Five Year Plan

Over on Syntax of Seaweed (must remember to ask if that blog title is just an attempt to fuse the concepts of linguistics and veganism, of it there's a story behind it), Colm has been talking about making a Five Year Plan.

I realised the other day that I'm about two years into my last "five year plan". I came up with it while I was cycling around Estonia in May/June 2009, and it's now May/June 2011, so...

So I guess it's time to see where I'm at, in the grand scheme of things.

I have to admit, the FYP I made back in 2009 was largely the result of a mid-tour crisis. Since 2007 I had been flirting with a vague idea that I would eventually move to Estonia to work and study for at least a year, but I hadn't really narrowed down what would be involved in such a thing.

I had been "Living Vague" for a few years at this point, having come to the conclusion that my ability to make decisions about my future left something to be desired. This was the result of a roof-top epiphany I had back in 2005. To put this in context, I have to go back to 2003.

In 2003 I was completing my honours year in a double degree: Arts (majoring in English Literature) and Education (secondary English/Drama). At this point in my life, my plan for the future was to teach high school English and Drama for a couple of years before setting up a private Speech studio. I was teaching part-time, finishing my honours programme and thinking of trying to get work in Canberra (the country's capital), as I thought it would be a good experience. I had applied for a job there, and thought I had a pretty good idea about what would happen next.

In 2005 I found myself standing on the roof of a small school in a small town in Tasmania, applying a large sign to a short wall. There was one point, while waiting for my boss to bring the rest of the equipment up onto the roof, where I looked out over the rolling hills to the sea, and thought: "How the heck did I get here?"

At that time, I never wanted to teach again. Although I still had vague dreams of becoming a private Speech teacher, I was really looking at any path that would take me away from classrooms. I realised I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Not a clue.

I also realised that, really, I never had. I just gave people a sensible sounding answer whenever they asked me, and then went along with that. When my "plans" were tested, they crumbled like the poorly formed illusions they were.

So, in 2005 I decided my plan for the future was "just keep swimming".

In 2007 I decided I wanted to spend some time in Estonia, but was still basically taking my outlook on life from a combination of Dory (from Finding Nemo) and assorted lyrics from Robert Lee Castleman's songs (Well I'm blessed, I guess/By never knowing which road I'm choosing/To me the next best thing/To playing and winning is playing and losing).

"Living Vague", like I said. Just waiting to see what comes next, and giving up the illusion that I can have any control over it.

Then, halfway through my cycling tour of Estonia, I found myself in Rakvere. Now, I'm sure Rakvere has its good points, but it was the ugliest town I had encountered on my tour, and I was there for a proper rest-stop. I had passed through some genuinely pretty places, and was now cooling my heels (well, actually walking around a lot) in a town that seemed to consist mostly of ugly Soviet-style apartments. After you've done the castle, and gone for a walk around town, there really isn't that much else to do in Rakvere.

It gave me time to think, and I was suddenly over come with a sense of "What are you doing with your life?" You want to move to Estonia? Why? What are you going to do? Where will that get you?

If it is possible to have a crisis of faith in regards to vagueness, I was having one. This nagging sense that I didn't know what I wanted out of life haunted me for the next three days. Then I found myself in the Liiv Museum.

I had no idea who Johann Liiv was before I walked into that museum. I was only familiar with a handful of Estonian writers, and I only really knew them by reputation - my grasp of the language wasn't good enough for anything else. The woman who came to give me a ticket asked me what I was doing in Estonia. One thing lead to another, and I found myself saying that I wanted to come back in a few years to study literature.

It was something I had said before, but up until that moment I hadn't realised I meant it. Previously, it had just been an idea I was playing with, now it was an honest-to-goodness goal.

I left that museum with a book of Liiv's poems and an idea of where I wanted to be in five years time.

Then I started to think about what I would need to do in the next five years to get there.

Here's the list of things I came up with:

• Learn Estonian
• Learn at least German or Russian - preferably both
• Get a Master's degree in something
• Get some papers published in journals
• Get TEFL qualifications

So far I've got the Masters and I've started making progress with Estonian and German. Russian has moved to the back burner a little, and I personally blame Italian. Not that I'm learning Italian. I am so not learning Italian. I haven't even thought about the TEFL qualifications yet, but I've still got three years to go, and quite frankly I think the Diploma of Languages and a Grad Cert in Tertiary Teaching is enough to go on with for the time being.

Oh, and I've recently had my first honest-to-goodness academic journal article published in the Australian Library Journal.

That's not too bad, I guess. I really need to focus more on the journal article side of things, I've got a few degrees to finish off and I need to start thinking about that TESL stuff eventually, but I seem to be making fairly decent progress through my five year plan.

Which means it must be about time for something completely unexpected to carry me away in a totally unpredictable direction.

Bring it on, I say. If the past is anything to go by, 2013 should be an interesting place.

Makes me laugh

Every single time:



(Don't expect to see anything, just listen).

Nomenclature

I've been thinking about my name lately.

I'm a little bit over it, to be frank. I never used to think it was that complicated, but lately I've started to notice how often I need to repeat myself when I say it, or how often I trip over the keys while typing it out, or how it's just stupid when you think about how someone from a Non-English-Speaking-Background would pronounce it.

My surname in particular is a bit of a problem. B R Y A N. Pronounced br-EYE-an. Learning Estonian and German (and dabbling in other language I'm not supposed to be learning) has lead me to believe that a name with a Y in it is just asking for trouble - especially if it's pronounced like EYE. I've been thinking for some time that I might try to go with either my middle name or my Grandmother's maiden name when I move to Estonia, just to make things easier on the people around me. My cousin switched to Alas for professional purposes when he moved to Estonia. Partly because "Dullroy" is even worse than "Bryan".

As for my first name? I'm just a little over the number of syllables in it. Two is getting to be too many - especially with the R in the middle of it. Do you know how many ways you can pronounce the letter R? Of course you do, I've rabbited on about it endlessly. Quite frankly, I don't think I could be bothered trilling it properly so that people would understand how to spell it based on my pronunciation.

I used to be called "Shazz" a fair amount in high school, which is easier on the tongue. I've often wondered, though, if I could get away with calling myself "Shan" (as in Sh-ah-n) - like the Irish "Sian", but without the crazy Celtic spelling. I've accidentally typed it that way a few times (or as "Sharn"), and every now and then when I get over-tired and a bit lazy I've caught myself saying it that way.

I think it would be good to have a name that sounds more-or-less right when you slur it incoherently. Having a name that requires annunciation is just old, man. I'm, like, totally over it.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda...

So, the other night I learnt that Estonian only has one conditional past tense form of verbs.

This is vaguely laughable. Estonian has fourteen cases while English barely has four (and only really uses them for personal pronouns). Estonian has two forms of the infinitive while we only have one, and 6 present tense forms while we only have two. Estonian has 32 letters in its alphabet, while we only have 26.

And yet, while English has four different past tense conditionals, Estonian only has one. I feel like saying: "Are you sure about that? You don't have another six conditionals tucked away somewhere?"

But, it's got me thinking about the PT conditionals we use. My Estonian teacher never learnt the difference between the three rhyming words (would, could, should). At TAFE, where she studied English, they never covered the variations between them. I don't know about "might" - we didn't talk about that one.

But, for anyone else who isn't sure about the difference, here's a simple(ish) explanation:

Should = shall
Would = will
Could = can
Might = may (sort of).

"I should have gone" is connected to "I shall go".

"I would have gone" is connected to "I will go".

Sadly, we don't really use "shall" as much as we used to, so a lot of people don't get the subtle difference between "shall" and "will". Think of it as the difference between destiny and desire. "I shall go" implies that it is supposed to happen, whereas "I will go" originally implied something that you want to happen. "Will" is a word we stole from the Germans and it originally meant "want" - think of the sentence: "it is my will that this should happen". We kinda stole "shall", too, from the German word "sollen".

Of course, in modern colloquial usage, "will" has long since subsumed the meaning of "shall", and now it covers both concepts - except in the past tense. I love the way we have the left-over remains of long-dead concepts still kicking around in our language.

But it's probably worth remembering the classic line from Cinderella: "You shall go to the ball!" There's something definite in that...

"I could have gone" is connected to "I can go".

"I might have gone" is connected to "I may go"... Except it really isn't.

"Can" and "may" are two more words where one has taken over the meaning of the other. "Can" is, of course, whether you are capable of doing something, while "may" is whether you are allowed to do something. These days, "can" is used to cover both meanings - and, even in the past tense, people often use "could" when they once would have meant "might".

"I should have gone to the ball..." (I was really supposed to go, but I didn't)
"I would have gone to the ball..." (I wanted to go, but I didn't)
"I could have gone to the ball..." (I had the opportunity/ability to go, but I didn't)
"I might have gone to the ball..." -- Okay, actually this one is a bit weird. While "might" is technically related to "may", it's actually slightly off kilter - more closely related to "maybe" than "may".

No one ever actually says "I might have gone to the ball" and means "I was allowed to go, but didn't". Usually, "might" is just a catch-all conditional - a way of saying it is/was/could be possible, but there are no guarantees. It has well and truly lost it's connection with "may" in this case, and is more of a pure and true conditional than the others.

While I could potentially say "Oh, yeah, I should have gone to the ball" and the sentence can stand on it's own, if I say "I might have gone to the ball" I really need to follow it with the reason why I didn't: "I might have gone to the ball, if not for those pesky kids!"

In this way, it could cover any of the meanings of should, could or would. It just shouldn't.

The strange thing is, that "might" often carries the meaning of "can" in practical use, while "could" often carries the meaning of "may". "I asked my mother if I could go to the ball, and she said I could - as long as I cleaned up my room, first." As opposed to "I might be able to go to the ball, if I can get a good dress."

The English language is an odd thing.

By the way, one last thing:

It's "would have" NEVER "would of". Same for the others.

Definitely got talent...

A Strange Game

There's an extent to which Eurovision makes no sense at all. The rules are largely there for cat wrangling purposes. The votes are calculated based on a weird mix of maths, politics and name-dropping.

I have to say, though, Eurovision 2011 was something to look at. I want to know who was the projection/lighting designer. Did each country have their own, or did the host country provide the design like they provided the space?

I lost count of the amount of times I found myself ignoring whoever was on the stage in order to watch what was going on behind them. My favourite backgrounds would have to have been Ireland, Switzerland and Serbia. Least favourite was definitely Sweden. That was also my least favourite song/performance. The entire thing was all noise and nothing else. I have no idea why all those countries kept giving them points - they ended up in the top three, while a lovely song like Switzerland's came last. I guess not enough people felt they had to stay on Switzerland's good side...

Now, I say my favourite backgrounds were those for Ireland, Switzerland and Serbia, but the hands-down best background was one that wasn't designed at all. Ukraine's Sand Art was just fantastic. I started to get the feeling that the song was there to highlight the art, rather than the other way around.

This is the second year in a row Serbia has delivered a blond with a pixie-cut, and for the second year in a row it was almost impossible to not like the performance. It was definitely one of my favourites, and I can't believe it didn't do better in the rankings.

I spent the last half-hour of the show yelling at the TV screen: "Vote for Serbia! And Switzerland! And Iceland! There's no way Greece was better than Bosnia-Herzegovina! Stop voting for Sweden! No, really, stop voting for them, they were terrible!"

It didn't influence the outcome, of course. I also spent a great deal of time shouting "vote for us!" ("us" being Estonia), only to then shout "no, vote for Switzerland, they were so much better than us!"

Ah, but no one listened.

Of course, some of the better acts (like Norway) didn't even make it through to the finals, which just goes to prove that the European voting public and/or judging panels have questionable taste.

For my money, the top five acts were Serbia (English version), Iceland, Italy, Denmark and Ukraine... ah, but I should say that Ukraine is there by virtue of the sand art, rather than the song.

I also thought Ireland or Denmark would have won - they just seemed like the kind of acts that would win Eurovision (in spite of the haircuts).

But, hey, what do I know. You can't predict Eurovision. It's a strange game.

Screaming Hairy Armadillo Babies!

I just had to say that. In fact, I have to say it again:

Screaming Hairy Armadillo Babies!

Sign of the Times

It's a sign of the times
That my love for you is getting so much stronger
It's a sign of the times
And I know that I won't have to wait much longer

I hate that song, but often find it stuck in my head. It's one of those stupid pandering-to-daft-and-overly-romantic-teenage-girlies songs that was so common in the 50s and 60s. "I know you're bound to propose to me at any moment now, even though you act like a jerk and treat me like I don't matter, because I can just feel it. I'm so emotionally caught up in you that I just know you feel the same way about me even though you are carefully disguising it as extreme indifference."

Ugh.

Anyway, it wasn't actually my intention to write about that song (curse it's catchy tune!) but rather sign writing.

I briefly worked as a sign writer's assistant while studying for my graduate diploma, and every now and then I miss it.

Strange, really, considering I wasn't any good at it. Turns out that a lack of attention to detail, poor time management skills and limited manual dexterity do not make for being a good sign writer.

My boss (a fine man - one of my favourite people in the world, but so darn eccentric he makes me look normal), valiantly put up with me for the three months he said he would, but made it perfectly clear sign writing was not the job for me. He rarely said it directly, of course, but would often look at me and say "You'll make a fine librarian." It took a while for me to work out he actually was saying "give up your day job", but then I've never been the sharpest pencil in the draw.

I love being a librarian, but every now and then I'll look at a sign and remember what it was like to be behind those things - surrounded by fonts and designs, with the smell of all sorts of different things in the air, feeling the sense of achievement that comes from making something with my hands...

Sure, my spacial awareness leaves something to be desired, and my ability to count isn't good enough to compensate for it. Okay, I have about as much control over my hands as apes have over their feet. And I will grant that my inability to keep track of time is something of an issue in an industry where you bill people according to how much time you've spent on their job.

But on the other hand, I never once cut myself. I consider that to be something of an achievement, considering I was carrying knives around in my back pocket. And I never once accidentally wrote on my hand with that thing that looks like a pen but is actually a needle. Given the fact that I'm usually the biggest klutz on the face of the earth, I think this proves I have some potential for improvement.

I like to think that, eventually, I could make a somewhat competent sign writer. Plus, I only ever worked with vinyl, and part of me is just itching to do something involving wood or 3D effects. I used to borrow my boss' SignCraft magazines and think about how wonderful it would be to work up to the point of making some of the good signs.

My boss never let me near anything terribly complicated, though. Not even paint. Probably because I usually stuffed it up, which was kind of expensive.

A girl can dream, though, can't she?

Google Ads

This has happened to me a few times, now:

I'll do a Google search for something, click on a link and get redirected to a completely different page - a commercial page that has absolutely nothing to do with my search (usually trying to sell me cars, or some such), and with something about "jump" in the URL.

When I go back to Google and click on the link again, I get straight through to the page I wanted.

What's going on here? Has Google finally decided that shoving ads and sponsored pages in the middle of your search results and at random intervals in the pages you read isn't good enough, and now they're just going to take you to whatever commercial page they feel like instead of the page you've chosen?

If so, then why aren't they following the usual pattern of choosing "recommended sites" that fit the topics I'm searching for? Sending me to a page about cars when I was looking for "language levels" is sloppy. It's so far away from what I was looking for that I'm likely to notice immediately and go back to my search without being distracted by it.

Also, taking me to sites when I haven't clicked on them is evil. So if this is a Google thing, then they've clearly decided to completely abandon their "don't be evil" mantra.

Which makes me think that it might not be Google. Not because I don't think Google would have turned evil, but rather because I think they would have been less obvious about it.

So who is doing this, then? How are they jumping between my search screen and the page I want to see? How can I make them stop?

Plain Dress

One of my favourite books of all times is Jane Eyre by Currer Bell*. In it, the lead character often describes herself as dressing in "Quaker-like" clothes. This was sketchily outlined as being really plain, unfashionable and only remarkable for how boring they were.

This was, until I recently decided to read a bit about them, one of my few exposures to the concept of the Quakers. They apparently had a "style" - Jane Eyre said so, because she said her clothes were in the Quaker style. And, as I have been reading, they really did have a "style", of sorts. For a while, at any rate. It was a style that wasn't unique to them, though. At least, not in the basic concept: Plain Dress.

Plain Dress is a funny concept. It's a very common expectation among a number of religions and denominations, but people eventually and inevitably get it wrong.

When Plain Dress is first adopted by a group (be they Quakers, Mennonites, Hasidic Jews or Muslims) the idea is to dress modestly. To eschew the latest fashions and instead wear clothes that are simple, practical and humble. People who dress plainly do not go in for the latest frilly collars. Indeed, their collars are not frilly at all. They do not go in for bright, attention grabbing colours. They do not go in for clothes that are made of some material that looks good, but doesn't stand up to the test of time.

And most assuredly, the original idea is to eschew clothes that scream "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!" After all the idea of Plain Dress is to dress plainly.

When groups like Quakers and the Amish first started dressing like that, they weren't dressing particularly differently from the rest of society. Their clothes were, simply, boring and practical. They also weren't the latest fashions - probably a few seasons out of step.

Somehow, though, most groups that adopt Plain Dress seem to get the wrong end of the stick. Instead of simply being "not in fashion", they stick with the same style of clothing even though it becomes wildly anachronistic. After a while, a style of clothing becomes so out-of-date that it becomes a kind of Fancy Dress, rather than Plain Dress. It becomes a badge of peculiarity, screaming "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!" even more loudly than wearing the latest fashions would.

I'm not sure what the reasoning behind that is. How exactly do so many groups go from "let's dress in a boring way so no one will notice us" to "let's dress like we have come from a hundred years in the past"? What strange force of peer pressure causes people to dress identically for hundreds of years, when the original concept was simply to avoid flashy clothes?

The Quakers worked this out a few decades ago. Rufus Jones pointed out in one of his books that it was one of the most sensible things they did: decide to be a bit less "peculiar" in their appearance and remember the point behind a lot of their habits. I wonder, though, if they still go with the concept of Plain Dress, but apply it to modern clothing.

Do they choose to wear pants that fit comfortably and wear well even though they are a bit out of fashion? Do they choose clothes that cover their entire torso? Do they choose to wear outerwear that adequately covers their underwear? Do they choose to wear clothes that are practical and make sense even though no one is selling them at major department stores and they have to go out of their way to shops that specialise in useful clothing?

Okay, maybe I just described my own clothing style. But, if that was what Plain Dress means for the 21st Century, it could be kind of cool, really. Previously, I've just worked on the assumption that my compulsive need to buy clothes that fit comfortably and wear well would doom me to looking like a dork for the rest of my life. Now I can tell myself it's an ideological principle, and feel better about it. "No, I'm not dressed like a boring dork, I'm in Plain Dress".


*Yes, everyone knows Jane Eyre was written by Charlotte Brontë. She wrote it as "Currer Bell". Look at the title page of the good, scholarly copies of the book - it still says "by Currer Bell".

Out of Sight

I have this interesting thing that happens with my family.

Everyone who has known me for more than five minutes realises my brain works on the out-of-sight-out-of-mind principle. It's why I write messages on the back of my hands and on my mirror (and occasionally other surfaces). It's why I leave things where I'm likely to trip over them. If it isn't directly in front of me, I have great difficulty remembering it ever existed.

I suspect I was one of those kids who failed the Piagettian test with the ball long after they should have worked it out. You know the one: you show a kid a ball, and then roll it behind a couch. Does the kid go looking for the ball, or assume the ball is no longer there?

For many years my filing system consisted of leaving things were I was likely to see them. We will not go into my mother's tendency to move them and then deny ever seeing them. That's a different "thing".

No, my thing at the moment involves people moving things to places where I'll never see them, and still expecting me to remember that they exist.

"Let us shift the pot plants," they say, "to the side of the house where they will have a better ratio of shade to sun." That's okay, I'm fine with that, but for heavens sake don't turn around three weeks later and say "Sharon, why don't you ever water those pot plants?" When do I ever see them? I had originally put them somewhere visible, you have moved them somewhere invisible. The pot plants have ceased to exist.

Yes, in theory I know exactly where the pot plants are. However, without a reminder within visual range, that knowledge remains unaccessed by the active part of my brain.

These are things they know about me. So my only conclusion, regarding this behaviour of theirs, is that they are deliberately messing with my mind.

I don't think that's very nice.

Tights are not pants

I would just like to remind people that tights are not pants. Particularly when they are not opaque.

If you can see skin-tone through the fibres of the tights, then you should probably consider wearing them as underwear, rather than assuming they will adequately cover your underwear. Especially if you expect to be walking up stairs.