Question for all you ex-pats out there.

Erin's on a student visa. The general rule with a student visa, certainly as I know it and as everyone seems to agree, is that you can work full-time during holiday periods and half time (18.5 hrs) during term.

If you're in a period where you should be writing a thesis, then you're technically still in session and can only work half time. The guidance that Erin had had, however, suggested that if your supervisor/HOD approved a break, you would technically be back on holiday time, and would then be able to work full-time again.

The Uni's International Office disagrees, stating that she just can't work more than a 20 hour week regardless.

And not to say that that doesn't make sense, but given that this is Edinburgh Uni and they've already royally screwed E over at least twice so far, financially speaking (such as by taking all her remaining fees out of her second last loan installment, leaving her with nothing for the summer that she's apparently not allowed to work in and of course unable to claim another fee loan installment as the fees have been paid already out of her living costs installment), I thought I'd check.

This comes the day after I discover that my new job (which is, appropriately, with the university) is, unexpectedly, paid monthly, and I will see nothing until the end of August. So as you can imagine I'm feeling just peachy today, tyvm.

Questions from andlosers. If you want questions, comment.


1. If your deepest, wildest ambitions could be realised, what and where would you be?

International superstar, naturally! Er... I think that ultimately the one thing I've always wanted to do is produce music. I love writing, performing, recording, and it's the one thing I could imagine doing with the rest of my life and never tiring of. So I guess my wildest, deepest ambition would be to actually be supporting myself, or even just mostly supporting myself, through music. Unfortunately I'd also like to eat and pay my rent, and I'm not actually that great a musician (and I don't have the right looks to get away with being a mediocre one), and even good, musicians struggle for years and mostly get nowhere, so it's certainly pretty 'wild' as ambitions go.


2. What's the single nastiest, most horrible corner of Edinburgh in your opinion, and how would you make it awesome?

I don't really know, to be honest. I tend to only hang around the lovely places in Edinburgh - it's very easy to never go anywhere horrible here if you don't want to. I guess the worst places I've ever actually been to are Wester Hailes, Sighthill and Muirhouse. I guess the best way to improve areas like that are to foster stronger community ties, build more parks, have better upkeep of buildings and public utilities/services/buildings, etc etc. In short, get a Green MP in? They're good at that stuff. I'm pretty sure that as Scotland (and Britain as a whole) goes, more effort and funding is being put into Edinburgh's nastier and more deprived areas than most places, so wherever it is is probably already heading in a decent direction.


3. Words, pictures or music?

This is a harder one since I've had love affairs with all three, but as such have thought about it a lot so I do know the answer. Pictures are easy to discard because you can easily create pictures using words or music, whereas creating music or words through pictures is a little harder. Does that mean, though, that pictures are what we're aiming for all along and therefore words and music are secondary? Hm... Well, regardless, I'm going for music. In the 'would you go deaf or blind' would-you-rather question I always choose blind, because I could live without art, and even reading/writing (since books-on-tape and speech-to-text are pretty good these days), but I would be heartbroken to never hear music - or human voices for that matter - again. So yes. Music.


4. You're Peter Petrelli from Heroes, albeit without the stodgy acting or witless, glazed-over eyes, and can take on your friends' abilities without harming them. Whose would you want?

I've made such an effort in my life to surround myself with people I admire, so this one could go on forever. The first thing that springs to mind is daisyflip's determination, adaptability, bravery and innovation. And her talent, but then I want everyone's talent. But yeah, she has managed to get by being self-employed for years now, never knowing exactly what she's going to be doing for months at a time, subsisting on doing stuff she hates while being paid peanuts-to-nothing for bits and pieces of things that she loves, looking out for every opportunity and jumping headlong at it, constantly on the move, constantly looking forward. Next to her, claiming to be a musician, or to have dreams of doing this or that or the other and saying that I am aiming for want I want, eventually, honest, I feel like a total fake because I'm not doing what she has, because it just scares me way too much.

I want time_for_tea's ability to drop everything and disappear off on holiday/ travelling/ working abroad/ etc etc for months on end. Although my emotional attachment to my home has lessened in the past year and change, I know that I would struggle greatly to leave home for that long without it scaring the shit out of me, particularly if I was travelling from place to place, never really settling, just doing whatever wherever. Mind you, I don't have his savings, which probably makes it easier. Can I have his ability to save, also, plz?

I have a number of friends who show an immense willpower when it comes to their eating habits. I would like the willpower to more easily stop eating when I've had enough instead of when I'm full. I know that I could, but it's so hard, damnit. This 'ability' is interchangeable with the 'ability' to eat as much as one wants without putting on any weight. Either would do!

I would love some proper talent from someone who has it. Anyone/anything, really. I'm a total fraud, which is I suppose its own talent in a way, but not as satisfying long-term. This ties in, of course, to the ability to throw oneself at said talent, headlong, totally committed - see first paragraph of this answer.

I would like to not care what people think of me. I'm not sure that it's true that anyone really doesn't care what anyone thinks of them as I think that no matter what you say you do care to some extent. But I do know that there are a lot of people who care way less than me and they're a lot happier and sorted for it, in that respect, I think.

Like I say, I could go on all day. But this will do for now.


5. As the resolution of a legal battle too long and involved to possibly get into here, you're forced to participate in one reality TV show before the year is out, and you've got to look like you're enjoying it. Which would you pick?

Well, I don't know that anyone enjoys these things all the way through. I can't say that I know a huge number of reality TV shows, but going with my own knowledge I suppose the obvious one would be X Factor or whatever it's called. Or is Pop Idol still going? Are there any of those sorts of shows where you actually get to hone and perform your own material instead of singing covers?

Anyway, failing that, and perhaps more interesting for me, I've often said that if I was in the right position, and single, I would totally have auditioned to be on Big Brother at some point. This was after watching the very first season (which was brilliant - I haven't seen any since so can't comment on any after that) and thinking that I could play that game way better than those people were. Of course, the characters who get onto Big Brother as the years go by are more and more ridiculous and I imagine I'm nowhere near weird or damaged enough to actually get onto the show, but I do genuinely think it would be interesting. And of course I could sleep safe in the knowledge that there'd be no way I was staying the course to the end without being voted out, so it wouldn't be as though I was actually having to do it for three months or however long it is.

Following the coverage of the depoliticised London Pride, there's a question I've been meaning to ask for a while of you, my esteemed friendslist. First, a little background.

For the first... I dunno, year, maybe? or something? ...well, the first while, anyway, that I was visibly gay*, there was the occasional catcall in the street from randoms, usually out of moving cars. The traditional and rather unimaginative 'lesbians!' was usual, or occasionally some delightfully supportive expression of approval such as the guy that once leaned out of the window of his moving car while going around a corner at Tollcross to give us two thumbs up and say 'Excellent!' The scary part was the fact that he was in the driver's seat.

I digress. So this went on for a while, maybe once or twice a month, maybe not even that - certainly not very often, and after a while it petered out to virtually nothing. This wasn't perhaps terribly surprising, as that was 2003-ish and since then civil partnerships have been brought in, gay couples (and indeed unmarried couples) have had adoption rights sorted out and evened up, a rash of pop stars and so on have come out and generally the whole thing has become awfully passé and not at all noteworthy.

Or so I thought. But in the past... two months, maybe a little more? Erin and I (and on one occasion I alone) have been shouted at in the street either from cars or pub doorways once or twice a week.

Now Erin has been here since last August, and we've been living where we now live for about ten months. Neither of us has undergone any particular transformation of appearance - I bleached my hair but that was ages ago now, and my cut is a pretty simple bob which I've had way shorter in the past. I don't even go out every day dressed in men's-style formalwear, which I did for months on end a year or so ago.

Not that there'd be anything wrong with having changed our appearance to look 'more gay' if we had - I'm just trying to make it clear that there's been no superficial change to our circumstances that would explain a sudden upswing in catcalls.

So I guess this is my question: Queers out there (wherever you are, I suppose, although please tell me in your comment where that is in case I've forgotten), have you noticed any sudden increase in being shouted at by random idiots while you're out and about?

Obviously this is more a question for those of you who might reasonably expect to be 'clocked' on sight - if you habitually hold hands with your same-sex partner in the street, do you have a traditionally 'camp' or 'dykey' appearance, or indeed if you cross-dress etc since I did say 'queer' and not 'gay' (although I'm not sure the cross-dressers/transfolk ever got a break from in-the-street-abuse in the first place, of course).

So anyway, bit of a minefield phrasing this question properly on LJ, isn't it? To sum up: I haven't been shouted at in the street by random wankers in years, and suddenly they're everywhere. What gives?


*By visibly gay, I mean that when I walked down the street there was something about me that made it reasonable to assume on appearances alone that I was a lesbian. In my case it was not stereotypical short hair/plaid/whatever (usually), but the presence of another woman holding hands with me. Please don't take immediate offense at this judgment - appearances are pivotal to the post.

This post infuriates me.

It infuriates me not because I disagree with the basic principle that rape is systemic and cultural, that it's a facet of the way today's society is programmed, in all those subtle ways we are barely aware of, to believe that men are strong and are designed to take what they want, designed without self-control, and women are designed to be submissive and possessed. Because I do believe that, and have argued over and over and over again that the only way to truly make a proper dent in rape statistics is not to change the way the law deals with rape to attempt to raise conviction rates, but to educate people to not commit (or in some cases facilitate) rape in the first place.

However, I don't think the way to go about that re-education is to tell guys who aren't rapists, aren't rape-apologists or are even rape-preventers to pat themselves on the back for not being dickheads and criminals and share their stories of when they didn't rape that chick that time. Seriously, what the fucking fuck? Telling 18 year old guys that they're doing a service to society by not committing rape (as suggested by this poster) is helping the situation how exactly?

Yeah, there's an element of sarcasm there, but even taken facetiously the basic principle that being That Guy - you know, a decent human being - is such an exceptional thing to be that it's now your responsibility to re-educate all the neanderthals around you is just bullshit. Frankly, it's sexist hate-mongering of the highest order, I see it in variously distilled forms all the time, it's entirely unhelpful and Oh My God does it piss me off.

You know why we don't tell stories about the time that guy didn't rape us? You know why guys don't talk about all those rapes they didn't commit, or averted? Because it's the norm. In the real world - not your weirdo, messed-up, all men are rapists, all women are victimised, all drama, all the time world - most guys don't rape women, and most guys who do don't do it in front of a crowd to give some other guy the opportunity to stand by and let it happen.

cereta says it shouldn't be a story when a guy doesn't rape a woman, and I agree with her, it shouldn't. What astounds me is that she thinks that it in any way is. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe other girls leave parties or wake up in the morning or whatever and think "Wow, I could've been raped last night and wasn't." Clearly some of the women in her comments pages do think that way. I certainly don't. Not being raped is the norm. Yes, rape is a horrible, horrible thing, and yes, conviction rates are tragically low, and yes, it is a problem in today's society but come on, we're not that far gone, are we? Am I a bad feminist for taking the positive outlook that however muddy consent issues can get, and however many guys have no awareness of when they've crossed a line, things are still getting better all the time, and we are not still living in caves and hitting women over the head to impregnate them?

From the top of my head, in the past decade:

• I went on a number of long, late night drives with a guy who I didn't know that well, and I also knew would jump me given the go-ahead and you know what? I didn't expect to be raped, and lo and behold, he didn't rape me. Make a poster.
• I've shared a bed, while rather drunk by the way, with a guy who I knew fancied me rotten, and I knew he wouldn't try anything, and guess what? He didn't. Stop press.
• I've on multiple occasions been paryletically drunk in flats with just single guys in them. I never expected to be raped. I wasn't raped. Tell your friends.

cereta asks why I don't tell these stories when I read about a rape in the news. Why I don't talk about the time some guy took care of me while I was drunk and didn't molest me. Again, let me tell you why: it's not a story. Girls don't talk about the guys who did them right. No one is interested in those stories, not as a general rule.

I realise now that I've been stupidly ungrateful my whole adult life, and I should really remedy it now, so this is from me, to all you guys. All my male friends who didn't molest me when I was semi-conscious on your couch: thank you for not raping me. All my male friends who have arrived at my flat to find me just out of the shower and running around in a bathrobe and didn't have a quick grab: thank you for not raping me. Every male friend I've ground against in a club while hilariously drunk or simply sky-high on life: thank you for not raping me.

Well, don't we feel better? John, Andy, Chuck - and all you guys out there I haven't thought of, if you can remember a time you could have raped me and didn't, I invite you to go out there and tell the world about how you didn't violate me and what a good guy that makes you. That'll advance society a whole whack, won't it?

I guess my big question in the end is: When did it become trendy to have a victim complex? This chick posts this frankly sexist rant dripping with sarcasm about That Guy - aforementioned decent human being - and literally hundreds of people jump on her bandwagon of "Oh, I felt so lucky when I wasn't raped that time, it's tragic, really." Fuck off.

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is hopelessly cute
7 (23.3%)

is very funny
9 (30.0%)

has possibly failed to pinch it off properly, and is going to necessitate an impromptu cat shower and liberal use of carpet cleaning foam
22 (73.3%)

omfg, cat!
16 (53.3%)

Okay, so I finally YouTubed Susan Boyle.

That was what all the fuss was about? Seriously? A somewhat plain bird who's, y'know, (without getting technical) not bad at singing if you squint a bit?

Belatedly I can express my utter cynicism, disgust, and, well, unsurprise, I suppose, at the way the media has manipulated expectations for a quick ratings boost and, if anything, made it harder for less attractive folk to get anywhere in the music business by indulging in the enemy of minorities everywhere: Tokenism.

In short, when I fail to become an international superstar, I plan to blame Susan Boyle.

My only hope is that Susan herself at least ends up with some kind of career out of it - with some training I'm sure she'd be a good character actress on Broadway or the West End. You know, once she learns to sing properly.

Failing that, she should at least be able to sell easy listening standards to old ladies along with their Cliff Richards boxed sets - although I would observe that you never did have to be attractive to do that (cf: Harry Secombe, although admittedly blokes have it easier generally), so that's not exactly barrier-breaking.


Edit: Just to prove I don't make snap judgments, I did go back and also listen to Cry Me A River. She's no Julie London, but it was quite nice and vastly superior to her performance of IDAD on that show, but not enough to significantly change my opinion.