Ringing In ...

The holidays are ringing in. I am going to take the day off tomorrow and spend it with my sweetie, just lazing around and getting into the mood. Holidays is a stressful time, so one might as well take an extra day to destress for the holidays! After that, family gatherings, then a New Year's trip to the mountains. Mmmm ...

The Definition of Christmas

What is it that makes a Christmas? In my opinion it is:
. Darkness
. Snow (for atmosphere)
. Smell of pine, cinnamon, cloves, apples, clementines
. A clean house, smelling of polish and teak oil
. Light decorations in every street
. Mulled wine or cider and ginger cookies
. A beautiful steak on the dinner table (but whether it is pork, fowl or game doesn't make a difference to me)
. Cheesy, old Christmas ballads
. Candles everywhere
. Church bells ringing at six o'clock
. Mass echoing under dinner
. Hot chocolate on Christmas morning and a good book to read

Nothing Ever Happens

Met with old friends the other day, where I was just thinking how everything somehow always stayed the same, with nothing eventful ever happening. Still, when you start digging into it, a number of landmarks have been made in the last few months:
. Miss I. met a man, gave her resignation, found a new job, started writing, got engaged, sold her studio appartment and bought a penthouse appartment with her husband to be.
. Mrs A. and her husband celebrated their twenty years together, and she took on PhD studies while her husband found a new passion in painting.
. Miss J. had a second baby, adopted a step child and changed appartments.
. Miss G. ended an unfulfilling relationship, finished a bachelor’s degree, started working full time, put her appartment on sale and bought a long dreamed of new appartment.
. Miss F. lost her job, found a new one, departed with her boyfriend (who left for overseas), learned to surf and rockclimb, got married to her boyfriend, applied for graduate studies and decided to go live abroad.
. Absent from our get-together, Miss K. having had three children in five years is now fighting cancer and we worry about her and her family.
. Miss A. moved with her family to Eastern Europe, moved back and completed her studies.

This is to name but a few. None (or only a rare few) of these events were on TV, but these are the events that fill up a lifetime, I guess, of our uneventful lifes …

Inside the Computer

I upgraded to an ADSL connection the other day. Nothing to write home about of course, but I did have to install a net card into my computer, which as everyone knows involves opening the box and manually "installing" the card in a rail on the motherboard. Something I don't normally do everyday, so it was kind of exciting, to take a peek inside and admire the insides of your faithful companion. Fascinating, in fact!

After some start-up difficulties (my router wasn’t correctly set and had to be taken back to the service provider and reprogrammed), I am now all set up and ready to multiply my presence in the web world.

To Do ...

A week ‘till Christmas, and the bulk of Christmas “to do”s completed:
. write Christmas cards
. stock up on candles
. finish the ceramics artwork with my niece
. finish the end of the year bookkeeping
. do Christmas cleaning (not clearing the storage room this year!)
. change the batteries in the fire detector
. finish all paperwork that needs to be shipped overseas
. go to medical examination (for my visa)
. bake leafbread
. meet with friends from high school
. decorate ginger cookies (has been scheduled)
. go to a Christmas buffet
. buy a Christmas tree (pondering on it, will decide this weekend)
. buy Christmas presents (only three left, but I already chose them)
. plan and decide on a Christmas menu
. give my car a Christmas car wash (will do it on the 22nd)
. buy fresh groceries (plan to do it on the morning of the 23d)

I have worked hard not to overdo anything this time. Also, feel kind of relaxed and peaceful.

Ah, the French System ...

French universities are notably different from other academic institutions I have known. I was just talking about it with my friend F last night. We studied in the same schools, encountered the same problems, thus are brothers in arms, sort of ...

For one thing, students in France don't have any contact with the professors. Professors just walk into the auditorium, perform their lecture, then leave. That’s all you ever see of them. Where I come from, professors go by their first name. A peer relation between a student and a professor is unfathomable in France.

Secondly, universities do not provide services to you. You should be thankful in the first place that they let you in, but don’t you dream of asking for something that does not conform with the standard curriculum, also: forget about ever obtaining souvenirs from your stay, like transcripts of exams passed, grades received, or certificates. These are only delivered sporadically, and only if it suits the institution involved.

The French are decades behind in computer matters. They will make you learn, theoretically, how one works; you can study Turing machines, formal languages and automation theory but you may have to wait until way into your doctoral studies before you actually get to see one. Computer, I mean. Last time I knew, Internet or computer access was not automatically provided to students. I had to fight, reason and bully my way to get a computer account when I was in my fifth year, and the terminals in use in the only open terminal facility (unventilated!) on campus were ten years old.

The same applies to the housing, actually. Buildings are put up, but not given any maintenance, like repainting, cleaning or whatsoever. In the highest ranked university of France, the staircases smell of urine. If the glass in a window breaks it won’t be replaced, no matter how cold it gets. If a student spills coffee on a his desk, the stain will still be there three years later, next to the dirty sketch he penciled in out of boredom.

For decades the French have kept to an educational system that doesn’t have a counterpart anywhere else in the non-francophone world, their diplomas of DEUG, licence, maitrise and DEA (to name but a few) having no equivalent outside of France. This in itself does not facilitate comparisons, but as if things weren’t hard enough they also have to keep a unique grading system, where grades are usually appointed by “mentions”: très bien, bien, assez bien, passable, … However, should the grades be numerical, they will be on the scale of 0 to 20. Nota bene, the grade 20 is never accorded. Actually, the grade 18 is hardly ever accorded. To tell the truth, grades above 14 are very rare and most students will always be accorded a mark between 8 and 12. Except in math where most of the grades will be in the range between 3 and 10. These grades may not look impressing when translated into the standard scale of 0 to 10 or 100, but the French believe that low grades will help motivate the students.

Finally, French students never talk about studying, but “working”. They are always “working”! Just as well, because once they get a position within the public system and start working, they probably won’t be doing that much work, really …

Paper Work

I have been spending so much time on paperwork lately. Each time I find myself immersed in it, seeing no way to get it done, I calm down reminding myself that I have known worse in France, back in time.

Why the French are so notorious for their bureaucracy is another question. They claim so to speak to have invented science and technology, the World Wide Web among others, but when it comes to putting them to use, they really drag their feet. I often even wonder if they know how to use computers, in general, and I think the worst official web pages I have come across (both in content and visual worth) are the French ones, should it be their governmental or academic institutions. And they plain outright just don't answer e-mail, nope! (Also, why should they, when an e-mail doesn't even have a stamp!?)

For five weeks now have I been working on having transcripts sent from the French universities I studied at in order to ship them again to the U.S. where I am now applying for entry. And I am getting nowhere at it, despite e-mail, snail mail, phone calls and lots of "Monsieur/Madame", "s'il-vous-plait"s and "Veuillez agréer ..."s, believe me. It's exasperating. On one side I have the French, demanding a lot of patience, ass licking and formalities, on the other the Americans favoring service, speed and efficiency. (Plus, the two nationalities hate each other, but that's another story ...)

But well, I have seen worse. I have applied for a French residence permit and been told that it could not be delivered unless I had a university inscription, while I couldn't complete my inscription at the university until I had my residence permit, thus being sent back and forth.

It even occurred to me this was some sort of a sick joke the French played on foreigners who came to dwell in their country. Then the key is to come stand in line at different venues, different counters, again and again and again, and again, with at least four copies of every possible document and a bunch of identity photos and postal stamps, until one day surprisingly they give you the paper and you are so relieved that you forgot you were ever annoyed by the hassle.

Sometimes of course unexpected problems can arise, like my third year in France, when the guy who stamped the residence permits died, so I had to be without one for seven months. And you learn just to take things as they come. But they have lots of cafés there too. And cheap, good wine. So that helps. Sort of.

Right now, right here, however, I have no cheap wine and no café terraces, so I'm really not in the mood for games. If only I thought they would read my blog, and then get things going for me, please ...

Manifesto

With my last record on uninspired blogging in mind, I have put down the following guidelines for myself:

1. Make a point of not being silent too long. A blogger should blog at least once each week, except on holidays. Blogs that stay the same for more than a week are depressing. Notice: If you haven’t had anything to say for a while, maybe that’s a sign you should get up and do something with your life.
2. Don’t nag about something unless you think you have a fresh, humorous angle on it.
3. Don’t be rude and don’t write things you wouldn’t be comfortable with someone reading.
4. Don’t talk about all too trivial things unless: they are descriptive, they should be shared (like naughty recipes), there’s something extraordinary about the commonness of them.
5. Don’t lie, but by all means, EXAGGERATE.
6. Don’t preach (this might be hard!).
7. Try to respect the six points here above.

Further things I am going to keep in mind: I promise to try to keep the background of my blogpage white, in any case not to display any horrible background pattern. I also promise not to put any stupid, mind-boggling animations into the page.

Bloggers Block

It’s kind of obvious that bloggers don’t always have much to say. That can be a problem, because the blog consists of what is blogged. Considering the number of bloggers, and the banality of most of our lifes and thoughts, bloggers block must be not such an uncommon phenomenom. I recently saw a good blog on means to combat bloggers' block. The blog was unfortunately not in English, but I’ll just steal the basic ideas and make them mine:

So, on the methods, the first and the most common approach is silence. When you don’t have anything to say then you simply don’t say anything. Even if it was for weeks. This is a common reaction and if it wasn’t the internet would surely be much more clogged up than it is with completely useless, uninformative information.

Number two is nagging. Then you nag and whine about everything that annoys, upsets, angers or frustrates you or in some way hampers your existence. You can also moan about the difficulties you’re having with blogging. I guess you will have to have something of a fresh angle ever to make this sound interesting though.

The third way is provocation. Then you put forward some provoking, unsubstantiated opinions or judgements, wait for people to pick up the thread and comment on your statements and then comment on the comments. That should keep you going for a while.

The fourth method is banality. Then you blog about any trivial incident of your day, down to brushing your teeth and what you had for breakfast. Just as exciting as a school assignment.

Method number five is lies. Just lie that something interesting happened to you. It doesn’t need to be plausible, actually the more outrageous, the better. What a crazy idea. But funny, right?

Lacking in Writing Skills!

I got my GRE scores, and was somewhat disappointed, in particular seeing the score for the analytical writing section, which qualifies me as one who "provides competent analysis of complex ideas; develops and supports main points with relevant reasons and/or examples; is adequately organized; conveys meaning with reasonable clarity; demonstrates satisfactory control of sentence structure and language usage but may have some errors that affect clarity."

And I thought lack of clarity was part of my mysterious charm! But seriously, this just has me wonder whether the graders are at all smart enough to read subtle texts like the one mine most certainly was.

This is probably the last time I am going to spend 1h15m non-stop, handwriting text with a pencil. Also it was probably the first time in over ten years I had to do that. And it hurts! By now, our hands are much better adapted to a keyboard. Writing with a pencil, especially for a long duration, takes tremendous effort and coordination. Am I glad at least that we are past the age when texts had to be carved into stone …

Otherwise, last time I wrote a paper in English (for academic purposes) was during my second year in highschool. Something like 20 years ago. As far as I can remember the subject was either “All my sons” by Arthur Miller or “Brave new world” by Aldous Huxley. I was probably not too fervent about these subjects at the time. Nor was I passionate about the subjects of my GRE test, one of which was on an airline company’s measures to educate their staff, the other on the importance of university students taking courses outside their field. Honestly, I have zero insight into the first subject, fair insight into the second but very mixed feelings about it and no affirmative stand.

But that’s no excuse to score just a 4.0 on your GRE test. Damn it! Did I just blow it?

And a more serious question: Am I simply too old by now to measure up to academic standards? Have my golden days passed me?

Thirty-Something Singleton Lost

It's a pity that they should do so little justice to the character of the lovable thirty-something single female in the sequel to the original film on Bridget Jones, The Edge of Reason that now is in the movie theatres. In the first part we learned to like that endearing Bridget whose shortcomings were basically to be thirty and single, and well …, a little chubby, hopelessly romantic, a bit gauche, and to smoke too much. Who could not identify at least with some of her quirks and some of her mishaps? I sure could. And even when we affectionately laughed at her, the joke wasn’t on her, but on our judgemental, competitive society that most of the time doesn’t value the treasures to be found in Bridget’s ingenuity and candor. At the end of the story also Bridget came out as the winner, having beaten the odds, overcome misfortunes and found her too-good-to-be-true Mr. Right. And again we identified with her.

Unfortunately, in the sequel to Bridget’s “adventures” she has become completely inane, brainless and vulgar. Oh, maybe that’s all there is to thirty-something single females. Because truly there must be a reason why she didn’t settle down yet! And we wind up feeling so sorry for her perfect boyfriend that we almost feel like calling up the human rights watch to get him out of this relationship from hell. Now, so much for the character of Bridget Jones. Otherwise, the movie has a few funny bits, but the story is completely worthless. There’s a formulaic rerun of the gigs from the first movie, most of which try to outdo the previous versions. It wears a bit on your patience. I got my best laughs from the first fifteen minutes of the movie, then I started thinking: Oh, no, not again …

But I still believe there must be a lovable Bridget out there somewhere. Maybe Darcy will find her third time around …

My Past in Boxes

I have for various reasons been going through old documents and papers that I have stored up in boxes either because I assumed I might need them later, or for reference, or because they bring up fond memories, or because I knew they would have comical value some day. I'm a collector by nature, of course, and when you have had things stolen from you once you tend to hang on to what is left, but I've really been trying hard to get rid of stuff, and to prove that, I can fit my whole past now into about four boxes. That is, personal items without practical value.

The boxes are now old enough to constitute a real treasure chest to me, in that each time I take a peak into them I discover some things I wasn't aware of any more, that I didn't know about or had forgotten, sometimes that turn out to have tremendous value for me, sometimes just enough for a good laugh.

Among my recent findings were:
. My vaccination certificates.
. Photos of my old self.
. School records.
. Letters from people I had forgotten about.
. Drawings by myself.

And among the most surprising things I learned from my findings were:
. Back then I used to have time on my hands to undertake extensive private letter writing, and since the advent of the internet I have hundreds of pages of them.
. Apparently, I've had more boyfriends than I thought (though only one at a time), but I probably had more fun thinking and writing about them than spending time with them.
. I used to make these quite decent drawings with pen or pencil, even if I now find myself completely devoid of artistic skill.
. Apparently, I had seriously been considering doctoral studies in Complex Analysis or Algebraic Geometry.
. A long time ago I had taken a number of classes on really tough subjects I now know nothing about, like arithmetic convolutions, quadratic forms, algebraic extensions, reciprocity, formal languages and grammatical systems, metric spaces and multiple integrals, residual methods, operators and reduced forms, fondamental group and classification of surfaces, ... and done quite well at them, amazingly enough.