New home sweet new home
Posted by: lucie
Sometimes it really does seem like I'm always moving. But the thing is, it never really worked out that well with the Irishman. It started with the creepiness, which diminished but never completely went away, and ended with the realization that he was having some troubles with adulthood. Things like, you know, collecting money from your flatmate/tenant for bills, then never paying those bills, then letting the phone and internet get turned off. Basic responsibility stuff. Things like not replacing the freezer for two weeks after it breaks because you're broke, then accepting an advance payment of rent from your flatmate/tenant so you can go get one, but spending the money on god knows what and never replacing the freezer. How can a person be 34, not on any drugs, and think this is acceptable behaviour?
Anyway, so I have moved. I have a space of my own - a single person student flat that is actually quite cozy. Since returning from Portland I'd actually been living out of a couple small bags at my boyfriend's tiny flat, so getting into my own home again is an amazing feeling. He watched incredulously as I moved knick knacks two inches to the right then one inch to the left again on this shelf or that, rolling his eyes as if to say that no one could possibly truly believe such details mattered. "I am a girl and this is called nesting," I said. And besides, home for me really is wherever I hang my hat. Pretty much all my worldly possessions are with me, and I like them to be arranged in a cozy way. When I get my prints hung on the walls, this place is going to rule.
It's also warm and quiet - two features the last place didn't really have going on. Did I ever mention that a nearly-deaf 94 year old lady lived above me and listened to her tv on what must have been maximum volume? "That poor old woman," I would say to myself. "She has nothing but that tv. Damned if I'm going to bug her about turning it down." But slowly it got to be too much. The ceiling wasn't enough of a buffer, not was the combination of the ceiling and earplugs. It didn't make for a good study environment. The sound of silence is a blessed thing, my friends, when you have been deprived of it.
School is back in full swing, as is the dreaded teamwork. I still have the number one bastard in the class on my team, and his psychological state is rapidly disintegrating. The other day when I disagreed with him in a meeting, his response was "Fuck - just shut up." Seriously, who loses their composure that hard in a meeting? I tell you, some of the characters around here. I tell you.
My Tuesday evening class, however, makes up for any teamworking misery the course cares to throw at me. We have amazing discussions about public policy, poverty, the failings of the World Bank and IMF, how to analyze the appropriate balance of public and private sector, public and private goods, and all kinds of stuff that people of the world should really talk about. It rules. My professor is a humble, extremely intelligent man who has been on missions with the World Bank and seen a lot of the world. Everyone in the class participates, he brings in hot shit speakers almost every week, and I leave feeling intellectually sated. It kicks strategy's ass.
No news was good news
Posted by: lucie
The phone rang at 2.30am the night the boyfriend's mother was in surgery - 4 hours in - and I panicked at the thought that it was going to be the worst possible news. Pointless panic as the call was actually from his father, long divorced from his mother and completely out of the loop. Apparently the boyfriend's family has a hard time with the concept of time zones, which is fairly easy for me to believe given that I received text messages at 7am in Portland asking, "Why haven't you called me yet?"
It was a tense moment, but no bad news came at 2.30am, nor throughout the night. The next day, allowing for ample sleeping time for all involved, he rang his sister. The surgery wasn't 100% successful. They didn't actually remove the cyst, opting instead to rig it up to drain into her intestine or some such fancy biological rerouting. This was due in part to the fact that they couldn't cut it out of her liver as planned, mostly because the liver was too hard. This, I'm told, is probably down to the booze. And the pancreas, the pancreas I guess they just decided not to mess with. So it's still there, and we have no details on exactly what this might mean, but at least she came out on the better side of that 50/50, and that's enough for now.
Five days in the hospital without a bottle of vodka might lead to some interesting self reflection, too... though she must be drugged up as anything.
In the meantime, school marches on. I had an inspiring first session of Public Policy in a Small, Open Economy last night with a brilliant lecturer who has clearly experienced and accomplished much in the world, academic and otherwise, yet remains refreshingly humble. "You don't need to take any notes in this class," he told us. "I would prefer that you focus on participating in discussion. I can assure you that I do not have any pearls of wisdom to impart that are so important you'll need to write them down. I'm not going to say anything so unique that it absolutely has to be remembered. There is plenty of wisdom in the readings." He then proceeded to deliver a very engaging lecture about the 'levers' of public policy, how small economies grow and why Ireland has kicked Scotland's ass over the past couple decades.
Today the Managing Public Services course begins, and tomorrow we dig into strategy and budgeting. Tomorrow is also the day for (cue dread-inspiring music) team feedback sessions. This is where those of us who learned to loathe each other on last semester's painfully executed pre-exam group project sit in a circle and contemplate why we sucked so hard and what on earth we plan to do about it. That's pretty much going to bite, as is teamwork this semester. My new year's resolution for team work in strategy class: don't worry about it so much. Hell, I don't even care about strategy class, and anyway, it's not like we're going to fail.
And anyway, I got me a $50 round trip ticket to Barcelona for this weekend.
Posted by: lucie
The boyfriend's mom is an alcoholic. Not in the way that both of my parents are alcoholics because they start drinking wine or cocktails at about 6 and stay pretty tipsy at a minimum until they go to bed, either. She's the real deal. Drinks vodka because it is clear and odourless, starts around 10am, and tells him the same story on the phone ten times when he calls because she's drunk and can't remember what she's already said.
That type of thing catches up with you. He's been trying to explain for a while that her stomach pains and various other health problems are because of the drinking, but she won't buy it. There's always some other reason. And recently she was vindicated to some extent when she went to the hospital and they discovered that she had a cyst growing in her gut, and that it had attached itself to her liver, spleen and pancreas. See? Not just the drinking. Whether this itself was caused in part by the drinking she refuses to consider. And anyway, she refuses to give many details. The boyfriend first heard about this a month ago. Last word was that some kind of specialist surgeon had requested to see her. This made it sound fairly serious, but she brushed it off.
Yesterday he finds out she is going in for surgery today to have it removed, and that the surgery will take EIGHT HOURS. They're going to take out a piece of her liver and a piece of her spleen to get it out of those areas, and it from her pancreas as carefully as possible. The specialist wanted to do it himself because it's such an unusual case. They haven't seen anything quite like it before.
The boyfriend's sister, who is a nurse's assistant, has been asking around about the risks and is under the impression that she has a 50/50 chance. "A 50/50 chance that the operation will be successful," I ask?
"A 50/50 chance she'll come out of the operation," he corrects. "They can fix all kinds of things - livers, kidneys, lungs, heart - but once you get near the pancreas it gets dodgy. You don't fuck with the pancreas." He worked at a hospital for five years before he came to the UK for school. He knows a few things himself.
The boyfriend learned of the surgery all in one phone call with his mother and sister, the sister filling him in on most of the medical details and the mother taking the opportunity to say the kinds of things you say when it might be the last time you talk to someone. She was sober, at least, he says. The doctor gave her pills that would react violently to alcohol. Just to keep her from drinking.
So 2.30pm central it starts, and we go to bed hoping the phone doesn't ring in the middle of the night with bad news. It will be 6.30am here by the time it is done.
Back to school
Posted by: lucie
It begins again tomorrow. My colleagues have returned from their various homelands, some of them a good 5-10 pounds chubbier after indulging in their respective native cuisines. We talk about Christmases, families, hometowns and the inevitable looming curiosity about the grades we will soon receive for exams we sat nearly a month ago, and when we might hear this news (January 25th at the latest, but having received scores for one exam before the break, we are inclined to believe they will trickle in). We avoid any mention of the end-of-semester party, at which most made asses of ourselves due to lack of adequate food and/or sleep, or simple overenthusiastic imbibing due to excitement at the end of 7 exhausting exams. Rumours of one student making out with another's wife are kept as hushed as possible. Poker faces are fronted as certain names are brought up, each student having been rubbed the wrong way by a few cast members as group project and exam pressure came on. But we're generally fairly pleased to be back together. We missed each other at least a little bit, somehow, despite our differences.
They say semester two is as hard as, if not harder than, semester one, but it's tough to believe this could really be the case when we get to choose much of what we'll study. Last semester: 7 foundation courses and no options. This semester: one core course (strategic management) and three options. I'm excited about mine. Well, two of them, anyway. Public Policy in a Small, Open Economy, in which we will discuss everything from poverty to interest rates, and Managing Public Services, a course with an international perspective. Both of these should play up nicely to my interest in international development, so I'm looking forward to them despite a harrowing reading list. My third option is Planning, Budgeting and Control. Not exactly a trip to Disneyland, but more grounding in numbers and accounting will definitely help me get comfortable managing budgets and assessing costs and expenses in the future. That was not a particular personal strength in my last job, and really, there's nothing like being an idiot with money to make you feel totally unprofessional.
Strategic management looks like a little bit of a joke. This is meant to be a very serious MBA subject. The professor certainly seems to take himself quite seriously and likes to namedrop Harvard (where he was recently a visiting professor) every five minutes. He made us meet him for an introduction to his course, which begins this semester, when we were in the middle of final exams last semester. During this meeting he strongly recommended that we read the entire textbook over Christmas break. I managed chapter one when I was in Portland. Chapter one tells you what all the following chapters will be about, and from this synopsis you learn that each will include an example of a company that handled a given certain aspect of strategy totallly wrong. All examples of people who screwed things up. Something about this tells me that they aren't very good at teaching you how to do things right. Kind of like the old crack about music critics being failed musicians and restaurant reviewers being mediocre chefs. Well, I'll let you know about strategy in a few weeks.
Lots of my colleagues are aggressively beginning their job search, which stresses me out and makes me feel that I should do the same. One thing I've recently admitted to myself, which I was scared to admit before for fear of failure, is that... (it's hard to write, even) I want to work in international development. That's what I want to do. I have a feeling it's hard as hell to get into, and I'm not even sure where the "bottom" is. Maybe I can get a foot in the door with an MBA, maybe not. I've actually looked around at Msc programs in international development and may make an application to the London School of Economics this week (apparently most of their courses fill up in January/February for September start). Last year they accepted something like 80 out of 600 applicants. But what the heck.
The boyfriend thinks it is silly to get two masters degrees, and that it would just show employers that I didn't really know what I went back to school for, or that I wanted to be a career student. But this MBA to me is kind of like the undergraduate degree I never got... and two years, really, that's not so much time out of life if you have figured out what you really want to do with yourself career-wise. God knows I've dabbled in enough things and had time to look around.
Well, more reflection required, anyway. There is time.
