Interholics Anonymous

Hello, my name is May and I’m an internet addict.

It occurred to me today that I don’t actually remember the last time I went 24 hours without being online. I suspect it will have been on a day when I simply wasn’t home for that long. Maybe when I was last on my friend Tom’s canal boat. Actually, I just remembered when it was – it was when I went away for the weekend just before term started. So, at least six weeks ago.

The internet is a wonderful tool. There is very little in my life that I do without the internet being involved in some way. Anything even tangentially connected to money is internet-related: I have a strict weekly budget regulated through my (three) online bank accounts. Most of my social life is either organised or conducted through the internet. Some of my closest friends are people I’ve only met once, or maybe twice, but have been talking to for years. When I’m bored I watch videos online or read blogs. I trawl my way through webcomics and read my news on the BBC website. If I need to find something out, I google it. Email is my preferred method of contact. I talk to my family on Skype. I even plan my shopping lists online, with the aid of the Sainsbury’s delivery service – I don’t get the shopping delivered, but I find out what it will cost before  I go to the supermarket.

Basically, the internet is an important part of my life. I think there are three types of people in the world. There are the people who don’t use the internet at all, ever, never have and possibly never will. A huge swathe of the planet’s population still falls into this category, even though apparently internet access is a human right (for the record, I am well aware that “internet as human right” is a massive simplification of what was actually said. I’m a law student, guys, but I’m also a fan of snappy soundbites). Then there are the people who use the internet a fair amount, as a tool for contacting people, looking up directions to places, watching cute videos of cats, and sometimes reading interesting articles.

And then there are people like me. People who fly across the globe to spend the weekend staying in a four-storey mansion in Chicago with a bunch of people from some weird website. People who think there’s nothing even remotely odd about making plans to go and live for two months, or two years, with someone they’ve only met once. People who know where the X ALL THE THINGS meme is from. People who know what a meme is. People who accidentally spend eight hours online without realising it, and only find out because their browser has an add-on to cut internet access in just such an eventuality.

I blame my parents, frankly. Or rather my dad, because he is the sort of man who can program a computer to say “It is very dangerous to turn off your computer” when it has safely shut itself down, and who makes a website for his three-year-old daughter. Thanks to my childhood, there is very little in life that I can’t solve with a laptop and an ethernet cable. I’m always staggered when people say “but I don’t know where the police station/chemist/pet store/gigantic metal chicken shop is“, as though that is a reason not to report the money they found in the street/not buy sun cream/feed their pet cat toast for a week/save their money instead of spending it on a gigantic metal chicken. It took me several years to realise that actually it’s quite unusual to spend quite so much time online as I do, and not necessarily hugely healthy.

Certainly I don’t think the internet is killing me. I exercise, I eat healthily, I socialise with people I can actually see, I leave my room daily and I do plenty of things away from my computer. But I seem to have lost my will-power. I definitely remember deciding not to go online at all yesterday. That is definitely a decision I made, but it’s not a decision I stuck to.

So. My resolution: I am not going to touch my laptop from now until 8am on Monday morning. I have absolutely no need to use it: I have printed out all the past papers I need for revision, I doubt I’ll get any important emails over the weekend, and facebook will not actually die without me. I am keeping an online log of what I eat, partly for dietary purposes and partly to try and figure out which food it is that is trying to make my stomach digest itself, but I can do that the old fashioned way for one day.

Please, if you see me online at any point in the next forty hours, please shout at me. Down the phone, that is. Not by email or anything. That’s the point. And wish me luck. Gulp.

Premonitions of Summer

We didn’t really have a spring this year, did we? The weather here, at least, and presumably elsewhere in the UK, has been a bit mad – miserable grey winter-type days, interspersed with hot sunny summer days.

This week we’re in a run of hot sunny summer days. And I’m melting. Tomorrow I’ll break out my new summer skirts and shoes, assuming that I can bear to put the shoes on over the blisters I rubbed wearing uncomfortable trainers earlier in the week, but even switching denim for cotton is unlikely to stop me from wanting to just lie down in the fridge.

According to the internet, and my reliable sources living out there, the USA is going to be at least this hot, if not hotter, all summer. It could reach 30 degrees celcius in August. Today it’s been about 22 and I’m feeling a bit sick. Oh dear. Wish me luck.

Incidentally, I went to buy some sun cream the other day and it was £15 a bottle. I almost passed out, and then I walked out again in the optimistic hope that it might get cheaper later in the year. Unlikely, I realise.

In Memory of the Puppies

It is a lovely sunny day (at least I’m assuming it is – it was yesterday. I haven’t opened my curtains yet), and just the sort of day on which someone might wish to go for a short walk and find themselves at a quaint and adorable country fair.

Just such a day on which a country fair might happen, for instance a country fair with a dog competition. A dog competition where the first class involves puppies. You know, that sort of country fair.

The sort of country fair that was cancelled two days ago because there has been too much rain

I was really looking forwards to it, too.

Revising my Schedule

Alternative title: Revising: My Schedule.

This week marks the first week of proper exam preparation. Lectures have basically finished, other than two remaining recap lectures, and supervisions are finally over. The first exam is in under three weeks, and I have begun to tackle the issue strategically.

There is no way I can learn all the things. No one can ever learn all the things. In the past I might have attempted to do this, but I am older and wiser now. Instead I have printed out past papers and am working on a different subject each day, identifying the questions I could have a stab at answering and the ones I couldn’t even think where to begin. Yesterday and the day before, most of the questions fell into the former catergory. Today I came across at least three of the latter, just from one exam paper. Eek.

Every year at this time I realise that if I had worked more effectively during the year things would be easier now. I think I sometimes forget, however, that this form of learning only really works after the foundations have been laid. Had I been presented with an exam paper at the start of the year and told to find out what the answers were, I think I would have run away screaming. Now, even if I can’t think what on earth I would write, I can identify the topics and locate the information. That’s encouraging, at least.

Currently I’m enjoying my half-hour tea break, which actually is devoid of tea but did include a slice of fruit loaf. In a few minutes I’ll set to and do another two hours of work before my lunch hour. Two more hours after that and I’m likely to be losing interest and concentration. I’ve learnt to work with my own limitations and apparently I am not capable of concentrating on one thing for more than two hours (which bodes ill for the three-hour exams, but generally the fear sets in and time speeds up). After a substantial gap for choir and food, I’ll tackle a final two hours before collapsing into bed. So now you know why I’ve not posted much lately – there’s nothing to tell. Wish me luck!

Tiredness and Reader Issues

I have considered posting here over the last few days, but I haven’t found the energy. My new strategy of getting up early backfires spectacularly when I end up staying awake later at night than usual. I somehow have managed to skim two hours off my sleep time from both ends. I’m hoping to catch up on sleep this weekend and then get into a sensible pattern for next week, which will mean politely but firmly informing friends who come round for the evening that I need to go to bed at ten thirty. I love hanging out with my friends and the social life here generally takes place after 9pm when people have usually finished working for the day, but I’m finding it hard to function at the moment.

Another reason I haven’t been posting is that I haven’t been logging in, because my WordPress reader has stopped working. I’m finding it incredibly frustrating to click on the button looking for my list of blogs and instead getting a blank page with the character 0 on it. I hadn’t realised how symbiotic my blog relationship was.

I’ll be back soon, I promise. Nothing much has happened this week, to be honest.

Feng Shui Procrastination

On Thursday afternoon I suddenly was overcome by an irrepressible urge to vacuum my room. This could be because the alternative was reading interminable chapters of a book about prisons, but I prefer to believe it was out of an inherent desire to make things clean and tidy. Ahem.

At any rate, I got stuck in and vacuumed thoroughly. I even moved some of the furniture! It was quite the adventure, particularly considering that I hadn’t cleaned up since early February. I discovered an entire colony of dust bunnies living under the radiator.

Then I realised that the alcove with my window in it is just big enough to fit my table, which doubles as my desk. For several minutes I pondered the possibility of moving my armchair out of the alcove and putting my desk there, and then moving my bureau into the space where the table was so that the chair could go where the bureau sat. The purpose, I think, was to create a second workspace where I could sit and make notes from my textbooks without the distraction of my laptop four inches away. My plan was sadly foiled on two counts: one was that the cables for my study lamp and internet connection are not long enough for the table to move, and anyway my laptop wouldn’t fit into the bureau when it closed which would be annoying, and the second was that I can’t actually move the bureau more than about three millimetres without putting my back out. So that plan was foiled.

However, I did tackle the appalling jumble of papers which I  had been storing under the folding top of the bureau.

Remember this mess? Imagine it twice as bad and then double it.

Remarkably, it didn’t take me very long to sift through the contents, pick out the treasures and discard the rest. I discovered that I apparently am an inveterate collector of empty white envelopes. I get paid each week in cash placed inside a small, otherwise unused envelope, and for some reason I keep them all. Well, not any more! The new improved me will no longer horde unused and unusable envelopes on the off-chance that I might some day buy a small card without its envelope. The new improved me instead has a tidy selection of filing slots, and a clear work surface for her books and papers.

And the new improved me is off to take advantage of exactly that work surface by swivelling 90 degrees to the right. Exciting times.

A Short Weekend Away

On Friday morning I got into a car and was driven a little over an hour away, to a large house surrounded by countryside. There was no mobile phone reception and I hadn’t taken my computer, so the free wifi was useless to me. I was with a group of people who I knew either reasonably well, slightly, or not at all, but there was never a sense that anyone was unwelcome and by the end of our stay I had made many new friends.

We were there for a little over forty-eight hours, but it feels much longer. And also much shorter, at the same time. Now that I’m back, sitting at my little desk surrounded by things I need to sort out and confronted by two large Post-It notes with my extensive to-do list, I can’t quite remember how it felt to take a leisurely walk through (muddy) fields and watch the birds and rabbits getting on with their lives, or to curl up in an armchair and read for hours on end without any sensation of guilt. We ate huge delicious meals and talked companionably into the night, and then slept soundly in comfortable beds. On Saturday afternoon I had a three-hour nap.

Having returned, and with the start of term imminent, exams are feeling a lot more imminent. But I’m feeling relaxed and ready to go to work. I think it’s the best possible combination: a short break that felt much longer.

99 Days until The Olympics

If you live in the UK it will have been quite hard not to notice that yesterday marked the 100 days to go point for the London Olympics.

For me, it marked the 96 days to go point for my visit to a friend in America who I haven’t seen for three years, which is much more exciting. The Olympic countdowns are very handy, because I know that I just have to subtract four for my own personal countdown.

But this post isn’t an excited treatise on my summer plans, but rather a reflection on the interesting issues raised by spending a summer in America and thereby avoiding a summer where Britain in general and London in particular will be attempting to emulate some of the less enjoyable aspects of US life.

A quick glance over the Safety and security page of the Olympic website is a good start. Ticket-holders are advised to avoid bringing bags if at all possible, and if they must bring something then “in most cases you can bring one soft-sided bag”, which will of course be searched on entry.

Now one might think that the purpose of these bag searches is to ensure the safety and security of the spectators and competitors. But it isn’t.

It’s to ensure that their many sponsors get the best possible run at making a whacking great profit.

A glance down the terms and conditions of the tickets makes for very interesting reading. In particular I was drawn to the paragraph detailing the items which cannot be taken into an Olympic venue. There are the obvious ones, like no illegal drugs or dangerous objects, or lasers and noisy things (thank goodness, that means no vuvuzelas). And then there are the ones which beg questions:

• food (save for baby food)
• alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages (save for baby milk and other valid medical reasons)
• liquids in containers of greater than 100ml in size so you better start looking for your travel-sized suncream
• objects bearing trademarks or other kinds of promotional signs or messages (such as hats, T-shirts, bags, etc)
• large quantities of coins
• bottles or containers made of glass or other material so basically, no liquids at all, unless you have a container made of no material
• refrigerators I just found this one amusing

Now, it isn’t that there are concerns about the massive safety hazard caused by people taking food to a sprint race. I know this because one of the sponsors of the Olympic games is… McDonalds. Of course. That is who I would choose to sponsor a sporting event which has as part of its Food Vision “Providing healthy and nutritious options for everyone”.

However, if you want to buy your McMeal, you had better be a Visa card holder because the outlets at the venues won’t accept any other type of payment except cash – and remember you can’t take in “large quantities of coins” such as one might need to purchase overpriced junk food. Unsurprisingly, Visa is an Olympic sponsor.

There will also be outlets selling beverages including alcohol, so they aren’t worried about people becoming drunk and rowdy. They’re just worried about them becoming drunk and rowdy on alcohol not purchased from Heineken UK, another Olympic sponsor.

It isn’t all bad, because the venues will be providing free water. It hasn’t been decided exactly how that will be done, but at least it’s something. Mind you, Thames Water is also a sponsor – but since they’re the main provider of tap water in London that is not very surprising.

The figures for security staff are nothing short of alarming. The original estimate was that 10,000 people would be needed. In January that rose to 23,700 – of which 13,500 are likely to be from the Armed Forces.  It’s understandable, of course – you need a lot of manpower to confiscate everyone’s sandwiches and make sure they aren’t carrying in any dangerous water bottles.

Obviously all this has an impact on the cost. The total cost that the organisers are admitting to will be £9.3 billion. I’ve seen the figure of £11 billion bandied about as well. I don’t know anything about these things – I can’t even begin to picture how much money that is – but even I can tell that something drastic must have happened since the original estimated budget of £2.4 billion.

Of course the government are arguing that it will benefit the economy overall, but I’m not convinced. It will certainly benefit the Olympic sponsors, but I’m willing to bet that it won’t benefit the small businesses who have been forbidden from advertising near the venues in case they sneakily “ambush” the revenue from the official sponsors.

All of this makes me very sad, and very pleased to be out of the country while all of the hoopla is going on. I’m travelling out with my choir, who will be flying back into London on July 24th – three days before the opening ceremony. Judging by the signs which are already up around the London Underground network, advising people to find a different form of transport for the Olympic period, I predict that they will be flying back into pandemonium.

I had originally thought that I might like to attend some of the Olympic events. By the time the ticket ballot came around I had realised quite what I would be letting myself in for, and also how much money I could be placing on the line in an attempt to get a ticket, so I didn’t bother, but it would have been nice to have seen Hannah Cockroft competing in the Paralympics, for instance – we were friends as children. I was even mildly pleased when we won the hosting bid, in a vaguely patriotic way, but in the years since then I have become increasingly curmudgeonly and these days I would far rather see £9.3 billion poured into the NHS, the education system, the transport network… Even setting fire to it would at least provide a source of fuel – perhaps you can run cars on burning bank notes?

So I’m glad to be going to America, with all its airport patdowns and jumpiness about socialism, processed sugar and abortion. I expect America to be a bit odd and obsessed with security and capitalism – it’s part of the appeal, that other-worldly “I can’t believe how weird it is here!” feeling. I’m not so sure I find it endearing back home.

The Problem with Exams

I realised today why I’m having so much trouble motivating myself to revise for these exams.

It isn’t that revision is boring, although it is.

It isn’t that I feel the exams are fairly irrelevant to what I want to achieve, although I do.

It isn’t that I know I’ll do tolerably well even without revising, although I think so.

It’s that I’m irritated by the whole premise of an exam. They don’t test how well you have understood the material, or your ability to think critically and analyse and make an argument. I have written some quite good essays this year which have demonstrated all of those things. But exams have an element that is missing from essays, and that is rote memorisation.

I’m finding it difficult to find another aspect of life where this sort of memorisation is required. When you fill out a tax form, you don’t have to remember exactly how much you earnt that year. You check the paperwork. If you want to research a place to go on holiday, you don’t have to scramble to recall school-day geography lessons, you just find some information about the places you’re considering. When you cook a meal, you are allowed to follow a recipe. The more often you do something, the less likely it is that you will need to depend on an external source of information, but you aren’t ever forbidden from checking it.

Qualified lawyers don’t make their cases based on what they can remember of something they read six months ago, and frankly if they did try that I expect they would be found professionally negligent. Surgeons don’t perform operations without reading the patient’s medical history.

I could go on but I expect you have understood my point by now. All exams are testing is our ability to cram the names and facts and dates into our brains. So when the results come out and the notices go up ranking us in class order for all to see, those rankings don’t actually reflect intelligence or understanding. Certainly there is an element of that, but the ability to remember specific wording and exact names plays a large part. As far as I can tell, the purpose of an exam is to test how good you are at passing exams, and that is seeming increasingly ridiculous to me. At least all the exams I have done up until I reached university did in some way have a purpose – albeit a daft one – because I was proving by achieving high grades that I could… achieve high grades, and then I used that to get to the next rung of the examination ladder.

Now I am stalling, waiting for an opportunity to drop back down the ladder to the start of another degree in which memorisation will be far less important than competence, and exams will be substantially replaced with practical assessments and project work. It just seems to make more sense somehow. What, really, are exams preparing us for? At the end of the day, if I get a 1st in these exams all it will prove is that I spent a lot of long, boring hours reading a list of case names over and over and over, trying to etch them into my memory alongside the relevant concepts. I’ve understood the concepts – just today a friend asked me about something which was relevant to an essay I wrote several weeks ago on international law. I remembered the gist of what I had read, and what I had thought about, but I couldn’t remember the name of the international treaty I was referencing, and I certainly couldn’t remember the specific article number. You know what? It didn’t matter. We didn’t need to know those, and if we had, I could have found the information in seconds.

I will revise for these exams, because I need to get a 2.1 in order to a) live up to my supervisors’ expectations, b) retain my self-respect having achieved high 2.1s all year, and c) stay in the choir. I will jump through the hoops because I signed up for this hoop-jumping over four years ago and I’m certainly not getting myself into £20,000 worth of debt just to throw it all up in a fit of pique over the whole system. But I am not getting het up about it and I’m not measuring my personal worth against my percentage score at the end of it all. Whether you believe in God or not, the fact is this: at the end of our lives, we die no matter how highly qualified. No one goes to heaven on exam results alone.

Going Home

It feels like a very long time since I left Cambridge. It is, really – three weeks, three very busy weeks. Tomorrow I’ll be getting a coach and a train back (a compromise between cost and efficiency – just coach would have been cheaper but longer, just train quicker but more expensive; this way is tolerable in both camps) and immediately getting back into my usual routine by cycling out to the hospital. I had been anxious about how I would let them know I couldn’t come in to volunteer, as I had been expecting at the start of the three weeks to be home by Wednesday, and then a string of events happened which meant that I didn’t have to make a 9am apologetic phone call to cancel.

There are several exciting things lined up for the next month. I’m going on a three-day retreat with the college chapel, just before term starts, and then the following week I’m being baptised. The week after that my mum and her mum and stepdad are coming to visit, to see me being confirmed at the university service. After three years of just missing confirmation services at every church I’ve joined, it’s finally the right time, and I’m glad it didn’t happen earlier now, because I wasn’t ready.

In less churchy news, exam term will be getting going and revision will be kicking off. I’ve been doing a bit over the last couple of weeks but it’s hard to concentrate here and I’m hoping I’ll be more efficient back in the seclusion of the library. It will help that there aren’t any cats or dogs to distract me there.

There will, however, be quite a bit of choir. Things quieten down a lot during exam term, with one rehearsal of the week cut out entirely and two more shortened, but in the first few days before lectures start we have additional rehearsals to make up for it. I’m guessing we’ll be making plans for our summer tour to America as well – it feels a lot closer this side of easter! I need to get myself sorted to find some travel insurance that doesn’t cost the earth, and save up hard so that I have some money to spend while I’m out there. I have very little idea how much things cost in the States.

June is shaping up to be quite exciting as well – from June 14th onwards I’ll be buzzing around the country going to training days, open days, concerts, recording sessions, a special service in a very exciting place, weddings and all kinds of things. It gave me a bit of a jolt to realise that other than a couple of windows of a few days each, I don’t really have time to visit anyone again between now and the end of September. It’s nice to have a full diary again (this time last year the future was looking very empty and bleak) but it’s a little alarming.