Snarkity snark

Xtin's Top Six Most Hated Conversational Gambits

1. Xtin! Haven't seen you for ages. What have you been doing? I mean, you know, other than writing up obviously?
   Moaning softly to myself, obviously.


2. So when do you think you'll be finished?
   NEVER! Never ever! In the shame and ignominy of complete intellectual uselessness I shall be cast into outer darkness where evil winged beasties will feast upon my soul for all eternity! All right? Are you HAPPY now?


3. Where are you from?
   Australia. Thank you for emphasising my otherness and status as an alien in my own home.


4. Yes, obviously I knew that you were from Australia. I meant where in Australia?
   I apologise for understanding your question to be so much less subtle and intriguing than it in fact was.


5. Why on earth would you come to live here? The weather is so dire.
   Forgot to factor that in to the life decision. Stupid me.


6. Do you miss Australia?
   Yes, I do. Being away from my brother rips my heart out every day. Thanks for reminding me. Oh wait, you meant the mythical 365 days of tropical sunshine and Neighbours.

Xtin's Six Top Alternatives

1. Xtin! Love the new hair!


2. So I was watching this episode of Battlestar Galactica ...


3. Coffee?


4. Ultimately, do you think that Buffy's more mature relationship was with Spike, or Angel?


5. There are blue tit fledglings on the lawn!


6. Ice in your scotch?

Curmudge-slinging

So today, apparently, Xtin is 75 years old and feelin' crotchety.

Today's pointless rant is about the handling of change. Not the kind of change that means different from the way things are, because of course I and all other little old ladies oppose that utterly. I mean the kind of change that you get when you provide a merchant with more cash than was required for the services and/or products that were rendered, and so he passes you back the difference.

Once upon a time, when I was a child, I remember when change was counted back. For you feckless youths who don't know what this means, the process was as follows. Suppose you hand over £5 for something that cost £1.25. The person handling the cash would utter the price of what you had bought and count back the amount to £5, beginning with the lowest denominated currency, thusly:

One pound twenty-five pence. [Hands the 5p] One pound thirty, [hands the 20p] one pound fifty, [hands the 50p] two pounds, [hands the £1s] three, four, five pounds. Thank you.

Well, naturally in the modern day and age this wonderful and transparent practice is impossible because the persons in control of the currency cannot count. However, I am no Luddite. I believe in the great advancements of science. Look at these handy light bulbs! So I am happy to believe that the computers which are telling then how much change they owe me can count. But this has led to the following travesty of handing back:

Three-twenty-five. Ten pounds. [reads the cash register output] Six pounds seventy-five change. [Collects the 75p from the till and puts in palm. Collects fiver from till. Tears off the receipt and sandwiches it with the fiver between thumb and forefinger.] Thank you.

At this point, the clerk places everything in your hand at once, in reverse order. Receipt on the bottom, then the note, and a precarious pile of coins on top of that. This is just the most idiotic and annoying practice I have ever had the misfortune to be on the receiving end of umpty-ump times a week. Don't even get me started on the uselessness of the slippery, thermal-paper receipts which infest my handbags and pockets. If you are lucky enough to get your hand back into the region of your bag without the coinage careering onto the floor/among the impulse-buy sugary snacks/rolling onto the counter from whence the clerk must catch them, there is no way of handling the pile one-handed short of stuffing it in a ball into your nearest receptacle. And why not? Why not, you ask? It is because the only way that a human being can effectively manage crispy flat paper and a bunch of tiny metallic objects is the way that the clerk did it in the first place: by holding the coinage in his palm and handling the paper money with his fingertips. And the only way I will get to do that too, insensitive pillocks, is for you to hand me the everloving damn change first, and THEN give me the paper money, and if you absolutely must, the godforsaken receipt.

That is all.

How beastly

Well, I've been hiding under a rock. Even from my blog. But who could resist Antichristmas as a return to ersatz-public life? So. Piece of cultural information. The emergency services number in the UK is 999. Bet you never really thought about what the emergency service number would be somewhere else, did you? I thought not. Me neither. Culture shock is the combined impact of ten thousand things like this. Plus, I have the added bonus of being Australian, the culture for which British people have a complex and rich stereotype. So my culture shock is actually the tasty chocolate crust of British culture, plus the creamy centre of what British people think Australian culture is, neither of which bear any relationship to me. But I was going somewhere with the 999 thing before my raging expat issues distracted me.

Joke based on piece of cultural information:

Q: What do Australians dial in an emergency?
A: 666.

Uh-huh. Hilarious. You mean, you don't call Beelzebub when things go to hell?

So today, I got carded. Say what? Recall, dear reader, that the age of majority in this country as it applies to alcohol, purchase and consumption thereof, is eighteen. It had to have been at least conceivable, in the mind of the minion in the tasty Sainsbury's orange-fleece corporate wear, that I was seventeen years old. It is important to keep in mind, while I tell this story, that lately I have been feeling aged in the extreme. My eyebags are so big they cast their own shadows. My face holds up little placards which read "Gravity: Operating here for thirty-two years". So the right response to to the orange minion is surely, good heavens, how wonderful! How dewy, how fresh and carefree I must look today! I am not the crumpled kleenex of a human I thought I was!

Instead, I wanted to tear off her eyebrows with my teeth. Are you kidding me? I was making a newspaper cutting scrapbook project about the Challenger disaster before you were even born, sunshine! And now you won't let me have this cheap-ass bottle of New Zealand semillon blend which has too many damn food miles on it but I wasn't giving a rat's furry buttocks about that right now because I just want to get home so that I can keep trying to get this stupid degree, which by the way is my third? Fine! Go shove it up your multimillion dollar corporate conglomerate nickel-and-dimed ass!

If this is not evidence of the presence of the Beast, I don't know what is.

Why ...

... in the name of all that is holy, is every single pair of women's trainers at my local sports superstore resplendent in shades of pastel pink, blue, and silver? Is there a giant market of off-duty Barbie princesses who long to give their itty bitty princess tootsies with the silver-glitter pedicure a rest from the glass slippers, but still need something to match their eye-watering pink wonderland outfit?

The men's department is wall-to-wall Big Bad Coolness. Everything is designed to look like the kind of thing you'd wear if you were an urban superhero who needed to serve Justice, fast, down wet alleys, in the dark. I want these shoes.

WTF?

The current Nike Women advertisement, which makes my eyes slitty with resigned aggravation, involves women being very athletic in one way or another with a voiceover that explains how little kudos they get, and closes up with a defensive challenge to "try to tell them that they're not athletes".

The point of the advertisement is evidently supposed to be that the women involved clearly are very athletic, QED. Fie on this supposed end. The assumption is that that real athletes have stadiums of people cheering for them and earn bucketloads of cash, and notably are men, thus, most egregiously of all, women need to defend their status as athletes in the first place.

I'm not an athlete. But I'd swallow Nike's shrill equality message without choking so much if the damn shoes weren't telling me that I'm supposed to be a Barbie princess.

Bride of Frankenphilosophy

or: Jobsearch timewhine

Naturally, one tries to give one's sad little life some spice by seeing how one's research ties up to one's itty-bitty little life issues. This week's theme is: vagueness. For those of you who are interested, the canonical and brilliant text is Williamson's most unambiguously titled Vagueness.

The Ongoing Hellacious Jobsearch has given me a whole new appreciation of the problems arising from the vagueness of pretty much every single predicate of ordinary language. It's standardly noted in philosophical discussions about vagueness that the trouble is borderline cases -- we know perfectly well that a guy with 10,000 hairs isn't bald and a guy with 0 hairs is. They're what's called "clearly in" cases. It's some of the guys in between where you might get into a fight. Well lemmetellya, I've been conducting my very own bit of empirical research on the concept of the "clearly in".

Especially:

(a) specifications of time

We will notify you shortly. Oh? How shortly is that, exactly? OK. No-one knows. So much for that stupid question. Here's another. When are you certain that "shortly" has passed such that no-one is gonna notify you, sunshine, hasta la vista and thanks for all the fish? Is a week too long? Two? Even three? How about "immediately"? The same day? Tomorrow? By the end of the week?

Don't even get me started on after a reasonable interval.

(b) specifications of quality

The standard of applications is extremely high and only candidates of exceptional research merit will be considered for interview.

I have two first-class degrees from a good (uh-oh) university, three respectable (Mammy! Get me gun!) publications, an almost-finished (Ha! Hahahahaha ...) PhD, a research proposal full of the usual BS and some pretty hot letters of recommendation. So, no kidding ... how many grains make a heap?

You know what? Forget it.

Terminally Boring High

There are many boring conversations in this world, but currently number one with a bullet on Xtin's All-Time List is The Trauma of High School. When this subject comes up, I want to reach for a handy icepick and pith myself.

Just for starters, isn't this a long time ago yet? Sure, I'm 32, which makes me about five years older than most of my grad school littermates, but that still puts them ten years from walking out the doors of the damn place. For the love of God, have we not had any experiences in our adult lives that we might discuss? But of course we have. Naturally no-one wants to discuss those, because they are far too real and intimate and personal. You might have had an experience that someone else hasn't had. You might actually have something idiosyncratic and interesting to say. Good heavens, much too risky. Let's whip up some totally ersatz intimacy instead. High School Horrors are a lovely shared narrative that everyone can settle into like a rerun of Welcome Back, Kotter. Even though of course, no-one here was in a remedial class. Which just makes it so much the easier. Wasn't it awful being the smartest one in school? Weren't you persecuted by the girls who talked about lipstick and INXS? The teachers never paid any attention to me because all the disruptive students were always painting on the walls/giving the Chess Club wedgies/passing notes containing their latest pregnancy test results/whatever ...

Which brings me to reason number two that these are the most boring conversations in the known universe -- they're not even a real discussion about trauma. (Frankly, I wouldn't really care even if they were, but that's just because I'm evil). Part of of the subtext is the conclusions that everyone can easily draw from the very fact that all of us had this experience -- we were all nerds, we were all persecuted for being the smartest in the class, blah de blah. So guess what? You're not special any more. This is one big group of hyper-smart people. And that makes you nervous and insecure, and this high school talk is a way of everyone discussing how they were once intellectually special under the fatally dull cover of how awful the whole experience was. Please. It's just sad.

Naturally, I don't intend that this prevent anyone from using the shared horrors of high school as a handy and evocative metaphor when discussing whatever else you'd like to talk about -- emphasis on whatever else.

I'll take Human Relations for two hundred, Alex ...