shadows of echoes of memories of songs

As mentioned yesterday, I went to a Safe Cycling seminar given by the Oxford Cycle Workshop. It was along similar lines to a recent post from LondonCyclist, and I won't try to do justice to an hour's presentation in a paragraph of LiveJournal, but it was reassuring to know that according to them I'm already doing the right things. The two main take-home points were be visible (not just in the sense of wearing hi-vis jackets and — of course — using lights, but also in the sense of making sure you're not hiding down the side of another vehicle, skulking in the gutter, or lurking in someone's blind spot, but rather claiming your place in the lane you're in) and be predictable (stick to the rules of the road, behave like a car where possible because then cars know what to expect). There was a third not-explicitly-stated rule of "don't be a jerk". I wish more road users followed that one. There's another post in my head about Stupid Behaviour I Observe On The Roads Every Day, but really, who wants to read it? We all see it often enough anyway.

Unsurprisingly, the Oxford Cycle Workshop chap didn't say anything about cycling while pregnant (and I didn't ask, as it was a bit out of scope!). I didn't expect him to (he didn't mention helmets either, interestingly), but I did expect better from a supposedly comprehensive book about pregnancy and birth; however, the NCT's book "Happy Birth Day" doesn't seem to say anything about cycling at all (as I mentioned yesterday, I've emailed them to ask about this). ( a long ramble about cycling, walking, falling, and risk )

I was hoping to get further than day 6 before dropping the ball, but yes, I totally forgot to post anything yesterday. We went to the shops (took some books to Oxfam, bought food for us & food for the birds), had friends round for tea & biscuits (& sparklers in the garden!), then went out for dinner with them (the friends, not the biscuits or sparklers). That's more going-out and socialising and walking-around than I've done for weeks, & was a very welcome change from hiding under a rock (though I kind of wish I could hide under a rock a bit today instead of having to go out & meet people for lunch & go into town & do more stuff). When we got back I had a bath, & nearly fell asleep over the Guardian crossword (finished it this morning). Exciting life. I don't even remember thinking "I should have posted something on LJ", even when I woke up in the middle of the night (as I always do now). Normally that's when the should-haves come and ambush me. Perhaps I was actually too tired to worry about them.

I realise this is now sort of cheating on today's entry. Will try to post some real content later today instead of what-I-did-at-the-weekend.

This is cheating a bit, but then I've already set the bar low by resorting to writing about my dreams on day 2, so a meme isn't really much worse, right...?

Rules: Use the first letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real . . . nothing made up! If the person before you had the same first initial, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can't use your name for the boy/girl name question.



Your name: Janet
A four-letter word: jolt
A boy's name: Julian
A girl's name: Jerilyn (it is a real name, I had a friend at primary school called that)
An occupation: judge
A color: jaune (cheating, I know, but I can't think of a real one!)
Something you wear: jacket
A food: jerky (om nom nom)
Something found in the bathroom: Janet (quite frequently these days)
A place: Janet's house (this is getting desperate)
A reason for being late: Janet going back to get something she forgot
Something you shout: jump!
A movie title: Jaws
Something you drink: juice (preferably grape)
A musical group: 
Journey
An animal: jagular
A street name: Jeune Street
The title of a song: Jilted John

This one's a bit of an odd 'meme' (in the sense that we seem to use the word on LiveJournal) because the answers don't seem to have to be anything personal. In fact, it's not so much a meme, as a game. We used to play it at home, and we called it "Fruit Flower" because those were the first two categories on the list. ( Category games )

I'm going to try to post every day this month again. I mean, I'm going to try again; I failed to do it last year, because of fail. In the past I've called this attempt NaBloPoMo, but it's not really a National blog-posting month, it's a Not-very-national-at-all blog-posting month: hence NoBloPoMo. In fact, I'm also probably not going to write very much or very fast; so it should really be SloMoNoBloPoMo. And I figure I can probably manage to be a bit post-modern about it once or twice, at least enough to justify calling it SloMoPoMoNoBloPoMo. (HoHo!)

My main reason for doing this is to try to stop me procrastinating so much, or at least to try to break some of my procrastination routines. ( I will never say the word procrastinate again... oh OK, I lied )

So one of the purposes of this month's writing is to make myself sit down and Do A Thing until it's Done (and 'Done' doesn't have to mean 'brilliant' or even 'good', it just means 'completed'; sometimes it even just means 'bounced into someone else's court for the time being', though it's a bit hard to do that with blogging). No word-limit (oh, OK, it has to be more than 140 characters, otherwise I'd just post it in the other place). I suspect a lot of it will not make particularly interesting reading, so apologies in advance for that, but I'll try to make it not too dreary and not all just whining. Let's see if I can keep it going for another 28 days.

Since I seem to be in an LJ meme mood (or rather too icky-feeling and brain-dead to do anything more intellectually stimulating) here's one of those question memes (pinched from jackiesjottings):

( A-Z of questions )

I don't know if ewx meant to start a meme here, but here's what I get from typing a single word in Google Scribe & then hitting return a lot:

"Badgers Forward blog shortly before they were born into and then out of their way to their destination in the world of their owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet, so I'ma keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective owners"

I couldn't agree more.

[The subject line is to be sung to the tune of "Women and Men" by TMBG. I hope you enjoy this earworm as much as I am enjoying it.]

I rambled a lot in a response to a friends-locked post by monkeyhands, who said I should post my response somewhere everybody could see, or more precisely, "I would like to see you turn this stuff into a proper LJ post where people who aren't my friends can read it. But I realise you have Important Very Hard Coding to do. :) " But because I'm a Modern Woman and I can have it all, I got today's not-actually-that-important-but-entertainingly-Hard Coding out of the way (still whittling away at the XSLT to turn docx into TEI XML and back again without loss of style/formatting information - today's problem: right-to-left text in Arabic), done my volunteer shift at the Oxfam bookshop, and am now posting this stuff as well, go me. So anyway, I reposted the comment below, wholesale and unedited, and hopefully it makes enough sense without the full context. And then I went and rambled some more after that, too.

~~~

I should point out that the "geek as a gender" thing is not mine originally -- see explanation here.

geek work environments seem more meritocratic to me and I’d like to find out more about why that is

A couple of factors which I think may be relevant:

* geeks usually have some experience of talking to people in online chatrooms etc where you don't always even know somebody's gender. (This is a mixed blessing as some people just default to assuming people are male if they don't know their gender... but then that can be even more educational if they find out the truth & are forced to reassess their assumptions as a result.)

* geeks have often had some experience of being laughed at for being socially awkward, ie for failing to conform to rules that they didn't accept and don't understand. So when they get a chance to construct a micro-society for themselves, it may have fewer 'secret' (implicit) rules of interaction (and more explicit rules, and more insistence on codifying the rules - again a mixed blessing).

* related to the above -- programmers are used to 'communicating' (with computers) in a language which doesn't really have tones of voice or nuances; a language where if what you 'say' does the right thing, then at some level it's good enough. (There may be a more concise way to say the right thing, or a way to avoid having to say the right thing more than once, or a way that "just seems more elegant".)

In practice, I think it's often just substituting one set of implicit expectations for another, though. :-/

Also, there's a risk of a "geekist" attitude along the lines of "nobody who isn't a geek can possibly have anything worth contributing", the sort of attitude that refuses to acknowledge that things like literature and art and kindness can possibly have any value to society, because you can't express them in equations. But that's kind of at the extreme end of the geek spectrum.

“oh, they’ll be expecting me to buy the birthday card because I’m the only woman here”

I do get some of that, but I don't know to what extent that's because I'm female and to what extent it's because I'm probably the most sociable member of the team, the one who's willing to talk to people. (I mean, I'm not ruling out the fact that being sociable is related to being female, nature/nurture/Nietzsche/quack, but I am certain that being female is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being sociable.)

E.g. the year before last I got asked to organise the team's Christmas meal, which involved talking to people & asking them what they wanted to do and blah blah blah then ringing the restaurant and booking the table and getting people's menu choices. I don't like trying to guess stuff when I can ask the person who knows directly (and I work with people who do not worry too much about being socially gauche), so I asked my line-manager whether he was asking me to do the "social secretary" stuff because I was a woman; he looked pained, reminded me who else was on the team, & asked if I could imagine any of them organising a social event. I had to concede that he had a point. :-} I guess that's a bit of the "oh just give it here" problem, & maybe we should be trying to teach the less-sociable people to socialise, but that's problematic (morally and practically) too.

As you say, though, it's hard (maybe not always possible) to disentangle the sexist expectations from the other social/cultural assumptions -- and we have to be able to make some assumptions otherwise we'd go mad trying to analyse each social situation from first principles every time. On the other hand I think sometimes it's important to ask people about their assumptions. But that's often hard.

I don't know. I can only really talk about how I do things, and then only anecdotally, and a lot of it comes down to chance and selective memory, and social interaction is experimentally unrepeatable, and and and. And I'm not saying that because it's difficult to untangle we shouldn't try to untangle it, but my coping strategy (imperfectly implemented) for my own life is to focus my limited energy on fixing things I stand a chance of being able to fix; so I can't do anything about being female, but I can do lots of other things to try to work better with people and persuade them to work better with me.

Anyway. I should do some work otherwise I'll just be reinforcing the stereotype that girls just sit around posting to LJ when they should be working. :-}

~~~~

So much for the comment. Then I realised that in my list of disintegrating statements I didn't say much about my stance on the f-word. I don't tend to describe myself as a feminist; but then, I also don't tend to describe myself as a human being. I've said before that "All I know is that whenever I express sentiments that distinguish me from a feminist I get called a doormat", but that's just being facetious and doesn't really explain the problem.

I certainly don't think feminism is "over" or has "done its job"; I think there is still a sickening amount of inequality in the world, a lot of it relating to gender and sex and sexuality, because those are things that are important to people, and people commit terrible atrocities in the name of things that are important to them, and telling people they shouldn't care about those things is a rubbish way to fix that problem. I do think there's an enormous amount of cultural baggage associated with the word "feminism", not all of it helpful, and I think it's at best disingenuous to pretend that that baggage doesn't have any effect on how people react to the word. (At worst you're basically telling people "You mustn't accept the labels that the patriarchy imposes on you ... but how dare you refuse the labels that we impose on you?" which is a bit like telling women whose husbands are beating them up that they'd be much better people if they let another woman beat them up instead.)

I also don't see how "I'm a feminist and I'm not going to stand for your sexist bullshit" is actually a stronger statement than "I'm not going to stand for your sexist bullshit"; in other words, if you're fighting for the cause, I don't think it matters if you're not wearing the official uniform. In fact, I think sometimes the uniform gets in the way, because if you're always wearing the uniform, people start to see you as a role rather than a person, and that's not helpful if you're trying to get them to see you as a person and stop categorising you in according to their perception of your role. I'm not saying that there's no place for labels and causes; I'm just saying that there is also a place for action outside the labels and the causes, and that failing to wear the official uniform every day doesn't make you a bad person, and that "if you're not for us then you're against us" is a pernicious lie.

And talking of uniforms, I know I am just awkward and contrary, but to me the famous feminist tshirt has the unfortunate subtext of suggesting that a feminist has to dress in the wearisome conformity of the "alternative" subculture, the confrontational slogan tshirt, only available in I'm-only-wearing-black-because-they-haven't-invented-a-more-tedious-colour, only available in stare-at-my-chest-please. Where are the feminists wearing suits and ties, the feminists wearing actual uniforms, the feminists in spacesuits, the feminists in Laura Ashley dresses, the feminists wearing tracksuits, the feminists wearing silk negligées, the feminists wearing nothing at all, the feminists who are not even looking at the camera?

I know I only read the Guardian's Family supplement to get annoyed, really, but this Saturday's front page article is even more teeth-grindingly aggravating than most... to the extent where I'm starting to suspect (or should that be "hope"?) that it's actually a spoof. Some of it is almost too easy a target:

"I work out what's going to happen when Saffron's rounders game at one end of the county clashes with Aspen's cricket match in the other direction, and they both need picking up at the exact same time that the nanny finishes."

Oh noes! How will they cope?

But it was this bit that really made me want to punch them:

What Tony's fed up with, he says, is the assumption that because they are well-off everything is easy. They do have a nanny from 8am to 6pm weekdays. "But at 6pm she goes home and then it's just us. So on a Friday night I'll get in from work and it's literally straight into looking after the babies. There's no respite: the weekend is heavy domestic duty and then on Monday morning I'm back into work from first thing."

Wait, what? You have to literally look after the children that you paid £millions to have? That's so unfair! And, after all that, they still expect you to go into work on Monday? O cruel world! "We loved the idea of a big family," says one of these spoilt kids (the parents, that is). Evidently the reality of a big family is slightly harder to deal with.

What he would most like, he says, is for people to realise how normal their lives are. "It's not about spoilt children and designer shoes, the way some people seem to think. We're just an ordinary family, with an ordinary kitchen, an ordinary garden and ordinary goings-on."

Yeah. "Ordinary," that was just the word I was looking for.

I should post more before I entirely forget how to write. So I'm going to post about something small and annoying (no, not myself): my Three micro-SIM for my iPad. (I can't call them '3' because it's too confusing when I'm also talking about '3G'.)

( I bought an iPad because... )

When I activated the Three SIM, despite the fact that it was supposed to be a PAYG SIM Three wanted to know everything about me: from the usual name/address/DoB etc to things like how long I'd been in my current job, and what my previous address was. This was presumably for a credit check, but when I asked why they needed to know this, all they could tell me was "we need to know these things, Mrs M—, because, Mrs M—, in order to set up your account, Mrs M—, we need to know these things to set up your account". Anyway, all this information was nothing they couldn't get off Facebook anyway, so I gritted my teeth and went through the mandatory 45 minutes of interrogation, and then the 3-hour wait until the SIM is actually activated, etc etc. It did work in the end, though; and I can now get MAGIC INTERNET FROM THE AIR on my iPad (hurrah!).

However, I then came to set up my 'my3' account, i.e. the ability to look at my bills etc online. I put in my name and address and SIM number, and so on, and was told that in order to activate the account I'd have to type in a PIN which they would send my SMS to my Three mobile. .... See the problem? The Three SIM is in an iPad. Not a phone. There's no way to receive a txt on the iPad (there may be apps that fake it, but that's not the point). And because it's a micro-SIM, I can't even just slap it in another phone. OK, I probably could find someone with an SMS-receiving device which would accept a micro-SIM, but I figure I shouldn't have to do this to make their stupid setup process work.

So I emailed them and pointed out the flaw in their process, and waited for a reply. They tried to phone me a few times; I was annoyed that they couldn't just reply to the email (I got an automated ticket response, but that just told me to phone their helpline), but figured that maybe they'd be able to give me the PIN over the phone once I'd cleared security, but couldn't do it by email.

Today I finally gathered enough round tuits to phone them back. First, there's no ticket number or other way to skip through the phone-menu and say "I'm following up this previous request that you told me to follow up". Second, when I do get through to a human being (or at least a slightly better AI than a phone-menu), I find that there is literally no other way for them to give me the PIN for the account. "OK, Mrs M—, the reason is, Mrs M—, the iPad does not support SMS." I pointed out that they knew that when they offered an iPad contract, but the point was lost on them. Apparently I can log into my 'my3' if I'm using my Three connection on my iPad, and then it won't ask for a username or password at all; but that's the only way to do it. "Mrs M—, we are looking into another way of doing this, Mrs M—, OK." Fortunately I will get notifications and bills and suchlike by email, i.e. I don't have to go into the 'my3' account to get them... but still. The only thing that's stopping me cancelling the Three SIM now is the knowledge that doing so would involve talking to them again. Well, that and the fact that I'd have to go and deal with a different phone company instead, who would simply be differently awful.

The moral of the story is ... I don't know. It can't be "don't buy an iPad" because it's absolutely great and has honestly actually been useful as well as being a joy to use. It can't be "don't deal with mobile phone companies" because if you want to use mobile phone technology there's no real alternative at the moment. Maybe the moral is "everything is a bit full of fail, but mostly works in the end". Not exactly catchy, but it'll do.

The concept of 'fail' is another subject for another blog, or maybe a book (in fact, I will gladly write a book about 'fail' if someone will pay me for it, because I've written most of it in my head already). Which means I probably won't ever get round to it, because of... well, because of fail.

It's so hard to write about anything meaningful any more.

I know I've said this before. Some of you made kind comments. I probably never managed to find the right words to reply to them. You've probably stopped reading by now.

It's easy to talk about emotions, but 6 years in Cambridge taught me that emotions don't count: they're what stupid people have instead of science degrees. I don't know how to talk about anything that matters.

Nearly every morning I wake up feeling sick and panicky at the things I haven't done and the things I'll never do and I'm scared to look at the emails that are probably waiting in my inbox to tell me that I've failed at something else. See, it's easy to talk about that.

When I sat down and started staring at the screen this evening I was going to try to write about the election, about politics. It's laughable, isn't it? No, not the election: the thought that someone like me would try to talk about a grown-up subject like that. It's like a dog standing on its hind legs.

Maybe it's for the best. There's enough opinion and enough noise in the world that it's probably a good thing if I refrain from adding to it. Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't written this -- oh, certainly it would have been better, but sometimes better is still bad. The only way to make it good is to unravel it all, all the way back to the start: the hands withdrawing and the light receding and the first cry drawn back into the throat, cutting off the fatal breath.