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.

The One Show of Literature Modules

Today I walked, in the rain, to my first lecture of term in which I was certain I would know absolutely nobody in the room. As predicted, the room was full of strangers. Well, apart from the lecturer … He tutored me for an independent essay 2 years ago. He didn’t seem to recognise me though…



Having left home in a slight hurry, I stumbled in last, with steamed up glasses, soggy jeans, and a puddle in the back of my rucksack. I did that proper slow trudge into the classroom, looking around (pointlessly) for people I might recognise or who might ask me to sit with them. But of course all the desks were full, and I don’t think everyone was quite as aware of my entrance as my mind would have me believe. In my nervous distraction I took off my coat and hoody and bag, but not my hat. I realised this about 10 minutes in, but my state of hyper-self-awareness prevented me from taking it off at such a late stage in the lecture. It stayed on for the entire session. My head got a bit hot. The shiny new classroom design (with screens everywhere and words like ‘inspire’ stenciled on the walls) made me feel a bit like I was a new girl walking into an American form room. You know those films where the ‘new kid’ walks in and the camera pans round a room of faces staring open mouthed at them. That and the fact that I was wearing glasses and carrying a rucksack…

Having spent my morning reading the some of the lecturers recommended reading, which went rather enthusiastically into all the minute details of medieval English theatre staging, and used the words ‘interestingly’, and ‘fascinating’ both repetitively and over-optimistically, I was actually rather looking forward to the module. In a slightly amused way. The academic had also interspersed his chapter with sentences along the lines of ‘But we will find the true importance of these ‘parts of tree’ rollers attached to the York wagons later.’ And ‘Another function of the wooden arches will soon be revealed’. I felt like I was reading a ‘York Mystery Cycle’ edition of the One Show. I got the impression he fancied himself a bit of a geeky detective, and actually found it a bit charming. Not enough to read it to the end. But a bit.



After I sat down, the lecturer opened his first session by saying ‘I’m not going to make the mistake of asking if this module was anyone’s first choice, as I suspect it wasn’t anybody’s. However I will say this: students who study my modules tend to do very well’. I was the only one who laughed. Luckily I don’t think anyone heard me slouching at the back. He went on to say that we were welcome to take notes if we want, but all the information’s online.



Despite my awkward start in Medieval English Drama 3, I think I’m going to enjoy taking The One Show of literature modules. I’m looking forward to discussing whether the Wakefield Cycles were performed on manual or horse-drawn wagons, and why some wagons used 6 wheels and some 8, and whether the York wagons were meant to be viewed side or head on. I haven’t yet decided whether I am excited about this for the sheer hilarity of the situation, or because, deep down, I actually find it quite interesting. It’s the same complex emotion I experience when Matt Baker segues from interviewing Maggie Smith to a segment about British cauliflower consumption. I laugh at the hilariously tenuous link, but I once it starts, I kind of want everyone to be quiet so I can learn about cauliflowers …

 

the sort of people who are interested in my module 

Back To School

Would you look at that. It’s been a WHOLE YEAR since I started my blog! Happy Birthday Blog! It’s nice to think that this little site has now kind of tracked an entire year of my life. And an exciting year at that. With this in mind, I’m going to try and update it more often, so I have more to look back on when I’m old and boring and grey.

Starting blog-year 2 off with a BANG:

It’s 9.30 on a Sunday night. I’m curled up in bed wondering whether to finish reading Henry VI, or to watch a tv programme before I go to bed. If I decide to watch something, I’ll have to choose between the new Attenborough show about the rise of vertebrates, and the documentary about giant animals with Steve Backshall…

Cosy as I am, I can’t pretend this how I imagined I would be spending the night before my first day back at university. My overriding memories from first and second year consist mainly of painting my face like various different animals, and after a few beers roaring ferociously at anyone I met. Apart from that time I dressed up as a zebra…

Today I have divided a 100 page course-pack into sections and bound each one neatly with string, eaten 1 malteasers bar and half a bag of chocolate eclairs, read and made notes on a middle English York Mystery Play, done lots of ambigious ‘computer stuff’, and decided that strumming without a plectrum definitely sounds better when playing ‘Other Side of the World’ on guitar. Oh, and I walked to the postbox. It’s at the bottom of my road.

Had I, all that time ago back in August, followed some crazy reckless abandon and refused to register to come back for my final year of uni, my day would probably have gone very differently. I would have gone to work for the seventh day of the week and run around behind a bar for 6 hours. Then, due to my living quarters being slightly cramped, probably opted to spend the evening in another pub before skipping tipsily home around 11 and setting my alarm for 7.30 to get up for job number 2 on Monday morning. It’s a slightly different lifestyle. I would have eaten less food, and spoken to more people. I would also have read less, and played less music. I would have gone further than the end of my road. Rather than walking to the postbox, I would probably have looked guiltily in passing at a pile of letters and papers yet to be written on and sorted out.

When you come home from work and turn on the tv, you don’t have a constant nagging feeling that you should be doing something else. Here, with two dissertations to write and over 40 Shakespeare texts to cover in 20 weeks, there’s always something else I could be doing. I don’t know which I prefer. They say that spending a year out is a good thing to do, because it makes you appreciate education more. I'm not sure working has made me appreciate education more, but it may have made me appreciate midday starts and student discounts more. I can’t help wondering how many of the things my lecturers say next week will strike me as impractical academic bullshit.  

That said, did you know that H.D. was sent from London to Austria and referred to Sigmund Freud in 1933 due to her increasing paranoia about the Nazis and Adolf Hitler? I found that out this week. Some of the politicians at the time might have benefited from the same condition! I can feel I’m getting my geek on already.

My first seminar is tomorrow. Having been away for a year, it’s unlikely I will know anybody in it. I also have my first meeting back at the uni newspaper tomorrow, and a trial shift in a local bar next week. Give it a month or so and hopefully I will have got myself a nice (but probably reasonably unstable) balance of the two. 

Flashback

Money, Hypocrisy, Williamsburg and Wall St: They're not as bad as eachother

In the last couple of weeks I’ve somehow found myself in 3 separate jobs, working almost 7 days a week and simultaneously moving house. Phhew! My feelings of guilt towards this blog hold what I imagine to resemble the awkward feelings of a busy, neglectful mother towards her child. All I want to do is look after it and write for it and plan more things to do with it, but unfortunately, earning money has to take precedence.

In about a month I’m going travelling, and come September I’m going to have bills and expenses flying out of my bank account left right and centre. You know, like other functioning members of society do all the time? My break from the world of careers and study will soon be over, so I’m going out with a bang. The day before my 21st birthday, my friends and I are flying out to Amsterdam! We’re going to spend 3 weeks interrailing round Europe, and fly back to the UK from Venice in September. If all goes well, I won’t even notice myself morphing into a responsible adult. That’s what happens when you turn 21, right? I’ll return to the country an of-age young lady, and with all these exciting experiences under my belt, will settle immediately back into Birmingham life. I shall get a job and pay my rent on time and never drink too much and shall consider hand sanitiser, plasters and tissues as handbag essentials …


I’m going to have to get myself a handbag…

So unfortunately my writings have suffered in this new onslaught of life-stuff. It’s a bit of a sad situation. But while I have a spare couple of hours, rather than leave this space blank, I thought I would make like a dodgy sit-com episode, and go over content I’d made before. I curled up with my notebook, and had a read through the old scribbley pages from New York that hadn’t made it into digital form yet. So, again in afternoon television fashion,

HERE'S ONE I MADE EARLIER

:

I’m sitting in a café on Bedford Avenue (aka Hipster High St, Brooklyn). I’m in the corner on a rickety chair; the walls are stained with chipped yellow paint, which strange stained glass lamps on the wall dye orangey red in places. An exceptionally raucous Buzzcocks number is playing, much louder than a coffee shop should. A large black woman is taking orders behind the bar, belting out every instruction and customer request in bold soul-singer style. ‘Plain bagel and cream cheeeheeese, yeah!’ ‘thankyouuu, coohoome again!’ She doesn’t worry about making her tuneage meld with the angry guitars also blasting through the small shop.


I’m watching the queue for the bathroom begin to snake out of a dark, red-painted tunnel, at the end of which I can only assume is a tiny door shielding a toilet lodged in a cupboard. I really need a wee. I bet there isn’t any loo roll.


On using the toilet, I found band stickers plastered from ceiling to floor, across the cracked mirror, and even on the toilet seat. The one right above the sink said ‘fuck your job, write your screenplay’. The soap was kept in one of those plastic ketchup bottles you get in diners. There was loo roll.


I like Williamsburg. I like the cracked paint, the rickety chairs and the loud music. It tickles me, rather than repels me, that it is has been necessary to put up a sign saying ‘no spitting’. I like that I am asked whether I want ‘big or small’ as opposed to ‘grande or tall’. I like it, but I’m also faintly amused by the whole atmosphere I now find myself in.


Looking through the bookstalls stationed up and down the bustling street – every one of which has at least two Camus books, a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics and a minimum of one novel by either Virginia Woolf or Doris Lessing – I can’t help but crack a bemused smile. There’s something undeniably hypocritical about an area where people sell their art on the street every weekend for $10 or $15, and give their books away for any donation, but where the shops sell ‘vintage’ clothing for upwards of $150 and bespoke indie jewellery for as much as you would find in Manhattan. You can’t help but wonder whether the sellers are just setting up bookstalls in order to show the world that they have read Camus, and philosophised over the Greeks. The majority of people here are not short of cash. The local houses are beautiful family homes, or river view penthouses. With this in mind, the rickety chairs and chipped paint of this café become highly intentional design features, rather than odd quirks. People seem to be paying a lot of money to appear poor, anti-establishment, and grassroots-y. And frankly, thanks to their ripped levis and genuine ray-bans (even though it’s October), it’s a slightly half-arsed effort. Haight-Ashbury this is not.

All this amuses me, but doesn’t anger me at all. I have no judgement to pass on Williamsburg, as I did on the BusinessAwards Dinner. I don't have the same vom-ball forming in the back of my throat when I overhear conversations here, about tattoos of cats and bikram yoga. People here have just as many image hang-ups and hypocrisies as their Wall St counterparts, but at least the image they are conveying is one of sharing, and a lack of emphasis on money and value. Their hypocrisies don’t effect global finances, or lead to tax evasion, or deny school places to children in Africa. Hell, I’m sitting here too. Writing in my hardback notebook, wearing Calvin Klein jeans. And I have a copy of Ariel in my bag. I’m right at home. I don’t really see a problem with maintaining an atmosphere of dilapidation and retaliation despite the wealth of the area. 

Isn’t it actually nice to think that some of the people giving away books on the street must be highly paid city-workers…?

Mistakes.

Today, most of the people I started university with got their final degree classifications (well done everyone!) and I had a job interview. So the buzzword for the day really has been all about careers and lives and like ... the future and stuff. You know, that massive dark cloud of uncertainty, fear and despair hanging over my entire generation?

It got me thinking about what makes a good career, a good life, and whether there is a formula for success.

Career-wise, whenever successful people and celebrities are interviewed on TV about their careers, they always seem to say that they just fell into it. ‘Lucky bastards’ I used to wail in my head. ‘Don’t be so modest; stop pretending that everything in your life was so unexpected. Give me the key, the EXACT WAY you got your EXACT LIFE.’ These days I tend to think that they were probably telling the truth. Few people do exactly what they wanted to do when they were in school. I also think that it’s a good thing there isn’t a key, because I don’t really want to be Sporty Spice any more. My 9 year old self could have fast-tracked me on to X-Factor by now … ew. 

This last year, things didn’t turn out the way I had planned. All my deliberation and reasoning around my decision to leave New York circled around the idea of thinking about not just what I want now, but what is best in the LONG RUN. Whether or not in 10 years’ time, I would look back and think that I was stupid to leave.

But I’m not sure that this is necessarily the right way to look at things. The more time that passes since I left, the smaller the event seems. As more stuff happens, that decision becomes less and less relevant to my life. I think in general, in the actual ‘long run’, things matter less. Getting over the initial hurdle of rearranging your life is a big deal, but I reckon that individual moments are, as a rule, rather insignificant in our lives. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t scrutinize and think long and hard about big decisions that we make. -Actually, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. If it’s the best move at the time, worrying about whether it will still be the best move in ten years’ time is silly, because it ten years’ time it will be in the past. I'm so bored of second guessing my 30 year old self. That’s why left New York. And why I got a tattoo.

It’s pretty much a standard assumption that last year I made a ‘mistake’, giving up an exciting and important career opportunity. My decision has been one I’ve never publicly justified, and one I don’t defend a lot even in private. I think I need to, because I don’t regret it and I really don’t want people to think that I do, or to feel sorry for me.

I think mistakes (if you want to call them that. Although I prefer the term 'detours') are great. They make life more interesting, they make you more interesting, and they keep you on your toes. I hope I make many more. Working consistently within the realms of the reasonable, safe and practical can, I suspect, lead to more regret than a few unexpected debts or compromised living situations. I refuse to be submissive to some fictional, world-weary middle aged version of myself. One who everyone seems to be trying to convince me will be disapproving and regretful of all the irresponsible actions I make that stop me getting a respectable career. People have been warning me of her inevitable arrival since I first sat in a GCSE classroom. At what point do I begin to turn into this killjoy future-me? Probably about the same time I start answering to her.

I suppose what I’m saying is, in the wake of this imposing dark cloud, full of unemployment statistics, living wage figures, pay gaps and Ian Duncan Smith, I refuse to go corporate out of fear. 

BlogPost2013

I don’t like to let this blog get neglected. My (completely unofficial) target is to post at least once a month, which has so far been an easy task. But as time paces on, further and further away from the last time I posted, I have to admit that this time, I’m struggling.

Sorting out what to write about in my blog is usually a question of sitting down with some pen and paper, and organising all the millions of Thinks running round my brain in different directions; choosing the ones I need, and making them stand sensibly in a logical line.

But recently, I haven’t had the Thinks running round my head. Normally, it’s a question of batting them back and sorting them out before overflow. Like when I’ve got loose paper falling out my notebooks, bags and desk space and I eventually do the filing. 

Now I'm just desperately trying to summon them. It feels like the equivalent to spreading blank paper all over a clear desk and bed. Which sounds like a ridiculous and abstract form of mad protest ... My brain feels a little bit lost.

I seem to have fallen into a numb routine of going to work, coming home, eating, drinking and sleeping. A dim sense of guilt creeps into my head as I hit the pillow each night looking at the pile of half-finished books sitting on my windowsill, and the array of notebooks sitting under my desk; the same place they were in a week ago. 

I miss the Thinks.