Curiosity

I racked my brain all day* trying to come up with a suitable topic for C.  And yet it wasn't until I was on my way home, too exhausted to even read and so just letting my mind wander while staring out the window of the tram, that it came to me.  Forget about cucumbers (surely one of the most disgusting tasting things on the planet), forget about cocks and cunts and several other naughty and/or offensive-to-some words that I would never have been able to pull off writing about, forget about courgettes (because I badly need to keep zucchini in reserve for day Z), curiosity is where it's at.

It's possible that I have written about this before but since it's late and I want to get something posted for day C, I'm not going to bother searching the blog for it.  And if I have posted this before, in all honestly, I still get so annoyed about it that I have no problem with repeating myself.

I'm a big fan of Stephen Fry.  I liked him when I was a teenager watching A Bit of Fry and Laurie.  I liked him when I discovered a few years later that he was also an author and I read Making History.  I really like QI and I have enjoyed many hours reading his blog and watching youtube clips of him discussing events and topics like dying languages (his cameo in Ros na Rún, done while making a documentary about Irish, was pretty funny, too).  I have a lot of respect for many of his opinions and so I was very pleased to buy and start reading the second volume of his autobiography, The Fry Chronicles.  But then I discovered that on at least one topic I most definitely do not agree with him and I even found it difficult to believe that he could be so misguided.  Here's the paragraph that set me off:

"There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don't have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren't lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers, cars and celebrities.  Why?  Because they are interested in those things.  They are curious.  If you are hungry for food you are prepared to hunt high and low for it.  If you are hungry for information it is the same.  Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history.  You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out.  The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know.  They are incurious.  Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
Picture the world as being a city whose pavements are covered a foot deep in gold coins.  You have to wade through them to make progress.  Their clinking and rattling fills the air.  Imagine that you met a beggar in such a city.
'Please, give me something.  I am penniless.'
'But look around you,' you would shout.  'There is gold enough to last you your whole life.  All you have to do is to bend down and pick it up!'
When people complain that they don't know any literature because it was badly taught at school, or that they missed out on history because on the timetable it was either that or biology, or some such ludicrous excuse, it is hard not to react in the same way.
'But it's all around you!' I want to scream.  'All you have to do is bend down and pick it up!' "

What annoys me is that this does not allow for the curiosity being drummed out of you by, for example, parents who don't have the time or the inclination to answer your questions and who continually tell their children to shut up, stop bothering them, go and watch telly.  Never mind those that might try to beat it out of their kids.  If you have any contact with kids and have seen how wonderfully curious they are about the world and absolutely everything in it, you may agree with the above.  But now imagine for a moment that that wonderfully curious child is told every day, multiple times, not to ask so many questions, or worse, not to be so stupid or any number of variations on a theme.  Imagine that they go to a school where questioning is not encouraged or even actively discouraged.  Or when slightly older, perhaps then having to deal with teasing and pressure from classmates for being a swot.  How long do you think it might take before curiosity is buried so deep it seems to have disappeared completely?  Or what about those people who are depressed and could no more find a speck of curiosity in themselves than they could produce a carefree smile?

I know that my own experiences colour my view on this topic.  But I genuinely don't believe that I am alone in this because there are so many people who really have gone through some of the really horrible, perhaps extreme, examples above, so much worse than I went through as a teenager.  And I try, I really do and more and more so as I go along.  But I don't think it's ever going to come as naturally to me as it probably once did.  And it's definitely true that I missed out on a lot of time in school and college, even simply by virtue of the fact that it was such a rote-learning experience in the time and place I was.  It's also true that I bemoan the fact that I was never really taught critical thinking far too often instead of just trying to learn now.  And that kind of thing is undoubtedly what he means.  But I know myself well enough and have come to terms with my past enough to know that the full blame for my incuriosity does not lie entirely at my feet.

So in an effort to end on a somewhat positive note my call to everyone is to please always encourage curiosity, even if it may inconvenience you slightly in the moment.  If someone asks you why, especially if a child asks why, take the time to explain it.  There aren't enough mentors in the world, I reckon.  And in the meantime I have tried to a certain extent to fake it till I make it by adopting as one of my guidelines for life something I read a while ago: to be interesting, be interested!



*This may be a slight exaggeration but I definitely thought about it more than once

Billing

There are so many great things beginning with B.  I could be writing about beauty.  Or bread and butter.  Or babies or basil or beaches.  And instead I've chosen billing because it's twenty past ten and I've just gotten in from work and it's all because of quarter-end billing.  Without a doubt everyone's least favourite time of the year and they keep managing to cut our time even shorter by not allowing any leeway if one of our few precious days to get through billing falls on a bank holiday.  And yet we have to all keep on doing it because, let's face it, if the clients weren't getting bills to pay, none of us would have jobs to go to in the mornings.  But I could easily live with a job where this was not one of my tasks.

So I need to start moving forward on my plan to have a plan in place by the end of next year to move to a different area, even if I haven't managed to actually do move by then.  Carla, over at Half-Dozen Daily, is running an April savings challenge and although I can't join in since I get paid monthly and my money for April is all already spoken for and/or already gone to savings, I did say that I would set myself a mini-goal of searching out a course to do in September.  I really want to get the IHK translator certification as it would allow be to become a state-certified translator, allowed to translate things like birth certs, marriage certs and so on.  And, although you don't officially need anything to just to general translations, it's always nice to have another piece of paper in this land that loves pieces of paper.  This is, after all, the country where you are expected to hand in copies of your school diplomas (that's school, not college) along with your college stuff and references when starting a new job.  Even if you've already been working for twenty years.

Having the translator's certificate would mean savings for me because I'd be able to use it to do some freelance work to supplement what is likely to be a far lower salary than I earn now if I move in the direction I want.  I am badly out of practice at doing exams though and that is one thing I will really need help with.  Even just writing with a pen for long periods of time is something I am completely out of practice at.  And the exam involves translating both from and into your foreign language so I badly need an intensive grammar course to go over all of those things I was lazy about learning in school.  I'm actually pretty good most of the time - it's only when I stop and think about it that I start tripping up.  And at least I made some progress today by going onto the IHK website and downloading information on the exam, including the two places that offer preparation courses.  Next step is to find out what courses those places have on offer next September.  Although the end of September is not only quarter-end, it's our financial year-end too so you can imagine the billing fun we have then!

Comment moderation

I've had a chance to trawl through some of the more detailed posts on the Blogging A to Z challenge to try and discover why they list turning off word verification as part of the rules.  It wasn't in the FAQ but it wasn't buried too deep.  My goodness but these people are hostile towards word verification.  While I find it annoying at times, I enjoy the spam protection it gives me too much to let that bother me, even if I do often need to enter a verification twice.  I also seem to be different from many who posted their opinion on this in that I have no burning desire to get loads of comments, I definitely don't view getting comments as one of the main purposes of blogging and just generally seem have a very different idea of what blogging is all about.  To satisfy the rules I have, however, now switched off word verification for the length of the challenge.  I've re-enabled comment moderation to at least try have some measure of control over potential spam so please be patient when your comment doesn't show immediately.

Active

I may enjoy this A to Z challenge more than I thought.  Since I couldn't come up with any words beginning with A just because I had to, I decided to have a skim through the A section of my pocket thesaurus.  Yes, I know you're not supposed to admit to liking things like reading dictionaries but I do.  One word inevitably leads me to the next and before I know it, half an hour has passed and I've forgotten what it was I had to look up in the first place.  At some stage in college I even took Diane's idea from Say Anything and started underlining the words I was looking up.  I never kept it up though - I assume I got too depressed by the fact that I kept needing to look up the same words over and over.  It's interesting going through my German dictionary now though and trying to remember a time when I didn't know those words.

But I digress.  Of all the potential words I could have chosen, active seemed the most pertinent at the moment.  Because if I get any less active, I may solidify in place.  And with the clocks changing at the weekend, I can remind myself that in the depths of January, I had promised to start going swimming again in the mornings before work as soon as that happened.  

I didn't get up early as planned this morning to go into work for a few hours either but knowing I was sitting down to write about being active at least spurred me on to clearing off the clothes horse and putting that away as well as giving the floors a quick sweep.  Still have to do the ironing and clear up some accumulated clutter but I'll get that done by Wednesday evening at the latest.  

For today, the active will come in a half an hour or so when I head out into the remaining sunshine and head towards to river.  It's a longer way to walk to work but I'll have a nice walk heading west so with a bit of luck I should catch at least part of the sunset.  And on Thursday morning, I plan to get up early to head to the pool.  Can't do it tomorrow because I need to be in work early and on Wednesday I have an acupuncture appointment before work.  The weather has even hit eight degrees today and if that keeps up, who knows what could happen!

Blogging from A to Z April

Just saw a mention of this on Kat's Sunday night chit-chat and, given that April is only starting, I decided to just go ahead and sign up for the Blogging from A to Z April challenge.  You basically post every day, except Sundays, during April, following the letters A to Z for your topics.  You can still sign up in the next 12 hours or so, I think, in case anyone else wants to join in.  I was going to start with a post about April Fool's Day and then saw that the very first A to Z challenge post in 2010 was that so I'm off to have a think about something more original.  Or else I'll be back in a while with a post on April Fool's Day.

Sunday night chit-chat

When at the market yesterday I caught sight of these coconut macaroons.  I usually try to just block out the fact that the people who sell dairy also run a bakery at their farm but this week I saw these and couldn't resist.  I didn't look properly though because look at the size of it!  It could easily have been shared by four, it was nearly the size of my fist (and I don't have dainty hands!).  Not having three people around to share it with I gamefully managed it on my own.  It took me nearly four hours, two cups of tea and a glass of water to do it, though.

So anyway, on to some Sunday night chit-chat.  If you care to join in, just head over to Half-Dozen Daily to link up.

What are you:

Reading

Mostly blogs.  Have been catching up on the archives of two fairly new-to-me blogs, Absolutely Sweet Chaos and Head over Heels in Debt.  I did finish The Master and Margarita though and next up is finishing Die grosse Liebe for German book club and reading Atonement for English book club.

Watching

I watched the pilot for Beauty and the Beast yesterday which had me searching for and watching the pilot for the 80's series it is loosely based on.  I used to enjoy that but had never seen the beginning of it.  Am going to watch another couple of episodes of the new one shortly.

Listening to

Not much at the moment, just the clock ticking, the sound of the keyboard and the occasional car outside.  While I was reading blogs today I had a couple of albums running on my MP3 player, including the newest on from the Battenkill Ramblers, which I somehow missed the release of in January.  I've actually had one of their songs as my resident earworm this week but have consistently been too lazy to get up and dig out the CD it's on to listen to (thereby guaranteeing driving myself mad because of not being able to remember all the lyrics) so it was nice to just have this album a click away.  How sad is that!

Baking/cooking

Nothing much.  I heated up the second last portion of turkey and orange hotpot from the freezer, topped with cubes of bread, also from the freezer, earlier but apart from that, my ginourmous coconut macaroon meant absolutely no need to bake anything at all.

Happy you accomplished this week

I ordered and received a new SIM card for my phone.  For some inexplicable reason, I got a text message a few months ago saying that my SIM card would be invalid after 1 April.  I had been putting off getting a smartphone because I didn't want the bother of switching numbers so thought I should use this as an opportunity to finally make the move to a smartphone.  If you sign up for a two-year contract, you can usually just pay a small fee (about 20 euro) and then the rest of the cost of the phone is built into your monthly plan.  I actually did do some research, trying to figure out web use on a phone and all that kind of thing.  And in the end I bought a pre-pay card to put into my existing basic phone.  But, I did make sure before buying it that I can simply add on a data-plan at any stage and therefore switch it into a smartphone without having to switch numbers again.  It cost me 9.95 to get the card which give me 10 euro of credit to start with.  Except that it came with 20.  Not sure how that happened and am happy to pay another 10 if they come looking for it.  I also got an additional 5 euro credit as an online acquaintance uses the same provider and had an offer to "win" new customers, getting 5 euro for each of us.  So far I am very happy.  I had a response to my email questions within a couple of hours and the card was delivered within two days of my ordering it.  It's a card from one of the local supermarkets (Edeka) and runs on one of the better networks and the data plan that I can add for a flatrate 10 euro per month offers 500MB of data, which is more than most of the others I looked at.  And, even better, I don't even have to go to the supermarket to top-up, I can do it online.

Oh, and I added fancy percentage bars to my blog to track my savings.

Looking forward to next week

The weekend!  I know that seems like wishing my life away but it's quarter-end billing next week and because of tomorrow being a holiday, we'll be on another cycle that's a day shorter than normal.  I expect mega-stress this week.  Actually, because I've been out sick and then trying to catch up so much over the last few months, I still have a small amount of filing to do from last quarter end so I'm going to get up early tomorrow and go in (despite the bank holiday) and do that so that Tuesday is at least not spent trying to explain to the manager why she doesn't have last quarter's information on file.

Thankful for today

That the cold which started on Thursday seems to not be getting worse.  I have done almost nothing for the past three days and although that means I'm sitting looking at a filthy and messy house, I really couldn't handle getting badly sick again.  And who knows, getting up early to go to work for a couple of hours tomorrow might be just the spur I need to have a slightly active afternoon.  I may even get the ironing done.

Bonus question: Do you wear slippers around the house?
Yes.  In summer I have very light ones which have micro-fibre soles that dust your floors as you go.  They're quite fun but just not warm enough to wear in winter so I switch to nice wooly ones then.  My current ones are not going to last another winter but I have my eye on some nice felt ones for next winter.

Bees

I have seen reports recently about Barack Obama signing the Monsanto Protection Bill into law. To be completely honest, I haven't done any in-depth reading on this because just reading the headlines was enough to make me feel like there's no hope left for the world.

And now I've just seen this link on twitter and it's so incredibly disturbing I don't even know what to think - even though I know full well that head in the sand is not at all the appropriate response!

Stop the Mass Death of Bees!

"Monsanto's Mon810 corn, genetically engineered to produce a synthetic version of the insecticide Bt, has been banned in Polandfollowing protests by beekeepers who showed the corn was killing honeybees. Meanwhile, commercial beekeepers in the U.S. have filed an emergency legal petition with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suspend use of a pesticide that is linked to massive honey bee deaths. The legal petition, which specifies Bayer's neonicotinoid pesticide clothianidin, is backed by over one million citizen petition signatures."

If you're in the USA, perhaps you'll consider (at least) signing that petition.