And most importantly, my mad family, they called me Lucky

Cuthbie's Girl said to me the other day that its never your lucky day until it is, and she's right. Its a much more complicated idea than I realized when she said it. I've been thinking about it ever since. You never know your luck, but more importantly, you never know your luck until its all in. And I hope that's not for a while. I'm obsessed with the idea of luck at the moment. Not good luck or bad luck, but Luck in itself, which I suppose is simply things happening in a stricter pattern, or perhaps, a more extreme pattern, than an entirely random universe ought to allow.

A friend of mind says I have more luck than anyone he's ever met, he just wishes more of it was good luck. I wouldn't mind believing in a little good luck just now. I'm not very good at blind, or at least visually challenged, optimism, because I find it really difficult to believe something without a reason. Let me be clear; this is not because I keep to strict or high standards of empiricism. It doesn't have to be a good reason and it doesn't even have to be better than all the other reasons, there just has to be something. Bill Bailey calls this, or something like it, 'relaxed empiricism'. Necessarily, I am also deeply anti-pessimism. If we're against believing things without reasons then it is illogical to be pessimistic. The trouble is, that's only theoretical, its ideological. In fact, its always easier to be pessimistic than optimistic. (Now might be the time to mention that my Da, who apparently has a black sense of humour, named me after the pessimist from a dialogue between an optimist and a pessimist, in sharp contrast to one of my favourite musicians who is called Felix and for whom this blog entry is named.) I think that culturally we have a bent towards pessimism. I think it comes from a slip in the thinking around the law of contradictions, which goes something like this: if there are always as many opinions as there are people and the law of contradiction says they can't all be right, then we can only assume that opinions that are personal are wrong. And then there's a little logical slide in the process and we think that personal opinions, as in, what we want to believe, is less likely to be true than what we don't. Hence the utter smugness of the cynical and the tendency to confuse cynicism and rightness.

Or maybe pessimism is just a survival instinct.

Not a lot of mileage from an evolutionary (or indeed, life-expectancy) point of view in being 'cautiously optimistic' that your natural predators won't prey on you.

Anyway, the point is, BlueJ got what is probably the most beautiful apartment in Dublin, but only after missing out on some truly horrid apartments. At the time, she wanted them and it seemed like bad luck. You never know your luck, not even after its happened to you sometimes.

Words, words, they're all we have to go on

The City of Ladies is doing what it can to aid BlueJ in her search for accomodation. Pretty much everyone is mining the property guides and sending on likely prospects to her. Actually, of all of us, its Christine who isn't pulling her weight. De Pizan says that it is the perogative of all good ladies (and in my view BlueJ is it personified) that they live in the City of Ladies with the great women of history. But it turns out, disappointly, that there are limits to allegory.

BlueJ is going to need a flat literally as well as literarily.

So I've spent a lot of quality time in the last few weeks getting to know the landlords and landladies of this city - not the City; I already knew Christine. And this has left me with a language problem. (It left BlueJ with a splitting headache.) Obviously, this is a much more serious problem if you speak a gendered language, but I refuse to say 'landlords and landladies' everytime I need to refer to this group. So I have taken to calling them 'landpeople', which, as BlueJ pointed out, sounds a bit Stolypin's reform-esque.

So this, in turn, has led me to reflect on the etymology of the words. A caveat first; etymologists are liars. That might sound like a vast generalization but, as Viola pointed out, we're all liars anyway. (I'm pretty sure two vast generalizations cancel each other out.) Language is too complicated and is spoken by too many people, for there ever really to be right answers in etymology. Because there's always a chinese whispers aspect to the way language moves, there is usually more than one origin anyway. The Chinese Whispers Principle operates both popularly and academically; the origins of words have, as often as not, been obscured by etymologists. Hopkins, for example, noted endless and entirely fictional etymologies in his diaries. Privately (though a lot less privately now) I think that etymology is one of the bastians of a kind of Victorian desire to make set in concrete correctness things which are infinitely in flux. But as a Victorian myself, I have to fess to loving etymology.

The word 'people' comes from the Latin 'populus', which means exactly what you think it does. Both 'lord' and 'lady', on the other hand, come from the Old English word for 'bread'. 'Lord' is literally 'loaf-guard', which is great - 'Touch the bread and you'll feel the sting of my sword, scoundrel!' 'Lady' is 'loaf-kneader', which is very woman's-work-is-never-done-ish. Anglo-Saxons like to name things through concrete particularities, kennings, so both these words are meant to express metonymically the role of lords and ladies as head of the house-hold, the ones with the dough. My point is, perhaps I should abandon my fledgling word 'landpeople'. However populous this exponentially-expanding class of people is, 'landlord' and 'landlady' actually do seem pretty etymologically apt.

Be with me now

I'm flat hunting in earnest at the moment. I inevitably respond very badly to this process and this time is no different. I wonder if other people find the whole wretched rugby scrum as traumatic as I do. Anyway I've not had time to read anything or write anything or indeed, think about anything. And anyway even if I had the time I wouldn't be able to, since I apparently have a finite amount of processing space in my mind and it is currently all taken up by worrying about finding flats, accessing flats, landlords, deposits, fighting for flats, maintaining some vestiges of dignity and humanity. It is enough to drive anyone to drink, and in my case the tense of that statement is probably inaccurate.

Why hast thou forsaken me?

My laptop froze totally last night, no amount of key combinations or general fiddling was having any effect whatsoever. I was horrified, distraught, hysterical. I can't afford a new computer! I don't want a new computer - this one's got all my add-ons and software and music and stuff on it already and I don't want to have to do all that again! I'm going to have to work with undergrads sniggering beside me at re-runs of Dan and Becs on UTube and cope with sticky space bars and unergonomic chairs. Oh God Oh God Oh God, did it save my chapter, did it, did it? Oh Lord, why me!!!!!

So eventually I stopped howling and got up off my knees and sought the last refuge of the damned. I yanked out the battery, turned it back on and prayed. And it boots up nice as pie like nothing has happened, if it was a child it would have had a sweet and non-chalant smile on it's face, that's when I began to suspect that it knew exactly what it was doing.

It was sitting there looking at me this morning from the desk, exuding restrained smugness. Implied threat soaking from every slimline, minimalist angle. And we both know there's nothing I can do about it. It's made it's point. Despite my opposable thumbs, self-awareness and problem-solving ability, there is nothing, NOTHING, I won't do to keep the wretched machine on it's feet till the blasted thesis is handed in. It sits there having no need to crow about it's victory, the extent of my annihilation in the face of it's manipulations is clear.

Your mother was a hamster....

There’s not enough gratuitous name-calling in the public sphere these days. Hannah pointed me towards an article the Aussie newspaper The Age, What’s In a Name, and not only is it highly amusing but it’s got me thinking about an aspect of one of my favourite lecturing topics ‘The Appalling Fall in Modern Standards’. Incidentally, there’s very little I can’t apply this particular spin to. I’m in my mid-twenties, imagine what I’m going to be like when I have a bus pass. Today, childer, we are going to be applying it public speech and general standards of English. (French might have the same problems but I wouldn’t know)

I speak here as someone who is still emotionally traumatised by the use of the term ‘flip-floppism’ in the US election. I have nothing against made-up words, but stupid, ugly, clumsy made-up words, where presumably the only reason for their use is either gross laziness or simple illiteracy, horrify me.

A number of people, and this apparently includes high level politicians and their aides, seem to think that good English is old-fashioned and unnecessary. (I’m going to have to be careful here because I could go on for a very long time about this, and also typos could potentially be very embarrassing.) As long as you’re getting your point across, what does it matter? Why waste time developing writing and speaking as a skill? Because it’s not an accessory, it’s not something one should have to be trained in if and when one needs it. English is not an add-on to an education, it’s the foundation of it. No one should be let into second level education without being able to construct a decent sentence. And anyone who purports to be bright should, by the time they leave secondary education, not only be able to use English correctly but also to produce prose that is reasonably easy on the ear. I’m not asking for Dickens here just English that reads well. There are many reasons I could go into to support this but surely the most basic is, if you are too stupid or too lazy to speak and write at minimum, acceptable levels then you should not be anywhere near a position of authority.

I recently had a genteel(ish) argument at a dinner party with an acquaintance, as to whether science students should be marked down for their grammar and use of English. And it’s true, their skills with commas and indeed verb declensions is not relevant to the paper on Bayesian Analysis, but if you are clever enough to write thousands of words on a topic most people can’t pronounce, you are clever enough to manage English and nothing but laziness would prevent you from doing so. There is a sort of tendency now (and I blame Modernism for this) to think that anything above the absolutely, functionally necessary is not only pointless but a bit suspicious and probably pretentious. Please pay attention: UGLY DOES NOT EXPLICITLY EQUAL HONEST AND GOOD, most of the time it just equals ugly. A little extra effort produces the kind of every day beauty that makes life just a little sweeter. These small beauties may simply be in the absence of the wince inducing awkwardness of a sentence that doesn’t flow.

Oscar Wilde posited a mild conundrum that I still find fascinating; which is more important, style or content. The years teach one that the two are not mutually exclusive, thank God. So at the advanced level, perhaps we might move on from basic grammar and aim for a little intelligent wit. No one would die you know, well probably not, chaos theory apart. So, take a bit of pride in your work and make your point about the flaws in their economic policy, destroy their moral basis, attack their social reforms, and then call them a ‘desiccated, little coconut’. Everyone’s happy.

And then

Dear God the irony. I have just found out that today is apparently Blog Against Sexism Day. Go me?

Update:
No really, I'm going home soon but..........I'm not sure I see the point of International Women's Day, as many people have said how come there's not an International Men's Day, what is this all about anyway, what are we trying to achieve here? But if I'm going to wave a flag I couldn't do better than link to this, a lovely little story including all the elements I love, scholarship in action, justice, sheer wanton stubborness and just the lightest tint of anarchy. And she's a girl, so it's seasonal apparently.

But it's not like that at all

This is going to be one of those statements which is really aimed at someone else. Someone I’m absolutely freakin’ furious with but of course for logistical reasons I must smile and be nice to. Anyway for the record here are two quotations from Olympe de Gouge, which to my mind (and let’s face I’m not interested in anything else here) more than adequately demolish unspoken points of view. And they are only from her because that’s what I happened to be reading when I reached simmering point, there are any number of social philosophers I could wiki and come up with the same sentiments, so there.

“and you will soon see these [] men, not grovelling at your feet as servile adorers, but proud to share with you the treasures of the Supreme Being.”

From a draft marriage contract:
“We intend and wish to make our wealth communal, meanwhile reserving to ourselves the right to divide it in favour of our children and of those toward whom we might have a particular inclination, mutually recognising that our property belongs directly to our children, from whatever bed they come,”

In what is, I suppose, my immense arrogance, I always take it ridiculously personally when someone I took for a decent human being turns out to have tendencies toward being a complete tosser. Pure prejudice may be disguised (although not with particular effectiveness) as common sense with the application of a little wilful stupidity. All bigotry of course has it roots in fear and confusion, from an individual feeling out-gunned and out-classed, that’s not an excuse. It’s barely even a reason.

The Caring Professions

I have being getting cracking, bloody tension headaches all week. I worked out somewhere back during my undergrad finals that this is due to fact that when particularly angst ridden I clench my jaw, constantly. This probably means my bloody back is going to go soon too. Joy.

It’s my neck actually, rather than my back (but if you say this, people compulsively refuse to understand the depth of the affliction) and while it’s quite common for people to suffer from a degree of tension related pain here, I am so far the only person I’ve heard of who has managed to temporarily paralyse themselves. Unless you take Freud’s hysterics into account of course, comforting thought that. Actually, I only managed this once, most of the time I’ld just prefer not to move rather than being unable to.

It has to be really quite bad before I’m forced to go back to my physio about it. This is firstly, because she’s a sadistic bitch, who for my money enjoys her work far too much, (the German accent doesn’t help either), and secondly, I’ll get the speech. The first part of the speech will go along the lines of asking whether I’m still going to yoga. When I stare at my feet (or, depending on what she’s doing at the time, the ceiling) and mumble guiltily, she will sternly and with grudging patience explain to me again why all the horrible, agonising pain is the fault of no one but my own stubborn, contrary self.

“All you must do is relax” she says, like this is the easiest thing in the world. The mere uttering of this statement has just ratcheted the pain up another notch, that, and her wrenching my arm behind my back. Then she says that I must work less, and worry less and MUST go to yoga. Yeah, no bother, sort that tomorrow, cow. Now I avoid yoga for all sorts of reasons but principle among these is my lacking the ability to manufacture hours out of thin air. For the medi-sadist this is just further proof of my pig-headed refusal to work with her constructively. This from a woman, who says things like “no, you are doing it wrong, you must go into the pain”, keep in mind the accent here, and “pain is good, it means it is working” (God’s truth, she really does say this).

Once when I was there she had some poor apprentice physio who was practicing on me (I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about this – “ah, so how long have you being doing this?”) while trying to pretend the sadist wasn’t glaring at her like Prof. McGonagall. I’m sitting there thinking this isn’t so bad, kind of relaxing actually. Sadist asks me if it hurts and when I reply in the negative, shoves the student out of the way and digging two thumbs under my shoulder blade, lifts me out of it. With an infuriating self-satisfied expression, she instructs the student, “that is the way to do it”.

For all the pain and trauma and, God help me, the bill, she has repeatedly and cheerfully got me moving again, and as I say once gave me back the use of my left arm. On further thought, maybe she winds me up deliberately, after all everyone’s got to make a living……..

It's not them baby, it's us

I think quite a bit about feminism, I’m naturally opinionated and a woman so it’s seems logical that I would be a feminist, no? What the purpose or definition or aims of feminism might be is something more problematic. One of the blogs I read is the F-word, now principally I’m entirely amused by the title, but it also is a very useful aggregator. It was a post on this that got me thinking this time.

The gist of the article is that the identification of mental illness and the provision of mental health services is a feminist issue. i.e. women on the basis of their gender have it worse than men. OH FOR GOD’S SAKE. It is of course well known that there are excellent and freely available and approachable mental healthcare facilities for men, that’s why the male rate of suicide climbs year on year you see. The whole bloody package of mental healthcare facilities is crap, for everyone. It’s complicated and it’s expensive and mad people don’t vote. It’s this sort of rubbish that provides fodder for the attitudes that make the blog title funny.

Reading this has confirmed in my mind something that’s been lurking for a while, ladies, it’s not men that are the problem.

I’m not saying that professional or indeed personal prejudice has been completely eradicated, nor that there should be any laurel resting going on there, but I do believe that we have reached the stage where external obstacles are no longer the problem. Thin=Happy is a convenient example here, though only an example. Body image issues remain one of the most serious and ubiquitous women face today. Why do we continue to allow this ridiculous concern to blight our lives? Yes, we are and have been fed a constant diet of images of dangerously underweight role models and an ideal structure that absurdly, prioritises beauty and in particularly thinness. Surely, if women stood back for a moment and gave this a long hard look we would all realise the patent silliness of judging beauty, no mind success, with a scales.

But we are all big girls now, educated, intelligent and with a multitude of sources from which to take our ideas and ideals, yet in this arena Marie Claire continues to dominate. Have we not minds of our own, do we not possess eyes and an accompanying aesthetic sense, that as of yet, are not actually edited by Heat? The maintenance of this pathology is entirely our own choice and what’s worse is, given the accepted wisdom that this is the fault of our parents and our society, we perpetuate this torture and thus gift it to our daughters. This cycle has to be broken somewhere, it may as well be now.

Obviously feminism doesn’t start or stop with eating disorders, but it is a facet of what I see as a worrying tendency in modern feminism to cling to victimhood. It’s never easy and it’s not always fair, but I do not believe that oppression is not the issue anymore and the old polemic of the sixties has outlived its usefulness. There are different issues now and they require a different solution.