Author: Milan

Nutritional matters

Since I am being constantly criticized on all sides about my diet, I feel some response is in order. It’s not as though I enjoy eating little but bagels and beans and that there is some obvious and much healthier and more enjoyable solution that I am spurning due to masochistic urges. I am constrained in terms of time, access to equipment, access to foodstuffs, finances, and lack of knowledge.

Food here is a genuine conundrum. The nearest grocery store, Sainsbury’s, has a minimal selection of foods that are not pre-prepared. As Jonathan identified, there is a ‘take away culture’ in Britain, which would be fine with me if only the food being taken away was closer to being nutritionally balanced. The lack of raw materials doesn’t matter too much for me, in the end, as I have serious concerns about hygiene in the small and generally bitterly cold Library Court kitchen. Toasters, hot plates, or George Foreman style grills are strictly forbidden in college. I also have no pots or pans (though Margaret kindly got me some dishes), and relatively minimal amount of time that can be dedicated to cooking. The major alternative to eating bagels, cheese, beans, and a few pieces of fruit is to eat the college meals. Unfortunately, they are seriously awful – especially the vegetarian option. It is usually a wicked hot bowl of steaming animal fat, along with some limp noodles and bits of ground-up boiled vegetable.

Opting out of college meals gives me about three Pounds a day to spend on groceries. I’ve spent about £300 on groceries during the eleven weeks or so during which I have been here, so the £120 that I will get back for skipping a term’s worth of meals is not an amount to be snickered at. It would buy almost 60 cheese ploughman sandwiches, or almost 250 cans of Sainsbury’s baked beans: each of which, with a bit of mustard or hot sauce, would be more enjoyable than the few meals I ate in college.

The healthiest option would probably be to buy pots and pans, walk often to the Tesco on Cowley Road, buy vegetables, and brave the cold Library Court kitchen, with its dirty surfaces and strange smells, to cook them. This seems extremely unlikely to transpire. The next best option is to carry on mostly eating the pre-prepared foods at Sainsbury’s, but focus on the ones with a bit more nutritional value: paying the extra Pounds for their decent veggie soups and odd, individually packaged raw vegetables. All that can be bolstered, somewhat, through the acquisition of minerals from supplements: especially iron, since I eat virtually nothing that contains it in quantity. This, I am endeavoring to do. It would also be good to find some low cost eatery with high protein and vitamin content to its food. I shall continue seeking it. If I find one, I will make a point of eating there with something like bi-weekly regularity.

Re-hydrated and bursting with vitamins and minerals

Cornmarket Street with festive lights

Without entirely meaning to, I have become nocturnal: going to sleep with the rising of the sun and waking eight hours later at nightfall. Now, I just need a black trench coat, a lot of eye makeup, and some piercings. While I’ve always had a generalized dislike towards the yellow cancer ball that looms in the sky – going back, perhaps, to my short-lived baseball days – it may not be socially or academically viable to live outside its time of ascendance.

I spent the time between about 7:00am and 4:30 having some of the stranger dreams of my life. There were live action levels from GoldenEye, as well as a lengthy dream entirely in the form of a peculiar kind of line animation. It reminded me of a series of nine drawings I once saw in a psychology textbook, as well as one exhibit at the Tate Modern. I also remember frantically enciphering things on Jonathan’s old Mac, in his former basement bedroom.

After waking up properly at 4:30pm, still feeling quite ill, I headed off to buy soup and vitamins, as I haven’t eaten anything today and don’t feel up to solid foods. That’s in addition to a newfound skepticism towards bagels as a source of nutrition. Thankfully, this evening was unusually warm; so much so that walking around in a shirt and Gore-tex outer jacket was perfectly pleasant. Hopefully, that trend will project north and east during the next two weeks or so.

On my way to buy nutritious liquids, on account of an ongoing gastrointestinal filibuster against anything more substantial, I received an unexpected package from Amazon.co.uk. I also got all my thank-you letters to family members not yet savvy with the electronic mail returned. Apparently, if you put the return address in small letters in the top left corner of the envelope in the UK, they send it back to you saying “Have a 1st class Christmas.” How kind.

Anyhow, back to this mysterious package. Included therein: a photography book, Lego-branded disc shooting weapon, and short note, not including the identity of the sender. If this was an oversight, anyone who sends me an email with the title of the book will get the credit for an appreciated gift. Otherwise, I shall direct it towards the world in general, particularly insofar as it includes my anonymous benefactor. Who would have thought that the day after I acquired my own webspace, and thus proper webmaster status, I would also own a Lego Bionicle 8613 Disk Launcher. Superior Geek weaponry, that.

Aside from two months worth of multi-vitamins and minerals, I now have some five litres of soup and three of fruit juice. I am assering the aforementioned newfound skepticism about grains, base of the Health Canada Food Pyramid as they may be. I personally suspect that the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool got through to them. 10-12 servings a day? It definitely seems to me that someone has been Scrooge McDucking it in one of those whole silos.

I spoke with Neal tonight, who has returned from Hong Kong, where he spent his birthday. Apparently, it looks as much like the setting of Ghost in the Shell as you might expect. (See, for instance) It sounds like an incredible city, and one that I would very much like to visit. I look forward to seeing the photos that he took there and will be placing online. I will put a link here when he does. He didn’t see any ghost-hacked humans, which is probably good, on account of their being so pathetic it’s a shame. Marc and Rae have moved on to Taiwan, Neal back to Beijing.

Nora leaves for North Carolina tomorrow, so I really must go spend some time with her.

  • Blog housekeeping projects: 1) Produce a list of known issues, such as the sidebar bug in some versions of ie. 2) Finish transferring images from October and September onto the new server. 3) Produce some non-chronological, non-blog pages, such as a short FAQ and perhaps some important excerpts from the old blog. 4) Create some kind of members area. 5) Produce a better Error 404 page. 6) Fix the weird gaps that keep appearing at the top of blockquotes. 7) Fix all internal links to refer to the new URL.

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New Webspace

As you can see, a sibilant intake of breath has a new home. There are still a few kinks to be worked out, especially in terms of photo posting, but everything should be up and running soon. Thanks for updating your links.

[Edited to add: It’s now 5:37am – late even for those with vampiric insomnia. I am done fixing the photos up to the start of November. I am off to make a tenth attempt at sleep, as Jessica advises. Bonsoir.]

Short days, new projects

Oxford University Career Services

After having coffee with Sheena, about which I shall not write, I read the second portion of Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost. The character whose account it is, Jack Prescott, is one of the least likable in fiction. He is a hot-headed bigot: a liar, rapist, and betrayer. That the story ends well for him is entirely as displeasing as the gruesome conclusion of the first part. Not, in any sense, a cheerful book. That said, the occasional foray into murder, treason, and intrigue is very much necessary for the committed reader of fiction. I quite enjoyed the discussions of cryptography in the third section, which I have not yet finished.

The book is set in the time shortly after Cromwell took over – not the nicest period in history. The violence, the bigotry, and the ignorance demonstrated in the book all reaffirm my belief that the world is generally improving. That’s not to say that these things are no longer present but, at the very least, that they must now generally be apologized for and defended, rather than be taken as automatically acceptable. It’s an unfashionable thing, these days, to believe in progress. First off, it involves the making of ontological claims that people no longer see as firmly based – which has some truth to it, but not enough to counter the evidence of overall improvement. Secondly, it requires the determination to judge the morals and practice of one place and time against another. While there are obviously difficulties in doing so – particularly insofar as the matter of individual and group identity is concerned – that doesn’t seem adequate to conclude that no such comparisons can be made with validity. I would suppose that people given the chance to choose between living in some past age or the present one would choose the latter, largely because of the enormous benefits of modern medicine and nutrition, but also due to imperfect but helpful systems of justice and notions of philosophy and morality.

That’s not to say there isn’t a long way to go: especially in areas like women’s rights, the environment, and the just distribution of goods: material, social, and political.

Summer job search:

This afternoon, I ran a mass of errands. Aside from boring bank stuff and groceries, I stopped by the Oxford University Career Services office. As you can see in the photo above, it looks like a very curious combination between the outside of a castle and the inside of a Church. It is up on Banbury Road, near the Computing Services offices and St. Antony’s College.

Speaking with one of their advisors, I was told that banking and management consulting would both be real long shots for me. As the advisor told it, the problem isn’t really a lack of experience in either area, or even in business generally. The first problem is the time span. Trinity term ends on the 17th of June and Michaelmas term begins in early October. Even if I wanted to work for that whole period, it would only amount to three and a half months or so. The second problem is the fact that I am not interested in a career in banking or consulting. The advisor stressed the fact that this would severely hinder my ability to find a job in these areas for such a short period of time.

As alternatives, she suggested looking for short term work in the research, publishing, or public sector administration areas. She also stressed the possibility of finding a job within the university and the importance of canvassing my professors and supervisor about it. I will ask Dr. Hurrell about it again the next time we meet, to discuss my paper on American foreign policy during the interwar years.

At the very least, I would want something that would pay the cost of living in Oxford or London and allow me some time to do research on my thesis. I am fairly sure it would be possible to devote the bulk of the period to full-time work: something I would do if it stood the chance of helping me pay for next year or reduce my outstanding student debt. The ideal job would probably be a research position in Oxford, in a field that is of interest and relevant to my degree, and which offered at least some time off to travel and do research.

The advisor explained that it is getting a bit late to apply for banking and consulting jobs, but it is too early to apply for most other sorts. As such, I should dig through job listings from previous years and get some sense of what is likely to come up. Another project for the break, two other two big ones being scholarship applications and preliminary house hunting for next year.

Travel preparations:

It is eleven days, now, until Sarah and I leave for Tallinn.

Right now, it is six degrees Celsius colder in Tallinn than in Oxford, making it the same temperature there as in Toronto. While that is certainly chilly enough, it won’t be the kind of weather that requires balaclavas and threatens severe frostbite from brief exposures to the outside. Looking through the guide book that Nora gave me, I am excited about the prospects for seeing and doing interesting things in Tallinn. Additionally, I am looking forward to seeing Helsinki. Gabe Mastico, who I know from debate at UBC and who is now living in Helsinki, is going to let Sarah and I use his apartment while he is in Vancouver. Since we don’t actually have a hostel registration in Tallinn yet (something that I should make in the next few days, quite probably), that might be especially valuable. Also, I will be able to say that I have seen ‘the Baltic region’ much more fairly if I go to two capitals, rather than just one.

  • Here’s a question about encryption, to which I am seeking an answer. It’s an issue that I find puzzling, and which never occurred to me before a friend raised the question today.
  • I am not feeling at all well. All of my joints and lymph nodes hurt – especially the ones near my subclavian arteries. I am going to get soup and vitamins tomorrow.

Sedate day

Oxford by night

Happy Birthday Neal Lantela

As Oxford thronged with tourists, I spent today reading. I belatedly finished this week’s Economist, and moved forward on my books. It was a pretty slow day, really, but a bit of recuperation and a refocusing on work cannot go too badly wrong. I really need to buy whichever Christmas gifts I will be sending back to Canada, though it may be wiser to just buy things online and have them shipped. Postage here is criminally expensive.

This evening, I spoke to my friend Kerrie Hop Wo in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. She has been in Ghana, working for an NGO. Distressingly, she was diagnosed with “double malaria” two weeks ago, though she is now feeling better. Her husband Nolan also got a mild case. Thankfully, she says that she is feeling quite a bit better now. It goes to show the kind of dedication you need to have in order to commit yourself to spending a long period of time in a malarial region. It also increases my admiration of Andras Rozmer, in my program, who has been voluntarily infected with a particular strain in order to test a vaccine.

Along with Astrid’s frightening description of the altitudinal effects of climbing Quilotoa volcano, it’s enough to make me re-think the wisdom of Plan Kilimanjaro 2007. To quote: “[V]omiting, dizziness, headaches, and the craziness that it takes to continue are signs of cerebral edema, and one should descend. Unfortunately, one is then crazy enough to continue.” While I don’t envy her any of those symptoms, I have found her descriptions of various Andean adventures fascinating.

Tomorrow morning, I am having coffee with Sheena Chestnut: one of the eight young women in the M.Phil program. She is at St. Antony’s along with Roham, Emily, Iason, Kai, Alex, and Shohei. She did her undergrad at Stanford and is planning to do her doctorate at Harvard. She strikes me – and many others – as a strong State Department member in the making. We’re to go to a place called Brothers, in the Covered Market, where I have not yet been. Given the hostility many people here seem to have towards Starbucks, it will be nice to know of another alternative.

Milan: Creature of the night

Telephone in Claire's flat

One seeming property of the end of term is that I am becoming properly, vampirically nocturnal. My mean sleeping time is pushing onwards and onwards towards dawn, as my mean waking time descends past noon and into the afternoon. I hope the powers will follow the lifestyle, if not the thirst for blood. At some point, it’s a trend that will need to be beaten back. For now, it feels like a fairly appropriate extension of my personality and general state in the world.

Unfortunately, it seems that I won’t be seeing my mother in March, on her way to Iran. According to a message she sent me today, she was denied a visa on the grounds that she has American citizenship, worked for the American government, and is a feminist. I don’t know how the Iranian screening process would have identified the last item, or why they would be particularly concerned about it for a tourist, but it must be highly disappointing for her. I hope her appeal will be successful.

In an inspired piece of bureaucratic nonsense, I got yet another letter from NatWest today. This one says that, after receiving my fax, two sets of written instructions, and going to my home branch so they could record and verify my signature, they need to send banking details to my permanent address, in Canada. This is so that I can use their web banking and actually know how much I need to pay off for my credit card. They say they can only send the precious access code to a permanent address, for security purposes. Even though I won’t be there and it will surely be opened by someone else who will send it to me by email, this is obviously an intelligent security step. Their concern is that they think the code will expire before I am able to get it: perhaps because they are planning to send it by elite-trained homing pigeon. Given the fact that Britain is a major exporter of financial services, you would think they might have the slightest smattering of sense about such things.

Claire’s party tonight, at Wellington Square, was good fun. Somehow, the people present, the decor, and the overall character of the experience were all reminiscent of parties in Kits, such as the one where I met Meaghan Beattie, during my UBC years. In particular, the much-enjoyed and somewhat infamous ‘Dirty House’ parties. That’s not a pejorative description, in any sense, but a reflection of a kind of academic-bohemian fusion upon which good parties are often predicated. I ended up talking about Pink Floyd and biofuels with several individuals. I also got involved in a passionate and protracted argument about the plausibility of string theory, and the likelihood that evidence for it will be found at CERN. Ah, Oxford. My thanks to Claire for the invitation.

Now, I should get to sleep.

  • Nick has some very nice photos from India on his blog.
  • My brother Mica is looking for comments on his videos. If you leave them here or send them to me, I can pass them on. See if you can spot my brother Sasha in this one (it’s not hard).
  • Here are links to my Oxford Facebook photos, for non-members.
  • The third book of the five part trilogy called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fell out of an eddy in the space-time continuum and onto my hard drive. I have been enjoying it.

Further commentary from Mr. Bitters

Whatever compelled my fellow Wadham students to mark the end of term with an off-key, drunken sing-along lasting until well after 3:00am, I cannot understand. I can, however, be justifiably irked about it – particularly since it happened in the room with which I share a wall.

There aren’t even any quiet hour regulations or residence advisors to report them to here.

[Edited to add:] On an unrelated note, people should consider taking action against Sony for intentionally deploying malware against their own paying customers, lying about it, releasing patches that make it worse, and never showing any contrition or concern about illegally sabotaging people’s computers:Image hosted by Photobucket.com

Christmas parties, elections, and employment

London Lights

Happy Birthday Lise Bondy

Later tonight, as I was working to finish this week’s Economist, it became terrifically windy – perhaps to mark the transition from term time to break time. I quite enjoy windy days, especially when they involve lightning. It’s such an awesome and humbling thing to experience. There is a certain raw pleasure that can be derived from shrieking defiance at the momentous forces of nature, as well as the much softer pleasure that can be derived from eventually withdrawing from the contest. Windy days give you the chance to shout out the fact that you are alive and existing in defiance of increasing entropy and diminishing enthalpy. Then, they let you go inside, have some tea, and read for a while.

I spent a relatively short time at the MCR Christmas party, enjoying the string quartet and the chance to speak with some long-lost Wadhamites for a while. Among them, Melati, who I would be surprised to have mentioned in the last few weeks. My contact with those off in Merifield is minimal indeed, as interesting as they may be.

With the election date set for January 23rd, anyone who is Canadian and residing outside Canada should register for absentee voting using this form. I shall fax mine in on Monday. Crossing the boundary into partisanship, I urge those registered in contested ridings to vote Liberal. Yes, there has been sleaze. Yes, we feel alienated in the west. Yes, there is some justified resentment with regards to the Liberals and Quebec. In the end, however, we don’t want a government led by Stephen Harper and we certainly don’t want one comprised of a curious mix of former Tories and socially conservative former Alliance members. Paul Martin may be – as The Economist has dubbed him – “Mr. Dithers,” but he is the best option we have at the moment. I want to live in a progressive society: one that espouses the kind of values Canadians have been nailing to the mast for at least fifty years. As such, I will be voting Liberal, just as I did from Rome in the summer of 2004.

In closing for today, it seems fitting to talk about employment. That is because I am hoping to use the term break to find some fitting remunerative setting in which to spend most of the time between Trinity Term and Michaelmas Term of 2006. My first job was delivering papers for the North Shore News. I delivered about 50 papers, three times a week, for about $50 a month. It took at least three or four hours to amalgamate the papers and flyers into deliverable objects and to walk around the area of the route. Working for about a dollar an hour, often under particularly rainy circumstances of those involving hostile dogs (I fear and dislike the species to this day) is not recommended.

Aside from that, I have worked for Pharmasave as a cashier; Staples as a computer salesman; the King’s Court Apartments as a janitor; Miller Thomson as a photocopier, researcher, and information technology assistant; the Wild Bird Trust, as a volunteer labourer; Leadership Initiative for Earth, as a volunteer researcher; Camp Fircom, as a volunteer leader; Science Alive Daycamp, as a volunteer leader; Muffin Break, as a cashier; the Olympic Athletic Club, as a juice bar attendant and writer; Newbridge Networks, as a solderer of electronic components; Swinton and Company, now Miller Thomson, and an information technology assistant; the Vancouver Aquarium, as a volunteer feeder in the tropical section; and for the Canadian Department of National Defence, by means of the UBC International Relations Students’ Association. Among those, my favourite jobs were the research jobs and the janitorial position.

This summer, I would like to work for some kind of a corporation that pays people well to think about things and doesn’t make them work ninety hours a week. That would help reduce my level of student debt, and ensure that I will have the funds to complete the second year of the M.Phil. Probably, the firms in London would pay more, but I really don’t understand what would be involved in getting a job there. Also, the cost of living would be much higher. I should probably take the advice of the woman from the Oxford University Career Services who I met at the New College guest dinner and come meet her about getting some kind of placement. In the mean time, anyone who is able and willing to provide information on where gainful employment might be found will be most attentively and appreciatively listened to.

  • For those of you who don’t care a whit for the business of formatting, as is commendable, I recommend reading the blog through its atom feed. If you don’t know what that means, and you want to, you can read this.

First trip to London

Leaving critical notes in the ambassador's scrapbook

Happy Birthday Matthew Tindall

Tonight’s event, in the residence of Canada’s second most important ambassador, comprised about 300 Canadian graduate students. The residence was quite lavish: richly endowed with artwork and the various trappings of high class hosting facilities. The project of meeting and mingling with dozens of Canadians from Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE, and elsewhere was a daunting one for me, but one which I think I rose to dealing with fairly well. I met a few interesting people from the Environmental Change Centre at Oxford. In particular, Andrew Robinson from Trinity College, who worked for the UNEP and is working on a master’s here now. Hopefully, I shall see them again.

On the bus ride out, I sat beside a Canadian woman who studied French previously and who is now studying law, with an aim to practicing in the area of shipping. In a few days, she is heading to her flat in the south of France, where she will be spending Christmas with her boyfriend. Despite her assurances that it will be extremely cold, I think there are a great many people languishing back in Oxford who will envy her the journey. Hearing her plans made me doubly glad about being invited to London for Christmas with Sarah and her mother. I enjoyed speaking with my co-national about points of law, language, and education – while heading southeast to London.

We disembarked at Marble Arch and soon found the High Commissioner’s residence. As I said, the inside was quite opulent. I suppose that is unsurprising given the importance of Anglo-Canadian relations over the short but broad sweep of Canadian diplomatic history. I spoke with the Commissioner himself for a while, as well as with several members of the Canadian diplomatic service. Chris Yung was there, as were Emily and a number of the Rhodes Scholars who I met at the outset of the year.

After a few hours of mingling, the staff stopped serving drinks: a message for postgraduate students to leave as unambiguous as firing tear gas. Despite a brief attempt to relocate to a nearby pub, I soon ended up shivering at Marble Arch, waiting with Sheena and Emily for buses back to Oxford. They were picked up fairly quickly by an Oxford Tube, but I huddled a while yet while waiting for the X90. I would have liked to do more in London, but there is little that a person can do to access a city when it is rainy, strange, and dark. As I observed on the homeward bus ride:

How hostile, how alien a dark strange city in the rain. The solidity of buildings and the alienation from our huddled fellows all remind us how we are to be jolted and feared, rather than embraced.The collective of experience of life now is such as to conjure intense questioning. Education is not just that investment of time and money that yields more money in the future. It is a wrestling with history, with isolation, and with our own limitations.

Self doubt is the main concern now. It’s a thing that you can seek to defeat – building walls of false confidence around yourself. Alternatively, you can plunge right into it and pray that you will emerge wiser on the other side. That process can only be attempted along with the realization that we can falter and drown.

A bit grim, I know, but it was a chilly and unpleasant night in the period after which it became a solitary one. I was hoping to derive some motive energy from the great metropolis of London, rather than scamper back, spurned, to the small town of Oxford. That said, it was worthwhile and enjoyable to see what an extensive mass of grad students Canada has dispatched to England. While it does have the unhappy impact of reminding you how unexceptional you may well be, you still cannot quite help being impressed by it. (I really do hope that I manage to find some way in which I am properly exceptional, after all, before I leave here.)

One piece of unambiguously happy news, in closing. Tomorrow morning, at 11:00am, is the final STATA lab. I hope that I shall never launch that most reviled of programs again.