Blue Saturday

sometimes just the language of job adverts makes me a bit teary.

plus the apparent lack of jobs that i'm qualified or capable of doing.

so, the age-old game of "going to sort my shit out. fuck, i'm near unemployable. might as well let my shit stay unsorted. rinse. repeat."

fuck this country, world, me. just need to let go of life really.

had good man to man with the boy last night tho about the importance of pursuing your goals whole-heartedly as you reach adulthood, aka "stop tooling about on the internet quite so much".

pleasantly unworried about my kids, who are much smarter and full of life and brain and willpower than i'm ever likely to be.

and it's sunny today, and perhaps the secret is just to welcome oblivion full on. at 44. dick.

best wishes NV

^ not worth much but it's all I've got

i'm blasting PE and washing dishes then cooking breakfast, ain't no moment bad in itself.

while the kids are here, anyway.

Is The Welcome Inn still open? I'd heard it closed down. Used to go there from a v young age (I remember the landlord giving me a free pint on my 18th birthday.) Was a brilliant pub and my first experience of going to a pub where you could walk in and be sure you'd know somebody.

Went back about 3/4 years ago and it hasn't changed a bit.

I heard it was gone though, recently.

yes, best wishes. PE sound like the best option at the moment.

it's one of those days where the clarity of light and cooler-than-summer sunny weather shout DO SOMETHING and I was going to just immerse myself in books, but it's a day that feels too pregnant with possibility (illusion) to do that.

so am standing on the south bank (ikr) watching things go by and trying to hang out a hook to catch something, anything that might justify the day before it solidifies with the light into something experienced.

tired and puffy-feeling from a week of too much drinking.

yr children sound wonderful NV, and yr love for them and descriptions of them make my heart feel full by proxy. (partly also the existential sketchiness brought on by tiredness and drink).

remember meeting a friend who'd just had a baby and it bought home forcefully the transformative effect of having people who you care about more than yourself. I'm not there, and I feel old, corrupt, sick - sick of myself (as in an illness caused by me as well as self-contempt), but yr posts remind me it is there, and so there is also somewhere a substantial feeling that make me not wish for oblivion. memory and hope rather than the now maybe.

best of luck.

language of job adverts

Job adverts are particularly bad for generating worries about not measuring up to some false overblown standard.

i know! but even as i'm aware of this i'm thinking "no way do i measure up to a world where people think like this"

Useful exercise would be to imagine an advert for yr current or past job tbh, it helps to compare the bullshit speak (or alternatively eh proves you can blag it)

^^^ Have done this

really enjoy doing career questionaires, it's such a shame when there's no actual jobs to be won at the end of them

Own reward iirc

do uk job apps have the same awful "personality assessments" where you answer questions like "i believe the guilty should be punished" with "strongly disagree", "agree" "neutral" &c &c. ?

rarely if ever on job apps have i come across that stuff, have heard of it with the occasional company of foreign origin

apparently my weakest skill is "showing energy and drive", lol science

"energy and drive" are BS, fuck that shit

Some do but it's not hugely common, as far as i know. I did a really strange one a few years ago along those lines. It had questions like "i know why stars twinkle - yes or no?".

I absolutely aced everything apart from "ambition", which is probably fair enough.

i've never seen the results of any test like that. i wonder if it's possible to do poorly if it seems too obvious that your answers pander to what you think they will want to see.

they're usually on applications for walgreens or some other shithole, adding to the absurdity.

"energy and drive" are BS, fuck that shit

i wish

apparently my weakest skill is "showing energy and drive", lol science

― iMacaroon dragoons (Noodle Vague), Friday, September 6, 2013 8:30 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is totally mine.

-_-

can one of you lovely folks kindly order me to get on with my writing and forget the bifurcation of my life down roads taken & not taken pls

if u dont get on with your writing you'll end up like me, frowing at a laptop in a stupid fucking cap listening to a Cafe Del Mar cd in 2013 ffs
http://i44.tinypic.com/2jciuw.jpg

get on with your writing! Don't be a mug

http://i40.tinypic.com/2n6smyu.jpg

*flees to Google Docs in terrified panic*

this is my Getting Over Shit music btw. suck it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_VmyoAnT98

'discrete mathematics'

i shoulda started that novel when u told me lj ;_;

there isn't a right and a wrong direction to take, it's more a case of the forces of evil that push you in the opposite direction than you want to go in - if it's just a case of feeling like what you should do vs what you wanna do well, cobblers to that really

oh I'm not framing it as right vs wrong. it's just two ways, with their various promises, yearnings

ach i just oscillate between Elijahian waffle and mewling self-pity nowadays

the opportunity cost of breathing is far too high and what are the government doing about it

After the capture of Khovd, Ja Lama inflicted savage reprisal against the Chinese military prisoners and civilian population. His acts of cruelty included slaughtering most of the Chinese troops he captured. It was rumored that Ja Lama stabbed the prisoners in the chest with a knife and tore their hearts out with his left hand. He then laid the hearts together with parts of the brain and some entrails in skull bowls so as to offer them up as bali sacrifices to the Tibetan terror gods and hung on the walls of his yurt the peeled skins of his enemies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja_Lama

― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Saturday, 22 December 2012 14:39 (8 months ago)

thought i had posted about ja lama on ilx before, now he gets a belated tribute

https://myspace.com/kingstownrecordings/music/songs

some tasty Acid from a friend of mine out here in the Humbrensian metropolis

http://i.imgur.com/kCNMKAn.jpg

via Pauline Oliveros

i fell off the wagon and ow my head

feel like having a discursive moan about education and lyfe and stuff but am quite thick-headed and distractible, seems unfair seeing as i've been going to bed early and acting all willing to work and shit

really pondering why even when i recognize the evidence for what they say i am unimpressed with the arguments of people who moan about declining educational standards in England. something about the system being not what they think it is or for and never having been, plus "intellectual snobbery" being v. ugly and misplaced i think?

on the other hand frequent eye-witnesses to young people being dragged thru and ultimately awarded qualifications when i strongly doubt they "understand" half of what they've "learned"

Some people who trash educational standards seem to be motivated be a desire to prove that they are the only ones who understand that things are going to hell in a handbasket, because only they have the intellectual pizazz to grasp how things could be. And many of them don't want to talk about what could change or whether some reforms have both positive and negative effects - they just want you agree with every single last thing they say.

i think that's part of it, partly couched in a moral realist position about "well we know what education shd be and what it's for"

this is prompted by some "let's cram more kids into HE campaign" i got a note about today which made me roll my eyes because it's such an unthought through policy anyway - like just "being in HE" is great and it's not a contested, socially shifting project, but then i also thought what the kind of "campaign for old-fashioned shitty education" crew wd say and felt uneasy at sharing similar thinking ground

it's a funny mix, is it, of ppl who would rather have education in very defined streams of vocational for the right sort and culture for the right sort, and then the rush towards 'everyone should be filled full of the wonders of education cos that's all that's wrong with humans *hearts 4 eyes*' and trying to pick a path that's beneficial and workable between these and twelve other competing falsehoods nb there is no money for such a path in any case.

this is it, our education system is a mish-mash of deliberate intentions and out-dated intentions and "hey we've always done it this way why would we change?" and evil plutocrats trying to obtain the cheapest possible wage fodder. maybe, probly, all education systems are that. it's just when people refuse to see this that you get a kind of glassy-eyed cant about "standards" and shite

oh and i saw some woman with her school-age daughter in the shopping centre this morning and my kneejerk "tsssk" turned into a "sure, it's a nice day, YOLO" in my head

Tssky on the YOLO

http://www.jonathans-stories.com/non-fiction/neurodiv.html

just saving that for myself for later reading

Uncomfortable read and bless the guy, despite me not agreeing with him.

i've read a bunch of impassioned arguments pro and con neurodiversity today.

http://radicalpsychology.org/vol7-1/boundy.html

this is a fascinating counter to Jonathan Mitchell's piece, and also contains references to a stack of interesting material.

i'm still a believer in neurodiversity as a perspective and as a movement, but it's difficult to know how to respond to voices within the autistic community that are sharply critical of the notion.

if nothing else, i've been reminded that "Nothing About Us Without Us" is a crucial demand that's still a long way from being met

sometimes i think about people of some fame - sportspeeps, actors, artists of various media - and realize that subconsciously i feel them as older than me even tho they're 10 - 20 years younger

god i want a drink or a dozen drinks but i've really mastered the art of saving myself for nothing. eventually getting by becomes this real achievable habit. bleak habit. secret of getting by = robotification.

the dry satisfaction of stayin dry.

by reference of things in other threads i don't wanna mess up - the thought gradually occurs that i've wasted enough of the intimacy i've already had to think about creating new intimacies. for what? wd only waste again. even if it were possible to abstract something that only grows organically...can't follow this train now. evening thoughts just lost in the dry country.

i don't know if this distance is all in my head or if my loved ones get a sense of it without understanding or realizing that it's there. i don't know what the gap is that i want to close. i don't know why i'm enveloped in this bubble, or if it can burst.

i dunno what i'm saying. or why.

Dear Mr B_______,

A 12-year-old boy from Kenya was asked to give a TED talk. Although nervous and inexperienced in English, he told his story before a crowd of hundreds. And when he finished, the response was immediate - a full standing ovation.

Thanks CMI! Gonna go out there today and be the best 12-year-old boy from Kenya I can be!

ugh weather ugh this country ugh rationalism ugh taking care of business ugh happy robot

mouldy empty dissatisfied cynicism - not cynicism really, just whatever the word is for being epically, Huysmannically jaded - is an energy, tbh

Totes