Personality Typing

Okay, so I cave in and do the Bridget Jones quiz, and it tells me:

Your profile is a tie between: The anti-Bridget. Not very Bridget. A little bit of Bridget. More Bridget than not. Very, very Bridget!

So let me get this straight. According to Underwire, that Bill Gates finger on the pulse of modern women, I’m either some sort of mighty morphin’ personality goo, or I’m so completely together and well-balanced that I can’t be shoe-horned into any one type. Come to think of it, I rather fancy the goo.

On the topic of personality typing, a more definitive source of guidance than Underwire got quite scarily into my head a couple of years ago, when I took the Myers-Briggs test in junior college. I don’t think they offer the complete test over the Web, but you can try its kid sister. The ENTP description in the booklet I got at the time was by far the most accurate I’ve ever read of myself, but this one got quite a lot right as well. I also liked this distillation of typical prayers each Myers-Briggs type might make.

Birthday Bits

I got my birthday card from my family today. My mother wrote: “Live with responsibility; walk in love.”

Given that I’ve attended 0 out of 6 possible hours of classes this week, and had to struggle today to restrain myself from shouting “Thar she blows!” after a fat bitch waddling on the pavement who nearly shoved me into the path of a speeding bus, those words are rather chastening.

Nick and I have reached an extremely convenient and mutually beneficial agreement about our respective birthday presents to each other. We somehow realized that we were both giving each other CDs that we also wanted for ourselves, in the shockingly conniving hope that after gift-giving, gift-borrowing would soon follow. So to make things easier and more efficient, we gave each other permission in advance to rip the CDs before giving them.

My Manta Ray’s All Right

You know that exquisite pain you get when a fantastic song is in your head, but circumstances prevent you from getting to actually hear it? I don’t know why there’s such a huge difference between hearing it in your head and hearing it from your speakers, but there undoubtedly is. You’re walking around for hours with it in there, and if it’s a song you love, chances are you know it intimately and your memory’s playing every note, but when you manage to get to your room and actually hear it in stereo, it’s like that moment’s a screaming orgasm and everything before was just indifferent foreplay.

At some point during lunch with Tamara at Belgo’s yesterday, Pixies’ Manta Ray started playing in my head.

I tried lots of ways to get it out. I went to Borders and listened to Sigur Ros, Black Box Recorder, Kid Loco, DJ Krush, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Sibelius. (Increasingly strange looks from the guy manning the listening station.) My find of the day: Pinchas Zukerman playing Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, and Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No.5, conducted by Zubin Mehta, for 5.99! That’s the great thing about buying classical music that isn’t usually possible with indie rock – you can get so much good stuff for cheap. Supporting an indie rock habit, where every CD you want has an IMPORT sticker on it and costs twice as much as an ordinary CD, generally requires a willingness for turning tricks, drug dealing, organ farming or investment banking.

So anyway, nothing worked. I still kept having to remind myself not to burst out into “Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, YEAH!” in front of other people, and it was torture not being able to. Then I got home, scrambled to my computer, put it on and turned up the volume, and…

HOO-HOO, HOO-HOO, YEAH!!

:)

Commonwealth Day / Director of Debates

It’s been a reasonably eventful day. Made it downstairs for breakfast (a remarkable event in itself). Went to the Foreign Office and did the Commonwealth debate. Went to Westminster Abbey for the Commonwealth Day Observance Ceremony. Saw the Queen. She was in green (hat, suit, bag). Saw Tony and Cherie. He really does look like a car salesman. She really does look like a walking set of teeth.

Went to my debating Annual General Meeting. Got elected Director of Debates. Yay. :)

Man, I’m exhausted. I think I need to go home and cook. Or do anything else which involves slapping around raw meat. It’s incredibly therapeutic.

Earliest Bird

Around 5 am this morning I tore myself away (note: not really because it’s all that fantastic, more because I’m trying to finish it) from The Ground Beneath Her Feet to go to the toilet. So I was in there, at 5 am, and I heard birdsong outside the window. I wanted to draw back the curtains and look out, but there was this sudden irrational fear that that was exactly the thing not to do. Sort of like how hearing children’s laughter in horror movies while walking in creepy houses late at night is never a good thing. My overactive imagination conjured up images of me opening the curtains to see a face pressed against the glass, eyeballing me. A small tape player, on the eaves outside, trilling birdsong. Wedged securely, so that it doesn’t fall as I am dragged through the window and gorily killed.

I skittered back to my room.

Back in there, and with the sense of security you get from being in your own space rather than a toilet, I looked out of my window, still hearing birdsong. I didn’t see anyone, or anything. Snuggled back into bed with Salman, Ormus and Vina, laughing at myself for getting spooked out so easily. When I finally turned out the lights, put on some Nick Drake, and tried to fall asleep, I could still hear that bird, keeping its solitary vigil, singing to a dawn that hadn’t come yet.

Commonwealth Cognitive Dissonance

Of all the worst ways I’ve ever spent a Saturday night, I can safely say that reading about the Commonwealth, as I spent most of last night trying to do, probably features quite high on the list. On Monday (Commonwealth Day, woo hoo) I have to go to the Foreign Office and pretend, by supporting the motion This House Believes That The Commonwealth Matters, that I both know and care about this organisation in front of its Secretary-General and, of course, the huge Internet audience of schoolchildren that will be forced to watch.

I am now a fount of knowledge about this wondrous organisation. If I am ever on holiday in Lahore and another military coup erupts, I will walk through its turbulent and strife-ridden streets, past Uzi-toting gunmen at military blockades, and demand an audience with whichever General is in charge. I will tell him that this is a blow at the heart of democracy which the Commonwealth will not stand for, and apprise him of the numerous mechanisms through which it will make its displeasure felt. The latter task will take all of five seconds. He will listen attentively, only occasionally twiddling the ends of his moustache. He will then have me summarily executed.

Perhaps this is overdoing it a bit, but I really don’t enjoy doing debates where at the very moment my mouth is saying “Truly, the Commonwealth is a unique and valuable organisation which has much to contribute in bettering the lives of its peoples”, my brain is saying “MY ARSE”.

Last night was gloriously low-brow

Last night was gloriously low-brow and frivolous. I started the evening off with Celebrity Big Brother. Then Carl came into the TV room and waved the first two episodes of the current season of the X-Files at me, and so we had to watch those. Then the Italian girls came in and put on Cocktail, and we all had a good time yelling “Bastard!” at Tom Cruise and pulling apart the corny dialogue. It was all very Bridget Jones.

The thing which probably struck me the most about last night won’t be a surprise for anyone reading this who actually knows me in real life, but I’ll go into it anyway because I just feel like writing about it.

The X-Files, or its good episodes anyway, reduces me to a gibbering emotional wreck. I loved this show long before it was hip, while it was hip, and still love it now it’s pretty much unhip. I’ll be the first to acknowledge it’s had some laughably bad episodes (killer pussies, Bride of Chucky, Scully Madonna with limpid-eyed alien child…), a large number of hilariously verbose pretentious voiceovers (Chris Carter, lose the thesaurus already), and don’t even get me started on what they’ve done with the conspiracy arc.

But the thing is, there’s just something about the characters that gets to me. I could rehash the usual Mulder-Scully skeptic-believer unresolved sexual tension spiel but everyone’s already familiar with that. I guess what particularly endears me to them is their ability to do the whole undying trust and loyalty thing while generally avoiding Hallmark moments. People always tell me “Oh, Michelle, you’ll be more forgiving about gross couply stuff when you’re in a relationship.”

No, I bloody well will not. I can certainly see Hallmark moments enhancing any relationship I’d want to be in, but only in terms of their comedic potential. I’d be quite fond of a man who could deliver cheesy lines with an expression just one twitch short of deadpan so I knew he didn’t actually think “I love you always forever till the end of the world blah blah blah” would fool me into falling over with my legs in the air.

Er. I was talking about the X-Files. Yeah, the X-Files. Love it.

The surfing, she is good

The surfing, she is good these days…

The time management, she is not.

Alas.

Just when I thought Neil Gaiman couldn’t get any cooler, he went and started writing a blog about American Gods.

Hugely gratifying: Literary critics ‘fess up at Slate about great books they haven’t read. This compilation of Amazon reader comments on the Modern Library’s top 20 novels of the 20th century was reasonably entertaining as well, though given that I’ve only read 4.5 of the 20 (The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five, half of To The Lighthouse), I suppose I’m not in a position to judge the accuracy (of lack thereof) of their commentary.

Slate performs an important public service with The Complete Bushisms. Some of my favourites:

“Keep good relations with the Grecians.”

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”

“This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It’s what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve.”— Speaking during “Perseverance Month”

“We want our teachers to be trained so they can meet the obligations, their obligations as teachers. We want them to know how to teach the science of reading. In order to make sure there’s not this kind of federal—federal cufflink.”

“Laura and I really don’t realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis.”

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.”

“The only things that I can tell you is that every case I have reviewed I have been comfortable with the innocence or guilt of the person that I’ve looked at. I do not believe we’ve put a guilty … I mean innocent person to death in the state of Texas.”

Oh God, I’m just halfway up the page!

Blogging From The Hip

When Jared at Entropy ponders the inescapable reach of the Increasingly Visible Hand of Corporations Incorporated, and Rabi at Wockerjabby is trying (eloquently) to put her finger on the line between her campus persona and who she is in her writing, which is something I’ve been wondering about ever since Russ told me he saw a different person in my site from who I seem to be in normal life, and Ken is as funny and strange (and uncapitalized…grrr, Ken, grrr…) as usual and calls me the “the critical, rational and cost-mindful goddess of all that is musical and cd-ish”, and the computer room is closing in minutes and the resident computer room Nazi is stalking around impatiently, and I’ve really got to get back to sex discrimination law because I haven’t attended a single lesson this entire week and it’s THURSDAY now, and this sentence is really rather long; when all these things are afoot (and that’s not quite the right word, but I don’t have time to think of the right one), I think it’s better to highlight good stuff other people are writing today than try to come up with some crap of my own.

Whoo, gotta run. Nazi man having kittens.

Sorta Glum About Twenty-One

Elsewhere in this site I write about being mostly “boringly well-adjusted and secure”. I should say that one chink in this smug little encasement is birthdays. I turn 21 in 10 days. It’s stressing me out.

The eternal question is how I’m supposed to spend it. There’s always this pressure to do something exceptionally decadent and exhibitionistic. Throw the parrrdddeeee of the year. Kill a couple billion liver cells. Chill with God on the astral plane. Surpass the Kama Sutra. Oh, and another thing: it’s all supposed to be incredibly social; your friends are meant to turn out in droves to take embarrassing photos of you getting utterly wasted, and carry you between bed and toilet bowl as required once you’ve truly succumbed to the ecstasies of the moment. Once you’ve come of age.

But my friends right now are scattered around the world. Lots are in Singapore. A significant number are in the US. A couple are here. And even if they were all in one place, most of them wouldn’t get along. The A’level scientist classmates would be incredibly helpful, and clean up afterwards. The O’level convent classmates would sit in the corner and laugh maniacally. The arty eccentrics would write and perform a commemorative interpretive dance-poem. The Singaporean debaters would lounge on comfortable furniture and make fun of everybody. The UCL debaters would be getting drunk wherever the alcohol was. And I would be running around desperately between groups trying to make sure everyone was having fun, and having none myself.

Birthdays are meant to be an affirmation that your birth was worthwhile, a celebration of your life so far, a symbol of hope for your life in the future. Can all that be captured in a party?

For my 21st birthday I want to slalom through the Northern Lights the way children run through floor fountains. I want to ignore the realities of clouds and snuggle up in a fluffy one somewhere between the ground and the stars with a radio which can only just catch the frequencies so that everything sounds tinny and otherworldly. I want to redefine science so that molecules don’t merely move up and down in response to the energy transmission of a wave but always at its crest, and then I want to transmogrify myself into rain and explore the waters of the world. I want to go to Tolkien’s Middle Earth and beat the shit out of Gollum. I want to go to a jazz club with Dean Moriarty.

I want to skydive with a parachute that jams until just before landing, and spend ten thousand metres of free fall realizing just how much I still have to do with this life.