If you’d like a warning, this is a highly unimportant post about family and personal stuff. If that’s not your thing, go and read the science category or something.
My parents came to visit over the weekend. Arriving after my early morning Friday class I was late meeting them on their drop off point from the airport. They had so many bags for such a short time. Luckily half of them were for me: extra clothes and bits and pieces.
As one should do when discovering a city, we did a lot of walking. On the Friday when we went to visit a friend at the BBC, when we met up with an old friend of my parents now working for part of the European Commission, when we were wandering the city to see interesting things and amazing buildings. We stopped off for various drinks of beer, good and bad coffee, organic food, a Turkish restaurant and more. It was great to see them but as I should have expected, it brings back all the ideas of missing family. I’ve seen them recently perhaps just as much as I would have done if I’d been in the UK but being in another country does make the distance feel a bit more substantive. When they left it was odd. Empty, like I’d convinced myself forget it could be. But it was great to have them visit.
As we walked away she called out…
“I hope you’re not thinking about him too much. Who needs name anyway when you have Laura?”
And all I could say back, though I do love her so, was:
“damnit… Me. I need him. It may be terrible, but I do, I need him”
Continue reading ‘Parting Comments’
Andy Stern on the WSJ: The Wal-Mart Posse
He makes a huge fuss over how many anti-Wal-Mart groups are funded by ‘organized labor’. As though that’s a bad thing? Who else keeps tabs on these people? Nobody! They don’t hide their funding. It’s obvious that these ‘anti’ groups are going to be funded by somebody. And it’s not going to be Chinese factory owners. Who does care: the people who get paid dirt cheap nothingness wages. The unions are tryign to change wal-mart even when they’re not largely paid by wal-mart workers because of anti-union policies throughout Wal-Mart’s history. I think that’s pretty impressive that the Unions still try. And he claims that Wal-Mart is good for poor people. Only if you’re rich enough to drive there and shop and have other options too. it’s not great if it’s the only store in town, if it’s built a mega-store on your backyard. It’s not great if it’s made you redundant by putting your former employer out of business. And he claims that 7-12 dollars an hour is not a poverty wage. Not poverty?! Good lord. I assume he’s not paid 7 dollars an hour. I’m always amazed by American opposition to ‘organized labor’. It always shows a really rather mean capitalist streak. Don’t let those poor people get themselves together. Their leaders MUST be into something else. They MUST have an alterior motive.
“Today the company employs 1.3 million American workers, and its recent push into groceries has made life miserable for Safeway and other grocery chains organized by the service workers or the UFCW.” - Are the unions really that scared of Wal-Mart doing groceries? Who cares as long as they do it right! But this isn’t Costco with an average wage of 16 dollars an hour. Wal-Mart workers are lucky to be able to shop in their own store. And the reason there are always thousands of applicants for Wal-Mart jobs isn’t because they’re good jobs. It’s because Wal-Mart drops their stores on the poorest, cheapest areas in the region. There are lots of people out of work! That doesn’t make the jobs good ones, it just shows how desperate the people are. The WSJ disgusts me sometimes.
Andy Stern on the WSJ: The Wal-Mart Posse
I ordered some Moo Flickr MiniCards yesterday. I can’t wait to get them. (in other news - I’d never really thought about how strange the name really is until I had to type it. Really, very strange! Moo?! Why not just MooCards or something? Are they planning on doing some ‘Moo Flickr MaxiCards’ or something?)
Below, see a selection of my cards, spread out and messy on my desk. I shared them with my friends during our lectures today and they all, unanimously, adored them. They’re small and cute and would make a perfect gift at the end of the year. I can’t wait. So many events and only 100 mini cards!
I’ve been struck recently by an advice column. On the normally rather flippant and offhand website of the gay/lesbian themed magazine ‘Out’, there is an advice column, written daily by a fantastic woman called Cynthia O’Neal. Every day she answers, seriously and thoughtfully, the questions of boys (and perhaps girls - though I’ve never read one) who write in with their quandries. It’s fantastic because it is unswervingly serious. She directs her readers to respond to events with a cool eye, not jumping to conclusions, but to see that long term sustainability often comes from simply sorting out one’s life in the present. ‘Later’ will deal with itself.
She’s fantastic, and though there is suprisingly little about her online, she is, I believe, a star. She’s the founder of a New York charity called Friends in Deed which helps those who have been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. She founded the group in conjunction with Director Mike Nichols and uses it to help, with group support session and one to one practical aid, those who often come to a realization that they are going to die. Founded in response to many of her friends coming down with and dying from AIDS, Nichols and O’Neal created an organization that acts as a support network, a friend in tough times for those who need it most. From Oprah.com, a quote from Nichols’ wife Diane Sawyer: “They will never be without someone to lean on or call in the middle of the night… and so many of these people have no other family but Cynthia and Friends In Deed” I’ve never before read an advice column that doesn’t have jokey responses or witty repartee, and hers is all the better for lack of it. You read her advice to strangers to find wisdom, not to find a bitchy snap-back, and I love her work all the more for it. It is the best thing about the magazine and there is clearly no shortage of questions from the public.
www.out.com/advice.asp
I thought this article on the Guardian’s blog site ‘comment is free’ was fascinating. The article may well have come from the Observer (Sunday version of the Guardian) newspaper, so it’s not really a blog post. Henry Porter discusses Jack Straw’s recent comments about he would prefer Muslim women not to wear full, covering, headdress, and how ‘our’ Western secular societies are largely capitulating to pressures from some religious groups not to conform and adapt to living within these communities:
He didn’t quite say that the veil has no place in a liberal secular society, but if that was his intention I agree with it. This is not to persecute Muslims for their beliefs or deny them rights: it is simply to say that the veil, like it or not, has become increasingly regarded as a symbol of separatist aspiration and of female subservience. Many wear it voluntarily, but it does not stop this being a symbol of women’s oppression which stretches back to the times of classical Greece.
Several official, as well as the self-appointed, spokesmen who have entered the fray since publication of the Lancashire Telegraph last week have suggested that Muslims are being discriminated against. ‘Would he say to the Jewish people living in Stamford Hill that they shouldn’t dress like Orthodox Jews?’ asked Reefat Bravu, chair of Muslim Council’s social and family affairs unit.
The answer is that wearing a veil in a largely secular society says something about the woman’s position in her marriage and probably prevents her from engaging with that society properly and so enjoying the rights of other women. It is fundamentally different from wearing, say, a sari or any of the traditional clothes of the Hassidim because it erects a barrier between her and the people around her.
I couldn’t agree more with the assessment. I find it doubly troubling, the wearing of the burkas themselves but also the reaction to the comments because there is an implied separation between societies. When so many communities can successfully cooperate and celebrate that melange of cultures, having certain groups intentionally remove themselves from the conversation, establishing and enforcing restrictive, divisive practices is disappointing. And prolonging the ‘outrage’ seems, honestly, petty. Women should not be treated, whether voluntarily or not, in the manner a burka or such garments implies. Not anywhere, but certainly not in societies that espouse individual rights and freedoms. These may clash with religious practices but eventually, one must take the upper hand and in the UK, we haven’t apported religion that dominant standing for decades.
Guardian CommentIsFree: Jack Straw should be praised for lifting the veil on a taboo
I know it’s been a while since I’ve written anything substantive on here, so I thought I’d share a photo from last Thursday night with the world in place of interesting content. I hope It’s alright with Laura, featured below, that I’m posting a photo that I took with (beautiful, new) camera on the night in question. Club SOHO or SOHO club, I don’t know which, is an Erasmus-society event every Thursday. It’s a hot and sweaty, overpacked, techno filled collection of Spanish people with the occasional injection of anything-else thrown in. Lots of cheesy Shakira when the night gets late, lots of people dancing too much, sweating too much and drinking too much. It’s also just about the smallest club I’ve ever seen. Funny still though. Where else but Belgium would you have someone actually charge to use bathrooms in a club? You’ve already paid to get in, next time will we also have to pay just to get out?
Very exciting news. I had a payment from the EU yesterday which alleviated my immediate finance related panicking. Actually if I’m honest I have no real idea where the money comes from. I’m in Belgium for the year studying and as part of this I get a grant from an European Commission program called Erasmus. That’s all well and good but someone has to pay for the Erasmus grant. Furthermore, certain Universities in the UK get differing amounts, while different countries also allocate varying amounts to the funding of students taking years abroad. My Spanish housemate studying at a private university receives approximately one quarter of what I do. My Italian housemate has essentially the same allocation as I do. I don’t understand it.
The money actually comes from the bank account of my University’s Study Abroad department. It doesn’t actually matter to me where the money comes from, but it would be interesting to know how the cash flows and where it’s coming from.
Anyway, it’s lifted my bank account from being over my overdraft, to just slightly in the positive. I need to remind myself that I have almost a thousand euros tied up in a rent guarantee which I’ll get back that the end of the year. So in theory I should feel richer than I do. I don’t feel rich at all, that’s how rich I feel!
