crazy day...
it's been such a crazy day today. my emotions have been going up and down. i'm exhausted by it all and it's only 6pm.
it was a good enough morning. last night i'd attended a concert by portuguese Fado singer, Mariza. Fado means 'fate' or 'destiny' in portuguese and it's a style of portuguese music that has been around since the 1800s. it can be set to famous portuguese poems and is usually a song about longing or desire. It was lovely. Mariza is famous for having taken Fado from its 19th century roots and mixing the traditional portuguese guitars with other instruments such as trumpets and pianos and drums but retaining the 'essence' of fado. You can have a listen here:
Oh people from my land
Now I have understood
That this sadness that I carry
Came to me from you
But I digress from my day. *sigh* i had to stay over in Leam so I headed back to London first thing in the morning. For the first time (to be fair) my oyster card failed me. I had put in £10 before getting on the tube home and by right the journey shouldn't have cost me more than £1.80 so imagine my surprise when I checked that the value left on my card was only £4.50. Cue my lining up at the counter and the most unhelpful man who refused to refund me even though a computer printout showed him exactly where I had gone with the oyster card. His reply that there was missing money was because 'There must have been a negative value on the card before I topped it up.' Obviously he wasn't going to take my word that the machine made a mistake.
So i trudge home preparing to deal with the Oyster card hotline who inform me that their computers are updated daily at 2.30am so I have to ring them tomorrow.
So i think so far, so crappy day. But I had to run off to The Apple Shop in White City today because there's a problem with my Macbook. And there the day got slightly better. I grabbed 2 spare oyster cards from home and ran for the bus. I got on the bus and both them had no value in them. *sigh* i was prepared to get off the bus and top up the card but the bus driver looked and me and just waved me on.
So may be nice things happen and I thought things were looking up.
Cue the big but...I had to head back to the Apple shop because the audio jack in my Macbook is jammed. It's convinced that there is a digital output plug in there even where there isn't. So what that means is that if I want to listen to any music I have to use headphones or plug it into a stereo system. It sucks and the Mac guy couldn't fix it. Well, he could except because the audio jack is connected to the logic board, it would cost me £350. No thanks, that's a month's rent and frankly, I can live with listening to music via my headphones. But still it sucks. So back to crappy day.
Then I head home, hitting Tesco on the way to get some groceries and because I had a left a pathetic facebook status update on my facebook earlier after the oyster card trial and the most miserable afternoon ever trying to justify why my research requires funding through writing an 'Impact Plan' on how my research can benefit academic researchers in my field, outside of my field, and public organisations and government bodies and the wider public and communities and there my day got better because of some really nice things that people working in academia and i felt for the first time since I finished my PhD that maybe I have arrived. That I have transition from a student to someone who is going to make academic research their career. Essentially, she had told me 'it's okay to be demoralised' and to feel miserable about the way in which we have to go about trying to justify what we do because this if everyone could see the value in the things we do, then there in a sense, there is no value in trying to find out what it truly means. And for that I felt comforted.
And to top off this crazy day, and it's not ever 7pm. I find this video and I agree with the 2 year boy.
To be or not to be, that is the question...
Yeah, it is!
it was a good enough morning. last night i'd attended a concert by portuguese Fado singer, Mariza. Fado means 'fate' or 'destiny' in portuguese and it's a style of portuguese music that has been around since the 1800s. it can be set to famous portuguese poems and is usually a song about longing or desire. It was lovely. Mariza is famous for having taken Fado from its 19th century roots and mixing the traditional portuguese guitars with other instruments such as trumpets and pianos and drums but retaining the 'essence' of fado. You can have a listen here:
Click to viewOh people from my land
Now I have understood
That this sadness that I carry
Came to me from you
But I digress from my day. *sigh* i had to stay over in Leam so I headed back to London first thing in the morning. For the first time (to be fair) my oyster card failed me. I had put in £10 before getting on the tube home and by right the journey shouldn't have cost me more than £1.80 so imagine my surprise when I checked that the value left on my card was only £4.50. Cue my lining up at the counter and the most unhelpful man who refused to refund me even though a computer printout showed him exactly where I had gone with the oyster card. His reply that there was missing money was because 'There must have been a negative value on the card before I topped it up.' Obviously he wasn't going to take my word that the machine made a mistake.
So i trudge home preparing to deal with the Oyster card hotline who inform me that their computers are updated daily at 2.30am so I have to ring them tomorrow.
So i think so far, so crappy day. But I had to run off to The Apple Shop in White City today because there's a problem with my Macbook. And there the day got slightly better. I grabbed 2 spare oyster cards from home and ran for the bus. I got on the bus and both them had no value in them. *sigh* i was prepared to get off the bus and top up the card but the bus driver looked and me and just waved me on.
So may be nice things happen and I thought things were looking up.
Cue the big but...I had to head back to the Apple shop because the audio jack in my Macbook is jammed. It's convinced that there is a digital output plug in there even where there isn't. So what that means is that if I want to listen to any music I have to use headphones or plug it into a stereo system. It sucks and the Mac guy couldn't fix it. Well, he could except because the audio jack is connected to the logic board, it would cost me £350. No thanks, that's a month's rent and frankly, I can live with listening to music via my headphones. But still it sucks. So back to crappy day.
Then I head home, hitting Tesco on the way to get some groceries and because I had a left a pathetic facebook status update on my facebook earlier after the oyster card trial and the most miserable afternoon ever trying to justify why my research requires funding through writing an 'Impact Plan' on how my research can benefit academic researchers in my field, outside of my field, and public organisations and government bodies and the wider public and communities and there my day got better because of some really nice things that people working in academia and i felt for the first time since I finished my PhD that maybe I have arrived. That I have transition from a student to someone who is going to make academic research their career. Essentially, she had told me 'it's okay to be demoralised' and to feel miserable about the way in which we have to go about trying to justify what we do because this if everyone could see the value in the things we do, then there in a sense, there is no value in trying to find out what it truly means. And for that I felt comforted.
And to top off this crazy day, and it's not ever 7pm. I find this video and I agree with the 2 year boy.
To be or not to be, that is the question...
Yeah, it is!