« February 2006 | Main | April 2006 »
March 31, 2006
Wanted; A week and two hours.
I’m afraid that there’ll be NaNoEdMo winners icons for me because I failed. Being prone to hyperbole I’m tempted to say I failed miserably but that’s not strictly true because I only fell short by a measly 8 hours! The thing is way back at the beginning of the month when I was all eager and complacent confident, I refused to clock anything less than 15 minutes and if I forgot to note what time I started work then I would always under estimate and round down rather than up because remember boys and girls, if you cheat, you only cheat yourself, or something. So right now I’m wondering if maybe I did complete the 50 hours after all but we’ll never know. You see, I can’t even fail properly.
This was supposed to be a rather upbeat post about how it doesn’t matter because it’s the taking part that counts and whoah that’s 42 hours of work, I’ve put into draft number two, I was even going to amuse you with some of the hideous errors I found. But that was two and a half hours ago.
I lost a week you see, on Monday I worked out that I had an assignment due in the middle of the Easter holidays, which basically meant that I had to get it done by today, a whole week early, if I had any chance of getting it done at all. Add to this scenario only ONE computer, a husband who also had a piece of work due today and you end up with something a bit like the new recipe I tried last week for Vegan vanilla sponge cake; vile indigestible sludge, definitely nothing like what it is supposed to be.
I had been working for two hours tonight, when Littleone had a nightmare, I rushed upstairs and managed to get her back to sleep again, but when I came down it had crashed and wouldn’t retrieve any of the work I’d done in that two hours, despite me meticulously hitting ‘save’ every five minutes. I guess it wasn’t ‘save’ at all but the ‘please-kill-my-work-whenever-you-feel-the-need-because-God-knows-I-have-two-hours-to-spare’ button, death to Bill Gates for putting them so close to each other.
The moral of this tale is that I should not have studied this Friday night, I should have got a babysitter and joined Mr PE on his mate’s birthday pub crawl at least then if I had blogged about losing two hours, I would sound infinitely more cool.
I bet my head still hurts in the morning too.
Posted by purple elephant at 11:12 PM |
March 27, 2006
Because it would be nice to have a post on the front page...
HIM; You should come down the Portland Arms for the pub quiz. All mothers get entry to the quiz and a glass of wine - FREE.
HER; And a FREE babysitter too, I would hope.
HIM; Not exactly - well - er - No.
HER; Aye there's the rub.
Aww! I may mock but it's the thought (and the knowledge that one glass of wine is never enough) that counts. Which is more than the OU have done, I can confirm that they will NOT be offering free top marks to all mothers for that important piece of work they have timed thoughtfully to coincide with the middle of the easter holidays.
Posted by purple elephant at 10:03 PM |
March 18, 2006
Because the god of motivation moves in mysterious ways....
I actually laughed out loud at this Nick Mamatas article, even if his point is that statistically I should give up and go to bed....
There is also the fundamental neurosis created by the relationships we have with our parents. Is the protagonist of your story being hunted or challenged by a tyrant who nonetheless cares deeply about the lead character and understands him better than does anyone else in the whole world? Does the tyrant have his eye on conquering the company, industry, nation, planet, or universe but can make his move only after he crushes the protagonist and, say, three of the dude's friends? You have a Daddy problem. Grow up first; then write. Or commit suicide if you must, but for God's sake, don't leave a note.
Methinks he had his Bill Hicks DVDs out before he wrote this.
Posted by purple elephant at 11:28 PM |
March 15, 2006
Oh Moses you can always sell any song to me.
If there’s one thing you’ve worked out about me by now, it’s that I’m overly sentimental where animals are concerned. I sometimes think I might prefer animals over humans, or some humans at least. If the school playground, the city centre or the pubs were full of - say- elephants, then I wouldn’t have quite so much trouble getting my arse out the door.
The other day I heard on the radio for the first time in a long time, that song 'Jessie' by Joshua Kadison (in case you were wondering I had no idea who sings this song until I just Googled it.) Now at first listen this is just another cringeworthy drivelfest about unrealised dreams that sounds way too much like Elton John at his tiresome mid-nineties worst. (Goodbye Norma Jean, I respect you so much that I wrote a song about you and then changed the words to fit the next media harassed, tragic heroine to pop her clogs)
But this song is different all because there is a third party involved, his name is Moses,
She asks me how the cat's been. I say, "Moses he's just fine but he used to think about you all the time. We finally took your pictures down off the wall. Oh, Jessie, how do you always seem to know just when to call?" She says, "Get your stuff together. Bring Moses and drive real fast." And I listen to her promise, "I swear to God this time it's gonna last."
The guy? Well the ball’s in his court he can pack up and go, take the chance that he’ll get hurt again, or he can stay behind and sob into his pillow, waiting for the next 5am call. We’ve all been there. Most of us learned to just get a helmet. (I have been told that with my human empathy I should become a therapist) But what of poor Moses, he gets no part in the decision but my God he hurts just as much. I would bet he still thinks about her all the time but has no idea what is going on. And by the way doesn’t drinking tequila and looking for sea shells sound so much more fun with the cat?
So if this is what I’m like over a cat who loses his owner, then you’ve probably guessed that I can’t watch nature programmes on the TV, or at least I have to hide behind the sofa when anything gets brutally murdered or eaten and then put up with the heartless Mr. PE. telling me to get with it, it’s just Nature. David Attenborough has gone DOWN in my estimation since the weekend. I sat down to watch a seemingly harmless programme called Planet Earth and he dangled quite the cutest most prettiest, babiest panda in the whole wide world in front of my eyes and then tauntingly told me that it’s that baby pandas very rarely live to adulthood. Yep cheers Dave! Here’s a baby panda and it’s going to DIE!
So it was then that I came up with my new idea, with all this interactive TV and everything, we should be able to pull it off. David Attenborough should record two voice overs for his documentaries; the straightforward honest here’s-a-baby-panda-as-good-as-dead version for the hardened Mr. PE types and the here’s-a-baby-panda-isn’t-he-a-cutey-wutey? version for - er - well me really. David Attenborough would get a couple of extra quid for the bother, we get the respective versions that we want to see, everyone’s happy....
Well except for the baby panda perhaps, who is still going to die.
Posted by purple elephant at 06:35 PM |
March 11, 2006
A Gmail request
I’m bored with my fsmail email account on many fronts. I won’t bore you with the details but needless to say, it’s crap.
I’m intrigued by Gmail. Is it as good as they make out? Would you recommend it? I’ve tried to sign up but they don’t do the SMS invitation code for phones registered in the UK for some reason.
Have any of you Gmail users got some spare invites laying around? If so could you let me know in the comments of this post and I will get back to you. I’m new to all this so I’m not really sure how it works.
When we were kids there was a mother living on our street who used to make it her business to find out when every single birthday party was and then proceeded to take her kids along, whether they were invited or not. All four of them. Everyone was way too embarrassed to protest.
Why do I feel like that woman right now?
Posted by purple elephant at 08:30 AM |
March 10, 2006
Insomnia
Things have been a little busy around here over the past few weeks and to keep that candle burning at both ends, I admit I have been dowsing it in caffeine, which means that when I do stumble into bed at God-knows-what hour, my body cannot move but my mind is still darting about hither and thither.
I keep my Virago bookshelf as close to my bed as possible, they seem safer there from any feminist book thief that might descend upon my house in the middle of the night and steal my signed Sarah Waters. Anyway back to last night, there I was counting Virago authors instead of sheep and listening to the Radio at the same time when on came a new story that destroyed my chance of sleeping for the rest of the night.
Wayne Rooney Gets a 5m Advance for a Book He is Not Going to Write.
Yes that would be Wayne Rooney, poet extraordinaire, who already earns more per week than most of us could spend in a lifetime. I pity the poor ghost writer who has to turn that drivel into something remotely readable. Talking of which the article links to an interesting piece on ghost writing.
And then to add insult to injury, in a completely unrelated issue Mr Joe Public phoned in to discuss the great authors of the past few hundred years and he reeled off a list of about ten names, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway and so on. Not one female got so much as a passing mention, it was as if the Virago bookshelf disappeared into a mist.
I know I know I should’ve phoned in and let off a tirade about all the forgotten (and the not so forgotten) women writers out there but this is me we are talking about here and I don’t do phone ins, well not without a chance to perfect my radio voice anyway. So instead I seethed about it for the rest of the night and at least he shut up eventually (for they do tend to let Joe Public drone on too much on these night time shows) but every hour (coming to think of it, it might have been every half hour I know it seemed like a lot) on the dot the headlines with Wayne Rooney and his excessive book deal came back round to taunt me. I’ve never been so glad to hear my alarm clock I can tell you.
Only three mugs of coffee today.
Posted by purple elephant at 10:02 PM |
March 09, 2006
I blame the tutor ........
I have a new tutor for this year and he is great, rather obsessed with James Joyce which is not necessarily a bad thing but great all the same...
What was that? Oh you are waiting for the giant BUT - well here it comes....
If I must pick a fault it is that he is a little too amicable, which is a trait that indeed has its place but that place is not when standing in front of a classload of students talking about how lenient you are with deadlines.
Yes I know. we are OU students, we are older and wiser than your average eighteen year old student and we are there because we want to be not because mummy and daddy expected it of us and we are mature and disciplined enough to juggle grown up things like family lives and jobs and still end up completing our work and without an excuse of a hungry cat to be seen for miles around.
Oh yes that’s us, or at least so he thinks.
‘I’m happy to give extensions!’ he said smiling cordially, ’All I ask is....’
Ah! I thought, here comes the BUT...
All I ask is that you have a bloody good excuse.
All I ask is that you bear in mind that any extra time spent marking means I spend less time with my beautiful wife and children. Have that on your conscience buddy.
All I ask is that you get down on your knees and beg.
All I ask is that you agree to have 20% knocked off your mark..
Nope none of these things, what he actually said was ‘all I ask is that you let me know before the deadline.’
Let him know? Jesus Christ so it’s not even ‘asking permission’ anymore.
So yesterday just as the adrenalin was kicking in reminding me that I only had a day left to finish what I was writing, there was a little voice in the back of my head saying, ‘Well it’s not a day really.’
So consequently despite my good intentions this year, I caught the last post with ten minutes to spare.
But the important point is I didn’t take advantage of his ill-advised generosity.
Bah! There’s always next month.
Posted by purple elephant at 10:35 PM |
March 04, 2006
We could be heroes?
The other night Mr. PE was watching an episode of that Surviving Disaster series on the Estonia Ferry disaster As it happened he fell asleep and I ended up putting my book aside and allowing myself to be sucked in.
What disturbed me was that unlike many other survival stories, there were very few tales of outstanding bravery or heroism. In fact those who survived mainly admitted that they did so because they focused only on themselves.
One of those interviewed was a committed socialist and peace activist. Previous to the disaster he campaigned tirelessly to save the lives of others and almost dreamed of a situation in which he could put his humanism to active purpose. He freely admits that when that time came, ‘the survival instinct’ kicked in and nobody else mattered except himself. In the reconstruction they dramatised a scene where a woman, trapped under fallen debris begged him for assistance. The ship was capsizing at this point and to get out the passengers had to climb several flights of stairs to the top but of course as the ship was tilted dramatically, this was a struggle against gravity. Many were stumbling and falling with only themselves to carry and the peace campaigner knew that this act of heroism would slow him down, maybe fatally, so the woman remained under the debris and no doubt went down with the ferry.
As it was the Peace Campaigner was one of the last to jump from the ship before it sank to the sea bed, so from a utilitarian point of view he did the right thing, for if he had tried to save the woman they both would have died, yet as he says, morally he has to live with his decision for the rest of his life.
There was another woman who had a sense that something was wrong long before the abandon ship warning went out (which was, by the way, broadcast too late and only in Estonian, a language most of the passengers didn’t understand) and she failed to persuade her friend to evacuate the cabin and then had to get down on her hands and knees and weave her way in and out of the legs of the fellow passengers who were rooted to the spot and begging for help. When she jumped out of the ship, her life jacket broke free and she found someone in the same position, grabbing on to her legs and dragging her down, in a last ditch attempt to float. She had to kick them free and let them drown. Eventually she made her way to a life raft and was rescued some hours later.
Only about 100 of the 952 passengers were rescued. According to the narrator most of them were crew (again, very telling) or strong, well built men in their twenties and thirties. Nobody under the age of twelve or over the age of 53 lived to tell the tale and there was a low proportion of female survivors. The narrator seemed to imply that this was relative to body strength, for even when they escaped the ship the survivors still had to endure many hours in the icy seas before they were rescued.
This diagnosis seemed a little over simplistic and short sighted to me. The featured woman, was evidently slim and petite, although she was a dancer by trade so would have been reasonably fit but I can’t help thinking that the reason she survived was that she was travelling with one friend and so had no familial ties to hold her back. Again the Peace Campaigner was travelling with friends and as hard as it must have been leaving the trapped woman behind, if he had been a mother and that had been his child, would the decision have been so easy? If the dancer had three kids to round up from the cabin, would she have been able to weave in and out as she did? Of course not. If we can talk of the ‘survival instinct’ as the survivors did, then can we also talk of a ‘maternal instinct’ and then ask ourselves which instinct comes out on top when the two are in conflict?
We have already established that if the Peace Campaigner had attempted to save that woman then neither of them would be with us today. We can safely say that if the dancer had a brood of children then she would have been considerably less likely to have survived and in no position to inform us of the tale.
My guess is that the heroes are amongst the 850 odd passengers who did not survive because if an act of bravery or heroism fails and remains undetected and undocumented then that does not make it any the less heroic. And what of the women? Did you spot the hideous mistake above? In my choice of words I worked so hard for a whole paragraph to belittle an imaginary woman’s act of heroism by reducing it to ‘maternal instinct.’ Yes, it seems even I was desperate to define the male as brave but a similar act committed by a woman as inevitable, irrational even, anything but heroic. Surely as women we cannot be heroes - sacrifice it’s just what we - do.
So when I first got sucked in to Surviving Disaster, I was disturbed at the thought that the world might not be as full of heroes as I originally thought or that when it came down to it, I might act in exactly the same way as the survivors of the Estonia. Could I have left my children in that ship to save my own life? From the safety of solid ground I think not but can I really tell? By the time the credits were rolling I had reassessed my definition of heroism to include all those who sacrifice, whatever the gender of the protagonist and whatever the relationship between the saver and the injured party.
Maybe we are all heroes after all.
Posted by purple elephant at 11:02 AM |
March 02, 2006
Little Murk Riding Hood
You know Shakespeare’s Sonnet number 130, the one that begins;
‘My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red...’
Well after all these years, it is as if I’ve finally got the joke. I reckon that when the Bard wrote my favourite sonnet he had just been experimenting with Dylon Cold Dyes. If he means ‘The colour a lilac sheet becomes when immersed in ‘Coral’ dye solution is far more red than her lips’ red’ then I’d think about getting the woman some iron supplements, her lips are certainly far from red.
Imagine the colour of your dish water after you’ve just caught up with a whole day’s worth of washing up and then at the last moment you pricked your finger on that empty can of cat food lurking at the bottom. Say you lost about three drops of blood into the murky depths. Now we are getting close to the colour of Little Red Riding Hood’s Cloak today.
Oh and I forgot to wear gloves and coming to think of it my hands are far more red than her cloak's red.
But it was a cloak with a hood and everything else she wore was red, (just in case they didn’t get the message) and she was happy which is the main thing.
I didn’t stop all day and did manage to complete all of yesterday’s tasks (but none of the second list) and I skidded into bed around 12:30am. Today brings a whole new list of its own but thankfully not quite as long.
******
In other news; Just a Minute and The News Quiz will not quite be the same without Linda Smith.
Posted by purple elephant at 05:10 PM |
March 01, 2006
Things to do ... Things to do ...
Things that I MUST do today.
1) Head into town and find some red fabric dye and also some food.
2) While I’m there take this month’s photos for the wheel of the year project.3) About 3 hours work on an assignment.
4) About 2 hours editing on the novel.
5) Somehow magic a old lilac double fitted sheet into Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak, as my daughter has to go to school tomorrow dressed as a character from a fairy tale. (Hence the red dye.)
6) Other domestic everyday chores, too dull to list.
Things I would LIKE to do today but probably won’t get the chance.
1) Hang around in town long enough to get the photos developed, come home scan them in and upload them.
2) Finish the last 50 pages of The Night Watch.
3) Be sociable when some friends come round to watch the football.
4) Watch Desperate Housewives. (Might have to tape it.)
5) Write a blog post that is remotely interesting.
6) Sleep.
Posted by purple elephant at 09:26 AM |