So, I wrote a post about the Red Party the other day, and in my failure to proofread (evident in the prevalence of typos on this blog) totally failed to notice how critical I apparently sounded. What I meant to say was that I perfeorm poorly at these events and find them intimidating, and have never quite understood the culture of 'partying for a cause', mainly because I wouldn't have to foggiest clue as to how to organise such an event without running it so hopelessly into debt that no money was raised whatsoever. Clearly, this is really more of an issue with my failure to throw awesome parties or function socially than otherwise.
What it reads like, though, is a criticism of the event and the way it was run, as I have been made aware by someone leaving an offended comment on said post. I'm sorry if I offended anyone, and this was certainly not my intention.
Damn. :(
Also, curse the onesided anonymity of the internet! Someone is annoyed with me personally, and knows who I am, but I have no idea who. Am not sure if am more horrified with the idea of having hurt the feelings of any of my lovely friends who were involved or with the idea of people I barely know having such a negative experience of me.
@#$%^&*(*&^%
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
In Which Words and Ladies are both Sadly Mistreated.
What is this thing people seem to do where we use words as if they served a purely decorative purpose and had no actual meaning per se? This question is the subject of today's post, although I'll leave out "literally" and "decimate" just because even thinking about the abuse of these innocent and actually meaningful words makes me twitchy.
Right off the bat, I wish to make it clear that I do this sort of thing as well; I always want to use to word “repine” when I mean “rely on something” when it actually means to pine over something; I don’t know why this should be the case, but it intrudes on my semantic life more often than I’d’ve expected. Still, having admitted that fault, I now plan to completely ignore it and harshly judge others by standards I myself fail to meet. Any questions?
There is a newspaper on my kitchen bench at present open to an article about that football-player (NRL? AFL? NFI) who glassed his girlfriend in the face. Touchingly, but slightly creepily, the aforesaid girlfriend has written him a character reference saying that he “never intentionally hurt her" and so on. Leaving aside only for a moment the weird psychology at work here, assuming the guy is as guilty as he’s been found to be in court, there is a phrase in this reference which irks me. “Greg is one of the most loving, sensitive, yet principled men I have known.”
What? Why “yet”? Do you mean “and” but feel “yet” has more class, or do you honestly believe that being ‘loving and sensitive’ and ‘principled’ are usually mutually exclusive and that his (dubious) juxtaposition of these qualities sets him apart? If this latter is actually what this poor woman thinks, then we may have come to the core of the problem; she’s clearly dating the wrong kind of guys. The kind of guys who glass you in the face or ask you to choose between loving sensitivity and principle. Call me greedy and old-fashioned, but I’ve always kind of fancied only dating guys who combined these characteristics (the lovingness, sensitivity and principledness, not the glassing-you-in-the-face; I’m not crazy about being glassed in the face. In fact, glassing me in the face even slightly is something I’ve always considered to be grounds to strike someone off the list completely).
Really worse, because it’s used in situations where clarity of understanding could be a life-and-death matter, is the “visualise” thing. Surgical reports always use this word wrongly, and quite frankly that freaks me out. Any time I’ve gone to sleep and have been cut open, I want all the people involved to understand one another perfectly. “After making the incision I was able to visualise the liver”. Yes? Well if I close my eyes and imagine, I can visualise the liver right now. This means “to see with the mind’s eye” or “imagine”. If you mean that you could see the liver, then, here’s a thought; just flipping well say “see”. No one will think less of you for using a shorter word on the grounds of it being in any way meaningful or relevant.
And don’t try to tell me that this is “just semantics”, either, because semantics means meanings. And if you don’t think that the actual meaning of what you’ve said is relevant then obviously listening to you at all is a waste of time, since according to that approach all language is merely “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing” (or however that quote goes). Saying “that’s just semantics” in a conversation about meanings or words is like saying “that’s just the holocaust” in a conversation about the deaths of millions of Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, mental patients, unemployed people and miscellaneous Europeans in the mid 20th century. (Godwin's Law! That's right, even talking to myself I get so infuriated by this that it's all Nazism.)
Coming back to the obviously more important question of the acceptance of domestic violence for a moment; have you guys heard that song on the radio recently? The one with the verses describing a ‘he hits her so she hits him and they both up the ante’ scenario and the refrain “a kiss with a fist is better than none”? Oh my, I have even stronger feelings about that sort of thing than about visualising things you can see.
First off; what sort of thing is that to say, potentially and inevitably to the victims of domestic violence? Someone who feels trapped in an abusive relationship doesn’t need that. This is something that could potentially have an actual effect on people’s lives (unlike that Chaser sketch, insensitive as it may have been) given how browbeaten and biddable people often feel in these situations.
Secondly, as a single girl who is perfectly ok with being single and unkissed for lengthy periods of time, I rather resent the implication that this is so pathetic that I should look with envy upon beaten wives. What the hell, you guys?
Less weirdly (but coming on the heels of that song, while I was feeling all enraged, enough for me to notice), I heard a song the other day where a man refereed to his wife as “The Wife”. Does this not weird out anyone but me? Sure, call your wife “wifey” in a jokey way, refer to her as “my wife” to people who don’t know her by name, but why the Definite Article? As if she were some kind of strange phenomenon which were visited upon you, like The Plague. Approximately equally irksome is the thing where people refer to their own and (more creepily) others’ husbands as “Hubby” as if that were his name. Again “my husband” is fine, and “my hubby” if you feel the need to be cloyingly saccharine, but you are aware, aren’t you, that he is an individual with an actual identity and his own name? This used to happen at my work all the time, and always put me in the mood to suggest to patients that Anathema would be a lovely name for a baby girl, just to see what would happen.
Conversely, I’m apparently alone among my friends in not finding it creepy for a guy to call his girlfriend (or wife, fiancée, partner, whatever) “Princess”. I realise that it’s putting her on a pedestal and all that sort of thing, but so does any term of endearment, surely? I’ve always been fond of Beautiful and Gorgeous and endearments, but this doesn’t mean that I’m dating people just because I happen to find them decorative. Maybe this is a hypocritical reversal of my position on Hubby and The Wife, but there you go. Maybe it’s because Princess, Gorgeous, Beautiful, or whatever are always used in the vocative. You don’t say “I’ll talk it over with Princess and get back to you” (a sentence I’ve heard Hubby in all too many times); it’s a private name you call them only to their face. Conversely, “The Wife” and “Hubby” are both used to refer to their signifieds in the third person. That’s the thing. If they were pet names, used to the people, I wouldn’t mind, because I wouldn’t be being made to collude with the oddness, it’d be your own affair.
Who am I kidding? It would still totally bug me. But there you go, sometimes in life, you get to be unreasonable, and there’s no time for that like 2am.
PS: For those of you who are unsure, to "decimate" means to kill on in 10 of. So it is exactly a tenth of the strength of "annihilate". This thing where people say "they were absolutely decimated" is maybe even worse than the thing where people say "literaly" of things they could only ever mean figuratively. If the football team "literally decimated" their opponents, what you're saying is that they genuinely and really, not metaphorically, made their opponents choose one man out of every ten on the team, and then killed those guys. @#$%^&*(
Right off the bat, I wish to make it clear that I do this sort of thing as well; I always want to use to word “repine” when I mean “rely on something” when it actually means to pine over something; I don’t know why this should be the case, but it intrudes on my semantic life more often than I’d’ve expected. Still, having admitted that fault, I now plan to completely ignore it and harshly judge others by standards I myself fail to meet. Any questions?
There is a newspaper on my kitchen bench at present open to an article about that football-player (NRL? AFL? NFI) who glassed his girlfriend in the face. Touchingly, but slightly creepily, the aforesaid girlfriend has written him a character reference saying that he “never intentionally hurt her" and so on. Leaving aside only for a moment the weird psychology at work here, assuming the guy is as guilty as he’s been found to be in court, there is a phrase in this reference which irks me. “Greg is one of the most loving, sensitive, yet principled men I have known.”
What? Why “yet”? Do you mean “and” but feel “yet” has more class, or do you honestly believe that being ‘loving and sensitive’ and ‘principled’ are usually mutually exclusive and that his (dubious) juxtaposition of these qualities sets him apart? If this latter is actually what this poor woman thinks, then we may have come to the core of the problem; she’s clearly dating the wrong kind of guys. The kind of guys who glass you in the face or ask you to choose between loving sensitivity and principle. Call me greedy and old-fashioned, but I’ve always kind of fancied only dating guys who combined these characteristics (the lovingness, sensitivity and principledness, not the glassing-you-in-the-face; I’m not crazy about being glassed in the face. In fact, glassing me in the face even slightly is something I’ve always considered to be grounds to strike someone off the list completely).
Really worse, because it’s used in situations where clarity of understanding could be a life-and-death matter, is the “visualise” thing. Surgical reports always use this word wrongly, and quite frankly that freaks me out. Any time I’ve gone to sleep and have been cut open, I want all the people involved to understand one another perfectly. “After making the incision I was able to visualise the liver”. Yes? Well if I close my eyes and imagine, I can visualise the liver right now. This means “to see with the mind’s eye” or “imagine”. If you mean that you could see the liver, then, here’s a thought; just flipping well say “see”. No one will think less of you for using a shorter word on the grounds of it being in any way meaningful or relevant.
And don’t try to tell me that this is “just semantics”, either, because semantics means meanings. And if you don’t think that the actual meaning of what you’ve said is relevant then obviously listening to you at all is a waste of time, since according to that approach all language is merely “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing” (or however that quote goes). Saying “that’s just semantics” in a conversation about meanings or words is like saying “that’s just the holocaust” in a conversation about the deaths of millions of Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, mental patients, unemployed people and miscellaneous Europeans in the mid 20th century. (Godwin's Law! That's right, even talking to myself I get so infuriated by this that it's all Nazism.)
Coming back to the obviously more important question of the acceptance of domestic violence for a moment; have you guys heard that song on the radio recently? The one with the verses describing a ‘he hits her so she hits him and they both up the ante’ scenario and the refrain “a kiss with a fist is better than none”? Oh my, I have even stronger feelings about that sort of thing than about visualising things you can see.
First off; what sort of thing is that to say, potentially and inevitably to the victims of domestic violence? Someone who feels trapped in an abusive relationship doesn’t need that. This is something that could potentially have an actual effect on people’s lives (unlike that Chaser sketch, insensitive as it may have been) given how browbeaten and biddable people often feel in these situations.
Secondly, as a single girl who is perfectly ok with being single and unkissed for lengthy periods of time, I rather resent the implication that this is so pathetic that I should look with envy upon beaten wives. What the hell, you guys?
Less weirdly (but coming on the heels of that song, while I was feeling all enraged, enough for me to notice), I heard a song the other day where a man refereed to his wife as “The Wife”. Does this not weird out anyone but me? Sure, call your wife “wifey” in a jokey way, refer to her as “my wife” to people who don’t know her by name, but why the Definite Article? As if she were some kind of strange phenomenon which were visited upon you, like The Plague. Approximately equally irksome is the thing where people refer to their own and (more creepily) others’ husbands as “Hubby” as if that were his name. Again “my husband” is fine, and “my hubby” if you feel the need to be cloyingly saccharine, but you are aware, aren’t you, that he is an individual with an actual identity and his own name? This used to happen at my work all the time, and always put me in the mood to suggest to patients that Anathema would be a lovely name for a baby girl, just to see what would happen.
Conversely, I’m apparently alone among my friends in not finding it creepy for a guy to call his girlfriend (or wife, fiancée, partner, whatever) “Princess”. I realise that it’s putting her on a pedestal and all that sort of thing, but so does any term of endearment, surely? I’ve always been fond of Beautiful and Gorgeous and endearments, but this doesn’t mean that I’m dating people just because I happen to find them decorative. Maybe this is a hypocritical reversal of my position on Hubby and The Wife, but there you go. Maybe it’s because Princess, Gorgeous, Beautiful, or whatever are always used in the vocative. You don’t say “I’ll talk it over with Princess and get back to you” (a sentence I’ve heard Hubby in all too many times); it’s a private name you call them only to their face. Conversely, “The Wife” and “Hubby” are both used to refer to their signifieds in the third person. That’s the thing. If they were pet names, used to the people, I wouldn’t mind, because I wouldn’t be being made to collude with the oddness, it’d be your own affair.
Who am I kidding? It would still totally bug me. But there you go, sometimes in life, you get to be unreasonable, and there’s no time for that like 2am.
PS: For those of you who are unsure, to "decimate" means to kill on in 10 of. So it is exactly a tenth of the strength of "annihilate". This thing where people say "they were absolutely decimated" is maybe even worse than the thing where people say "literaly" of things they could only ever mean figuratively. If the football team "literally decimated" their opponents, what you're saying is that they genuinely and really, not metaphorically, made their opponents choose one man out of every ten on the team, and then killed those guys. @#$%^&*(
In Which Expectations are not so much Great as Mildly Unhinged
On Friday it was the End-of-Block Party (not “the end of Bloc Party”, as in, “we decided to kill that band”) which, for all you non-Med kids is sort of like an end of semester party but less so. Anyway, this one was dubbed the “Red Party” ( the previous one having been a White Party, which makes us sound rather like bunches of skirmishers in the Tudors vs. Stuarts War of the Roses, now I come to write it down). Everyone was supposed to wear red (which was done with the usual level of commitment by the various attenders, which is to say that Yours Truly got completely carried away, and many people merely claimed to have thought that the pinkish tint on their black dresses was adequate on the grounds of serving a higher deity than Having-Fun-And-Not-Taking-Yourself-Very-Seriously, to wit: Looking-Hot-No-Matter-What) to support AIDS. Not to support AIDS in its admirable quest for global domination, obviously, but in order to help fight it. You know, because nothing says “serious funding for important autoimmune disease research” like “one free drink with ticket, wear red and be prepared to get lucky!!”. To this end, condoms were also handed out at this most salubrious of soirées, which advanced the cause presumably in the sense of (a) raising the awareness of the Medicine students that condom use reduced the spread of STIs and (b) reducing the risk of any of us catching it on the night. After all, thinking about AIDS is bound to put anyone in the mood (is apparently the gist), so it’s better to be safe than sorry.
ANYWAY. These trivialities aside, a reasonably pleasant time was had by all, and even if getting completely into the costume spirit was about as hip as it ever is, I still had fun (because I always do) dressing up for it. In fact, let’s face it, what with uncomfortable shoes and gigadecibel noise levels (hyperbole aside, is that even a word?) and crowding and expensive drinks and what have you, it’s important to really enjoy getting dressed up for these things because it’s so often the highlight of the evening. Maybe this attitude on my part contributes to the fact that this so often ends up being the case, but insight or any semblance of constructive thinking has never had any real role to play in the realm of blogging, let’s face it.
This is not, in fact, meant negatively, I actually really enjoy the aesthetics of interesting clothes and a chance to wear all the makeup you want without looking like a twit at 8 in the morning. At such an event, you can really go to town on your makeup, which is much more fun than just normal “try to look exactly like yourself only slightly better” makeup. I like doing this occasionally, because although I know I don’t look that different, and although anyone who was so much as slightly interested could find about a squillion (or about 280, which is more in that “a million deaths is a statistic” kind of way) photos of me on facebook, I like to pretend to myself that sometimes someone might go “ooh!” in a teen-movie post-makeover “She’s All That” spirit. I realise that this is dim (not least because that was a terrible movie, and, like I said, I barely look that different) but I lead a small sort of life and I think it is not unreasonable for me to extract these moments of mindless enjoyment from it. I do not, of course, wish for all the Freddie Prinz Jnrs. (heh) to fall for me beside fairylit pools or whatever it is, I just like to look noticeably levelled-up, so to speak.
Anyway, the upshot of this sort of slipshod thinking (and of our internet-filled and feedback-form-formed age) is that a part of me always sort of expects to get feedback about this sort of thing. Not just outfits and social functioning, but the party as a whole. This is probably a function of the fact that I’ve been being “educated” in one way or another for very nearly 20 years now (holy crap, this is the 19th year running, even if we don’t count preschool, whic we totally shoul, right?), and have basically accepted “being marked” as one of the basic precepts of life, I suppose. But this is very rarely something which actually happens for these sorts of social events. If you’re lucky, photos of you will end up on facebook (if you’re very lucky, one or two of them will even be flattering), and maybe some nit like me will write a blog post about how nice it was or something, but ultimately this is not actual follow-up in any meaningful sense.
At least having blamed the school system for this particular bit of oddness I don’t need to really worry about this strangely pathological urge of mine to ask “how I went” after these sorts of thing, I just need to continue to strenuously resist it.
This lack of feedback is probably a good thing anyway, for two reasons, even aside from the obvious ones like “who needs to worry about that sort of thing at a party? You definitely need to get out more, but maybe to different parties to the ones I’ll be at, yeah?”.
Firstly, I catch myself constantly expecting these sorts of big events to be actually momentous in some way. For something really Big and Important and Exciting to happen. In fact, these sorts of things (or things which seemed so at the time, which is enough) have happened in a good way a total of maybe four times in my adult life, despite the hundreds of parties I’ve been to. Usually what happens if you go to a party is exactly what you would expect, which is to say, very little which is out of the ordinary. This has the weird effect, in the meanwhile, that I catch myself at the party feeling like I’m waiting for the Thing to happen, when in fact it’s happening all around me, already, but is not all that momentous.
Secondly, I have a really quite impressive gift for faux pas. Notable this time is that asked if I came to this sort of party often I answered over-honestly, “not really”, and asked what it was that I did do, was utterly unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. The correct response, of course, is “I usually go to house parties” (rather than noisy crowded Event events), but this only occurred to me fully 24 hours later. At the time I succeeded in giving the impression of being some kind of housebound maiden aunt type who only occasionally leaves the house to do anachronistic things like Swing Dancing (which I like, so there). Also, asked what sort of music I actually like, I always seem to fumble inarticulately. “Oh,” (I say), “you know, most music. Lots of stuff. Not this song, particularly, but a lot of things...” And here I get carried away with not wanting to sound like a self-indulgent wanker who thinks their music taste is better than anyone else’s, and claim to have even worse taste than I actually have. What’s that even about, self? Maybe it’s because of the fact that there are, at present, 49.2 days worth of music in my iTunes. Any attempt to typefy such an amorphous mass of music must inevitably fail, but I really should pick 3 bands whose names to plump out on these occasions. Hip, but not alienatingly obscure, appealing but not overpopular. Preferably bands whose music I actually enjoy. On these grounds, Cathy Petöcz, Coldplay and The Presets are respectively excluded. Ok. In the future, I shall say “’The Bird & The Bee’, ‘Camera Obscura’, ‘The Postal Service’ and Lily Allen, this week, but I’m much to fickle to have proper favourites” which has the advantage of truth. Excellent!
ANYWAY. These trivialities aside, a reasonably pleasant time was had by all, and even if getting completely into the costume spirit was about as hip as it ever is, I still had fun (because I always do) dressing up for it. In fact, let’s face it, what with uncomfortable shoes and gigadecibel noise levels (hyperbole aside, is that even a word?) and crowding and expensive drinks and what have you, it’s important to really enjoy getting dressed up for these things because it’s so often the highlight of the evening. Maybe this attitude on my part contributes to the fact that this so often ends up being the case, but insight or any semblance of constructive thinking has never had any real role to play in the realm of blogging, let’s face it.
This is not, in fact, meant negatively, I actually really enjoy the aesthetics of interesting clothes and a chance to wear all the makeup you want without looking like a twit at 8 in the morning. At such an event, you can really go to town on your makeup, which is much more fun than just normal “try to look exactly like yourself only slightly better” makeup. I like doing this occasionally, because although I know I don’t look that different, and although anyone who was so much as slightly interested could find about a squillion (or about 280, which is more in that “a million deaths is a statistic” kind of way) photos of me on facebook, I like to pretend to myself that sometimes someone might go “ooh!” in a teen-movie post-makeover “She’s All That” spirit. I realise that this is dim (not least because that was a terrible movie, and, like I said, I barely look that different) but I lead a small sort of life and I think it is not unreasonable for me to extract these moments of mindless enjoyment from it. I do not, of course, wish for all the Freddie Prinz Jnrs. (heh) to fall for me beside fairylit pools or whatever it is, I just like to look noticeably levelled-up, so to speak.
Anyway, the upshot of this sort of slipshod thinking (and of our internet-filled and feedback-form-formed age) is that a part of me always sort of expects to get feedback about this sort of thing. Not just outfits and social functioning, but the party as a whole. This is probably a function of the fact that I’ve been being “educated” in one way or another for very nearly 20 years now (holy crap, this is the 19th year running, even if we don’t count preschool, whic we totally shoul, right?), and have basically accepted “being marked” as one of the basic precepts of life, I suppose. But this is very rarely something which actually happens for these sorts of social events. If you’re lucky, photos of you will end up on facebook (if you’re very lucky, one or two of them will even be flattering), and maybe some nit like me will write a blog post about how nice it was or something, but ultimately this is not actual follow-up in any meaningful sense.
At least having blamed the school system for this particular bit of oddness I don’t need to really worry about this strangely pathological urge of mine to ask “how I went” after these sorts of thing, I just need to continue to strenuously resist it.
This lack of feedback is probably a good thing anyway, for two reasons, even aside from the obvious ones like “who needs to worry about that sort of thing at a party? You definitely need to get out more, but maybe to different parties to the ones I’ll be at, yeah?”.
Firstly, I catch myself constantly expecting these sorts of big events to be actually momentous in some way. For something really Big and Important and Exciting to happen. In fact, these sorts of things (or things which seemed so at the time, which is enough) have happened in a good way a total of maybe four times in my adult life, despite the hundreds of parties I’ve been to. Usually what happens if you go to a party is exactly what you would expect, which is to say, very little which is out of the ordinary. This has the weird effect, in the meanwhile, that I catch myself at the party feeling like I’m waiting for the Thing to happen, when in fact it’s happening all around me, already, but is not all that momentous.
Secondly, I have a really quite impressive gift for faux pas. Notable this time is that asked if I came to this sort of party often I answered over-honestly, “not really”, and asked what it was that I did do, was utterly unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. The correct response, of course, is “I usually go to house parties” (rather than noisy crowded Event events), but this only occurred to me fully 24 hours later. At the time I succeeded in giving the impression of being some kind of housebound maiden aunt type who only occasionally leaves the house to do anachronistic things like Swing Dancing (which I like, so there). Also, asked what sort of music I actually like, I always seem to fumble inarticulately. “Oh,” (I say), “you know, most music. Lots of stuff. Not this song, particularly, but a lot of things...” And here I get carried away with not wanting to sound like a self-indulgent wanker who thinks their music taste is better than anyone else’s, and claim to have even worse taste than I actually have. What’s that even about, self? Maybe it’s because of the fact that there are, at present, 49.2 days worth of music in my iTunes. Any attempt to typefy such an amorphous mass of music must inevitably fail, but I really should pick 3 bands whose names to plump out on these occasions. Hip, but not alienatingly obscure, appealing but not overpopular. Preferably bands whose music I actually enjoy. On these grounds, Cathy Petöcz, Coldplay and The Presets are respectively excluded. Ok. In the future, I shall say “’The Bird & The Bee’, ‘Camera Obscura’, ‘The Postal Service’ and Lily Allen, this week, but I’m much to fickle to have proper favourites” which has the advantage of truth. Excellent!
Monday, June 22, 2009
In Which Parcels are given their Due
Today, in the mail, I got a parcel. Not even just a mailed package of some uninspiring kind (honestly, I can’t even think of anything to put after the “like, for instance, a...” which I’d just typed. Is there anything boring to get in the mail?) but a full-on gift, mailed with a card. How awesome is that?*
There’s something fantastic about being mailed things. Letters are interesting and exciting (when they’re actual letters, rather than confirmation of enrolment forms, or bills, or Thai menus) but parcels are the both the brilliant excitements of gifts and mail combined into some kind of ultraexciting superobject. (Usually. There are exceptions to all rules in life, and friends deciding to mail me, say, half a mouse, in hilarious response to this post will be dealt with with unwonted sternness).
I don’t know what it is about the parcel process which makes things so fantastic. It could be the surprise (and certainly expected parcels are less exciting, but they’re still pretty damn fantastic), or the extra effort (thus, when I was mailed the brass plaque of my degree, I was not as excited by it as I would’ve been by something sent by a friend), or it could be that someone-was-thinking-of-me-when-I-wasn’t-there flatteringness (and this is a concept which I find unduly intriguing). I think in all probability that it’s a combination of this last point and the all-encompassing mystery of it. You don’t have any idea what will be in it (or if you do, you’ve been waiting for whatever it was in suspense), you often have no idea who it’s from (although a return address is always a good idea, nay a necessity, in a parcel, an expert in receiving parcels knows not to look straight away), and you have no idea what prompted whomever it was to post whatever it is to you.
Man, the more I think about it, the more I wish I got more of these things. Seriously, the more you think about them, the better they are.
Today’s parcel was a delayed birthday present from Hellena, a beautiful little wallet thing which she bought for me in Hong Kong (I think?). The previous one (a few months ago) had an “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” (which is so great, you guys) DVD and some parfait spoons, from Sylvia as a moving out present. (This gift was sort of meta-brilliant, combining as it did a replacement for the DVD she’s taken with her on moving moved out, - of the first and best season of a show so brilliant that it has entered the lexicon of my entire friend-core - and spoons of a variety which is also unarticulatably awesome. Parfait spoons are like tea spoons but with very long handles, for eating icecream and milkshakes and such (and getting the last St Dalfour’s marmalade out of the jar). It’s hard to quantify what it is that’s so great about them, but I do find them awfully appealing.) Before that, Georgia mailed me a surprise Christmas gift of a soap which looked and smelled like a giant licorice allsort, which was really really nice.
Once, long ago, when my Charming Cousin Alexander was far away on his navy ship (not boat), and had mentioned that he missed chocolate, I mailed him a parcel of every available type of Cadbury chocolate and extra plain Dairy Milk, about 40cm x 20cmx 10cm, which was thrillingly successful. Apparently this sort of gift rapidly makes you the most popular Midshipman aboard, and apart from that, it was heaps of fun to mail, knowing that the receiver would have no idea what was in it until he opened it.
Now I think about it, I don;t know why it should surprise and please me so much to think that the people I’m friends with think about me with fondness when I’m not there. I think fondly about friends all the time, often in their absence, and often see things and think “Ooh, Catie would love that, I should get this!” (usually just before checking my account balance and going “oh” in a small, sad sort of voice). So why should it be surprising when others do so? The more I think about it, the more I realise that I find it hard to really believe that people are thinking of me in my absence. This doesn’t bother me, it just means that I’m always startled when people say “we were talking about you the other day, and...” which is weird given how much time I spend talking about people. For someone who writes such a consistently self-absorbed and introspective blog, I sure do seem to have been standing behind the door when they were handing out the insight.
Ooh, I was about to go off on a tangent here about this point, but I note that this post is now 2 pages long, so I guess I’d better sign out before I fill everyone’s Google Reader up (or however it is that that thing works) but rest assured, dear Reader; you haven’t heard the last from me.
*NB: when I write "How awesome is that?" I want you to read it, not as a sincere question ("What is the exact degree of awesomeness pertaining to this object or event?") but in the excitable tone in which one would say "..and he's got a pilot's license, imagine that!" if one were Vince in the Mighty Boosh.
There’s something fantastic about being mailed things. Letters are interesting and exciting (when they’re actual letters, rather than confirmation of enrolment forms, or bills, or Thai menus) but parcels are the both the brilliant excitements of gifts and mail combined into some kind of ultraexciting superobject. (Usually. There are exceptions to all rules in life, and friends deciding to mail me, say, half a mouse, in hilarious response to this post will be dealt with with unwonted sternness).
I don’t know what it is about the parcel process which makes things so fantastic. It could be the surprise (and certainly expected parcels are less exciting, but they’re still pretty damn fantastic), or the extra effort (thus, when I was mailed the brass plaque of my degree, I was not as excited by it as I would’ve been by something sent by a friend), or it could be that someone-was-thinking-of-me-when-I-wasn’t-there flatteringness (and this is a concept which I find unduly intriguing). I think in all probability that it’s a combination of this last point and the all-encompassing mystery of it. You don’t have any idea what will be in it (or if you do, you’ve been waiting for whatever it was in suspense), you often have no idea who it’s from (although a return address is always a good idea, nay a necessity, in a parcel, an expert in receiving parcels knows not to look straight away), and you have no idea what prompted whomever it was to post whatever it is to you.
Man, the more I think about it, the more I wish I got more of these things. Seriously, the more you think about them, the better they are.
Today’s parcel was a delayed birthday present from Hellena, a beautiful little wallet thing which she bought for me in Hong Kong (I think?). The previous one (a few months ago) had an “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” (which is so great, you guys) DVD and some parfait spoons, from Sylvia as a moving out present. (This gift was sort of meta-brilliant, combining as it did a replacement for the DVD she’s taken with her on moving moved out, - of the first and best season of a show so brilliant that it has entered the lexicon of my entire friend-core - and spoons of a variety which is also unarticulatably awesome. Parfait spoons are like tea spoons but with very long handles, for eating icecream and milkshakes and such (and getting the last St Dalfour’s marmalade out of the jar). It’s hard to quantify what it is that’s so great about them, but I do find them awfully appealing.) Before that, Georgia mailed me a surprise Christmas gift of a soap which looked and smelled like a giant licorice allsort, which was really really nice.
Once, long ago, when my Charming Cousin Alexander was far away on his navy ship (not boat), and had mentioned that he missed chocolate, I mailed him a parcel of every available type of Cadbury chocolate and extra plain Dairy Milk, about 40cm x 20cmx 10cm, which was thrillingly successful. Apparently this sort of gift rapidly makes you the most popular Midshipman aboard, and apart from that, it was heaps of fun to mail, knowing that the receiver would have no idea what was in it until he opened it.
Now I think about it, I don;t know why it should surprise and please me so much to think that the people I’m friends with think about me with fondness when I’m not there. I think fondly about friends all the time, often in their absence, and often see things and think “Ooh, Catie would love that, I should get this!” (usually just before checking my account balance and going “oh” in a small, sad sort of voice). So why should it be surprising when others do so? The more I think about it, the more I realise that I find it hard to really believe that people are thinking of me in my absence. This doesn’t bother me, it just means that I’m always startled when people say “we were talking about you the other day, and...” which is weird given how much time I spend talking about people. For someone who writes such a consistently self-absorbed and introspective blog, I sure do seem to have been standing behind the door when they were handing out the insight.
Ooh, I was about to go off on a tangent here about this point, but I note that this post is now 2 pages long, so I guess I’d better sign out before I fill everyone’s Google Reader up (or however it is that that thing works) but rest assured, dear Reader; you haven’t heard the last from me.
*NB: when I write "How awesome is that?" I want you to read it, not as a sincere question ("What is the exact degree of awesomeness pertaining to this object or event?") but in the excitable tone in which one would say "..and he's got a pilot's license, imagine that!" if one were Vince in the Mighty Boosh.
Friday, June 19, 2009
In Which Blogs and Overanalysis are contemplated in some kind of Meta-Post
The thing is that blogs are doomed to failure. Not that the institution of blogging is dying out over all, you understand (although it certainly seems that its halcyon days are past, in this era of twitter and sporadic updating), but that each and every blog is, in and of itself, condemned by its own genre. (Blogs are much like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories in this respect. That genre is also infuriatingly incomplete-feeling, and leaves one feeling that in order to fully comprehend one’s reading matter, one would need to reread all the pages in different orders, as well as being something which sounds like a really good idea until you think about it even fleetingly.)
The problem is that blogs are pointless. This is broadly the point of a blog; one “logs” one’s thoughts or whatever, like a ship’s captain or similar. And this would be fine, except that most entries in ship’s logs were/are probably along the lines of “Still at sea, heading North by North West at whatever latitude and longitude. Tired of ship’s biscuit, strangely attracted to Cabin Boy, still not king [or ‘there yet’ or whatever it is that sailors want to be. ‘Free of syphilis’, maybe?].” Even when exciting things happen, they wouldn’t be written down excitingly. “Met the French in battle, engaged at 11:30am, no loss of life” is probably the way thrilling battles get logged, and the Marie Celeste doesn’t have anything like “Aliens or miscellaneous mysterious being here to kidnap us all, even though we’re halfway through dinner, brb”. It’s essentially pointless for entertainment, is what I’m trying to say here.
And that would be unfortunate even in the case of a ship’s log, but most people are not usually trying to discover the Lost Continent or fight the battles of Trafalgar, or sneak Aztec gold past the Armada or anything. Most people get up, go to work/uni, come home, relax briefly, go to bed, rinse repeat. In fact, that’s what’s particularly odd: when something fantastically interesting has happened to one, and one wishes to blog about it, these are invariably the least interesting posts to actually read (or certainly this is the case for this blog). The posts which really work are the ones where one rambles idly about some point of irrelevant thought tangentially related to one’s life. (Or this is what I tell myself, obviously).
My Very Cool Flatmate Georgia recently went to see some kind of interview/talk thing with Christian Lander, the guy who writes “Stuff White People Like” and apparently his advice for successful blogging (and man, that dude knows about successful blogging, he got a book deal within 3 months of starting his blog, or something) was above all to make your blog “about something” not just a collection of ramblings. This clearly works really well sometimes; Stuff White People Like and Cake Wrecks and Postsecret are all fantastic. But are they really blogs in the original sense? They’re kind of more like serialised articles in the newspapers of old, surely. So they’re not so much exceptions to the problem with blogs as cheating by not being really blogs per se, not attempting to record the minutiae of the lives of their writers or really “log” anything.
Also, obviously, there’s the problem of audience. I’ve blathered about this in the past (really, almost incessantly). Blogs are both 100% public - mine’s accessible to people I’ve never even heard of, let alone anyone I’ve ever met - and at the same time unlikely to be read by almost anyone. This post alone is already almost 600 words long, and with everyone on the internet constantly typing, who is there to read it all? So when you write a blog post, you need to write it such that it would be ok for anyone in the world to read it, and at the same time acknowledge to yourself that the odds are that no-one will.
Maybe that’s the problem with the content, and the reason that I keep posting this sort of thing. If interesting things happen to me, they make for very dry blog posts, and if they’re that interesting, I’m too busy doing them to blog about them. This leaves only the idle contemplation which is so often inappropriate for general publication. Thus, I’ve always fancied the idea of writing a blog post about all that fantastically pathological overanalysis which goes with being a person interacting with other people, but blogging about it would by definition make it worse.
I don’t know if anyone else does it (the overanalysis, you uinderstand) to the same extent or if I just really need to get out more, but so much do I enjoy trying to figure out who likes whom and what’s going on in everyone’s lives that sometimes I lose all concept of social normality. What’s the difference between friendly banter and flirtatiousness? I’ve never been sure (and man, not being any good at that distinction has caused awkwardness of both the obvious kinds), maybe because of having gone to a non-co-ed school. (This theory is clearly bollocks, though, since everyone else seems ok at it, probably it’s just me.) How do people tell what’s going on around them?
How, in particular, does one deal with the sort of person who pays people extravagantly insincere compliments, or playfully criticises one? That “Sunscreen” song which was so popular in about 1998 told us to “remember compliments you receive, forget the insults”, and even if it’s hard to do that without sounding ludicrously self indulgent (3 words which perfectly sum up the blogging thing, by the way), when is that appropriate? Someone the other day told me that I was “really easy to dance with, great” which was awesomely spontaneous and probably sincere, so you’d keep that in the mental file (also, awesome!). Conversely, being told that you’re “the hottest girl” in whatever category is always vaguely suspicious. Maybe this is because of some kind of deep seated insecurity, or maybe because compliments like that are so rarely sincere (indeed, the frequency of their being accurate would perforce vary inversely with the size of the category of comparison, yeah?). In this instance, the “hottest girl” category was generously expanded to include basically all the girls present pretty much straight away, which is even more of a red flag in terms of bothering to be properly pleased.
Still, obviously all such things are well meant and have a core of complimentarity to them. Even a car full of guys shouting “show us yer tits” is ultimately complimentary, even if clearly impurely motivated (not to say distressingly pointless, surely?) so maybe it’s foolish to try and weigh these things. But that, of course, is the nature of overanalysis, I guess, and everyone needs a hobby. It’s stupid, but it’s probably my favourite: overanalysis, swing dancing, craft projects. Also maybe tea?
Whoa, this post has gotten way too long, sorry guys, and well done to anyone who’s made it this far.
See? I told you I’d mention you.
The problem is that blogs are pointless. This is broadly the point of a blog; one “logs” one’s thoughts or whatever, like a ship’s captain or similar. And this would be fine, except that most entries in ship’s logs were/are probably along the lines of “Still at sea, heading North by North West at whatever latitude and longitude. Tired of ship’s biscuit, strangely attracted to Cabin Boy, still not king [or ‘there yet’ or whatever it is that sailors want to be. ‘Free of syphilis’, maybe?].” Even when exciting things happen, they wouldn’t be written down excitingly. “Met the French in battle, engaged at 11:30am, no loss of life” is probably the way thrilling battles get logged, and the Marie Celeste doesn’t have anything like “Aliens or miscellaneous mysterious being here to kidnap us all, even though we’re halfway through dinner, brb”. It’s essentially pointless for entertainment, is what I’m trying to say here.
And that would be unfortunate even in the case of a ship’s log, but most people are not usually trying to discover the Lost Continent or fight the battles of Trafalgar, or sneak Aztec gold past the Armada or anything. Most people get up, go to work/uni, come home, relax briefly, go to bed, rinse repeat. In fact, that’s what’s particularly odd: when something fantastically interesting has happened to one, and one wishes to blog about it, these are invariably the least interesting posts to actually read (or certainly this is the case for this blog). The posts which really work are the ones where one rambles idly about some point of irrelevant thought tangentially related to one’s life. (Or this is what I tell myself, obviously).
My Very Cool Flatmate Georgia recently went to see some kind of interview/talk thing with Christian Lander, the guy who writes “Stuff White People Like” and apparently his advice for successful blogging (and man, that dude knows about successful blogging, he got a book deal within 3 months of starting his blog, or something) was above all to make your blog “about something” not just a collection of ramblings. This clearly works really well sometimes; Stuff White People Like and Cake Wrecks and Postsecret are all fantastic. But are they really blogs in the original sense? They’re kind of more like serialised articles in the newspapers of old, surely. So they’re not so much exceptions to the problem with blogs as cheating by not being really blogs per se, not attempting to record the minutiae of the lives of their writers or really “log” anything.
Also, obviously, there’s the problem of audience. I’ve blathered about this in the past (really, almost incessantly). Blogs are both 100% public - mine’s accessible to people I’ve never even heard of, let alone anyone I’ve ever met - and at the same time unlikely to be read by almost anyone. This post alone is already almost 600 words long, and with everyone on the internet constantly typing, who is there to read it all? So when you write a blog post, you need to write it such that it would be ok for anyone in the world to read it, and at the same time acknowledge to yourself that the odds are that no-one will.
Maybe that’s the problem with the content, and the reason that I keep posting this sort of thing. If interesting things happen to me, they make for very dry blog posts, and if they’re that interesting, I’m too busy doing them to blog about them. This leaves only the idle contemplation which is so often inappropriate for general publication. Thus, I’ve always fancied the idea of writing a blog post about all that fantastically pathological overanalysis which goes with being a person interacting with other people, but blogging about it would by definition make it worse.
I don’t know if anyone else does it (the overanalysis, you uinderstand) to the same extent or if I just really need to get out more, but so much do I enjoy trying to figure out who likes whom and what’s going on in everyone’s lives that sometimes I lose all concept of social normality. What’s the difference between friendly banter and flirtatiousness? I’ve never been sure (and man, not being any good at that distinction has caused awkwardness of both the obvious kinds), maybe because of having gone to a non-co-ed school. (This theory is clearly bollocks, though, since everyone else seems ok at it, probably it’s just me.) How do people tell what’s going on around them?
How, in particular, does one deal with the sort of person who pays people extravagantly insincere compliments, or playfully criticises one? That “Sunscreen” song which was so popular in about 1998 told us to “remember compliments you receive, forget the insults”, and even if it’s hard to do that without sounding ludicrously self indulgent (3 words which perfectly sum up the blogging thing, by the way), when is that appropriate? Someone the other day told me that I was “really easy to dance with, great” which was awesomely spontaneous and probably sincere, so you’d keep that in the mental file (also, awesome!). Conversely, being told that you’re “the hottest girl” in whatever category is always vaguely suspicious. Maybe this is because of some kind of deep seated insecurity, or maybe because compliments like that are so rarely sincere (indeed, the frequency of their being accurate would perforce vary inversely with the size of the category of comparison, yeah?). In this instance, the “hottest girl” category was generously expanded to include basically all the girls present pretty much straight away, which is even more of a red flag in terms of bothering to be properly pleased.
Still, obviously all such things are well meant and have a core of complimentarity to them. Even a car full of guys shouting “show us yer tits” is ultimately complimentary, even if clearly impurely motivated (not to say distressingly pointless, surely?) so maybe it’s foolish to try and weigh these things. But that, of course, is the nature of overanalysis, I guess, and everyone needs a hobby. It’s stupid, but it’s probably my favourite: overanalysis, swing dancing, craft projects. Also maybe tea?
Whoa, this post has gotten way too long, sorry guys, and well done to anyone who’s made it this far.
See? I told you I’d mention you.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
In Which an Outlandish Birthday Gift is Fantastically Successful
This pst, contrary to the usual spirit of this blog (UFOs fighting dinosaurs! Etcetera!) actually has a point; it details the adventures involved in the creation of Andrew's 24th birthday present, the all time best gift I have ever created, or will ever be bothered to create. If this seems like your sort of thing, read on, oh reader...
For reasons that are now largely lost to me, but which apparently have something to do with an episode of Scrubs, it has long been an ambition of Andrew’s to own a “Onesie” to wear about the house. You know the things, they’re basically a pair of pyjamas which are all one piece. Odd rural male characters in old kid’s movies (The Fox & The Hound, maybe?) used to wear red ones with a button-up flap on the back, possibly as underwear. You probably had one in your youth with built-in feet of dubious grip, and pockets, and usually a teddy bear on the left breast.
Well, since Andrew is essentially my best-friend-in-law, and since he is as hard to buy gifts for as all the other boys on the planet (Seriously, why are boys so difficult to buy gifts for? I wish they would just take to wearing earrings, like girls. Not for aesthetic reasons, obviously, because I’m pretty sure it’d look terrible, but at least you’d have a default gift, y’know?), and since I’ve recently taken to doing craft projects to keep me warm while we watch TV of an evening, I figured that this birthday it was time to do something about it.
Finding a pattern was rather more difficult than you might imagine, since the market for adult onesies is limited to say the least, but eventually a pattern was located in the “girls’ nightwear” section of a pattern book in the Spotlight in Penrith. It was decided that a car theme would be ideal, given that Andrew is maybe even more of a Top Gear and Really Fast Car fan than most of his demographic, and miraculously, an absolutely perfect fabric was there; flannelette with cars and racing flags and “Champion” signs all over it, all in the compulsory white-and-primary-colours scheme necessary for such a garment.
Over the next few weeks, during Foyle’s War, a complete series of Doctor Who, and a season and a half of Twin Peaks (due to Flatmate-Thesis, Reality TV, and weird reception such that our TV picks up Prime and Win rather than the usual channels 7 and 9, we mainly watch TV-on-DVD in short crazes in our house) it was cut out, dithered over, and sewn. I’m too lazy to go to the barely perceptible effort of setting up the sewing machine and dedicating the actual time to making things, so it was all hand sewn on the sofa, which may mean that it falls apart on the first wash, but by then it will have served its gift-purpose.
In terms of wrapping, since I got efficient and cleaned my room last week, turning up, amongst a quantity of other junk, a largeish shoebox, it was decided that in order to explain the weird choice of fabric, the box would be coated in pictures from a Top Gear magazine, which turned out to work brilliantly.
Last year, I’d taken it into my head to make him a beanie which looked like a MarioKart chain-chomp, which didn’t actually fit, which was a bit anxiety-provoking for this year, but not only did it fit, Andrew tried it on at his birthday party and didn’t take it off until after the end of his birthday party, which was fantastic.
So, verbiage aside, here’s what we’ve got.
The box, fabric, and the tools of production:
A better view of the box, on our awful carpet:
The fabric itself, with the pocket turned out (I failed to take any pictures which have the collar, cuffs, pockets and soles of feet all in them, but they’re all in this stars-and-stripes fabric, with the stars made grippy with clear fabric paint on the soles):
Andrew in suit:
And a risqué close-up of the back-panel (which I’d had to draft, since obviously the people who designed the pattern where making a slightly less ridiculous garment) – note the great buttons we found, the same colour scheme as the cars on the suit cloth.
Anyway, you guys, long story short, it was basically the most satisfyingly successful thing ever, and was ridiculously awesome.
For reasons that are now largely lost to me, but which apparently have something to do with an episode of Scrubs, it has long been an ambition of Andrew’s to own a “Onesie” to wear about the house. You know the things, they’re basically a pair of pyjamas which are all one piece. Odd rural male characters in old kid’s movies (The Fox & The Hound, maybe?) used to wear red ones with a button-up flap on the back, possibly as underwear. You probably had one in your youth with built-in feet of dubious grip, and pockets, and usually a teddy bear on the left breast.
Well, since Andrew is essentially my best-friend-in-law, and since he is as hard to buy gifts for as all the other boys on the planet (Seriously, why are boys so difficult to buy gifts for? I wish they would just take to wearing earrings, like girls. Not for aesthetic reasons, obviously, because I’m pretty sure it’d look terrible, but at least you’d have a default gift, y’know?), and since I’ve recently taken to doing craft projects to keep me warm while we watch TV of an evening, I figured that this birthday it was time to do something about it.
Finding a pattern was rather more difficult than you might imagine, since the market for adult onesies is limited to say the least, but eventually a pattern was located in the “girls’ nightwear” section of a pattern book in the Spotlight in Penrith. It was decided that a car theme would be ideal, given that Andrew is maybe even more of a Top Gear and Really Fast Car fan than most of his demographic, and miraculously, an absolutely perfect fabric was there; flannelette with cars and racing flags and “Champion” signs all over it, all in the compulsory white-and-primary-colours scheme necessary for such a garment.
Over the next few weeks, during Foyle’s War, a complete series of Doctor Who, and a season and a half of Twin Peaks (due to Flatmate-Thesis, Reality TV, and weird reception such that our TV picks up Prime and Win rather than the usual channels 7 and 9, we mainly watch TV-on-DVD in short crazes in our house) it was cut out, dithered over, and sewn. I’m too lazy to go to the barely perceptible effort of setting up the sewing machine and dedicating the actual time to making things, so it was all hand sewn on the sofa, which may mean that it falls apart on the first wash, but by then it will have served its gift-purpose.
In terms of wrapping, since I got efficient and cleaned my room last week, turning up, amongst a quantity of other junk, a largeish shoebox, it was decided that in order to explain the weird choice of fabric, the box would be coated in pictures from a Top Gear magazine, which turned out to work brilliantly.
Last year, I’d taken it into my head to make him a beanie which looked like a MarioKart chain-chomp, which didn’t actually fit, which was a bit anxiety-provoking for this year, but not only did it fit, Andrew tried it on at his birthday party and didn’t take it off until after the end of his birthday party, which was fantastic.
So, verbiage aside, here’s what we’ve got.
The box, fabric, and the tools of production:
A better view of the box, on our awful carpet:
The fabric itself, with the pocket turned out (I failed to take any pictures which have the collar, cuffs, pockets and soles of feet all in them, but they’re all in this stars-and-stripes fabric, with the stars made grippy with clear fabric paint on the soles):
Andrew in suit:
And a risqué close-up of the back-panel (which I’d had to draft, since obviously the people who designed the pattern where making a slightly less ridiculous garment) – note the great buttons we found, the same colour scheme as the cars on the suit cloth.
Anyway, you guys, long story short, it was basically the most satisfyingly successful thing ever, and was ridiculously awesome.
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