Strong Verbs Are Just Better

God I pick the worst time to wibble.

Have to go to work in ten minutes. My absolute saint of a mother will be arriving around lunchtime and cleaning out my room. The plan is to be ready to go by time time I finish work at six.

I never did get a photo of the jacaranda in full bloom outside my window. Every year, I only remember as I'm leaving, and the flowers are already wilting.

I probably should turn off my Narnia playlist, it's really quite depressing.

So K and my Wife endured a double round of college fire alarms this morning. The Wife sent me an email saying 'be glad you weren't here'. Except that clearly I cannot be spared the joy, because the hostel fire alarms went off at one am this morning. SIGH.

However, due to the fact that they close the common room at 11pm, I actually got more sleep last night than I've had in one go for about a week.

another update on my conference-going over on my medieval blog. I HAVE A COPY OF THE NEW BLUE BOOK. I will love it and cuddle it and call it Hnæf.

This entertaining conversation between myself, my boss the Elegant Dutchwoman and the head Chef, henceforth known as Mad Scotswoman.

Highly looks up from reception computer and greets a waiting Student, just as the phone rings.

Highly: Just a moment, while I answer this. Hello, Obvious College Reception, this is Highly Speaking, how may I help you?
Phone, with a crackle for mobile transmission: Hello, Highly, this is Elegant Dutchwoman, calling for Mad Scotswoman. *sounds of students clattering around dining hall* There's quite a few boys here, have you sold any meal tickets?
Highly: Yes, one.
Elegant Dutchwoman, to Mad Scotswoman: Just one.
Mad Scotswoman: Who was it?
Elegant Dutchwoman: Who was it?
Highly: It was Generic Pymble Number Fifty-Five.
Elegant Dutchwoman: It was Generic Pymble Number Fifty-Five.
Mad Scotswoman: Ah, GPN55. *more clattering and banging*
Elegant Dutchwoman: Who else was there?
Highly: No one.
Mad Scotswoman: Well, there's Generic Pymble Number Seventy-Four.
Elegant Dutchwoman: GPN74. Write that down.
Highly writes down GPN74.
Mad Scotswoman: And I there's Generic Pymble Number One Hundred and Nine. Is that GPN109?
Elegant Dutchwoman: Yes, that's GPN109, write that down, Highly.
Highly writes that down.
Elegant Dutchwoman: There was someone else, who was it?
Mad Scotswoman, very reluctantly: Noo... well... there was kayloulee... with Highly's boyfriend.
Highly: He's not my boyfriend anymore!
Elegant Dutchwoman: He's not her boyfriend anymore.
Mad Scotswoman: He's not her boyfriend anymore?
Highly: He's not my boyfriend anymore, and he often comes to lunch with K without eating anything.
Elegant Dutchwoman: He's not her boyfriend anymore and he often comes to lunch without eating anything.
Mad Scotswoman: Oh.
Elegant Dutchwoman: Write those down!
Highly stares at the things she's already written down, and decides that's enough. Phone hangs up.

Waiting Student: I take it he's not your boyfriend anymore?

There are several new and exciting aspects to research which my little modern project has suddenly made available to me. Like primary documents, within arm's reach! The knowledge that there are lots of sources, both easy and difficult to access, if I only look in the right places. There will be dead ends, but... *glees*

For example, this afternoon I walked down the corridor and looked at the official college photos. Evelyn 'Dick' Dickson does not appear once in said photos, in the twenty odd years she lived here. I wouldn't expect her in the years she was only Louisa's guest, but when the Council insisted she enrol in University (who paid her fees, I wonder??), it seems she did not become a student of Women's College. (I'll have to check the Roll, though. See above point about LOTS OF SOURCES), and nor does she appear in photographs in the years she was Honorary Physician. (The latter doesn't seem to be odd- at that early stage no tutors or staff appear in the photographs aside from Louisa.)

Louisa's sister-in-law appears in one photograph as Principal, in one of the years in which Louisa was overseas visiting the aging Eleanor Grove. On some occaisions Evelyn acted as Principal in Louisa's stead (she normally acted as Louisa's secretary), but interestingly, no photographs feature Evelyn as stand-in Principal.

Maybe the year in question was the only year in which Louisa's absence was long enough to warrant a stand-in in a photo. Maybe the photo was taken for press purposes.

There are a lot of gaps in the early photo wall, however... I wonder what factors meant they took no photos?

I HAVE A JOB!

I start training as a receptionist at college sometime soon. I get to work right through the winter break five days a week, and I get to work second semester without giving up the Library. The library's not that exciting and it doesn't pay much, but I love it very much, so I am a Happy little Highly now.

So I decided to tidy up the Women's Collection and the Fiction Collection while I was in the library tonight. And I discovered that, holy St Catherine¹, we have an absolutely brilliant collection of feminist literature. Now, this wouldn't normally be my idea of fun, but given the patchiness of our collection on all other matters, this is impressive. We have a book on women in science fiction (both characters and authors)! We have an extremely battered old copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book I've heard about but never seen. I'd always assumed it was something in the generic line of Everywoman or Everygirl, the latter of which I grew up with and the former of which I considered to contain entirely too much about pregnancy and menopause and other icky grown up things. From looking at the contents, though, it's not just an early production in the same mould as those two, it's a really really good example of the genre and more people should have copies.³

Anyway, on a whim (feminist literature being as far removed from Wulfstanian law codes as you can possibly get), I borrowed out Naomi Wolf's The Beaty Myth. It's shitting me off- what's with theorists and not footnoting anything? She's telling me a fascinating story, but the only paper trails I could concievably chase up are the court cases! This annoyed me about Germaine Greer, the one time I tried to read her, and it annoys me about Geraldine Brooks too, and (to a certain extent) Richard Dawkins, when I tried reading him. These people like to weave stories about how shocking or fantastic something is and just never back up their historical content! For all I know, they could be interpreting their sources entirely wrong, but how am I supposed to trace it? How am I supposed to know if she's right that until the industrial revolution, women's work was complementary to men's in the family unit, and valued equally? How am I supposed to know if she's right that images of beauty only flooded the market in the nineteenth century? Why am I supposed to believe a theory based on history if the history is apparently unsourced? As far as I can tell, she's just *decided* that's the way the distant past was, although she seems to be better informed about the recent past. (Or perhaps I'm more poorly informed about my own century, and so more gullible?)^!

Ahem. That wasn't supposed to be a rant. That was SUPPOSED to be a rave, along the lines of: this book is really, really interesting. It may not be all 'true', whatever true is in these matters, but it's certainly interesting.

Did you know that in 1977 a fellow called John Molloy, considering the problems which faced women in the workplace when it comes to dress (this segment follows a large passage on the problem of being expected to look 'feminine' without being sexually attractive or inviting sexual attraction), conducted some experiments. He got a cohort of women, and had them dress in a uniform fashion (as do men)- a skirt suit, with a pallete of colours, high heel shoes, makeup, some jewellery, but overall a sober appearance- and all wear them to work for a year. The control group, meanwhile, continued dressing fashionably for work. After a year, the women dressed in 'uniform' reported that their bosses attitudes toward them had improved, they were afforded more respect, and were twice as likely to be recommended for promotion.
Nevertheless, no one took up this recommendation. The New York Times Magazine decried him for requiring women to 'look like men' (what, exactly, about skirts, high heels and makeup looks like men?), and the findings- apparently based on extensive testing, which is rare enough in this sort of field- never really affected the way women thought about proffessional dress. Of course, it doesn't have much effect if one woman adopts a sober, relatively timeless outfit. That's not a uniform, it's a personal fashion choice. Wolf quotes Molloy: Without a uniform, there is no equality of image.
Think about it. For women, 'presentation' requires an entirely separate skill set to the one which qualifies you for the job, as well as the money that goes into maintaining hair, makeup, clothes, and so on. For men, presentation requires only the money to buy a good quality suit.

Amusingly, Molloy's 'uniform' suit is just what I asked my mother to buy me for my twenty-first- something sober, unlikely to go out of fashion, consisting of a skirt and jacket or skirt, pants and jacket, in a design which she (or someone else) can easily take in and out as my weight goes up and down and my shape changes every few months, as it does, and sensible, low-heeled shoes to wear with it. The shoes will have to be replaced every few years, but the rest of it ought to do me for interviews and work and conferences for at least five years. Ten'd be good.⁴

~

1. Patron saint of archivists, librarians, libraries, scholars, schoolchildren, philosophers, students and spinsters², sadly struck from the canon in 1969. I am now swearing by St Catherine on all matters academic and book related.
2. All of which categories I have, am, or would like to belong to.
3. Somehow, in googling for those links, I discovered these two highlarious sites: Iron Hymen (for girls) and Sex Is For Fags (for boys). They afforded me some minutes of sarcastic amusement. And yet it all seems eerily familiar.
4. These things do last forever. I was wearing last year the suit jacket my mother wore to work before I was born. I'd be wearing it still if it hadn't gone mouldy in my wardrobe over summer. Must get it dry-cleaned. She offered to hunt me out the skirt that went with it, having given up hope of fitting back into it (and if she ever does, she damn well deserves a new skirt!). Maybe I should adopt that as my uniform, eighties shoulder pads and all.
! Oh, and goblinpaladin: she uses 'Byzantine' as some sort of insult to laws. Can't quite make out what she means. (Draconian? Impossibly complex? Sexist? Who knows?)

Actually, a story about a lovely lady who is not a nun, and the rather awesome thing she was able to do, with the aid of a group of nuns. Her name is Mary Assunta, she was a resident of Women's College for six years- so she's been around the whole time that I've been here- and she's just finished her PHD and is working for the Australian Cancer Council, involved in tobacco control in the asia-pacific. A few years ago she recieved the prestigious Luther Terry Award.

One of the exploits which put her on the map of global anti-tobacco advocacy was getting up, in the middle of the 1998 stockholders meeting of Phillip Morris International- before six hundred immediate spectators and live global video feeds- to ask the amusingly-named CEO, Bible, why so much tobacco marketing in Malaysia was being aimed at minors.

And how did a Malaysian anti-tobacco campaigner come to be in the stockholder's meeting for Phillip Morris? Ah, well, here's where the nuns come in...
There's a lovely little community of nuns, somewhere in the US, whose convent owns a nice chunk of Phillip Morris shares, and has done for the last hundred years or so. Having decided that actually, the tobacco industry is a nasty thing, did they sell their stocks? No, they did not. Instead, they hung onto them, and routinely nominate anti-tobacco campaigners as their proxies to stockholder meetings. Mary was the first international anti-tobacco advocate they had ever sent.

Isn't that cool?

Aaand... coming up, as a special present to those on my flist: tales of guerilla advocacy.

phrasemuffin wins. He wins so hard.

Today he presented me with the bestest birthday present ever. I'm someone who takes great glee in putting together idiosyncratic and perfectly targeted presents for people, but I am rarely the recipient of such things. And Random David just took the cake for effort and obscurity.

He presented me with:

An XKCD shirt

and a pinboard. Yes, a pinboard. Said pinboard had pinned to it a small stuffed Puss In Boots, and five cards. Said cards had inscribed on them LOLCAT references! "I can has cheeseburger". "My innocent eyes, let me show you them."

He assures me that he can never regard XKCD or LOLCats or Beowulf references without thinking of me. The first and third I understand; the presence of the second in the list induces some dismay in me. It seems that, as well as kayloulee being Fresher Highly, a year in her company has seen me morph into Senior Kayloulee. I had barely seen a LOLCat before I visited her room... And I dubbed her Mrs Figg for her propensity to subject visitors to photographs of cats.
Beware, kayloulee. I am absorbing your identity.

P.S: goblinpaladin is reading me Beowulf. EEE!