(no subject)
from erica.....:)
1. Do you think we will be friends forever?
awww! well, I hope so :) I miss those days of insanely lengthy emails and occasional fantastic phone calls! If not so much when I put the number in wrong so it cost twenty pounds. hhhhhmmm. Not that it would likely be like that again! but um. I would really love to come visit you again, actually, to reply to your comment here :) Maybe one day I might somehow manage to save some money, and do so.
2. What book (aside from the Bible) has had the most influence on your life?
Hmm would that I could honestly claim that the Bible were the book that has had most influence on my life! After much thought, I also can't choose one. I decided I'd limit myself to four, and one related item:
** Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and "The Idiot". The Idiot was the first time I ever imagined that literature could convey such hideous, radiant, beautiful emotional intensity as it obviously can, and the first time I'd ever thought the idea of 'love' could be cruel, ambivalent, or frustrated in any other way than rejection by its object (such, at least, is my best reconstruction of the rather vague memory and understanding of what I thought at the time ;)
** Peter Singer, and "Western Poverty and Third World Guilt" - actually this was only a 20 page article. - which started from the suggestion that maybe we could see starving people as having a greater right to food than we have to more useless crap, and with a most elementary logic drew the most startling and disturbing conclusions. and um.... maybe any good statement of moral philosophy will produce much the same effect on any interested uninformed reader but Singer's piece was hovering at the edge of my most important decisions for yeaaaaaaaaaars to come! (in a nutshell - without pomp or ado he concluded that we every single one of us in the west more or less had a duty to give all the money we owned away till we were in as bad a financial-resources situation as the most folorn sub-Saharan! Because why, after all, should we suffer less than they? (though obviously we shouldn't suffer more, either).).
** Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil," Schopenhauer, "Essays and Aphorisms," and Camus, "The Rebel"....hehehe alright I know that's cheating... but I can't leave them out!!!! More of the same, really, I guess. I think I could not adequately express the importance I feel the observation of such rigorous approaches to epistemology (and everything else!) has had for me :)
** ed. Frederic Jameson, "Aesthetics". This is an amazing collection of trendy Marxists (Adorno and Benjamin and all that lot :P) writing about books and paintings and music and things and it has affected the way I understand all these things since! oh yes! not that I know anything about paintings. But the suggestion that aesthetic appreciation could in fact have its roots in actual social relations, not just some abstract and/or obscure facet of being human, was an enormous revelation for me (not that such links are necessarily readily observable! but you know... to try and look for them... really a revelation!). mhmmm... and the idea of literature as chrystalizing the most important aspects of human interactions (like the key central core of boss-worker oppression as boredom and lack of money due to restricted free and work time options, say....).... like, picking out the essential bits and ignoring the clouding factors experienced in an ordinary human lifetime.... very good!!
I can't believe that's seven men and no women!!! well it would be pretty horrifically patronising to choose one now hey.... and anyway I'm going for an item not a book... which is.... :)
** the gender and sexuality studies section of my sociology module! Oh my goodness! See before that I had the vaguest notion possible of a mysterious and (more or less) unalterable atrribute called gender that floated around till it attached itself to someone at birth and was, pretty much, indivisible from sex. So to consider it characterised instead as something arising from, reinforced by and constantly altered through interactions between people was faaaaaairly interesting! And, I think, much the same story could be told for sexuality. And all that has had a very considerable influence on the way I think about and talk to everyone that I know. Apart from being massively fascinating in itself :)
so there! I would like to put it that I'm tired and, well, probably would come across an idiot trying to explain all this business whatever (ohhhhh but dear to my heart it all is!) but maybe especially so tonight. ;) eh!
3. What is the best dream you've ever had?
The best dream! I don't know about that. I am always intrigued by my dreams, but I don't tend to look back on them too fondly. But I'm not complaining! Maybe what interests me so much is that they almost invariably are (as I reconstruct them afterwards anyway! ;) shot through with menace and events of huge importance but considerable obscurity, unnerving and disconcerting but rarely depressing, very much like, it always pleases me to think, any of Kafka's novels. ;) (I'm tempted to say especially America, but maybe that's only because I read it recently and was completely entranced by it!)
I'm trying to think of any one dream in particular though and I'm struggling! In fact, and I absolutely promise you all I'm not making this up, the only specific dreams I can remember involved principally erotic escapades with my male friends. Hurm! It'd not like I don't have dreams that I remember though. weird!
4. What exactly do you do at work?
As little as possible! *snicker* heh heh....we 'provide a front-line service to some of the Harrogate district's most vulnerable residents' :P As my boss' boss might put it. mooooooooreeeee meaningfully, we sort of have two separate roles, that of assessing benefit and that of defending it to irate people with eviction notices on the telephone :) -the benefit in question is Council Tax Benefit, and Housing Benefit, Council Tax itself is a subject in its own right but anyway you have to pay Council Tax and you can claim up to one hundred perfect benefit on it, and Housing Benefit is intended to pay towards rental costs (not mortgages etc.)
So - there's all these silly (or necessary, you could argue, and in more dour and dull moments I would ;) obscure rules to be applied first of all about people's circumstances [1], no I mean actually that's second, because first of all you have to establish what people's circumstances are, by using the correct evidence [2], much more because people don't know what we need than because they're likely to lie about it. And then they never send the right things either so you have to coax it out of them and... well... think about whether you reaaaaaally can allow 3 weekly payslips instead of the required five to get the money to the minimum wage single parent (to adopt a cliche but with justification), especially when there's that weird irregularity on the second, or whether you should cancel his claim when he's not replied to a letter within the month but probably more through incompetence and disorganisation than anything else (something I can empathise with rather closely ;)
um. :) that's that! And then when we're on the phone we get all sorts of questions about why they're entitled to what they are, what they can do to get the most benefit possible allowed by the rules, what else they could apply for, what evidence we could accept to keep cheques in payment in the mean time, and also have to sound sad at angry people and sort out mistakes other people have made (well, sometimes me too...hehe) and all that sort of thing. Actually I genuinely get sad quite often. :P But I'm sentimental like that. huuuuuummmmm.
Well that is a synopsis! ;) I wonder if that tells anyone anything at all about what it is like to sit at my desk all day and eat biscuits whilst musing on whether two payments of £90 in a month on a bank statement should be queried. Oh and our computer system is nasty and takes huge swathes of effort to get anywhere with! .....for reasons purely related to my own pride, I've tried to make it out like it's not a stupid job, but if you get me in an honest moment, I'll tell you that most of the time it's really dumb and rather meaningless work (if pretty vital in its effects!) :P
[1] now what's a good example.... ooh! 'Single Room Reference Rent': most of the time if you're under 25 and have no children or other adults living in the property living with you, your Housing Benefit will be limited to a maximum of 'the reasonable cost of a single room,' before your income is even taken into consideration (anyone else gets just a 'reasonable rent' for x bedrooms and living rooms where x varies with the number of people living in the property before income/capital is looked at). However, this is waived if Disability Living Allowance is in payment to the claimant, as long as it's Middle or High Rate, Care component only. Higher Rate Mobility component and Lower Rate Care don't count! This is the only time that disabilities will ever affect the 'reasonable rent' decision :)
I suspect that I haven't explained that very well, and possibly that it couldn't really be explained too well. Oh well.... I had fun ;)
[2] original copies two months' bank statements, an in date tenancy agreement or printed receipts from a registered childcare provider only, please!
5. Do you have any secrets you've never told anyone?
Hmmmmmm! In principle, I would hope not, since I am one hundred and a bit per cent behind an approach of telling anything anything if they would be interested, as long as it's not going to irrationally adversely affect their view of me or someone/something else. Um. So, you know, say if it was some weird spiteful desire I had, and someone understood it as something stupid that I shouldn't do, but didn't go 'what the hell can you ever think that for I'm never talking to you again', I would hope I'd tell them. Of course that's a pretty vague and adaptable proviso that could probably cover just about anything if you tried hard enough ;) I don't think there's anything that I've especially carefully and deliberately kept to myself no matter what my expectations of the person I'm talking to is, though!
awwww thanks Erica :) that was great fun and ace questions!
Now I'm going to bed. Night all!
1. Do you think we will be friends forever?
awww! well, I hope so :) I miss those days of insanely lengthy emails and occasional fantastic phone calls! If not so much when I put the number in wrong so it cost twenty pounds. hhhhhmmm. Not that it would likely be like that again! but um. I would really love to come visit you again, actually, to reply to your comment here :) Maybe one day I might somehow manage to save some money, and do so.
2. What book (aside from the Bible) has had the most influence on your life?
Hmm would that I could honestly claim that the Bible were the book that has had most influence on my life! After much thought, I also can't choose one. I decided I'd limit myself to four, and one related item:
** Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and "The Idiot". The Idiot was the first time I ever imagined that literature could convey such hideous, radiant, beautiful emotional intensity as it obviously can, and the first time I'd ever thought the idea of 'love' could be cruel, ambivalent, or frustrated in any other way than rejection by its object (such, at least, is my best reconstruction of the rather vague memory and understanding of what I thought at the time ;)
** Peter Singer, and "Western Poverty and Third World Guilt" - actually this was only a 20 page article. - which started from the suggestion that maybe we could see starving people as having a greater right to food than we have to more useless crap, and with a most elementary logic drew the most startling and disturbing conclusions. and um.... maybe any good statement of moral philosophy will produce much the same effect on any interested uninformed reader but Singer's piece was hovering at the edge of my most important decisions for yeaaaaaaaaaars to come! (in a nutshell - without pomp or ado he concluded that we every single one of us in the west more or less had a duty to give all the money we owned away till we were in as bad a financial-resources situation as the most folorn sub-Saharan! Because why, after all, should we suffer less than they? (though obviously we shouldn't suffer more, either).).
** Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil," Schopenhauer, "Essays and Aphorisms," and Camus, "The Rebel"....hehehe alright I know that's cheating... but I can't leave them out!!!! More of the same, really, I guess. I think I could not adequately express the importance I feel the observation of such rigorous approaches to epistemology (and everything else!) has had for me :)
** ed. Frederic Jameson, "Aesthetics". This is an amazing collection of trendy Marxists (Adorno and Benjamin and all that lot :P) writing about books and paintings and music and things and it has affected the way I understand all these things since! oh yes! not that I know anything about paintings. But the suggestion that aesthetic appreciation could in fact have its roots in actual social relations, not just some abstract and/or obscure facet of being human, was an enormous revelation for me (not that such links are necessarily readily observable! but you know... to try and look for them... really a revelation!). mhmmm... and the idea of literature as chrystalizing the most important aspects of human interactions (like the key central core of boss-worker oppression as boredom and lack of money due to restricted free and work time options, say....).... like, picking out the essential bits and ignoring the clouding factors experienced in an ordinary human lifetime.... very good!!
I can't believe that's seven men and no women!!! well it would be pretty horrifically patronising to choose one now hey.... and anyway I'm going for an item not a book... which is.... :)
** the gender and sexuality studies section of my sociology module! Oh my goodness! See before that I had the vaguest notion possible of a mysterious and (more or less) unalterable atrribute called gender that floated around till it attached itself to someone at birth and was, pretty much, indivisible from sex. So to consider it characterised instead as something arising from, reinforced by and constantly altered through interactions between people was faaaaaairly interesting! And, I think, much the same story could be told for sexuality. And all that has had a very considerable influence on the way I think about and talk to everyone that I know. Apart from being massively fascinating in itself :)
so there! I would like to put it that I'm tired and, well, probably would come across an idiot trying to explain all this business whatever (ohhhhh but dear to my heart it all is!) but maybe especially so tonight. ;) eh!
3. What is the best dream you've ever had?
The best dream! I don't know about that. I am always intrigued by my dreams, but I don't tend to look back on them too fondly. But I'm not complaining! Maybe what interests me so much is that they almost invariably are (as I reconstruct them afterwards anyway! ;) shot through with menace and events of huge importance but considerable obscurity, unnerving and disconcerting but rarely depressing, very much like, it always pleases me to think, any of Kafka's novels. ;) (I'm tempted to say especially America, but maybe that's only because I read it recently and was completely entranced by it!)
I'm trying to think of any one dream in particular though and I'm struggling! In fact, and I absolutely promise you all I'm not making this up, the only specific dreams I can remember involved principally erotic escapades with my male friends. Hurm! It'd not like I don't have dreams that I remember though. weird!
4. What exactly do you do at work?
As little as possible! *snicker* heh heh....we 'provide a front-line service to some of the Harrogate district's most vulnerable residents' :P As my boss' boss might put it. mooooooooreeeee meaningfully, we sort of have two separate roles, that of assessing benefit and that of defending it to irate people with eviction notices on the telephone :) -the benefit in question is Council Tax Benefit, and Housing Benefit, Council Tax itself is a subject in its own right but anyway you have to pay Council Tax and you can claim up to one hundred perfect benefit on it, and Housing Benefit is intended to pay towards rental costs (not mortgages etc.)
So - there's all these silly (or necessary, you could argue, and in more dour and dull moments I would ;) obscure rules to be applied first of all about people's circumstances [1], no I mean actually that's second, because first of all you have to establish what people's circumstances are, by using the correct evidence [2], much more because people don't know what we need than because they're likely to lie about it. And then they never send the right things either so you have to coax it out of them and... well... think about whether you reaaaaaally can allow 3 weekly payslips instead of the required five to get the money to the minimum wage single parent (to adopt a cliche but with justification), especially when there's that weird irregularity on the second, or whether you should cancel his claim when he's not replied to a letter within the month but probably more through incompetence and disorganisation than anything else (something I can empathise with rather closely ;)
um. :) that's that! And then when we're on the phone we get all sorts of questions about why they're entitled to what they are, what they can do to get the most benefit possible allowed by the rules, what else they could apply for, what evidence we could accept to keep cheques in payment in the mean time, and also have to sound sad at angry people and sort out mistakes other people have made (well, sometimes me too...hehe) and all that sort of thing. Actually I genuinely get sad quite often. :P But I'm sentimental like that. huuuuuummmmm.
Well that is a synopsis! ;) I wonder if that tells anyone anything at all about what it is like to sit at my desk all day and eat biscuits whilst musing on whether two payments of £90 in a month on a bank statement should be queried. Oh and our computer system is nasty and takes huge swathes of effort to get anywhere with! .....for reasons purely related to my own pride, I've tried to make it out like it's not a stupid job, but if you get me in an honest moment, I'll tell you that most of the time it's really dumb and rather meaningless work (if pretty vital in its effects!) :P
[1] now what's a good example.... ooh! 'Single Room Reference Rent': most of the time if you're under 25 and have no children or other adults living in the property living with you, your Housing Benefit will be limited to a maximum of 'the reasonable cost of a single room,' before your income is even taken into consideration (anyone else gets just a 'reasonable rent' for x bedrooms and living rooms where x varies with the number of people living in the property before income/capital is looked at). However, this is waived if Disability Living Allowance is in payment to the claimant, as long as it's Middle or High Rate, Care component only. Higher Rate Mobility component and Lower Rate Care don't count! This is the only time that disabilities will ever affect the 'reasonable rent' decision :)
I suspect that I haven't explained that very well, and possibly that it couldn't really be explained too well. Oh well.... I had fun ;)
[2] original copies two months' bank statements, an in date tenancy agreement or printed receipts from a registered childcare provider only, please!
5. Do you have any secrets you've never told anyone?
Hmmmmmm! In principle, I would hope not, since I am one hundred and a bit per cent behind an approach of telling anything anything if they would be interested, as long as it's not going to irrationally adversely affect their view of me or someone/something else. Um. So, you know, say if it was some weird spiteful desire I had, and someone understood it as something stupid that I shouldn't do, but didn't go 'what the hell can you ever think that for I'm never talking to you again', I would hope I'd tell them. Of course that's a pretty vague and adaptable proviso that could probably cover just about anything if you tried hard enough ;) I don't think there's anything that I've especially carefully and deliberately kept to myself no matter what my expectations of the person I'm talking to is, though!
awwww thanks Erica :) that was great fun and ace questions!
Now I'm going to bed. Night all!