stealing from geo

i'm gonna steal geo's meme. is that allowed?

current clothes: an old orange jumper of n's that shrunk, jeans, saturday hair (unwashed), and an old pair of crocs. i am so glam.

current mood: happy-tired with a pinch of foreboding

current music: some programme n's playing with that is reading out the names of planets and stars (i assume as he clicks on something) in a weird, disembodied, posh female voice. her pronunciation is crap.

current annoyance: see above.

current thing: banana bread! comfort food of the highest (lowest?) order. it is in the oven now. we will eat 2 slices, rhapsodize, and then leave it to go moldy on the the kitchen counter. this is not a new thing.

current desk top picture: it's a field. who looks at their desktop??

current book: country of my skull by antjie krog. amazing. the writing is incredible, and what she is writing about is so unimaginably awful. she is a south african poet and journalist, and she covered the truth and reconciliation hearings. this book is her writing about that. i really can't recommend it enough.

current song in head: some classical thing, horn-heavy

current dvd in dvd player: don't have a dvd player, just stream and download. last thing watched was the rachel maddow show from msnbc. last movie watched was fight club. see how current i am?

current refreshment: a rapidly diminishing pint of freeminor honey ale.

current worry: the reading i have yet to start for my class on tuesday. the 4 weeks of work left ahead of me before my jail time is complete. oh yeah, forgot to mention, my contract at work is finishing in a month. this is, my friends, a good thing, believe me.

current thought: gosh darn it, is that banana bread burning?

exploding part 2

this is a really weird week - an inside-out week. one of the courses i'm taking this term, the before mentioned post-apartheid jurisprudence, runs from 6 - 9, mon- thurs this week, reading week. i'll say.

in a brilliant preparatory move i booked the week off work. i'm home all day (frantically reading) and then go into london all evening. trains are much nicer this way.

the course is incredibly interesting, on a lot of levels. it's taught by a south african scholar from pretoria (hence the one week thing). it's lots of legal theory, but in a real context which makes it more pragmatic, and gets us into all kind of sticky theoretical corners which is fun. we're looking at the intersections of law and politics, constitutional systems, judicial activism, how societies are transformed (or not), the effects of authoritarianism and colonialism and racism on humanity and our ability to transcend/fix/deny these things - all in the sense of the post-apartheid legal system. the reading has been illuminating; well chosen articles that have really made me think. there's only about 12 of us so there's room for discussion.

i find myself fascinated, in a moth-to-candle sense, by the idea of change, of re-structure. can we change, tweak systems of law or politics to enact a new result? or does the neo-liberal privitising/corporate/money system now bulldoze across any ideas of incremental, or even whole-scale change? is there any way to reconcile the open wound of colonialism? or will we, like the bankers in today's paper, just offer platitudes of regret and carry on as normal? and what will be the repercussions of that (as i am fairly confident that is what is/has/will happen/ed/ing)?

and that's just the start! the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

on a lighter note, apparently british critical lawyers* are known as britcrits. which makes me smirk.

*a term used to describe people who think that law and politics are to a certain extent inseparable and changeable, and the sooner we admit the fact and get on with things, the better - i paraphrase, obviously

exploding...

just back from my first post-apartheid jurisprudence lecture. 3 hours of critical law theory. my ...head... is... exploding.............

it's not snowing, it's a snow event

so sayeth the bbc.

also this:

"...and with wind chill, we could be looking at temperatures as low as -1 so be careful..."

i awoke to the cacophony of no trains - we live beside the trainline and the rumble of trains is quite comforting, not quite noticeable and always in the deep background. this morning was ominously quiet, which woke me up.

no trains. the greatest snowfall in 20 years said the bbc. i listened to this as i drank my coffee looking out onto the centimeter or so of frozen snow that made up faversham's contribution to the "snow event". it seems the snow missed our corner of east kent - not that it made any difference - when you work in london, you rather need trains going there, and buses when you arrive, neither of which were forthcoming today.

"are you warm and safe?" my boss rang my mobile to ask me this morning. "yes," i replied, looking down at my slippers."well, then - stay put," he instructed.

good grief.

when my parents were here at christmas, they left winnipeg in -35 c.
on one of our many walks, crossing the kent salt marshes with a nasty north wind whipping our scarves and taking our breath, I complained about the cold. "cold?" my father yelled through the wind, "COLD???? what kind of canadian are you?" and, never one to miss an opportunity for comedic effect, clutched at his chest, proclaiming, "you break your father's heart..."

i can hear him laughing from here.

but hey, why look a snow day on the mouth? we decamped to the pub with the papers and proceeded to "keep warm" with bells on.

i do feel though like i may have revoked some sort of canadian citizenship test...

complications

i had the dostoevsky class last night. our reading list consisted of kafka's the trial, in the penal colony, dostoevsky's crime and punishment and an excerpt from the brothers karamazov. i read all but the last one, which is (of course) what the class was focused on. not that reading the excerpt would have helped at all.

i've never understood literature - not really. i love (LOVE) books, and reading, and i read a lot, but i never pick up on all this stuff that is apparently "meant" - this means that - and this dream signifies that, and what she really means is this is a socio-political critique of the inherent madness inside all mothers so that explains the penguin....

i never get it.

and it's not like i don't get subtext - hell i can make a dirty joke out of just about anything! although, on reflection, that may have more to do with 10 years on british construction sites. what i mean is that i understand that there are layers.

i also understand that many writers don't write with any of this in mind whatsoever, and read these critiques thinking, "wtf??"

so, in a 90 minute class in a module called punishment and justice, we talked about ... ??? ... the schism between where christ and action lie in dostoevsky's view and how this relates to ...???... and how we must always be aware of the possibilities of the unintended consequences of "speech act" and this relates ...???...

i thought this degree would be hard core international law. statutes, readings, un sc resultions. i am so glad i am not paying for this.

it is interesting though.

bottling promises

gooseberry wine is very very nice.

uh huh, oh yeah.

i do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that it makes your tongue - sparkle. it's dry, but slightly tangy - its a keeper.

and we only made a gallon.

*sigh*

THIS year, we said to ourselves today, between unseemly slurps from the "leftovers" from bottling, we will make TONS. oh yes. TONS.

recant

ok the book idea was stupid.
i blame hotel rooms.

anyways.

in other news, i handed in my first post-grad essay today! yay! 4000 words on how the war on terriers has affected development. it was light and cheerful - for sure. with hindsight, not a great topic to be immersed in during the most depressing month of the year but luckily, it was obama getting sworn in so that saved the day.

and my new class is looking good. It's called punishment and justice, and i took it primarily because dostoevsky was on the reading list and i always wanted to be the sort of person who read dostoevsky and never got around to - you know - actually reading him. ditto kafka. and you know, it's very good! of course you know. i didn't, though. the literature portion is only 2 weeks - the rest is law, philosophy etc - job's a gud'un, as my lovely mancunian facilities manager would say.

other than that - just january. and a job that looks unfavourably upon hibernation. bastards.

3 posts in one evening =

room service + wifi + some good music

what do you think of this template?

(and why didn't I order the creme brulee?)

books

I read a blog post the other day where the author had listed the books she had read that year, and I must confess, it looked paltry to me. But then I thought, I have no idea how much I actually read (except for "lots"). I have been trying very hard, with varying degrees of success, not to buy new books anymore, but how many do I actually go through? So, in the interests of scientific research, I'm going to note here what I've been reading and what I've finished.

So far this year, I've read:
Like water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (reread - new years day hangover book:))
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (reread)
Home from the vinyl cafe by Stuart Maclean (more comfort rereading)
and of course copious amounts of law journal articles which I shall omit from this exercise.

Currently Reading:
My Invented Country by Isabel Allende
The i-chong: meditations from the joint by Tommy Chong
The loved dog by Tamar Geller

I crawled out from beneath my rock and surveyed the horizon

Earlier, my horizon was bleak and beautiful in that misty skeletal British mid-winter sort of way. I was on the train from Euston to Manchester, happily slurping through several G&T's kindly supplied by the steward, another fellow passenger on the "it's good to soften the edges" carriage. "It makes the journey go by faster," he laughed, sneaking me another one. Which was a good thing what with points failure at Coventry delaying everything into stretched-out sameness. I'm like that on long-haul flights, too. I know it's going to be 10 hours, but 2 hours in, I look up - surprised - "I'm still here?"

So, you may have surmised, it all got a bit chaotic there for a while. The flu was bad, and it was awful and I missed a whole week of work (a first), and I didn't feel quite right for weeks afterwards. All better now though, and freshly grateful for good health.

Then parents! and christmas! and new years! and suddenly back to work and it all seems like feverish imaginings. But it was good, and fun. I'm a lucky lucky woman.

Speaking of reality bumps, poor Humph sure had one when Mom left to go back to Canada. She came well-equipped with delicious doggy-biscuits, the willingness to scratch chins without fatigue and a soft streak Humph took full and complete advantage of. She also had a way of saying "Well hello there big boy" and I think Humph fell in love. He moped for days when she left, looking up as to say - "you? who are you to compare?" He is now back to normal.

And so am I, I suppose. My new class started last night, I'm back in manchester, work is crazy and uncertain, but it's all ok.