'Male Restroom Etiquette'

With the help of "The Sims", a narrator, and centuries of documented practical experience, we've got:

Past midnight

It's just past midnight. One of those moments I should be going to bed, but not quite
ready yet... one of those moments I could finish off a paper I'm writing, but not quite got the braincells to read anything else any more... so I guess I'll just write about my day.

Went to bed pretty late/early last night, at around 2am, working on the paper due next week. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing, but once I get started doing research, I just read on and on and on, and don't feel like stopping. And for a short paper of 2000 words in length, I've got some 70 footnotes that total to around 3500 words alone! And I'm not even finished yet. I guess I have what is called 'footnote fetish'... almost every single sentence I qualify my arguments or refer to similar and contrasting arguments with a footnote. So a typical example would be this:

It is such a perspective of a “millenist, triumphalist, upbeat”[1] liberal international society that echoes concerns of a return of standards of civilisation under the liberal label.[2] Indeed, a “facile universalism”[3] of standards in the international system would overshadow the political, economic, social and historical idiosyncrasies of our “multicultural (as opposed to cosmopolitan)” international society".[4]

Too pedantic? Too detailed? Too much fine print dealing with something that says very little? Not sure, but it's 'lawyer-ly', and I do enjoy writing like this, because it makes me feel... smart!

Anyways, I only managed a few hours of sleep before I had to get up just before eight to go to work. I had to turn back home almost immediately after leaving home because somehow the circular lock on my bike came off and started to make embarrasingly loud noises against the wheel as I cycled.

I was somewhat sleepy, but the sun was out and shining wonderfully like an early day in spring. And somehow I always feel so 'energetic' and excited about going to work, even if it's just one day in the week.

As I arrived, a couple of boxes were spread over the floor, and my colleague excitedly told me about the 'goodies' and books that a number of sponsors have sent us. About time, since for the last couple of months we've be trying to solicit ('beg') for sponsorship and for whatever people can spare to support the event on HIV/AIDS we're organising. Luckily, we got a positive response from UNESCO, which sent us two big boxes of information packages. My colleague nonchalantly opened one, and started to show me the wonderful things that were inside the info packs... Between it all was a little foil package, and I curiously removed it.

My colleague saw the expression on my face, like the expressions of so many other people who realised what it was that I was holding, and burst out laughing. It was a condom, not just any condom, but a female condom, with on the back vivid pictures and careful instructions showing how to put it on (or in?). The rest of my co-workers came, and each were equally surprised and burst into laughs as I was. So now together with the latest collection of contraceptives, we also a bunch of red ribbons, a number of lollies with 'Safe Sex' printed on them. And still to come is another big batch of condoms. We have so much that my boss asked whether we'd like to take some home with us... without thinking too much, I said no. Well... I guess taking them home will be a waste, since the chances of them being used in the near future is... (lower than) slim : /

Come mid-April, when our guests start to arrive from all over Europe, we'll be standing at the door welcoming them with our huge supply of condoms and other 'accessories', and say: "Welcome to Holland"!

---

[1] José E. Alvarez, ‘Do Liberal States Behave Better? A Critique of Slaughter's Liberal Theory’, 12 European Journal of International Law 183 (2001), 189. At 192 Alvarez talks of the “oppressive voice of neo-liberal hegemony”. Much of this ”liberal triumphalism” can be traced back to Francis Fukuyama’s seminal declaration that “with the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” history was at an end: Gerry Simpson, ‘Two Liberalisms’, 12 European Journal of International Law 537 (2001), 539; and also Susan Marks, ‘The End of History? Reflections on Some International Legal Theses’, 3 European Journal of International Law 449 (1997) and Gerry Simpson, ‘Democratic Liberalism in International Legal Theory’, 15 Australian Yearbook of International Law 103 (1994). See also Alex Mills and Tim Stephens, ‘Challenging the Role of Judges in Slaughter’s Liberal Theory of International Law’, 18 Leiden Journal of International Law 1 (2005), 29. Patrick Capps, warns that liberalism seems to justify “unilateral interpretations” by the Kantian proposition of a ‘league’ powerful states “of what objective morality requires when applied to a highly complex world”: ‘The Kantian Project in Modern International Legal Theory’, 12 European Journal of International Law 1003 (2001), 1020. Euan MacDonald cautions against “neo-liberal imperialism”, the foundations of which “rest on an incoherent mixture of selective positivistic analysis, highly contestable political science, and the essentially uncritical acceptance of a 200 year-old political theory”: ‘International Law, Democratic Governance and September the 11^th’, 3 German Law Journal (2002), available online at: .

[2] Fidler (1984) speaks of “the standard of civilization [having been] reincarnated n the standard of liberal, globalized civilization”: 411. Anghie (1999), similarly writes that “the civilizing mission may be reconstructed in the contemporary vocabulary of human rights, governance and economic liberalization” (80). Simpson (2001) distinguishes between ‘classical Charter liberalism’ which emphasises “tolerance diversity and openness together with an agnosticism about moral truth” (539), and ‘liberal anti-pluralism’, which is a profound form of “illiberal conformitarianism” that views original Charter conceptions of sovereign equality as “an absurdity” (541). Koskenniemi (2002), 54-67, outlines that the origins of the ‘liberal project’, with human rights as “the fundamental objects of protection by international law”, took root at around the same time as European expansion in the late 19^th Century.

[3] Thomas Carothers, ‘Empirical Perspectives on the Emerging Norm of Democracy in International Law’, 86 American Society of International Law Proceedings 261 (1992), 262-264.

[4] Gong (1984), 244.

Monday morning

Woke up at 8.08am this morning. In order to get on the train and be in class at 9, I usually have to leave at 8.10.

"Oh, sh*t!" I thought to myself as I read my watch. The sun was already up and bright, but I was feeling pretty miserable for having such a wonderful start to Monday morning. Within 10 minutes, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, tried to get my hair in order ( realising again that it was a bad idea to shower and then go to bed...), got dressed, and got on my bike. I cycled as fast as I could, but it was exactly those moments when you're in a hurry things get in the way to slow you even more. Traffic lights, slow cyclists, cars...

I missed my regular train, but thankfully there was a slow train a couple of minutes afterwards, which would get me into Leiden (where I study) a little before 9. I ran and skipped through the streets, and managed to complete a walk that would normally take 20 minutes in around 10. Sweaty, hungry, out of breath I got into class, ten past nine. We have this unspoken rule at the university, the so-called 'Leiden quarter' (Leids kwartier)... usually classes don't officially start until a quarter past the hour, so I was technically still on time.

It was a slow and boring class, even more so because the weather, in what seemed like the first day of spring, was so lovely outside. The lecturer asked questions from the 150+pages of readings we had to read to prepare for class, but nobody seemed to have read anything... because frankly the text is so tedious and technical that you'd have to read two, three times to understand. A grueling two hours, and class was finally dismissed.

Almost the rest of the day I spent in the library, working on this paper due for next week. The topic is up to us to decide, as long as it's related to a theme of international law. In my undergrad studies I had come across criticism of international law as Eurocentric and as something simply forced upon the rest of the world. And more recently I came across literature about how international law was used in the 19th Century to justify colonisation and imperialism under the banner of 'humanity' and 'civilisation'... so obvious, with my flair and attraction for the critical, this was what I chose my topic to write about. There's more and more talk of liberalism's virtues of human rights, democratic governance, rule of law, and more and more you see certain states preaching these idea(l)s, or even setting these conditions for other states if they want to be accepted as a member of the (so-called) 'international community'. Well, it occured to me that perhaps today we are not that far away from the slogans of 'humanity' and 'civilisation' as we presume to be... that perhaps today international law is not something that can be applied universally because it appears to be so neutral and so accepted by all. So in my paper I'm going to try to draw the links between 'civilisation' then, and liberalism now, and how through time and different contexts, the (neo)colonial tendencies and inequalities of the international system have not shifted away from the hegemony of the few over the many. Fascinating, mind-boggling stuff... at least I find! :)

Anyways, after sitting in the library reading (and getting distracted by cute people walking around...), I took a break and went to see an old colleague of mine. We've not seen each other for almost a whole year, since she's been on fieldtrip to a far, far away land called Angola. It was like old times, we sat down to dinner, and two hours later were still sitting there, leaving only because the waitresses were wiping the tables around us in a subtle sign telling us to go. She's one of the few close friends with whom I can talk to about anything and everything. We chatted,I told her about my (love-less) life, family, studies, my disgust of bourgeois pretences like the gala I attended sometime ago... and she told me about her adventures in the 'bushes', about being phone-tapped (possibly followed), and the extremes of poverty and super-rich-dom in Angola.

I cycled home, not in a hurry like I was while leaving home his morning, and admired the beautiful stars on this wonderful, calm evening.