England was good at producing ex-Englishmen, I came to feel, as Tonga was at producing expats. Of course the British had a tonic sense of humour; they had so much to be funny or dismissive about.
Love this piece about coming home to the UK by the great Pico Iyer. One of the most eloquent reflections on a sense of place that I have come across. I read it on my kindle while cramped on the Central Line during rush hour which made it all the more poignant (not really).
I’m a freelance writer, therefore my rent is paid from many sources. As a side hustle, I’ve been doing some temp work for a market research company. My conclusions as follows:
-People act on incentives. When you phone someone and ask them to participate in a 25 minute survey about something that relates to them only tangentially, if at all, there is no incentive. In fact, there is a dis-incentive (read on).
-Time can’t be bought, therefore it’s extremely valuable. Modern technology has made us all staggeringly efficient, but it’s also made us exponentially more busy. Expectations are higher on everyone. Spending 25 minutes talking about something uninteresting for no reward means 25 minutes you can’t spend creating, catching up, or resting your data-weary brain.
-The stakes are low, nonexistent really. The only people that have a vested interest in a survey being completed properly is the company that commissioned it. Neither the surveyor or the surveyee really care about the end-game. The people who care aren’t involved in the actual transaction, so how can it be successful?
-Scripts aren’t sexy. The only time people willingly deal with customer service representatives, call centres, or wordy and repetitive pieces of verbiage is when they absolutely have to: calling the bank, reconnecting to the internet, changing a flight. These negative associations are the reason why the phrase “international market research study” makes people shudder.
-The phone is too personal. Cold-calling someone on their cell phone is regarded as a grotesque invasion of privacy these days. When you do that, you’ve already done wrong in their eyes. Send them an email, offer even a small incentive (a coupon, a voucher), and present it to them in a setting where they don’t feel you’re overstepping your bounds. You can employ less people like me and likely get more respondents.
I can only imagine that the people who design and assemble these surveys for multi-national companies are paid large sums of money and have multiple graduate degrees in statistics, research, and business. How have gotten this far in life and not grasped the basic tenets outlined above?
All I have is a bachelors degree, a basic understanding of incentives, and a grasp on how language can help or hinder a cause. Maybe they should hire me to rewrite their survey instead of paying me a nominal hourly fee to call people who want to hang up on me.
Some people aspire to have BMWs, or a beach house etc. If I can have a bookshelf like this one day, I’ve pretty much made it in my mind.
(via notmybeautifulhome)
Get rich slow.
via: nevver
By putting English Roses on the kitchen table and hanging oil paintings on the walls, my mom taught me to surround myself with beautiful things simply because they’re beautiful. By having not one, but three, successful careers (as a journalist, makeup artist, then oil portrait artist), she taught me that nothing is off limits if you decide to make it yours. Most usefully, my mom taught me that good manners – particularly a hand-written thank you note – will get you far and that a cup of tea can help cure most of life’s ills.
Read what other EcoSalon writers love about their mamas.
— I Ching No. 3 (via soul-surfer)
(via htbmc)
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, in reference to global warming. (via under-the-kamanitree)
(via climate-changing)
Painted mobile phone adverts always make me nostalgic for my favourite continent. Sigh.
Luthuli Ave. April 2012
via: dailystruggle:
(via africasacountry)
Sometimes, good writers starve. Sometimes, dreadful writers succeed. John Grisham’s sentences thud and crepitate all over the page, and he has become a literary tycoon. Edgar Allan Poe nearly starved.
Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out. When a baby is to be born, she is born.
This, from Gene Weingarten’s piece about the ghostwriter of a popular children’s book series, sounds kind of artistically self-righteous, but I find it reassuring. I realized this week that despite how hard it is, I have to pursue writing because I have no interest in anything else, nor have I cultivated any other skills. Here’s hoping my fate lies somewhere between Grisham and Poe’s
overcoming self-doubt in the realm of creativity is simply coming to trust your own judgment
via inanebliss
—
-Martin Buber
(via katherinesexton)
When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.
When I read this paragraph in a New Yorker piece today, I had to stop and re-read it a few times. I’ve often contemplated this idea, albeit in a far more abstract way. It is, of course why we stereotype models as dumb and engineers as homely: why would a person spend time studying and proving theorems if they could just walk down runways and drink champagne? It’s kind of an uncomfortable thing to declare in writing I suppose, lest readers think the writer is referring to themselves.
The writer of this piece, Adam Gopnik, was actually referring to Albert Camus, the man once described by the editor of the Partisan Review as “the most attractive man I have ever met.” Leave it to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s iconic portrait of Camus (above) to show us precisely how Camus managed to make existentialism impossibly sexy.
More from the New Yorker piece:
Camus once saw [Jean Paul] Sartre over-wooing a pretty girl and wondered why he didn’t, as Camus would have don’t, play it cool.
“You’ve seen my face?” Sartre answered, honestly.
It appears that French existentialists aren’t all that different from frat boys after all.
IThe Owl and the Pussy-cat went to seaIn a beautiful pea-green boat,They took some honey, and plenty of money,Wrapped up in a five-pound note.The Owl looked up to the stars above,And sang to a small guitar,“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,What a beautiful Pussy you are,You are,You are!What a beautiful Pussy you are!”IIPussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!How charmingly sweet you sing!O let us be married! too long we have tarried:But what shall we do for a ring?”They sailed away, for a year and a day,To the land where the Bong-Tree growsAnd there in a wood a Piggy-wig stoodWith a ring at the end of his nose,His nose,His nose,With a ring at the end of his nose.III“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shillingYour ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”So they took it away, and were married next dayBy the Turkey who lives on the hill.They dined on mince, and slices of quince,Which they ate with a runcible spoon;And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,They danced by the light of the moon,The moon,The moon,They danced by the light of the moon.
Freelance journalist and full-time optimist.
