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Idly: Sometimes situations really don't seem to have good solutions available. Even trivial ones.
On my way home from the shops yesterday, I noticed that a young man on a bicycle nearby was stopped, staring at what I could see was a printout of a map, looking around seeming confused and, well, lost. I pulled out my earphones and asked him; he showed me his map, and where he was trying to get to, and I realised he'd been going totally the wrong way. As in, had been heading directly away from his destination.
Trying to clarify stuff with my hands full of shopping and no pen was awkward and tricky, and we were about fifty feet from my house, so I invited him to come with me there. He waited outside (I'd actually intended him to come in so I could use googlemaps for my own ease, but he stopped at the end of the driveway and looked awkward about following me, which: fair enough) while I dropped my groceries in the kitchen and grabbed a pen, and returned to lean on the letterbox and make little indications at the corners he needed to take.
It took a while, because he evidenced zero familiarity with some of the most well-known roads in the city, and his English wasn't that great. So I tried to explain it as clearly as I could, with directions relative to where he was starting out, and the simplest route; if he'd already ended up at my street, when his original path should have taken him nowhere near, dude was going to have a problem.
(Damn, it just occurred to me: I didn't think to ask if he could actually read. If he was illiterate it would also explain his problem, if he couldn't read street signs. I just assume all adults are literate. Or, more to the point, if he could read in English, since his accent was appropriate for a language with a non-Roman alphabet.)
So, yeah. Giving directions: trivial situation. Giving directions to someone clearly very new to the city, or at least this (fairly central) part of it, with whom I had very limited language compatibility? Difficult. I find these moments oddly frustrating. Also, for some reason his map was printed at 90 degrees to what I'm used to ("up" was in fact east) and I had no idea how much I would suddenly find it difficult to parse a map of my own neighbourhood under those circumstances.
This is why maps need to be printed with north at the top of the page. I don't really buy into the ethnocentric argument for this - I've spent almost my entire life south of the Equator, I am as on board as it is possible to be with giving love to the southern hemisphere, but the plain fact of the matter is that the majority of the human race lives in the northern hemisphere anyway, including the majority of non-white people, and maps need a common reference and north is what we're used to.
And there is no good reason to point your maps east or west. For the love of God, there is no axis that way.
In other news, my friend Oliver is an evil, evil bastard who fights dirty. I am going to psych today. These sentences are not unrelated.
(I don't WANT to go I want to spend the day in bed with the blankets over my head and he's MAKING me go.)
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So, my first reaction to my new Nivea for Men Facial Wash is more-or-less: wow, this is awesome! I really like how it makes my skin feel. Clean but not dry. Other products I've tried tend to leave my skin feeling stripped (I suspect these ones are intended to remove makeup, which I don't wear) and taut or greasier than ever. So, hooray.
But then I thought about it, and started wondering.
( Cut because this almost certainly qualifies as Trans 101. )
(Also, seriously, Corporate World. If I want to moisturise, I'll use moisturiser. I have some. It's a tub of sorbolene cream - it costs me like eight bucks for a six month supply, and I apply it exactly when and where I want it, and it works brilliantly. Shut up.)Current Music: Smile Empty Soul - With This Knife
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The positive: I leave my iPod playing, and pick it up 24 hours later, and it's still working. The battery is amazing.
The negative: THe battery is nonetheless really low and I need my iPod for going to psych all by myself.
*breathes*
*hopes it lasts*
*takes a book*
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