enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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recovery day, part II (second entry for the day)

Random thoughts.

French Canadi@n women have the most interesting hair. Even the middle-aged ones. I work in Qu3bec and so I get to see lots. Lots of them have very interesting short bobs. Kudos to them. The best one I've seen is the one that I saw today: totally asymmetrical and long at the front on one side and short on the other and up the back. Believe it or not, it did not look wacky. But next to these women I look like June Cl3aver.

Speaking of which, you have to question yourself and your style a little bit when you are walking to a meeting with your senior-bureacrat-in-the-frumpy-Canadian-public-service boss and she tells you that she likes your sweater and then proceeds to ask you if it is cashmere. (It is, but in order to express appropriately some idea about how completely underpaid I am at the moment, I felt the need to tell her that actually my mother had bought it for me. She had, although I didn't tell my boss the part about how my mother thinks that if she buys me colourful, expensive sweaters I will somehow be more likely to attract a husband.) It's just like with that colleague who told me the other day that there is some website out there on which I can try to snag myself a "sugar daddy." I gave him the same response that I did my mother: I think what I most need to enable me to fulfill that ambition is bigger flotation devices and a smaller or at least more infrequently exercised brain. Or maybe mouth? :)

I joke. I fight bitterness at every turn.

Actually, speaking of frumpy public service people, we make reasonable incomes relative to those in the rest of this country. Did you know that a recent St@tist!cs Canada study found that in order to be in the top 5% of earners in Canada one needs only to earn $89,000 a year? It used to be a joke that that figure is in Canadian dollars, but now that the greenback is sinking and we are at par it is not such a big deal (even though the Canadian dollar is WAY overvalued relative to the US buck and will inevitably sink again...well, dependent upon the US economy and lord knows there are some uncertainties there...but I digress). But it remains true that the top earners in the U.S. earn on average FOUR TIMES AS MUCH. Or something like that. I can't remember if that is exactly the correct point. But I believe that it is. If not, it is close.

Speaking of economics reporting of the humorous and not always strictly-speaking correct variety, I was thinking today that if I don't succeed in becoming a diplomat :) (can you imagine that, really?), I should consider trying to write for the Ec0nomi3t. It's not that I haven't thought of it before. I might be limited by the fact that I did not finish my PhD. And my gosh is that ever a right-wing sort of a rag, really. But you just never know. You just never know.

I was reading an Economi3t article today about Sus@n Ath3y of Aardvark University. She became the first woman to win the John B@t3s Cl@rk medal for the best economist under the age of 40. And my goodness is her resume impressive. But that is not what I am here to talk about. It's that I got to a paragraph in the Ec0nom!st article that had me thinking, "I could have written that!" It was as follows:

Ms Ath3y's less abstract work includes an analysis of how firms in a cartel can maximise joint profits when
they do not know each other's costs. Should they set �rigid� prices and split the market equally, or let the
firm with the lowest cost supply most? The latter would be more efficient; the snag is that high-cost firms
must have no incentive to pretend that their costs are lower than they are in order to sneak an increase in
market share. Often, but depending on technical conditions, rigid pricing pays off. You may imagine,
correctly, that all this is mathematically daunting. (Mercifully, Ms Ath3y provides a summary in plainish
language on her homepage.)

Only I would have added to the piece: "Since Ms. Ath3y is mathematically so kind, we will forgive her for having named her first born Carleton." Just kidding. I think it's her maiden name. No offense intended to anyone who has named a child in such a formal manner. Really. :) (This would seem to highlight the problem for me of careers in either diplomacy or journalism--one is not permitted to speak plainly.)

I have had other thoughts about career change today, with few being quite as adventurous as the "companion to sugar daddy" one-- the other one essentially being that I should drop everything and go back to school to complete a Ph.D. in Can@dian H!story. I'd be such a great historian, particularly given my refusal to ever use the word proletarianization. But then of course I'd never get published and that just wouldn't do. :)

I jest.

Maybe.

I think I'm going to write a letter to Marg@ret W3nte of the Gl0be and M@il to ask for career advice. She's a nice, straightforward American woman whom I quite admire if am not always in agreement with re. politics. She's commonsensical; that's the attraction. And I have to tell you that I know for certain that she is nice, since I once applied directly to her for a job for which I was completely unqualified. She actually took the time to write a letter back to me to explain why I was unqualified and I believe--perhaps incorrectly--that she was not mocking me.

So there you go. Lessons learned and observations made in many spheres of life today.

5:18 p.m. - 2007-09-26

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other diaries:

stepfordtart
ohell
awittykitty
annanotbob
manfromvenus
smartypants
fifidellabon
hungryghost
hissandtell