know where all this came from. At first, I didn’t really mind very heavily decorated fairy cakes that become too sickly to finish very quickly. I preferred them in a decorative capacity. But they’ve very, very quickly become the Emeli Sande of the culinary world. I’m living in hope that 2013 will be the year of edgy takeovers of failed cupcake businesses.
STOP QUOTING ELF on social networking sites. If you’re guilty of this, you’re guilty of killing Christmas, so fucking stop it.
Put Arrested Development on a regular TV channel so I don’t have to get a Netflix account.
Stop counting things in sleeps, you are not infants, this is unnecessary, and simultaneously infantile, very confusing, and broadly inaccurate. If you’ve ever made a joke about how many sleeps a narcoleptic or insomniac has until something then congratulations, you’re not funny, at all.
If you are making a new year’s resolution that’s not one of the above, kindly refrain from associating with me.

You’re very welcome, world.

Christmas Adverts 2012: A Festive Round-Up

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:40:00 -0500

I have a lot of other, more productive things to be doing, but I’m sitting in front of the TV instead, switching between Bargain Hunt, E4 and the Crime Channel, writing this, when I actually have more pressing things to be writing. I’m telling myself it’s because I’m deathly ill and there’s no way I can attempt to translate the Russian State Archives when my eyes and nose feel like they’re trying to violently escape my face and this is currently blowing my mind, but I probably just have a cold. My mucus-filled hell has driven me to ramble some things about Christmas adverts, because I’m hell-bent on dragging you all down to my own wretched level. I probably love Christmas a lot more than your average human, proven by the fact that I started eating mince pies in October, and by my desperate need to prove that I love Christmas to anyone reading this. But that’s not the point. The point is that I resent Christmas being ruined by shit adverts.

I’ll gloss straight over breathy covers of classic songs, because this, unfortunately, is not a Christmas 2012 phenomenon, but a crisis of our age, predicted by the Maya, and written in the book of Revelation. John Lewis has tried to up its game this year. It’s moved on from a boy being really excited about a mysterious gift for his parents (it was probably a pipe bomb or a decomposing animal, the little prick), to a snowman proving either that the only way to a female of any kind’s heart is material goods; or that you can endear yourself to a woman with only gloves and a scarf. Literally warm her up . Thanks John Lewis! Problematically, too, the ad only presents us with a snapshot of the couple’s relationship, without raising uncomfortable questions about the possibility of a man-made entity developing sentience and the potential for love and hate; how warming up a snow-woman endears you to her instead of melting and killing her; or how exactly snow sex works.

Inexplicably, most Christmas ads this year appear to reflect and celebrate the misogynist and sweatshop-like conditions suffered by the stereotypical mum-at-Christmas. Apparently a vague gesture of recognition in a supermarket advert and your happiness/all round ungratefulness are enough reward for mum’s toil. And a petrol station bouquet from dad instead of actually helping her buy and wrap any presents. In supermarket land, women over 30 are servants who have to beg for scraps of the Christmas dinner they prepared; daughters and girlfriends are a terrifying army of product fiends, satisfied only by 3 for 2 deals on make up and bubble bath, while sons and boyfriends are dustbins for all food (even Iceland’s), and dads are saints, whose sole contribution of a bouquet is enough to make all the lethargic oblivion forgotten. Merry Christmas!

I’m fairly sure adverts are supposed to make you feel good about a brand, and make you want to shop there at Christmas because they have cheap and probably (before any lawyers get involved) steroid filled poultry, not engender a deep and resonating sense of guilt about letting mum shoulder the burden at Christmas. I might make some onion gravy this year (but I’m not buying any turkey for anyone, fuck you Morrison’s).

Honourable mentions, though, go to the Iceland advert, purely for its fitting use of Pure Imagination, as that’s exactly the strategy that was employed in the invention of its luminous, demented experiments they consistently pass off as Christmas dinner. And to Lidl for their Christmas magazine which they ingeniously titled “A Lidl Bit of Magic”. Wonderful.

Whistlestop Tour of the History of Women through the Russian Ages

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:15:00 -0500

Whistlestop Tour of the History of Women through the Russian Ages:

Although evidence for its historical evidence is scant, there are various traces found in early account; folk tales; and linguistic artefacts that are of important consequence to the history of women in Russia…

This is me writing my research proposal

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 07:36:51 -0500

This is me writing my research proposal

I don't think the workers of the world uniting is quite what Osborne actually has in mind.

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:18:00 -0400

So. SO. Gideon had a few ideas about welfare reform, termed in some pretty handy rhetoric that’s actually a gulf away from reality. It’s the old Victorian tale of the idle poor again, and not an awful lot has changed, except the unemployed, assumed drunks with large families aren’t just passed off as Catholics this time, and the single, unemployed young people not living in their parents’ homes aren’t assumed to be prostitutes anymore. Oh, and the Tories are quoting Marx now, that’s novel. But broadly, they’re to take the brunt of the proposed £10 billion in welfare cuts, and ironically the ‘chains’ they have to lose are actually their labour rights, which are only chains if you’re a soulless automaton seeking nothing but profit for profit’s sake [insert joke here].

6.5 million children living in households receiving tax credits are from working families; more than double the number of those living in homes without work. The assumption made that the joblessness of these families makes them less deserving of tax credits is an obvious fallacy. Most people willing to argue that people push humans out of their own bodies for a little extra cash tend to have an example of someone who has been evidently alienated from society and logic (and the means of production…), whilst ignoring the obvious fact that having a child is much more costly than the child benefits they’re likely to receive. And it also hurts, and often involves stitches, so there.

But this is obviously beside the point. These children, these faceless bawling bundles of flesh who are causing all the stitches and getting “chavs” penthouse flats, apparently, are the ones who would be penalised by these proposed cuts. And for what? According to Randeep Ramesh the Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated that in order to save £1bn a year, entitlements to the 330,000 out-of-work families with three or more children would have to be cut by £3,000 per family. But realistically, this cap on benefits for out-of-work households only saves a relatively paltry £250m each year.

These changes affect children down to acute developmental details, if reports that junk food depress IQ are to be believed, compounded by the dietary possibilities for many low-income, time-stretched families. These children are worth no less than those whose parents work, or who have fewer siblings. So why are they considered so? And the paltry savings projected by these cuts point to the chilling concept that these are politically motivated attempts to discourage particular sections of society from having children; much as the hike in tuition fees seemed oddly directed at the creation of a conservative elite in arts and sciences. Wonder where that would lead?

Vague conspiracy theories aside (this being written in the early hours, forgive me), another starkly out-of touch concept is that of the withdrawal of housing benefits to under-25s. I would hope that the absolute idiocy of this needs no explanation, but I’ll just drop in that projected savings from this are only in the hundreds of millions of pounds, and that the withdrawal of this benefit is not least going to affect the independence of both young adults in a volatile job market and the financial stability of their parents whose homes are being volunteered, but will more importantly endanger the lives of many forced to move back into violent or abusive situations. For many, homelessness would appear to be the ‘safer’ option.

So when Osborne asks: “How can we justify the incomes of those out of work rising faster than the incomes of those in work? Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift worker leaving home in the dark hours of early morning who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?” the answer is staring him in the face. Regulate banks and big business. The space they needed from government to ‘prosper’ and bring about economic recovery has clearly failed; and the policies outlined in the chancellor’s speech are unlikely, according to all the sources I’ve read, to meet his targets for recovery – projected, probably optimistically – into 2018.

Instead of attacking benefits in a political attempt to save a weak free market strategy, try raising a little more by protecting workers’ (and I’d like to stress, working mothers’) rights; against unfair, ‘no-fault’ dismissal, the rollback of maternity rights and flexible working hours, and against attempts to undercut the minimum wage from public and private enterprise. If you want to encourage people to work, particularly those with children, don’t penalise them for working. In times of struggle, many undeniably find employment impossible when their position in insecure, particularly as a parent, and staying in work is simply not the best option for their family. Which already exists, permanently, whether the Tories have decided this is a ploy for cash or not.

And for that reason; those very pressing concerns to most people, attaching conditions onto state benefits seems wildly misguided. Making voluntary work a condition for the retention of benefits is, at best a desperately naive and out of touch initiative to make people more ‘employable’, and at worst, an outright attack on the welfare state. Even with expenses reclaimable, many voluntary positions are untenable if you simply can’t afford the transport costs, as I’ve learnt the hard way; if this is to work, an overhaul of the Jobseekers’ service is to be needed to align suitable types of voluntary work to people, and to provide means for them to fulfil this without triggering greater financial difficulty. What is often forgotten is why most people turn to the welfare state in the first place.

So what you don’t do is try and trigger a roundly unproven growth in the free market by sneakily deregulating the labour market, encouraging employees to trade in their rights for shares in companies that exist in a decidedly volatile economic environment. Much as many small firms seek to circumvent minimum wage regulations, substantial fears have been voiced that this ‘shares for rights’ arrangement will allow new firms to circumvent labour regulations, making the positions of employees increasingly insecure. Workers of the world unite, did you say Gideon? Indeed. But don’t give up (what’s left of) your rights. You really do have nothing to lose but your chains these days, after all.

Oh, and a note about Miliband’s re-branded One Nation Conservatism (why is everybody talking like this is a good thing by the way?), best expressed by Jon Richardson on er, 8 Out of 10 Cats (yes, I have quoted it, you can’t stop me): “You want to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor? Well good luck because you can see it from space now”.

There must be a word in some language for:

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:32:00 -0400

The rebellious camaraderie shared with the person on the other side of the street upon the tacit agreement to commit to a danger cross before the lights turn.
The sense of profound yet misplaced injustice over being prevented from reaching the end of Rihanna’s We Found Love by a faulty laptop battery
The split-second of involuntary mutism and subsequent croak that follows running into an acquaintance unexpectedly.
The jolt of panic and despair after having calculated how long it is until your next substantial lie-in.
The dichotomy between thrift and glutton experienced after using leftover mushroom juices in a pan to fry bread for a late night snack.
The tragedy-cum-bravery of a timid-looking girl eating a banana crouched in the corner of a dimly lit library staircase when there is actually an abundance of more suitable places to eat lunch.
The misplaced pride over the sheer amount of coffee required to make oneself feel remotely normal of a morning.
The dull, perpetual heartache of being unable to attend Hogwarts; apparate; or ever meet Sirius Black.
The sense of anti-climactic revelation after a dream about wooden spoons turns out to be a prophecy about wooden spoons.
The fear of conspiracy triggered by the above-average frequency of occurrence of fruit-stickers on surfaces in one’s day to day life.
The grim amusement at witnessing a Jubilee buffet of sandwiches and Lambrini in the rain at a tram station.
The pathos of an elderly lollipop man in the city centre tirelessly serving his community to negligible appreciation from the public.
The sense of defiance when one’s perfectly legitimate research into Russian women in history throws up Russian porn results, to be noticed by the person sitting next to her.
The hollow bleakness inspired in one’s soul by the limp attempts by politicians to be casually photographed doing something topical (a la pasty-gate).
The despair for the future of the human race provoked by the launch of “women’s” chocolate bars and pens.

Rape is still a crime if...

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 07:57:00 -0400

Hey! George Galloway. Julian Assange. Todd Akin. Western media (tired of naming people now). I’d like to remind you that rape is still a crime under all of the following circumstances:

You are a footballer
The victim gets pregnant from it
You are a superhero
You say yes
The victim is asleep
You get to make the laws
The victim has said yes, to something, at some point in their life (including sex)
The victim is a feminist
You’ve reinvented it as some sort of board game
Charges of espionage may also be involved

Attempts to redefine rape for political purposes do not serve the purpose of whistle-blowing on abuses of (super)powers. The redefinition of rape to ‘proper’ rape, and ‘illegitimate’; ‘non-forcible’ rape; ‘sexual misconduct’; or any other veritable misnomer, has serious implications for the many women who are raped every day. Rape does not just refer to a brutal attack on a stranger in the street. It refers to any incident on non-consensual sex, whether by a stranger, or a lifelong friend.

These severely limited redefinitions of rape to a violent attack from a stranger not only have powerful implications for future convictions, from juries of our peers, but insults and shows blatant disregard for the experiences of individuals who have been raped. The devastation that results from rape by someone you know is every bit as serious as that by a random, violent attack; particularly when the role of trust in maintaining healthy relationships and a happy life is considered.

But this is unimportant to the white, middle-class men who seek to redefine rape as a crime. What’s more important than the lives of real people, mostly women, are political arguments that can be much better supported by other means. You do not need to dismiss alternative, very serious charges against a man, as “feminist fabrications”, to prove that certain Western nations often seek to subvert justice, and practice an imperialist system. You can look straight to those nations for evidence of that. You do not need to fabricate a distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ rape in order to argue against abortion. You can promote adoption and counselling survives, which would benefit women, regardless of pro/anti-choice standpoint.

To redefine rape to support a political argument casually and unthinkingly dehumanises its victims; mostly women, let’s be honest. It assumes that the crimes committed against these people are unimportant, a statistic. It assumes that they do not have the right to react against an act committed against them. It assumes that they are not capable of honestly identifying a crime committed against their person. Essentially, it reinforces the social attitude that the rights of women are unimportant, when they pose a threat to assumptions of patriarchy.

Julian Assange may be at risk of an unfair trial, this is true. But this should be distinguished from the charges of sexual assault made against him; these are serious charges, to be treated as such, at risk of a much greater injustice against millions of people across the world. They should not be used as a tool against the US, or dismissed as part of the big battle against US hegemony. This is not only dangerous to women, but to the credibility of those who ‘legitimately’ oppose hegemonic power. And George Galloway would do well to remember that.

Olenska: Yekaterina Samutsevich closing statement at the Pussy Riot Trial

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 07:25:40 -0400

Olenska: Yekaterina Samutsevich closing statement at the Pussy Riot Trial:

olenskae:

Yekaterina Samutsevich’s closing statement in the criminal case against the feminist punk group Pussy Riot:

During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my…

Writing about Writers' Block.

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 10:28:00 -0400

For someone who is trying to scrape a living together out of mindlessly pawing at a keyboard and scribbling illegible notes, I really hate writing. I am without doubt never going to produce some timeless masterpiece that alters our understanding of life, death, humanity, and/or the heart. For one, I’m too committed to the “and/or” paradigm for that to happen.

I’ve never attended a writer’s workshop, unless you include the seminar we had, where the freewriting exercise resulted in a page of drivel about how much I was looking forward to my lunch, instead of previously unarticulated thoughts about my dissertation topic (true story). I probably should though, because my method and technical skill is obviously terrible; my sentences are far too long and I use an unnecessary amount of punctuation.

I’m trapped in a loveless relationship both with writing, and with myself; probably the most boring and narcissistic love triangle of all time. Made all the more so because I’m actually writing about it. I suppose some of the narcissism is cancelled out by the relentless and inescapable self-criticism, though. Like a nagging backseat driver, or a gym teacher bunny conscience who routinely has a go at me for being shit, but also for worrying too much about being shit. It’s like Shakespeare.

There are days like today when a deadline is looming in the not-too-distant future, after an evening of frantic scribbling and a massive theoretical breakthrough when I sit down with, honestly, the best intentions in the world, to hammer out a brilliant chapter on gender theory and feminism in the early Soviet state, only to find out that I can actually breath anymore, let alone type real words.

There are days where I can steadily hammer out something (of questionable quality); like 500 words on fake novelty crisp flavours, or an Opening Ceremony Aidan Burley might enjoy, that are of no particular consequence to anyone. But when it comes to writing anything of substance, when you have a purpose to write for, it can be like trying to pull individual letters of the alphabet out of hardening cement. Every sentence is a tug of war with the desire to stare bleakly into space and randomly click on things, or slowly fall asleep at my desk, despite being off my head from chain drinking coffee (in a chainandfrom a chain.)

I think it is fairly safe to say that I will never function effectively as a writer. If I’m going to progress any further at all, I am going to have to find some form of cleansing ritual where I rid my mind of the panic that sets in every time I look at anythign with words on it, and learn how to breathe properly. It used to be a looming deadline that set me to work - but that method is risky, at best. An hour seems like plenty of time to write 4,000 words, until you’re 52 minutes in and only 450 words down.

So, I need a new method. I thought about incentives, but my self discipline is all taken up by being vegan, or so I tell myself, since it hasn’t actually required much self discipline at all. Because I don’t have any. I’m just going to have to pay someone quite frightening to smack the coffee out of my hands for every half-hour that passes without something being added to my word count.

That would probably work. Volunteers?

The New Library: The Birthday Letter

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 05:08:02 -0400

The New Library: The Birthday Letter:

the-new-library:

This, by Erika Paget, is really really beautiful.

animalstalkinginallcaps: OH, HEY. NO, IT’S NOTHING SERIOUS....

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 04:37:31 -0400

animalstalkinginallcaps:

OH, HEY.

NO, IT’S NOTHING SERIOUS. JUST KIND OF POOPED. NEEDED A BREAK FROM THE OFFICE. I ALREADY CALLED IN.

I’M JUST GOING TO STAY IN AND CATCH UP ON GIRLS. MAYBE DO SOME LIGHT BLOGGING.

HOW ABOUT YOU? ANY EXCITING PLANS TODAY?

I’ll miss this when I finish my Master’s and get a real job (for a year)

whydoihaveablog: Yo, I have seen exactly 0 minutes of the 2012...

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 05:20:39 -0400

whydoihaveablog:

Yo, I have seen exactly 0 minutes of the 2012 Olympics, and about 15 minutes of the 2008 Olympics, but I am still pretty sure that if your father was a stingray, you have an unfair advantage in water-centric Olympic events.