Doing work while grouchy

When I'm working while feeling a bit down and out, things like this REALLY piss me off: "The first is the structural poverty of the African continent. By structural poverty, we refer to the lack of structures, both concrete and ideological, that function to ensure social continuity."

The offending phrase is 'structural poverty'. 'Structural poverty' could mean economic poverty caused by structural factors, but the author uses it to mean the poverty of structures, in which case shouldn't he have used something like 'lack of structural capacity'????? Or why didn't he just use 'lack of structures'???? Save himself having to define it again in the next line? What benefit is there in using 'structural poverty'? In any case his definition is so broad that it covers everything - policy structures, administrative structures, transport and communications, legal structures, political structures, social structures, ideological structures. Plus what do you mean by 'ensuring social continuity'????? Geographically? Temporally? What is social continuity anyway? You might as well draw a smiley face in place of all that crap.

Sometimes the quality of articles in supposedly academic journals is horrendous. I need to smash my head against a wall. Admittedly I have to find a hard enough wall.

Today it seems as if the whole world has forgotten how to use their brain and mouths (and pens. and handphones) at the same time. *glares at LSB*

Also, typos! What are typos doing in a peer-reviewed journal?????? It's typos galore here! Wth!

Have finished reading the whole article, and am still disgusted. He starts off with talking about various strands of Pan-Africanism, gives us a whole list of difficulties with African integration, and his conclusion has no relation to what he's talked about earlier. It's a version of 'I argue X because of A, B, C, unfortunately, A, B, & C are irrelevant to my argument'.

Today had better not get any worse.

Rainy days and Bach's Chaconne

Not that I really know what Bach intended for his Chaconne, but for some reason for me it's always been a lament about mortality. Bach's Chaconne conjures images of an old cathedral, a solemn funeral, gloomy skies and the cemetary at Salzburg that I visited on a cold and rainy summer day that had so many old tombstones and brilliantly colourful flowers.

Today's a rainy day as well, and I'm vegging in my mum's room with the huge windows and looking out at tree branches swaying in the breeze, grey skies, and a half-hearted drizzle. Perfect Chaconne weather.

Can we date?

The Morning News answers the age-old question!

Also, Service held in memory of Kent's giant carp. Gosh, I don't know if carp is good eating, but did no one look at that fish and think BIG FOOD?

WW2 on facebook

(courtesy of LSB)

(& Collegehumor. Yes...)

a modern adaptation of world war II for the american teenager.

A book I now REALLY want to read

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

From one reviewer (accessible via above link):

I had just taken a shower and washed my hair and I sat down to read the chapter about how filthy astronauts become after weeks or months in space with no access to personal hygiene. Disintegrating underwear! Toxic BO! E coli bacteria that migrates INTO THEIR EYEBALLS. I'm not kidding, I had to get up and take another shower.

On the resolution of the 2nd Cold War

Finally, FINALLY the Accommodation Office says yes to something. At one point I thought that even if I'd emailed offering to donate a thousand dollars, no conditions attached, they'd brusquely reject my offer.

I recall being absolutely upset when I wasn't allowed to apply for citizenship. It wasn't so much that I was dying to get the citizenship, and more because the rules felt so ridiculous at that point. I'd lived in Singapore all my life, I felt Singaporean - probably more so than some Singaporeans, I had an absolutely clean record, I'd definitely be able to get a job when I graduated, and there was no question that Singapore wanted me. It just didn't make sense to me at that time that I had to get some sort of income before applying - especially since this requirement was not published anywhere on their website or application procedures (as far as I know).

Of course now having worked in the civil service for a while, I get why they'd put this requirement in place. Nevertheless.

Usually it's tremendously difficult for me to get really angry and upset over anything (LSB doesn't count), but when there's a lethal combination of: 1) rules that seem senseless and overly rigid; 2) people who are indifferent and inflexible, something just snaps inside. I can stay up all night fantasising about how to destroy these bloody rules and institutions and wreak sweet sweet vengeance on these poker-faced bureaucrats. I cannot do my own work because I literally see red, my correspondence with the offending bureaucrats becomes increasing accusatory and confrontational, I start talking about things like 'student welfare' and 'professionalism' and 'service standards', and basically, do very little to help my case. I actually had to stop checking my email at night because if I got an email from the Accommodation Office, I knew I would get so frustrated I wouldn't be able to sleep.

More importantly, I get very depressed as well. The thing is, I don't like being confrontational, not because I'm afraid of the consequences or anything like that. It's more because being nasty makes me feel nasty. When I have to fight to get what I want because I feel that the people dealing with my case won't help me unless forced to, it reminds me that the vast, vast majority of people in the world don't give a shit if I die tomorrow. If I want others to make an effort for me, I have to coerce them to. If one day I find myself powerless, I would also be helpless, and without hope. I hate those thoughts. I prefer the illusion that even if one day I find myself down and out, there will be people who would try to help. Basically, I don't like reality very much.

To the Accommodation Office

Quite basically, thank you for being inflexible, unhelpful, indifferent assholes.

note from LSB's book

"Guha thought of consciousness - and therefore of peasant subjecthood - as something immanent in the very practies of peasant insurgency. Elementary Aspects is a study of the practices of insurgent peasants in colonial India, not of a reified category called consciousness. The aim of the book was to bring out the collective imagination inherent in the practices of peasant rebellion. Guha makes no claim that the insurgent consciousness that he discusses is indeed conscious, that it existed inside the heasd of peasants. He does not equate consciousness with the subject's view of himself. Rather, he examines rebel practices to decipher the particular relationship - between elites and subalterns and among subalterns themselves - that are acted out in them and then attempts to derive from these relationships the elementary structure, as it were, of the consciousness or imagination inherent in those relationships."

- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, pp.15-16