End of holidays/start of semester

It's so weird looking back on the holidays to think of how fast they've gone, and thus another year of university starts. Woohoo. I'm sure you can all hear the joy in my (typing) voice.

I feel like for the sake of completeness (because, for better or for worse, I am obsessed with formalities and completeness), I feel like I should write some kind of summary of the holidays/something about the start of the new semester, seeing as I started using this blog (kind of) to document the holidays and rant to something that was not a person, so that I would not annoy people with my incessant talking/whinging/ranting. But as it happens, I've stopped talking/whinging/ranting about life incessantly, and so it's actually turning out to be a lot more difficult to write this thing than I had initially envisaged. Instead, I will write a list of good/bad things that happened, kind of like the pros/cons lists that we had to write for the year 10 Enterprise Studies achievement standard on decision making. Because obviously my analytical skills are fantastic.

Plus

+ Economics Department work: interesting work, paid well, excellent people, learnt a lot, left a million times the economist that I was when I started.

+ Grey Lynn Law Office work: reeeeeeally interesting work, also helpful for learning how to relate to different people, quite impressive/inspiring to realise how much lawyers can help people/the law can be used for good... which is something that a student of contract/commercial/agency law tends not to see very much.

+ Trip to Melbourne: I love Melbourne. The food and fashion and architecture is amazing. I want to go back again and again and again and again.

+ 20th and 21st birthday parties: because is there anything that I'd rather be doing on a Saturday night? ...nope.

+ Seeing family: it was good to have the extended family come and stay over Christmas.. and now I'm craving ravioli.

+ A (large) few individuals: who probably know who they are. You are amazing and thank you for everything and love you long time and so on.

+ V-Day: kind of self-explanatory.

Minus

- Having to re-learn the importance of giving (and receiving) perfect information, and how people's actions are suboptimal when they don't know the full fact situation. Which is actually quite an important lesson to know when you're dealing with people. I think there is a quote somewhere about how the problem with people who tell the truth is that they assume everyone else is doing the same. Apparently I cannot assume that.

So there you have a reasonable summary of my holidays, which were actually, if you average out the happiness, probably my most enjoyable in a long time (the deep pits at the start were outweighed by the gains at the end - graph to come soon). Alas, the university semester has restarted, and already people are starting to get tired and stressed, which is annoying. I have quite a lot to do but I am aiming to be less stressed than other people, and will achieve this by... actually doing the work/reading etc. So I guess I have to read my Equity casebook as a bedtime story. Oh well. I think that I am on the verge of getting a cold and I hope that it just stays away until the weekend is over because there are too many dinners/parties etc on over the weekend. Once the university week starts again, it doesn't matter. How slack. University seems like it will be less stressful this year, with no commerce papers. Or maybe just stressful in a different way. I am sure that there will be much panicking at the Davis in the future.

And on that note, I really must go, so that I can get all my reading done in time for the law school barbecue and go to Equity and Land and sign up for the General Moot before 4pm. Goodnight!

0100101

For the last six days, I've been on holiday at my family's beach house. Fortunately, the weather has been excellent so I've been able to spend the time outside, hopefully soaking in some vitamin D and generally enjoying the holiday period. This has been a huge relief, because I am by nature a city dweller, and I start to go a bit nuts when I find myself in remote (i.e. 1 hour north of AKL) places like Omaha. This is particularly the case when the weather is bad, because fine weather is pretty much a condition precedent to a beach holiday. However, many times have my parents driven me up to Omaha to stay there for weeks in the rain, with nothing to do. Accordingly, we now have quite a large collection of magazines to get us through rain at the beach. I always thought it would be easier just to drive home. My parents disagreed.

A few days ago, as I was lazily eating my breakfast, I started to flick through an old Hello! magazine, from when Prince William first started dating Kate Middleton (I am not quite sure why I am so keen on all these royal family stories; perhaps it is as they say that girls secretly want to be princesses). The article basically detailed all her background, as told by a 'close friend'. It painted one of those classic and almost cliche stories of the girl who was ignored all through school then went on to befriend a prince at university. Charming. The bit that interested me was that apparently when she was in high school, there was a practice in place whereby the boys of the school would rank the attractiveness of the girls from one to ten, and tell them. Kate was a seven.

This then brought back a high school memory of my own. At Dio, at the end of fifth form, it was quite common for quite a lot of girls (typically the very bright ones, or the ones whose parents wanted them to marry into a rich family) to leave the school and go to King's, another of the country's top schools. King's College is a private boys' school from years 9-11, and then there are boys and girls for years 12 and 13. As it happened, a lot of my Advanced Maths class was leaving to go to King's, and those who were leaving talked incessantly about King's from as soon as they found out that they had been accepted, until the end of the year. Anyway, someone had heard that King's College too had the practice where the boys rated the girls according to their appearance. Immediately, many of the prospective King's girls laughed it off, and one began a lengthly speech essentially about how women shouldn't see themselves as objects to men, and somehow linked this in with the ranking system. I wasn't fooled. I could feel it. Panic was in the air.

I never did find out whether my friends were rated. In fact, I never really thought about it again for a while. However, last year I was in the car with two of my male friends, who were rating seemingly all the girls in our year of Law. I probed them for more information on the rating system. Apparently, the 'marks' that the girls receive go from one (ugly) to ten (beautiful), and obey a skewed bell curve distribution. The mean is seven (because apparently at our age most females are in the prime of their lives) and you can't give out fractions.

I went home and pondered the information I had just been given. The conclusion that I came to, however, is that despite how seriously my two friends were taking their rating system, it simply fails to provide any useful information. If the distribution of female attractiveness is really bell shaped, meaning that a perfect ten is extremely rare. However, most men are married, and to women who I'd say are objectively less than tens. So, giving a girl a rating out of ten is useless, because the ratings are not given relative to the score at which that the man would 'settle'. For example, saying 'that girl is a seven' is unhelpful unless you add 'but I'd be happy with an eight'. The whole dilemma is further confounded by the (scandalous!) fact that some women's personalities add to or detract from their overall attractiveness. The interpretation of the figure is just too uncertain.

It's also unnecessary. Attraction is binary. Yes or no. 0 or 1.