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.

My personal public transport gripe

For work, I have been researching transport, and in particular the motorways. The other student who works with me is researching public transport. Accordingly, many discussions have been had over the relative merits of different public transport systems. The views espoused are generally positive.

However, last week, when I took the bus home, something happened. It was something which both brought back memories and left me rattled.

What I am about to say next will sound like a digression but it actually isn't:

School field trips were great. You used to be able to skip classes without having to get a parent to ring up and say that you were sick, and go to some place that was sort-of related to what you were studying, (usually) with a group of friends. However, there was one aspect of field trips which was always somewhat problematic. This was the bus travel, but not for the reason you think. Most people would probably think that I don't like bus travel because of the perception that I'm a neo-liberal who doesn't believe in public goods. This is not completely true, though public goods do make an economic mess when you're trying to draw them on a graph.

The real issue was the whole two-person-to-a-seat rule on buses. For most of my high school life, I didn't have a best friend at school. Accordingly, this meant that I didn't automatically have the 'right' to sit next to anyone. And after you're about 12, it's a bit weird to ask someone who is your friend but not your best friend "can I sit with you?" without sounding a tad creepy. That's just my opinion. As it happened though, I was fortunate enough to have a group of friends, and I can only once remember having to sit next to a random. Happy times.

So, I guess you could say that my approach to getting a seat on the bus (and a partner) was a bit like the aircraft gas mask approach: help yourself before you help others. Survival of the fittest, to put it less originally.

But, as it happened, finding a partner was never the biggest issue. There were two potential problems that could arise prior to the completion of a successful bus ride. The first is when you're walking down the aisle to get to your seat, and you see someone that you know, who is alone and is looking for a partner. The best way to get around this was to avoid eye contact, which was actually easier said than done, because usually the desperate person would be trying everything to lock in some unsuspecting classmate. Sometimes, in desperation, they would call out your name, and you'd have to say, as quietly as possible "uhh sorry X, I've already promised to sit with Y...." ...meanwhile all the people sitting around are a) witnessing the person's public rejection; and, b) probably thinking that I'm a horrible person. The second situation that could arise was when the teachers realised too late that they had not ordered enough buses, and so would shout out "THREE TO A SEAT!". Anarchy invariably ensued, and if you didn't move quickly enough, you would either have some random assigned to your seat, and be burdened with having to include them in your conversation for the entire journey, or, even worse, some teacher would pull you out and assign you to another seat, and so you would be the burden on some other people's conversation.

And now to get back to what I was talking about. I got onto the 746 at Britomart. I was one of the first people on, so I had my choice of seats. I took the seat behind the second lot of doors at the back of the bus. Before departing, the bus waited for more people to arrive, and by the time we departed, the bus was full. It was so full that everyone had to stand. All the seats were taken. All except one, and that one happened to be the seat next to me. I began to wonder why no one getting on was sitting next to me. Subconsciously, I was probably even staring longingly at each passenger who walked past, trying to make eye contact. But alas, the seat next to me stayed empty for the entire trip.

Don't get me wrong.. there were certainly people on that bus next to whom I would rather not have sat, for example, the lady who looked like she had just done Christmas shopping for a family of twenty, judging by the number of bags she had. Despite this, I was plagued by self doubt. Why did someone choose to sit next to the bag lady and not me? Did I seem unfriendly? Did I look like a criminal?

Or maybe everyone else had organised their partners before they got on the bus.