Hotels in Rome

Duuuuuuuuuude, where has time gone? Not sure, but it's definitely managed to slip through my fingers. One day it was spring and I was looking stupidity in the face, the next it's winter and I can only dream of having time for stupidity.
Off to Germany next week - first time this year. I really want some sunshine! Gimme winter sun! Gimme outdoors cafes! Looked at some hotels in Rome, but not sure if that's the right choice. Looks interesting - lots of culture and definitely great food and coffee, but I have memories of Grá's Rome winter holiday... Hmmm... will have to think of it some more.
I'll be back!

The Age of Stupid?

I spent much of my evening talking of, thinking about or researching the subject of stupidity. I'm not entirely sure what brought that on, but somehow I was struck by the levels of it one encounters in every day life. I'm not going to go into a giant rant about stupidity at this point, but I do feel a strong urge to briefly state just how much I dislike stupid people:

Lots and lots and lots!

Something that I did find and consider to be worth mentioning here was a Rumsfeldesque paradox when it comes to stupidity. Just like the former defense minister found known unknowns (for anyone who was fortunate enough to be in a coma during the Bush years, there is a Wikipedia entry about this issue), I found some upliftingly smart stupid people, but also some incredibly depressing stupid smart ones. However, unlike most unknowns, stupidity rarely goes away. On the contrary, it tends to be contagious: Put an idiot in among average people and very soon you have a group of seeming simpletons. Even more strikingly, given half a chance they will attract other stupid people and slowly crowd out all others. This, I fear, is largely due to our society's view that it is better to back down than get into a stupid argument, which in my way makes it pretty dumb to back down in the face of a bully.
Oops, didn't I say I wasn't going to rant? I guess I'm more frustrated than I thought. In any case, if you want to find out where you stand on the stupididy scale, check out The Stupidity Tester, a little test that I initially thought was quite stupid, but actually found quite clever and amusing. -- No, not only because it proved to myself that I'm not hopelessly stupid myself.
But I think I best get going for now. Just one last thing that I have to say to answer a question that came up today: No, Google is not evil, Google is actually quite good. Why? Because by not tolerating stupid people, they are actually contributing to making the world a better place. Good night.

A Letter to Myself

Dear Me,
I've noticed that lately you've not been as satisfied with your life as you could be. You seem stressed and a bit frustrated, I'm assuming that is due to your not quite satisfactory work situation. You've also not been looking after yourself enough and you health is suffering. Do you think getting a cold in the summer is a coincidence? And you didn't even have had a fun day in the rain to get it. It just simply appeared.
Anyway, initially I was going to ask you what was up and give you some encouraging words of support. But the more I think about it all, the more I feel like just shaking you and yelling: "Snap out of it!" Don't you realise that you live in one of the most exciting cities in the world, your private life is nothing short of perfect, you have a lovely home, some great friends and a job that, albeit boring, is not without its advantages. Your desk nearly overlooks Trafalgar Square, for crying out loud! So, why don't you stop blaming the recession, life, the gods, your mother, my mother, everybody else's mother and their dog for your current frame of mind, get off your lazy back side and start doing the things you enjoy? I'll tell you what - why don't you take advantage of the break in the rain and head off to Roman Road market? Or Broadway Market? Or do a tour of the charity shops? I'm sure you can mind some clothes to destroy in your ambition to step in your grandfather's tayloring shoes. Go on, get out of here...!
I'll see you later. Have a great day.
Love,
Me

Tell Me Why I Don't Like...

... Well? I could fill the blank with a number of things, but I think I should make use of my right to remain silent for fear of incriminating myself. I'm sure anyone who knows me what to replace the dots with.
Some times the right answer is Mondays, but this was not the case today. It was May bank holiday, which, although it doesn't have the same wonderfully revolutionary chaotic sound as the German equivalent, Tag der Arbeit, was quite nice. My life was very un-leftist/May Day-ish, if not to say embarrassingly middle class, but quite nice all the same. I went for a walk around Regent's Park with a friend who was visiting from Germany and had a coffee and a lovely raspberry cup cake with a mountain of cream cheese icing at Inn the Park.
This yummy bit of the bourgeois life was the perfect ending for a great weekend, which included my usual Viet Macchiato in the sun at Broadway Market, a ride on the London Eye, a Clarin's summer makeover (which taught me to vehemently say no next time someone asks me if I have a minute while walking through a shop), and an elating 7-km-run along Regent's canal (yes, I'm bragging; no, I don't mind that it's obvious). But somehow I'm feeling slightly melancholic this evening. It's that nagging question about the point of it all again.

"Huh?" I hear my imaginary audience (yes, you! I'm imaginarily watching you!) say. Well, initially I was going to come to London to get away from the pointless 9-to-5 office routine and the corporate world, which I find entirely opposed to what life should be. There was no way, I claimed, that I would be going back to either. But then this damn economic bubble burst and I had to eat my words. So now I'm back on the PPC scene searching for the meaning of life. Google this, bitch!

Ok, ok, outburst over. There's more to life than work and there's definitely more to my life. I'm still keenly studying digital anthropology and looking into digital communities. It's a shame I burried my copy of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in a box in my dad's attic. I think it would come in really handy in my pursuits.
Hmm... I see a disconcerting theme in this entry. Every paragraph I try to say something nice, but somehow the flow of words turns it into something negative. So I will just resign myself to the fact that today is a day of moodiness and put all of us out of our misery by shutting down the PC. Have a good night, see you on a happier day.

The Beauty of East London

A certain routine is emerging in my life. I'm not sure if I find it comforting or disconcerting, but it is definitely very me. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to the wonderful scale of OCD strength, I score fairly low. I'm not the sort to stack my t-shirts exactly on top of one another organised by colour. Nor do I walk the same way to the tube stop every day or have certain foods on certain days. But I do like to explore on the weekends and be boring during the week. When I was still new to London (and wasn't working), I went exploring a lot more often during the week and had a lot of relatively boring weekends. Now though, I'm back to doing what I did in Dublin: Turn off my personality during the week and then come back with a vengeance on the weekends.
I could now muse endlessly about the pointlessness of gainful employment, my frustration with the corporate world and other seemingly lefty, but in fact quite conservative views of mine. But I will refrain for now. You never know who's listening.
Instead I'll look on the bright side of life and focus on the weekends. The past two Saturdays were beautifully sunny, which inspired me to go on long walks/runs/cycles around east London. I love the vibe of this part of town, the run downedness of the old industrial architecture, the barge life on the canals, the small town feel mixed with lots and lots of foreign influences and - I admit it - the shops, bars and cafés that attract the trendy crowd. I tend not to hang out there, but they do give the area a special something and make people watching heaps more fun.
No sunny Saturday is complete without a visit to Broadway Market, where I get a Vietnamese Macchiato at Cà Phê VN, sit on a lounge chair and watch the world go by. The market is always worth a wander too. I give two thumbs up to the apple and pear pick 'n mix, the pork from Downland Produce, the organic fruit & veg stall whose owner saved me from certain death by stupidity last week when I decided to run there in the blazing sun. I arrived there bright red and exhausted, having taken the long way via Bethnal Green Road and not taking into account the temperature.
A few kind words, a banana and an organic nettle lemonade later, I was fit as a fiddle again and ready to get a load of summer dresses reduced to 5 quid. Great stall too, by the way. Belongs to a mad lady who designs her won stuff, but has it made in India. She's expecting a new shipment soon and has to shift the old wares.
The place stands in stark contrast to another one of my Saturday favourites: Roman Road Market. If you want fat birds with screming kids, cheap clothes and stuff that fell off the back of the wagon, this is the place to go. I don't like any of the above, but I still find myself strangely drawn to it.
Yesterday, I took in a third (so-called) market: Spitalfields. It stands in stark contrast to the other two in that it isn't really a market in the traditional sense. I love what they have done to the old Victorian building and I must admit that some of the shops and cafés in the area are not bad at all. But overall it is an excercise in Yuppie self-validation through wannabe ruggedness. Maybe I'm doing them wrong, but I feel that if the market did not add value to the area in a quite graspable financial way, most of its visitors would not think twice about demolishing it. At the moment it still stands, though, and I came away from there with a new haircut and a saylor's top that I found in the street. So I'm happy.

I've got a Job!

What can I say? It was amazing... At the beginning of the week I thought I was unemployable (yes, it did start messing with my head, silly me!), on Wednesday my CV was sent to an employer, on Thursday morning I had my interview and on Thursday afternoon I had a job. I'm still a bit shocked, so more thoughts will have to wait. I'll just leave you with the following note I found online:

Life from Above

We went on the London eye the other day and I was amazed how cool the world looks from above. I should mention that I am quite scared of heights. I don't really know why. I've never been attacked by a staircase and no tower has ever done me harm. But I still don't really like them. Or rather, I don't trust myself around them. - With good reason, as my stepping off a roof a few years ago has proven.
At the same time, I have always been fascinated by tall buildings. I remember the excitement I felt the first time I saw a sky scraper. I was 12, jet lagged out of my mind, sitting in my hotel in Anaheim, California, at 4 o'clock in the morning marveling at the sigh of small people on lit roads and a giant cross on top of the building opposite. I was only a few floors up, but to me it felt like I was in the clouds. It was the first time I had really left the confines of my little small-town life and I thought I owned the world.
Now I've long left that life behind and I know I own the world, but there is still a lot to be said for getting my feet off the ground occasionally, for getting out of my comfort zone and for seeing the world from a different perspective. I am really glad I overcame my initial reservations. It was so worth it. -- Note to self, don't listen to yourself when you're being a chicken.
Ueber den Wolken, muss die Freiheit grenzenlos sein...

Am I Loosing it?

This morning I had some fairly unpleasant conversations with recruiters, so I was feeling a bit deflated. But luckily I am hard to put down and impossible to keep down, so I quickly got over it and went surfing. I would call it retail therapy, but it is more the online version of my shopping style: browse some sites, get some input, collect impressions, clip art, ideas. I suppose in this instance you could call it creative re-flation.
Today it was all about clothes. When I'm down there's nothing like some beautiful threads to pick me up again. I know that's kinda strange to some people because I would not consider myself a superficial person. However, I do come from a family of Jewish tailors, so the importance of dressing well is bred into me. His love for clothes and attention to detail saved my grandfather's life when the red army freed Auschwitz (they desperately needed a good tailor) and I know it will get me through this rough patch. I think, I'll go shopping now...
Oy wey, ikh gleyb ikh bin meshugge!

Online Advertising Needs a New Direction

I've just read a wonderfully interesting article on TechCrunch: Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet. Inspiring stuff for my newly digital-ethnographic mind. Online advertising is fascinating to me because I think it harbours both amazing possibilities for advertisers and the online community and the dark side of modern life.
If it's done right it can entertain us, as a brief search on YouTube will show. (I love this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRD1wmvwUc&feature=related.)
It can provide us with information we may actually need, which is why Search Marketing was so successful for such a long time. If I look for a "job site", ads form job sites are actually a good thing.
And it can save us money. If someone sends me a money off voucher or a discount code by mail, I may actually profit from it.
And yet many people (at times me included) have - to put it mildly - strong reservations against online advertising. I hate spam with a passion and have stopped using many a good app because of intrusive display ads. When I watch online videos, I keep 2 windows open to have something to do while the ads are running in the background just like I take a toilet break when the commercials come on TV.
All this is due to fundamental flaw in the way traditional advertising and it's poorly developed online cousins operate: It is disruptive. When I am watching TV or using my e-mail, I do not want some company forcing me to stop what I'm doing to listen what they have to say. It is rude and would not be tolerated in face-to-face interaction. Imagine you're in a restaurant chatting to your friends and a complete stranger walks up to the table and in a moment of silence blurts out: "Are you looking for cheaper car insurance?" It really wouldn't matter if you were, you'd not put up with him. I'd ignore him at best, but most likely would give him a piece of my mind. This is something I cannot do to obnoxious advertisers, which is a contributing factor to why I dislike them so much.
And for that very reason we have devised advertisement avoidance tools: Recording devices that let us skip TV ads, blocking software that filters it out on websites, spam filters etc. And let's not forget one of the reasons why Twitter is loved while Google, Facebook and others are met with increasing suspicion: They are not trying to turn users into consumers (something that was, according to one of my previous employers, online advertising's raison d'etre). They don't pester you with commercial rubbish. They don't interrupt your conversation.
Does that mean there is no advertising going on there? Far from it. But it has moved away from the outdated offline model of disrupting conversations to a model that is more suitable to the Web 2.0 and more gentle on the people it is trying to reach. (Sorry, I hate the term user.) So in my opinion the Internet will indeed destroy traditional advertising. But at the same time, it may actually open the doors to new forms of advertising that will finally manage to add value to the lives of its audience (whether by entertaining them, giving them information they need or saving them money) rather than just sustaining an industry that does not see eye to eye with them. They will have to learn to talk to us rather than at us. They will have to get involved in our lives rather than arrogantly assuming they can shape them to their liking. It's a brave new world and I can't wait to be part of it.

Digital Anthropology

Apart from window shopping and people watching, I have seriously increased my online activity over the past few weeks. I've not only revived both of my blogs, I've also gotten a lot more active on Facebook, joined Twitter and have gone e-mail crazy.
Equally importantly, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the Internet and my place within its community of users. Digital Anthropology is a newly discovered passion that I find hard to leave alone. Questions like what is a web user? Am I a consumer or producer of the Internet? What is the nature of my interactions with the net, its other users, and myself. Is what I am doing here a dialogue or a monologue? And if it is a monologue, does it have an audience? Or is it maybe a dialogue between two different sides of myself? Questions, questions, questions... I'm definitely going to have to answer some of them and in order to do that I will dig deeper into the field of digital anthropology.
I'm fascinated by it and really don't want to let go. I feel that this is what I'm meant to be doing, which is an entirely new sensation to me. I've never had a clear plan in my life nor did I ever know what I wanted to be when I grow up. (Other than tall, that is, and when I stopped growing at 5'3'', I gave up on the planning thing.) I've just run with whatever life put out there for me. That is not to say that I went mainstream or did not pursue my dreams. But my dreams were always individual dots on the graph of life. They never connected to form a clear path:
I wanted to live in LA, so I moved there not knowing anyone and not sure about how to get a visa, a job, a place (it worked out great!). Then I looked for a good thing to study, and despite my experience as a legal secretary anthropology was the perfect fit. During my studies I focused heavily on Latin America, but I ended up specialising on Africa. I got a PhD in Media Anthropology, but rather than staying put and pursuing research, I moved to Ireland and started working in digital advertising. Now I've quit my job to move to London. In the middle of the biggest crisis in recent history! (I must admit, I am doubting my own sanity over this step, but it felt right, so it must have been right. All previous steps have been hard at first, but I regret none of them.)
But now they all seem to make sense. It is strange, as if the diverging, interrupted paths have suddenly by some magic twist of perceptionary illusion, come together in one spot and shouted at me: "THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO BE DOING!" In this time of unemployment and seeming emptyness it all comes together. I now understand why my time was not wasted in trying to sell cheap car insurance, penis enlargement and the like. It gave me unique insight into the psyche of the other side of the Internet. Before, I knew only the user. Now, in an almost sickeningly postmodern, hermeneutical twist, I have come to know those who try to make money from the online community and understand what they think this community is. But I know that this is not an image. It is a distorted reflection of the commercial mind of the business world reflected onto the online community. No, that's actually not quite it. That sounds cynical and wannabe communist. I need some time. And more knowledge. But I see some really interesting stuff here; questions of the online and offline self, of the convergence of online and offline worlds and of the nature of value. In fact, I think I understand the underlying reason for companies' inability to cash in on the social side of the web. But before I go off on another accidental anti-capitalist rant, I will get on with some research. I will be digging digital. And I'm loving this!

Shopping for Ideas Recession-Style

Since the move to London I've had waaaaay too much time on my hands. The job situation is a lot worse than I had expected and finding one is nigh-on impossible. My first reaction was to be happy and go shopping a lot. Not shopping in the buying sense of the word. But not window shopping either. It's somewhere in between with added people watching, scrap booking, picture taking and the odd stop in a caff. I'm forever collecting flyers and free mags, taking pictures of the strangest things (I'm preparing a bit of an exhibit of London oddities, which should be coming soon), staring at people's clothes and hair styles. I also wander through the shops to see what's up in the world of retailing. I don't target particular places, mixing and matching Selfridges with the Roman Road Charity Shop and the designer boutiques in Mayfair with Kings Mall in Hammersmith (What a dump! But what a gem at the same time!). Occasionally I actually do buy something, mostly items that reflect my current state of headless experimenting... The other day I came home with a pair of shoes that go with none of my clothes, but are great, a bag of dried Oregano, a multipack of Monster Munch and some soap.
This seemingly random selection is actually a lot less random than it seems. What binds them all together is that they each made a contribution to making my life into what I would like it to be and in the process making me happier. It's as if life is constructed like an architectural plan arranged in concentric circles. The initial sketch in the middle, the core without which the rest would not be possible, was to move to London. Once that was worked out in detail, it was time to add the ideal place in a ring around it. Then to furnish and decorate our home. Other bits in the growing layers of rings are to get me into the mental state that I have wanted to be in, get me a job, focus and update my wardrobe tweak the details of our home and many more. (Not necessarily in that order!) This is where my shopping trip fit in. The shopping in the sun soothed my mind, shoes are a reflection of where my wardrobe is going, the soap was well needed to complete the cheesy Ikea-styled colour-themed bathroom, the Oregano was sorely lacking in my kitchen. And Monster Munch is just yummy.
I think a lot of people are carrying on like me at the moment and I'm surprised the press haven't come up with a snazzy name for the phenomenon yet. It is definitely a sign of the times to go back to basics, focus on who we are and define ourselves less through the money we spend. I must admit, I've never got into the non-crisis mode, so to me it's just a deepening of what I've always done. But even some of my friends who felt obliged to spend over the odds for a night out (and then tell everyone about it and about the fact that they didn't have the money they spent before going into a long declaration of their various depts, listing them like trophies of the successful conqueror of modernity) are coming back down to earth. I doubt that this attitude will really outlive the recession, people immensely enjoyed showing off the superlatives of the growth years and are seeing the new modesty as a restriction rather than a chance.
For me, the whole point of the excercise is not to pretend that I could afford things or to dream about times when I can. Nor is it about budget buying. Trading Liberty for Primark is daft. The difference is visible at first glance, so it isn't really a substitute. Unless, of course, you never saw the difference in the first place, in which case you should have been turned away from Liberty at the door. (Sorry, I have strong feelings about posers.) Rant over. Where was I? Ah, yes, why do I wander aimlessly between Tottenham Court Road and Cannary Wharf staring at skinny jeans and CCTV cameras? It's to fill my creative store with ideas and to get a general feel for the direction the world is heading in. It's essentially urban ethnography. Maybe I should try to make this a profession?!?...

Redesign Nightmare

Wow, I'm not just back, I think I'm back with a bang. I spent all afternoon designing a new template for this blog and while I'm not completely there yet, I feel Pink Orange is finally taking shape. Watch this space, I can't wait to see where it takes me.

Another beginning

Wow, it looks like this blog is moving from one beginning to the next. After years of silence I have caught the blogging bug again. So I hereby declare a new beginning...may it last longer than the last one. ;o)