Fuck Internships

I don't know what to do with my life.

First off, my grades are crap. No one wants to hire anyone who's managed to fuck up her First Year in Uni and get a 2:2. Nevermind that I missed it by 0.666666 marks. Fuck the rounding up and rounding down system.

Second off, the things I actually am interested in are very hard to get due to numbers. The world has too many PhDs running around clawing at academia and think tanks as it is. Even working in NGOs is hard for the same reason, too many people and too little places.

Thirdly, I can't take a job that is high stress. I simply cannot cope with stress or insomnia (which is brought about by stress anyway), because at the rate my neuroses are going, I am going to end up dead sooner rather than later - and that's just with the stress LSE brings.

Lastly, and worst of all, I have no confidence in myself at all to even go out and apply for anything. Even rubbish like HR wants applicants to have a 2:1. In the eyes of the competitive working world, I am nothing even with my shiny expensive degree from LSE and intelligence.

I hate it when people ask me about the future, because presently, I have none.

Drei

Since I have not been doing this for some time, I have decided to write about 3 books that I have read recently.

Imre Kertész's Detective Story took a while to get a hold on me. At the end however, I was left with a fairly discernable impression. It was not enough however, to strike quite a resounding chord with me. A good read nonetheless.

Anne Tyler's Digging to America was highly entertaining. Jumping from narrator to narrator, I especially loved the bits the grandmother Maryam narrated. I even brought the book the school on multiple occasions to read when I was between classes. Still at the end, it seemed to lack a little something (or as Jia puts it, umami).

The best of all 3 however, was Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. The titular story did not impress me as much as the latter three short stories did. When it comes to a well executed and finished story, Capote is simply one of the best. The problem I usually have with short stories is that they ring hollow when they finish. Sometimes, you even wonder about the motivation for even wanting to write them. They tell something unsatisfactorily and answer nothing. This was especially the case for Enright's Taking Pictures and D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum. Capote however tells and sums up a good yarn.

Eating Animals

Apparently I am heartless. On Wednesday, I somehow managed to drag my hungover ass into the Old Theatre by 6:25pm (luckily, because at 6:45pm the lecture theatre was full), and listening to Jonathan Safran Foer talk about his newest book (albeit published more than a year ago), Eating Animals. As some of you might have recalled, I am a great fan of his writings. Every year that I have read them, every year they have made my list of Top Ten Reads (which reminds me that the 2010 one is still tardy :/) Going for a talk by him, even though I like my meat very much, seemed only natural.

So anyway I went and listened. He was very good and very convincing. Not everyone can go vegetarian he argued, but surely you can give it up for just one meal a week? And he's right. Unfortunately while my mind and my heart, arguably thinking organs, I am unable to reason with my stomach. 30 minutes after eating a satisfying meal of spaghetti bolognese (fine there was beef in it), my stomach started to bray for more food. As much as I like the idea of going vegetarian, and I do know of the health effects of eating too much meat, meat is still one of those stomach fillers that keeps it full for the longest period of time. And I am frequently hungry because my metabolism is completely out of control, to the point that it is detrimental to my health >:(

Thus today while separating the meat into single person portions, I realised I had 4 portions of pork chops for 1 person, 1 portion for 2 people (Christoph gets 1 more pork chop) and 3 portions of chicken for 1 person. Therefore I must conclude, I am heartless to the poor animals.

I need a life part deux

In my neverending wrestling with essays (!!!), this time with the Chinese Civil War, I often mentally turn into a mush pile as all my energies are directed towards dissecting, rephrasing and plagiarizing works of the Good Men. That and wishing I was playing CIV4 instead/getting a haircut/pulling out my hair strand by strand.

Therefore, my latest obsession: the waiter in the first part of Kelly Clarkson's I Do Not Hook Up. SO HOT.

Somedays, I just wake up feeling anxious and strained, and don't know why. Today is one of those days.

Wright's Bar, Tea and Me

So here I am sitting in the Govt Common Room, Book I Have to Read, next to me - and blogging instead.

My expressed purpose of bringing my Not Very Light laptop to school, was to do work. Instead I am procrastinating. I blame it on the earlier HY235 lecture, which is the academic equivalent of crawling under barbed wire in the mud while the enemy rains machine gun bullets over your head. The enemy in question in this analogy is my lecturer, who shoots Narratives and Facts at us, with no real Organisation, in a RapidFireRateMode. Instead of feeling refreshed, invigorated and stimulated by the material, one feels like they have just run a marathon where all you do is mindlessly scribble down Shite, because there is no time to actually process the material. Not like there is much analysis anyway. I hope no one decides to vanity google HY235.

So anyway to recover, I resorted to my old trusted activity: a good tea with sugar from Wright's Bar (45p!) while sitting outside the Old Building and People Watching. In front of me, there were two fairly wizened people handling out fliers and trying to detain people to harass. I caught whiffs of "cuts", "government doesn't care" and "near SOAS, Birkbeck". I sat there for 15 minutes as they floundered around, the woman managing to detain 2 people and the man detaining none. He also called an IHT around under his arm, probably nicked from the LSE reception. They did not once approach me, even as they stood, defeat by the unmistakable air of Apathy from passing LSE student hordes. I found that amusing, perhaps they decided by virtue of my race I was Apathetic anyway. I also saw some friendly faces, Filipe for one, and some other people I wanted to dodge, some people from my old dorm. I also saw a women walk by in a striking mustard yellow coat, with a deep plum dress and stockings. She really likes her colours I suppose.

I have now procrastinated for 47 minutes. I'm off to the loo, then I PROMISE that I will start work after.

OXON & BOOKS: a list

Yesterday I popped up North for a whirlwind visit to dear old man in Oxford. As usual I paid my respects to The Last Bookshop, £2 for all books, located near St. Aldgate's. The Last Bookshop stocks a delightful array of books, some exquisite photography books (for when I get my own proper flat and proper coffee table I presume) and general literature. There were loads of tempting buys, vying for my attention like Chabon's Kavalier and Clay (didn't get it though) and Nemirovsky. I managed to stop myself at 5 books though:-

Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion
Imre Kertesz - Detective Story
P. D. James - Cover Her Face
Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
Bret Easton Ellis - The Informers

Along with the generous £25 Amazon voucher I got from Christoph's mum for Christmas, I also got:-

J. M. Coetzee - Disgrace
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red
Edmund de Waal - The Hare with Amber Eyes
Anne Tyler - Digging to America
Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's

I am currently reading Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm.

I will finish and post the very delayed 2010 list next. I promise!

Boeuf de Tartare

The last dinner I had in Germany was a very nice beef tartare, homemade. The beef was excellent, and much tastier than the one I had a few days ago in Bürgerspital. Although that being said, the atmosphere at Bürgerspital could not have been beaten because WoHu joined us there, along with many bottles of wine and schnapps. We had a nice table, inside a large wine barrel. The service was very German though. The highlight of the night had to be just as we were about to leave, someone could not stand up because she had too much Silvaner (wasn't me), and I turned around to see a large chunk of the wreath surrounding our table MISSING because WoHu had ripped/pilfered a large keepsake just like the last time we were out. The sight of the missing chunk, complete with the fact that I had tried to take some earlier but found it superglued down, made ME collapse in giggles.

The damage that night (one spoon, two menus, the wreath, all the decorative nuts and apples on the table for the restaurant) was at least 4 glasses of Silvaner, 3 bottles of wine, 2 glasses of schnapps and 1 rustling for me: some €250. Needless to say everyone was very very happy. I was only happy by proxy though, since 3 completely happy drunk people make from awesome dinner companions and I was still recovering from my cold. At one point, WoHu started banging the sides of the barrel with his head, and I started hitting it with my fists. All the other diners were staring at us, two middle aged and two young people being completely rowdy and shouting, while ordering lots of wine. I think we completely ruined it from the couple seated near to us, who were obviously trying to have some romantic night out.

Yup. That's going to be a night I remember for a long time.

But like I said, the beef tartare Christoph's mother prepared today was simply par excellence. The size was very generous too. Now, while Christoph and his mum are busy walking off their dinners (his sausages and mustard, her's a beef tartare too), I am being a lazy bum and sitting on the couch half watching Viva (I have no idea why I am so fascinated with MTVs again, probably because it makes good background noise in a language that is not German) and half typing this.

Tomorrow, back to bloody London and the problem with the fucking landlord again.

*on a separate note, why the hell does it seem all the music popular in Europe is clubbing/dance music?

Silvester

The top song of 1996, apparently: 10 Kleine Jagermeister

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The first new years' I spent overseas, has probably been one of the best new years that I've spent. Namely because for the first time (well I do recall a class party in 2008/2009 that involved a group playing Mahjong in my dining room, and the rest of us watching The Shining in the living room - with Cheryl arriving late and scaring the bejabbers out of me), it was actually properly celebrated for the sake of New Years'.

We went to the oldest restaurant in Wuerzburg, had a really nice dinner for a very nice price, then we walked home. On the way back, we saw lots of fireworks as 2009 passed into 2010. There were lots of drunk people setting off fireworks, some in a rather alarming way best observed amusingly from a distance. One firework even ricocheted off a tree branh and bounced across a road, near to where we were walking. Towards the end of the walk, we crossed a bridge which spanned the Main, and watched the fireworks being set off in all directions.

Back at the house, we watched some trashy music television - some Boney M, some Genghis Khan - which was enjoyable in its trashiness. We even saw some countdowns of (goodness knows what categorization they used) that put O Zone's Dragostea din Tei at number 5, and Las Ketchups' Aserejé (The Ketchup Song) at number 6. Also some What a Feeling, sung by the original singer and some weird Swiss DJ. It was bad trashy music TV at its best.

I am now listening to Backstreet Boys' I Want It That Way (1999) on the TV now, a new countdown that began with Roxette and The Scorpions in 1990. Good, good New Years' Day.