Today has been slightly bizarre. Case in point: I get home at 1am and there's quite a rowdy little party going on in my apartment, and there's a *very* good-looking (also drunk) man passed out on my couch. You know that old car mechanic joke? They say that a car repair job can only have two out of the three qualities below:
1) fast
2) good
3) cheap
Fast and good, can't be cheap.
Good and cheap, can't be fast.
Fash and cheap, can't be good.

And so it goes for available, un-taken men (at my ripe old age of 22 anyways):
1) good-looking
2) smart
3) nice

Good-looking and smart, can't be nice.
Smart and nice, can't be good-looking.
Good-looking and nice, can't be smart.

I digress. What I meant to say was - I found out a number of things today:
1) I suck at ice-skating.
2) My chirpiness (that word looks odd) doesn't rub off on absolutely everything alive, and that pisses me off - life is better CHIRPY! Want to mope? Don't go for social events. Hmph.
3) I am hopeless at standing up for my religion and what I believe in (although - not having made up my damn mind about a lot of important issues also doesn't help).
4) I'm very good at saying things and promptly forgetting about them, e.g. "When I was young, I was confused.. I think I had bisexual tendencies..."
5) How bloody privileged I am is bloody transparent to me.

That last point is important.
Marx and Weber have been messing around with my head for the past couple of days, and I've been reading Bourdieu and his stuff on cultural capital, habitus, and the reproduction of social class and inequality. I don't even realise (not to the extent I should, anyway) half the things I unconsciously - or have been schooled to do - like the way I speak, the expectations I have (like effort = achievement and recognition), down to the way I shake hands with people, the way I make eye-contact... they all help me to get things done my way, to make laws and institutions work in my favour. Just the other day I was blithely saying to Diana, 'I'd like to think I am just like everyone else.. I don't think I am any different from the average Singaporean or the man on the street.. I mean, sure, I probably write essays a bit better, but there is nothing I can do that the average person cannot. I have no specialised skills!"

Bullshit. It isn't about that at all. And I should jolly well remember that.

I have been griping about how expensive my KSG coursepacks were (like $300 ++ for one course, and I do four or five a term) and how it was *such* a hassle that I had to borrow them out on 3hour loans and read them in the library, and today, while I stood at the librarian's desk in the KSG library, this girl at the counter (probably about my age) was telling the head librarian that she was starting to get very tired of her job.

His response: "Well, you better stop complaining. You do realise that this is probably the best job you're ever going to get, right?"

She stiffens slightly and says: "That's not true, I have another job that pays better. It's $10 an hour... this is $9 an hour."

And the worst thing is - in a country like America, he is probably right. The minimum wage right now is, in real terms, the lower than that in 1970, and the trend continues to go one way - down.

Do you know how much tenured professors earn a year? How about endowed professors? How much do the likes of Steven Pinker, Amartya Sen and Sam Huntington get?

Graduate students like me get paid $4500 to be a teaching fellow for a term - that's 13 weeks, usually once a week for two hours, plus you mark some papers.

Undergraduates leaving Harvard command up to $500000 a year doing consultancy and banking.

Do you know how rich the Kennedy School of Government is? Do you know how many of the rich and famous grace its hallowed forums and halls every single day?
Do you know how rich Harvard is?
Can they not afford, with their $26bn endowment, to pay their so-called low-skilled workers better? Can they not guarantee them a modicum of job security and basic human dignity by giving them formal employees' rights instead of going through subcontractors who make their workers travel 2hours to and fro to work, and work 365days a year with nary a rest?

Ok, am too tired to rant. That huge coursepack awaits me, and it's already past 2.

One last thing: Did you know that the word 'meritocracy' was coined by the Labour Party in the UK in the 19th or early 20th century (I forget) to describe a system of rule in which the concept of social justice would have no purchase whatsoever - or indeed, cease to exist at all - because those who benefit from the system would be socialised into thinking that they absolutely deserved all they had achieved, and there would be no moral impetus at all for for the establishment of poorhouses, charitable organisations etc etc.

How odd that a term created for derisive, pejorative purposes should today be regarded as absolutely sacrosanct. We should pay more attention to etymology.