Resurfacing

You can judge me for eating
half-baked brownie goo more often than
medical professionals advise, though. 

It's been an embarrassingly long sabbatical, but I've cleared out the cobwebs and have flexed my writing muscles for something other than summarizing credit overlay matrices (which are a real thing; I didn't just make that up).  Like a duck that has held its breath and dug for grubs in the mud, or whatever it is that ducks to do get their food, I am now resurfacing.  Please do not judge the rest of this post by that truly awful simile.

In the Western world, there’s a very popular narrative that follows “conventionally successful” people.  It involves someone in a “conventionally prestigious career,” like law, medicine, finance, politics who has everything he or she is supposed to want but is lacking that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Said successful person takes a leap of faith and pursues that oft-cited road less travelled, changes his or her entire life, simplifies/streamlines/some variation of that verb, and finds that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Usually, this narrative involves a wealthy white person “finding him/herself” with the help of non-white people.  Eat, Pray, Love is probably what comes to mind (apparently the author was actually given an advance by her publishing house to finance her nine months of self-finding, if you’re curious).

This narrative doesn’t even have to involve the whole cultural shift.  Think of that guy you heard of who quit his job at Goldman Sachs to become a painter.  Think of the lawyer who was at his desk at 11pm, had an epiphany, quit his job, and moved his family out of the big nasty city and into a place where they might not be rich but where they could connect with nature and breathe fresh air.  God, think of that Nicolas Cage film The Family Man.  Weirdly enough, we’re taught to believe that all the things that are right to pursue are actually wrong and that breaking from convention! is where the true meaning of life lies.

(Just to fuck with you, though, you should still want all the things you should want.  I’m sure there’s a way to reconcile those two things, even though they’re mutually exclusive.  This is why there are so many Tibetan craft shops in places like Marin County.)

A year ago, I had a plan.  My plan was to get my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate and to teach English in China.  The end goal was to, after a year, have enough contacts that I could find a job in international trade or finance over there, which is a logical but definitely not a guaranteed outcome.  Everyone waxed poetic about how brave and exotic this plan was to the point that you would have thought I planned on becoming fluent in Lingala, hot air ballooning over the Congo River basin, and setting up a sculptors’ commune in the Ruwenzori Mountains.

I might have actually had somewhere to wear the multitude of traditional clothing I bought during my internship in Tanzania.  Pictured: me at 17, significantly less clued in to pretty much everything.

Needless to say, it was pretty flattering.  I felt terribly cool.

However!  To support myself while I got certified, I was writing and researching for one of my dad’s associates in the mortgage banking industry, which meant that I was working in not just in finance, but probably the most hated sector of finance (in case you somehow missed the ulcer-inducing collapse of the global economy back in 2008).  Saying that you work in mortgage banking is like the anti-free-spirit-breaking-from-convention.  As far as most people are concerned, you’re more interesting/more ethical/generally a better person in every way if you say that you’re a corporate lawyer…and people hate corporate lawyers.

The thing is, though, that I liked the writing.  I liked learning about the industry and watching and analyzing how the big-picture changes came into effect in response to government regulation or international economic movements or releases of consumer data.  I liked using my brain to wrap my head around the myriad moving parts and how they all affected one another.  No one in finance is supposed to find their job interesting—everyone is supposed to burn out, sell their soul to the devil, lose track of their true passion in their relentless pursuit of moneymoneymoney before falling, weeping, to their knees when they realize just how empty their life is, etc.—but here’s a dirty little secret: some people do.  I won’t say “a lot of people” in finance do, but rest assured that there are some.  I would know.  I’ve worked with them.

So last June, there I was, certified, ready to take my St Andrews degree to go teach English for $1500 a month.  I was up to my elbows in interviews, 95% of them with institutions that were clearly less than ethical in their dealings.  One recruiter told me that he wasn’t sure about actually getting me a job, but that I seemed like “a great girl” and had “a great smile” in my picture and that we should definitely meet up for a beer when I moved out there (oh, totally!).  Another offered me a job (which I accepted), wrote back two days later to say that it had actually been offered to someone else, and then repeated the process with two other positions.  Another told me I should fly to China on a tourist visa and that they would take care of getting me a work visa when I got there (nota bene: if there’s one thing you don’t want to fuck around with, it’s Chinese visas). 

The absolute last thing I wanted was to relocate across the Pacific at great expense and effort to find myself in trouble with the Chinese government with no support from my employee, shelling out insane money for a lawyer, and facing deportation.  If you go looking for horror stories of people that blindly accept teaching jobs overseas, you will find thousands in a matter of seconds—people getting deported, people getting unfairly fired, people signing contracts they can’t understand, people getting a quarter of the pay they’d been promised.  I was 22.  My parents had paid for eighteen years of private education (and a lot of other stuff).  I really, really didn’t want to call home broke and in tears and I really, really didn’t want to feel as though I’d spent another year dicking around before I was on a career path, which I saw as pretty key to becoming a real adult.

On top of that, as much as I loved Shanghai, early summer in the San Francisco Bay Area is seriously nice.  Waking up to yawning blue skies and warm sun day in and day out was glorious after having existed under British cloud cover for so long.  The taste of the drinking water, the ease of getting to the beach or Napa or Tahoe, the fresh produce, the unexpected enjoyment of having my family close by—these were all great.  The Bay Area might have been where I grew up, but deciding to stay here instead of going to Shanghai didn’t feel like a consolation prize (at all).  Not to mention the fact that, in terms of job hunting and laying down a career path, this is where the bulk of my contacts were.

I’m a bond trader now.  I spend a lot of time in Excel, have a calculator that I actually use on a daily basis, and discuss things like deliverables and ROI and risk management.  A typical day involves trading $35 million at a time to investors like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, tracking the Cyprus bailout plan, and discussing strategy with our hedging guys on the east coast.  There are expensed dinners with investors where lighthearted chat gives way to hardball negotiation and bluffing after a few bottles of wine are put away.  The office is a total boys’ club, and I get a lot of flak if I order a vodka cranberry instead of a neat scotch when we go out for happy hour (“imagine if you’d ordered some pink girly shit like that when you were out with a bunch of other traders on Wall Street; they’d never take you seriously again”).

Outside of work hours, I live in a new apartment with pool, jacuzzi, gym, deli, and dry cleaner on site right next to the bay, and it feels like my own personal oasis.  If it’s 3am and I’m six miles from home in a bad neighborhood, I can take a taxi and not stress over how much more it’s costing than the bus.  When I’ve had an exhausting day, I can opt for takeout instead of trekking to the grocery store and cooking.  My friends and family will confirm that the quality of their birthday and Christmas presents has taken a turn for the better.  I can pick up the tab when one of my friends has a special occasion, donate as an alum to my schools, and leave the kinds of tips that I like to think are actually a pleasure to receive, as opposed to the you-can-tell-how-much-I-resent-this-particular-social-custom kind of tips.

Oh, and I should actually be able to get into the housing market down the line so I’m not hemorrhaging money for rent every month for the rest of my life.  O-M-effing-G.

So, if I were to be considered successful, it would be successful in a very conventional way—and I don’t even hate what I do!  Another dirty secret—in fact, I really like what I do, and I like the people I do it with!  No one’s going to make a Hollywood epic about it, but I’m pretty okay with the Eat, Pray, Love devotees and other free spirits not thinking that I’m doing something “cool.”

Years ago, I remember my dad saying that after decades in the industry, he still woke up every day excited to close another deal.  If I could at some point have that in a job, I thought to myself, that would be awesome.  I believed that, if I had a job that made me feel that way by the time I was fifty, I would have arrived.  I have that right now at age 23 (well, almost 24…urgh).  I genuinely look forward to going to work in the morning, which I’m fairly certain that that translates to satisfaction.  I’m not walking around in a perpetual state of existential ennui wondering how life got to be filled with so many things but to be so devoid of real meaning.  I’m actually pretty fucking happy. 

As for the idea that I turned down a life-changing opportunity or took the “boring” or “sell-out” path, I can see how my choices might have come across that way.  Consider this, though: there’s a reason that rent in San Francisco is astronomical.  People want to live here, and that’s because it’s a fantastic and bizarre city and it's San Francisco to the core—in no way does it feel like a so-called “typical” developed world city.  For all the experiences I may be “missing out on” by not living in China, there are an equal number I am getting by living here (like taking BART through downtown Oakland at 10pm on a Thursday—when you’re sober it’s terrifying, but when you’re buzzed it’s hilarious!).  I’m also sure that there are Shanghainese 23-year-olds who are working in finance who considered taking that alternative path and moving the San Francisco but who are tremendously happy with what they did opt to do.  Kind of like Chinese mirror Cecis.

Maybe my sixteen-year-old self, if I could get in touch with her, would be rolling her eyes at how very boring I turned out to be.  Keep in mind, though, that my sixteen-year-old self was in many ways kind of an idiot…and didn’t appreciate the value of a really excellent 1997 Napa Valley cabarnet.

This is where I get to live my life as a, uh, soulless drone.  

Life After Uni: It's a Riot

I am fully aware that the last thing I posted is three months old, but I’m not sure that I can be bothered to make excuses or justifications. Erm...I've been busy? Anyway, here we are.

When it comes to the shift from university to ‘the real world’, clichés abound—stuff like ‘the beginning of the rest of your life’, ‘becoming a “real person”’, et cetera. If I’m entirely honest, though, I haven’t had one of those moments where I realise, with a hugely jolting shock, that, ‘Oh my God, my life has changed ENORMOUSLY!’ I suppose that was what was in my mind when I titled the blog ‘In Transit’, because this is meant to be THE transition. So I’m a little bit disappointed that I haven’t had some major epiphany. But then I thought about it. I’ve worked during the summer since I was fifteen, having done full-time summer jobs all through uni, so I’m used to working nine-hour days. I worked in a proper office job last summer, so I’m used to looking presentable, commuting and using my brain. I’ve had my own flat, I’ve had a salary, I’ve managed my finances, I’ve lived overseas, I’ve lived in a massive city. Is my ‘new life’ really that different, then?

Well, no. All of ‘adult life’ was kind of expected, in which case, thanks are due to my parents. Congratulations, Mom and Dad, you raised a kid who’s not having a nervous breakdown about replacing a light bulb (in all seriousness, I mean that—I’ve been really lucky to have the opportunities that made THE transition so smooth). On paper, all the stuff looks rather monumental...

1. I wore a sombre black robe and got handed a diploma (ie I graduated). For one rather surreal week, my family and I stayed in St Andrews and drank a lot of champagne. I had stressed that, although it may have been June and California may have been Barcelona-sunny, Scotland would be grey, cool and breezy. They soon realised that I was not exaggerating and expressed wonder at how I had survived there for four years. Anyway, one long, Latin-filled ceremony and one mind-shattering graduation ball later, I found myself on the Caledonian Sleeper to Euston, bidding goodbye to St Andrews and goodbye to Scotland. It’s not like I was heading off to war, and plans have already been made for a cheeky weekend back up, so this was a lot less emotional than it could have been.
























This is me, but edumacated

2. I signed a contract for a job in London. A few years ago, this would have been entirely unremarkable, but now that the global economy is in the toilet, it does feel like slightly more like an accomplishment. It’s in PR, which isn’t my dream industry, but it puts money in the old RBS savings every month, so...you know. Amongst other things, it gives me an excuse to shop at Banana Republic for things like grey pinstriped trousers, which, if you’re unemployed, just look kind of try-hard.
























Employment is SO cool!

3. I signed a contract for a flat, also in London. When I was in California for the three weeks between the end of term and graduation, my brother told me, ‘You’re going to be living in a hovel—just so you know’. Ted has never exhibited any clairvoyant tendencies (rather, any particularly acute ones), so I’m not sure where he got that, but it turned out to be wrong. There are a few cons—it looks a little like a crack den from the outside, our landlord is kind of a bitch, and I accidentally blew up the oven a few weeks ago—but the interior is lovely. It gets tonnes of light, has a massive and recently refurbished kitchen, and comes complete with a balcony. On top of that, it’s a stone’s throw from Clapham Common and the tube. We also have a lot of Caribbean neighbours with gloriously cool accents, and, true to the Caribbean stereotype, they listen to really catchy music and cook food that smells delicious. Allie and I are working on getting a dinner invite somewhere.
























We looked at a flat about two feet away from this sign. Unsurprisingly, we opted not to live there.

4. I established a routine whereby I commuted from aforementioned flat to aforementioned job. Every morning, I hit the snooze button a few times, pelt out the door about ten minutes later than I intend to, and squeeze onto a Northern line train whose person-to-space ratio rivals that of the Shanghai metro at rush hour. After my first week of work, I admit that I was so exhausted that, zombie-like, I boarded a northbound Victoria train instead of the southbound one that would take me home. I completely failed to register the stop at Green Park and got to Oxford Circus before I realised that something wasn’t quite right. It also kind of makes me hate the general public even more than usual—I find that my ‘excuse me’ sounds more like a threat than a request these days—but Clapham Common to Victoria is a short commute by London standards (thirty minutes).
























How commuting makes me feel sometimes

...but, let’s be honest, everyone does this (apart from blowing up the oven). Unless they get signed for a record deal or descend into hipsterdom. How I hate hipsters.

Things wasn’t quite expecting?

1. The worst riots London has seen in thirty years...in my backyard. I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided pretty much any kind of violent conflict in my lifetime, but as someone who’s never even been mugged, I can’t help but worry on occasion that I’ve got a bull’s eye between my shoulder blades, or maybe a flashing neon sign on my forehead that reads ‘WALKING UPPER-MIDDLE CLASS CASHPOINT WITH MINIMAL UPPER ARM STRENGTH’. Needless to say, when the news said that there were a thousand angry, fearless rioters making their way up Lavender Hill towards my house, I was a bit shaken. After Allie pointed to flames and hooded figures on her computer screen and said, ‘Look, we’re on the news’, the two of us, doing our best to seem casual, drew all the blinds and locked and barricaded our doors. My little chilli plant, which lives on our kitchen window sill, seemed especially vulnerable with its delicate green stalks waving in the air, so I tucked it behind the toaster. It then dawned on me that the looters were going after plasma TVS, not chilli plants, and that if a bunch of lawless yobs broke into my house, I would do better to worry about my laptop, jewellery, or skull. The riots themselves have stopped, but this whole thing, whatever it may be, is far from over. When people ask where I live and I tell them Clapham, I get a response that goes something like ‘Oh my God, was your flat okay?’, usually accompanied by a concerned and sinister ‘oooh’ sound. It’s as if I said that I grew up Darfur.

















What immediately comes to mind when I tell people where I live (photo actually taken in Croydon, I'll have you know)

2. Even ‘real people’ get excited about free food and free booze. Last Wednesday, we had a company rounders tournament and picnic in Hyde Park (company-mandated fun) that included a load of wine, sandwiches, quiche, hummus, crudités, and those delicious vegetable crisps that I wish weren’t so expensive. As we all clustered on our blankets and watched the sky fade to dusky pink, the main topic of conversation was, yes, the free food and booze. Similarly, the last half hour of Friday afternoons, which sees a company-wide ‘tea’ where ‘tea’ actually means ‘wine’, is when my coworkers are at their most animated. The cheese twists and chocolate buttons are practically hoovered up, the company manages to work through half a dozen bottles of sauvignon blanc in an impressively short time, and chatter fuelled by weekend euphoria fills the room. When, if ever, do free food and booze become less exciting?



















Cue mass hysteria!

3. A taste for seriously black coffee. As someone who fixes her coffee in such a way that it wouldn’t look out of place on a Viennese dessert cart, believe me, this was unexpected. I’ve found myself brewing coffee so strong and dense it could probably sit up and bark. Rocket fuel. Liquid crack black as the night. So intense that, if I brew a cafetiere and leave it in the kitchen downstairs, I feel obligated to leave a warning note. It leaves me feeling like that guy in Get Him to The Greek after he gets an adrenaline shot to the heart, which isn’t a good thing per se, but it definitely beats the sinking exhaustion brought on by, you know, being awake in the morning. I thought that caffeine addiction was just one of those office clichés, but it turns out that a good dose of it really does make work more bearable.














Me after my morning cup o' joe

4. There’s a fox that loiters outside my window at night. Yes, a real-live fox in Zone 2. What? Would you have expected that?















Hehehe!

I’m sure there are others too.

So. ‘Real life.’ All that I’ve come to conclude is that it’s not nearly as terrifying as everyone makes it out to be, but also that it doesn’t inspire some kind of massive celebration where there are champagne corks flying and everyone dressed to the nines.



















Hooray for not being a total screwup!

Not the next Aesop’s fables, but I suppose I can leave you with something about life being a journey, not the destination.

Hmm. That’s pretty milquetoast. Check back in a bit.

Various methods of procrastination during revision

As graduation encroaches, so does the end of my career as an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews. I've really come to love the things I study, but if it were up to me, I would just sit down with my tutors and have an intellectual discussion over a chardonnay rather than the draconian system of biannual examinations. Surely we should be marked on our chat, not just our ability to regurgitate information. Nevertheless, the university appears to still be giving us exams, which means long, torturous days of slogging through badly taken notes and prose that most definitely qualifies as turgid. Yes, we have entered the twilight zone of revision. To be fair, though, most of us spend a lot more time griping about revision than actually undertaking it, and when we finally actually sit down to do some work, 'something more interesting' always seems to come up. Wink, wink.

1. Looking up private islands for sale in the South Pacific. I've never been to the South Pacific, it rarely comes up in the news, and I never encountered it over the course of my studies (the region does not figure prominently in Russian history or Chinese foreign policy, unsurprisingly). My vague notions of the South Pacific are mostly derived from Conde Nast articles and childhood visits to Hawaii, so, within the confines of my head, it has remained a great unblemished paradise of sorts. And it turns out that properties for sale in Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji et al go for prices that are far from exorbitant-you can buy half of a private island in Bora Bora for just over USD3 million. This seems like a bargain.









Looks decent


2. Excessive, borderline-psychological-disorder-style tidying. Five minutes into a journal article I usually have a mini-freakout over my room being 'filthy'. All surfaces are cleared, disinfected and reordered. All clothes are folded, hung up and stowed, with the laundry sorted into lights, darks and delicates. All stray papers are discarded or filed. All creases in the duvet are fastidiously smoothed; in extreme cases I usually end up changing the sheets and pillowcases even if they were just washed. This is a classic. Everyone knows that a student's bedroom is at its cleanest when an essay deadline or exam is looming.











My bleach usage skyrockets during exam time


3. Personal beautification. I think I've plucked my eyebrows about six times in the past seven days. They don't look all that different-I have a healthy fear of overplucking them-which means that really, I've just spent a lot of time cross-legged on the bathroom counter with my face smushed up against the mirror doing nothing. When I want something more time intensive, I plaster my skin with a clay masque, wait for it to dry, wash it off and moisturise. It takes about ten minutes for it to dry, and I have managed to convince myself that, for those ten minutes, I can't possibly revise. Logically, this is entirely untrue. If I'm really desperate, I clip my nails.













Seriously, don't overpluck

4. Naps. Never a huge fan of office chairs, I do most of my academic work sitting cross-legged on my bed with my back against the wall. Unfortunately, it is nearly effortless to tip over so that my head lands on the pillow, and we all know that from there it's a lost cause.










When I'm out, I'm out


5. Looking up how much it would cost to fly to [obscure faraway destination here]. It would cost 635 pounds to fly from London to Antananarivo (capital of Madagascar, for those too lazy to pull up Google maps) if one embarked on the 16th of March and returned on the 31st.










Central Antananarivo looks just gorgeousss

6. Trying on various formal dresses and high heels. You know, just to remind myself what they look like.













It turns out this dress and heels look exactly the same


7. Downloading most of VH1's Top 100 Dance Songs of the 90s. I am now the proud owner of hits such as Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) by C+C Music Factory, Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot, Bad Touch by Bloodhound Gang, MMMBop by Hanson, and Precious by Depeche Mode. I don't like, have never liked, and probably never will like Depeche Mode, and chances are that I will never listen to the others after next Wednesday (last exam).










The 90s were totally rad!


8. Newfound enthusiasm for the gym. At least this one is healthy and constructive-it might provide an opportunity to listen to my new 90s dance hits, gives me the chance to interact with other human beings, pumps me full of endorphins and of course prevents me from becoming a fatass. Plus, if every visit entails cardio, core, stretching, AND sixty minutes in the shower/moisturising my legs/waiting for my hair to dry, one casual innocuous-sounding gym session can take up a good two and a half hours.










What would probably happen if exams went on indefinitely


9. Watching 'educational' documentaries on North Korea. The DPRK has come up in my current module on Chinese foreign policy, but, if I'm entirely honest, it's really not important enough to merit my watching multiple documentaries on the whackjobbery of Kim Jong-Il and his father. It's just so incredibly BIZARRE. How does someplace like that still exist?! Isn't it incredible that there's a whole North Korea that we, the wider world, know absolutely nothing about?!! The more documentaries I watch, the more it blows my mind. And, erm, educates me.












I'll definitely be mentioning this in my IR exam


10. Anything. Really. Along with pretty much every single person in St Andrews at the moment, I'm starting to wonder if I have severe ADD.













Hey! Dressing up as a clown and learning to juggle seems like a constructive use of my time

Good luck, fellow St Andreans. The exams do end eventually.

...and one thing about Scotland that is not so awesome

Before any of you get all hot and bothered about the title of the post, it's not about 'the people' or the traditions or the culture or the right to be independent or anything like that. In fact, unless you or one of your loved ones works at the Apple store in Glasgow, there is nothing in here that you can or should take personally, so, you know, cool your jets. (ha)

Although I was somewhat loathe to come back to the UK after two hot, blissful weeks on the island of Sri Lanka—by all accounts, paradise—I’m now quite happy to be in London. I always forget how much I like the place until I’m back; I’ll be striding along happily with hordes of people, coffee in hand, when I realise, Oh, right, I actually really enjoy it here. When Natasha and I were sat beneath a creaking ceiling fan watching the tuktuks of Unawatuna whiz by in the bold equatorial sun, I had questioned my sanity about the decision to move here next year and made a note to start looking into something based in Honolulu, but false alarm! I think I’ve made the right call.

Another reason I’m genuinely excited about moving here? The Mac store. Specifically, the one on Regent Street.

Generally, I have a hard time caring about technology (my mobile looks like something you would get with a McDonalds Happy Meal, made worse by the crack that appeared in the screen after I got it back from Tel Aviv airport security), but I love my Mac. A lot. Love isn’t even the right word; at this point, it has actually become an extension of me. The Chinese word for computer, diannao, is better suited, as it literally translates to ‘electric brain’, and my laptop is just a part of my brain that is outside my body. Thanks to the time my little electric brain and I have spent together, Apple has effectively hooked me for life. I could put something like ‘once you go Mac you never go back!!!’ here, but it made me cringe, so I’ll just leave it at that.

The trouble with living in St Andrews and Scotland in general is that the only Mac store is based in Glasgow (ominous music).

I will admit that there are some nice bits of Glasgow, yes, but for the most part, it’s difficult not to kind of despise it. Obviously there are no direct trains from St Andrews, so the only other choice is a two and a half-hour coach that takes you on a tour of the heart of Fife, and as you go through the heart of Fife, the coach accumulates a lot of people who, frankly, you would rather not sit with in an enclosed space. One of my more recent rides on the X24 saw a herd of about twenty-five local women in their late thirties embark, absolutely wasted, at about ten am from the beautiful town of Glenrothes (a total lie. Glenrothes is an armpit, has always been an armpit, and will always be an armpit.). It was their friend’s fortieth birthday, apparently, and they had decided to celebrate by being tremendously irritating. Armed with balloons, plastic water bottles filled with booze and luridly coloured mixers, pungent cheesy snacks, bad dye jobs, and a lot of excess flesh, they proceeded to make life hell for the next two hours. The low point? Either when they all started singing ‘Single Ladies’ at the top of their drunk Fife voices or when a particularly robust one started to perform a striptease (a shudder just ripped through my body). That was a particularly bad journey, but even without a flock of drunken chavs, it’s long, it’s boring, and it’s made worse by the fact that you know, at the end, you’ll be deposited in Glasgow. I’ve done it a few too many times and appear to have developed some kind of visceral reaction to the thought of it.










I suspect these people are in fancy dress, but they should give you a good picture of the kind of thing one has to put up with on the ride to Glasgow

So there’s that, you know, the whole five-hour return trip through some of Scotland’s shittiest parts. Not technically the fault of the Apple store. The same goes for the people soliciting for charity who roam the length of Buchanan Street every weekend, the very ones that scare the hell out of me by approaching purposefully with a big Joker-esque smile and leave me shrieking excuses about ‘important appointment pleasepleaseplease get away from me’. The Mac people can’t do anything about them, I don’t think.

But! The sanctuary provided by the modern and spacious floorplan and the gentle whirring of Macs en masse is deceptive, because it turns out that the people working in the Glasgow Apple store are kind of incompetent. Actually, really incompetent. Nice enough, most of them, but if their jobs are to help people with their computer needs, then they are painfully bad at their jobs.

The laptop saga is long and generally uninteresting, but the basic issue was that my poor little Macbook had to have its logic board replaced (I think this is the thing with the ethernet port and all that—very important). After being quoted a price that made the blood drain from my face, I left my electric brain in the hands of the Glasgow staff for a week. After a long seven days I made the journey back to Buchanan Street, where it was presented to me all new-looking and shiny and happy and functional. I took it in my arms and promised to never leave it again. Forty-eight hours later, it convulsed and then died. Made nauseous at the thought of going back to Glasgow yet again, I had it examined by a guy down in Edinburgh on my way to the airport who pried it open and said, ‘Jesus fucking Christ’. Apparently the logic board had been put together shockingly badly. Like wires crossing things that they shouldn’t, screws that were the wrong size, things that were making the topcase bulge outward as though an alien were living under there. I put in a few calls to the Buchanan Street store, during which I listened to a lot of easy listening whilst on hold and was then promised that someone would call me back. Needless to say, that never happened, so I bundled up my electric brain, which had now become a very expensive, delicate and cumbersome paperweight, carried it through Sri Lanka, and vowed to avenge its pathetic death by booking an appointment at the Regent Street store in London upon my return to the UK.

After showering off the grime accumulated from a three-hour train ride through the tropics and twelve hours of flying, I bounded out into the sunshine streaming through all of London and made my way there. Compared to the torture of getting to Glasgow, it was so easy I could have wept. It seemed as through one minute, I was hopping on the tube at Sloane Square and the next, I was making my way up the trademark translucent aqua stairs towards technological salvation. I’m never living in the middle of nowhere again.

Unfortunately, instead of arriving at 3.40 for the appointment I had booked from the hot confines of a Sri Lankan internet café, I arrived at 4.40. My timezones had been well and clearly scrambled by the overnight journey and daylight savings time, and as the laid-back guy in the official blue shirt told me that, erm, actually, my appointment was for an hour ago, I wanted to kick myself. However, he immediately promised me that he would make space and that I would be seen anyway—something would never happen in Glasgow.

I waited for maybe twenty minutes when he came rushing back to sit down beside me, sympathising, ‘You’ve been waiting for ages, huh?’ Considering that I had been without a laptop for a month, twenty minutes hardly seemed that long, but I proceeded to tell him the whole unfortunate tale, including the fact that I was leaving London on Tuesday and would either need it done by then or shipped up to Scotland. As transit-induced exhaustion started to set in, there was a great deal of hand-wringing, eyes cast upward in despair, some tears that were definitely more real than strategic, and a plaintive ‘I just want my laptop back’ to conclude. Now thoroughly mortified at my inability to tell time and to not cry in front of the Mac employees, I was led over to another laid-back guy in a blue shirt.

I braced myself for the worst.

His nimble and technology-friendly fingers danced over the machine a bit, and after a minute or two he looked up and said, ‘We should be able to finish this within a day, probably. As long as we have the parts.’ He checked to see if they had the parts. They did. ‘Okay, so that’s that.’ This is going far, far too smoothly, I thought. Suspiciously so.

Warily, like a fawn approaching a mountain lion, I asked him if I would be charged the £400-plus I had been told a new logic board cost.













How I feel when I ask about the cost for computer repairs

‘No, of course not. It should be ready by the time you leave for your flight on Tuesday. If you want to speak to anyone, call this number. We’ll get it fixed, thank you very much, and have a nice day.’ And I was walking back out the doors, blinking into the sun that was beginning to set over Regent Street.

It was so easy! So incredibly, unfathomably easy! After I had spent the majority of four years living in an isolated and wind-blasted little Scottish town, and with Shanghai seeming a world away, I had forgotten how gloriously accessible everything is when you live in a proper city. As I slid the key into the lock of my aunt and uncle’s house, which has always provided a lovely temporary home when I’m in London, I thought of all the wonderful things that accompanied life in civilisation. Indonesian food. Nightlife past two. Supermarkets other than Tesco and clothing shops other than Jack Wills and H&M. And, of course, a massive Apple store filled with people that actually seem to know what they’re doing, right at my fingertips.

(Art, music, theatre, diversity—all that is good too.)

Oy vey

New Year was a bit difficult this year—difficult in the way that eating ten packets of saltine crackers without water in under a minute is difficult. For reasons unbeknownst to my older and somewhat wiser self, we used to undertake the Saltine Challenge in high school when we were bored, had had a class cancelled and had ready access to saltines. No one ever seemed to succeed; instead, whoever was making the attempt always ended up covered in crumbs and choking on the dry off-white lump in his or her throat in a somewhat non-dangerous way.















Just try eating ten packets of these babies in under a minute with no water. It's easier to eat human hair.



On the first of January, I woke up with that same oh-my-God-I’m-choking-because-cracker-paste-is-blocking-my-airway sensation—something I hadn’t experienced in years—and it wasn’t the result of a light-hearted and stupid saltine-eating contest; rather, it was the first day of 2011. There was an irrational but rather large part of me that thought 2011 would never come. That it would exist only on facebook as part of my network information (‘Cecile Babcock, University of St Andrews ’11’). That really, I had just started university, so it must be closer to 2007 than 2011. That 2011 was just a year from 2012, ie the London Olympics, the next American presidential election, and the Mayans’ predicted end of days. But no, I opened my eyes to a cold and soggy day in St Andrews (our sunny Middle Eastern family holiday had since ended) to find the entire world telling me it was 1 January 2011. I stifled the urge to yell FUCK! as I rolled out of bed and mentally prepared myself for the coming year.

Providing I don’t screw up catastrophically in the coming semester, 22 June 2011 marks my own personal end of St Andrews days, also known as graduation. By that point I am expected to turn into a ‘real person’ with a job, a tastefully furnished flat, and a general idea of what I am doing with my life. I have a tentative grasp of the last one—which means I know the general industry in which I’d like to work and that I’d like to make a tonne of money, though the geography of my life is still very much up in the air—leaving me with .5 out of 3 so far.

I’m not one of those people who is going to mourn the ‘student lifestyle’ whereby I only have four hours of class a week, can sleep in until noon and can get a pass from the rest of society for an indolent and slovenly lifestyle. For one, I’ve never been the sort to sleep until noon, which, during a Scottish winter, means you miss most of the daylight. But I also get antsy without a full schedule and find a Monday to Friday nine to five job very satisfying. Plus I love earning money; it’s like working out and getting endorphins that go straight into your bank account. It also must be said that yes, I am looking forward to leaving St Andrews for London, ie a place with more than three streets. I’m thrilled to be able to celebrate Chinese New Year, go to proper clubs, and shop somewhere other than New Look and Jack Wills. There is no doubt that I’ll miss St Andys, but the time has come to say, city life? Yes please.

So it’s not that I want to stay a student forever and ever or that I wish to spend the rest of my life ensconced in a small Scottish seaside town. Nor is it that I think I’ll fail or end up with some really heinous degree. I’m just a) a bit worried about landing a decent job in the midst of a global recession and b) not that great with change. There. I said it. I’m awful at change. I can’t even throw out a pair of old heels without a lot of mental preparation and deep breathing. My tendency towards borderline irrational nostalgia doesn’t help things, either.
















It's been fun, St Andrews...you good-looking town, you

It’s a weird time for all us in the winter of our St Andrews years. People have been graduating from university for millennia, and barring death or perpetual failure to hand in essays, the end is imminent. I could toss around the usual slew of clichéd adjectives—scared! excited! nervous! confused!—but I’ll stick with that not-altogether-dangerous choking sensation. I suppose the best way to deal with it is to quit eating saltines and drink a bit of water. Or a frappuccino or a Golden Cadillac, as the case may be.