My daily dose

It’s such a normal thing. It’s late Monday morning. I decide to quickly walk to the shop that is theoretically about 100m away from my flat, but is practically about a block away, in order to search for punch ingredients for Friday night’s party. It’s a warm, sunny day in winter, so I’m wearing a pink pinafore dress – that comes to just above my knees – a black t-shirt and some furry flat boots. I do look cute, but not sexy, Just nice and comfy.

As I’m approaching the front gate of my complex, I see the garbage collection truck arriving. Mondays are trash collection days. As I get closer, I see that one of the workers is looking at me. I make eye contant accidentally, but then look away immediately and drop my head. As I pass the man – trapped because passing him is the only way to get out of my complex; he starts shouting at me in the line of;

Hey sexy lady, look at me…

My name is…

I try to block out his words, because hearing them upsets me, but hearing the detail upsets me more. But I’m still angry. I’m angry that he, random stranger, has the power to degrade me like this sue to the mere fact that he is a man and I am a woman! I used to walk to class more often last year and it happened to me quite regularly. Eating away at the health of my soul.

There are two extremely sad things about this. The first is that I have no power to fight back, nobody to lodge some sort of ‘complaint’ about because out of hundreds of trash collection workers I have no case. And the lack of punishment and even acknowledgment of negative behavior will make this man think it’s okay, and will definitely make him think it’s okay to do it again and possibly okay to sexually harass other women in more severe ways, like potentially raping them. And perhaps this is the root of this country’s severe rape problem. The other sad thing, is that the actions of this man reinforced the traces of classicism, racism and sexism that I have inside of me.  And this will cause me to fear and hate a little bit all men like him, although they are probably not all like him.

It’s time (and it’s always been time) that the message gets out there that

IT’S DEFINITELY NOT OKAY!

All these things

Just a moment ago, I was busy listening to my favourite singing identical twin lesbians’ (relatively new) album. (Tegan & Sara, for those of you who don’t know.) I was also busy trying to work on a slideshow for a presentation I have next week, but was very much distracted by the multitude of vegetative matter that had sprouted in my garden due to the winter drizzle. The thing is, I’m struggling lots with this presentation, for the simple reason that;

I HAVE TOO MANY SUPERVISORS!

Seriously. I was talking to my beloved about them a couple of weeks ago, and he raised the question of how many supervisors I actually have. So I counted them;

1 x sensory science supervisor at Food Science

1 x winemaking supervisor

1 x wine chemistry supervisor

1 x analytical chemistry supervisor

1 x winemaking supervisor that used to be part of my previous project but now is just in the background as some sort of consulting presence

1 x multivariate statistical supervisor sitting in Norway in the town of As, sortof keeping a watchful eye…

That makes six in total… Way too many I’d say. See, the main problem I’m having with them is the fact that they all have their own ideas about what I should be doing, and some of them have too concrete ideas about what I should be doing whilst other don’t really care enough… This seems particularly to be a problem with the first four, because they seem to be the only four that actually sit in meeting with me and disagree about what I should be doing. It almost feels like I need another team, almost like a supervisor mediation team. Because I seem to have figured at least one of them out, but I’m only now starting to figure the rest of them out. Which makes this whole thing difficult, almost like an academic psychological minefield.

Hopefully, though, we will all soon agree, and I will soon have an actual project. Which would be awesome!

I love my monster!

After a friend told me that the reason why she hasn’t been spending much time with me is because she’s been spending a lot of her time on a particular website – one with pet monsters – I went to check out Moshimonsters . I subsequently adopted a monster, because I have a bit of a weakness for cute furry (or non-furry) monsters. The whole concept around the website is combining social networking (for kids) with a virtual pet. The most awesome thing is how cute they are! Check out my monster here. Enjoy! (And I hope that you don’t get as hooked as I did!)

Janita likes to…

Because Anna from little red boat said so…

Janita likes to make things! And I do! I really really do!

Janita likes to tune to DAAd and let the A just drone. Not really sure what that means.

And because my name is not all that popular, this is REALLY all there was…

Been away for a while…

Recent(ish) things that happened…

1 ) My thesis topic changed drastically about a month ago, doing the same sort of project still but on something different.

2 ) I started working at a wine farm on occasional weekends.

3 ) I saw Muse (etc) live a couple of weeks ago. Awesome!

4 ) Winter has sortof started, but also not, which is weird.

5 ) have started trying to catch up on all the foreign movies I’ve missed out on all this time.

6 ) Have joined a wine analysis panel, which means that I have to sniff several galsses of wine every morning, which means no more going out in the week for me!

7 ) Have become mildly addicted to Questionable Content.

8 ) And the rest is history…

My shoes! My shoes! I found them!

Black pumps. There are many many things that I can say about black pumps, but I’m going to try to say not that many many. I like them. A lot. I wear them. A lot. I wear them out really really quickly… Which mean that these shoes usually need to be replaced every couple of months. This is not as fun as it sounds though. Yes, HAVING to go shoe shopping is not actually every girl’s dream! I am extremely picky and always have trouble finding shoes that fit, as my feet were not ‘designed’ with the ‘ideal proportions’ in mind. (I often find it rather annoying that pants, for example, come in a variety of cuts and proportions to suit different body shapes; and pants are something that can be altered! You can’t do that with shoes!) Anyway, so last year, I thought I had it waxed, because I purchased two pairs of black pumps; firstly because hopefully they won’t wear out so quickly, and secondly, in order to have a back-up pair should the one pair get thrashed. However, when I went on a very very long December holiday, I only took one of these pairs along, and when I returned to my flat, the other pair was nowhere to be found. I searched everywhere (or so I thought). Nothing. It was sortof OK though, because I had another pair… The shoes would turn up eventually, won’t they? But then something dismal happened. My other pair got worn out. So worn out, in fact, that I was embarrassed to wear them in public. Which made the disappearance of the other pair more of a crisis. I searched. I made phone calls. Nothing. And then, the other day, when I was packing to go camping, I found the lost shoes between some shopping bags in my garage. How they got there, I have absolutely no idea. But yay yay yay yay! Outfits work again!

Reverse technology

This is a weird, ‘inversive’ though almost, but I’m going to try and explain it anyway. Ok, so I’ve just started doing my Masters degree, and nobody is quite sure yet what exactly I’m supposed to do in terms of experiments. There have been lots and lots of ideas, but if I were to carry them all out I would be at this university at about seven more years – and hopefully they would give me a doctorate for my effort. Anyway, so currently I have no samples and no course of action, so I’m just busy reading and reading and reading some more (and writing up things for meetings, and having meetings). This whole reading thing is creating a lot of paper though; because I print everything I read, for archival reasons and because I’m not really comfortable with reading from a computer screen. Why, you may ask? Well, because computer screens tire my eyes very quickly, the dimensions are all wrong (I happen to have a large-ish computer screen but it’s still not quite A4 length) and I like tagging, marking, writing on and holding my research (I have a complicated system, this is big for me).This whole paper thing has become a bit of a mission though, because I work a several locations (my home, my library, two academic departments that are rather far apart) and I’ve gotten a bit annoyed with having to lug so much paper around. An then I have this thought about how cool it could be if you could just compress paper into something small and then decompress it when you need it. I thought about it for a minute, a realised, duh, that is what having Adobe files on a flashdisk is all about, and I felt really lame.

But it still wouldn’t quite be paper, though.

(And yes, I can’t wait for the day when we actually have this kind of technology going around.)

What should my next blog post be about?

I’ve actually had too many ideas for a next blog post to actually settle on one (and writing several seems like too much work), so I would like to propose a poll. I shall list several ideas I had, and should I get a positive response regarding one of these topics, I may (or may not) write this blogpost. Here goes:

1) Annoyances with undergrads (general)

2 ) Annoyances with undergrads (slow-moving, traffic jamming)

3) Renting two bad movies on Saturday night

4) My new copy of Nylon Magazine

5) Mounting excitement for Cokefest

6) My deadline that has moved to today

Please vote now to avoid disappointment!

Just another cliche to add to the ones already prevalent on this day

Aww…Valentine’s day! How awesome! Cute couples everywhere, people walking around with flowers, people dressed to match the day… it all makes me want to vomit! Seriously, I thought that having a wonderful somebody to celebrate this not-so-wonderful day would somehow change my sentiment about it… It didn’t. I still think it’s lame and commercial and superficial (and that it often causes unnecessary trouble between  people due to unmet expectations). So lame, in fact, that I’m actually ignoring it in a way, trying not to mention it unless it is mentioned first. As I’m trying to actually ignore this day, I seriously tried not to wear red or pink or hearts or anything like that today. I failed. I failed because I was in a bit of a rush this morning and I just wanted to wear something that made me feel comfortable and good and like myself. Because I dress like it’s Valentine’s day every day; I’m always wearing something red (or pink) or some sort of heart accessory. (My red shoes are a current favourite). Not really for of any reason except that i like it… but maybe it’s connected to that intrinsic belief that it should  be Valentine’s day every single day.

Learning about the Unscrambler

Ok, so here’s the thing. I’m a Masters student now. A just-started-dont-really-know-what-to-do-with-myself sort of masters student. I am just starting to learn how to make wine, half on-the side, half as part of my research. (I will also be joining the wine society today; also as part of my research.) Anyway, I’m actually just a little bit bored and unmotivated, as sitting around and reading scientific article is not a lot of fun. This is why I’ve been almost looking forward to the Statistics course on Multivariate Analysis that I’ve been doing yesterday and today. It’s something to do!

As this course is organised by the Food Science department, we’ve been garunteed of good food, and this has been the case. But learning to use the Unscrambler? A bit of a nightmare. I think part of the nightmare is a result of the fact that I don’t have a statistics degree like most of the other people doing the course, which means that even though I almost understand what the lecturer is saying, I never truly understand. And trying to understand makes your head tired, sore, and like a whole bunch of fluff by the end of the day.(I actually had trouble putting together coherent sentences by the end of the day.)

I have a whole day of this ahead of me today. And my flatmate is going shopping.