"But that's the problem.

You can't just say "let's pretend it never happened", because it did happen. You complain that people cannot suspend their disbelief, but you live in a world of suspended disbelief. You can't just push everything to the side and keep going all the time, because there comes a point at which you have to acknowledge what's happened and learn from it."

I wish that this wouldn't keep playing back in my mind... but some people are just... complete repeats of others.

Does it ever happen...

...that someone says something to you, and it actually bothers you heaps, but you pretend that it was a joke, and then just sit there becoming more and more enraged?

That's me, right now.

Too true.

I remember having the idea of this graph in my head over the summer holidays, but I never ended up drawing it. Then, whilst doing some late night procrastination on Tumblr, I find that someone has made it:

Except when the economy collapses?

"Some women choose to follow men and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore."

The best articulation that I've heard so far of why I'm not worried about having to work 100 hours a week after I graduate.

Apparently I look unhappy when I'm thinking...

... so I probably look very unhappy as I am writing this, but I assure you that I'm not as unhappy as I look.

I'm an economics student. You probably know this. I'm fairly open about it and even if I haven't told you, you probably noticed by the way I refer to opportunity costs or utility functions or game theory in normal conversation and attempt to relate them back to everyday life. The problem that I have increasingly is that people always ask me for my views on the economy: how do we fix the recession? what policy changes would you make? and inevitably I have no idea. This bothers me for at least two reasons. The first is that it's not a good look to have almost finished an economics degree and then to appear to look like you have no view on the economy. The second is that I don't feel much self-actualisation by getting to the end of the degree and realising that I, or perhaps we collectively, know very little about economics.

A lot of different, but all very intelligent people have put forward their own views on how to run the economy. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and so on. People who don't know a lot about any of the people tend to pick one and follow what they say blindly, thus there are Marxists and Keynesians and monetarists all happily floating around making policy around the place. But the problem becomes once you've read them all, and read them all closely, that they're actually all quite convincing, but also that there are a lot of misconceptions about what each one has to say. Adam Smith's entire framework was pre-industrial revolution; Marx wanted free education and 'fiercely progressive' tax systems with a top tax rate of 25%; Keynes wanted the government to spend money to stimulate the economy by injecting it into necessary spending which the private sector would not undertake; Friedman didn't hate poor people, but rather he believed that the economy should be designed such that those on welfare should be treated as the exception rather than the rule. None of them has completely unreasonable ideas, and as you start to know more about what each is saying, and know enough to know what the positives and negatives are of each approach, coming to a 'correct' conclusion becomes more an exercise in skills of argumentation than a weighing up of the merits of each approach. I think that I have thought about this too much and the lines have become a bit blurred. People with clear cut opinions are often underinformed.

The title of this blog is also a reference to an economic concept. In perfectly competitive markets, participants have perfect (complete) information and this allows them to make optimal choices in their situations. I named this blog 'imperfect information' in an attempt to rationalise ex post why I felt so terrible at the end of last year. The reason, I rationalised, was that I had been lied to (both the act and the omission). Had I been told the truth, then perhaps I would have made optimal choices in the situation that I was put in.

The problem with that analysis is that it assumes that I am the paradigmatic rational consumer upon which economic theory is based. I'm not. Looking back on it, had I been given perfect information, I probably would have made different bad choices. This is because, even though I put on a facade of being rational and emotionally unaffected, people who know me know that that's not the truth. Because the truth is that nothing hurts more than when you put yourself out there for someone, and they turn around and say "ok; I've seen what you have to offer, but I think I'm fine without you."

Not to worry. I don't think perfect information is even possible. Everyone puts on a facade. We're all trying to impress other people with our confidence and looks and wit that we don't tell them about the fact that we're secretly freaking out about all our study/work/personal insecurities. Not that I blame anyone; I probably do it too. It's just annoying because, as someone who tries to be honest all the time, I tend to assume that others are doing the same. I think this is why I'm unnecessarily starstruck by some people around me when I shouldn't be, and feel bad about myself for lacking these qualities which others don't even have. More suboptimal decisions.

So I think I'll just have to learn to deal with imperfect information. Given that, even if I did act rationally, my decisions would probably be suboptimal, I guess it wouldn't hurt to be a bit more irrational for now.

Perfect information

...not so great either.

Or maybe I'm neither, because my grammar is deteriorating so badly.

Really I will...

I really need to

- write opinions;

- sleep;

- stop failing at life.

I am feeling

emotionally distant.

Advice on a Friday night

A brief foray into art

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who didn't quite understand the difference between an offer, agreement and a contract. In an attempt both to help her and to entertain myself during a four hour break between classes, I drew this comic strip type thing, which showed how a boy and a girl got together, labelled with the analogous stages of contract formation.

Anyway I was going to post it here, but it had an unexpectedly bad ending ("breach of contract: remember that specific performance is not an available remedy for personal service contracts"), which makes me seem more cynical than I actually am. Maybe.

My favourite insult

About an hour and a half ago, I went offline (shock! horror!) so that I could duraseal the three volumes of Tax Law legislation that I bought today. My parting message in one of my Facebook conversations was "ttyl dork".

A few minutes later, I received this text:

"Don't call me a dork, person durasealing their tax books!"

Good call. It is a rather dorky thing to do, prima facie. But they are massive and their covers are flimsy and if I took them to university in my bag twice a week then they would surely be destroyed, if left uncovered. So, my response (in my head) was:

"It's not dorky; it's sensible!"

However, having thought about it for a few moments, I realised that being sensible does not necessarily preclude something from being dorky. In fact, the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Depressingly, most things that I thought of immediately after making this realisation were both dorky and sensible. See below:

Almost back to full health

As, I am sure, most readers of this blog are aware, I'm currently at university studying for conjoint Law and Commerce degrees. Since I was very young, I've wanted to be an investment banker, so the Commerce degree has always been the 'main' degree and the Law degree has been more of the 'bit on the side'. Consequently, my Law marks have always been lower because it has never been the focus, and I've had a certain disinterest in the law, atypical of one of its students.

This year, however, because I am one paper away from finishing the Commerce degree, but many papers away from finishing the Law degree, I'm taking only LLB papers. The result of this is that I'm at Law School all the time, and so it is as if I am only studying Law. The weird thing that I've noticed is how, if you sit back, you get absorbed into the machine that is Auckland Law School. It's kind of like being back at high school, being in a factory which churns out thousands of copies of the same kind of person (that's actually quite harsh, because there's more critical thinking/intellect at Law School than there was at high school, but there's a strong.. culture (?) which makes all the students extremely similar (and the same kind of person that is churned out is ...lawyers). I guess the point is how quickly, if you let yourself, you get absorbed into this Law School culture. I went to Law Careers Day today, along with all the others, and I'm going to a mooting meeting tonight: two things that I would never have expected myself to have done, say, this time last year.

...and at the end of this thought process, it's dawning on me that there's something completely Orwellian/1984-esque about this. I love Law School.

......quite honestly.

This is comforting...

...because I am pretty sure that I'm at the bottom of my Agency Honours class.

So I got all that stuff done

and now I'm really sick. Fail.

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!

Nietzsche at Rakinos

"Because if we're not trying to be the best person that we can be, then what the fuck are we doing?"

Possibly the most blunt articulation of my life philosophy that I've heard, and I didn't even say it myself.

Dear Emma, stop procrastinating.

A few highlights from letters to dead people:

(should've been addressed to Charles Dodgson really)

So, actually quite a few highlights. I love that website.

Oh hi Julian Casablancas

I enjoy your rendition of I wish it was Christmas today so much that it almost doesn't bother me that you use the indicative mood where the subjunctive should be used.

Almost.