Such as me being asked, “Where can I find a lounging nude female?”

Thankfully, at that point in time I was working in a sculpture gallery.

I’ll admit the lack of intellectual stimulation starts to get to me – as I would hope it would get to anyone expected to spend the majority of an 8-hour shift doing near nothing. So I have become an expert in two things: slow pacing and tight-lipped grinning. It’s quite simple, really. I pace quite leisurely through my designated galleries, then grin at the people I don’t know simply to let them know that I am acknowledging their existence while hoping that they can smell the reek of boredom coming from my direction and then feel the need to ask something absurd, like “how do I get to the ceramics gallery?” I then occupy twelve minutes of their time, not only providing directions but drawing an elaborate diagram of the path and also of what I’ve packed for lunch.

The most exciting bit of the job is when I get to watch someone “discover” something. For instance, a middle-aged woman walks into a room, begins to walk the perimeter, looking at objects behind the glass casing. And then a shriek, a look over her shoulder, a frantic wave to another woman with raised eyebrows. “Look what I’ve found!” she exclaims, and then proceeds to talk about the greatness of this object, seeing things in it that surely no other human being has taken notice of in the item’s 500 years of existence. Two minutes later, she walks away. Two hours later, someone else has the exact same “discovery”. In short, these people fail to realise that clearly, these objects had to have been “discovered” to be put in a display in a museum -  and that reading a placard that someone else wrote does not mean they’ve become experts on the subject.

As much as I may make fun of the job (as it is quite easy to do so), it’s pretty good for employment and great in conversation.

When you say ‘All right there’ to me, please don’t look at me strangely when I respond telling you the state of my being and thanking you for inquiring.

‘All right there’ is not synonymous with ‘hello’. If you want to greet me and don’t care how my day is going, a simple ‘hi’ will suffice. Otherwise, expect to hear my life story because I know no other way of how to respond.

I remember I put on my socks,

What is it? What is it? …

-Shel Silverstein

It was a trouserless tube day for some people in London and other cities across the globe. The day initially started in New York City by group Improv Everywhere and made its way to London’s Underground for the first time this year. But it still doesn’t top the time I saw a man in a full Chewbacca outfit waiting for a bus in Southeast London.

In the week leading up to Christmas, the UK received its first snow of the season. In London, it was a light dusting; elsewhere received a few inches. But like any area that doesn’t have names for every different type of snowfall, the british had a slight panic, mainly due to travel.

It started with several Eurostar trains breaking down due to “exceptional circumstances” of the trains going from particularly cold weather in northern France into the warm subterranean Chunnel. Then the airports began delaying or cancelling flights. Since it was only the first day of the weather “fiasco”, our flight from London to Edinburgh went according to plan. Three days later, on December 23, the return flight wasn’t looking as promising, much to my annoyance.

To someone who has spent the first two decades of her life within the Ohio snowbelt, it becomes hard to understand how people can’t cope with two inches (5cm) of snow. I realise that not everywhere has the equipment to handle the smallest snowfalls, as exemplified by English airports using farming tractors to remove snow from the runway and other areas.

So here is a bit of advice to a few people I saw in Edinburgh struggling with the concept of snow:

1. Learn the difference between ‘grit’ and ‘salt’, as they are not synonymous. Salt melts ice. Grit merely attempts to provide traction on slippery surfaces. Salt is white, like snow. Grit is a brown/red colour.
2. Salt should be spread out to melt as much ice as possible. Don’t waste a whole bag on a small area.
3. Not the salt that you put on your food…
4. You don’t need to buy a shovel to clear 3cm of snow from your steps; just use a broom.
5. De-ice the plane before you make everyone board it, especially if the whole airport only has one de-icing rig.
6. And perhaps use a bit of SALT to clear the area where the rig has to go. If the rig gets stuck, use some GRIT to help it get some traction.
7. Wear gloves if you’re going to have a snowball fight, or at least don’t be surprised when you touch snow with your bare hands and discover how cold it is.
8. Recognise that you need two pairs of shoes when going anywhere: your ‘walking in snow shoes’ and then the ‘fashionable shoes’ you change into once you reach your destination. If you’re wearing high heels whilst trying to walk downhill on a slushy pavement, you might as well just slide down the slope on your bum.

But then there are the times where I have to laugh.

Earlier today, walking through a tunnel in Elephant, the typical Nokia ring tone sounds. Several people nearby check their mobiles, but the ringing continues. Then, a man sitting in rags on the floor of the subway, the man who had just asked someone ‘to spare five pence’, slowly pulls a mobile from his pocket and attempts to cover it with his hand as he says ‘ hello’.

Perhaps society’s obsession with being connected has gone too far. Or perhaps I’d be better off investing in weathered clothing and sitting on the piss-covered walkways of Elephant & Castle than trying to find a proper job.

For those who don’t know, Argos is like a department store–it has almost everything you could want aside from toiletries, clothing and produce. However, it’s not really a store in the sense most people are used to. Instead of walking in to find the product you want on the shelves, you walk in only to pick up an Argos catalogue, fill out a slip, and buy your items after only seeing pictures of them. You then wait for your number to be called and your purchases handed over to you. (Just think of the Sears catalogue without the store and only an ordering centre.) The ‘shop’ is essentially several tables with catalogues on them, a till, and a counter that separates the small waiting space from the warehouse in the back. I believe a comedian once called it ‘the shop for people who hate shopping’.

In my two months here I have grown to hate Argos. It was marvelous at first because their ridiculous selling strategy results in very low prices–highly appealing to someone with no income and living on a weaker currency than British pounds. But as I eat my spaghetti speckled with teflon flakes from our unnaturally battered Argos pan (we’ve only had it since the end of August), I can no longer ignore the quality (rather, the lack of) of these cheaply-bought products.

I am now of the mindset that it’s worth spending a bit more on something simple if it means it will last a bit longer and I can see it before handing money over. No, I don’t want to spend a fortune on pots and pans, but I didn’t intend to spend anything on a pan that’s only going to last two months. Most annoyingly, I could have spent the same amount on a pan at Target and received a much better quality–but such is the life in expensive cities like London.

On a related note, how dangerous is the consumption of cheap teflon? (At least I won’t have to pay for medical bills if I start developing brain tumors.)

The building itself is what would be considered a ‘Victorian Conversion’–it wasn’t exactly built to be apartment blocks, but someone messed about with the architecture and turned it into several little flats. Living in an older building means the table slants in the same direction of the floor, the rooms are strange shapes and the windows were designed before central heating existed. Thankfully, we do still have the modern conveniences of electricity, internet and plumbing. I don’t think we’d be living here otherwise.

Today I decided that I would clean the inside of the windows–only the bottom half as the windows stretch to the top of the 12-foot high ceiling. I feel I spent a good two hours scrubbing off grime that has probably been on those windows since London’s industrialisation at the turn of the last century. It seems that Victorians had little sense of practicality, or at least their architects didn’t.

Three weeks after moving in, we awoke to a domestic dispute at three in the morning. Unfortunately, this victorian building has ceilings around 10-feet high don’t hold sound back; contrarily, they seem to amplify it. As the screaming failed to diminish after a few minutes, I went upstairs for my first meeting of my neighbour. I knocked a few times, only to hear an angry foreign language continue behind the door. I knocked once more and they went silent. Joe opened the door with a smile and as I drowsily explained that we were trying to sleep: “Sorry, so sorry. I’m just arguing with my girlfriend,” he said non-chalant. Two days later, he knocked on our door (at a reasonable hour) to apologise once more and give us some cake. Unfortunately, this seems to be a ritual; and most unfortunately, the cake part isn’t.

As for the ground floor, each morning at 8:30 our floors vibrate slightly as the shop below us lifts its security grates. The shop is a plumbing merchant, meaning the front window contains a display of decorative toilet seats and covers. It’s a relief to know that if I ever decide I’d like the Union Jack on my toilet, I need only go downstairs.

So Joe lives above and the Plumber is below. It’s like I’ll never escape the election 2008 craziness.

Lucky me, I visit Elephant on a regular basis, partially because I have to go through there to get to central London, but mostly because that’s where uni is. The London College of Communication (LCC) is styled in a similar fashion to the rest of the area: deteriorating Soviet Russia. Perhaps it was clean and modern in the 1960s, trendy in its boxy geometric architecture, but the lack of upkeep and general decadence of the area gives it the appearance of needing hit by a bulldozer. (One need only to step inside to discover it’s not too bad on the inside, save the lecture room on the 13th floor covered in pigeon poo.)

Tallmadge and Kent have well-prepared me to know that education has nothing to do with architecture, and after two weeks of LCC I can tell it will fall into the same category. And while the building itself isn’t the most pleasant to look at, the view is fairly nice. If it weren’t for a particularly large building to the north, I’d be able to use Big Ben as my clock; unfortunately, I can only make the top bit of it, which is useless unless it’s noon.

Either way, just outside the university is the underground, the train station, and several bus stops, always full of people looking forward to putting a good deal of space between themselves and Elephant & Castle. The Southwark Council is attempting to renovate the area and already built new housing developments, which look out of place in their style and cleanliness. Perhaps one day the roundabout will have a greater appeal to it, but for now it remains a dirty transportation hub with 1960 buildings begging to be demolished.