Muddy Bay Diaries (3)

Thursday evening
While on the expotition through Lerwick, I got a phone call from Brian Smith, the organizer of the conference on the Shetlandic site. The bus that would bring us from the hotel in Lerwick to the conference in Scalloway would be leaving at 9am the next morning. And could I please tell all the other people who would be going to the conference?

So while I had dinner in the hotel that evening, I kept an eye out for possible conference people. I knew hardly any of them, only some of the Faroese and they were nowhere to be seen. There were some people who were talking in English with a Scandinavian accent, but that doesn’t necessarily have to mean that they were conference people. So I ended up not identifying anyone and later asking the hotel reception if they could pass on the message.

Hotel staff doesn’t seem to be English. There was a Scottish woman there (who later turned out not to be a conference person) who asked for a glass of rioja with her food. They brought her a glass of milk. This is a true story.

Friday morning
So the next day I find out why the Faroese were nowhere to be seen the day before: the Norrøna had only arrived at 5am Friday morning. Which for the passengers means being woken up quite loudly in Danish at 3.30 or something rude like that. So at the breakfast buffet I said hello to Turið, and later also met Leyvoy and Hjalmar (æh?) again. Plus being introduced to a busload of other Faroese, I think there were about twenty of them.

There was also this blond girl who looked really familiar but I couldn’t quite figure out why. It turns out she was the cousin of the people I stayed with in Argir in 2004, so I did see her then but only very briefly. It was nice though to see all these people again, and speaking Faroese again. A bit rusty, but that was soon to improve...

The bus came at 9am as promised and drove us to Scalloway. They have this massive fisheries college there, where the conference was held. There I saw Doreen again, and she introduced me to a host of people that I’d read books and articles by, so it was nice to put some faces to names. They already seemed to know quite a lot about me, which was pretty scary.

Name badges are very useful.

Back in Edinburgh

I’m back in Edinburgh. It rains. The conference programme was so busy, and the internet connection in the hotel so unreliable, that I didn’t actually continue the Muddy Bay Diaries in real time. I will have to get rid of a backlog. I might even include pictures!

Muddy Bay Diaries (2)

The wireless network is disagreeing with me every now and then. I can't always seem to connect. Oh well.

I went exploring after posting the previous post. Lerwick is not an exceptionally pretty town. There's a fair number of new developments, and I guess it looks like any other Scottish seaside town. It has a harbour, a ferry terminal (well, two actually), a shopping centre... and nothing like Tinganes in Tórshavn to bring the average age of the buildings down by a couple of hundred years. Maybe it's also the Scottish way of not really taking very good care of your country? Lots of litter and it looked very industrial. Sometimes, through the buildings, you could see a glimpse of another island or a hill. That was nice.

They have road signs here, but I am not completely sure whether they point in the right direction. I can understand that on a pedestrian route you may have to climb a gate every now and then, but the bit where there was just grass in every direction... I must say that the water splashing in my water bottle gave really nice sound effects as I sunk down to my calves in moss. Several times. I decided to head for the athletics track (a bit of bright red in a sea of green) and ended up in the civilized world again.

There is also a little lake with the ruins of what may once have been a lighthouse or a fort or some other sort of tower. I didn't go and explore as it seemed like it was the headquarters for the local ned community.

Muddy Bay Diaries (1)

And I have arrived at the destination of my expotition: Shetland. It was quite an adventure to get here, and not everything went according to plan. Of course I was at Edinburgh Airport way too early, and I had to wait another fifteen minutes before the check-in for the flight actually opened. It had to be done at a self-service machine thingy, which turned out to be easy enough. The queues for the security control were extremely small, not at all the 45-minute trail I had experienced on several occasions before. So I ended up in the departures hall ages before the flight was supposed to be leaving. Most of the domestic flights on British Airways departed from Gate 7, so it seemed like the most useful place to sit. Of course when the gate was finally announced, it was Gate 1A so another minor trek through the airport was needed.

The airplane was by far the smallest one I have ever been on, I think I counted it could seat 37 people. It wasn't a direct flight from Edinburgh to Sumburgh, there was a stopover in Wick, probably because the fuel tank isn't big enough for the entire trip or something. We had a slight delay at departure because there were problems with the baggage handling (again, it seems to be a recurring theme in Edinburgh) but we arrived in Wick reasonably on schedule. The flight takes about 50 minutes.

"Welcome to Wick Airport." Wick Airport is a strip of tarmac with a couple of metal-plated buildings beside it. One of these actually has the sign "Wick Airport" on it, and passes for the terminal building. It also seems to be the only one with windows. Some people didn't want to go any further, so they left the plane at Wick, and others came on. Then suddenly we seemed to be one passenger short. She was found in the terminal, thinking it had been a direct flight to Shetland and that she was already in Lerwick. (Which is interesting seeing as the plane was to Sumburgh, not Lerwick...)

Meanwhile there were people on the plane talking about their how manieth attempt this was. Puzzled at first, I soon found out that in previous days, the weather in Sumburgh had not been good enough to land. "They can deal with mist, but not with [something that I couldn't quite hear]," they said. I assume that was wind from the wrong direction. For one couple it was already their third attempt to get to Shetland.

And it was looking like they needed a fourth when the plane was restarted for the final jump to Shetland and the right engine went splutter. The co-pilot went out of the airplane to fix it. At one point we heard (and felt) someone kicking the plane repeatedly. Don't know if it did much good, at least it didn't make the engine do anything else than splutter. So in the end they called in the big guns. A wee tractor with a generator on a cart and a pair of jump cables. At this point I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be on the plane anymore...

Anyway, the tractor did make the engine start up again, and we were soon on our way to Shetland. Landing there was quite an experience, the plane went lower and lower and I am sure we were still right above the sea. Then suddenly there was a bit of runway and the plane braked so as to not roll of the runway at the other end of the island. I had expected it to brake a little more but that didn't seem necessary in the end. Sumburgh Airport is bigger than Wick's, at least it has a proper terminal and I think it has room for more planes than even the airport in Vágar (but that wasn't very big either).

A taxi was waiting for me and drove me to Lerwick. On the way I got my first glimpse of Shetland. I had expected it to be a bit like the Faroes, and in a way it is. There is one headland that I could see from the taxi that I am sure I've taken a picture of in Tórshavn... But it's also different. The Faroes are more rugged, Shetland seems to be smoothed over somewhat, it's not as pointy. The fields on the way ranged from extremely stoney via a bit stoney to just grass. It wasn't as green as the Faroese grass, but maybe that's a matter of the time of year. There were sheep. Also in the Faroes you don't get red phone booths, but you do get bus shelters seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

The hotel is very nice. I have a double room with radio, tv, a bath and I thínk the shortbread on the table is complementary? They also have Wi-Fi internet which I shall pay £5 for to connect to. (When you read this, I have. This is currently being written in Notepad.) I shall also have to explore the food situation beyond the shortbread, and see if the organizers of the conference are in any way interested in my arrival and how I can let them know that I am alive and well in Muddy Bay (as the place-name sign at the entrance of Lerwick dutifully translates from the Old Norse).

Flatmate

MG can stay in the UK until somewhere around the end of April 2008. I no longer have to worry about my flatmate being deported and trying to find a new flatmate and stuff. Big relief.

Nothing

I have absolutely nothing to say.

Rephrasing your M.Sc. thesis – I’m using Norn as a case study for my Ph.D., but rather than a haphazard description I am now using a model so I need to restructure and rephrase everything – is very mind-numbing work. I wrote something along the lines of 800 words today, which isn’t too bad, but I still didn’t really work very hard.

The people on the LEL Staff and Research Postgrads e-mail lists are having a lively discussion about making new consent forms for recordings, what the purpose of them is and what they should say and all that. Seeing those e-mails come in was the highlight of ER’s and my day. I am working on Early Modern Europe, and ER’s dissertation is on breaking of Old English vowels. So those consent forms are enormously relevant.

I have been adventurous in the chips department today. (I know that is crisps for the Brits, but with WB away in Manchester I am left with ER and in South African English it is chips so I default to the Dutch chips.) I normally only eat ready salted, although I can branch out to the Kettle Chips (see, chips!) sea salt and black pepper taste. Today I had McCoy’s nacho and sour cream ridged tortilla chips (see, chips again!). Wow, they are good!

I am still not adventurous enough for the chicken and stuffing-flavoured crisps. I will repeat that. Chicken and stuffing-flavoured crisps. That is just wrong at I don’t know how many levels. They were left at our party, along with Sunday roast-flavoured crisps and lamb and mint-flavoured crisps. I don’t know who brought them (AF?) but justice will be done.

Also a lot of fizzy drinks were left at our party (along with a couple of half-emptied bottles of wine). AF brought cherryade which has a lot of chemical stuff in it, and only two calories per 250 ml serving. MG says the coloring is made by crushing beetles, so that’s where those two calories come from: healthy non-vegetarian drinks.

We also tried the bitter lemon and tonic over dinner today. They have quinine in them. I’m not sure: bitter lemon/tonic or malaria? The nastiness of the tonic almost goes away by mixing it with cherryade. I don’t think malaria works that way, so the tonic wins. Only just.

Shetland is coming closer. Read a nice quote about Foula today, it was described as ‘a peat bog on a rock’. Doesn’t sound too enthralling, frankly. I know we’re having a tour of Shetland on the Sunday, but I’m hoping we’re sticking to the Mainland. Will cope with Bressay, the ferries to Whalsay or Yell look awfully long already but I can probably do those too... but I wouldn’t be too sad to miss the peat bog on the rock.

I may have to look up the word ‘nothing’ in the OED.

Castle Cèilidh

It turned out to be dry enough to have the Castle Cèilidh actually in the castle of St Andrews this year. It definitely made for a much more crowded event than last year, but whether it was necessarily better? Dancing in your old trainers on slopey grass is only marginally better than the feat we managed at the Channel 4 dem in Edinburgh Castle last year. But above all, it was genuinely Baltic! Dancing means taking your hands out of your pockets, which means freezing your hands off. So I gave up halfway and wandered around the castle premises for a bit. Took a lot of pictures but the camera refused to cooperate while transferring them to my computer so I lost half of them. (It’d better not try this in Shetland!)

Torchlit procession was pretty from behind a wall that gave some shelter from the icy gales. The pub (which wasn’t really a pub but more something like the Human Be-In) was welcomingly warm. I survived the coach trip back only to find MG in the stairway who had managed to lock herself out. Oops.

Today was a meeting with the almighty supervisor, who was very positive both about my write-up of the Postgrad Conference paper for the online proceedings and about the talk I’ll be giving in Skálavágur (as Scalloway is apparently called on the Norse place-name map of Shetland with Britain tucked away in the corner). I told her of the agony of having to read about different methods of curing different types of fish only to find out something about trade patterns. She told me about her experience of getting a book on ‘Indo-European trees’ out of the library, thinking it was about language classification, only to find a chapter on the oak, one on the birch and one on the elm.

Kind of irritating that the haaf fisheries and subsequent labour in-migration (i.e. weak links i.e. language change) starts in the 1720s, when I have already declared Norn dead as a community language. I’ll have to think of another explanation.

I should also mention that the HTML that Blogger produces is absolute gunk.

Sore loser

Italy’s biggest arsehole Silvio Berlusconi has now decided that he’s going to scare the Italian parliament away from electing a left-wing candidate for the presidency. How? By not paying taxes anymore. Which, seeing as he’s not only Italy’s biggest arsehole, but also the country’s richest one, should be a matter of a lot of money.

But why would this work? I thought there were useful instruments like court orders and jail for people like Berlusconi who don’t want to pay taxes. (And while they’re at it, they might as well check whether he paid the right amount of taxes when he was in power and could get away with anything.)

The week

A long time without a proper update. This needs to be sorted...

Work has been going alright. I’m more or less done with the theory chapter and have left it behind for now. I’m now writing the chapter on Norn, the first of my case studies. This basically involves restructuring my M.Sc. dissertation and paraphrasing everything. I also discovered that I need a bit more data, and am suddenly finding books that I never found, or indeed looked for, last year. I’m hoping I can get the chapter more or less finished early next week, before I set off for Shetland and can actually meet all the people who wrote these books and may be able to fill any gaps there still are in my research.

The word of the day game that we’re doing is also going nicely. So far we have absquatulate, buccelation, ca’canny, doryphore, egglet, foison, gilly-gaupus and hydatism. I think it’s ER’s turn for the i on Monday. It must be, ’cause I did h and WB is down in Manchester next week doing recordings.

I turned 27 on Tuesday. I suddenly feel all mature and wise. Not.

On my way to Dunedin on Wednesday, I met AK. He asked me whether I had already received the issue of Northern Studies. No... Well, he sent it to my pidgeon-hole. But I’m no longer in LLC so I have a different pidgeon-hole now. Oh well, trekked over to the Celtic building on Thursday to pick it up. They did change the page numbers on me, but there it is: my first publication...

Knooihuizen, Remco (2006). ‘The Norn-to-Scots language shift: another look at socio-historical evidence’, Northern Studies 39, 105–117.

Dancing in the Chaplaincy was okay, the floor was very slippery which led to a lot of humorous situations. MG dealt very neatly with the Panda situation, so although she and her mum will still be coming to St Andrews with us tonight, next year she’ll only be coming to cèilidh class. We’ll also give her mum the cribs for the Summer Dance – seeing the manicness of it may convince her that Panda’s not quite up for dance to corners and set, corners pass and turn, Quarries’ Jig and Muirland Willie figures, Schiehallion reels, and whatever other nastiness I managed to squeeze in. Hello/Goodbye setting, there’s that too.

Friday was my birthday party. I invited a lot of people, and although the room and hallway were full, there were still numerous people who didn’t show up. Okay, so some of them had an excuse, like being in the US, Switzerland, Cambodia – and I’ll let St Andrews get away with it as well. But others... No – focus on the nice people who were actually there. Mostly NS people, although WB (with ES) and ER did constitute a very small delegation from work.

Crisps. Lots of crisps. And there was a lot more alcohol than at MG’s party, even though it was mainly the same people. I think an entire bottle of gin was shared among four people, there was also a lot of wine – we’re left with a lot of half bottles of wine, please come and collect! – and we now have a wide variety of empty beer bottles. The party was very nice. I got an executive toy from AF, magnetic sticks and balls that you can build things with. Also chocolate (from ER and from SP) and wine (from RB). Oops. Some revelations again. Last year it was TT and MG who suddenly appeared to have gone out for a month prior, this year it’s EMcG and JH. And EMcG’s flatmate and AL became very cosy after a few G&Ts...

Nothing happened yesterday. I went to the office to pick up the book I was reading, so that I could sit outside our living room window in the grass reading, but as I was walking to the office it started to become a bit more covered, so I read a bit in the office. Went home via LG’s (and CB’s back!) for tea, read some more, played with my executive toy and with Google Maps.

Google Maps is actually great fun. The sheer size (or lack of) Sumburgh Airport still amuses me, and I’ve been looking for landmarks a bit. Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the St Peter, the Statue of Liberty, the Monument on the Dam, the Tower of Pisa, Frogner Park, etc. etc. You can lose hours and hours on there. Great procrastination device. A pity though that a lot of areas still don’t have properly zoomable pictures.

Today it’s Castle Cèilidh in St Andrews. It was raining here this morning, but AF just texted DMcL in St Andrews and apparently it’s clearing up and they have good hopes it can still be in the castle.

კოკა-კოლა

The label on my Coca-Cola bottle is in Georgian. This is strangely exciting. I also need to re-learn the Georgian alphabet, because 15 years after they first taught me it (they being two Georgians who now go through life in our family history as "the dwarfs"), I don't remember all 33 letters.

Bedtime procrastination

I really should go to bed, but also I really should update.

The weather has been nice lately, which in a way is good because it makes me happy. It also sometimes makes me sad because there is little point sitting in the Meadows by yourself and looking at other people having fun with their friends. I could of course ask people to sit in the Meadows with me, but I don't want to impose. Also, it would be nice if they would ask me. (Thanks LG!)

The shit hit the fan big time New Scotland-wise when Panda decided she was adult enough to sign up for the Castle Ceilidh in St Andrews. No way are we going to take her along! Part of the 4-hour committee meeting on Friday was spent thinking of politically correct reasons to refuse her; I think we’re going with that we cannot cater for her needs and therefore do not want the responsibility of having to do so. It will probably result in tears and temper tantrums on Thursday.

Dancebase does Dancing for Downies, but it’s not very clever that they do it when Panda is at school.

The committee meeting was very long, but actually good fun. MG got tired and snappy at the end, but other than that. Some memorable quotes that I really couldn’t justify putting in the minutes:

“JF makes strange noises sometimes.” (HP)
“JG had very wiggly hair. It made him look a bit like a Klingon.” (JW)
“I like your Super Ted.” (HP)

Needless to say that there was a JF Strange Noises imitation competition, and the hair of AG was also assessed but it wasn’t related to any Star Trek character.

Which brings us to AP, who decided to burden WB and me with her problem that she could never tell the theme tunes to Star Wars and Superman apart. I think we spent about an hour listening to the two tunes and comparing, and we went off on tangents about other tv shows from our past (most of which I didn’t know – but then again, they wouldn’t have known Nathalie, Vrouwtje Theelepel, de Fabeltjeskrant or de Familie Knots). Eventually we decided that Star Wars and Superman actually have the same theme tune. They must have.

Language in Context was cool. We had lunch first (remind me never to eat nachos and curly fries at Negociants again!), and then the talk. RL based very strong conclusions on very little data, but everyone was very enthusiastic.

Linguistic Circle was even cooler. Gong phonology in a contact situation. Gong is a Sino-Tibetan language from Thailand, with four tones (one of which has two allotones), ten monophthongs (each with three or four allophones, but they overlap so there are only 17 monophthong realisations), and three diphthongs (with allophones). It has been in contact with Thai for about thirty years now, and the resulting Contact Gong has 17 monophthong phonemes because the Thai speakers can’t apply the allophone rules anymore, five tones (same reason), and ten diphthongs. Thai, like Normal Gong, has three. So 3+3=10.

Home-made tomato soup is nice.

We are doing a word-of-the-day thing in the office. WB started it on Wednesday. Previous words of days are absquatulate, buccellation, and ca’canny. It is my turn tomorrow for D. MM sent me a list of possible candidates, and although I do like decussate and dextrorotary, I think I’m going with doryphore. Some would say it’s very appropriate. But then I will get upset and might defenestrate you, and you may end up disabled or deceased.

Next week is my birthday. Help?

I am also going to a seminar on language policy and planning by someone called Tadhg Ó hIfernáin. JW is not convinced that this is actually a name. I think it is, but I wonder what the English version of it is. I think the Irish do English versions?

I also have my flight details for the Jakobsen Conference. I am flying to Sumburgh. Airport code LSI, which I think stands for Lerwick Shetland Islands. Which is odd as a) it is in Sumburgh, not in Lerwick, and b) there is an airstrip (I wouldn’t call it an airport, although they call it Lerwick Tingwall Aerodrome!) closer to Lerwick. I say LSI is in Sumburgh – if Google Maps and their satellite images are anything to go by, the airport is about five times as big as Sumburgh. Actually, from the very detailed satellite image (it’s an airport, the satellites are primarily for military use – guess why you can zoom into Sumburgh a lot more than you can into Edinburgh...) I am not convinced there is actually a Sumburgh beyond the airport. The next farmstead over seems to actually be called Jarlshof.

MG is Beltaning until 5am tonight. I am not waiting up for her.

Good night.

Worry and relief

From Michael Flinn (ed.), Scottish population history: from the 17th century to the 1930s (Cambridge: CUP, 1977), specifically from the chapter 'The demographic influence of the potato':

The potato made it possible to feed the increasing population, and the continued growth of the population in the early decades of the nineteenth century forced an ever-growing proportion of the population into dangerous dependence upon it (p. 422).

Oh dear.

The initial appearance, diffusion and general adoption of the potato can, fortunately, in Scotland's case, be documented fairly precisely (p. 423).

Phew.

The Shetland Times

I’m in the Shetland Times! Now I just have to make sure I live up to the expectations...

The talk at the Postgraduate Conference went alright. It wasn’t the same talk as I’ll be doing in Scalloway. This was about whether it was possible to use modern models to do historical research. My conclusion was that it wasn’t impossible, at least. Everyone was really positive, which was a bit surprising, because I really did think it wasn’t that good. Especially since I basically drew conclusions from very little data, and there was a bit of going in circles going on in my argument. But MM let me live, she even nodded a couple of times during the talk. I got a few laughs when I said that I can’t do what LC does, and drive over the Forth Bridge to Fife to record hours and hours of piper kids talking, and ask them about their social behaviour – because my people are dead. The questions from HTL (MG: ‘Who has a verb for a middle name, that’s stupid!’) were answerable, those from CH actually quite encouraging. The PGC was quite a success...

Mess

MS is uncontactable so the whole merged highland thing is still a bit of a mess. And FC is in a state because I was under the (wrong) impression that there was no step class in Term 3. Yay for New Scotland. :(

Holiday

So far I have...

• bought new shoes
• bought a little present for KM
• decided on a date for my birthday party (Fri 5 May), subject to MG's approval
• showed the neighbours how the satellite navigation system in their car actually works
• finished the presentation I'm giving tomorrow week
• helped my mum buy a new printer and installed it
• watched all three Shameless DVDs from the set
• given up eating the really manky potato flavour (! - not even real potato) snacks that my mom's friend brought back from their holiday in China
• tried to download my mom's friends China holiday movie from their camera unto their computer, which is impossible without installing the proper software, which is impossible because she's managed to lose the CD

I still have to

• meet my former babysat kids tomorrow
• make sushi with half our and half my mom's friend's family on Saturday
• buy chocolate for LG
• do some cycling, weather permitting
• close the bank account where the only thing happening for years is them taking out € 3.50 every three months for a debit card that I never use

It is also looking like I'll be home around the beginning of August for my mom's birthday plus to give AL somewhere to be on holiday between Romania and Ludwigstein.

Well done Edinburgh!

Well, I made it home on Saturday as planned, only slightly later. The luggage transport belt inside the airport terminal in Edinburgh had snapped, and they didn't seem to have a back-up system at all. We were all asked to deposit our luggage at the outsize baggage desk (basically: chuck it on the heap) and it would all be taken care of manually. Of course, if they wouldn't make one big heap but already do some sorting as the bags come in, that would have been a lot easier.

Getting to Edinburgh airport two hours before departure time seems to be a good idea anyway, given the time everything takes there. Queue at check-in only took twenty minutes but the whole queuing and x-ray procedure takes ages. Why they don't just open all x-ray terminals, I have no idea. It took about an hour.

Once in the airplane, we were first told that we were waiting for the bags for a maximum of 15 minutes, then that we would leave in five minutes regardless of whether we had luggage or not, 15 minutes later we were told we were going to leave in five minutes and now half the bags were on the plane, the other half wasn't, and another 15 minutes later we finally left. With all the bags, only they never actually announced that. I found out because the people next to me had to get a connection to Budapest and were slightly panicking.

Anyway, so we left 55 minutes late. The rest all went quite smoothly. The food was even quite nice.

At home now. Very windy.

Therapy failed...

Sorry to have to disappoint AL, but retail therapy didn’t work. Maybe I’m just not good at retail therapy. I’m very bad at buying things. I must have seen at least five different pairs of shoes that I wanted to buy (some of them affordable even) and all sorts of other cool clothes, but I didn’t buy them because I somehow doubted I actually needed them. I know that is sort of the whole point of retail therapy – buying stuff you don’t actually need but that’s good to have anyway – but I’m just incapable of doing that.

So I spent three and a half hours going up and down Princes Street, and I came back with one DVD. Well, one three-DVD set. Second season of Shameless. Good stuff.

Needed it too. Doing retail therapy on your own is not fun, if all the other people are doing retail therapy in pairs. And then going into the EUSA shop in Potterow on my way back was a bad idea too. A: they didn’t have chocolate chip muffins anymore, or the Guardian, and B: there are just some people you don’t want to see with someone else. (Skidedanskere!)

So watched three episodes of Shameless from my bed with my big fluffy toy dog. And tonight we’re invited over at LG’s to watch Much ado about nothing. Am debating whether or not to take the big fluffy toy dog with me. It may not be allowed to leave LG’s again, that’s the problem.

And breathe out...

Yay, Easter break! Well, I’m taking it anyway. Version 1.0 of the presentation is finished and with no one else in the office, it’s not exactly the most motivating place to work, so I’m leaving it at version 1.0. Nothing left to do, except send some e-mails out about the Postgraduate Conference, so I’ll go to the office in a bit to do that, bring home my laptop and then really start my Easter break.

After that I’m taking AL’s advice and am going into town for some retail therapy. There’s some stuff I need to buy for people back home, and I might just treat myself to something although I have no idea yet to what.

Went to the cinema with the NS bunch yesterday, to see Ice Age 2: The meltdown. I had forgotten about the little squirrel. And about the tiger actually as well. All I remembered was the mammoth and the sloth. It was an okay movie. Afterwards back to AF’s for tea and pecan pie. Was nice. But slightly too late maybe.

Nice to know

So some time in February VP said it was better to just stay friends, ‘because I was only getting so worked up about the whole thing.’ Of course by then it was already crystal clear that the whole thing was never going to happen anyway, and there was no doubt my feelings were never in the picture... but it was a nice illusion.

So today I learned that I was only told this after VP had secured non-single status for himself. Or perhaps slightly prior, that I was an obstacle that needed cleared before he could do so. Illusion shattered.

With all the commitment issues playing in this moment’s relationships, and me lending an ear to everyone (MG, WG and VP over the course of three days!), surely that whole relationship thing is an overrated institution that we could easily do without. Not worth the bother and the mental torment it causes.

Now if I keep telling myself this, I might start to feel better...

Ideology

Mainly for MG but others can enjoy too... Sixteen possible definitions of ideology:

• the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
• a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
• ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
• false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
• systematically distorted communication;
• that which offers a position for a subject;
• forms of thought motivated by social interests;
• identity thinking;
• socially necessary illusion;
• the conjecture of discourse and power;
• the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
• action-oriented sets of beliefs;
• the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
• semiotic closure;
• the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
• the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

From Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 1-3. Here quoted from Rosina Lippi-Green, Language ideology and language change in Early Modern German: a sociolinguistic study of the consonantal system of Nuremberg (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1994), p.7.