Sa-a-aad

I am so sad. “Why, Matt?”, I hear you all cry in underwhelmed semi-interest. Well, the world will find out this Thursday whom The Economist has decided to endorse for President. I’m looking forward to finding out with pathetic excitement. And it’s sad because it’ll have no effect on anything whatsoever. Anyway, things seem to be looking good, judging by the last paragraph on here.

I would tell you something about my own life, but I have had to put it on hold in order to finish off this essay which is now due in NEXT WEEK. It’s been in my life for eighteen months and it’ll be out again in eleven days. I went to the Science Library to weed out some of the typos in the third and penultimate draft, but it was so noisy I might as well have gone and set up stall in the nearest blast furnace.

I have crawled out from under my essays to bring you the following announcement:

Thanks to Knicola, I found this fantastic page of Obama photography today. Some of them are phenomenal. Check it out here.

Exhale

Getting up at a decent hour (7.30am) is really refreshing. I only did it so I could watch the Grand Prix, but now it’s finished I’ve got the whole day to get work done and feel bad for not redrafting my year abroad essay. Yeah, that thing’s back in my life, by the way. It’s like trying to stake a vampire: it takes a few stabs before you pin the godforsaken thing down.

Also, Nicola’s back in town! I was bored in the library last night and found out she was in Covent Garden with her boyfriend, so I went along and joined them. It was the first time I’ve really been out so far this term. That’s how much of a square I am.

The sweet swell of electoral fraud

I checked my mail today and in the ‘G’ rack was a REAL LIFE ABSENTEE BALLOT for the REAL LIFE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. I know so because it said so on the envelope and it had a big bold US Postal Service label on it. Oh, how tempted I was to steal it and have my wicked way with it. But then I noticed it was from Maryland, so I probably don’t need to bother.

Ho hum…

Things are plodding along quite predictably at the moment: there have been no major upsets or surprises, with the possible exception of workload, although I’m becoming gradually more accustomed to that as time goes on. I’ve been kicking a few things into the long grass for the time being – the year abroad essay, mainly, which is due on November 7th – because I refuse to deal with all my life trauma in one week and because I’m not yet prepared to face the fact that I’m going to have to get back into dissertation mode like I was a month ago.

I keep prattling on about sacrificing any vestiges of a social life recently, but the last week shows that up to be one big fat lie. On Thursday I met up with my Austrian friend Sara and spoke German for about three hours (including a very intense debate about Haider – her: “The main reason Austria keeps voting for the extreme right wing parties is that Austrians are just stupid!” – anyway, look how that one turned out). On Friday I wandered around the West End rather aimlessly with Jake, waiting for him to display some degree of competence in anything, ending up in Starbucks when he failed to do so. And on Saturday night I battled my way down to the wilderness of south London for a lovely dinner with Knicola and Joe.

The main problem with my life at the moment is having not the faintest idea what I want to do with The Rest Of My Life, which unhelpfully starts in like eight months or something. It’d be easier if one or a few things stood out, but every option I can think of has significant disadvantages – often including the fact that I can’t really be bothered, at this stage in my life, to start a serious rest-of-my-life career, 9-5 for five days a week. Where would the year out in Berlin and the Netherlands that I’ve been promising myself as a reward for sticking out this godforsaken degree fit into that? But the interest on my loan is beyond a joke and I really have to start paying it off as soon as possible.

I saw a guy today wearing a t-shirt with a full-size copy of this image on. It looked brilliant and I WANT ONE. But I can’t find any on the internets

And finally… this column in today’s New York Times is food for thought, considering that the writer just won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Jörg Haider

This morning’s news that the Austrian extreme right-wing politician Jörg Haider died this morning in a car crash actually caused me to sit open-mouthed in shock for a minute or two. Objectively, he was an utterly despicable man, and I don’t care for any of the ridiculous defences his sympathisers wish to invoke with their so-called democratic free-speech credentials: he pallied about with descendents of the Waffen-SS and referred to the Holocaust not as ‘murder’ but as ‘a punishment’.

“Oh yes, but he changed in the last few years,” people say. I say: bollocks. The change was about as fundamental as the present Conservative Party’s: one tree logo doth not a progressive party make. This is all extraordinarily timely for me, because on Thursday I met up with my Austrian friend Sara (who I met on the Dutch language course in Zeist in 2007) and we had a long conversation about, you know, why Austria keeps voting for the extreme right, and Haider in particular. She was scathing about her country and the people who vote for parties like this. Austrians have a track record with it. And it’s always the same old story: which vulnerable group is the first to be rounded on during times of economic armageddon? Why, it’s the immigrants, stupid. Haider’s election campaign was predicated almost entirely on the matter of immigrants: leopards like that don’t change their spots.

It’s difficult to know how to react when somebody you despise dies, especially in such horrific circumstances. Feeling happy about it would be repulsive; but any attempt at mustering sadness feels to me to be distinctly false. Haider was a human being with a family and for them this is tragic, but I can’t and won’t shed tears over the passing of someone as horrible and as dangerous as him.

Anyway, this has been a hectic week, hence the blog silence. The workload is manageable but intense. One of my flatmates knocked on my door at midnight last night and was amazed that I was translating a text on a Friday night. I can deal with it though – reading week’s not far away in any case. And, although I was really stressed out preparing for it, I gave a compulsory presentation in one module on Thursday morning (compulsory in that I had to do it at some point in the term; it wasn’t compulsory to volunteer to do it in the first week available, as I very uncharacteristically did) and it went smashingly well. A Master’s student came up to me at the end and complimented me on being “very informative”. Which was nice.

Royston

There was a free bar at the wedding reception. Dear God. I don’t think there are words to describe how I felt yesterday; the worst thing was that I knew exactly what was coming on Saturday night, and true enough, I was proved painfully correct. I particularly enjoyed the 70-minute train journey of shame on Sunday morning.

Anyway, now that I have properly recovered I have to turn my attention to other important matters – the most pressing of which is a presentation I have to give on Thursday morning in my German film module on the film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. I know a bit about it already, having “studied” it in Berlin, but I do need to do some proper research for it to avoid being ripped apart in the inevitable q&a session.

Oh yeah: I still have that dissertation to re-draft. The damn thing is like a bad smell that no amount of Febreze will get rid of.