Empty Cage

I am in such a moody, languid, listless end of days stupor lo’ these past few days it’s incredible I’m still dragging my ass out of bed. Just in an absolutely appalling state of mind. And honestly, getting like this is more a chance lottery of brain chemistry because there is quite honestly nothing wrong right now at all.

I’m always impressed with how suddenly all encompassing moods come up. One minute my life is average, the next I’m wondering how ‘get out of bed’ wasn’t one of the tasks of Hercules. I then take it out on everyone because sharing is caring when you’re being a miserable bitch.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll be back to contemplating things like ‘has university/my life/my dreams etc etc all been a horrible mistake.’ Yep.

Go Team Arbitrary Unstoppable Moodiness!

Facebook being basically the most important thing in the world, and accumulating 10 thousand friends basically being the equivalent to winning at your social life, it never fails to entertain me when the yearly purges go down and everyone’s status is something to the effect of “Wow, deleted a hundred of you suckers, feels so nice.”

Everyone clamors to these statuses (statii) to rejoice in their continued window into said person’s inability to realize that lolcats is just not, nor ever was, a particularly funny thing. Or, you know, whatever you do with the almost friends you keep on facebook. The ones where it would be weird to delete them, but who interest you in no way. Maybe some mutual friends are holding you back.

As the kind of girl who is doing a constant pruning of the old friend list, and never announcing it I always find it sort of a weird ritual. I mean, if we’re friends, I generally know we’re friends and you don’t have to tell me I made the cut I can figure that much out for myself, you know, by being your friend and stuff. Still seeing your status update? Thumbs up, sailor. Not? Well, I probably won’t miss them that much either.

Which brings me to whatever thesis my unslept mind is going for. Recently, someone who I would very barely call an acquaintance posted one of these statuses on facebook and I was shocked. We had met once, for five minutes, if that. Our mutual friends are all peripheral people who I know exclusively through student politics and rarely see in a setting other than yelling and meetings. And here I had made the cut! Wow!

Of course, my snide side kicked in and posted something snarky to the status which should guarantee my loss of the “coveted” friend slot, but I found it amazing. Obviously someone was not screening too carefully. But I think it says something more about the practice of a big purge. If you’re going for broke, go for broke. Because you can damn near guarantee that some asshole like me is reading and looking to ruin your day.

Food for thought.

I haven’t slept, maybe this is where the majority of the dickishness is coming from, hurray!

I’m trying to decide if keeping a continuing blog is worth it, I like the idea of it, and when I actually get myself to sit down and write things I would argue that I’m not the worst blogger who ever happened to the internet (I would equally fervently argue I’m not the best), but the problem is that I have zero discipline.

I’ve been contemplating this a lot this summer, many of my faults and problems, I’ve always considered myself the kind of girl with no weaknesses. But I think being able to identify them might make them easier to work on.

I’m just going to put this out in the air, because I think it explains everything. (Or, at least more things). Growing up, I was the smart kid. The smart nerdy kid, the nerdy is unrelated, but I’d like to argue that growing up a little clever ruined me for life. Growing up smart, carted me, one way, to a life of mediocrity.

For starters, as I mentioned, I have no discipline, especially when it comes to sitting down and improving myself. Natural talents have absolutely crippled my drive to improve. I find myself thinking ‘I should really read more on this topic to firm up my grasp’ and just don’t bother, because I use the ‘I’m smart; I can figure it out’ reckoning. But, you know what, me, you’re not going to grasp advanced mathematics just because you, at one point, were slightly above average intelligence. You learn this through study, work, and effort, not just because your rational thinking skills are sometimes okay.

It should be obvious how this is ruinous.

The other problem, the twin dragon, is the unholy perfectionism leading to procrastination, leading to epic failure.

Being previously considered quite smart, I developed a certain complex about always being smart. Not just that, always being the smartest. Just, feeding on approval of my brain. In some, very lucky, and very dilligent people, this is a very good thing. If you’re obsessed with being the smartest person in the room, you work night and day to be the smartest person in the room, for me, something very different and very bad happened.

I got a nasty case of perfectionism.

It’s actually quite crippling to be a perfectionist, and for me, paralyzing terror of not doing The Best has completely ruined me for the past number of years. I put things off because I cannot do them to my high expectations, and then cram through them the day before and barely pass. You’d think this would make the perfectionist work harder, but the killing blow ends up being I now have an excuse. ‘Well, of course I didn’t do all that well on that paper, I wrote it four hours before it was due’. These rationalizations will murder you. If I don’t do well on a carefully thought out and researched paper I feel like an idiot, and how would I cope with, given an even footing, not being the very smartest person ever?

The final, related, but not as tightly related way that I went from being a cocksure brainiac to an average joe were the crippling effects of boredom growing up.

My parents had always tried to keep my brain going as a kid, reading, writing, drawing, and playing with technology. But school was always very, very tedious. Even when we covered things I found interesting like Science and History, I was often irked by the snail’s pace at which we covered things and the general lack of depth my elementary schools decided to get into.

Obviously this is necessary, kids are dumb, I was a dumb kid as much as any of the others, but I often wonder if I had felt challenge I would have risen to it or crumpled under the pressure.

Addiction to boredom is as hard to master as any other and you start to lose interest in everything feeling nothing is up to the challenge of your outstanding mind — and I’m not even that smart, I shutter to think how shit would have gone down if I was genuinely clever. Boredom is the worst because it actually starts to affect your mood as well. Eventually you start to get melancholic that this whole wonderful world cannot hold your attention.

And so these three things, lack of discipline, perfectionism, and boredom, stemming mostly from a childhood of being the smartest little bugger in the room have ruined me, and at this point, I’m worried if it’s irreversable. The general apathy towards getting to be someone exciting.

I’ve been trying to consider solutions, but step one, lack of discipline always rears it’s ugly head. Maybe it’s time to get a life coach, or a personal assistant. Or, hell, someone to flog me when I’m slacking off.

I am more than capable of being a gigantic hypocrite. I do it a freaking lot, and on this particular sticking point people are going to have to stop taking my half baked do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do advice, because there is not one iota of me that ever, ever, ever follows my own advice.

This is mostly to take a page from the ever shitty relationships book. I am not very good at making these things work, and I’m even less good at closing them off neatly. And yet, I’m your preachy asshole friend who will tell you straight-up to get over everything quickly, and don’t look back.

I’m looking at this topic now because I’m finally feeling confident about my own recent breakup. It’s only been a few months. Only. I’m probably still a little sensitive on certain subjects (like if someone mentions a deceased pigeon on a balcony I may pitch one hell of a fit) but for the most part I’m not contemplating if a huge mistake was made. It wasn’t. Phew. Dodged a bullet. Didn’t send the King of Time and Space packing, nor was he likely to develop the next Google. (God, LPG, if you do I will never forgive myself).

The thing that bothers me about these things is that I’m a poor judge of what kind of a person I like.

And even if I don’t like a person I spend a lot of time sticking in incompatable relationships because I have trouble identifying why we’re incompatible, and then I turn it into a science experiment. Why can’t we stick it out — let me get my microscope.

The analogy falls apart when I get a personal attachment problem and suddenly iiiiiiiit’s internal conflict time. Was the problem related to how neurotic I am, how neurotic he was, or was it a joint neurotic venture? We lived together, the answer in this particular case is obvious. Oh, wait, hold it right there, microscope again time!

Close friends give me the Hamlet analogy a lot. I will spend the whole of a play contemplating, weighing, thinking, pondering… that’s all I’m going to get without cracking a thesaurus. And very little time doing, doing, doing. I would say if I was even a little more of a doer than a thinker my quality of life would improve (my marks would vastly improve).

I also strongly believe that I would be a happier person too. My Arch-nemesis/very good friend has complained for years that all of my misery can be attributed back to myself. I’ll think things into oblivion, and I won’t enjoy them even a tiny bit.

So, the new goal is to stop over thinking, and over complicating matters with my thinking. To try and be friends with, and date people who I wouldn’t normally give a chance to. To let things go when they need to be let go. And most importantly, stop being terrified of failure due to a lack of omniscience. I may be pretty close, but I certainly wouldn’t call me perfect. Why lose my brain over it?

Domain names, domain names, which one can I pick?

Being a boring person is absolutely the pits. Yeah, here I am, blogging. But what was that whole firm resolve to post more frequently? That’s what I thought.

I’m being hired to do webstuff again, which is really nice, because my brain is about to go into rigour mortis. I miss the days when summer wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. Also maybe hired to write things. This could get messy.

And I’m back on that new domain name kick again. Maybe archive everything here now, and start afresh. Like, okay, keep it all because I’m a squishy sentimental freak, but try a blag without so much baggage.

Because there is some truly terrible stuff here. Like writing that I shouldn’t have committed to the webs. To be fair, I started this blog, what, three or four years ago — I was still a teeanger.

And Mad Hattery needs to be finished and not glossed over.

But at least I now have tumblr. Hah. Accomplishment. Not.

So, I read the uncorrected proof of Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, and thought I’d give you a quick review before slogging through more philosophy. It’ll also hopefully increase my general appeal rather than — to disgruntled U of O students.

Let’s get the ugly truth out of the way first here. I am unnaturally in love with everything that Libba Bray has written, I find her Gemma Doyle trilogy completely wrongly marketed, and thereby misunderstood, her Going Bovine impossible to really put into words, and that short story in Geektastic while poorly placed in my opinion also, pretty much how all fiction should be.

So, enough fangirling over the author, let’s try and talk about the book nice and objective-like shall we.

The first thing I’m going to say about Beauty Queens deterred me, but is bound to attract just as many readers as it scares away. And that is that I honestly didn’t find the book visceral enough. The concept put me in mind of Lord of the Flies, and so I was envisioning this awesome beauty queen showdown with everyone. Everyone. Ending up with their head on a pike. As I said, to Creepy McMe this was a flaw, the normal reader may find that in the book’s favour. But, don’t go into Beauty Queens expecting blood. (Oh boy, that sentence feels dirty, this is going to be one of those reviews).

Of course, in my never-humble opinion the greatest strength of all of Libba’s work is extremely interesting characters in extremely bizarre situations. And yes, it would be fair to say for the second time my favourite character in the book came out as the gay one. Leave my sub-concious alone. Beauty Queens does not let down in its cast of interesting characters are abound, though, easily the blandest character is the protagonist herself. I don’t think this is a pitfall I have ever seen Libba fall into before, but truly Adina (I see what you did there) gets extraordinarily eclipsed by everyone else in a way the Gemma Doyle never did.

I liked the ‘setting’ though. Not in the sense of desert island, but in the invention of a cultural context complete with advertisement scripts and product placement. It added some of that wicked surreality that has me selling more books for Libba than her agent at the bookstore where I work.

The story itself had some hits and misses. Again, I found the protagonist crumpling under the pressure of holding up the whole story, especially when she’s such a bland character. The book’s major claim to fame will be straight up facing issues. It reads like a check list of YA issues in fact, and unfortunately if I run through the check list I risk spoiling a major plot point which I had guessed about 50 pages prior to it happening. But then, I’m a genius.

After all, this rambling and do I, or do I not, recommend Beauty Queens? That, my friend is a wholehearted ‘probably’. The charm of her other tales are here, and while Adina’s not my favourite, the other characters make up for it. And the atmosphere is awesome, I felt like there was a missing punch in the face. The good kind. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t put it down, but I felt kinda like there was a build a lack of climax and then a let down with such glowing happily ever afters I was in danger of being ill.

I still love you Libba, promise?

Just as a note — these are my own personal, internal opinions. They should not reflect upon my association, family, friends, employees, pets ect. Also note, because people keep dinging me on this — by SAFA I mean SAFA Executive.

The referendum has concluded, and I have to say, despite my squirming about getting enough people to vote at the last second, I was pretty confident about this whole process. Right now, I’m feeling pretty confident that I’ve made some good strategic moves, and that I’m ready to… pass the presidency on to someone else as quickly as possible.

Defederation is the golden word on campus these days, though mostly with regards to the SFUO, so our little success story is bound to be completely overlooked, but I think it’s a big deal, mostly because I’ve been nursing an ulcer over these votes. So, I’m going to post inflammatory things in my politely Canadian way now. Well, to be fair, I doubt I’ll say anything here that I haven’t said at a BOD meeting at some point or another.

SAFA (Student Federation of the Faculty of Arts) is broken, extremely broken, and to be honest I am hard pressed to think of a way to fix it, shy of taking the science route, eliminating member associations and just having representatives from each department. I think I’ve finally figured out why it’s broken too, or at least part of the problem.

For those unaware of the happenings in the faculty of Arts, the SAFA executive is the highest executive in Arts, acting as an administrator to the smaller departments. The executive is paid out an honouraria every month (they always call it that, let’s reduce it to layman’s terms — a sum of money equal to about $200) for doing what is formally called ‘Policy 5′ on the absolute bare minimum that a SAFA executive can do. These include things like going to executive meetings, and I suspect, breathing.

Most SAFA executive can run their policy five in under 3 minutes, usually glazing over the ‘I didn’t do’s which they say just as fast and in the exact same tone as the ‘did’s. They also like a healthy smoke screen of all the parties that they attended. We vote, SAFA gets honouraria. Cake.

And this is the biggest issue that keeps resurfacing. ‘Let’s just keep voting yes until someone motions to close’. I’ve done it before, and it’s not completely unreasonable when a simple BOD takes three hours. But it’s unhealthy to the various departments in Arts, since we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot with sheeple voting. This is how we ended up with a section in the constitution that takes 5% of the levy of a student association that doesn’t attend these insipid things. We voted this in, and it was a really stupid idea. SAFA claims its all fair because if they don’t attend they don’t get their honouraria.

This is such a false and bizarrely twisted analogy that it entertains me. You lose your personal money if you don’t come, but I lose 5% of the money that goes back into the students that I’m supposed to be providing events and services for? How is this a dichotomy? Maybe if you paid me to go to these… Perhaps if the BODs were useful to running my association attendance wouldn’t be a problem.

Any ways, this honouraria versus none has sort of turned SAFA into the task masters of the whole faculty of Arts instead of the administrators. When they want something they demand. Then doing passive aggressive things to eventually bend us to their will.

And maybe this would be okay if they then provided useful services to the MAs. But one association spent most of the early part of the year financially in the hole, and SAFA didn’t deem in necessary to lend them a cent to allow for events (and this is one of the large associations), but they were okay spending a few hundred dollars on executive bonding. Due to a mistake in apparel last year, (that was debatable the fault of a previous SAFA executive), another association paid all or almost all of their levy cheques this year directly to SAFA. So far, holding 101 week, and events, and dealing with the SFUO are the only services they can promise us right now.

A previous UPSA president whom I love and respect very much pointed out to me the following, knock down argument. ‘Much of SAFA has never sat on a MA before, they don’t really know what we do, and because of this they’re afraid that we do nothing.’ Which is the argument that has kept me from rage quitting so many times. But most people will tell you, shit gets ugly when the boss doesn’t know what you do. And then you get fired.

I love the idea of solidarity in the Arts department, but I think we’re doing it wrong. As I announced at my last BOD, Arts could function with a chair, and the member associations alone. Then I got laughed off the stage. But my heart was in the right place.

I got an extension on a project I didn’t finish, a paper that was due forever ago I am allowed to hand in late, and honestly I’m just sad now because I actually have to do them rather than flagrantly ignore the deadline.

I’m sick, I don’t wanna work.

The tough draw a unicorn.

Or at least, that’s how I dealt with my AI2 challenge at the Computer Science Games last weekend. Which I would have blogged about earlier, if I hadn’t gotten what I am not calling ‘CS Games Plague’ a serious disease that involves coughing, mucus and feeling generally like shit. But, turns out that a night of social alcohol with friends (that’s right, potential employers, I was very controlled) has mostly killed it. Or maybe I’m more distracted by the hangover,

Regardless, it was a very interesting look at engineering culture, from one of those cursed to be born an artsie.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, I want to write more stern things about the SFUO, and SAFA but I feel like I’m just going to alienate more normal people when I do that.

And finally we find the reason my blogging stems to a trickle after a few short weeks. I completely run out of interesting things to write about. I even run out of uninteresting things to write about leaving me in a pickle.

I know what I said about blogs with regards to ‘nothing’ but, I just thought I’d point out that the greatest obstacle to me being famous on the intartubez is the fact that I am an extremely boring person.

I think it’s interesting though, that I just updated my LinkedIn profile. It feels weird to be student, 22, and already fairly expected to have some sort of business related web presence. It’s like I’m finally entering the real world. I’m not going to harp on things like privacy and that sort of thing (how I have to hide my almost non-existent binge drinking photos from the internet) but more how much you are expected to show.

In this day and age people like to be able to have a pretty general idea of me before they meet me. Know what I look like, things that I’ve done, and more than one person has told me if I don’t have a profile on X site I should hang up my hat.

But oddly enough I think this is a good thing. Employers kicking your ass because you are an ass on the internet may not be kosher, but I think that in the case of a hiring situation having a picture of someone beyond their polished best ‘I will say what you want me to say so you hire me’ is probably a good thing. You’re giving a job to a person not to a set of credentials — otherwise what’s the point of an interview.

In more schizophrenic news, I tried MeeGo Linux and I owe you a review.