Slinking back to the blog at last...

Yup, I haven't written anything in quite some time. I have a lot I could say right not, but alas I cannot be bothered :P Ok, ok - I'll try and keep a more regular blog. As much as anything else it'll ensure that I keep writing and that it doesn't just fall by the way-side while I hunt for employment.

So, first off I have now completed the MSc and know for certain that I have passed :D I just don't know the mark and probably won't until Wednesday evening when I go home to visit the family for my birthday.

Secondly, I just got my rota from MHM and it confirms my belief that they might just be entirely incompetant. I asked for 2/3 shifts a week this month, with the exception of the first week where I could only work one. I had asked for the 2nd and 3rd of October to be reserved as days I couldn't work because the plan was to spend a few days with the family while I have a bit of free time. So what did they do? They gave me shifts on both those days. Not only that, but I got the rota so close to the 1st that there isn't really any practical way of changing the shifts. Gits. So I'll go home on Wednesday evening, and come back on Thursday morning. Apart from that, I have also discovered that I am now doing roughly 50% of the work for the Edinburgh team. Another thing is that they have only given me one of the better-paid weekend shifts, and the one that they did give me is out at the Dean Gallery to which there is no public transport on a Sunday. I say again, gits. And finally, Tim and I had planned to go away for a few days this month, but because of the way the rota has panned out this might not be possible. Once more with feeling, gits. In conclusion, there is a distinct possibility that I will quit at the end of this month. But on the plus side at least we don't have to do surveys at the museums any more...

Went and saw MacBeth on Friday with Charlotte: superb production, and certainly one of the best productions in terms of emotive interpritation. The woman playing Lady MacBeth was exceptional. I also met Charlotte's boyfriend that evening - a pleasant, if slightly overly-intense, young man who is lecturing in Economics at Herriot-Watt. The evening was something of a cultural body-blow in some respects. It made me realise just how often I apologise for things that I don't have to apologise for. It showed me that a lot of the time I apologise just for having an opinion, or for not having an opinion. Charlotte and Philip are both from mainland Europe, and although I like both of them very much I don't feel comfortable around them: this in and of itself is not a bad thing because challanging aquaintances provide interesting perspectives, but I did find myself suffering from something of a cultural inferiority-complex. Their sense of humour is very differant, and their priorities and attitudes. There are a lot of people who think that main-land Europeans, especially the French, are arrogant: I would not dispute this in some cases, and Philip himself openly admitted it, but I think that a lot of our adversion to arrogance is born of being told not to be arrogant. We have willfully surrendered our collective self-confidence in favour of being overly polite. So I found it really very difficult to converse with Philip (Charlotte not so much) because he was dismissive of quite a lot of what I had (when I dared venture) said, and quite merrily talked away as if his opinion could only be right. On the one hand, I found him rude and arrogant, but on the other hand I was trying to reconsile this to the fact that it wasn't terribly rude in his culture, just in mine. I also acknowledge that in many respects he had the advantage over me in terms of age and educational advancement and world-experiance, as does Charlotte. Ignoring the BS I've managed to create around the situation, and stripping it back to bare-bones, I spent the better part of an hour feeling like a complete ignoramus. But I bet Philip didn't guess that I understood everything he said when he talked to Charlotte in French...

I'll probably come back to this cause there's a few things I want to talk about in relation to culture and cinematic appreciation, but I think I've waffled enough for one post.

Other news - er, not a lot.
My flatmate and her boyfriend have decided they want to buy a house together: I'll admit that I was shocked in that although they've known each other for years, they haven't been going out for very long at all. They reckon it'll probably be about a year before they finally get a place.
Still job hunting, although I'm finding it hard to work up the motivation.
Tim and I have started going to swing dance classes, and it's good fun :)