In Which Joy is wished even unto the Fishes in the Deep Blue Sea

Unless you've more or less completely avoided me both online and off for the last month or so, you'll be aware that I had some exams last week but am now footloose and fancy free. You guys, it's pretty neat.

Since my exams, I've seriously had a lovely time every single day, and there's no sign of that letting up any time in the immediate future. I'm not sure whether it's the leisure or the charming company and activity schedule keeping it all so lovely, but all these aspects of the past almost-week have been of unusually high standard.

Firstly, naturally, I went to the usual post-exam party thrown by the Social Butterflies in charge of the Med 1 Cohort. (This time the theme was the tutorials we'd had throughout the year, which made a change from the colour themes of the ones I'd previously attended). As usual, it was all very well-executed and so on (man, whenever I write about them I wonder whether the crazies from the Red Party Debacle still really do ever read this, although at least this one dispensed with all the pretensions of charity, thus reducing the dizzying heights of the moral high ground from which the organisers previously viewed we the peons), and although these things are always a little awkward, it was actually pretty great.

Seriously, I think I am actually incapable of having an entirely awkward-free time at one of these sorts of events. No just because I've never learned to mingle, but almost out of habit. If I went to a party like this where I wasn't at all awkward, that would be so novel that I would be disconcerted and feel awkward after all. Since this would doubtless cause some kind of universe-destroying paradox of sociopsychological wossname, it's probably for the best that I'm unlikely ever to breach that asymptote of social functioning. I mean, really, the ramifications harldy bear thinking of.

Anyway, I saw some of these people again on the Saturday, which was marginally more what these sorts of things are usually like, particularly for the first part of the day. In the evening, some of us went to Popular Paul's place (ooh, alliterative) and had one of those 'sitting about discussing whatever and eating barbecue foods and suchlike on balconies' sorts of evenings which makes you feel almost like you're doing an advertisement for some kind of Student Lifestyle product. Which is to say: it was all almost implausibly pleasant.

Maybe it's tragic that I can go to so many parties and suchlike (obviously I'm not just talking about "two" here when I say "many"; there were other events wih which I have chosen not to regale you, lest I try your patience too seriously) and have such a nice time, and still come out of it mainly treasuring the memories of the compliments paid to me. But seriously, it really is awfully nice. Someone said that they really thought that "articulating things was something I was really good at" (or words to that effect) ("obviously not a reader!", I hear you cry) and I was all bashful toe twirling ans "shucks" just like I am every time someone says something nice like that. Particularly reassuring at the time, since I'd actually thought I'd been making rather a hash of it that day. He actually asked if I "wrote at all", which was kind of cool. I'm not entirely convinced that I'm actually intelligible more than about 60% of the time, so it's nice to think that people are going "that chick is saying things in a good sort of way" or something.

The great thing about this "you like me, you really like me!" approach to interactions with people (apart from it's slightly tragic air or pathological approval-craving, which is not so much "great" as "mildly unfortunate") is that even if a compliment is not entirely sincere, you can still appreciate it. Thus, even if that had been meant as a nice apeasement despite the fact that everything I'd said had been completely incomprehensible bollocks, the fact that someone would bother saying it at all it pretty nice. As in; if they're going to bother to say it, then at the very least they like you enough to want you to be happy and complimented. See what I'm getting at?

Anyway, I could carry on here, but (a) it's after 1am, and (b) this post is in very real danger of devolving into some kind of pitifully boastful list of nice things people have said to me recently, so I think it may be about time to wrap up.

Our closing story tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of a girl who recently fulfilled a long-cherished ambition of getting hold of that Three Dog Night song "Joy to the World" (you know; "Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he was a good friend of mine, I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine"). We leave you with the image of the girl in question dancing about her flat singing to herself with questionable skill but unmistakable enthusiasm. Note particularly the die-hard pep of really actually hoping that the "fishes in the deep blue sea" are having a good day. That's what you might call Holiday Buzz. Isn't it nice?

In Which being a Good Person is probably not the sine qua non of leadership.

So, we had a lecture on Leadership last week, which was quite alright. Of course, as long as I can remember we've been being given classes on "Leadership" (like, I remeber one in year 3, I think, and I bet that wasn't the first), and I don't think we've ever been given a lecture on how to be a good follower. Surely we can't all be Captain Kirk, isn't it statistically reasonable to say that the vast majority of us will spend the vast majority of our time being further toward the "follower" end of the spectrum?

This is mainly meant facetiously, but I do think there's a kernel of truth there. Taking and accepting leadership is a separate and important skill, and quite honestly I think most of us would benefit from some tuition in this area. Our whole Culture is uncomfortable with Authority, and we lack the skills to just do what we're goddamn told.

We can't all dream big and also get what we want. Like the Dinosaur Comics say, not everyone gets to be an astronaut. There are a bunch more people who are garbage collectors than Rock Stars, and if we hadn't all been told to dream big and suchlike, I'm betting a lot of people would be happier. I'm just saying is all.

(Heh, I'm listening to a pretty great song by Scouting For Girls called "James Bond" and the singer keeps saying "I wish I was James Bond". Is it tragic that my mind keeps saying "wish I was James Joyce" when it sings along? Because I would totally prefer to be James Bond to being James Joyce. I think? On reflection, James Bond gets tortured, and James Joyce merely tortures syntax. Maybe I'm having a Freudian slip here?)

Anyway, this lecture we had suggested (well, the lecturer suggested, but so did the slides, so in a sense you could say it was the "lecture" as a composite entity. Maybe this is a stretch?) that we "take a moment to think of who in history sprang to mind when we thought of great leaders". His suggestions were all national heroes of one kind or another. Just about all of mine were bad guys. Maybe this is because Good Guys work within the system, and so the opportunities to really distinguish themselves are limited. Maybe it's because I have that most cliched of internet concepts: "a twisted mind". (Seriously, everyone on the internet thinks they're "twisted", "crazy", "unusual" and uniquely so. Everyone.)

Seriously though, who springs to mind? Julius Caesar did some pretty great leadership things, especially his mind games with the Tenth Legion in Gaul(for those of you interested, wikipedia probably explains it more accurately and succinctly than I would). You can tell he was a great leader because he convinced an entire loyal army that he personally was Awesome and to attack their own fatherland. This is a pretty big deal, you guys. I doesn't take impressive leadership to convince people to do things they've been trained to do, things they want to do, but it's special to be able to get people to happily do something alien to them.

The lecturer was particularly taken with Winston "Hey dudes, let's attack the Turks at Gallipolli, I'll be in charge of that!" Churchill. He had this whole thing about how he beat Hitler and was a great orator. Yeah, maybe, but the rest of the country helped with that (beating Hitler, not the speech-writing). Also America. Also Churchill sucked as a peacetime leader, just like the Duke of Wellington.

Maybe this is a pertinent point. Great leadership comes in different flavours "war", "administrative", "inspirational in emergencies", ("strawberry")?

I don't think that I have to think that someone is/was a good person, or likeable, or even non-abhorent for them to have leadership skills. The lecturer raised the question of whether Hitler was a good leader and dismissed it by saying that he killed people and had a stupid mustache. Ha! Managing to take over Europe even briefly, even partially, with a mustache like that, you can't deny, is a little bit impressive. Unspeakably awful, obviously, not to be encouraged, doubtless, but still, it's impressive to be able to convince so many people to do something so repugnant all while looking like a total douche.

So although I clarify again that NAZIS WERE/ARE BAD (I am just so haunted by the fear that I'll end up in a Today Tonight special one day when I grow up, and they'll find this and quote only that "on her blog, she describes Hitler as '...impressive'" that I'm having to labour this) I reckon that Hitler's feats of leadership were at least as impressive as Churchill's. More so, even?

Similarly, Alexander the Great took over Persia and built the world's largest empie blah blah blah. With not a little terrorism thrown in, to be honest (cf. the city of Tyre). An empire which fell to bits as soon as he died, on account of how there was no system of administration set up or anything. This, I agree, is not what you'd call a desirable trait in an empire. But what that means is that until he died, he was holding together an enormous Empire across the entire Middle East (something many have tried and few if any have managed) (are you listening, America?) with sheer force of personality! That, my friends, is impressive leadership. That guy was a big sulker, and an Achilles fanboy, and the sort of dude who didn't see any problem with enslaving or killing everyone in a sizeable city, but still, that guy must've had charisma in sapdes.

It's surprising, actually, how hard it is to think of "great leaders". The lecturer suggested Gandhi, and I don't know enough about Gandhi (to my shame)to be able to make any comment on that. I think perhaps that the really meaningfully successful leaders are the ones who are unobtrusive. Conversely, the really impressive ones are the ones who are flamboyant, and that requires breaking the rules. Which is not a really great way to do things in the long term.

I suppose this is because any opportunity to distinguish yourself always implies a disruption in the quotidian rhythms in which people successfully and for the most part happily live their lives. It's the leader-follwer thing again. It takes 40 men with their feet on the ground to support one man with his head in the clouds.

Funny, I'm really having trouble thinking of any individual leaders who were both impressive and properly successful. Cyrus the Great seems to have been pretty crash-hot (the surname is a giveaway, really). He built the Persian empire out of practically nothing and it lasted for generations and ruled the world with considerable success until Rome. Sure, Greece fought them off, but they still meddled with Greece to great effect.

They're all ancient, the good ones. Firstly, I suppose, because you can judge them in the long term ("no. centuries legacy lasted for" is hard to do with someone who made it big 50 years ago). Secondly because we lack such compromising details as "Gallipolli was his fault". Thirdly, and really most importantly, though, because of democracy. Since the people who are in charge now are nominally the People, anyone who does well themselves must be in breach of the social contract. Even in those parts of the world where democracy is not the vogue, it still taints our perceptions.

For the record, I think that guy who was King (George) when Churchill was Prime Minister was pretty impressive. Telling everyone that in a way you're glad when your palace gets blitzed because you wouldn't want not to share the sufferings of your people at least in some measure is the sort of PR masterstroke you have to admire.

Oh, hey, Jesus (not an exclamation of surprise, a suggestion of a name). Yeah! There's a dude who lead people impressively and had a fairly sizeable legacy. Also in ancient times, which proves me right, a bit. Also proves my "only badass dudes make it big" point. You can tell he was operating outside the system because of how the Government nailed him to things and made sure he died. This is not a sign of a person who's working within established modes of advancement. Whatever you may think of his legacy or personal qualities (and I actively un-invite you to comment on this paragraph because I know many of my readers have strongly opposed views here, and my blog is not the Flanders fields for a great religious debate). Certainly there was a guy, and certainly he had a legacy and leadership. Other angles are not relevant here.

Anyway, what do you think? Who springs to mind as a good leader, when you're asked? Because apparently I've got nothing.

In Which nothing actually Happens, per se, because it's not that sort of Blog

So, if you know me or are friends with me on Facebook (and quite frankly I am surprised if you're reading this without fitting into either of these categories, but you never know, maybe someone else has been lured in by tales of my lyrical brilliance or something) then you have probably heard about the wordcount on this leviathan of a blog. Essentially, I added up all the posts (and that's just the posts on this particular blog; there are only a few scant posts from the Livejournal era) and checked the word count, which is between 77,000 and 80,000, not counting comments.

And because I'm the sort of person who wonders about these things (which is to say; someone who ought to be doing something useful)I checked, and it turns out that that's about the length of a longish mystery novel. Those usually go between 60 and 80 thousand words. This year alone I've apparently written well over 30 thousand.

So it occurs to me: wouldn't it be nice if I'd used all those words and such writing something with some kind of narrative or structure or continuity or something? (I'm sure the same thought has struck you, too, dear reader, in the wee hours when you're wasting time on the internet reading blogs rather than going to bed: "why can't she write something with any structure or meaning? Aaargh!" etc.) Isn't it a dreadful pity? If it was a goodish novel (and we may as well be charitable and assume it would've been, since it doesn't exist and the assumption costs us nothing) then it could be being sent to publishers by now! I could have been published long ago, in point of fact!

There are those who believe that everyone "has a novel in them", which I'm sure is very lovely, except for the fact that with regard to most people we'd be lucky if it was only as bad as Twilight. And that's exactly how bad it would be (if, as I said, I were lucky) if I were to try to write a novel.

It's one of those things I've always secretly rather fancied the idea of doing. (Inasmuch as I'm capable of doing anything secretly: I tend to excitedly explain all my secrets to anyone who'll listen, although I'm very good with other peoples' secrets, surprisingly) This comes with the territory of being one of those would-be-creative Arts student types. I can't play music to save my life (I can't even sing, I've recently realised, which is a great pity), and I can't much paint or any of those other sorts of things My People like to do. But a novel! Anyone can write a book, one sort of feels.

"It's just words!" you think, "I talk all the time! How hard can it be?" Plus also, a very very rare few people are fantastically successful and become very rich and popular, in an absolutely morally-impregnable sort of way. If you invent something so useful that everyone in the world wants one, it's kind of wrong to refuse to give it to them (witness the patents on the horrifyingly expensive cancer-therapies). If you merely sell a service, you don't become obscenely wealthy without ripping people off or somethign. Everywhere you tend to have the same sorts of problems, especially once you're at that end of the scale.

Essentially, something like writing a book which makes millions of people happy is the best way not to have to worry if you're somehow a terrible person for getting rich off all those people. Music maybe used to be that way, but copyright is a thorny issue there now. Also, music producers etc. would take a cut, and you have to tour and miss your family, and paparrazzi try to entrap you and the whole deal, if you're looking at all like making it really big.

So obviously this is something I should look into.
Problem is, even leaving aside the thing where it's basically impossible to get published and all that sort of thing, that I haven't an ounce of narrative in me.

I know this because I was trying to come up with some kind of script, (no, not even that, some kind of story idea) for a short film with Clever James and Exuberant Lauri recently, and for all my smug self-assurance, I didn't have a single idea. Not one. Turns out, I can write a thousand words in an hour of what I choose to think is sometimes quite alright blather about not much, but when it comes to making up an actual kernel for all this fluff, I've got nothing.

Worse, I get halfway through being all "yes! This idea is brilliant!" or whatever and only then realise that I've blantantly plagiarised something by accident. Or even a couple of things. Sometimes I get all excited about how easy it would be to do a "Bridget Jones' Diary" type thing about a girl who just happens to be quite a lot like me (or rather, how I imagine myself to be, so more someone who bears a distant resemblance to me in a good light) before I realise that even that needs a plot. Nothing all that exciting happens to me, and when it does, I'm too busy doing it to write. Also, more pressingly, I have no idea how my life ends. There are very few tied-off loose ends in my life.

Also, proper authors can make "he thought about the problem for a moment" into an 8-word sentence (rather than a 1,000 word blog post) but can make "he met the girl and they had a slightly awkward interlude and agreed to meet the following afternoon" into a 4 page dialogue, natural-sounding and so on. I find it difficult not to come straight to the point in recount events (don't all shout at once, I know, we always thought that I had some kind of allergy to coming to the point). It turns out I can digress as long as you like, but padding the actual things with "she paused to delicately scrape the teaspoon on the edge of the cup to rid it of the last lingering drop. The melodic sound of that barely-conscious habit of hers had entranced him, once, now he wondered how he had tolerated it all those years" or whatever I get all "how am I supposed to know what sort of teacup? It's not real!" I don't even think to think that, in fact, which is rather worse. When I used to write stories, back in school, all the characters sounded like me, somehow.

I've just remembered that one of the characters in that story I wrote in high school (the one where I accidentally plagiarised that actual plot elements) was a pirate captain who was described as "rugged - not ruggedly handsome, just rugged". So that's something, at least, isn't it?

Hmmm... maybe I ought to just embrace this sort of thing. There are two options:

A: try to become David Sedaris, somehow, and become very popular selling books which are essentially blog-style stream-of-consciousness memoirs, or

B: be as one with the nature of blogging and learn to listen as well as talk.

Obviously my plan here is really B with a side order of idly speculating how lovely A would be.

In Which I vacillate again with regards to the comment thing

Ok, in a spirit of perpetual oscillation, I'm re-enabling anonymous comments. Because it turns out I deal better with crazies sending me anonymous grumpiness and with spam than with a lack of feedback. But essentially, it would be nice if everyone would sign their comments?

So I was thinking about this the other day; although the future cannot be foretold, it does exist, right? So, although no-one can know for sure how long they will live, there is a certain length of time for which you definitely will live. It doesn't have to be "written" anywhere or anything, but eventually, you will die. At that point you will have been alive for a specific length of time, no more and no less. With me so far?

Ok, right in that specific amount of time (X years, let's say. For the sake of mathematical ease and tragic irony, we'll have you die on your birthday) you will have been happy for a certain amount of time, and sad for a certain amount of time. Obviously there are more than two emotions, but we'll divide them for simplicity into "positive" (P) and "negative" (N), yeah? Now P and N may be equal, or one may be greater than the other, and it would hardly do to enquire, but what if you could choose when to have which one, would you do? Like, if you're having a really bad day, you can use some of the happy from your future, but that means that when you get to that point in your future, you aren't happy for however long it was that you took, because you've already used it up.

If you could choose, would you spread the happiness and sadness equally across your life? Or would you try to get all the sadness over and done with early, knowing that your future would then be unmitigated bliss? If you did that, would the knowledge of the unspoiled happiness in your future (of which you would not know the duration) be enough to get you through the years of accumulated sadness(would you be allowed to have that extra 'P' sneakily, that certain hope, or would the sustaining hope have to be subtracted from your total positivity allotment?)? Or would the concentrated depression drive you mad and spoil your later years?

Alternately, would you use up the happy first up and just kill yourself as soon as you got sad, knowing that that was it for happy times? Could you do that? If P+N=X and your amounts of time were set, would you be able to reduce X, skipping N, without having an effect on P? Maybe this is playing with the rules I've just made up a bit soon, since they're barely established.

Still, it's an interesting idea. Would you just go with the mystery (which is to say, the system we already have) or try to play the game to your own benefit? I think, on balance, I would try to take a bunch of the badness now, ameliorated with happiness in patches, so as to have a rosy future to look forward to.

Maybe the way you answer this sort of question isn't that hypothetical. How else would you describe struggling through a vocational degree and feeling pretty unpeppy most of the time in the hope that one day you'll be a happy doctor? This is a bit less sure, though. After all, who knows if being a doctor will be all that good? Maybe I'll be so busy being a tetchy Med Student that I'll fail to notice the one true love I should've met at an idle job with an advertising firm or something, thus missing all that happiness I thought I was working towards. I guess all investments are a gamble that way.

This is probably what religion is for, huh? "If you try hard enough now, despite all the crap now, later on it'll be all good all the time"?

Hmmm....

Note: on re-reading this, I sound way more unhappy than I am. I am not so much unhappy as not actively happy, which is what I'm used to being a lot of the time.
Right now I'm sewing a thing (which is the best cure for moodiness) with tea and a new CD (new to me, it's the Lucksmiths' debut, so it's also pretty old) and so on, so it's pretty nice.

In Which Zooey Deschanel is Pretty Cute

So yesterday, I watched (500) Days of Summer, which was pretty neat. It was, at times, a trifle contrived (not in places like the dance interlude and what have you, which might be considered sort of obviously contrived, so much as in smaller things like character naming), but on the whole it was great.

Naturally I did that thing everyone will do where you watch it and go "I'd love to be that sort of girl and have that effect on people" but secretly know that you much more closely resemble the slightly pathetic but ingenuously adorable hero. (Note, this is not me saying "I'm adorable", this is me saying "I reckon I'm more of a haver of crushes than a crushee"). Also, at one point the heroine rides a bike which is the exact bike I've spent the last week lusting after, so I'm glad I saw the move afterwards, rather than beforehand, so as not to feel derivative.

Anyway, obvious neurosis aside, what really struck me was the sort of thing which drew me to the characters; distressingly, these were pretty wanky. Thus, not all of the indie-hip-beautifulness or lyrical appeal of Zooey Deschanel held as much appeal as the throw-away lines which allude to a wider literary wossname. So our hero carries on about how he believes in love and the great Romantic ideals, and she refers to him casually as "Young Werther". Now call me a geek if you like, but I really do love that. I mean, I've never even read Goethe, but I'm all "ha! You said something funny and obscure and I got it! We are both so clever, we should totally be friends!".

(Clearly) it's sort of tragic, really. I do the same thing generally, I fear. Certainly I find Russell Brand more amusing when he uses phrases like "labial fricatives" or even just words like "denoument" than when he's making blow-job jokes. Does this make me a snob? Maybe (but since I don't find blowjob jokes all that amusing at the best of times, it doesn't really worry me).(Note: it helps that he's ridiculously attractive, as well.)

Conversely, at the end of the show I watched yesterday he did that "You've been a lovely crowd, good night," thing, but then followed it with "Hare Krishna". The problem with which is that my knee jerk reaction to a guy like that using a valedictory comment like that is to go "huh, tosser". If I actually thought he (or anybody, of course) actually adhered to that whole belief-set, it'd be a different story. Maybe the problem is just that I've known many more twits who say that sort of thing because that's their schtick than people who actually believe it or generally even know what it means beyond "being deep" (this also goes for that sort of head bow over supplicatorily joined hands thing some lads do in lieu of a wave of greeting).

I wonder what effect it has on us, this sort of cheapening of these gestures and words. It's an established point that swear words lose potency with repetition (thus one surprised "shit!" from a sweet old lady who never says anything harsher than "darn" in ordinary circumstances is usually more impressive than yet another "fuck" from a twerp lad in a pub who says it as punctuation). But does that work with words that have been holy too? I suppose it must, since serious high concepts become very bad blasphemies become merely mediocre swear words become the adorable archaisms of children's books, as a sort of inevitable continuum. (Thus, knights in kids books can say "Zounds!", people's mums say "bloody" to describe the traffic, and so on). (For those of you not down wit da lingo, "zounds" was originally "Christ's wounds!", a pretty big deal, back in the day, blasphemy-wise, and "bloody" was "By Our Lady", likewise, natch.)

Anyhow, it’s a funny thing, how appealing it is when people refer in passing to things that you happen to know about. Maybe it’s a validation thing? Like “you know that thing? I know that thing! We should be friends! If you like things that I like, I must be ok.” I sort of hope there’s more to it than that, but fear that there mayn’t be. I know that when The Lucksmiths tell you that they were “drunk in the haze of happy hour”, for instance, that’s a bunch more interesting and clever than it would be if the Smiths had never been “happy in the haze of a drunken hour”.

I fear this may all be snobbery again. I’ve been reading Kipps by H. G. Wells, this week. It’s a social commentary-type comedy thing about a young lower class man who unexpectedly inherits a small fortune and rises to the upper middle class. Basically the book is full of that vaguely awkward Pretty Woman which-fork-is-the-one-for-the-salad sort of awkwardness. It’s odd, though, the character has one of those accents which is written out with the lower classinflections. Like Hagrid. You know the one, where the character says “orf” rather than “off” every time. It’s strangely jarring, because I don’t think I’ve ever come across a novel before where the hero, rather than some comic-relief bit-parter has one of those accents. Not one which the author painstakingly writes out, anyway. It always seems to be an instrument of comedy, like being less well-educated is the same thing as being amusingly stupid.

I was about to be all “we must be such snobs for finding it intrusive, for noticing every time, what does it say about our subconscious beliefs about class” and such, but I’ve just had a reassuring thought. Since, right, language as written in a novel is not written as it sounds (otherwise American books would ‘ahl luhk as iyf thay werrr naht i Ninglish att ahl’), then the intrusiveness of a written accent in perforce a deliberate authorial move. Essentially, every time he chooses to write a line of dialogue, the author is deliberately choosing to reinforce the otherness of the hero. Since the character does not set out to say “orf” but means to word “off”, then anything written from his point of view, anything written truly sympathetically, would be written with the words he means, rather than the words he pronounces.

On the whole, that’s fair enough, I suppose, since the point of this book is that he’s a fish out of water, all alone and, to mix metaphors appositely, hopelessly out of his depth. It’s funny that 100 years ago, books about culture clash between the lower and upper classes were all about how the lower class people were amusingly out of place and all that, whereas although that certainly remains a major element in the equivalent texts today, there’s a great deal more of the making fun of the toffee nosed plum-in-mouth snobs. This would presumably reflect the shift in access to the texts: the viewers of the comic movies are more likely to identify with the less-classy characters, whereas the readers back then either were upper class, or liked to fancy themselves so. Back then, everyone wanted to be a little bit “better” than they were, which is still the case. But they didn’t raise their eyes to high as to judge their “superiors”, whereas now we have so much access to information, and now that we all have votes that count for the same amount, and all that, we’re much more inclined to wish them down to our level, rather than wishing ourselves up.

I guess that accounts for Celebrity Big Brother and Prince Harry, as phenomena?

In Which what Always Happens happens. You know, like, again.

I have an essay due on Monday. If we are Facebook friends, this can hardly have escaped your notice. And it should be really easy. I mean, it's a measly 1000 words, about a reasonably abstract concept for which we have enough evidence to sustain debate but not enough to make Obviously Right Decisions. They actually gave us the references. Also, inasmuch as it's competitive (and it isn’t, thankfully), I'm competing against a bunch of Science students who are used to having length requirements in pages. Or, millimetres. Not essay writers by preference, in fact.

What's stupid about this is that I still haven't done it. I haven’t even started writing it as such. The problem is the readings. I used to be pretty ok with these (warning: this may be lies caused by the golden haze of intervening years which overlies my recollection of Essays Past) but these days trying to read these papers is not so much boring as overwhelmingly soporific. It's bizarre. I can write (I would go so far as to say that I am, in fact, writing even as we... uh... write) but I'm moving, then. I can watch videos, TV, youtube, because then other things are moving. I can read books and suchlike because the characters are moving (maybe this point is a stretch?). But in the research, nothing moves. People either get vaccinated or don't, and then get sick/die or don't. All while remaining, narratively speaking, perfectly still.

What this means is that I keep having to pause in order to regroup and wake up. It's pretty irksome, dudes and dudettes.

So anyway, what's happening here is that, in an attempt to keep awake and focused, I've opened (that word always looks like it has the wrong number of Ns in it to me; no matter how I spell it, it looks awry)this blog in another window, so that I can flick between essaying and blogging. The only potential problem (apart from the "that's not your essay, you idiot, why are you online at all" issue, which naturally strikes one most forcibly) is that you might all get told things you couldn't possibly be interested in with regard to flu vaccination. Also that if I put bits of essay on the internet I could conceivably be hauled up for plagiarising myself or something. But what are the odds, really, eh?

Aaargh. It's so boring. I'm struggling not to sit, lurking, on Facebook, spamming everyone I know by updating every second second (have a self-imposed limit of 3 status updates per day, tops, in case I just drive away everyone I know) (unless, y'know, I really want to update more). The problem is that these days everything you do is published. Whenever someone thanks all their friends individually for the birthday wishes, it floods the feed. And that's a pity, because you essentially use up the patience your slight acquaintances have whenever you address a mutual friend. This interplay tends to keep my friend numbers static. I get added occassionally, but the number never changes much because the people I know less well defriend me in a trickle. Which is fair. People I met once, years ago, don't necessarily need to be kept informed about my kitchen or whatever.

Twitter has a similar problem, but only about 15 people are following me there, so it's less of an issue. And some of those are probably bots, really. But I still feel like the Courtney Love of my circle of Online acquaintance. (Not in a drug-addled late nineties sort of way, in a man-she-sure-uses-twitter-a-lot sort of way. I would've nominated Stephen Fry as the other example of that, but I really feel that to be a trifle above my touch).

Technically, I haven't updated my facebook status at all yet today. I say "technically" because (a) in my mind, I've written maybe 80 (this counts in the this-is-a-disease-you-know-that-don't-you? stakes) and (b) I keep having to do other things, like write on people's walls (I do have to, I was asked for that link, for instance), which still interrupts everyone. This is a pity. I saw 2 movies today, for one thing, and I could happily have been pithy (or at least "said something") about either, although less readily about both, since they're not all that easily integrated.
My goodness, do you realise that this post is already almost as long as my essay needs to be? It could totally be done by now! It's about 10 times as longs as what I've actually written.

I wonder how long an essay would have to be before it got really annoying that my Backspace key seems to be squeaky? Also, whoever heard of such a ridiculous thing? A squeaky delete? But my computer is still so new and shiny!

It's almost on a par with the fact that my DVD player still only plays voices on about 20% of DVDs. Not all DVDs, I have learned, will allow you to view them in "Bypass" or "2 channel". This seems confusing, but soon I shall get organised to get it fixed and afix to it a note of such searing passive-aggressiveness that no-one will ever again cause it to stop working while trying to be helpful, because no-one will dare to touch it at all.

Back to the essay, though. I keep having a fairly stupid problem. Since I have spent those parts of the evening when I wasn't actively writing my essay (so, most of it) writing this, lurking on the internet and watching stand-up comedy, I keep going off on these interesting-but-not-strictly-relevant tangents in my essay. This is because in viewing or reading anything, one temporarily absorbs its lexicon. Thus, for instance, in my mind at the moment, all of this is in this slightly chav english accent, on account of how I've been watching a Russell Brand show. Also, because like attracts like and all that, I tend to like comedians who spend a lot of time off on tangents and lost among subclauses. (Ross Noble, Russell Brand and Eddie Izzard spring to mind, so I guess "unusual looking" is also a thing?) The difficulty with which is that that really only exacerbates the tangential distractableness in my writing. In a blog, this is mildly exasperating at worst, in an essay it's rather more unfortunate.

So I shall probably have to delete that whole well-reasoned but not strictly relevant paragraph about whether or not it is ethical to consider health care workers primarily as vectors for disease as opposed to considering them in their capacity as individuals who have to actually undergo the mildly aversive intervention (getting a flu vaccination). (It's indicative of the interestingness of this essay in general that this seemed like a really interesting point before. Now I return to this window and reread it after half an hour, I feel that my view of its interestingness is perhaps better-balanced).

Aaargh...

In Which Knowledge is Acknowledged

Well, it's been that sort of day (the sort of day where I declared my intention to do something completely different), so I've updated the links bar to the right of the actual bloggy bit. There are still a bunch of moribund links there, but who am I to say that Pun will never decide that you can be a married lady and also still update your blog? (For instance.) So I've just sort of left those ones at the bottom of the list in a gesture of... patience, maybe? Supportiveness? Let's face it, it's really more of a gesture of the inability to throw anything out. A lot of the mess in my house is a gesture of that sort of spirit. Year 12 was 7 years ago, but who knows? Those notes still might be useful one day. I couldn't possibly throw them out. This makes my house a bit of a fire hazard, potentially, but on the upside, although the risk of fire increases with the amount of paper I can't bring myself to just flipping throw out, the amount of secret non-regret regarding any such conflagration varies proportionately with it. Which is to say, although it makes a fire more likely, I'd be less sad about one?

I've begun a bunch of posts recently, but they've all been just a bit not-very-good, so I haven't finished or posted them. The problem is, right, that this isn't all thought out well in advance. These posts are the actual thought processes that I'm having about whatever I'm writing about. So if I have an idea for something that would maybe make a good post, I have to strike a careful balance. If I don't think about it at all, I can't remember what it was. If I think about it much at all, though, by the time I get here I've thought it right through, and the whole things seems strangely stilted and false. Like a wooden actor reciting lines by rote, rather than an impassioned orator holding forth. (Not that these are ever that much like that, but you see what I mean).

Anyway, one of the things was that the other day I saw a jacaranda tree in bloom! It was also in leaf, and it was a pretty saplingy looking tree, so it looked sort of uncertain about the whole thing, but there were definitely flowers. This means it is officially the beginning of the season of being inappropriately, over-earlily and not-as-secretly-as-would-be-ideal-ily Excited about Christmas! Yay! Those of you who've known me for years saw where this paragraph was going from about the 14 word, but for the rest of you, this is an official warning. Soon I will be even more excitable than usual.

I was going to write this whole post about how I was absentmindedly nice to people (that is one weirdly spelled word, isn't it? "People"?) last weekend and a couple of times, as a result, people gave me things for free, but like I said, I overthought it. Whenever I tried to write that thing I either sounded like a smug preachy twit "Hey, you guuuuuuuys, I'm really sooo nice, you should all try it!" or like I was only doing it because sometimes if you're nice, people just give you stuff "Hey, I like your, uh, teeth or whatever. Anyway, do I really have to pay for this cocktail?", so that was unfortunate.

Still, it was pretty great you guys, I totally did get stuff and people were really nice.

Also, I was talking to my Dad the other day and he said that he was at a conference (or job interview? Or something? Anyway, he was reviewing a bunch of young up and coming types)recently and they had to do an impromptu speech (it would be awesome if that was a job interview type thing, because that skill has come in useful all of maybe twice in my life, and I'd like to find out if I'm actually any good at it, or just filled with misplaced smugness: all too possible) on the topic of which they thought was more important: emotion or knowledge. Which is fine except that apparently every single person posited that emotion and feelings were definitely more important. I caught myself doing it too. He told half the story and I was all "oh, feelings, obviously" but when I learned that I was just another sheep in this respect, I got sort of suspicious.

Because, OK, right, fine, but ALL of them? So no-one really thinks that knowledge is more important? Even sometimes? Is this because of Disney movies? Have we all been raised to believe that "follow your heart" is a better message than "stop being such an idiot"? I bet that's it.

I've never seen a movie which, given the choice between head and heart, doesn't pick the latter. Which is cool, yes. I mean, being in love is peachy, and reaching out to people with empathy is important, and whatever. But seriously? Have none of us, at our age, really taken a moment to go "wait, I'm taking the advice of a cartoon princess who has faced a total of one adversity in her recorded life, and that advice is that when in doubt, I should listen to a pump"?

What does that even mean, to follow your heart rather than your head? Given, as I've intimated, that we've pretty much established that the poetic emotional "heart" per se is not what you might call a meaningfully separate entity to the brain, isn't this just laziness? Since both your knowledge/understanding and your feelings/emotion are in the same spot, in the same organ (give of take 15cm), how can one be inherently superior to the other (obviously there's more than actual proximity at work here; ot totally value my frontal cortex more than my uvula, for instance)?

I think it's really just that your "heart" usually tells you to do what you actually want to do. "I know I should write my essay, but my heart tells me to go to the beach". "I know that I'll lose my job if I don't answer the call, but my heart tells me that my family is more important" (this latter is a big theme in movies. Also, one's heart very often wants one to hurl one's mobile (or "cell") off a cliff or out a window or into a pond or something: your heart wants you to upgrade to an iPhone, maybe?) But here's the thing, that's obviously that you "know" that your family is more important. Or whatever. It's really just lazy thinking. The real message is "do the thing you would really prefer to do".

Because knowledge is useless in a vacuum, sure, but feelings in a vacuum are meaningless. I may have no use for my knowledge of what Caesar said to the Tenth Legion (although I bet that comes in useful before I die), but it's probably better than that feeling you get where you're sad for no reason. Even being happy for no reason, while nice, is not actually as nice as feeling happy and knowing that it's because of something actually good happening. Because it's also not sustainable. Feelings need knowledge more than knowledge needs feelings. (Note: if I'd taken the other tack and was writing this the other way around, or if I'd gone with my original idea of having 2 posts which debated with one another, I would, at this point, mention that it's easier to learn things which have emotional valency. I know this because of Science. So in fact, it's what you might call a commensurate, if not symbiotic, thing.)

Maybe it's a Class Anxiety, Cultural Cringe sort of thing. Here we are, a bunch of well-educated (don't be modest, you know that you're well-educated, otherwise you'd be unlikely to be bothering to read this, since blogs like this are definitely most useful as procrastination), heart-felt, Disney-raised young people, and we're all afraid to say that "Knowledge is power". This is because knowledge is so often stratified along socioeconomic lines. We fear that to say that knowledge is of any really meaningful use will be to imply that poor people, people who didn't finish high school, illiterate people, are somehow not as good as us. And this is a point which, in our heart of hearts, we have mixed feelings about.

Einstein famously said that "imagination is more important than knowledge" and you know what? If you've already been extensively educated in physics and are trying to derive a theory of relativity, so that you already have a basis of knowledge which you can afford to dismiss with an airy wave of the hand after using it, then sure. If you're trying to make a line of very popular posters and fridge magnets to console students, doubtless. If you're trying to sound modest to the layman and also thumb your nose at the smug pricks you work with, then by all means.(Bet you a dollar that this was what Eistein was up to). But the fact remains that imagination without any knowledge will only do you any good if you already happen to be a philosopher in the class of Socrates. Which, no offence, you aren't. I have a number of philosophical friends who take themselves and the internet marginally more seriously than might be considered strictly good for them, but even they can only build their castles in their sky because of having spent so long being talked to by people with their feet on the ground.

Also, people with autism are not measurably more dissatisfied than people with dementia, or amnesia, who've lost their knowledge. Granted, those people have lost something they had before, and bipolar folk tend to miss their emotions rather when they're trying to get their medications right, but I don't know that the people who've lost feelings are really as frustrated as people who've lost their knowledge.

People with intellectual disabilities such as Downs Syndrome never get as much knowledge, mind you. They seem pretty happy a lot of the time. Except that I suspect that might be one of those things that we really just desperately want to believe, that those poeple are happy, really. Firstly so as to allay our pity and that feeling which is akin to survivor's guilt, and secondly because we want to believe that we just get sad and stressed because we're so damn clever. Also, those children are hardly a case-controlled example. They are so cossetted and protected that of course they often look pretty happy. (Note: this is a good thing. I would not dream of thinking for a moment that that's not exactly how it should be).

Maybe our feelings are more important to others? Mothers of autistic babies and mothers of Downs babies both have a pretty terrible time, but the ones whose babies love them back are probably ultimately more satisfied with their lot. Unless we're dealing with a doctor or maybe a pilot in bad weather or something, we tend to value the sensitive niceness of others more than their knowledge. And even then, we really prefer them to be lovely as well as able to tell us that we don't have lupus. (Hey hey, check my pertinent yet obscure pop culture reference there. Expertly done.)

Maybe this is why our movies want us to follow our hearts? Because it's on a par with such messages as "it's nice to share" and "do unto others etc". It's not really for our own good at all that we should follow our hearts. It's for everyone else's?

Alternate conclusion: it's 1am and I've gotten a bit carried away? Who can say, really?

Still, I feel better knowing that someone, somewhere, has made a better-structured defence of rationality over affect than a "Cheer Up Emo Kid" t-shirt, which, let's face it, is the same thing. Being a capital-R-Romantic is so the century before last. In theory.

In Which one might come for the Free Reception Food, but stay for the Unlikely Mishaps and Fake Sexual Tension!

So, I have been invited to a wedding later this year (well, 2 so far actually)with a Plus-One. Specifically "Angela and Partner" are invited to the wedding of an old friend. There are 2 points here: the RSVP and the addressee(s).

The RSVP for a wedding is usually the phone numbers of at least 2 people, and a postal address and usually an email as well. Which, sure, must make for a logistically difficult time come guest list collation time, but which is pleasantly non-commital for the guests. If you hate writing, you call. If you're not someone who does well on the phone (that's me: it always seems to excruciatingly awkward to phone people, somehow: this is why I will almost always prefer to text) you write. Or whatever. But this invitation has the Bride's Mother's Mobile number. That's it. Not even a backup second person to call in case her phone gets lost.

This sounds doomed to end badly to me. This woman will get about 200 calls over that month or so, many from people she's never met, and then have to get the names and write them somewhere. Plus, half the people will inevitably have different ideas to hers as to what constitutes a good time to call. Essentially, unless you're a fantabulously socially adroit society hostess, this strikes me as a system that might be uncharitably described as "poorly thought out" (or "stupid" if you will). This lady, lovely as she is, is not that. Everyone I know who's RSVPed (RSVP'd? Returned Sil Vous Plait? You know, called) reports a cringeingly awkward conversation with someone who was apparently surprised they'd called: why, if this is your response, would you put your number down as RSVP? (Ok, so I've only actually spoken to one person, but that's still 100%. Statistics, that is).

So, obviously, I'm putting off the dreaded call. Not only because of all this, and not only because I happen to know that the dear lady loathes me personally (this is not paranoia, she really does, oh my. Or did in High School, since which time I have thankfully avoided the entire messy business) so that it will be even worse than it was for everyone else, but because of who it's addressed to.

"Angela" will definitely be attending, and I have no problem attending a wedding alone (in fact, I've never taken a date to a wedding in my life, and it's been a young life rich in wedding attendances, let me tell you). But for the first time, if I wanted, I could bring someone. And I am so reluctant to pass up the opportunity to do so that I don't want to RSVP until the last minute, because once I commit to not bringing anyone, the opportunity is lost.

Because here't the thing, dear reader: this is it. This is my chance to embroil myself in an obviously stupid bad-rom-com-or-similar-style hijink at a wedding. (Can you have hijinks in the singular? It seems wrong). This is the one chance to get a friend to come along to a wedding for the dinner or whatever and pretend to be dating like every movie that ever starred Jennifer Aniston or Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts or whoever. Even though I know that it would not really involve fantastically comic adventures or mishaps, a part of me reeeeeaaaally wants to do that. Bring along a friend (and amusingly, I've already received at least 3 offers to be that person already) and be all "hi, this is Sam-or-whatever {Sam is nicely non-gender-specific, and when it comes to fake-wedding-dates, it doesn't do to be too close-minded} we met at Medical School. We're, uh, very much in love. What a lovely wedding this is!" especially, quite frankly, to the previously-mentioned Ang-hatin'-parents of the bride.

Of course, being a seasoned viewer of rom coms and dodgy movies of similar genres, I am aware that there are strings attached. You can't just bring someone to an event and pretend to be dating them and ignore the serious risk of ending up in some kind of love triangle or something. And I don't know which is that more distressing prospect: ending up in some kind of narrative-induced relationship with Lauri or Jenny or James or whoever, or the final realisation that that's not how it would really work. What would really happen is that there would be no wacky hijinks at all. A pleasant and slighlty odd afternoon would be had be all and it would all be totally unremarkable.

I think, on the whole, I would rather live the rest of my life knowing that when I finally had the chance to do something dim like that, I passed it up, than have it finally proven to me that life doesn't work like a popcorn movie.

It's like those possible-major-natural-disaster things (like Wednesday's non-event of an apocalypse, or the New Zealandish tidal wave that totally failed to wipe out our flat a month or so ago): you're obviously very glad not to have had your life ruined and all of that, but a part of you is sort of disappointed that nothing dramatic and exciting happened. "Thank goodness everything is ok! Now we can... get on with our work... oh. *sigh*". This would be like that.

So, the odds are that I will not elect to bring anyone to this darn wedding, but rather nobly endure the probably-entirely-imaginary slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (or outragous people who dislike me) and it will be perfectly lovely, but I'll put off the reply just a little longer to keep the my-life-as-a-movie dream alive.

Also, very probably, I'm still stressing about being disliked by someone who barely remembers me and won't recognise me anyway. Still.

Seriously, though, wouldn't it be cool to be in one of those sorts of narrative? Potentially having to kiss one of your just-friends seems like a small sort of cost to pay if you get to have adventures. S'all I'm saying. (Applications close for partner-in-crime post on the 30th of September. If any of you who've jokingly offered really actually want to come, you should totally tell me, and we can work something out) (maybe...).

In Which There Is No Such Thing As Cows

You guys, in World Square in the City there is a statue of a bull. Not a Minotaur, or any particular Bull (Zeus jonesin' for Europa or something), just a bull.

There's a plaque next to it which is pretty long, explaining the significance of the statue, but I've never gotten much past the 5th word, because the 4th is such a doozy.

Checkit: "The Bull, a mythological beast..."

No.

There is a steak restaurant not 20 metres from this plaque. I love this sort of thing. Dumb at it's finest.

In Which Internet Access Remains Elusive

I bet you're wondering if I've finally gotten internet at my house, aren't you? Well, I sure am.

After months of ridiculou saga-ness, (more on which another day) we've finally got it connected. Sort of. I can access (very very slowly) google but not wikipedia, my blog but not facebook (!) gmail but not my uni mail. I can load A Softer World, but the pictures don't display, and I can see all of Dinosaur Comics except the last 2 or 3 lines of text in the comic.

It's incredibly frustrating but somehow utterly hilarious, is what it is.

In Which a Sense of Proportion could only make Life less Exciting.

You know those people who take things just waaaaaaaaay too personally? You know the ones: good things, bad things, the weather in Paraguay, they secretly believe it all somehow reflects on them, and that their opinion is both relevant and interesting to friends, innocent by-passers, and passengers in their taxi? The types with that specialised flavour of deluded self-absorption who can be offended (or irrationally pleased) by such innocent remarks as “Who are you feeling?”, “I’m so tired”, or “My, I hear that weather they’re having in Paraguay is lovely at present! Wish I was there!”. Yeah, I’m one of them. (Ha, I’m listening to my iPod on shuffle as I type and Ben Folds has just informed me that “she’s so sensitive and shit just happens sometimes”; more from the “music which says something to me about my life” frontier.)

This will not, of course, be news to any of you with whom I have been friends for any length of time. Especially anyone who’s ever lived with me, or been in any way trapped with me for prolonged enough periods that I’ve failed to bother hiding the crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that this could be considered a good thing, and it probably often (maybe not “usually”) is. People who have a healthy sense of proportion don’t get quite so pleased and excited by a nice morning, and don’t feel quite so self-satisfied by the mere knowledge that the cafe on the corner of their block is so highly considered that people drive from suburbs and suburbs away, just to have breakfast there. Those people would think “oh, how lucky we are living near a nice cafe, also, I bet the ocean views that cafe gets sure don’t hurt!” not “Aha! Look! A firetruck is parked outside our cafe, even the firemen on duty go there! Awesome, our cafe is the best, we rule.” Uh, hypothetically.

What I’m saying is that this is not exclusively a problem. The problem lies in forgetting that one is coming from a different place to other people (even if they’re self-absorbed, they’re still not coming from Planet Ang, but rather from their own personal planets). Last week I got all upset by something that had absolutely nothing to do with me. And I don’t mean something of the “8 million babies killed in Burma but I don’t know anyone who lives there” (which would be relevant to everyone in the sense that (a) we’re all people and should be moved by the suffering of other... etc. etc. etc. and (b) Burma is not that far away, and anything that kills that many Burmese babies would be bound to get us eventually) or even the slightly tragic “when Princess Di died, I cried for a week” varieties. I mean like “I had a sudden encroachment of awareness of my own irrelevance and ordinariness when I found out that my ex had joined a Swing Dancing troupe”. Caveat: “irrelevance” to the world of swing dancing. My ex is a nice guy, but I don’t particularly mind being irrelevant to him (although being felt by an ex to be deeply, meaningfully and truly irrelevant is never nice either, really).

It cannot possibly be conceived to be anything whatsoever to do with me, but it really seemed like a slap in the face, somehow. That, my friends, is obviously completely insane. Which was clear every time I tried to explain how I felt to anyone; “he’s joined the #$%^&* troupe! I don’t get to be in the troupe! How dare he?!” I would say, and even my dearest and most understanding friends cocked an inquiring eyebrow and waited for the other shoe to drop, for the part where this in any way impinged on my dancing experience or, as we say in the biz “mattered”. (Heh, I love saying “as we say in the biz” about perfectly ordinary words. Sometimes I forget that it’s actually from that Fry & Laurie sketch, and that most people would more or less figure it denoted being a tosser of the worst calibre.)

This (this thing where I take random things too personally) became particularly obvious to me over the last day or two: I did a fair amount of baking with an oven which has been called “tempestuous” by the kind hearted, and unprintable things by those who are not. Baking is thus marginally more challenging than it might otherwise be. Now, I can’t even remember the name of the girl who, when I made cake for something once, had her young man try a piece first and checked the quality with him (in front of me) before she had any: “Is it moist? I only want some if it’s moist.” I know it’s a little thing, but it seemed so rude at the time that every time I take something out of the oven which I’m baking for a potentially critical audience (which is how I inaccurately categorise my PBL group) I hear her in my head. “Is it moist? I only want some if it’s moist.” Good grief. That’s clearly an innocent inquiry and comment. She hadn’t had any, so it can’t be considered a criticism, I don’t know why it seemed so breathtakingly rude to me. I guess it was just the silliness that struck me. I was sitting right there, what was he going to say? “No, good god, it’s so dry that it’s sucking all the moisture from my body! Pass me a glass of water and stay the hell away from this godawful cake! Get out while you still can!”

Not only do I now worry about the imaginary people criticising things I make (which I’m sure makes me more critical of them than I need to be), this sort of it’s-all-about-me thing also means that I tend to read other people’s life decisions as such as well. This made sense that time a boyfriend toyed with the idea of moving overseas but was surprised when I seemed to feel that this would matter to me. But it doesn’t make sense when friends decide to take up things (or people) which I think (because, hey man, I’d totally know, right?) are bad for them. Sometimes I catch myself actually being annoyed with my siblings for their adult decisions which in no way affect me. Maybe it’s always going to be worse with siblings, who knows?

I guess this all goes hand-in hand with the tendency to overthink things people say to you. Criticisms are not something I’ve ever particularly come to relish. Apparently you’re supposed to treasure the opportunity to use feedback to improve yourself or something, but I pretty much tend to get defensive and fail to appreciate it. Did you ever hear that song by a guy called Quindon Tarver, which was in the Triple J hottest 100 in about 1998? It was called “Everybody’s Free (to wear sunscreen)” and it was essentially a spoken address to a graduating class, advice of various types, set to a background of that song about how “everybody’s free to feel good” or whatever. No? Well, check it out some day. In it, there was a piece of advice which I really remember: “Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults. If you manage this, tell me how.” (Or, y’know, words to that effect. Apparently “really remember” was a trifle hyperbolic.) I’ve always figured that a sort of step-wise approach to this was the way to go, so while forgetting insults remains an elusive dream, I tend to really hoard and treasure compliments.

The problem with this is the same problem you always get when you horde and treasure things; you raise your own standards and want to classify things according to quality. This sort of defeats the purpose, a smidgin. Because when someone says “ooh, you look nice today” a tiny part of me (the part that’s not busy going “gawsh” and twirling it’s toe metaphorically in the dirt in a pleased, bashful sort of way) (so really quite a tiny, tiny part) thinks “why ‘today’? Do I not usually? Am I overdressed?”. I’m almost sure that I’m getting worse about this recently, but maybe I’m just noticing more due to the comparative turmoil of the last 12 months.

Maybe all this introspective blogging is just doing what navel-gazing always does, sending me slowly, but surely, completely mad. It could very well be that. (Also, I apologise for the weakness of this post, I was building to something before, but I had to cut it, so it sort of peters out a little bit. Next time, Gadget, next time, I shall write something with some good honest structure, honest.)

In Which an Upbeat Trend is Unimaginatively Continued

Do you remember how I said the other week that I’d lost my USB? Well, I found it at the traditional time, which is to say “immediately after purchasing a replacement” (also, it turns out to have a lost and forgotten and now wildly out of date post on it! Maybe I shall post from the past one of these days). This (finding it) is a good thing, since apparently I managed to lose that new one this morning, sometime between when I uploaded yesterday’s blog post onto it and when I got to the library and tried to upload it onto the actual internet. Although it’s obviously sad to have lost it, and annoying to have been delayed in posting, a part of me is amused. That’s the part of me that realises that that which is lost is inevitably found eventually, and when whomever it is finds that USB, they’re going to be really confused that all it contains is a document entitled “In Which There Are More Nice Things” containing 1,300 words of upbeat blather. This current high USB turnover mystifies me: until a month ago, I’d had the same USB for about 7 years; what’s changed recently? I changed which bag I was using a couple of weeks ago (because my Crumpler still smells strongly of campfire from the Farm), but only to the one I’ve carried since 4th year, and I never lost one since then. And it counts as being since 1st year, too, since I drafted the pattern of the current bag from the one I made in 1st year. Strange times. Oh well.

Today was somehow charming. The weather was so lovely and temperate this morning that I walked to uni from Moore Park just for the loveliness of it, and it was light (not just lightening, like usual) when I woke up. At uni there was some brief collusion, which is always interesting (this is not some kind of strange innuendo, I was colluding in a conspiracy to organise a birthday present). Then on the way home I listened to my awesome Tarzan playlist. When I got home, I spent the entire afternoon in the kitchen, baking strawberry muffins and hazelnut brownie-cupcakes, making mint lemonade and watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on my laptop. I defy anyone to have come up with a better way of spending the afternoon.

All this bakery and what have you is on the grounds that it’s my turn to bring food to my PBL tomorrow, but I haven’t the cash to buy chips and lollies or whatever it is that one might expect, whereas flour and sugar are cheap. Also, man, baking is a lot of fun, as well as being a more effective and impressive way to buy friendship. What with all these pastries and such (I made olive-parmesan pastry coils too, but they didn’t work out as well, so they don’t merit a mention) as well as the fact that tomorrow is the day chosen for James’ birthday thingy by Jenny and I (so I’ll be bringing in the present, which is also homemade, is my point here), I really feel like being awfully 1950s tomorrow. Unfortunately, being as how I don’t live with my parents and have a job (or have a job, even), I do not have so many pairs of comfortable-yet-stylish shoes that I can wear each pair about once a fortnight, which is the situation of someone I was talking to today. The upshot of this is that I have beautiful shoes and comfy-enough-to-wear-to-uni shoes and shoes that would go perfectly with a 1950s-feminine outfit, but no shoes which are all these things at once. So it’s jeans and joggers as usual.

What I was actually going to talk about, though, was my Tarzan playlist, which is awesome, mainly as an intellectual exercise. It’s called “Tarzan” because it swings along like Tarzan in the jungle, from lantana to lantana, with no idea where it’ll end up. The principle is this: each song (apart from the arbitrarily chosen 1st song, obviously) is picked because of some association with the previous song, but is not allowed to be from the same artist or album.

Thus, “Jeepers Creepers” a song by Frank “Ol’ Blue Eyes” Sinatra is followed by the Fratellis’ “Ole Black’n’Blue Eyes”, followed by “Ruby” by the Kaiser Chiefs, who, like the Fratellis, are a group of Scottish rockers. Cake’s “Never There” starts with a dial tone which (embarrassingly) is how N’Sync’s (hey, we were all young once, right?)”I’ll Never Stop” ends. It’s a lot of fun to put these together and try to be both randomly unpredictable and logically sense-making, so you don’t listen to it later and go “Why did I put Ben Folds’ ‘Still Fighting It’ next to ‘Meglio Stasera’, from the Pink Panther?” (answer: because I’d accidentally deleted Feist’s “So Sorry” from between them). Or maybe you listen to Jason Mraz’s “Wordplay” then Death Cab’s “Long Division” then Ben Lee’s “We’re all in this together” and go “wait, what?” and then realise that all three songs mention long division, which is uncommon enough that it’s satisfying to collect them in the one place.

I particularly enjoyed following “Smells like Teen Spirit” with a song from “High School Musical” about being in a basketball team (geddit? Teen spirit, team spirit from a tween movie? Oh nevermind.) (Hehe, geddit again? Oh, I’m on a roll here...) mainly because of how Kurt Cobain would so definitely have considered himself so, so much cooler than High School Musical.

Also it’s great because it never ends, but proceeds in fits and starts. For a while the other day it had ground to a halt at Nat King Cole’s exhortation not to let our eyes go shopping for our hearts, but then it became clear that that was neatly inverted when Lily Allen explained that she ‘[didn’t] care about clever, [didn’t] care about funny’ (more fool her) in “The Fear”. This naturally lead to The Smiths’ “Panic”, a song which suggests that we should hang the DJs because the music that they constantly play says nothing to him, Morrissey, about his life. So that leads us to The Crustaceans’ “The Ambulance Driver” (because if having ‘a diuretic conversation about the Doppler Effect’ in an Ambulance doesn’t happen to me in the next 7 years, I personally, will be surprised – that song says something about my life, if not Morrissey’s) and thus to Fountains of Wayne’s “Halley’s Waitress” for being another song reference so nerdy you could imagine an XKCD making the same comment.

... So, um that was incredibly boring to read, wasn’t it? Just a list of songs and weird connections. Sorry guys. But my point is that it’s fun to do, and you should try it (and then make me a mix tape!). Also that you should refrain from judging me for having boybands and the High School Musical soundtrack on my iPod (the latter was a gift, I totally swear).

Also, today, on my walk down Cleveland St, I saw a middle aged, average looking man wearing an XKCD t-shirt. I love that, when you see people from a distance and you think “you don’t notice that I exist at all, but I get the reference you’re making, and I think you’re pretty cool”. This was always how I secretly imagined it being when I used to wear my t-shirt that says “A city built on Rock& Roll would be structurally unsound.”

Ben Folds would have us believe that “there are people you meet who’re into something that is too big to be expressed through their clothes”, but quite frankly I don’t think that anything is impossible to express through clothes if you try hard enough (not that I would always recommend it, of course, usually “expressing” things is not a good primary aim in getting dressed of a morning). But what’s that big? The biggest thing I can think of that people can be into is religion, but that’s easily and commonly expressed sartorially (although politicians wearing cross necklaces are always to be regarded with suspicion: it smacks of being sent to prison and getting religion in time for your parole hearing, or some other kind of dreadful insincerity). If you’re into something more amorphous, it could still be expressed if you want, even negatively. Thus, if you’re into not being a douche, then you can refrain from wearing those “Hello Titty” t-shirts with a breast-ish Hello Kitty on it that you can buy from the Raben shop near Central. If you wish to warn people that you have Asperger’s and don’t quiiiiiiite understand how humour works you can wear those ones that say “I see dumb people reading my t-shirt”. I like baking and reading and history and geekery and Disney children’s movies and the BBC and absentminded positivity, and I have the badges on my lab coat to prove it. Maybe when I grow up I’ll just be Pauly Perrette, that lab chick from NCIS, that’d be pretty sweet.

What I’m saying here is (a) although you should never judge someone by their clothes, that doesn’t mean that people don’t ever tell you anything worthwhile about themselves through that medium, and (b) sometimes I really over-think innocent song lyrics. Well, um, most of the time, let’s face it. But at least that means I know to put the Spazzys’ cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back” after Dire Straights’ “Romeo and Juliet”, right? I mean, that’s got to be a life skill or something, right?

In Which there are more Nice Things (but not in a Cloying sort of Way)

So, My Flatmate Georgia Who Has Cooler Musical Taste Than I Do informs me that Nick Cave keeps a weather diary. To be strictly honest, this sounds marginally less exciting than almost any other kind of diary I can think of (except maybe some kind of log of the dryness of paint, or the growth of grass or similar, perhaps) but apparently it’s great because not only can he (after checking) tell you for certain whether it rained on the 4th of May, but also because of being an exercise in interesting writing. If you describe things which boil down to “at first it was sort of cold, but later on it got warmer, and it looked like it was going to rain but then it didn’t” every day, I guess you either become more and more boring and bored with it, or you get to pay more attention, and become a more interesting writer. “This afternoon the air was like: a crisp green apple/warm soft syrup, suffocating and sweet/ harsh and brisk as an illtempered jogger/ so windy that it was like being an inch tall, standing on the lip of a hairdryer” or something. Obviously, this is not a knack I’ve got.

Nonetheless the principle of writing things out properly is surely for the best, so despite the misleading promises (well, implications) in my last post, I hereby give you the things which made the Nice Things List today. As usual, lots of other nice things happened, and no-one should feel offended if they aren’t mentioned.

Today, after the small child being a birdplane around the ocean-watching people(which I mentioned in my last post), there were police horses on my street. This is in the same category of appeals-to-my-inner-6-year-old as an icecream truck on my street: thrillingly novel even if irrelevant to me. Also, I suppose you’re probably supposed to talk about Mounted Police (or is that only what you call them in Canada?) or something, but the actual horses are the cool bit. Those are horses with more authority and gravitas than me, and I’m a bona fide biped. Also, at this point, they have more of a career than I do, technically, by a long shot. They actually have jobs. Since I’m a student on Centrelink, if they earned wages (which I’m going to have to go ahead and doubt) and payed taxes on those wages (do employees of the state pay taxes? Surely they must, but it seems strangely circular. I guess they’d have to do so in order to get tax deductions) anyway if all those things, then those horses would be able to say to me “my taxes pay your wages” or whatever it is that good honest annoyed taxpayers say to dole-bludgers (except that now I come to think of it, we’ll have to add “also if they could talk” to the list of “if”s there).

Fortunately this is all by-the-by. The point is; they were on my street and that was awesome. Also, it was clear that everyone in the street was secretly a bit excited. On a nice Saturday afternoon, there are a lot of people hanging around and going to the cafe and going for jogs and mooching in the carpark and generally cruising like life is a movie about youths in the 1950s on my street. Apparently it’s just the Place to Be. So there were all these people about, trying to be all cool and not act like police horses were at all worthy of their interest, but visibly, from my balcony, unable to resist surreptitiously watching the horses. Joggers would jog coolly past, not looking, and then once they had gotten past where it would be clear, just ever-so-casually happen to look to their left and check them out.

There is, it’s true, something strangely incongruous about horses on asphalt. Back in the day, when horses were all the crack (um, so it occurs to me that to be “all the crack” is slang from maybe the 17th Century, and thus not part of common parlance any more. It does not mean that people went about jazzed up on having smoked horses, it means more like “all the rage”. I should change it, maybe, and take out this whole bracketed bit, but I like the idea of using the slang of the time in question when discussing it. It seems neat somehow. Also, maybe a little tragic that this was just the expression that came to me, and that “all the rage” was much harder to think of. I wasn’t even alive when that was a thing people said) back then, as I said, people wouldn’t look twice at horses just moseying about like that, but I suppose with time comes novelty and all that.

Also, how amusing that the thing I was trying to say in the main part of that sentence was so much less than the parenthetical remark that nested in it. Sort of like those people who get tumours bigger than they are. There was one on the news the other day, I think? This chick had presumably just thought that she was pregnant or something, but the thing in her abdomen ended up being 90 kg or something. She was just a tiny woman (after the removal, obviously) so maybe that number is wrong. Anyway, how awful that would be! Instead of saying “oh you poor thing, are you ok, that must’ve been really traumatic for you!” people invariably say “how could you possibly let it get that big?” and judge you. This seems harsh, given how powerful a motivator denial is, not to mention if you don’t speak English well or are psychiatrically ill or something. Also, public hospital waiting lists, maybe? Surely not.

Anyway, later on, once the horses invested in the authority of the state and their rather pleased looking riders (also invested with the authority of the state, but whatever) had clopped out of our day, I caught a bus to the city, and everyone on that bus makes it onto the List. There’s something sort of great about how different everyone is on a bus to the city on a Saturday evening to a weekday morning. Instead of looking sleepy and standoffish in suits and uni clothes, people are excited and the girls are painted and dressed outlandishly and everyone gives the impression of actually wanting to be there, either on the bus or at their destination. No-one has that air of fatigued duty you get at 8am on a Thursday.

Meriting special mention on this bus are 3 sets of people. The surfy dudes up the back, to whom, in Maroubra, one always rather unfairly attributes a vague aura of menace, were sitting talking about how wonderful it was that there was a pod of dolphins in the water with them that afternoon. It was pretty adorable, you guys. Next, the bus filled with sparkly young women in cold-looking dresses and large necklaces, and with hordes of people in red and white scarves on their way to the football. All these people seemed excited too, especially the tiny little girl (maybe a 4 year old?) with her footy-fevered family who clearly didn’t quite know what was going on, but who was nonetheless just as excited as could be. (Heh, I’m noticing a theme here: as a highly excitable person myself, I get all pleased when other people, even ones I don’t know, are excited about things.) Lastly, in amongst all this hubbub, the woman sitting beside me (who was also dressed to go out, as I recall) was reading a biography of Alexander the Great. This seems like a cool thing to be doing, to be all “well, I’m going out for the evening, but I do want to learn about the history of our culture [and Alexander the Great is totally part of our modern culture, his influence was crazy-big] en route!”. I feel like we need more of this sort of thing.

Also, the rest of my evening was perfectly charming and I saw some of my dear old friends and then unexpectedly went briefly to Swing at the Roxbury. I may recount these adventures to you another day, Dear Reader, but in the meanwhile it’s almost 3 (!) so I’m definitely retiring to bed.

In Which Perkiness Ensues

It has been occurring to me recently that what is needed is a deliberate appreciation of the small good things that are all over the place. As such, for the next... shall we say fortnight? I have decided to make a note of three good things, no matter how small or large, with no repetitions allowed within the fortnight, every day.

Obviously it’s not what you’d call a highly sophisticated plan, but I’m pretty sure that this sort of thing does people good. Here are yesterday’s Things (and don’t worry, I’m not going to insist on posting them all, it’s just that we need a “latest post” which has a higher sanity quotient, I feel, so this becomes a blog post rather than a 6 word entry in my notebook).

Here goes: it may sound silly, but I really like that rustling noise my (and presumably your) hair makes when I walk into a slight breeze with my hair really clean and dry and untied. Maybe this is only a thing with long hair, and obviously it would only work with your hair out, but there’s this lovely silky noise as it lifts and settles slightly with every step. A sort of high pitched “shhsss shhsss shhsss” noise. Maybe that’s a bit odd, but I like it.

Next up, yesterday we had a lecture in which Awfully Nice Jenny and I sat together and listened but also sneakily ate Nutella (of which, for reasons complex, she had a jar with her) off bits of plastic fork. This cutlery-modulated mode of delivery is the best way to eat Nutella. Once you sully it with bread or whatever you’re supposed to spread it on, it’s all downhill (unless you’re making a fantastic dessert pizza, or maybe having it on banana or something). Obviously this is slightly idiosyncratic, as an approach, once you’re older than about 8, so it’s especially nice that other people have alSso feel that it is acceptable, even preferable to eat it thus. But mainly it was just an awesome little impromptu lecture-picnic, and that was lovely.

Lastly (for yesterday) I have, over the last couple of days, been going through my ridiculous collection of earrings, ostensibly to tidy them up (so that they’re not just some kind of tangled sparkly morass in my jewellery box/drawer, but rather accessible, with the two halves of pairs together, and fewer empty boxes, and not all tied together by necklaces) but really, secretly, to find my favourite Bunny earrings, which are completely adorable and which have been lost for months. Last thing yesterday evening (so much last thing that it was really this morning, because we’d stayed up craft-project-ing and watching Audrey Hepburn movies and Rage) I finally found them, and there was much rejoicing. They say “why is it that things are always in that last place you look?” and usually it’s because I take the traditional approach, whereby having found what I’m looking for, I stop looking. In this instance, though, I must’ve gone through easily 100 tiny boxes and pairs of earrings all tangled up, and the ones in question turned out to be in genuinely the 3rd last box to be sorted through. This is good, because it kept me all motivated for the other 96 or whatever, but because they weren't in the very last box I hadn’t given up hope. Also, cannot help but feel that the very last box of all would have been pushing it a bit, just slightly clichéd.

Obviously, there were lots of good things yesterday, (any day on which you watch old movies while sewin’ on the couch is a good day, at least in part) but I think that picking Small Delightful Things is the real spirit of such a project. It’s dreadfully important, surely to remember to be delighted by little things every day, and I’ve been a smidgin off-task in that respect this last week, so this is charming.

It’s only early in today, so I haven’t got my Things yet, (I don’t want to use them up early, or I could be sneaky and lazy later on, and not bother to pay attention to the nice bits of the world), but the beautiful weather and view out my window, coupled with the nice, ordinary neighbourhood noises (waves in the distance, the occasional car purring into the carpark, small children being excitable on scooters and suchlike, and sometimes the distant vague pop of the outdoor military practice shooting range on the next headland) is certainly looking likely to make the cut. Also, it seems like a good thing to use up “it’s a lovely day” now, so I can’t be all “eh, whatever, it’s a nice day, I guess?” to make up numbers in a week’s time.

Maybe I should be more specific, though, it seems lazy not to bother. I think it’s cool that there’s a spot opposite my house, on the edge of the park, where there often seems to be a congregation of folks (different folks each time, not some kind of weird park-based cult) pointing and looking into the middle distance, probably at boats or something. This is kind of lovely, especially when, as now, there is a very small boy running around and around the little group (pretty clearly his family) uninterested in the whales or seagulls or whatever, but rather zooming about with his arms held out flat and slightly flapping them. Like some kind of excitable bird-cross-plane thing. Gives one the urge to go out to the park and bird-plane at some seagulls oneself, really.

In Which Friends Don't Let Friends Sit Up Late Doing Their Theses In The Lounge-room All By Themselves

You may or may not know, Dear Reader (dear Increasingly Hypothetical Reader: now I remember why I enabled those pesky Anonymous Comments in the first place, this lack of feedback is strangely disconcerting, and feels rather like I’m doing that thing where you continue talking to someone who thought you’d finished and has left the room. You know, you’re all “... and that’s why I never eat potato crisps” and you look up for emphasis only to realise that your flatmate is in the bathroom and you’ve been explaining things to your sofa for the last minute and a half. Which is always odd, because it’s somehow much more embarrassing than something which is by definition unwitnessed has any right to be. Anyway, my point is that the lack of comments is vaguely disconcerting, which is hypocritical, since I rarely if ever make the effort to comment on other people’s blogs. Where was I? This is why I shouldn’t blog late at night. Oh yes...) as you may or may not know, Dear Reader, there is still no proper internet at my house. My Fortunate Flatmate Georgia has one of those internet-on-a-stick things, but it seems not to work in my computer, and is pretty slow. The upshot of this is that these ramblings have to be uploaded by USB. Unfortunately, my USB is for some reason unrecognisable to the library computers and also always causes the Georgia-Web to crash, somehow. This being the case, and given that it’s insane to not have a properly functional not-mysteriously-cursed USB in this day and age, I recently bought a bright shiny new one. Which has now completely disappeared.

How does this happen? I know that the disappearance of socks and biros and suchlike is an oft-bewailed mystery, but seriously, what? Where can my USB be? Where is that blue top that I’ve been unable to find for a month and a half? What, in fact, is going on here?

Being as how there’s essentially no hope for a satisfactory solution to this mystery, I suppose we’ll have to settle instead for a slightly eclectic collection of recent occurrences. (Also, did you know that the word “occurrence” is from the Latin “Occurro” meaning to “run up to”? You can figure this out anyway really, that “curro” would mean “run” since “current” is pretty obviously derived from it, I’d reckon. This is sort of satisfying as an image, I think; that occurrences which happen about one are like a guy running up to you on the street and pantingly handing you a message, as if one were a general on the battlefield, or similar. You stand there curiously thumbing open an envelope and out eagerly withdraw a page which reads “You happen to suddenly bump in to an old friend, and go for a cup of coffee, which is lovely, and you wonder how you lost touch” or something, and you think “oh neat, I was wondering how to spend this afternoon.”)

Whoa, not only discursions on “recent occurrences” but also “very long slightly insane tangents in parentheses” and “subclauses lengthier than the overarching sentence from which they depend” apparently. Sorry guys. In my defence, it’s after midnight, and I’m really only up and typing rather than peacefully abed because I’m being moral support. Georgia Who Will Have Honours Really Soon For Sure has her thesis due in about 36 hours, so I’m making a productive and encouraging tapping-and-typing sort of noise while we rock out to Tears For Fears on our laptops in the lounge room. That’s how we roll these last couple of weeks, although naturally we vary the musical selection. Soon, we will watch TV and read books and relax like normal people. In the meanwhile, blog posts are non-compulsory reading but compulsory writing.

This is probably for the best, anyway. The last post I wrote was so lame that I didn’t even bother uploading it (think about the things you’ve read on this blog: if they made the cut and something else didn’t, it must’ve been really pretty seriously lame, and it was), and it’s surely good to get back on the horse, so to speak, in these instances.

It’s been a fairly pleasant 24 hours, really, so I’ve no right to sound so... well, cracked is the only word, isn’t it? On Friday night, I went to the birthday party of Kaveh From My PBL (not everyone’s title is exciting: sometimes you just need a practical descriptor, and this is not a person who needs any more nicknames. I’m aware of at least 4 that he already has, and we’ve only been at uni together for one semester so far). This was delightful event somewhat in the vein of the Red Party, not in the sense that it was a massive charitable event at which awareness was raised and prophylactics distributed, but in that it was at a Venue, not a mere “place” per se, and that you had to lean in towards people to talk because of the efforts of a DJ. Also, the people were again the Med 1 In-Crowd, which I seem to have somehow accidentally sort-of-infiltrated the edge of (one always secretly suspects that people in these cases will suddenly realise and throw you out, like people in a 90s movie set in a High School [why do I keep talking about Teen Movies this month? So odd, I swear they’re not usually this big a part of my lexicon. Only recently, somehow] or something, but this is obviously stupid. Real social groups are permeable, and in real life it’s possible to be a cool attractive popular person who knows who Llando Calrisian is without having to live some kind of lie. I assume. I make no claim to be the former, and I’m not actually sure I’m spelling that name right, so perhaps this is irrelevant to me anyway. I suppose that in this sort of setting, everyone’s likely to be a bit of square, really, aren’t they? I mean, like, deep down, under the body paint? Never mind.)

The party really was nice, I’m not being sarcastic when I say it was delightful; I chatted to several excessively lovely people from my various classes, and their equally pleasant plus-ones where appropriate, as well as chatting to people whose classes I’ve been in for a mere 6 months, and who therefore were perfectly within their rights to make it clear that they didn’t know me from a bar of soap.

In short, being as how such a saccharine time was had by all, there is very little of interest to actually say about the people who were actually part of the event itself, nor about the event, which was, as I believe I’ve noted, nice, except to maybe note as usual that it is an as-yet-unrealised dream to one day learn to mingle at these damn things. It’s so difficult to talk to more than one person at once that when you know fewer than about two thirds of the attendees, you inevitably spend a bunch of time just quietly people-watching (also a lot of fun, let’s face it) and waiting for the conversation to flow back your way. This seems to be something a lot of people manage effortlessly, but we can’t all have these sorts of Socialite Super Powers; some of us are our own Mild Mannered Alter Egos, basically.

The people who just happened to be at the same pub (are you allowed to call places like The Loft “pubs”?) however, were intermittently more remarkable to the uncharitably-minded. One gentleman in particular distinguished himself in this regard. Having danced himself up to where I and some equally unsuspecting girls where standing, he draped an arm across me and exhorted me to dance on the grounds that he was more worthy of our sashaying and company than the guys on our other side because they were Indian. (First note: leaving aside for a second the breathtakingly racist subtext and indeed text of this remark, I’m pretty sure they weren’t all Indian anyway. I know that at least one is Colombian, for a start. My point here is: being brown doesn’t make you Indian, and even being Indian doesn’t make you “Indian” in a stereotyped sense. And being any of these thing doesn’t make you less worth dancing with, holy crap).

At this point this Unspeakable attempted to entertain us with an impression of how it would be to talk to these acquaintances and classmates of ours; “Would you like a curry?” His attempt at an Indian accent would not have been out of place in The Footy Show or something. Or so I imagine, I’ve never actually watched a whole episode, to be honest; I’m not even sure what flavour of football it is that they enjoy. Not soccer, I guess, and this is as close to Football as I really get.

Then he singled out the guy in our class (to whom I’ve never actually been introduced, so his name is a mystery to me, but I see him every day, so I definitely recognise him as having more right to any potential friend-loyalty than some random in a pub, let alone a weirdly inappropriate racist one) and laughed at him for having a turban and a beard. Pretty sure that that hasn’t been acceptable since well before I was born. I went to junior school in Penrith, so if anyone was going to be aware of the things bogans think is acceptable humour, it’s me, and not even 5 year old westies in the late 1980s thought it was cool to point and laugh because someone wore a turban or headscarf. This classmate, I was earnestly assured, would rather offer me a pappadum than dance.

At this point I removed the arm (successful at last, having been attempting since about the 2nd sentence he’d said) and enquired whether the race-themed pickup lines ever worked, and explained that if they ever were, that time was not now. I would’ve pointed out to him the error of his ways at some officious length, but it was too loud to do that without leaning in close to him, and that’s clearly a trap. (Maybe this was, in fact, his plan, who can say?)

The thing is, he seemed genuinely surprised. Why would this be? Could this sort have thing have ever worked? Surely not; he wasn’t that old, surely at no point in his entire adult life has that sort of thing been cool. Sure, the dude was probably massively drunk, but even that wouldn’t make most people think that the way to get chicks is to racially stereotype the people they hang out with. Do you think that this has maybe worked for him in the past? Or is it like a Sasha Baron Cohen movie: all it takes is a couple of drinks and the thin veneer of reasonable-person-ness comes off people, exposing the horrifying unacceptable core, like an M&M dropped into a glass of solvent?

Aaargh. There is no way that wondering about this can help, at this time of night, but I sure hope that that was some random in the pub, not someone from our actual class, because it would probably confuse him I went up to him some day and told him off, since he probably doesn’t remember, and also because I pretty much despair if this is the sort of dude whom the interview process doesn’t cull. Also, I don’t need to accidentally sound like I’m backstabbing someone in from uni on my blog, not again. In this case I’d much rather front-stab anyway.

In happier news, I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie today! It was pretty awesome, although as usual I got to the end grateful to have read the books, since the exposition left a little to be desired. A poignant closing shot of a phoenix (not in flames) is ever so much more poignant when it’s been introduced earlier in the movie. Even having seen the others and read all the books all those times, I still went “what’s with the redhead eagle?” for a second or two. Also, I can’t believe it took me until today to twig that the phoenix is named Fawkes for the purpose of awesomeness. Guy Fawkes you guy! Omg, duh. Think of all the times I’ve read that and not gone “fantastic naming, go team!”; so many wasted opportunities. Still: plan to make up for lost time now, and also totally plan to reread the last book, since I can’t really remember what happens in it anymore, which is great, since I know I enjoyed it last time, so this is a chance to enjoy the book properly all over again. I guess when I read it I was in the throes of that global Potter Fever Pandemic that struck the geeks of the world all at once, so I was probably too excited to pay attention properly.

Funny, really, those events were somehow sort of meta-great. Queuing to buy a book is a whole bunch more fun when you’re doing it with an enormous number of people who share your interests, even if you don’t know them. And the fact that all of the geeks of your particular enthusiastic flavour and fandom all over the world are doing the exact same thing adds a really lovely air of community to it, somehow. Maybe this is how we ought to look at Swine Flu? Not as an insidious world-wide killer but more as some kind of feverishly sniffly harbinger of global togetherness? How touching.