Painted Cats 3
Posted by: lucie
Painted Cats 2
Posted by: lucie
My brother-in-law scored the painted cats book in our white elephant gift exchange and laughed until he nearly cried. I will miss those poor little creatures. He said maybe someday when I least expected it, he might re-gift it to me.
Painted Cats 1
Posted by: lucie
So my family decided to do a White Elephant gift exchange for Christmas this year, with one good gift and one gag gift. I knew right away what my gag gift had to be. Two years ago I was in Powell's and I saw this book called something like Painted Cat. On the cover was a cat painted to look like a leopard - inside were cats painted to resemble everything from American flags to burlesque dancers. It was so grotesque and wrong. Just so very wrong.
I couldn't find it at Powell's despite asking two or three info desk people the rather embarrassing question of whether they remembered a book about painted cats and where I might find it, so I had to turn to Amazon. Still couldn't locate the same book, but I found the pocket sized version of "Why Paint Cats."
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to share with you a few photos taken of this obscene book. Sorry I didn't have the wherewithall to scan - I was just getting ready to wrap it up, so I was in a hurry. Still, you'll get the gist. Without further ado, I give you painted cat numero uno.
Text: Tarty Puss, 2001. Organic Peroxide and Vegetable Dye on Slinky Mink, Siamese. I McGregor, Aberdeen.
Publican Ian McGregor holds Slinky Mink. He paid £5000 for her to be painted in 2001 but claims that the cost of the painting was more than repaid in bets that he took with hapless drinkers who were willing to wager that there was no such thing as a tartan cat and that he didn't have one upstairs.
Best darn town in these United States
Posted by: lucie
Portland rules. I sure wish it didn't cost me $1300 to get back here and hang out, because I'd love to come back more often. But there it is, so you just enjoy the limited time you can get.
I've had blog block simply because of how much has gone on since I was regularly posting. You start thinking about updating and there's just too much to say, so it rolls along that way for weeks and then months. Well, weeks, anyway. Because for the past couple of months I've hardly had the time to think about writing anything other than notes or sample exam essays, let alone do it. I've hardly read anything outside the realm of business, either. It's nice to have this break to see non-MBA friends, think about politics, religion, reread The Doors of Perception and finally get around to Maureen Dowd's Bushworld, which I'm so late on that it was 50% off at Powell's because it was labeled "current events" and is not quite so current anymore, brush up on some Gabriel Garcia Marquez, drink coffee and sleep a lot.
Portland is so beautiful. I don't mind that it's getting bigger and bigger by the minute; it retains its vibe and remains the best city I know. People are unfailingly polite and kind and friendly here. You seriously won't find another city where so many people say please and thank you and excuse me, and say them sincerely, and where more than half the time you go to purchase something the person at the checkout counter chats with you like a friend, and almost all of them tell you to have a nice day or a happy holiday and they do genuinely seem to mean it. I've been to a lot of cities at this point, and never anywhere that comes close to this. It is so awesome.
I have met Urho people! Willow, Mike, Claire, Jona and Matt over the last few days, and more to come tomorrow! It is so funny to - well, not put faces to the names, because I have seen all these faces in photos and even video before - but just put actual people to the online personalities. I feel like I know them all already and wonder if there's a bit more incongruence on my side since no one knew what I looked like, or my real name, or where I actually lived or any of that stuff. So I may or may not trip some people out, but it's all been lots of fun for me.
And I've seen old friends like Cabel and my best girl friend from years ago who came down from Seattle last night, and hung out with family and oh my gosh, there's real progress going on there. For starters, my crazy older sister has seriously chilled out about a thousand notches. Did I ever write on here that she spent two Christmases ago in rehab? She and her husband have both cleaned up and they seem, if not happy, then at least very well. I haven't seen them since they got sober. He talked more the first night I saw him on this trip than he had in the entire time I'd known him before, cumulatively, and he was totally likeable. I never disliked him before, but there never seemed to be that much to him. They both seemed really happy, and kept mentioning friends, and things they'd done with friends, which was great since my sister has never had much of a social life. It was good to see.
Grandma is well - better than my mom generally reports, but certainly not what she used to be. The big joke with her these days is to tease her about the fact that my boyfriend has red hair. "Grandma, Lucie's boyfriend is SO CUTE," my sister says. "But," she adds, her voice turning serious, "He has red hair."
Grandma looks doubtful about this, but decides to be nice about it. "Well, I've never been partial to red-haired people," she tells me. This is a vast understatement. She used to tell us that she hoped none of us would ever dye our hair red, or have a red haired child. "But I guess there are probably some nice ones," she says generously. I joke that she had better behave herself if she ever meets him, and anyway, maybe he doesn't like grey-haired people that much either, and then what would she do? She suggests they could both "dip their heads in black dye" before they meet, and this will resolve everything. So that is settled.
Oh, I miss that boyfriend of mine. It's been less than three months but feels as though it is getting pretty serious. He sends me cute texts every day. At the airport, 7.30am: "I miss you already. I can't sleep because I am looking at cute pictures of you on my camera. You just make me so happy." In Portland: "I miss you. Come back." "I'm getting my hair cut and I miss you." "I'm eating ice cream and I miss you." Finally the other day: "Alright, I give. I can totally think of nothing else but you. I miss you so much."
I have been calling him every day. Before I left, he half-jokingly said I had to call him every day and I said there was no way in hell. But I do, and it always feels like it's been a week since I talked to him last. It's very weird to travel several thousand miles at this stage in a relationship, when you've just started feeling like you can't live without someone but you also understand that you don't really know them yet. It does this weird thing to your head where you miss the hell out of them, all the while not really knowing entirely who it is you are missing. But it's fun.
I saw my dad the other night for the first time in three years. It was chill. He looked old, and needs a haircut. We both acted like nothing had ever happened. I think the rest of the family is nervous that there will be fireworks, but I'm generally feeling neutral and relaxed about it. About him, anyway. His wife, she's another story. I need to grow up a little bit more very quickly, because she still gets on my nerves to a pretty unreasonable degree. She is staying out of my way, and I stay out of hers, so it should be alright. But we're going to have to spend many many hours together on Christmas day, and it won't be as easy to avoid her. God help me, she already announced that she was going to teach us all to salsa on Christmas. Please, Baby Jesus, please let her forget. I just think it's more than I could handle. If I have to salsa with her I might snap. She makes my dad happy, and I'm happy about that, but she SO rubs me the wrong way. It's all very dumb. I'm going to have to sort my head out about it very quickly or I will make Christmas tense.
That's another running joke in our family - my mom is one of those who always ended up breaking down and screaming at someone that they were ruining Christmas, ruining mother's day, ruining her birthday. So my sisters and I are really into making dramatic accusations of Christmas-ruining. The slightest misstep and we declare dramatically, "You're ruining Christmas! Ruining! Christmas!" We find this humorous, despite the sad roots of the joke. I'm not sure my mom thinks it's quite as funny, but what can you do.
Anyway, that's more than enough for today. There's a lot more to say, like my sister is eight weeks pregnant, my dad has become a total cheesey dog person, my mom moved to the Pearl District and lives in the building where Panic has its office, I am eating as much sushi as possible, and I haven't even started to tell you about this guy Bruce I'm staying with (strange character), etcetera... Oh, and maybe a bit about business school. But this is enough blather for now, I think.
Examania
Posted by: lucie
Good lord, seven exams in seven schooldays. Who ever heard of such a thing? It doesn't hurt to be taking them in beautiful, hallowed halls of academia previously graced by Darwin and David Hume, I'll admit, but that's really the silver lining. Seven exams in seven days sucks. Sucks times seven.
I have just finished number four, exiting the echoey hallowed halls of academia before anyone else in my class. You feel bad doing that because your footsteps reverberate and bounce off the filigree ceilings while others are still trying to concentrate, but I'd done my multiple choice economics paper, checked it twice and was being slowly driven crazy by a colleague who sniffled every fifteen seconds, forgetting to make use of the kleenex she had placed on her desk at the beginning of the exam. This is a problem of mine - I'm terribly easily distracted by sound. It steals my focus completely. The boyfriend is having to learn to adjust to it as I apologize profusely but still ask him to please not tap his pencil on the desk when we're studying. I do this despite understanding that it makes me sound naggy or annoying or just a bit freakish because it's actually that disruptive to me. Ah well.
Anyway. Four exams down, three to go, then there's a class holiday/end of exams celebration on Friday night, and I'm on a plane to P-town Saturday morning.
Here's the funny thing about exams. In the UK, they grade ridiculously hard. You don't really get in the 90s ever. You rarely get in the 80s. Only one person from my school has ever, in the history of the MBA here, graduated with an average score over 80%. Over 70% gets you 'distinction,' which is basically honors, and only about two people manage that each year.
50% is passing. It takes quite a while to adjust to that when you're from a country where 50% is a fail. It is also kind of tough to get excited about a 68%, which is actually a really high mark. But anyway.
Here's the thing, the thing I was talking about. It's an MBA, right, so you really only need to pass. It's not like anyone is ever going to care what grades you got. They'll care what school you went to, maybe, but not what grades you got. So we really only need to manage that 50%. Hence, by my boyfriend's logic, the whole MBA thing is really just like a ticket to some kind of business fraternity and higher wages, and the whole actual experience of it is kind of a joke. And he has a point. A pretty good point. He also probably has more fun than me.
And while most of us admit that we aren't really dedicated enough to give up the time we'd have to give up to study hard enough for distinction, we still want good grades. Bear in mind that the criteria for breaking out of the 60s is that your work has to reflect that you have done reading and learning outside the course material. When you're overloaded with course reading all the time, that's fairly impossible. Yet most of us, the native English speakers at least, seem to have this figure of 60% in our heads. We want to average over 60 on these exams. That way we'd still have an OPTION of working for distinction or something.
The drive to achieve even when achievement is completely worthless, that's what it is.
Anyway. I've made it through operations management, accounting, statistics and economics now. Tomorrow is organizational behaviour, Thursday is finance, Friday is marketing.
Four down, three to go.
Briefly resurfacing
Posted by: lucie
Hi interweb!!1!1
Wow, this honestly feels like the first free moment I've had blog since my last entry, which is pretty bad as I can now see it's been about a month. That's definitely a record. It's the end of the semester and things are getting pretty intense over here. Two weeks ago we had there a group ethics project to hand in and we spent last week on an "Integrative Project" - basically a case study-related team effort that's meant to draw on all the knowledge we've picked up in this first semester. The beginning of that overlapped with a rather detailed individual financial analysis project, so we were all behind on sleep and serenity when it kicked off. Then we had to adjust to our new multicultural teams for this project, and combined with all the ego flying around you can imagine how that went. I did my best with it but it was definitely the low point of my MBA experience so far. The people stuff can get pretty taxing. Gender roles stuff is also exhausting sometimes - constantly having to stand your ground as a woman and work doubly hard to get a basic level of respect from men from certain countries... It's a shame to generalize, but there's no getting around it.
Between you and me, Internet, the biggest asshole in our class was on my team. What's worse, he doesn't even realize he's the biggest asshole in the class. But when you take informal "who would you least like to work with" votes (and people have, interestingly enough), he unanimously wins. It wasn't pretty. And I have to keep working with him throughout next semester. This is how you learn, I guess.
I feel like I'm in a bit of a spin at the moment, but classes are over and this week is totally unstructured - just free time to study in preparation for exams, which start on Thursday.... Then Christmas break, and I'll be back in Portland! I can't wait to see my adorable 94-year-old grandma, who is the cutest thing in the entire world. Not so much looking forward to my dad or his new wife, but as I haven't seen him in years it's past time to make some progress on that front, so let's just call it a good opportunity. My family also started an odd tradition last year of getting everyone - including my mom and grandma - together at my dad and his wife's place for Christmas. I find the prospect kind of daunting but if they're willing to be in a room together, I figure I can roll with it.
So anyway, not too exciting. I'm still hanging around with the boy - in fact he's officially the boyfriend now - who would have thought, eh? He makes me happy, makes me laugh and keeps school in perspective when I start thinking grades matter (Who ever asked anyone what their GPA was in their MBA course?). We're the only "out" couple in the class (there are a few others, but they don't seem to be quite sure whether they really mean it or not, so they keep it under wraps), and it's all very sweet. The last few weeks have had lots of ups and downs but we seem to be supporting each other fairly well despite slightly shorter fuses and less sleep, so that's nice. I occasionally notice these books on his shelf again, like the Harvard Business School Guide to Employment in the Non-Profit Sector, or From Making a Profit to Making a Difference, and think how lucky I am to have ended up meeting someone like him here. We really enjoy each other, have great conversations and laugh tons... Strangely, I've recently realized that I never dated anyone who made me laugh before. It's a nice change. He's also probably the smartest boy I ever dated. You wouldn't have seen him coming, but there he just was all the sudden.
We're definitely in that weird kind of "wow, hang on a second, who are you and how did you get to be such a major part of my life" phase, but that's how it goes when you switch environments and get into a relationship all at once, I suppose. It's good. It's all really good.
