'Passion'

At work the other day, I got talking to a man called Harold Bishop*. Harold Bishop* is writing a book. It’s about the belief systems on which the world operates. It’s his life’s work. Harold Bishop* has been writing this book for over two years. It contains realities which need to be spoken. Harold Bishop* wants to open people’s eyes.

A good village barmaid must, in the interests of hospitality, often fight back sarcasm. A good village barmaid hones this skill when working in a rural pub on days like Maggie Thatcher’s birthday, Maggie Thatcher’s funeral, and the day Maggie Thatcher died. As I listen and learn about Harold Bishop*’s book, I continue to empty the glass-washer with pursed lips. ‘Good on you dude, writing a book’ I muster, about 5 minutes later. ‘I could never do that.’ ‘Oh, but you have to do it’ Harold Bishop* replies, eyes sparkling ‘when it’s your passion, you know?’

I do not know. And my insides flinch at the sincerity and fervour with which the word ‘passion’ is uttered. ‘Don’t think I’ve got one of them!’ I say, raising my eyebrows and shaking my head.

The firm, negative response I gave to Harold Bishop*’s talk of ‘passion’ is the same default reaction I have to people to who ask me what I want to do with my life. And I suppose it’s a similar question, as ‘passion’ is often connected with career. ‘Nope, no plan!’ I chirp back at them, wide eyed and contrary, daring them to plonk me in the feckless bin capitalism has created in our minds for people who aren’t driven entrepreneurs. ‘Go on, JUDGE ME’ my following comment of ‘I’ll probably still be serving you pints when I’m 30!’ implicitly says. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts on what I’d like to do after uni, it’s just that I don’t appreciate the world’s insistence that I NEED them. The pressure to find a suitable career path gets very strong towards the end of undergraduate study, and my intense contrariness exceeds even my own bounds of understanding, so I refuse to give people the satisfaction of thinking they can characterize me by my upcoming graduation and my ‘plans for the future’; the gaping hole about to be punched into my existence. I like to think that my final statement of ‘I might just save up a bit of money and then fuck off somewhere’ really hammers this point home.

I normally see ‘passion’ as a by-word for ‘bullshit’. But as I turn away from Harold Bishop* and begin polishing wine-glasses, I find myself staring into my distorted reflection, wondering about this nebulous concept. Trying to think of something, anything, that I really really like. That I need to do. Are some people different from me? Do they actually have ‘passions’? Am I missing something?

On the way to work, I’d jokily complained to my mum’s boyfriend about my inability to really feel the pressure and put in the hours in this final stretch of my degree. The conversation drifted to the topic of work and concentration, and he was stunned to hear that I have never pulled an all-nighter during my study, or in any other area of my life (drinking excluded). Apparently he frequently doesn’t sleep while working on projects. ‘Don’t you ever get so into something that you just can’t stop?’ He asks. ‘No, I’m a well-adjusted human being’ are words to the effect of my response. But later in the night the conversation comes back to me, and I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a level of commitment or interest that I’m lacking. The next day I asked my mum if she’d ever pulled an all-nighter during her degree, and she said she did it all the time. She too, was surprised I never have.

Sorry, I’m just a well-organized and balanced human! I feel should be the conclusion of this post. But a little bit of me is suddenly finding it slightly scary that I might never have a ‘life’s purpose’ (pompous as it may sound) or something to be characterized by as a person. ‘Oh, Harold Bishop*’ folk will say in years to come. ‘Decent bloke. He wrote a book, you know … nah, it was pish. But good on him, I say’. I’ve always been aware that I’m just about the least obsessive person I know. But this new realization that all the people around me have things they do, things they will get lost in, things that are necessary to their existence, makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t too... Is it enough to just mosey along, taking life as it comes with the hope of being generally useful and not making the world worse? Or should I try harder to find a ‘thing’ that I really love, that my sanity bids I do? Are people with ‘passions’ not all bullshitting? Should I stop putting that word in inverted commas?

*denotes name has been changed

I'm turning to the dark side and adding a gimmicky edge to this blog. I thought for each piece I write, I might pick to a song to go with it. You now get and insight into my brain, and some interesting music. I will try and make all my selections a either fun or different, and I promise that if you like similar music to me then you'll enjoy it. So to go with this, I've chosen Kate Bush, Sat in Your Lap. The official two fingers up to passion and drive! I can't recommend that you watch enough, it's one of the trippiest, dramatic-est 80s-est, bestest music videos of all time. She wears a cape AND rollerskates. She is also my hero. 

My only worry is that I have now used this song, and it is probably pertinent to just about everything I have and will write, ever. Hope you enjoy, and let me know if you think this is a worthwhile thing to add to each blog post!

Optimism

Right, so I’m just going to try something here. Get ready, cause you may be about to experience something you have never encountered on this blog before: ABSOLUTE, UNADULTERATED, UPBEAT ENTHUSIASM.

Wheyyyyy.

Don’t worry if that bowled you over, I’ll be back to my usual cynical self soon. An open love letter to Radiohead and a piece called ‘Pissing with the Door Open’ are just a couple of posts in the Siobhan’s Notebook pipeline. But first, I want to tell you all about my new role as a Youth Ambassador for ONE.org. For now, I’m putting on my serious, persuasive, saving-the-world hat (which interestingly fits nicely around my feminist hat – the two make a great ensemble!), and am temporarily striking the words ‘pants’ ‘poo’ and ‘fanny’ from my vocabulary. (Don't stop reading though!)

ONE are an international campaign charity working to influence policy on agriculture, health, business transparency and a variety of other causes relevant to developing countries. All their work is directed at achieving ONE goal: eradicating extreme poverty.

If that sounds like a far off dream, a pie in the sky, a ridiculous flight of fancy, then I have some good news for you. It’s totally doable. IN OUR LIFETIMES.

‘SHUT THE FRONT DOOR’ I hear your cry!

‘Shan’t!’ I gleefully respond, ‘It’s all completely true. Get ready for some truth bombs, imma BLOW YOUR MIND.’

In my short and privileged lifespan, the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide has been cut in half. If we can keep up the amazing progress already being made, keep investing in nutrition programmes, infrastructure and smart aid for the world’s poorest nations, extreme poverty could be virtually eradicated by 2030. 

Think of the immensity of that statement. No families having to survive on under $1.25 a day. No more people working long days to earn less than a pound. No babies born into extreme poverty. Before I’m 40.  

The job of ONEs Youth Ambassadors is to urge the EU to play its part in making this amazing goal a reality. The EU as a whole is the world’s biggest donor of aid, and we want to remind all the newly elected MEPs of the vital role they are playing in global development. We want as many candidates as possible to sign our #ONEVOTE2014 pledge, encouraging them to do their bit to support the world’s poorest countries in their 5 year term. It involves protecting aid budgets and working to increase business transparency and fight phantom firms, which divert much needed money away from developing countries as well as the UK.

3 London MEP candidates signing our pledge on launch day!

I can’t remember when I first became aware of ONE. The earliest marker in my memory is starting uni 4 years ago, and having to explain to every new person who added me on facebook exactly why my profile photo was of an angry, fist shaking baby.

I really got engaged with what ONE are doing two years later, when I attended the ONEshot Student Conference. It was very exciting. I even wrote a guest-blog about it. 

I don’t study international relations. I often saw development as a drastically complex mire, something I would never deign to know about or influence opinion on. The conference, full of passionate aid workers and SOAS students, did not alleviate this anxiety, this feeling of fraudulence. But ONE throwaway comment on the way the UK allocates its aid budget really stuck with me, and changed my outlook. A ONEshot speaker pointed out to us that the UKs aid expenditure in Helmand Province was disproportionately high, and that the reason for it was simple politics: Every time David Cameron made visits to UK troops, he needed to be bringer of good news. So with every Ministerial trip to Helmand, the aid allocation increased.

Aid is a big word, fraught with various meanings and connotations. And it is complex, so much more complex than I will ever understand. But the image of David Cameron reshuffling aid money to fit his upcoming speeches made me realize that although progress in development is influenced by a vast number of complicated issues, that doesn’t mean UK policy always is. Development policy appeared to me at that moment to be just as much at the whim of party politics as pasty tax. And I suddenly felt much more confident getting involved, and felt like I had a right to my opinion. Politicians need to be kept on track. 

With this in mind, I know words like ‘development’ and ‘poverty’ can seem vast and intimidating. But if you feel like this is keeping you out of the debate, or have the impression that this means you can’t make a difference, I urge you to get interested, and get involved. The issues surrounding poverty levels in developing countries and how they can be alleviated is a topic of great interest to me, and I’m learning more all the time. But sometimes getting started is as simple as agreeing with the notion that no one should have to live in poverty.

I’ve listed five things you can do right now to get involved and have your say, regardless of how qualified you feel to say it:

1) Sign and share the ONEVote2014 petition to get fighting extreme poverty on the agenda at this year’s EU elections: http://act.one.org/sign/one_vote_2014

2) Or this petition, telling European Leaders to fight phantom firms: http://act.one.org/sign/crack_down_on_phantom_firms/

3) Join the ONE Campaign. Remember, they want your voice, not your money: http://www.one.org/international/take-action/dashboard/

4) Share this, and various other Youth Ambassador Blogs. Don’t forget to hashtag! #ONEVOTE2014: http://thechangegame.wordpress.com/

http://www.sasaeniapaul.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/discordant-tunes-of-poverty-and.html

http://danalanclark.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/why-i-became-a-youth-ambassador-part-one-of-three/

5) Write your own! Get involved, get tweeting, get writing, get sharing. The more noise we make, the more important our leaders will realise it is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.

So that’s my enthusiastic, optimistic blog post. I hope you found it as reasonable and rational as usual. As Alain de Botton said, ‘Cynics are just idealists with awkwardly high standards’. Well this time, I really feel my standards are achievable. And here’s my crazed optimistic grin to prove it. I’m taking this to the top.

What is ‘Working Hard’?

What’s black, white, red all over and inconclusive? MY DISSERTATION

I’m sitting in a silent working area on campus. I’ve had the five disparate and red-streaked documents that currently make up my dissertation open for about 45 minutes. I am fidgeting on my swivel chair and listening to The Wonder Stuff while reading an interesting section on the Guardian website called GenerationY which focusses on graduate unemployment and money saving.

A girl sits down at the desk next to me. Naturally my eyes are immediately drawn to her computer screen instead of mine, and glancing over, I witness something extraordinary. The first window she opens is not Twitter, or Spotify or her emails. It’s not even the internet. It’s her work. Pages and pages of writing and journal articles. Five minutes at her desk and she’s in the zone. Staring at her screen, typing away. I look at her distrustfully for a couple of moments, unsure if I’m jealous or actively judging this girl for her dedication to her studies. ‘Swot’ the –rather large – section of my brain that still feels about 15 says.   

No matter how long I look at it, the red bits never go away

I sometimes wonder whether I’m hard-working or not. My flatmate used the word to describe me recently, and I was greatly taken aback. I briefly became slightly neurotic about the concept, trying to identify precisely what makes one a hard-working student. What actions of mine had led her to the conclusion that I, Siobhan haven’t-finished-a-book-all-year Palmer, am hard-working? What constitutes ‘working hard’, or ‘working hard’ enough? Hours spent in the library? Not taking a break to watch the Dancing on Ice final? What level of anti-social study is necessary to justify my position as full-time student?

I am constantly faced with two opposing angles on how ‘hard’ undergraduate study is. Many of my uni friends are experiencing high levels of stress, putting their degree (and the right classification) above anything else. And I suppose it is technically our profession. But is comparing university education with full time work really useful? Many ‘hard-working’ friends of mine seem to be living by the principle that we can have social-lives, alcohol, relationships after our course ends. I can't help worrying that that kind of outlook will leave us feeling drastically conned come summer. Isn't the world of employment where control over our own time stops?

When I leave the student bubble, go home to my job as a barmaid and explain to the locals what I’m doing with my life, I'm given the impression that uni is actually akin to ‘time off’. My chance to socialize and have fun before joining the real world. A holiday. People make jokes about daytime tv and long holidays and I laugh along and tell them my English degree consists of between 4 and 6 hours of lectures a week. But I worry about what's genuinely valued more, earning money pulling pints, or using loans to finance a degree from a Russell Group uni. My older coworkers reminisce about that time they started their dissertation the week before the deadline and spent three straight days in a pub. They never recall stress and hardship, like their degree was the pinnacle of their intellectual existence. So what am I doing right now? I’m comfortably passing my degree, but what is that? Am I working hard or having fun?

We seem to define everything in relation to some sort of absolute, like working hard is something you are, not something you do. And this absolute is generally connected to a job or the world of work. ‘The real world’ gives us a standard by which to measure how hard we are working: our earnings. The supposed logic is if you’re making £40,000 a year, you must be working hard because you have money to show for it. Maybe that’s why I seem to have no idea how ‘hard’ I’m working towards this degree. I have no direct, correlative measure of that work. I can’t be fired from study. My intelligence and ability can only really be measured against myself. And it’s blindingly obvious that just because I achieved a 2:1 in an essay does not necessarily mean I worked ‘hard enough’. It’s strange that the equivalent, that a 40k salary doesn’t automatically speak for how hard you work, is not so obvious a fact.  

There’s no objective measure for ‘hard work’, in any context. In the student environment, this makes many people neurotic and anxious, because there’s no limit on what you can or can’t be doing. No compulsory working day to fit your study into, or even an official purpose or end-point for what we might be trying to achieve. The fact that the main word attached to graduates these days seems to be ‘unemployment’ speaks to this. Returns are, despite what many people say, not always representative of effort invested. 

It’s a pervasive idea that hardworking is a state of being rather than an action, and this grates on me slightly, especially when it's attached or detached from whole sections of society, like students or bingo players. I think it’s a dangerous notion by which to measure yourself as a person. I turn off The Wonder Stuff. And turn on The Fall. I suppose the answer to whether these are the days I worked really hard or had the most fun ever can only be arrived at in retrospect.While I read about youth disengagement and how to eat on a budget, is whether I’m sufficiently justifying my 4 year stint in higher education through library hours really the biggest of my worries? I shouldn’t have to treat my degree like a full-time job. In a few months’ time, employers sure as hell won’t. 

In a few months time I'll be one of these. If I get my dissertation done and stop writing blogs.