I have been so busy this week. Along with being in training for work, we had a drink/dinner/work thing one evening and the rest of the week I had dinner and drinks with Stuart.

(WHY? Why is it when I had no life and was a shut in the flat did I go no where for the most part???? WHAT THE HELL????

I’m really impressed with the company’s attempts to make this a global product. It really feels great. When I worked for Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) each country felt like a separate business unit. There were tools that we used in the US for years that they still haven’t tweaked for UK use– I can only imagine for the other markets.

Anyway. . .

Everyone seems very nice- they are trying to fatten us up like Hansel and Gretel with all the food and drink—but I think the Seattle trip will be a blast and that it all will be a lot of hard work as we go toward launch but well worth it. Good group of people that care about what they are doing.

I have to say, I am so glad I didn’t stay with Y!

I’m very excited to be a part of this team.

Okay. No more work boring shit. I promise to come up with NEW boring shit.

Like:

My cord for my powerbook started to fray, causing me to be afraid of fire, electrocution and the crisping of my computer.

Like:

My husband is (at this moment) in the pub with a French (male) Friend after I was promised an evening of watching silly things together on TV. (I could have gone to the pub, but I wasn’t in the mood.)

Like:

The new job welcoming people in Seattle are working to have our welcoming dinner at my favorite restaurants on the planet- Wild Ginger. . .

Ahhhhhh Wild Ginger Seven Flavour Beef. . .

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I’m really impressed with the people at my new gig. Everyone is so friendly and my boss looked into sending me back from Seattle early so I could do my trip. (not possible- but what can you do)

My brain is crispy from all of the training and there are weeks more left- but it is all good. . .

I’m really excited to get going with it.

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So, good news with my job.

They are sending us to Seattle for training in a couple of weeks. Very nifty. Lived in Seattle for a few years- have some old friends from when I lived there- also some new folks that I met through Stuart– So this is a good thing.

Bad news, we were going to go to Porto, Portugal over Easter weekend and the timing fucks it all the hell up.

Oh well.

First day at work? Good. I have a laptop with a little write on the screen thingy. Those of you that have worked in Internet land will appreciate the remarkable thing of having a working computer on your first day of work. The fact that it is a nifty peice of hardware is an extra.

The day went by so fast– Ah, to have days that go by fast again. . .

FUCK- I wish I could go to Porto- the fuckers!

**Lame “Fish Called Wanda” Reference.

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One year ago today I arrived at Heathrow slightly spacey with luggage stuffed to the gills for what I thought was a three-month tour on this island.

Today I am off to my first day of work after six months. Slightly nervous. Worried that they will figure out that I am an idiot.

The great thing is it is a new team so everyone will be new so there will be none of that new person walking into a bonded team thing.

Been a strange year. . .

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Barbara Bush plays with her son, George W. Easter 1948

It was recently reported that Conservative families breed at a higher rate than Liberal families. Another interesting article was published recently in the Toronto Star detailing the results of a twenty year study that found that confident children usually became liberal while the whiney complaining beasts you want to beat with a stick often become Conservative.

Verrrrry Intervestink. . .

How to spot a baby conservative
KID POLITICS | Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand …
Mar. 19, 2006. 10:45 AM
KURT KLEINER
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn’t going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it’s unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it’s a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

Of course, if you’re studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn’t be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded it the “conservatives are crazy” study and accused the authors of a political bias.

Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions. But Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who was critical of Jost’s study, was less impressed.

“I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best,” he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.

The results do raise some obvious questions. Are nursery school teachers in the conservative heartland cursed with classes filled with little proto-conservative whiners?

Or does an insecure little boy raised in Idaho or Alberta surrounded by conservatives turn instead to liberalism?

Or do the whiny kids grow up conservative along with the majority of their more confident peers, while only the kids with poor impulse control turn liberal?

Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. For instance, there was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect.

For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.
Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their “rigidity,” maybe that’s just moral certainty.

The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as self-indulgent and ineffectual.

Whether anyone’s feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we’ve reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?

It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments about tax policy or free trade or health care, and more with the personalities we’ve been stuck with since we were kids.

Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based freelance science writer.

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One of the great pleasures in getting to know someone is discovering what they enjoy. The little things that show that you know them. The little things that wind them up. . .

There is an accordion player outside Sainsbury’s.

I call Stuart. I hear the phone click as he answers it, but he doesn’t say hello. There is a long pause.

“Thomas. Where are you?”

“On our high street.”

“There’s an accordion.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I hate accordions.”

“Yes, I know.” I hold the phone out toward the music for a few moments then bring it back to my ear. Stuart isn’t amused.

“I’m going to have you for that later.”

“I was thinking of buying one. An accordion.”

“Goodbye Thomas.”

“Taking lessons.”

“Goodbye Thomas.”

“I could play ‘La vie en rose’ over and over and over. . .”

“You’re a git.’

“I may sing with it too.”

“Goodbye Thomas.”

“In French.”

“Thomas. . .”

“Quand il me prend dans ses bras. . .Il me parle tout bas. . .Je vois la vie en rose. .”

‘Remind me to beat you later.”

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I live with a bed hog.

The worse kind.

He is a bed hog that projects his hogginess onto me.

We have a full bed. I had a queen size back in America that was all mine except for those relatively rare moments when it was shared with a boy.

I have had a couple of boyfriends over the years with futons (why any man still has futon in his thirties is a subject for another post) and my joints still haven’t recovered.

A couple of nights ago, I woke up to Stuart snorting with annoyance as he pushed my feet aside. I looked down and I was against the edge of the bed and he was sleeping, as he would say, star shaped diagonal corner to corner.

I squeaked, “Stuart!”

He looked down. “Oh. Right. Sorry.”

Another move he has (which is really sweet actually) is I wake up to him cuddled up to me holding me like a teddy bear. The problem is he is using my head as a pillow.

In the morning before he leaves for work, he tucks the ends of the comforter around my feet and hands, strokes my hair and kisses my forehead, my nose.

I stretch out invading the entire bed. As he shuts the door he mumbles, “Bed hog. . .”

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I added a guest book to my little corner on the Web. It’s just under my profile and above the paypal button.

For those of you using IE on a PC - I know my links and everything are way down on the page. I’m not smart enough to figure out why. I’m waiting until my tax refund comes in and I can pay someone to figure it out for me.

This is my last week of freedom before I have to go back to work and I will be so happy to get out of the house. Not working is great. Not working when you have no money and the weather is gray outside so that you become a pasty white doughy spotty shut-in is not so nice.

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I need to stop eating chili pepper garlic squid late at night from the takeaway down the road. Or stop drinking. Or drink more. Or realize that coffee is not a food group and there is no nutritional need to drink a pot a day.

Sometimes in my dreams I can fly. I have flown as long as I can remember, but it isn’t easy graceful Superman flying. It takes some work to take off. I flail my arms trying to catch a puff of wind to pull me into air. Once I am up, I soar and occasionally need to bird flap to keep from crashing.

Sometimes I lose the wind and I drift down. Sometimes people are grabbing my legs and yanking me out of trees while I twist madly trying to catch a breeze to get away.

Sometimes in my dreams I am a character rather than me. Or, I am me but different.

My friends Mike and Joe were waiting to go somewhere in a moving van and I asked for a ride to school. They were my friends but I wasn’t me, I was this girl still in High School. Mike wasn’t sure if he could give me a ride because he was waiting for someone to contact him for something that he had to do. (If you knew Mike, this is really funny.) I am waiting to see if I could have a ride rather than taking the bus.

Then they were ready to go but suddenly I wasn’t dressed. I had clothes on but they were all the wrong clothes, so I was running around looking for the right clothes so I could have a ride to school.

Then I was a Muslim girl. I’m Muslim and I am looking for the right clothes to wear and nothing I have is right.

Mike and Joe are getting angry because they want to go eat sushi.

Meanwhile the part of me that is me, not the character of a Muslim schoolgirl knows that the character me is sick. I have some flu or something.

I find the right clothes and I go to the bathroom but the urine doesn’t go into the toilet. It splashes back all over the floor and on my clothes.

Now I need to clean this up and find new clothes and I’m not feeling well because I have this flu thing that the character me doesn’t know about but the real me watching does and I can’t find my clothes and I can’t find my keys and I can’t find my shoes.

And then I passed out because I was sick with this flu thing.

No more chili pepper garlic squid. Definitely.

At least I didn’t wake up in the bathtub.

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Click to see all the Istanbul photos on Flickr,
originally uploaded by treefrog girl.

I want to go back to Istanbul. There is so much that we didn’t get a chance to see, the people are very friendly, it is such a vibrant city, rich with history and culture.

And there were cats everywhere. . .

Athens had dogs and Istanbul had cats. Are their cat and dog personalities for cities like there are cat and dog people?

We stayed in the old part of town and it seemed that down every street you would see another mosque. When it was time for the muezzin to do the Call to Prayer (Adhan) it would echo over the city, mixing with the voices of muezzins at other mosques. You can listen to a Call to Prayer here. It was really beautiful.

One translation of the Arabic I found is:

God is most great.
God is most great.
God is most great.
God is most great.
I testify that there is no god except God.
I testify that there is no god except God.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Come to prayer! Come to prayer!
Come to success (in this life and the Hereafter)!
Come to success!
God is most great.
God is most great.
There is no god except God.

I had done a bit of research before we went and what I read suggested that women cover their hair when they went into a mosque. At the Blue Mosque a number of other Western women did the same, but it was surprising how many that didn’t.

Built between 1609 and 1616, as the Sultan’s answer to the Hagia Sofia, it is really magical inside.

The Hagia Sofia (Ayasofya) is gorgeous.

Built over the ruins of two older churches in 537 by Justinian the Great it was the largest place of worship in Christendom until the completion of St. Peter’s in Rome one thousand years later. After the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it was turned into a mosque with minarets, tombs, and fountains added.

A substantial amount of the original Christian theme was left undistuburbed- including some of the most elaborate and best-preserved Byzantine mosaics still in existence.

I was really impressed with the Archeological museum. They had a number of beautiful pieces.

But the best part of the museum was the school kids. There were some (I am guessing) eight or nine year olds there on a field trip. I was trying to walk into a building just as a gaggle was walking out. I stood aside for them to leave and they looked up at me as they walked by smiled and said “Hello! Hi! Hello! Hello! Hi!”Fifty beautiful brown-eyed baby monsters. (Oh! My ovaries!)

The Palace Cistern (Yerebatan Saray) was a big surprise how much we enjoyed it.

It was marvelously Phantom of the Opera-esc. It was built in 532 by Constantine the Great and was enlarged by Justinian in the 6th century. Largely neglected after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 the Yerebatan Cistern was basically became a muddy subterranean ruin until it was cleaned up and opened up in 1987.

I want to go back and go into more mosques and see more of the city and go to some nice restaurants. We found a couple of okay places but I didn’t get to try any fish really. It’s going to be a while before I get a kebab from the man around the corner from our tube stop.

I want to go back to Istanbul. I am also happy to be back home.

You need a thick skin to just walk down the street. The shopkeepers take Mamet’s famous line from Glengarry Glen Ross, “A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing.” To an entirely new level. If you even glance at a shop you are asking to be accosted. One gentleman called out to us from across the street and then crossed over to get us to go into his restaurant/bar. It must be said that this approach did work because we went there the next day. After a while it is a bit exhausting. You might just want to read the menu of a restaurant when they pounce on you with a mixture of English, French, Spanish or Italian phrases. When we were walking along the Grand Bazaar they mainly called out in English while it was French at the Misir Carsisi.

When I bought spices at the Misir Carsisi, I was pressured me into getting more than I wanted. But that is part of the game. . . And it was a good deal. I spent thirty pounds on saffron, two kinds of tea, black and white pepper, vanilla beans, chills, mint and a pepper grinder. It would have cost much more in London.

At least the cabbies were honest - unlike Athens. (There should be a special corner in hell for the crooked cab drivers in Athens.)

We were nearly robbed when we were walking along the water. We were taking pictures of ourselves when a car driving by stopped, backed up and the passenger rolled down the window and called out to us. The driver kept both his hands on the wheel and stared straight ahead. We walked closer to the car but stayed three, four feet away. There was a barrier, a knee level wall between the walkway and the road.

The passenger said that he said he was with the police and Stuart said that he flashed a badge but I didn’t see it. He opened his door but stayed sitting in the car.

He asked if we had been smoking pot (we weren’t) where we were staying, pointed at me and asked Stuart if I was his wife.

I started to have visions of Midnight Express.

He then asked for our passports and I immediately knew that he wasn’t a cop and that he was trying to rob us. Of course we didn’t have our passports on us and even if we had we would have lied and said that we didn’t.

He tried to get Stuart to step over the barrier. Stuart looked at it and considered it for a moment.

I was screaming “No!” inside my head. It took everything in me to not tell these guys to go fuck themselves - which would not have been the right approach.

The guy gestured again for Stuart to come over by the car and Stuart said, “No, I don’t think I will.”

He kept at us, asking Stuart to unzip his jacket – I guess to see if he had a weapon. Kept asking us questions. Stuart said, “Tell you what. There’s a Police Station around the corner. (There wasn’t.) I’ll meet you there.”

Those were the magic words. He slammed the door of the car shut and speed away. I considered taking a picture, but I was worried that they would come back and that they had a gun.

I guess it isn’t a trip to Turkey without nearly being robbed or sold into white slavery. . .

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