Things are irritatingly bittersweet at the moment too.  A person that I care a great deal about and whom I have regarded as at the very least having friendly feelings toward me is quite bluntly being a weird twat at the moment. I don’t know if he’s chanelling a small child, going through a further adventure of his midlife crisis (of which his behaviour toward me may well have been partly down to), or just being a cock. Its relatively recent and seems to be over agressiveness combined with being a mardy-arse.  This comes as I have spent the better part of two months composing a letter to him to be honest about how much I do care. Part of me thinks “fuck you” but the bigger part of me says regardless I’m still going to give him the letter and if it is goodbye forever (which seems highly likely) then so be it.  Sad as that makes me.
But my protective loyalty toward him regarding his behaviours is diminishing every second that he is a total ass (though it won’t diminish total because despite my very bestest attempts not to I do care).  He’s just being a twat frankly.

Yeah, I know. I could not get any more up to date could I? Anyways, so time delayed me was reading this about x’s. That’s kisses by the way, not exes as in former boyfiends/girlfiends (lack of R intentional), or piratical map points.

If you can’t be bothered to read it here’s the executive summary: people put kisses on the end of messages as a matter of course, not because they actually want to stick their tongue down your throat. Mostly girls/women. Blokes tend to be a tad more restrained in their virtual smooching.

Mostly I agree with her. At least I hope the text messages I have don’t reflect a genuine desire on the part of some people (squeaky girlie types) that I barely know wanting to smooch me. Because frankly I will be running. Fast.
I don’t randomly x though. I think some people I send texts/emails to think I’m a cold biatch. And darn it I may well be. But I don’t see the point of signing off an email/text with xxx if you wouldn’t at least be prepared to give them a hug in real life. In fact it takes me longer to decide what to end an email with than to write the ruddy thing.
I’m not even polite enough to copy x (ie if they end their text with x) unless I actually mean it.
By which I mean a hug generally. In my head:
x-xx is a hug of varying degrees of squeeziness,
xxx is a kiss
xxxx is a proper full on kiss
xxxxx is an indication that were you in the same room you might like to brace yourself
xxxxxx just get in bed already it’ll be easier
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’m being facetious

But like I say I don’t copy kiss/hug. Though to be fair if you’re sending me a 4x text or email and I’m not feeling that back, we need to talk. Being a nerd I just audited my x-ing habits and concluded the following:
the only people who get text x’s are: Max, B, Becky, Gavin (if I’m creeping)
the only people who get email x’s/kisses/bisous are: Max, B, Zo, Fish, Becky, Leanne, Sarah, Kristine, you know who.

And frankly they’re all people I’d at the very least happily hug in real life. In some cases “and some”…I’m curious though, what are your kissing sign off habits?

Some of the books were in the basement clearly because they were in four humours medicine territory, and I half expected to see discussions about what kind of leeches* you need and whether the moon should be waxing or waning. However, these older books from when Britain was still holding onto the delusion of a much cherished empire were actually quite useful for photographic resources since early C20th doctors thought nothing of taking pictures of some parasite ridden dying person what ho’. Something of a human rights nightmare in printed form, but more evocative than descriptions, which is by and large what most of the modern books contain.

And of those modern books I think they’re in the basement for one of two reasons. Reason 1, is just one book, which is pages and pages of horrendously unparagraphed wittering. Scientific wittering I’ll grant you, but still wittering. Seriously research scientists of the world, people will not read your work if it is not fucking readable. Grammar is not some naff thing that only social scientists and arts people use, you don’t lose nerd points for using full stops. It is perfectly okay to have sentences that don’t run the risk of being at her majesty’s pleasure. Okay its pretty likely that when you’re writing about something in a very in depth fashion lay readers aren’t your audience, but that doesn’t mean you have to write as if it were some rambling ongoing conversation in your lab. And publishing houses-you, you are just as bloody guilty, just because people have a lot of letters after their names and have cured 6 different diseases [before lunch] doesn’t mean they don’t need editing for coherence and introducing to the concepts of full stops, commas and colons.

Reason 2 is that the central library has by and large been taken over with fiction, or how to books. Now I love fiction, I better bloody do I have enough of it on my shelves (and intermittently in my life), and I am actually rather fond of those Dummies and Idiots guides. I don’t love that it seems to be the only two things that most libraries seem to keep on the shelves. I understand that some things aren’t going to be that popular and so you want to keep minimal shelf stock, but my local library for instance has a medical section that is composed of 4 books. If you aren’t a middle aged woman there’s essentially nothing there for you. The main library of second city that I live between has a psychology section comprising 7 books. Seven books, seriously, for a main library? Personally I find psychology as dull as dishwater but 7 books is pathetic honestly, that doesn’t even allow one per type of psychology, let alone enough for someone to properly read about the subject. Not to mention the most irritating habit that libraries have gained from bookshops, my ex-employer being guilty of this, which is having stupid shitty “why does that bloke I fancy not fancy me” books in psychology. That isn’t psychology, psychology dull as it is to me,  is a proper scientific study, it is not a self-help guide about celestial bodies nor a pile of twaddle about how to lure the man of your dreams. It is proper quantitative research into behaviour. Similarly the past year’s worth of Radio Times bundled together in a folder, and a very old copy of Halliwell’s film guide does not constitute a proper media and communications studies section. I know libraries are underfunded and underused but hoofing out most of the academic content in favour of thirty separate books telling you how to crochet (if the first three don’t work you ain’t going to crochet, welcome to being me) is just daft. There doesn’t even seem to be much variety in the fiction…and of the two city libraries only one has one BS Johnson book and even that’s in the bloody basement.

I finally picked a parasite though. Or more correctly I picked a disease that interested me, and the cause followed.

For my research piece I interviewed, amongst others, the lovely Max who mentioned that she finds it easier to relate to scientific concepts if they relate to an emotional or social context. I think unless you’re exceptionally good with abstract concepts (theoretical physicists and mathematicians step forward) this is true of all of us. The main point of the assignment is supposed to be the parasite itself but frankly, to me, one protozoa looks much like another, and one nematode is fairly indistinguishable from the next. What they do though is much more interesting to me, and the response of the host against them too is more interesting than the little protozoic chap on his own. I would absolutely recommend Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex for being able to see not only the immediate relationship of parasites with their hosts (ie the diseases they cause), but also the evolutionary adaptations they have spurred. One example from the book is that of Sickle Cell Anaemia as a defence of cells against malaria by changing the cell shape, but the change in the cell shape also makes it tricker for them to move through the body, hence the anaemia.

But anyways the social/personal context has made it easier to get my interest levels up. I don’t think I could ever be a molecular scientist or a biochemist. Not only would the teeny tiny detail get on my nerves, but that lack of anything to hinge it onto. Yes everything is ultimately part of a bigger picture, but I couldn’t imagine spending years looking at one very specific cell function. I admire those that can, but I think the way my brain works that would be a sure fire route to leaping out of the nearest window.

My parasite of choice incidentally is Trypanosoma cruzi…google and then count yourself lucky you’re not exceedingly poor and living in S.America (as if there weren’t already very many enough reasons to be happy you’re not living in a Brazilian shanty town…). It’s bothered me this, properly, if you’ll excuse the phrasing, got under my skin. I’m angry at my own niaevty for never having heard all about this before, and really trying not to be cynical think that perhaps I’ve not heard about it because the 14,000 people who die every year are 14,000 poor people. I’m really trying not to be cynical, but the right this minute I’m failing at that a bit…

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*On which point can I just say how much I fucking hate out of office replies. a) I know its half term already ‘kay, b) I wouldn’t expect a bloody reply on a Saturday night anyway I just send my emails when I remember, and c) am I the only one who reads out of office replies with a “ner-ner look at me I’m on holiday and you’re not” voice in their head?
* Yes I know. And my thoughts on the resurgence are largely unprintable (which is saying a lot considering my language use)…for now I’ll just *sigh*.

Quite a lot of the time I do mooch along a bit. Not in a lazy or cowardly fashion, but more in the “if I’m going to fight a battle it better be bloody worth it”.
Similarly I am fastidious about being well behaved and law abiding, mostly, since I see no point going to prison for something stupid. If I ever end up on the wrong side of the law I’d like it to be something worthy of history books not for something daft like affray or nose candy. I’m not a good girl because I’m meek. I’m just saving my bad up for something worth it.
So my determined moods aren’t always that apparent, or that common. They tend to come in cycles (though I suppose by and large most humans are cyclical), and usually start with a rather intense need for exercise. And no that’s not an euphemism, I mean I start having bouts of staying up till stupid o’clock because I need to dance/hula-hoop for 3 hours. And I really do need to, I get properly angsty and fidgety if I don’t-I become the worst person on the planet to share a bed with.
Then when real life taps me on the shoulder and points out that if I keep staying up that late on a school night I’m likely to end up putting my clothes on the wrong way round and eating toothpaste, the energy gets diverted. My energies got diverted a bit sooner than normal thanks to some delightful emotional angst (thanks to Max, Becky and Jo for ‘ear and agreement that some people are tossers’ services). So I am in kick ass mode.

I have firmed up my university choice, after deciding that I can’t stand waiting for a decision that I’m not that bothered about anyway. So that is done and dusted.

I have decided that I am not doing Chemistry (well I am technically doing one assignment but it requires no going in). I don’t dispute that an understanding of chemistry is pretty fundamental for biological sciences, however being in a room full of on Bunsen burners is quite honestly hell. Partly because I have a temperature regulation system that appears to have been fitted by my local power company (another man came today, another on his way tomorrow-for the boiler I should add). But also because I am fucky terrified of fire. That I can turn on a gas oven without a stupid amount of panicking is down only to 5 years of getting used to it, and I still do so with some considerable trepidation. It is, to me, like being Marie Antionette and having a ruddy great guillotine in your garden. It is a big poster of death. Painful, hideous, suffocating death.

On the other thing, hmm, well I’m having me a Scissor Sisters moment…(and no I’m not actually planning murder-but this is their best song. I do not get why that ruddy I Don’t Feel Like Dancing is so popular, when they have much better stuff like this)

Question here for my random occasional visitors. What’s going on at Sutton Scarsdale Hall that has meant my site and my Flickr pictures of the hall have had lots of vistors lately?

I’ve googled (and even yahoooooood) and I can’t find anything that suggests something exciting is going on, so can someone enlighten me? I’ve had visitors from Nottingham, Derbyshire, Manchester, University of Huddersfield, University of Leeds, random Virgin customers that all come up in Southampton (but I think that’s just because of the weird way Virgin set up IP addresses, either that or most of Southampton and Portsmouth visit me every week anyway) and more. All looking for Sutton Scarsdale Hall. So, er, why?

Picture by Articulate Matter on Flickr (Creative Commons Licensing on photo page)

I shall now get back to my cephalopod essay…

xxxx

That tedious Mel Gibson film from a few years back where he can hear what women are thinking. I’d like that skill right now. Only not for women. Fuck it not even for all the male population. Just the one would do.

If any of my occasional younger visitors are reading this, I’d like to give you the depressing news that understanding other human beings does not get easier as you get older. If it did I would not be a thirty year old woman detailing step by step of a day over facebook chat to a friend and asking him what he thought.  If anything it gets weirder. I don’t dislike being in my thirties I should add, afore the fear of aging ingrains itself. Actually I like it. I’m by and large comfortable with who I am. I may not have the body of a 17 year old any more, but I have more body confidence, and I know more about the good stuff it can do (as well as the mildly depressing fact that running for the bus near kills me every morning). I’m less bothered by complete strangers giving me funny looks.

I am kind of dissapointed in the ageing process not furnishing me with a greater ability to understand other human beings. That I can as a fully grown woman, be reduced to a bibbling idiot. That I can develop and hold an argument about social constructs, and yet can wholly and completely become baffled by one action of another.That I don’t feel any more confident in reading people now as I did when I were 15, 18, 25.

I am heartened that the hot intestines feeling (I have no idea actually where in the body it really is but you know the one I mean) is no less than it ever was, but frustrated that I have no more knowledge as to whether it is a merited feeling or not.

I have enough life behind me to know that the advice of Auntie Fish is wise, and absolutely what I know to be correct. I have not yet established exactly how I follow the advice easily though. But then perhaps that’s more about me, than my age. Perhaps I won’t be able to do that even when I’m seventy. I’m not sure whether I should envy those that can do these things easily. Whether that has losses as well as gains.

I still wouldn’t mind half an hour of mind reading skills…

I was feeling fine on the bus when I went yesterday, then had an itty flutter whilst in Smiths (buying BBC Focus can sometimes be terribly exciting dontcha know).
I always go straight up to sit outside the lab, because quite honestly I am not schlepping about the college, so did that. Whilst I was sat there in “worlds official hottest college” the flutters started again, but I didn’t feel woozy. Just a bit sluggish. C arrived and she asked me how I was, I told her I was feeling a bit off, but okay. Which quite honestly was exactly how I felt at that moment.
JNBT arrived, we went in the lab, and fuck me that room is boiling. (Though mysteriously JNBT was muttering about being cold, how I cannot imagine?!)
I rested my head on the desk, because the heat started to make me feel really sluggish, and then JNBT arrived at our desk and asked if I was okay. Which I didn’t hear, so C answered and told him I wasn’t.
JNBT pulled a face and did the “you shouldn’t be here”, and my sarcasm gene kicked in and answered “don’t worry you won’t have a student die on you”. He wanted to know how I was going to indicate to C that I was feeling really bad, and so I said I’d just tap C. And then, just like in the movies children, I felt very crap all of a sudden. I went to grab her hand, and missed.
I felt utter crap. I felt wobbly. I felt unsteady. I felt fluttery. I felt nauseous, but amongst all that I felt angry, shocked, embarrassed and unbelievably ashamed. And once I started crying I couldn’t fucking stop.
So there I was 30 years old sobbing onto my biology teacher’s stomach. Possibly one of the most mortifying and embarrassing moments ever. In the one lesson that I couldn’t abide to miss, not only in front of a classmate, but in front of the one teacher I least would want to fail in front of.

So off I went to the local A&E, and by the time I’d been sat there for a while (there was a trolley queue) my heart rate was pretty normal. I saw some nurses and doctors, and some random woman whose job I know not (I’m guessing HCA). They prodded and poked, as is their want, took a staggeringly comprehensive medical history, said basically they couldn’t do much there and then, and gave me some advice.
Whilst I was waiting in A&E though I was overtaken with guilt about missing my lesson so emailed JNBT apologising, and asking what I’d missed. Fortunately I didn’t get a reply until just after I’d got home. I say fortunately because it made me cry for a good twenty minutes.
It seemed (emphasis on seemed) to me in my shaken, knackered state-having just retrieved child with a “you’re late” greeting from la grandmere-to be really quite annoyed with me. My first reading (and the three further torment thyself readings in quick succession) saw it as essentially saying “you’re too ill to be in my classroom, now naff off”.
It took quite some calming down, and a persuasive “Emails don’t convey well” lecture off V (who is herself a teacher, and in her case of teenagers so is perhaps very used to collapsing females) over facebook.
I am tremendously proud of the reply that I composed to JNBT and my tutor (who I’ll think of an acronym for at some other juncture). It was I think a bit more revealing than most people would opt for, but I trust the both of them so I’m okay with them knowing certain things. And fuck it I’m a blogger I’m not exactly that private about my thoughts, I know JNBT has been on here and for all I know so has every bugger in college. So being circumspect seems a bit pointless. Besides I needed them to know exactly how much the course means to me. Without getting histrionic, or pathetic.
I’m meeting them on Tuesday to talk about it all. JNBT’s reply reassured me that there’s no intent on chucking me off the course, but just incase I am prepared to do a Helena* and so they’d have to chop their own legs off to extricate me from college.

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* A Midsummer Night’s Dream
” I am your spaniel…” complete with leg grabbing of Demetrius. It was one of the stock audition pieces I learned and I think I can pretty much still do it.

My need for distraction comes from having watched part 2 of The Last Nazis which has left my already muddled up little head reeling*.
Part 1 from last week didn’t leave me feeling as confused as the second part. If at all. Part one though was an almost simpler context. It followed the Nazi hunter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center as he pursued Aribert Heim , who by every definition was a sadistic man. A man who from the descriptions it seemed, to me, took the Third Reich as an excuse to live out all of his cruelest fantasies. Subscribing to such a horrible ideology was probably only an extension of his existing personality*.

Part two though dealt with those on foot soldier level. In particular two of the men featured were from annexed countries (Serbia and Hungary) where collaboration was as much a way of survival as anything. One may or may not have been in the early-mid stages of dementia, one was on trial and speaking only in pre-written statements and the third was more lucid than the other two, but not much more forthcoming.
My reeling confusion comes from just exactly where, and how, you define what someone’s role in something as big, as awful as the holocaust ( or indeed any genocide) is.
At one point the film-makers spoke again to the man from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (Zuroff) and asked whether pusuing someone so elderly (all are in their nineties) was worth it. Zuroff’s position is that since they were not old, possibly senile, men when the holocaust was happening then that is exactly the course they should be taking. Just because it takes sixty years to find someone who has committed a crime, does not lessen the impact of the crime. Expecially not one so big. And I can’t disagree with him.
However, I think the filmmakers asked the wrong question. The more interesting question to me is how do you judge culpability?
Though since the second world war armies across the West have increased the level of questioning amongst the ranks, encouraging soldiers to ask why not just do what they’re told (though how many actually bother I’m not sure), it’s most definately a modern phenomena.
Self preservation is a pretty normal human response, and given the choice between following an order in an army that you got no choice about joining, or dying (and in the case of collaborators risking that your family would also bear the brunt of your failure). What do you do? I can’t possibly begin to answer that. I have no idea. I can’t imagine making a decision in a world where you know pamphlets could result in being beheaded (Sophie Scholl).
How do you define whether someone collaborated because they were a right wing sadist, or because they were petrified?
Where does the line of power start? Whose decision is the one that matters? Is it the frontline soldiers who actually do the killing? Or is it their captain? Or his commander?
There can be no excuse for such awful crimes, nor indeed those that followed since*, but ultimately whose responsibility is it?*
There have been over 1000 people tried for war crimes in WW2 so far (and to be fair given the age of the remaining people there’s unlikely to be many more). But there were many, many more Nazi operatives, soldiers, workers than that. So how do you decide who is culpable? Who is human awfulness at it’s most human? And who was scared and going along to protect themselves? How do you decide who to pursue?
As the filmmakers noted none of the men they saw seemed to espouse right wing ideologies. Maybe that was a concerted effort on the part of men knowing that they could end up spending their few remaining years in a gaol, but maybe it was a genuine reflection of them.
Much scarier, to me, was the right wing orator they interviewed Ursula (something), who had spent her life, since childhood, wrapped up in the ideology. She was a talented speaker, which frightens me greatly. More worrying still is her assertion that the current economy is ideal for her brand of politics to move in. History suggests that she is probably right, right wing politics and hatred of the outside thrives in poverty. It was after all the disasterous Weimar economy that made it possible for the Nazis to gain power.
In some ways the prospect of the now. Of the potential awfulness of such people easily gaining power, suggests to me that no matter how much hunting for elderly murderers we do, we haven’t learnt all that much from the mistakes of the past.

*Sky Box has completely deaded, and since I stopped paying them for a multitude of channels I didn’t watch there’s nowt I can do about it. This isn’t such a bad thing though given that iPlayer now is all spangly on PS3. Except of course for the playstations that it has apparently completely wiped…
*And the only movie I have on my stack to watch is Downfall, which is hardly going to fulfill the need for distraction.
* Some might argue that such a condition is always necessary for someone to subscribe to such awfulness. I can’t believe that to be true, humans are much more complicated and the genuinely horrid are I honestly think, luckily few and far.
*For my first assignment at college I just had to read a portion of Storr’s Human Aggression and I find myself in very definite agreement with his assertion that the cruelty of one human to another is unique to our species.
* Everyone’s at the wider sense I suppose.