I am sat at the computer in my bathrobe, having just come out of the shower in preparation for going out tonight. J has just called up the stairs from the kitchen, “Five minutes, Luce.” (Yes, ‘Luce’. *cringes*). We are alone in the house.
I’m not sure whether I should laugh with the easy sweet familiarity of it all, or run, run for the hills screaming in terror that this is what, like, proper couples do! It’s fine. It’s lovely. It’s working :-)
Just a quick note to say that I got my results t’other day. After several incorrect mental calculations, I have finally swallowed my pride, used a calculator, and come out with an average of 60.5, or a borderline 2:1. Combined with last year’s marks, I now have a degree average of 69.9, or an infuriating 0.1% off a first.
I really don’t know how to feel about that. My head is telling me that I’ve done better that I can ever have hoped to have done, and that I owe one hell of a lot to one friend in particular, S, who has supported me through the year both in and out of lectures and has gone way beyond the call of friendship in doing so. He deserves every single percent of his own 96 average! I also know that on top of that I will have a good case for mitigation*, and hey, a 2:1 is perfectly respectable.
Despite all that, though, I’ve just been left feeling a bit numb. On a normal year I’d've missed the first – and be gutted. There’s still a nagging part of me that wonders just how much of it was due to the year and just how much I’d've done poorly anyway, and there’s the disappointment at the exam marks for a couple of modules in particular. 48 on Maths Teaching. 48! At least it was brought up to 69 by the coursework, but still…! On the plus side though that’s the first (and last) essay exam that I will have done since A-Level, so it may just be a question of live and learn.
I suppose that what I’m really terrified of is having a similar experience next year. I always said that if I didn’t come out with a first class degree then it wouldn’t be the end of the world – and yes, I do still firmly believe that. It’s just that if I don’t do as well as I might have wanted, I want it to be because the Maths was too hard and not because other shit got in the way. If that makes sense?
Year closed, eh?
x
*Although after a close friend’s recent experience, I wouldn’t trust mitigation to get me anything. I’m certainly not banking on it.
You know it’s a sign of the times when your 13 (no, wait, shit, 14. 14!) -yr-old brother has to text you to remind you that it’s Father’s Day and have you done anything? Not that Dad will have remembered either, as we really don’t set much store by such occasions in our family, but still…!
Facebook quizzes have already been commented on by Callan as to their sheer pointlessness. Well, yes. They can be quite entertaining, though, albeit briefly. I am #513: Friends (according to ‘Which XKCD comic are you?’), I should really be at Oxbridge (‘What university SHOULD you really go to?’ – oh, the irony), and I may or may not be a potato. All well, all harmless!
It came up on my news feed earlier that a friend had taken the ‘What Psychiatric Disorder do you have?’ quiz, and had come out with Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Her comment was, “Everyone seems to be getting this. Bit of a cop-out.” Well, presumably that’s because most people taking the quiz don’t have a Psychiatric Disorder, and most people experience some degree of restlessness or stress at some point. Hence the need for the word ‘generalised’.
I think possibly I’m just rather unreceptive to that sort of thing at the minute – since coming back to Durham a couple of weeks ago my moods have been up and down and down and up and a bit all over the place, with no cause more than the obvious. And yes, it’s a stupid Facebook quiz, and yes, it’s just meant to be a bit of fun, and really no, I hope that people will have enough common sense not to use that sort of thing for self-diagnosis. I just find it a bit tasteless, that’s all. What next, ‘What cancer do you have?’ ? Ooo, ovarian, my favourite.
How do you define yourself? I define myself as many things – a student, a Brummie (perhaps of the less stereotypical variety), a mathematician, a geek, a sewist, a Quaker, and so on and so forth. Essentially, though, I define me as me.
I was having this conversation with some friends the other day on the way back from a picnic. One of them has just got together with a new guy, and it’s looking serious already. We were talking about their future, in a loose hypothetical way, when something really struck me. H was talking about her career, her wants, and her life in general purely in terms of his. That’s all good, I suppose, from the point of view that by marrying someone you are tying your life into theirs and that somewhere along the way that is bound to involve a certain amount of compromise. But her aims in life seemed to revolve purely around her prospective husband’s – to quote, she would rather be the wife of a successful businessman than a successful businesswoman herself.
I’m sure that a lot of this stems from H’s rather traditional upbringing (; her mother will ‘allow’ her to leave home only in order to marry someone deemed suitable), and if that is what will make her happy then I wish her all the best. But at the same time, she is a highly intelligent postgrad, with strong views and ideals of her own, and is a lovely person to boot – and instinctively I don’t like the idea of H being transformed into ‘the wife of whoever’.
And for all I can see only too easily how it happens, I despair in the same way at those mothers (and yes, sorry guys, it does tend to be mothers) who find their personalities and lives absorbed into that of their children’s. Whenever I come into contact with women pushing a pram or pushchair, I make a real effort to engage with them, to meet their eyes without simply going gooey over their children, however cute the children may be. There are many things that I dread about potential motherhood and that’s a whole long story for counsellors to get their teeth into, but one of those is losing my identity to my children. I find myself feeling guilty sometimes for that childhood perspective of my own mother – she was my Mum, not C, not a primary-school teacher or an English/European Thought graduate or a keen walker. I guess that’s one of the things that I’m consciously trying to make up as I’ve grown older.
I’m quite pleased, for that reason, that J’s friends seem to know me as ‘Lucy’, not ‘J’s girlfriend’. I like having my own identity. It’s something I plan to hang on to.
I wasn’t glued to the TV or the internet at 9pm on Sunday night, waiting for the news of the European Elections to start trickling through. In fact I waiting for that exact news – but I was standing at the edge of a hall in Pity Me, Durham, with a green rosette on my chest and hand in hand with J, the Lib Dem contingent behind us and the BNPs in front of us. Seated at the tables in a horseshoe were dozens of exhausted council workers and in the middle were 116,213 votes exactly, each one sorted, checked, counted, checked, and finally tied in a bundle of 100 to be placed on the appropriate pile. Our job as party representatives had been to scrutinise the counting process, flagging up any votes that had been placed incorrectly through malpractice or, as was much more likely to be the case given the sheer numbers involved, through human error.
Durham did not have any council seats up for election, due to the restructuring into a unitary authority that happened one year (two years?) ago. Our three European seats went to Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem, once each. The Labour count was much higher than I expected – it’ll have certainly been higher than the national average, I assume – but even that was down on normal when you consider that much of the North East of England has never even considered voting for anyone else.
I have nothing to add on the subject of the BNP, UKIP, and the increasingly far-right tendencies of the Tories to what has already been said over at Jenny’s blog. The hard fact is that every seat that the far right have gained, both in Britain and across Europe, is as a result of people voting for them, and not enough people voting in order to counteract the effect.
But this leads me on to Jenny’s question. What’s done is done, but what the hell can we do about all this now?
I suppose on a grass roots level it’s about motivating interest in politics, and trying to get informed debate going so that people know what they’re voting for (and why they’re voting for).
The next level up from that is getting involved in either activism or actual politics. I am not a member of the Green Party – J and I were there on invitation to help out a party member who we know from Quaker Meeting – but discussing the statistics and tactics, and feeling part of the whole electoral process has at least temporarily fired up my enthusiasm for getting involved properly. The system is undoubtedly flawed, yes. I had a pang of sympathy for the 400-odd ballot papers that were discounted for having ‘FUCK YOU ALL’ or ‘NOT FIT FOR GOVERNMENT’ scrawled across them – but the fact is that this is the system in which we presently have to work. Are we going to stand aside in protest at a system and let those manipulative people who have no such qualms take it over while we sit around debating the respective merits of various democracies, and wondering why things are getting really shit?
[And here I intend(ed) to go into a political discussion of a rather more philopsophical bent. It may yet happen. Stay tuned. But time slips on, and if I don't publish at least this first entry soon then it will be lost to the nether regions of my 'Draft' pile forever! It's been sat there a good few days already.]
This is a post which is hopefully preaching to the converted, but a reminder and a plea nonetheless to get out and vote today if you can. Vote for anyone. Vote if nothing else to keep the BNP out of the European Parliament – this one’s proportional representation per region, which is more likely to give an edge to small parties. Spoil your ballot paper if you don’t care or don’t trust any of ‘em. Vote postally at home, or in person away, but vote, vote, have your say, stand up against the über-right-wing minority who are threatening policies of racism and hatred, make your voice heard!
Oh, and remember: this is a European Election for most of us, in addition to a local council election for some. Therefore if you’re not electing a new MP for whatever reason, it has really very little to do with Gordon Brown. Yeh? Good.
A rather exciting part of being home for the week is that I have access once more to a sewing machine! A new top is underway – and as much as I am itching to post details on here, I had better not. It’s a surprise for J’s* graduation, and while I don’t think he reads this, I wouldn’t want to ruin things. Oh and yes, he does know I’m making a top to go with the skirt that I made at Christmas (also pictures pending). He just doesn’t know what it looks like, and well, yes :D
At the minute there is much annoyance, however, because I have discovered a stain spot in a very visible place on the fabric that I can’t get out. Given that I had enough cloth to the millimetre for cutting the pieces out (and no more), this looks like an emergency visit to the markets tomorrow with all fingers crossed that the guy in question still sells the same fabric. I am particularly annoyed because the stain wasn’t there when I cut out the pieces yesterday, and I just happened to leave them tidily over the back of the sofa in the sitting room through the evening/ night. Draw your own conclusions.
Sewing task no. 2 is to attach the binding to the dress which I got two thirds of the way through at Easter, so that I can hand-stitch the hems on the train/ back in Durham if necessary.
And I have also just bought a rather pretty, out-of-print and bargainous pattern over t’net from the American eBay. I have enough projects to last me the summer already but oh, it’s fun, and oh, fabric is so pretty, and oh, this is something that is cheering me up in life!
x
*J = Someone. Only in a non-depressive-or-serious-relationship-talk context.
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