Elite Enrollment

I was not expecting to be halfway finished enrolling by 10:30. I envisaged queues, confusion, passport photos and the mind-numbing infuriation normally imbued by University bureaucracy. Luckily, it seems that PG enrollment (not suitable for kids – lame joke, anyone get it… no, didn’t think so*) involves a lot less stress than UG enrollment. Woo Hoo!

Of course, I am sympathetic for all the people – especially Freshers, and its hard to feel sorry for them, I admit – who are going to spend the majority of the next week in queues in corridors or sat in stuffy rooms. The hudddled masses whose timetables have not worked out as they expected, the infuriated administrative staff and the befuddled looking academics cursing the heavens that this time of year has come around again.

I wish there was some sort of way to make enrolment a simple and joyous process for all involved. Back in the day, when I was young and spritely (and terribly hungover) at a mere eighteen years of age, I queued no less than three times up the windy back passage of the Students Union to collect my NUS ID card. Each time I was told I was missing a certain coloured piece of documentation – whether it was the yellow sheet that should’ve gone to my Home School, the green one with the stamps on from my Associate School – or, no, you should have kept the white one on top. Oh, and while your there, it helps us out in the Registry if all your sheets are handily constructed into the shape of an origami swan…

Oh dear, I’m sorry Mr Roddan, you’re origami skills just aren’t up to it, are they? Go to the back of the queue and have another go… Next!

Things get worse if you were a Fresher before the Days of the Internet – no, I don’t mean the early 1990s, I mean any Fresher starting in University before the introduction of online enrollment in, err, 2007.  Then you got to queue outside Talybont Sports Hall – a fear-soaked place if ever there was one – and queue up behind your letter (arranged in a handy system which, to the untutored eye, had nothing to do with alphabetical order whatsoever) and get given a wad of flimsies which, if all went well, by the end of Freshers’ Week would be helpfully constructed into the aforementioned origami swan.

At this point of course, you find out that your entire – and I don’t jest – timetable clashes and you have to start the sorry process all over again the next day – or try to clone yourself to attend two separate lectures simultaenously.
Personally, I’d go for the latter. Its a hell of a lot easier.

So bon chance to all you Freshers and Not-So-Freshers in your never-ending queues with confusion and hangover writ large on your faces. It seems that the ideal number of students for a department to enrol is around thirty. Ooh, I wonder if that helps anyone at all… Oh yeh, it does. Me.

Byeee!

Weird^2

Writers block is an absolute bugger. Whatever you are trying to write, you get to a certain point and either realise you’ve repeated yourself or that the English language isn’t entirely flexible enough to say exactly what you want to say (And yes, me blaming the language almost certainly is one of those ‘bad workmen always blame their tools’ moments). I’ve tried all sorts – distractions, breaks, planograms, spider diagrams, brainstorms, walks in the park, music, no music, radio, no radio, silence, cooking, fire alarms (unintentionally), reorganising, rereading, rewriting out, writing other things… You get the idea.

I’ve run out of distractions so it looks like I just have to write. The thing that annoys me is that in this thing I’m writing (I get a little bit paranoid about giving too much away) I know that three years ago (yes, I write slowly — no, it’s not a haiku, its a bit longer), this particular point got me stuck for August through November. The main problem – as you can probably guess by the fact I’m revisiting the same issue – is that I was never really happy with the fudge of the situation which I’d acheived on the previous attempt.

So I’m back in a weirdly similar position after three years. Working on the same (ACCURSED) chapter, playing with the same characters, just before enrollment day, on the evening of the Freshers party in an empty house. OK, the past and future don’t naturally parallel each other much on a deeper level – on the previous occasion, I decided that it was a good idea to get entirely bladdered and then lost in the Freshers party, then drink gin neat out of a mug because I didn’t own any tonic. But a parallel is a parallel, and enough of a parallel to get that doo-doo-doo-doo-dooo moment going in my brain. 

All cures for writer’s block welcomed.

Why Capitalism and Freedom are Incompatible

I know you’re all (i.e. the fictional populous of the inside of my cranium) whingeing about the lack of posts recently, so I thought I’d use all three of my little grey cells, hit you with a big fat headline and then (as is traditional) get bogged down in the mind-numbing tedium of the detail before admitting, on balance, when all is said and done, there are arguments on both sides.

The familiar argument for this comes from Nozick – that if we are taxed, we are not free since we must work surplus labour in order to pay our taxes. I disagree with this idea – however, from a strict act utilitarian point of view, is it not equally valid to argue that work itself is an inhibition to freedom? Clearly, the advantages of all sorts of productive labour are clear both economically, socially, psychologically and educationally.

But, is it not equally valid that work is an imposition on (and here I throw my nice post-structuralist anti-essentialist baby, kicking and screaming, out with the bathwater) on some essentially hippie, loved up and absolutely free (bordering on anarchistic) human essence?

I’ll leave the readers to decide that one, mostly because its one of those arguments which I have a feeling I have probably got completely wrong.

On the other hand, freedom – and in particular freedom of expression – arguably occupies a somewhat fraught relationship with modern globalised capitalism. This is clearly demonstrated in the – and I never thought I’d use this word about my blog – scandal surrounding earlier posts about customer service training. I find it an intolerable intrusion on my freedom of expression that my personal opinion – as an employee engaged in a merely financial relationship with a large company – is negated and unpublishable should it go against the brand image of that company.

Personally, I find this utterly unacceptable. There is no reason that someone giving me money in return for my labour, however powerful, should have any hold over my personal opinions or my freedom to express them so long as they don’t contradict the laws of the land, are not provably false or explicitly libel an individual or institution.

I invite anyone sufficiently better informed on the law – or best practice – to reply to any of the above.

Byeee!