Joe Six Pack And His Slippery Slope To Socialism

You know, I almost feel sorry for George W. First he started a really stupid war by lying about stuff, and as a result we worked out that his 'serious' face was not to be trusted. So the next time he put his serious face on nobody believed him, and as a result he's presiding over the sudden disintegration of global capitalism. What's a cowboy to do?

I don't have any shares and my pension was most of a hill short of a hill of beans anyway, so as long as I have enough of a job to cover my share of the mortgage, and M has enough work coming in to cover his, I reckon we'll work something out. Neither of us has a credit card, and we have learnt how to grow onions, potatoes, broad beans and (tbc) brussels sprouts, so we can move into Austerity Mode at fairly short notice. There's a lot to be said for being low maintenance. As Plumbing S said, while taking a chainsaw to another fallen tree, 'I might be oil-poor but I'm wood-rich'.

On the home front, I have taken Mr B's advice and found a secret weapon in the War Against Brookesalikes. Our new housemate is black and 6'3". I was telling him about the recent shrieking issues. Oh, I'll go round next time, he said. When I ask people to keep the noise down they usually do, for some reason.

I'm almost looking forward to it.

joella

I'm still afraid of America

... which is probably why - instead of being in bed like a sensible person - I'm still drinking vodka, watching the jaw-dropping Twitter Election Feed and wondering if I can stay awake through the televised debate or should go to bed and consume the mediated version in the morning...

joella

Watching the students #1

They've not been so bad yet really. Tonight though there was that noise that you know augers ill. That noise which is largely made up of bad dance music combined with shrieking at a volume that can only be achieved with heightened levels of intoxication, with all the doors and windows open. And it was only 8pm. On a schoolnight.

We were eating where we normally eat, with the back door open because we'd made a lot of smoke cooking, what with my Jewish potato cakes (I am potato rich at the moment) and M's chargrilled broccoli with chilli and garlic. We were relaxed about the noise as we have made this noise ourselves, except with better music. And it was only 8pm, and we were drinking steely ice cold Sauvignon Blanc and generally counting our educational blessings.

But I did wonder how many of them there must be in there to make that much noise, especially when they did assure us faithfully and politely that they would let us know before they had a 'rowdy evening'.

So I stood on my chair to look out of the window at their house. There was definitely a gathering in the back room, but not what you'd really call a party. There was also someone leaning over the sink in the downstairs bathroom, visible through the frosted glass. She was there a while.

I think one of them's chucking up already, I said to M. That's probably a good sign.

She carried on, lifting her head up then going back for more. Then another head appeared from the right. If I remember that bathroom correctly (and I have seen it, as I expressed an interest in the plumbing while the landlords were doing it up), head #2 belonged to someone who must have been sitting on the loo.

How odd, I thought, to chuck up in front of someone else. Especially when there are three toilets in the house.

And then I thought, no, she's not chucking up, she's snorting something.

I bought M a little video camera for his birthday. I am thinking of starting a StudentCam channel on YouTube.

joella

Sun comes up, it's Saturday morning

It's been a weird old week, no? Every morning the Today programme woke me up with more tales of global economic meltdown. I don't understand how banks work -- in fact several of us round a pub table with plenty of maths qualifications between us established that we had no idea what the FTSE numbers actually represent. I've always secretly believed that nobody does really, and indeed that all financial instruments more complicated than a biscuit tin under the bed have something of the Emperors New Clothes about them. And on the evidence of this week, I think I might be right. 

I take no great pleasure in this, of course. I don't want thousands of people who earn honest livings to lose their jobs or homes, and I don't want to wake up one day to find that all our stuff are belong to China. 

It's pretty gloomy at NGO X as well, as we are busy making ourselves fit for the future and that future has people giving less money to NGOs as they need it all to keep the heating on and buy cheese. There are days when I can see why people choose to be doctors or policemen or schoolteachers. *And* the mortgage has just gone up *and* we don't have a lodger at the moment *and* the weather has that 'I'm going to get cold soon' edge to it that normally I love but this year... this year makes me feel poor. 

But I don't turn the radio on on Saturday mornings. Instead I sleep and sleep and sleep until I'm good and ready to wake up. I still have some residual exhaustion (emotional, probably) from the Hot Place, so I wasn't good and ready until nearly 11. M was still asleep too, and we woke up to a sunny, sunny morning, and more silence than you would expect at the end of Freshers Week. 

The allotment needs attention. I'm going to pack up last night's leftover curry, make up a bottle of Ribena (we can still afford high-end cordial), get out the hand tools and go and get dirty. It will all, one way or another, work itself out.

joella

While You Were Out...

Today I have been mostly sleeping, and catching up on the things that happened while I was in the Hot Place. It wasn't that I didn't have internet access, I did... it was just that these things all seemed irrelevant. And probably were.

But they don't feel so here. And so we have:

1. The return of the students.

The neighbourhood is again full of badly parked cars and badly sorted rubbish (I'm thinking of offering lessons in both), and Tesco is again full of young people sporting tiny iPods and huge hair and buying Taboo and Doritos. One lot of our neighbours are mostly the same as last year's, and they were generally ok, but the other side are new. We hated their predecessors, but one ought to show willing, so we went round to introduce ourselves. They assured us that they were 'just five girls', were quiet and hard working, and will be sure to let us know if they have any parties. Splendid, we said. We'll get on fine then. And I hope it's true. In my mind they are already Posh Caroline, Ginger Caroline, Sporty Caroline, Scary Caroline and Baby Caroline.

2. Google Chrome.

I was quite excited about this for a while, as the work laptop I was using only had IE 6 on it (oh, the joys of a 'trailing edge' IT strategy) and I couldn't bear it. So I downloaded it, but gave up on it after a couple of days... a bit like early Gmail and its lack of a Delete option, I found its lack of a 'home' button annoying (I liked that there is no 'homepage' as such, I liked that a lot, but I wanted to be able to get back to that from another page without opening a new tab, and I didn't find a way to do that). The clincher though was that a lot of pages didn't work -- and didn't work in an ugly, flickery, jumpy sort of way -- because I didn't have the "right plug-ins installed". And I couldn't install them without downloading them over my shitty connection and then logging in as an administrator. As these pages worked just fine in IE I didn't *quite* understand what the problem was -- maybe GC doesn't do backwards compatibility -- but I also couldn't be arsed to find out. So I uninstalled it. I thought I might try again when I got home, but then I discovered that Firefox 3 had also happened while I was away, and its Most Visited and site tagging give me some nice new things to play with. So I can't see the 'value added', as they say in local government, of getting my head round GC for the time being. I'll watch this space though.

3. Sarah Palin.

Wow. She's a whole new kind of woman, and I am Very Afraid. I'm not sure what she *is*, but she is *not* a feminist, and I really don't see how she or anyone else can claim otherwise. Having a woman running for high office means there has been feminism, and that that woman has benefited from the achievements of feminism. It does not mean she embodies those values or will promote or even protect them. We had a million years of Thatcher, we should know that by now.

Now, personally, I also don't buy the 'Feminists For Life' thing. I don't think you can be a feminist and not support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. Not in a world where women don't have the right to choose not to get pregnant, or even in a world where they do, but they don't exercise it, or something goes wrong, or they thought it would be ok, or they don't want to make a fuss, or they didn't or couldn't care about themselves enough to stop it happening. We need to work on all that, for sure, and the best case scenario is a world where no one gets up the stick without wanting to be there. I support all moves in that direction, and if we got there, then abortion, like the Marxist state, would wither away. But while we're, you know, waiting for utopia, any move to outlaw abortion is a misogynist move. In my opinion.

But that's far from my only beef with Ms Moose Hunter. The thing that really sets my teeth on edge is her claim to be "just your average hockey mom". I'm not quite sure what a hockey mom is, but I'm always uncomfortable when women go round defining themselves by their relationships to other people. Especially when, like the Carolines, they use the word 'just'. Feminist it ain't, either, but I think I should move on from that -- my discomfort is more about the passive-aggressive pressure that is put on children when their mother (or father) has a deal of her own identity or self-esteem invested in their prowess.

I think my own mother did me proud in this regard -- though if she *had* had the desire to be a hockey mom she would have been sadly disappointed -- most of the time I was supposed to be playing hockey at school I actually spent hiding in the toilets, and when I couldn't manage to hide I always tried to be Left Half (or is that netball?) as that seemed to be the position where it was easiest to do nothing without getting shouted at. The only time my games teacher noticed me was when she was comparing me to a dead body.

She did me proud in other regards too though: when I was the same age as Bristol Palin (and a year younger than the "young man she will marry"), she walked into the room where I was doing my chemistry homework, closed the door and leaned back against it, and said 'I think you should get fitted for a diaphragm'. I remember looking down at the long carbon-based equation I was drawing out on my narrow-lined page, putting down my pencil, and saying 'I do know about Durex you know'. (We didn't call them condoms in those days, that all came with AIDS).

No, she said, you need something you take care of yourself. I'm not sure she'd call herself a feminist even now, but that was a remarkable thing to say to your 17 year old daughter. And so I went off on my own (I don't think I asked her to come with me, and I don't think she offered) to the anachronistically named Family Planning Clinic, to have an Amazonian woman in a white coat stick half her hand up me and say 'oooh, more room than I thought, let's try a 70!'. I emerged feeling small and invaded, bearing a large plastic box with my new diaphragm and a large tube of spermicidal gel which I would, in time, come to work out that I was allergic to.

But that box was as important to me as my first car. Thanks, non-hockey mom.

God, I take myself seriously at the moment, don't I? Let me get my alcohol intake back up and I'm sure normal service will be resumed shortly.

joella

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism*

So... I am back from the Hot Place. I missed a night's sleep in the process and am going through that weird not-quite-jetlag conflict-zone thing where you are fine for most of the day then fall heavily asleep at a random time and wake up in the middle of the night disoriented, thirsty and tearful.

Off and on, there and here and in between, I have been thinking about tomato's razor-sharp post on disaster tourism.

So... why did I go? The short answer is because they asked me to. There isn't much I can say about the specifics, but there are some serious information management 'challenges' (quite how serious I had no idea till I got there, to be honest).

Did I make any difference? Yeah, a bit. And could make more if a) I follow a few things up from here with the high-ups and the techies, and b) I go back early next year to do a bit more work with people there. I represent reasonable value for money. You get a lot out of me.

But those are the easy questions. I thought about some of the harder ones as well.

Why was I there to be asked? Mmm. Because I have more or less worked out what I'm good at, and I have more or less worked out that a) I need to be doing it -- ie that indolence is not good for me -- and that b) the end result of my labours needs to be convergent. I'm not an artist, I'm not a capitalist. But I'm not an altruist either. My motivations are as selfish as the next person's, but maybe less realistic: I think the best chance we have is via a fairer world. But I don't go out literally feeding the poor or negotiating with the G8. I'm an applied egalitarian. It's a bit weak, when you look at it hard. Unless you can be sure that good information management changes the world.

Which of course you can't. The biggest question of all is... should well-meaning organisations intervene in times of conflict, famine and flood (or is it true, as John Cage might say, and M points out from time to time, that if you try to improve the world you only make it worse)? There is no such thing as a neutral intervention, and even those with the most benign intentions can have, over decades, over centuries, potentially catastrophic unforeseeable consequences. The road to hell etc.

On the other other other hand...
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. (Mohandas Gandhi)
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men (sic) to do nothing. (Edmund Burke)

What's a girl to do?

joella

* with apologies to Max Weber, who, in his way, changed my life.

All fur coat and no knickers

You don't have to know me very well to know how important water is to me. I think about it all the time. I carry it with me everywhere. I have a qualification in its supply and removal. Clean water is life's first essential, but also one of life's greatest luxuries. There's not enough of it around and it's unforgivable to waste it.

So rubbish plumbing Really Pisses Me Off. 

The bathrooms in the guest house here in the Hot Place were recently 'refurbished'. The walls and floors are tiled, the toilets are those swanky looking back to the wall numbers with push button flushes, there are mixer taps on the basins and showers. There are towel rails and toothbrush holders galore. 

But the place leaks like a sieve. I first got here in the early hours of the morning, having travelled all day, and tried to go for a shower. No water came out. I investigated, and found a tap coming out of the wall that seemed to control the supply to all the cold taps (there are hot taps too, but I can't see much call for them -- the cold water is never cold and we are always hot). I turned it on and the toilet cistern started filling, which was reassuring. Then I realised why it was turned off: the joints to the shower taps, which come straight out of the wall, were leaking a steady stream of water. It just runs straight down the wall. This also robs the shower of some of its already fairly feeble pressure. Not that you can easily stand under it, as the holder for the shower head has broken off. Everything, in fact, that is screwed into the tiles can be pulled straight out. 

So I have developed a routine: enter the bathroom, turn on the water. Go to the loo. Fill basin (using my own travel plug, as the pop up waste pops neither holds water not pops up, so I have hoiked it out), wash bra and pants (we can get our washing done, but they will not do 'ladies underwear'). Leave them to soak, get in the shower. Get out of shower. flush loo (not done before shower to protect shower pressure, also sometimes the push button sticks, so the water just keeps pouring down the loo). Rinse underwear. Brush teeth (using bottled water, the stuff out of the tap smells funny and is sometimes a strange colour) while cistern is refilling, in case I need to go in the night. Turn off water. Go to bed. Repeat loo, shower and teeth part in the morning.

*This* morning, I turned on the water. No reassuring rushing noise. Turn on shower. Nothing. Turn on basin tap: feeble dribble. Swear a lot. It's 38 degrees outside and I am bleeding.

I went searching for a jug and a bucket, a perfectly effective washing method in much of the world, but no joy -- we do not have a jug and a bucket here, we have a shiny but USELESS bathroom. So I ended up standing by the basin, chucking water over myself with a coffee mug. I assumed that the water would make its way to the drain down by the toilet, but no, that would have required the floor to have been laid by someone competent. And it wasn't. 

It's enough to drive you to drink. But there isn't any of that either. 

joella

On the first day of Ramadan...

... I was woken up at 2am by a text from my colleague, who is staying on the second floor. 'R U awake? My place full of sand.' I had been vaguely aware that there was something going on outside, but my place was not full of sand and I had not investigated further. But it didn't sound good, so I called her.

Turns out that there was a massive sandstorm happening. Trees and powerlines were coming down -- one of the reasons I hadn't heard anything was because my room is right next to the generator, and when that's going you can't really hear anything else. 

And it is also on the ground floor, the smallest and gloomiest one, at the back -- probably because I'm not staying long. But this saved me from my colleague's sandblasting -- the top floor is a sort of hasty add-on, and the windows blow open and let in whatever's going around. As she is Muslim and had to get up before sunrise to eat, and everything in her kitchen was an inch deep in sand, her Ramadan didn't get off to the best start. As I didn't have to get up before sunrise, and indeed have given up on breakfast altogether, all I had to contend with was a gritty bathroom. It was a bit of a mudfest by the time I'd finished. 

We all got picked up at eight as usual, but it was like driving through a ghost town. There are no shops or food places open during the day, so I'd been warned to bring my lunch. Which I did, but I wasn't sure where to eat it. In the end I shut myself in an empty office. By the early afternoon people were yawning (I was also advised not to try and have any meetings after 11am), and the local staff left at 3 -- I can see why, but it can't make for the most productive month. We hung on, but nearly missed the lift home, which also runs earlier, just nobody told us. 

Returned to find half the guesthouse still with no power. The guards gave a sort of *you* try finding an electrician during Ramadan shrug. My room was one of the lucky ones (I am getting fonder of it by the day) but the ground floor kitchen was not. This meant that the fridge had been off for about 20 hours... which in 40 degrees is not pleasant. I held the milk and various other things at arms length while pouring them away, and discovered that my pan of leftover spaghetti, which had been destined for the next day's lunch, was full of oily cold water from the rapidly defrosting ice box. It was dark by this time, but my Kenyan colleague bravely cooked dinner for us, wearing my plumbing head torch, which luckily I had the foresight to bring. Me, I was too hot and premenstrual to do anything but feel oppressed, read an ancient copy of OK magazine that I found in a cupboard, and eat Cheetos. With extra sand. 

Around 10pm someone twiddled the right wire and everything came back but the TV receiver and the top floor. L moved down a floor for the night and the day closed.  

joella