Slave labour

It's been a busy week. After a all-night BBQ Sunday/Monday, I started work a month-long term of experience/slave labour at the New Statesman. I'm in their online department, researching, moderating their comments thingy and updating their new media blog.

For slave labour, it's not all bad. Considering some of the crap assignments many of my classmates are ordered to do while indentured--make coffee, deliver this across town, update my blackberry--I've been pretty lucky, I think. (New Statesman can be pretty silly, especially their subscription giveaways--Free Noam Chomsky Boxed Set! Free Chairman Mao Hardcover Book!--but then again, George Orwell wrote for them, so it's good enough for me.)

A few weeks back, I was telling my flatmate Helen about this gig, and she mentioned her friend worked there. I guess I wasn't really listening. On Friday, one of the guys in the online department, Tom, and I were talking about Goldsmiths, and he mentioned his friend was taking Arts Admin and really liked it. Ooh, I said, my flatmate is taking Theatre Admin, and realling two and two together (and realizing it does indeed equal four, or in this case, the identity of Helen's friend--apologies to the aforementioned Orwell), I realized Tom and I had been both talking about Helen without knowing. This made Helen laugh her lovely Edinburgh-laugh, and she said: "Nicole, you met him at my birthday party! How did you not recognize him?" Silly girl. As she well knows, my memory from that night is rather hazy...

So I look forward to Monday so I can tell him this.

I'm still doing stuff for Ethical Corporation, and they're actually paying me now (or would be if I had a National Insurance number). They sent me out to one of their conferences, this one at Earls Court. The session I sat in on was about measuring outcomes and social affects of companies that are difficult to measure, such as media. Given the massive social impact media has on people, and how hard it is to track, it made for an interesting discussion.

Aside from the slavery, I'm finishing up school work (week and a half left to polish three features and make a magazine--easy as an extremely time-consuming, stressful pie). I'm currently flipping between fixing up a fox-hunt-where-they-hunt-people story, polishing a profile on a local green politician, writing/interviewing for my "London is filthy" story, piecing together a quote-free opus on blogging, and mopping up whatever else I need to do for design, photos and copy for our magazine project.

So the question is: will any of this help me get a job out here so I can stay in London another year? And more importantly: do I want to stay another year?