Brave - Reviewdom

So I was going to write about age-based discrimination (and will probably follow with a short post on it) but I realised that I hadn't revied the awesome Brave yet. 

BRAVE

                 -Disney/Pixar,
                 -conceived by Brenda Chapman,
                 -directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman.


The first thing I have to say is that it doesn't remotely seem 93 minutes long, which has two implications 1) at no point is the plot uninteresting and 2) You leave feeling a tiny bit cheated because it was over so soon.

This possibly has something to do with a short animation (a delightful little piece entitled "La Luna") at the beginning, which accounts for about ten minutes of that running time, not to mention that credits always take much longer for animated features. But La Luna is worth seeing (7/10 at least), and Brave isn't all that short... it just finishes before you're prepared to leave.

The premise:

Our heroine, the fiesty Scottish Merida, who is also a princess, considers it grossly unfair that she has to get married just because otherwise her peaceful land will be torn asunder by war. This seems a little brattish, but we soon meet the suitors, whereupon we instantly forgive her.

Anyway, Merida picks up on the fact that her father is more interested in belching, role-play and hunting bears than he is in actually keeping the kingdom afloat, and thereby deduces that it is because of her mother, Queen Elinor (Shock, horror, a Disney flick with a living mother???). She quickly offends almost everyone present by ably demonstrating that anything men can do, she can do better, and with the assistance of teenage hormones and her lovable horse Angus, she storms out of the castle to have a private rant. 

The rest of the basic premise is pretty standard - she looks for a quick fix to her problems, it all goes horribly wrong and everyone learns something about themself in the process. But, in fairness to Brenda Chapman's story, no plotline is really original when you break it down to a single sentence. 

The finer details...

The major focus of this film - in a break from both Pixar's and Disney's general ideas - is the mother-daughter dynamic. As is Pixar's trademark, though, there are very few points in the film where the major focus is the only thing happening, and it does its best to make you laugh, cry and think all at the same time. 

Kelly Macdonald and Emma Thompson (Merida and Elinor, respectively) dominate the plot, and, in good old Disney fashion, their performances are perfect. Billy Connolly and Julie Walters, despite having a lot less to do with the plot directly, both voice very memorable characters that entertain without upstaging the main pair. Characters gain depth and fallibility within just a few lines, as much from the well though-out script as from animation so fluid that you can almost forget that it's not real.

I have to tell you that bears feature. This is shown in the trailer, so I don't consider it a major spoiler, but it needs to be said anyway because of the quality of the animation. It is extraordinary.

Forget Sulley's fur in Monsters, Inc. and the sea anemones in Finding Nemo (based on Sulley's fur) - they were ingenious and groundbreaking, yes, but they have nothing on this. The animators for Sulley, for those of you who don't know, went to extraordinary lengths to make the lovable monster's long hair look realistic - an onorous task which entailed animating thousands of individual hairs to respond to position and environment. In Brave, the animators have produced hair which is long enough to respond to environmental influences such as the wind, water etc, but short enough that it also shows the movement of flesh underneath this. And it is incredibly realistic.

Overall, it is the incredibly attentive animation that forces the viewer to take the plot seriously, and unlike many animations, make it easy for even older viewers to forget that the danger is imaginary. 

Any further ado will inevitably lead to spoilers, which I don't consider a good thing, so let's get straight to the scores:


Visuals: 10/10, although - as it moves the bar upwards - probably 11/10 when compared to any previous animation.
Writing: 8/10 - most of it was beautifully original, and it certainly flowed like a 10, but some details of the plot were annoyingly predictable.
Voice Acting: 10/10, easily. Accents were either real or pulled off beautifully, some complex vocal work was done and every emotion written was expressed precisely in the voice.
Score: 10/10. A touch of celtic goodness kept it out of the land of cliches for a Disney score, but still managed to create the mood and set the scene just as required.

so, Overall: 9.5 (brilliant)

I should, however, draw your attention to the fact that if you watch films just for the plot, you're looking at an 8/10 - very good, but not brilliant.

Volunteering... animal shelter.

Wildlife shelters are wierd.

I say this not because I consider it odd to want to save animals that have become injured by modern society and thereafter retard the species evolution by returning these injured animals to the wild. As a general rule, I do not believe that animal shelters do retard evolution for two major reasons:

1) In the UK, most species handled are either city-thriving species that have already adapted to modern life or at such low numbers that as many animals as possible have to be kept going, regardless of genetic quality just to prevent Allee* effects.

2) The bulk of animals treated in these animal shelters are birds and mammals, which are indisputably able to learn from their own mistakes and - in many cases - have also been proven capable of learning from the mistakes of others. Thus Action A, if followed by pain and stress, will be avoided in the future even if the animal survives.

Be that as it may, Wildlife shelters are awash with paradoxes:

1) Human hospitals smell of two things (in my experience) - Disinfectant and bodily fluids, even on non-surgical . With all the herring-gulls, ducks, pigeons and hedgehogs distributing their business as far and wide as possible, you'd expect that the predominant smells in the shelter would be similar. But instead, it smells of disinfectant and food (as far as you can call the cat-food that hedgehogs seem to love above all else "food").

2) When you open a cage, there is no way of saying how you'll feel after you've cleaned it, weighed the resident and closed the door. A mangy little hedgehog with no fur can be happy and hyper and quite definitely planning on living, and you'll leave (and scrub your hands) with a huge smile on your face from the adorable little zombie... while a larger hedgehog with a very positive history can have suddenly decided not to drink and losing weight at a rate of knots, and you feel like you're going to throw up just seeing it fade.

3) When someone walks through the door with a box, you're heart goes up and down at the same time. You can't wait to see this new and exciting animal, but then, of course, this new and exciting animal has to have been injured in some way (most probably by idiots with guns and/or dogs).

4) You can be the shallowest, least philosophical git on the surface of the planet (me) and you'll still feel obliged to find flowery euphemisms for death afterwards.


It's made me feel really good and really awful at the same time.


I conclude - it's wierd.

I plan to go again. 





*To put it simply, Allee effects come in when organisms cross a critical threshold and, although they are present throughout a large environment, their chances of finding a mate before they get eaten/expire are effectively nil, so the population rapidly dwindles and disappears

Volunteering in Conversation Rant

This one is a bit personal. 

So I suppose we need to actually talk about me.


I'm not just unemployed. I have aspirations. I have plans. I even have dreams (see my rather unrealistic to do list...). And - as much as I may joke about the impossibility of it - the core of it is that I sat through genetics lectures in order to get enough credits to keep learning a bit more about conservation. Because I love wildlife, and I love nature, and would really like to conserve it.


Then we get to the part with my s***ty dissertation. It was poor topic, more than regulation hours of lab work, and far too small a sample for there to be more than a fractional chance that anything of interest would be found. This didn't put me off, until my statistics showed me that actually I'd found something quite useful, but that unhelpful voice reassured me that nothing would ever come of an undergraduate dissertation. So I had a low patch and effectively self-sabotaged, turned in an atrociously under-written dissertation and as a result missed a good grade by 1.2%.


The result of this is that - in order to progress any further in academia, I really have to have some practical experience (not to mention money). Apparently self-directed practical experience from 22 years analysing the differences between the degraded UK environment and the rapidly degrading central african environment doesn't count. The best thing to do, or so I'm told, is volunteer.

And here lies the point which I want to discuss.

The UK's version of conservation sucks. Yes, their protective laws are groundbreaking, and their capacity for enforcement of laws is brilliant, but they seem to have forgotten that nature exists. It doesn't help that a lot of conservation organisations - home and away - are actually run by hunters who want to conserve nature in such a way that makes it easier to shoot (bluntly), but environments are overmanaged.

It is a garden state and many "pro-conservation" people firmly believe that maintaining the patchwork of farmland is important because the countryside has to be in use. They also can't seem to grasp that a healthy ecosystem is self regulating and, by controlling any native organism, you are reducing the food of its natural predator and thereby causing yourself to need to keep controlling.

Heathlands - which are a species rich but transitional habitat - are over-maintained. Naturally it would appear when woodland burns, and disappear once soil recovered and a bad season limited grazer numbers enough for trees to recover. But grouse are easier to shoot on open ground, so charities maintain vast areas of open moorland and heathland because the landowners have had centuries to instill in us that trees will destory the habitat.

Broadleaf forest - which naturally covers more-or-less all of the dry land in the country and thus regulates rainfall - is all but gone. Where it's not gone, the forestry commision has "dangerous" trees removed - that is to say, old trees which are becoming hollow and thus perfect for woodpeckers, bats and countless beetles. Dead wood is gathered up, and all our decomposers are disappearing as a result - or moving on to live plants (slugs being a notable example of an animal that, in the absence of its primary food source, become a major pest).

Waterways have been straightened and cleared, and I have actually seen parks noting their good work in clearing trees along banks where they were outshading other vegetation. Because, you know, that won't reduce soil stability and increase runoff and stifle the life within the pond/lake at all. Straighter waterways are maintained because it "reduces flooding risk" - my arse. It creates a flood/drought cycle instead: water runs fast down hills, creating flash-floods on the flats which, not dampened by bends, can become dangerous. On a small island, it gets to the sea quite quickly, and heads off into the channel leaving us parched for the rest of the year.

Britain is also the only country I know of where the vast majority of nature reserves are actually in use as grazing land.

Because "that's what the ecosystem needs".

Many of our ecosystems, such as heathland and some areas of downland, do benefit from low-intensity grazing. You can tell low intensity grazing because the grass isn't clipped right down to the earth in such a way that one good day of rainfall washes everything away. High intensity grazing creates a disturbed habitat which is about as species-rich as astroturf, and only slightly more natural.

And everyone says "you should get involved".

As an entry level volunteer, you don't really have any opportunities to innovate, change and sent things in a less ridiculously counter-productive direction. As an entry level volunteer in UK conservation, the best you can hope for is that your contribution doesn't do much extra damage.


Okay, rant over. Point is, I'm going to volunteer at a charity shop instead until I can get paid work at a zoo because frankly, they encourage wildlife a shedload better than british nature reserves do.

In Love and Zombies...

Bit of a random (surprise?) and quite a short (hooray!) one today... 


Let me start by saying that I find liberated intellectuals highly attractive.


To break that down, for me to be attracted, someone typically has to check these two boxes:


             1) They defy gender stereotypes.

             2) They eat knowledge for breakfast.



Being bat-shit crazy helps, but I'm not sure I actually know anyone who isn't, on some level, bat-shit crazy, so I don't think it's necessary to put it up there.



There are a lot more women/girls out there fitting these rigorous expectations than you might expect. And probably about sixty percent of the ones I've been lucky enough to meet don't treat me like an idiot for having a sense of humour, so the question remains as to why I have not yet seduced and married one of them before moving to Australia and having lots of sex and babies...


Yesterday, I finally worked it out. 


In a typical romance, there are a number of ways of expressing affection:

                 1) Asking on dates.

                 2) Paying for dinner.

                 3) EPS (Excess public slobbering).

                 4) Purchasing of flowers.

                 5) Purchasing of jewellery.

                 6) Going on holiday together.

                 7) Watching romantic DVDs together.

                 8) A nice bottle of wine.

                 9) A slow dance.

...and so forth until proposal. 

For me, expressing affection is much simpler. On the way to finding myself attracted to someone,  there is a point where my I decide that they are awesome, and as soon as that happens, one of two sentences is going to be randomly chosen and blurted out of my mouth without any input from me:

             1) "I want to eat your brain."

         2) "I want your brain on a stick."


What's most worrying - infinitely more than anyone that I am ever interested in thinking that I was raised in a Papua New Guinean tribe - is that on some very basic level I actually think like that.

Awesomeness = Yummy brains.

I really do need to find some way around this.

Now go forth and smivel without getting Cruetzfeldt-Jakob's Disease...

Rejection, Failure... My life continues.

So, lately a few good things have happened to me:

1) I passed my driving theory (thank you, Pearson Vue and your distinctly odorous Portsmouth offices)

2) I learned that I would not incur charges on my overdraft unless I was still in it in November (Thank you, Halifax and your double-sent letters).

3) I got out of my overdraft (Thank you, Dole... I think).

4) My father sent me details of this awesome volunteering post that has become available in the centre of the universe (= thank you, immediate paternal ancestor).

5) I got a nice macro of a Conopid fly (Physocephala rufipes) in the garden, having never even seen a live conopid before (Conopids: bizarre nectar-feeding flies which seem to be related to hoverflies, with elongated antennae and larvae which are endoparasites of various bees, wasps etc): here is a quick and half-hearted edit of it especially for you:

and

5) The evil monstrous hearless nice bitch cow devil-woman lady at the pit of despair job centre was not horrible the second time I saw her.


Unfortunately, the bad things keep happening:

1) I remain utterly unemployed.

2) I am only out of my overdraft because I am on the dole, which is increasinly making me want to die.

3) For some obscure reason, the government thinks I would make a good juror. I thought this was a good (or at least interesting)  thing until I realised that a) it means that I cannot apply for anything overseas because I would then have to return halfway through and irk my employer right out of their socks and b) if any of the stuff I have applied for overseas says yes (unlikely, I admit) I'll have to explain that I now can't, unless they feel like postponing my start date.

4) Two jobs that I had applied for which were local and unambitious (so I thought I had a good chance) have turned me down.

5) I have to see the dragon lady on 9.11 (American style date to make the point that although I am in the UK, I have an appointment with a monster lady on the eleventh anniversary of an event that makes me feel petty for being miserable).

6) I do not handle rejection well and as a direct result of having two rejections in one "send and receive", I am having to drink copious amounts of tea to remain even remotely functional.

7) My best friend has buggered of to Bath to do some singing for a week. Which means that my life is in dire need of comic relief.



I want to have some sudden inspiration as to how to see these things in a positive light... but currently I lack any inspiration and require more tea. 


I'm going to watch Kiwi! on youtube in order to feel more tragic... is this logical?


And then I'm going to daydream about being Australian.

Smivel

Aeroplanes... and more...

CnH(2n+2) + (2n+1/2)O2 >>>>> nCO2 + (n+1)H20

Alright, so it's a bit vague, and the format's all wrong, but hopefully the chemically minded get the gist...

It's the (organic) chemistry of combustion of basic hydrocarbon (alkane) chains. The CnH(2n+1) is the hydrocarbon chain, or - more tangibly (names are simplest isomers from Butane up. Longer chains = more isomers, but end result of combustion remains the same)

C1H(2x1 + 2)        =  CH4        =  Methane
C2H(2x2 + 2)        =  C2H6      =  Ethane
C3H(2x3 + 2)        =  C3H8      =  Propane
C4H(2x4 + 2)        =  C4H10    =  Butane
C5H(2x5 + 2)        =  C5H12    =  Pentane
C6H(2x6 + 2)        =  C6H14    =  Hexane
C7H(2x7 + 2)        =  C7H16    =  Heptane
C8H(2x8 + 2)        =  C8H18    =  Octane
C9H(2x9 + 2)        =  C9H20    =  Nonane
C10H(2x10 + 2)     =  C10H22  =  Decane
C11H(2x11 + 2)      =  C11H24  =  Undecane

And so on and so forth into infinity (well...)

These are also known as paraffins, and are found in most of our oil-based fuels. As a general rule, the thicker the fuel, the longer the chains.

What is the reason for someone who walked out of sixth-form chemistry three weeks before the finals to start talking organic chemistry, you ask?

Jet fuel. 


Jet fuel is a petroleum based fuel, and (although for some reason a lot of people think it's benzene, the wonderful ring hydrocarbon of awesomeness and ourobouros that brightens up every AS-level organic chemistry paper...) it is composed almost entirely of a variety of these simple hydrocarbons (again, keyword Alkane, because sooner or later I'm going to forget that not everyone knows that word).

In burning any alkane, we have the formula I opened with:

CnH(2n+2) + (2n+1/2)O2 >>>>> nCO2 + (n+1)H20

 To give this context, lets talk about methane. With just one carbon, it's the simplest, 

To burn methane, we need one molecule of methane and two and a half of oxygen gas (this is a theoretical burning, so we can have half of a molecule), and we'll produce one molecule of carbon dioxide and two of water. 

So in burning methane (getting swiftly to the crux of this matter) you produce half as many carbon dioxide molecules as you produce water.


At this stage you may well wonder where I'm going with this. 

It ends up at jet trails. And it's less convoluted than you might expect. 


If you burn ethane, with two carbons, you end up producing two carbon dioxides for every water molecule.

Propane produces 3 carbon dioxide, four water. (75%)

Butane produces 4 carbon dioxide, five waters. (


And so it follows. For every Carbon chain you burn, you produce one more water molecule than you produce carbon dioxide.


Now, it may interest you to know that, at fixed temperature and pressure, one mole of any gas occupies the exact same amount of space as another.

This is useful because a mole is a numerically-derived unit, which we can divide by about 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to get to the statement:

"one molecule of any gas at a fixed temperature and pressure takes up exactly the same amount of space".

Now comes the jet fuel/jet trails bit.

The jet trail is formed by water molecules in fuel emissions being spewed out into the pretty-cold atmosphere, where the sudden temperature drop causes them to condense and form clouds. 

While there is a fair amount of Diana Rossing (chain reactions in me-speak) leading to the formation of what eventually becomes a cirrus cloud, while the trail is still a clear line leading from the tail end of the jet, it's still composed mostly of the water from the jet's own burning fuel. 

This is all very exciting, of course.

Along with this water, comes fractionally less of carbon dioxide, taking up fractionally less space. In the best case scenario, with the burning of methane, there is half as much carbon dioxide you can't see being spewed into the sky as there is water that you can see (because it condenses). 

Methane is the best case scenario, and a very unrealistic one at that. In widely used jet fuels, ratios vary but chain lengths hover between 5 and 16 - so CO2 to water ratios at the plane-end hover between 5/6 (83.3%) and 16/17 (94.1%).



So for every jet-trail of rapidly-condensed water vapour across the sky, there's more than three-quarters that volume of carbon dioxide being spewed out, too.


Which, regardless of your stance on global warming, is really quite alarming. 




Go forth and smivel wisely. And cut back on air travel if you'd like coasts to stay roughly where they are...





P.S - This all came about while I was on the train, on the way to my driving theory test (which I aced, by the way), and trying to count the jet-trails etched across Hampshire's blue sky (which I failed to do. And I'm not mathematically impaired). Hampshire's airports combined wouldn't be expected to handle the volume of a recognised international airport such as Heathrow, Gatwick or the likes. Just so y'all know.

Olympic Closing Ceremony review... from BBC HD coverage.

It sucked.

The sound technician should be beaten with sticks for completely failing to do anything remotely resembling his job. 

In no particular order, these bits were the bits that, on their own, would have got marks slightly more than 3/10.

1) Boris Johnson waving a large piece of flammable material close to an open flame and potentially sparking an international conflict: 8/10 (Boris just gets voted in as mayor so that we can rely on free standup at the end of any major event). 

2) Eric Idle and his completely random dancers: 6/10 - it made no sense, but it was colourful and I may have laughed a little.

3) The Spice Girls (I'm so ashamed) - 8/10. Much as I hate to put crappy celebrities up there with the Boris, they were - unusually - making less about themselves and just playing their (awful) music as though they had a good sense of humour. Infinitely more enjoyable than expected, but that might have been because all the stars that people wanted to see were... not there.

4) Jessie J and "Queen" with... I can't even remember. Because it was less of a let-down than realising that neither David Bowie nor Kate Bush would actually be present, but instead some wierd people would do something symbolic yet completely irrelevant while their music played. 5/10 
[(also entertaining because it ran at the same time as my discovery that: a) My sister did not know who John Lennon was; b) She thought he died recently; and c) she didn't know that Freddie Mercury was dead (and yet has every Queen song ever on her computer)]

5) The bit at the beginning where there was an interesting set which was on screen for what, three minutes? Meanwhile a reliant robin was exploded by an amusing but tired Italian Job quote and Stomp was being entertaining (but seemed as though they were lid-synching). 6/10



And now, because the thing that we Brits do best (apart from the rest of the olympics) is moan, these were the very worst bits of the ceremony...

1) Beady Eye being so awful that for a moment I thought they were actually a cheesy cover band of Oasis. 1/10 (mark for showing up at all)


2) The sound technician being so bad at his job that you couldn't even hear half the acts. (Annie Lennox, Emili Sandé and the Who all seemed to be singing without a real microphone. Kaiser Chiefs were also difficult to hear, not sure if that's a bad thing, though). 0/10 for mucking up so many other things that could have been at least half decent otherwise.

3) The moment when you realised that the tap-dancing sound wasn't actually coming from Renato Sorriso's feet, but canned on the speakers. 2/10 for having such great choreography but faking it (the rest of the Brazil stuff gets a 5 or a 6, I'm not sure)

4) Fatboy Slim DJing when the octopus was infinitely more interesting and, frankly, a bit of Mighty Boosh, David Bowie or perhaps Yoko Ono's severed head would have been a more appropriate centrepiece to it. 3/10 because at least the sound was working and the octopus had so very much potential. 

5) George Michael being on stage at the beginning and by his turning up assuring us that it could only get better when it didn't, really. 0/10 because he seemed to think that it was all about him and it never seemed to end...

6) The exploding tightrope dummy. Just.... made no sense... why??? 2 points for randomness, -1 for lack of closure = 1/10.


One good thing about the awful ceremony was that the dull Belgian man (Jacques Rogge) who seems to turn up at all these ceremonies and talk into amusingly shaped microphones for too long seemed interesting by comparison. 

And the final thing that I am very pleased with is that I said during the ceremony that it seemed an appropriate transition from the public-spirity goodness of the Olympics, focusing on all those people acheiving greatness through hard work, to the typical UK grimy, cheesy, unimpressive celebrity culture, underwhelming events and mind-numbing dullness. Today, quite a few reviewers seem to agree. Not least the awesome Lynne Truss.

I have considered the possibility that the off-the-mark feel of the closing ceremony was an intentional but tongue in cheek reference to public expectations for the olympics, but I doubt it. 




It isn't really worth lynching Kim Gavin over, and Yoko Ono's hugely irrelevant Lennonface (ungraded) is not worth decapitating her for (and the piece could have been hilarious if it was a massive Lennonface-palm instead). But after the sheer awesomeness of the rest of the Olympics, it felt like it had been rushed together with no real thought, and as though Mr Bean had been asked to handle the artistic direction and forgotten to hire a choreographer.

Personal Statement Part ii... the elimination round.

So, having got past the "I hate me, how do I say that nicely in a personal statement?" part (here, in case you're interested),  I now have to find some way to whittle down the nauseating string of positive adjectives into a personal statement.



Based on the adjectives that I managed to twist out of my self loathing, I could say that I am an organised, committed, creative, engaging, positive, outgoing, flexible, contemplative, observant, unbiased, tolerant, reflective individual who is independent and happy to instigate, but good at taking a back seat, confident but constantly striving for self improvement and open to criticism, passionate and enthusiastic but having perspective, taking a balanced view, knowledgeable and with a thirst for knowledge, assertive with good prioritising skills and attention to detail, looking for work in the environmental sector with a long-term view of furthering my higher education.

But that is long, boring and wordy. Not that I'm in a position to, but I wouldn't hire someone so... immodest. In fairness, if I was a recruiter (which I am not), I would prefer to hire someone who put no personal statement because they feel that singing one's own praises is trite and - more importantly - vain.

I feel slightly unwell. And the point of the exercise is to feel better about myself, not to want to vomit on myself.

Because of the way that I  came up with these adjectives (which is far too long to go into within brackets) some of these words are redundant. The next task, then, is to group associated and/or interchangeable words:





positive
knowledgeable / engaging

contemplative / reflective
observant / attention to detail / organised


flexible/ independent / happy to instigate / creative / good prioritising skills
confident / assertive / outgoing

flexible / tolerant / good at taking a back seat


tolerant / open to criticism / striving for self improvement
committed / passionate / enthusiastic / thirst for knowledge

having perspective / taking a balanced view / unbiased

You may notice that flexible and tolerant are both included twice: flexible because it says that I can lead or follow (independent or taking a back seat), tolerant because it says that I can take leadership and advice (taking a back seat and open to criticism.

So the next step is to try and make sure it doesn't sound cliche. 

Let's get rid of:

Positive - in the current economic climate, it says a lot about you that you can spend 8 months unemployed and stay positive, but it's a little bit... peripheral.

Attention to detail - I was on a "how to get employed" course a while ago (can you tell it didn't work?) and one of the words that everyone used and it annoyed me that the lovely instructor didn't pick up on was "Attention to detail." I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that out of the five other people there, all of them included "Attention to detail" on their draft personal statements.

Of the two remaining, observant and organised... organised is not something to boast about. It's either required or not required, and you're not expected to apply for administrative posts if you're not organised. Stating the obvious in such an application might make them question whether you are actually organised. Well, if they were me.

So that's out.

(Do bear in mind that recruitment agencies use the most twattish thing ever to sift through CVs - automated keyword searches. And guess what? Automated keyword searches ignore the people that have used more original language and go for the drones. However, quite where in your CV the word is doesn't matter to the bot, so it could be an idea to put spare/commonly used words... between the lines*)

Between contemplative and reflective, I would tend towards contemplative. Reflective conjures images of someone daydreaming philosophies in the back of biology class. It's out.

Because they are a little less wound, the "independent" words are difficult to get rid of. Independent itself is again, a bit of a cliche and (I think I recall hearing) has gained a sort of stigma as it may mean that someone is impossible to get on with. It's out. Good prioritising skills feels like organised - if you're applying for a position where you have to prioritise, and you're saying you can lead, it's pretty much assumed that you know where you stand on getting the cake out of the oven or the baby out of the burning building. And less cut-and-dry cases. It's gone. 

Flexible is generally a useful one to keep in, and creative I'm going to hold onto as it's a little bit outside of the "independent" box. Happy to Instigate, then, is going to stand for independent here (although it is liable to tweaking later in the game...)

Outgoing sounds too much "I'm going to climb a mountain and then jump out of a plane" for most jobs (although I would imagine it's a useful hidden keyword for sales positions). Confident sounds a little bit overblown ("I know I'm wonderful, just hire me!" sort of thing). That may be the point, but Assertive is a good word because it tells them that you're not going to be in their face, but that you aren't going to just sit back and take abuse, either. It is possibly a bit cliche, but it's cliche because it's a very good thing to be that is not a prerequisite, and, if you have an assertive bone in your body (even if, like mine, it's in one of your toes), it may be worth keeping it (the adjective, not the bone) in for the semi-final.

I'm in two minds about Tolerant. It sounds a little bit like Nick Griffin (British Nationalist Party racist bigot leader, just in case you didn't know) saying "Some of my best friends are black!" (Although I doubt he'd say something like that and lose his single voter). Regardless that it's not actually about seperating yourself from ethnic/religious intolerance, but rather about tolerating bosses who are assholes (with me being British, that means "donkeyholes", which is infinitely less insulting than the alternative and need not be censored), it sounds like you're trying to cover up that you're actually an intolerant jerk. It can be different in context, of course, and may be another useful hidden word.

Open to criticism versus striving for self improvement is dealt with as such: which one takes a more active role? Striving for self improvement. It says you're not just open to criticism, you actively seek out criticism and advice to make yourself better. It wins. 

Now we come to committed, passionate, enthusiastic and thirsty for knowledge. 

These ones are difficult. The first three sound a little bit cliche, and thirsty for knowledge sounds wierd without one of them. It's going away (for now). Eager to learn may be a better one to say that you eat knowledge for breakfast, but if we use striving for self improvement, we cover that ground anyway.

Passionate is a little too informal, unless you're going for good cause work. It's disappearing from generic personal statementland in the meantime. Committed and enthusiastic work reasonably well together, so they both stay, for now. 

Taking a balanced view is clearly a messy way of saying unbiased. It's going, although unbalanced is another one for the invisible keywords if I suspect auto-filters are in use. As for having perspective... it sounds like it would be appropriate if you're applying to work in, for example, a funeral home, and are no stranger to grief, but it sounds a little out of place otherwise. Unbiased is great if you want to be a judge, but Objective might be better here.

So far, then, we're down to:
Knowledgeable, Engaging, Striving for self improvement, Contemplative, Observant, Flexible, Happy to Instigate, Creative, Assertive, Good at taking a back seat,  committed, enthusiastic and Objective.

This still seems a bit much - if I was to say:

"I am a knowledgeable and engaging  zoology graduate from the University of Nottingham, looking for work in the [e.g. customer service industry]. I am assertive but observant and flexible, happy to instigate or to take a back seat, and would enthusiastically commit to a role that makes the most of my objectiveness while challenging my creativity and allowing opportunities for self improvement."

it would seem a little bit... crowded. In particular Objectiveness doesn't seem to fit in, and the "but" between assertive and observant makes it seem as though we're using assertive as a euphemism for aggressive (when we just want to say we're capable of aggression when required). 

One option is to thrown in a third sentence (radical, I know):

"I am a knowledgeable and engaging  zoology graduate from the University of Nottingham, looking for work in the [e.g. catering industry]. I am observant, flexible and assertive, capable of instigation and objectively taking direction.  I would enthusiastically commit to a role that challenges my creativity and provides opportunities for self-improvement."

It's pretty keyword rich, and can't be read more than a couple of times, but as a basic structure, it works (more or less...).

However, I don't want something to work more or less - I want something that works. 

And that brings us to the next major hurdle in trouble. 

The first thing I do when proofreading anything (usually longer things, to be fair) is read them aloud. And reading it aloud, I'm getting rid of objective. It just doesn't fit. Other than that, it seems to be ready for someone else to tell me whether it's alright, and to go in pulp CVs in between... 



"I am a knowledgeable and engaging zoology graduate from the University of Nottingham, looking for work in the retail industry. I am observant, flexible and assertive, capable of instigation and taking direction, and would enthusiastically commit to a role that challenges my creativity and provides opportunities for self-improvement."





In other news, I have a rejection from Cardiff on their otters job.

Not unexpected, and at least they got back to me. And it wasn't right after the closing date, either, which means they must have thought about it. I would make this relevent by saying that they would have given me the job if I'd had a personal statement, but as it turns out, most of the jobs I apply for don't even want to see your CV, but rather require you to fill out an application form.









*By between the lines I mean throw invisible keywords into your CV. By colouring them white and putting them either in headers or footers or after fullstops, you keep them invisible but make sure the bots don't pass you by because you can think for yourself and/or use a thesaurus. 

Personal Statement... Finding something nice to say when I hate myself.

DISCLAIMER - while the following post lists a few psychopathologies that I once believed I suffered from, I recognise that I do not suffer from any of these - certainly not to a clinical level - and do not wish to give the impression that I am comparing my own problems to those of people who actually do suffer from debilitating psychopathologies. 



So I need to write a personal statement (because apparently every CV needs one... (although seeing as the person that told me that told me that I have zero chance of ever getting a job anyway... should I really bother?)). 

The first thing that I've heard you should do is come up with a list of adjectives to describe yourself. 

This is also the first place where I typically fail. There are two reasons for this:

1) If I spend too much time thinking about it, I realise that I hate myself.

2) Although I disagree on many of the details, I broadly agree with Bandura, Mischel and the other one's Social Learning Theory derived view that there is no such thing as personality, just a series of context-dependent behaviours derived from previous experience. 

As you may gather from the second point, I did A-level Psychology.

But before you run away screaming in fear of some pre-academic wittering on as though an A-level gives you any real grasp of a subject (which it doesn't), this is not about Psychology.

This is about something much, much worse. 

Me. 

As you may gather from it being enormous and bold, this next bit is the crucial take-away point here.

I spent the entire A-level self-diagnosing with just about every personality disorder going.

Which I now realise may have some purpose. 

I shall start by listing the things that I thought could be wrong with me...

Psychopathologies:

1) OCD.

2) Paranoid Schizophrenia.

3) Bipolar/Manic Depression.

4) Mild(ish) Sociopathy.

5) Autistic. 

6) Insecure Avoidant (Ainsworth and Bell).

The next step is to outline the behaviours that were suggestive of each of these issues.

1) "OCD" - certain things (not all) must be in perfect order. Once order is lost from said things (most notably books, DVDs, and other things for which the order does not technically matter), my life descends into chaos and hope vanishes. When something in my life has been interfered with by someone else, the pit of despair is most readily escaped from by scattering a couple of hundred DVD cases on the floor and alphabetising them.

Or filing a photograph of an insect in detailed taxonomy.

2)i) "Paranoid schizophrenia" - I get less done than I should because some part of me constantly criticising everything I do and evaluating every action for the worst outcome that can be "reasonably" expected (for which we add another little discussion point (below)), and it's not unusual for me to think that randomers on the street are talking about me/laughing at me. Narcissistic on some twisted level, I know. But having been teased (not in my imagination) quite extensively at school, not unrealistic.

2)ii) My version of reasonable is a little beyond reasonable. Aged 21 I convinced myself that an entire suburb of Nottingham was in a Different dimension. One year on I still half-believe that any footpath I haven't seen before is a portal to the distant past. And don't even get me started on swimming alone. 

3) "Bipolar/manic depression": Everyone has ups and downs. On the extreme up, I have thought I was some kind of God (I'll not be specific here in case any real ones out there get offended and smite me where I sit), and at the lowest end (most recently brought about by the evil bitch nice lady at hell the job centre), the thought of laying my head down on the road in front of the wheel of a moving bus and seeing it pop like a grape was very tempting. In the "up" phase, I impart more information than anybody needs to know about any point anyone bothers to make, and tend to dominate conversations whether anyone wants me to or no. In the down phase, I want a hollywood style apocalypse to wipe out everyone on the planet except me and perhaps a few tolerable acquaintances. 

4) "Mild(ish) Sociopathy" - I am uncomfortably aware that my moral priorities do not always match up with everyone else's. I'm not certain that anyone finds morality as an instinct, but I do suspect that most are not as coldl and analytical in their moral decisions. This is - unusually - not something I consider to be a negative. I usually know whether something I do is right or wrong because I have almost always taken the time to think about it. A lot of people think they separate right from wrong but are actually just following through with what they society expects them to see as right and wrong, and are thus at more dangerous of "following the traffic" over the speed limit (e.g. Nazi Germany, Boer War etc.). 

5) "Autistic" - a general failure to understand the pleasure in certain popular pastimes. Other than that, the key points of this are distributed through the others. 

6) Insecure Avoidant - This is the only one that I am confident actually applies. I have a difficulty with long-term attachments to people (strangely, I have difficulty not becoming attached to almost anything else). The trouble with my response to feelings of social inadequacy is that - when in a social situation where I feel uncomfortable, I have taken to pushing myself right through that door, becoming apparently extroverted, egotistic and showing my atrocious sense of humour for all to see. So the people who don't run screaming think that I have a special bond with them, and then I fail to make any contact for three years... Some people tolerate this (and become what could be loosely termed friends) others can get offended. 

Part three involves breaking these down into adjectives.

1) "OCD" -  Organised(Easy); Stubborn;

2) "Paranoid Schizophrenic" i) Self Critical; Self-evaluating; Negative; Pessimistic;

                                               ii) Delusional;

3) "Bipolar" - Can appear to be: Egotistic; Depressive; Loquatious; Know-it-all; Self-destructive; Extroverted; Inconsistent; Verbose; Quiet; Non-contributary; Domineering; Aggressive; Defensive; Passive; Disinterested; Exciteable; Insecure; (see why I thought I was bipolar?);

4) "Mild(ish) Sociopathy" - Cold; Analytical; Utilitarian; Amoral (but not immoral);

5) "Autistic" - Socially inadequate;

6) Insecure Avoidant - Antisocial; Shy; Introverted,

Dissociate from their roots and list them:

Organised,     Stubborn,     Self Critical,     Self Evaluating,     Negative,     Pessimistic     Delusional,     Egotistic,     Depressive,     Loquatious,     Know-it-all,     Self Destructive,     Extroverted,     Inconsistent,     Verbose,     Quiet,     Non-contributary,     Domineering,      Aggressive,     Defensive,     Passive,     Disinterested,     Exciteable,     Insecure,     Cold,      Analytical,     Utilitarian,     Amoral,     Socially inadequate,     Antisocial,     Shy,     Introverted.

Find something positive to say about each one (or at least neutral). 

Use a thesaurus as necessary

(highlighted red is negative, green is positive and yellow is somewhere in between)

• Organised is already positive.
• Stubborn shows commitment - Committed. 
• Self-Critical and Self Evaluating both suggest that I Strive for self-improvement.
• Negative/Pessimistic/Depressive(you could say Realistic) - can we say Balanced? Is that appropriate here? Yes, perhaps I'm not emotionally well-balanced, but by contemplating the worst possible scenarios I certainly Take a Balanced View...
• Delusional - Creative 
• Egotistic - is more pleasantly described as Confident 
• Loquatious/Verbose - is effectively the same as Engaging 
• Know-it-all - twists nicely to Knowledgeable
• Self Destructive... difficult... one can't say committed, because I am certain that I will not actually self destroy... which suggests that I consider something worth living for, which means that on some level I am Positive.
• Extroverted isn't really a negative, but it becomes more broadly applicable if I say that I am Outgoing
• Inconsistent shows that I am Flexible.
• Quiet could be taken to mean that I am Contemplative
• Passive and Non-contributary mean that I am Capable of Taking a Back Seat.    
• Domineering is also Instigative. That is a word, but not a great one. Lets keep it simple by saying that I am Happy to Instigate.
• Aggressive is similar... definitely not a positive... unless we combine it with Defensive and conclude that I am Assertive when required.
• Disinterested means that I am.... How the hell does anyone make that positive? That's a little bit like republicans trying to make their wilful ignorance seem positive. So where does my disinterest stem from? I say that I'm disinterested because on occasion I have the attention span of a gnat, which is largely because I've become Interested in something else, so you could turn this one right around and say that I have a Thirst for Knowledge. 
• Exciteable? Is it entirely a negative when it just shows that I am Passionate and Enthusiastic?
• Socially Inadequate and Insecure just says that I have doubts about myself and my abilities, which basically says that I am Open to Criticism. 
• Cold is the same as Detached, which says that I can take a step back and put things in Perspective.
• Analytical? Is this a negative? Not in context. It says that I am Observant and have good Attention to Detail. 
• Utilitarian... could once - and in certain situations still could - be considered a positive. However, for the purposes of this exercise, let's say that I am Unbiased and able to Prioritise.
• Amoral - we've already covered that I don't see this as entirely negative, and by seperating me from the blind morality that people draw from societal expectations, I'd say this makes me Tolerant of other people's world views. 
• Antisocial - obviously I don't mean this in the sense of vandalism and violent crime (neither of which I do or support). I'm using it in more-or-less the same way as Shy.  And if I don't always want to be in a crowd, that must meant that I'm happy working alone, which means that I am Independent. 
• Introverted is generally used as a euphemism for shy, which tells you that its meaning is not innately negative. A negative spin would really be Self-Absorbed, so finding the positive of that to escape the negative association with shy says that I am Reflective. 

So, in addition to producing a nauseatingly fauvist spread of highlighted descriptive words and phrases, I have managed to show myself that I am:

Organised;  Committed;  Creative;  Confident;  Engaging;  Knowledgeable;  Positive;  Outgoing;  Flexible;  Contemplative;  Assertive;  Interested;  Passionate;  Enthusiastic;  Observant; Unbiased;  Tolerant;  Independent;  Reflective;  Open to Criticism;  Capable of Taking a Back Seat;  Good at Prioritising;  Happy to Instigate;  Striving for Self-Improvement;  Taking a Balanced View;  Having a Thirst for Knowledge;  Having Perspective; and Having Good Attention to Detail.

The next step is to flesh these out into a personal statement.

I'll get back to you on that one.

Oh, and by the way...

SMIVEL

Disclaimer 2: In addition to recognising that I do not claim to suffer from any of the above listed disorders, please note that saying that I can be Depressive/Depressed is not the same as saying that I suffer from Clinical/Major Depression. There has been an unfair tendency to criticise those who use the word for anything other than the diagnosable disorder, but it literally means that one is feeling down. Which covers everything from having a bad morning to wanting to kill yourself, and is not limited to meaning the disorder.

Smivel out.  

See part ii here