‘Not in my backyard’ or ‘NIMBY’ is a very human attitude. I got it all the time while working as an engineer.

“We’re not going to have that toxic waste dump here! Put it in the city!”

“Incinerators give you cancer! Would you want to live near one?”

Alex told me that residents of Oslo are shouting NIMBY — for the American Embassy! I’ve never thought of the American Embassy as an undesirable neighbour. It makes a sort of sense; I guess the Norwegians are wary of a bomb attack.

I had to learn how to put on make-up because I performed in theatrical dance competitions and concerts. Before starting work, the only time I would wear any sort of make-up was for:

• dance performances;
• balls and dinner dances; and
• job interviews.

I now wear a little bit of make-up when I go to work. A style coach at university convinced me to wear make-up to work (we also had an etiquette coach, remember?).

One day, when I was going to do fieldwork all day, I decided to skip putting on that bit of eyeliner, eyeshadow and lipstick.

“Hi Joan,” Nuno said when I arrived at work. “Gee, you look tired.”

Whoops. I guess I set the standard for my appearance on my first day in the office.

The next Monday, I decided to do the full make-up thing: foundation, dark eyeliner, eyeshadow, shiny red lipstick.

I ran into Genevieve at the train station.

“Good morning, Joan. You look nice today.”

*Bing!*

Here are my conclusions, then.

• Wearing make-up helps you look prettier.
• But once you start, you can’t stop.
• If you decide not to wear make-up, you forgo the opportunity to look your best.
• However, you don’t run the risk of having an uglier-than-usual day.

I explained all this to Damjan. I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to step onto the make-up treadmill when I go to Cambridge. New people = opportunity to decide such things.

Damo was not satisfied with the rigour of my study and therefore could not place any confidence in my conclusions. Being the statistician that he was, he proposed I do a blind test.

“Right, Joan. Wear make-up one day and don’t tell me. Ask me if you look pretty today and then write down my response. Then, on another day, don’t wear make-up and do the same thing. We can then compare the results because they’ll be meaningful!”

I wondered whether or not the integrity of the test would be compromised by the general practice amongst boyfriends of never saying to girlfriends that they looked anything less than optimal. Then again, I’ve known Damo to err on the side of honesty over diplomacy on some occasions.

Damo became even more animated: he had found a way to enhance his research proposal. “We can make it a double-blind test!” he said.

“What, both of us can close our eyes? And you can guess if I’m wearing make-up?”

“Perfect!” he crowed.

Figure 1: Scenario A, where woman who normally wears make-up stops doing so briefly

Figure 2: Scenario B, where woman who does not normally wear make-up does so briefly

I met Greg in my Dispute Resolution class. He’s a high school teacher. His dad is a retired school principal and mum is a retired nurse.

He was telling me about a life-changing experience. Jill, another person in our class, had led a three week trip to China. On this trip, he and about thirty other teachers saw the huge need for teachers and resources in the Chinese education system.

When Greg got home, he persuaded his newly retired parents to spend six months teaching in China. When they agreed, he organised for them to go over.

Greg tells me that the Chinese and Australian education systems are very different. I suspected this already. He explained that the systems have developed to meet the different needs of the countries. In China, there are so many people and the competition is so fierce that schools are highly disciplined. Students do not question the teacher. The emphasis is on rote learning.

Greg’s parents found this to be an alien environment but they did their best to adapt. Greg’s father is an English teacher. One Friday, in an effort to encourage creative thinking in his Grade 5 students, he set them an assignment: “You have won one million yuan. How will you spend your weekend?”

One million yuan is about AU$160 000. One million yuan is about 125 times what the average urban dweller in China would earn in a year. It’s a lot of money.

On Monday, the students submitted their essays. Something interesting had happened. Greg tells me that 95% of students had described their normal weekends. They did their homework, saw friends, went to the movies. Oh, some of them bought some extra DVDs and computer games but that was it.

What does this mean?

Apparently, the most creative response was from a small boy who wrote that he would spend his one million yuan on grenades and guns. He wanted to go to Iraq to fight the Americans.

For my work in Shepparton, I speak to many farmers and country people. I’ve lived in cities and suburbs my whole life. This is something I have to confess to people so that I can explain my ignorance of basic agriculture, geography of regional Victoria, even Australian slang.

Jamie has been my first line of defence in this new environment. He grew up on a farm in south-western Victoria. Often, I let him do the banter and questioning while I sit back and absorb as much information as I can without revealing my city girl cluelessness.

I am grateful that I have had this opportunity to learn more about rural life. I don’t want to be an ignorant urbanite spouting off about water being wasted through irrigation, over-fertilising of crops or vegetation clearing.

Jamie tells me stories about about growing up on a farm.

“The farm back home isn’t big. We grow lavendar, also some beef cattle. Sometimes when a cow has two calves, she’ll pick one to look after and abandon the other. The abandoned one doesn’t last long. It’s just the natural way of things.

Sometimes, though, when dad felt like it, he said to me and my brother, “Josh, Jamie, if you want, you can look after the calf.”

Josh and I would come back after school every day to feed it. It was really cute, looking up at us with its big cow eyes. We were its ‘mum’. It would come towards me and nuzzle my leg. Every time, it would be looking for my udder.

I would hold my hand like this and it would suck my fingers. You have to be really careful, though. You have to have your hand palm upwards. Cows have strong mouths. If you held you hand like this, with the fingers facing down, the calf would snap your fingers backwards when it sucked.”

Goodness. With my newly acquired knowledge, I felt my giant block of city ignorance chip away just that little bit more.

It was the end of the formal part of the Friday luncheon. The speaker was thanked and everyone was invited to stay for drinks.

I knew what ‘drinks’ meant. ‘Drinks’ is a chance to get up and network with people. Have you ‘networked’ before? Sometimes I call it ‘schmoozing‘. You talk to people and somewhere in your mind (it could be at the back or the front), you are conscious of making a good impression because this person could be important to you one day.

It’s scary. If you’re nervous about cold-calling, of introducing yourself to random people, of breaking into conversations that have begun without you, then networking is scary. I think it must be even scarier when you’re a junior engineer and there is no compelling reason for the others in the room to speak to you.

I stood up with my glass and looked around. I sipped. Oh. I was looking at the white table cloth again. I forced myself to look up again and caught the eye of my big boss. Quickly, I averted my eyes. That was the easy option, talking to someone I already knew. My boss probably knew that too. I wasn’t going to burden him with my conversation.

As I hovered by my table, I thought about leaving. Others had. It would stop this feeling of wretched stupidity and awkwardness.

Okay, that’s it.

I turned and walked past other tables, past my boss, past the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the sunset over the Yarra River, and approached two men sitting near the front.

“Hello! Can I join you?” I smiled.

“Sure,” they said.

I pulled over a chair and sat down.

While I was in London, Damo generously funded me a 90 pence Krispy Kreme original glazed donut. So much had been leading up to this, my first Krispy Kreme donut.

We stood in front of a Krispy Kreme stall at Victoria Station. From the three people in the queue before us:

“Can I have the large box of donuts, that one…”
“Two chocolate ice glazed, three strawberry filled, one lemon filled…”
“I’d like a dozen donuts…” (Store assistant: “For an extra two pounds, you can have six extra donuts…?”)

Then I stepped forward:

“One original donut, please.”

So how was it? It was tasty — soft and not overwhelmingly sweet. Damo had a bite and said that it was the yumminess of a fresh donut, nothing unique to Krispy Kreme. And besides, it was too soft.

Does it beat mille feuille? Hell, no.

I mentioned briefly that in England, the ‘rank hath its privileges’ culture appears to be alive and kicking. I can explain with the help of the following photo, which I took at a college of Oxford University.

Most of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge that I visited had similar plans: the buildings faced inward on a big quadrangle of grass. Just to prove that Oxford and Cambridge are vastly different institutions, at Oxford these are called ‘quads’ and at Cambridge, they are called ‘courts’.

Anyway, I digress.

It became obvious to me that the purpose of these immaculate lawns, which take up a huge space in the middle of everything, is to provide a means for the high-ranking college members to display their divine superiority; there were signs that warned, ‘Keep off grass. Fellows and their guests excepted.’

There are other outrages too. I saw a building where there was one gate for ‘boys’ and another gate for the Warden and Fellows. When a college runs room ballots to determine which rooms students get to live in, the President of the student body gets first choice, followed by the Vice President and so on. I have also heard that it is common for student societies to be kicked out of a room they had booked well in advance — because a Fellow has decided to have a tea party. And even crazier, did you know that there is a queen of England? I saw her palace and everything. How quaint!

Finally, I’d like to refer back to Exhibit A. Clearly, from the cat’s relaxed pose, it is comfortable ignoring the ‘keep off the grass’ directive. Because no-one’s chasing it off, I can only presume that cats in England rank very highly.

Some people have trouble controlling how much they spend on credit cards. Perhaps they have three or four cards and juggle debts between them. How can they stop themselves spending?

“Plastic surgery! Cut up your cards!” they’re told.

But what happens if one day you really do need your card and you’ve cut it up? What then?

Someone provided me a neat solution. You can put your credit card into water and freeze it. That way, you don’t have immediate access to it. When you want to use the credit card, you have to take it out of the freezer and let it melt. While it melts, you can think about it — do you really need to spend the money? There’s no way to cheat yourself; you can’t put the block of ice into the microwave because you’d destroy the magnetic strip.

Before you ask, no, I don’t have a problem…although I did spend more money on a camera bag and filters on eBay yesterday.

I read this odd spot* some time ago: If the population of China was to walk by you in single file, the line would never end due to the rate of population growth.

I thought, “No. Really? Really?” I’ve looked up China’s birth rate in Wikipedia and with a population of 1,298,847,624 people and a growth rate of 0.57%, and assuming that growth is mainly due to births, then there are 14 new Chinese babies every minute, or one birth every 4.3 seconds.

Now, I reckon that in 4.3 seconds, about three people could walk pass me in single file. That means that if I wait long enough, then I will eventually get to the end of the line.

It would take a while and I suppose I can work out how exactly how long. Bother. It’s late but now I have to do it. Hey, this would make a good short answer problem in Unit 3 of Maths Methods.

Okay, it’ll take 58 years based on the assumptions above (and 365.24 days a year). If someone wants to check this, I’d appreciate it.

Of course, the growth rate 0.57% won’t be constant. China’s population profile is onion-shaped. I’m not sure what that means in terms of rate of population growth. The profile is probably dependent on the Government’s population policy too. Perhaps the current state of affairs isn’t all that significant in the grand scheme of the 58.4 years that I’m sitting there watching them all walk by.

*Girls will probably know this trivia already and also the ones that go ‘Until 1990, sausages were still legal tender in East Germany’ and ‘No piece of paper can be folded more than 7 times’.

China’s population onion (Source: NationMaster.com)

I was half listening to the TV on the weekend and this is what I heard on the British show, ‘What not to wear‘:

You don’t make the clothes look bad — the clothes make you look bad.

I was flabbergasted. Of course! Here I was, feeling inadequate because I felt fat and ugly, but it’s all the clothes’ fault!

The truth of such a simple statement bowled me over.