2014 — 6 September: Saturday
Back in my days1 of wage slavery I started to hear — though only in the later phases — the annoying phrase "work-life balance". It crops up early in the first of two essays I've been reading this morning while the cuppa cools and before breakfast becomes a more-pressing necessity. Source and snippet:
The phrase "work-life balance" entered the English language in 1977. Its metaphor remains mixed: if work is part of life, how can the two be imagined as counterpoised? And if not life, what exactly sits across from work on the metaphorical seesaw? When we lobby for flextime and telecommuting, or when on the contrary we complain about being on call around the clock and the globe, are we picturing a unitary self or rather a vocational veneer layered over a personal core?
The second essay concerned that elusive goal — happiness:
...so far we have almost no scientific studies of the long-term history of happiness. Scholars have researched the history of just about everything — politics, economics, diseases, sexuality, food — yet they have seldom asked how they all influence human happiness...
Both essays are more succinctly captured, I feel, by one of my favourite "Leeds postcards" from the early 1980s:
The cartoon "Just Around the Corner", attributed to PJ Polyp, first appeared in the Ethical Consumer.
Plagiarism...
... is paying off in an amazing tale of a Bosnian refugee — Emir Kamenica — getting into an American college in midtown Atlanta on the basis of an essay he painstakingly translated into English from a book called "The Fortress". But was that really the way it happened? Not when you listen to the teacher's account two decades later, certainly.
Now, what about some breakfast before it metamorphoses into lunch?
Just as I...
... get used to my two Asus 27" desktop monitors that have 3,686,400 pixels, along comes a Dell with 14,745,600 of the tiny devils. I don't think my fanless graphics card would cope :-)
Weightier matters
Tom Godwin's 1954 story "The Cold Equations" applies to more than space trips carrying a doomed stowaway.
Calibre...
... has just made the leap to Version 2 (casting off support for XP in the process) and is perfectly happy to manage ebooks on my new SHIELD tablet's version of the Kindle ebook software. This is doubleplus goodness. I'm going to try the first book of Lev Grossman's "Magicians" series. (I'd not heard of him until catching an NPR quiz show on which he's chattering right now.)
[Longish Pause]
I'm enjoying the story, though will admit to breaking off to fix an evening meal and re-watch "100 Girls".