Today’s post is dedicated in honour of a friend who is departing for the furthest reaches of the globe (sooner or later; I should probably save this and publish around actual departure time, but I would certainly forget), in fond and inadequate imitation of the blog he had just better continue updating from wherever it is he ends up.
The birds will continue to sing
And indeed,
We should be surprised should they cease.
Life seems unlikely
To alter really radically.
But it will be with a little despondency
That we read your Dispatches.
For although you were rarely there
And when you were, it was late,
The knowledge
That you are not going to guiltily
Melodramatically
Burst in,
Just as the party starts to wind up,
(with stories of the perfidies
of buses and brothers and the BBC)
Will weigh upon our spirits,
Just a little.
And though we deplore them
Though we criticise and plot
To eradicate them while you sleep,
Nonetheless,
We will miss
Your stupid sideburns.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
In Which a bunch of Fragments are collected
So, I often sort of wonder whether my blog is actually more of a waste of ideas than a discussion of them. I feel like I start off somewhere reasonable like “howzabout those new ads?” or “tropes, man, I mean, eh?” and then I have lots and lots of little ideas, which really could use proper exploring, but which generally just get pelted like hail into the post, and not explored any further. So, I can’t go about the place writing another very similar post about how it is that so many of my friends are geeky and so on, because that one’s used up, but lots of the things I only glancingly mentioned could’ve made quite a good post all by themselves, had I the wherewithal to exploit that. Basically it’s the same problem as I used to have with essays. Fortunately, however, no-one’s marking these posts, so we should be ok.
What makes this seem really especially relevant, though, is that I’ve just found a bunch of half-written, never-posted blog posts saved on my computer. And I would just finished them, polish them up and post them, but I can’t really remember where I was going with them, so here’s my plan: Instead of doing it properly or keeping them languishing forever on my laptop, I’ll just post them as is, caveat emptor as it were. Later on, if I suddenly remember or can be bothered, I might finish some of them and repost them as whole posts, and if so, I’ll signpost that reasonably clearly, so you don’t sit there reading them at work going “this is it; I’ve finally gone mad, and am thinking like Ang, because I swear I’ve read or thought all this before”.
So, here you are, some fragments:
In Which Worth is Mysterious
Where does a person’s worth lie? Traditionally, we have all been taught that it’s all about the heart and mind. A literary hero is someone with extraordinary courage or kindness or something (Brontës excepted, of course), and preferably someone with some kind of combat skills and a way with the ladies. This is an interesting point in the first place: from our earliest youth we are taught that these qualities are heroic and great, and it makes us special that we all have them. Except that if we’re all taught that we have the uniquie quality of being especially lovely, then just exactly how special is it?
I have little direct experience with the social pressures on boys, being as how I’m a girl myself, with no brothers, and who was confined to the exclusively female environment of a girls’ school until uni, more or less. I don’t know how it is that boys become men, since the ones I know tend to be either fully-fledged or sort of permanently half-baked. Obviously, there must be some strange pressures on young men, and presumably these are ongoing in some way, but it would be the height of hypocrisy of me to presume to write about them. Therefore, this post is going to be pretty markedly gendered. If this is something you anticipate finding infuriating, ciao.
I guess the whole crux of what I want to get at here is articulated best by that Disney movie Beauty and The Beast. Either you’ve seen it, or you should, and if the latter, I assume you were raised Amish or something (nice work being online to read blogs, if so). There’s this whole thing about how Belle is smart, and well-read, and also gorgeous. The bad guy, a roguish hunk named Gaston say that she’s “the more beautiful girl in town – that makes her the best!”. You’re supposed, as a child, to sort of boo-hiss at this point, because if Care Bears and Roald Dahl’s Twits have taught us anything, it’s that true beauty is deeper than that. She does happen to be the “best” in town, but actually that’s because of being bookish. Except, they sure did go ahead and make her the most beautiful anyway, just for emphasis. It’s not “Smart Girl and the Beast” or “Chick who Makes Friends with the Anthropomorphised Crockery and the Beast” (either a more accurate summary of the character’s relevant skills). What makes her special is that she looks past the ugliness of the Beast and sees that he’s quite nice really (except that he’s not, at least at first, that’s the whole point). In fact, when he becomes officially nice, he gets to be attractive too (although not as good-looking as Aladdin).
What’s happening here? We go to lengths to teach kids that it doesn’t matter how they look, but there’s already this subtext: a real hero is nice to teapots and looks good flourishing a sword. You can really look up to a man whose teeth go ting in the sunlight.
*****
(Intriguingly, this fragment gets to remarkably closely resemble the other day’s post. Apparently my subconscious has Thoughts about Beauty & The Beast. Probably it’s on account of having accumulated days and days of total viewing time watching it as a child. Well, mainly as a child.)
*****
In Which Writing is just One of Those Things
So, I am chary of apologising for not writing in weeks, ever since that XKCD last week which made us all feel so self-conscious about whether we were, in fact, deeply uninteresting (http://xkcd.com/621/). But nonetheless, I do have a reason for not having posted in a while. Firstly, I’ve been studying for my exams, and thus unwilling to spend my spare time at my computer, and secondly because I sort of got into a bit of a rut with the writing thing, and I didn’t want to just write the same thing over and over again.
I am listening, while ostensibly studying (and I am studying, I have learned all about corticosteroids this afternoon, and learned that I need to start summarising my notes as the semester progresses over the last fortnight) to the Camera Obscura album My Maudlin Career. This hasn’t grown on me so much as some of their earlier stuff, because it turns out that it actually is rather more maudlin than previously. What prompts me to write is the line which was just sung at me “so you think you want to be a writer. A fantastic idea”, and now I’m all contemplative.
I have a friend (a Dad, in fact) who has a theory that being a writer is the only really satisfactory way to become obscenely rich. Like the other ways to get obscenely rich (rather than just Really Quite Comfortably Off) it is highly unreliable, since most writers are more prone to be Struggling Artists. But unlike such things as major scientific advances or Inventions or what have you, there’s no moral murk about getting rich from it. If I invent a fantastic thing which purifies water, say, at practically no cost, and then charge through the nose for it (which is an important step preceding the one labelled “Profit”) then that’s pretty seriously morally suspect. If I come up with a cure for malaria or Cancer or AIDS and charge for it so that only people with money can afford to access it then I am roughly on a par with Hitler in the “Good Citizens of the World” stakes.
BUT... if I write (if one writes, anyway) Harry Potter or something then it’s definitely mine, people don’t need it, so it’s not wrong to withhold it pending payment, but a lot of people do want it, and I’ve made something which wasn’t there before and so on and so on. Obviously, if I write The Da Vinci Code and significantly increase the amount of paranoid stupidity and conspiracy theorising in the world, muddying what little knowledge of history has made it into popular culture, then that’s less than ideal. But something like Harry Potter hasn’t made anyone stupider, surely. I mean, it provoked book burnings and such in the Bible Belt, but they were nutters. Nutters who paid for the copies they flamboyantly flambéed. I mean, those guys probably raised the royalties revenue noticeably. ‘Nuf said about previously existent dimness. There’s no helping that particular demographic.
*****
As to this one, I’d just love to know where I was going with all that, but I probably never will. I mean it definitely looks to be heading towards “so being a writer is the best way of being rich”, but I wonder if it was to end up “maybe I should publish my blog, and make all 4 of you reader types pinky swear to buy a copy and recommend it. I could be like David Sedaris and end up with my own TV show or something!” or on more of a “I wonder how that could even be done, man, that sort of thing takes a lot of perseverance and being good at dealing with rejection, nuts to it”? It could even have been heading “I hope one of you people I know becomes a famous author some day so I can be all ‘I know that guy!’: we’re looking at you, Spencer”-wards, for all I recall.)
*****
In Which a Blogger Gets Away with It
You know something wonderful? It’s nearly the end of August. This means that next Wednesday is my birthday but even more delightful than that is the fact that this means that Spring is on its way. Sure, there’s always a cold snap in September-ish, and it often cools for a while in November or whatever, but it will eventually, inevitably, be warm. In a few meagre months’ time, we will count how long it was since we felt “too cold” (not “deliciously cool” like an evening breeze or a soft-drink being spruiked by a model who would die before drinking it or anything else so sugary) in days. In weeks, even! It the moment, it’s more a “minutes” sort of measure. “Hours” if we’re lucky. But we won’t stand in the shower aware that the hot water can’t last forever but dreading the chill gust of air when we step out onto the bathmat. We may not bounce perkily out of bed of a morning for our 8 am lectures (I personally have a strong moral stance against that sort of behaviour at any time of year) but we won’t lie there with our blankets drawn up to our chins, looking at our jumper,visible from where we lie, but separated from us by aeons of icy transition.
It’s pretty exciting, you guys. Warmth which you don’t have to get out of a kettle via a hot-water-bottle or tea mug.
Anyway, this wasn’t what I was going to talk about so much as something which has just suddenly and excitingly struck me. I was going to talk about “getting away with it”. Maybe this is not something you often think about, it could be that you feel that you are perfectly competent at everything you turn your hand to on a day to day basis. Let me tell you, if you are in fact able to do all the things you’re supposed to be able to do, you’re missing out on a world of adventure.
This is obviously particularly relevant to me in my student capacity. I have a latin major but was sort of surprised to have slipped through the net with every latin exam I failed to fail. In anatomy labs and such, I am constantly surprised by the things that everyone else seems to just know. I don’t remember ever being told what the branches of the trigeminal nerve are, but everyone seems to know them. (I’ve got them now, but the point stands) I’m fairly sure that I get a bigger sense of achievement out of every question correctly answered than other people, just because I’m so surprised that I got away with it. That I guessed right, or managed to pull the answer out of the air (which is often how it feels) – that “holy crap! I knew that! Wow! I should say it again and listen this time, so I can write it down!” feeling.
And it’s not just study things, this is how I know almost all the things I know. It’s ridiculous that I’ll make an obscure reference and then go “tell me you’ve seen that! A Bit of Fry & Laurie! C’mon!” but totally miss quotes from Ace Ventura or whatever it is the kids quote these days. Zoolander? (Actually, I did see Zoolander). It has come to my attention that doing this is about as socially acceptable on a “things that make you a terrible person and conversationalist” scale as just kicking people in the shins when they sass you, so I plan to stop doing it (well, both those things) any time now.
A fortnight ago I managed to conduct an entire conversation with someone about a singer by whom I know a total of 2 songs. The thing is, they happened to be the two songs that the girl I was talking to really liked. So I got away with it. I wasn’t actually pretending to know more than I did, so maybe “got away with it” has a more surreptitious air than it really ought to have done.
The thing is, as I’ve said innumerable times, I know almost nothing about almost everything. The thing is, not-quite-nothing is just enough most of the time. It’s amazing how often I’ll randomly get given one fragment of information or see one episode or something and that will be exactly what’s required that I know the next day. It sort of makes me wonder how many things I’m missing, but mainly it just makes me dangerously cocky.
Because the thing is, if you strike lucky 3 times, people won’t believe you that that’s genuinely all you know about things. Someone will list three books that they’ve read and they’ll merely happen to be three that you’ve also read, or read reviews of, or heard about on the bus, and they will assume you know every other book they ever read.
I failed to get away with it once when someone quoted a Jason Mraz song at me (long ago, before I had ever heard anything other than The Remedy, the one everyone knows) and asked if I knew any of Jason Mraz’s stuff. It’s a funny look you get when, asked about a singer you answer “it’s a familiar name, I think maybe I’ve read some of his stuff”. (Also, oh my, so embarrassing).
But with music in particular this is always happening to me. Music is a little like the Cranial Nerves in this respect; I feel like I managed to miss out on some kind of essential information that everyone else got. I’m just absolutely not in the loop except occasionally by chance. I’ll know the obscure band (by chance) which leads people to assume that I’m down with the scene, and then I’ll be all “The Kinks? Weren’t they on the Juno soundtrack?”.
Essentially that’s the thing, that’s the knack to getting away with these things. It’s exactly like having a towel in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you have one thing (a towel, a working knowledge of String Theory, a recognition of the works of The Kings of Convenience or Darren Hanlon), people will naturally assume that you’ve merely forgotten whatever else is in question and happily lend you the relevant stuff (a toothbrush and place to sleep, Newton’s 3rd Law, or who the hell Deerhunter are).
The funny thing is, I never pretend to know more than I do (not since I wised up at the age of about 13) except in exams, when that’s the whole point. But it’s funny how disconcerting it is when people suddenly realise that you weren’t just being all false-modest and faux-naïf when you said that you didn’t really know anything about this stuff.
*****
So, uh, there you go?
What makes this seem really especially relevant, though, is that I’ve just found a bunch of half-written, never-posted blog posts saved on my computer. And I would just finished them, polish them up and post them, but I can’t really remember where I was going with them, so here’s my plan: Instead of doing it properly or keeping them languishing forever on my laptop, I’ll just post them as is, caveat emptor as it were. Later on, if I suddenly remember or can be bothered, I might finish some of them and repost them as whole posts, and if so, I’ll signpost that reasonably clearly, so you don’t sit there reading them at work going “this is it; I’ve finally gone mad, and am thinking like Ang, because I swear I’ve read or thought all this before”.
So, here you are, some fragments:
In Which Worth is Mysterious
Where does a person’s worth lie? Traditionally, we have all been taught that it’s all about the heart and mind. A literary hero is someone with extraordinary courage or kindness or something (Brontës excepted, of course), and preferably someone with some kind of combat skills and a way with the ladies. This is an interesting point in the first place: from our earliest youth we are taught that these qualities are heroic and great, and it makes us special that we all have them. Except that if we’re all taught that we have the uniquie quality of being especially lovely, then just exactly how special is it?
I have little direct experience with the social pressures on boys, being as how I’m a girl myself, with no brothers, and who was confined to the exclusively female environment of a girls’ school until uni, more or less. I don’t know how it is that boys become men, since the ones I know tend to be either fully-fledged or sort of permanently half-baked. Obviously, there must be some strange pressures on young men, and presumably these are ongoing in some way, but it would be the height of hypocrisy of me to presume to write about them. Therefore, this post is going to be pretty markedly gendered. If this is something you anticipate finding infuriating, ciao.
I guess the whole crux of what I want to get at here is articulated best by that Disney movie Beauty and The Beast. Either you’ve seen it, or you should, and if the latter, I assume you were raised Amish or something (nice work being online to read blogs, if so). There’s this whole thing about how Belle is smart, and well-read, and also gorgeous. The bad guy, a roguish hunk named Gaston say that she’s “the more beautiful girl in town – that makes her the best!”. You’re supposed, as a child, to sort of boo-hiss at this point, because if Care Bears and Roald Dahl’s Twits have taught us anything, it’s that true beauty is deeper than that. She does happen to be the “best” in town, but actually that’s because of being bookish. Except, they sure did go ahead and make her the most beautiful anyway, just for emphasis. It’s not “Smart Girl and the Beast” or “Chick who Makes Friends with the Anthropomorphised Crockery and the Beast” (either a more accurate summary of the character’s relevant skills). What makes her special is that she looks past the ugliness of the Beast and sees that he’s quite nice really (except that he’s not, at least at first, that’s the whole point). In fact, when he becomes officially nice, he gets to be attractive too (although not as good-looking as Aladdin).
What’s happening here? We go to lengths to teach kids that it doesn’t matter how they look, but there’s already this subtext: a real hero is nice to teapots and looks good flourishing a sword. You can really look up to a man whose teeth go ting in the sunlight.
*****
(Intriguingly, this fragment gets to remarkably closely resemble the other day’s post. Apparently my subconscious has Thoughts about Beauty & The Beast. Probably it’s on account of having accumulated days and days of total viewing time watching it as a child. Well, mainly as a child.)
*****
In Which Writing is just One of Those Things
So, I am chary of apologising for not writing in weeks, ever since that XKCD last week which made us all feel so self-conscious about whether we were, in fact, deeply uninteresting (http://xkcd.com/621/). But nonetheless, I do have a reason for not having posted in a while. Firstly, I’ve been studying for my exams, and thus unwilling to spend my spare time at my computer, and secondly because I sort of got into a bit of a rut with the writing thing, and I didn’t want to just write the same thing over and over again.
I am listening, while ostensibly studying (and I am studying, I have learned all about corticosteroids this afternoon, and learned that I need to start summarising my notes as the semester progresses over the last fortnight) to the Camera Obscura album My Maudlin Career. This hasn’t grown on me so much as some of their earlier stuff, because it turns out that it actually is rather more maudlin than previously. What prompts me to write is the line which was just sung at me “so you think you want to be a writer. A fantastic idea”, and now I’m all contemplative.
I have a friend (a Dad, in fact) who has a theory that being a writer is the only really satisfactory way to become obscenely rich. Like the other ways to get obscenely rich (rather than just Really Quite Comfortably Off) it is highly unreliable, since most writers are more prone to be Struggling Artists. But unlike such things as major scientific advances or Inventions or what have you, there’s no moral murk about getting rich from it. If I invent a fantastic thing which purifies water, say, at practically no cost, and then charge through the nose for it (which is an important step preceding the one labelled “Profit”) then that’s pretty seriously morally suspect. If I come up with a cure for malaria or Cancer or AIDS and charge for it so that only people with money can afford to access it then I am roughly on a par with Hitler in the “Good Citizens of the World” stakes.
BUT... if I write (if one writes, anyway) Harry Potter or something then it’s definitely mine, people don’t need it, so it’s not wrong to withhold it pending payment, but a lot of people do want it, and I’ve made something which wasn’t there before and so on and so on. Obviously, if I write The Da Vinci Code and significantly increase the amount of paranoid stupidity and conspiracy theorising in the world, muddying what little knowledge of history has made it into popular culture, then that’s less than ideal. But something like Harry Potter hasn’t made anyone stupider, surely. I mean, it provoked book burnings and such in the Bible Belt, but they were nutters. Nutters who paid for the copies they flamboyantly flambéed. I mean, those guys probably raised the royalties revenue noticeably. ‘Nuf said about previously existent dimness. There’s no helping that particular demographic.
*****
As to this one, I’d just love to know where I was going with all that, but I probably never will. I mean it definitely looks to be heading towards “so being a writer is the best way of being rich”, but I wonder if it was to end up “maybe I should publish my blog, and make all 4 of you reader types pinky swear to buy a copy and recommend it. I could be like David Sedaris and end up with my own TV show or something!” or on more of a “I wonder how that could even be done, man, that sort of thing takes a lot of perseverance and being good at dealing with rejection, nuts to it”? It could even have been heading “I hope one of you people I know becomes a famous author some day so I can be all ‘I know that guy!’: we’re looking at you, Spencer”-wards, for all I recall.)
*****
In Which a Blogger Gets Away with It
You know something wonderful? It’s nearly the end of August. This means that next Wednesday is my birthday but even more delightful than that is the fact that this means that Spring is on its way. Sure, there’s always a cold snap in September-ish, and it often cools for a while in November or whatever, but it will eventually, inevitably, be warm. In a few meagre months’ time, we will count how long it was since we felt “too cold” (not “deliciously cool” like an evening breeze or a soft-drink being spruiked by a model who would die before drinking it or anything else so sugary) in days. In weeks, even! It the moment, it’s more a “minutes” sort of measure. “Hours” if we’re lucky. But we won’t stand in the shower aware that the hot water can’t last forever but dreading the chill gust of air when we step out onto the bathmat. We may not bounce perkily out of bed of a morning for our 8 am lectures (I personally have a strong moral stance against that sort of behaviour at any time of year) but we won’t lie there with our blankets drawn up to our chins, looking at our jumper,visible from where we lie, but separated from us by aeons of icy transition.
It’s pretty exciting, you guys. Warmth which you don’t have to get out of a kettle via a hot-water-bottle or tea mug.
Anyway, this wasn’t what I was going to talk about so much as something which has just suddenly and excitingly struck me. I was going to talk about “getting away with it”. Maybe this is not something you often think about, it could be that you feel that you are perfectly competent at everything you turn your hand to on a day to day basis. Let me tell you, if you are in fact able to do all the things you’re supposed to be able to do, you’re missing out on a world of adventure.
This is obviously particularly relevant to me in my student capacity. I have a latin major but was sort of surprised to have slipped through the net with every latin exam I failed to fail. In anatomy labs and such, I am constantly surprised by the things that everyone else seems to just know. I don’t remember ever being told what the branches of the trigeminal nerve are, but everyone seems to know them. (I’ve got them now, but the point stands) I’m fairly sure that I get a bigger sense of achievement out of every question correctly answered than other people, just because I’m so surprised that I got away with it. That I guessed right, or managed to pull the answer out of the air (which is often how it feels) – that “holy crap! I knew that! Wow! I should say it again and listen this time, so I can write it down!” feeling.
And it’s not just study things, this is how I know almost all the things I know. It’s ridiculous that I’ll make an obscure reference and then go “tell me you’ve seen that! A Bit of Fry & Laurie! C’mon!” but totally miss quotes from Ace Ventura or whatever it is the kids quote these days. Zoolander? (Actually, I did see Zoolander). It has come to my attention that doing this is about as socially acceptable on a “things that make you a terrible person and conversationalist” scale as just kicking people in the shins when they sass you, so I plan to stop doing it (well, both those things) any time now.
A fortnight ago I managed to conduct an entire conversation with someone about a singer by whom I know a total of 2 songs. The thing is, they happened to be the two songs that the girl I was talking to really liked. So I got away with it. I wasn’t actually pretending to know more than I did, so maybe “got away with it” has a more surreptitious air than it really ought to have done.
The thing is, as I’ve said innumerable times, I know almost nothing about almost everything. The thing is, not-quite-nothing is just enough most of the time. It’s amazing how often I’ll randomly get given one fragment of information or see one episode or something and that will be exactly what’s required that I know the next day. It sort of makes me wonder how many things I’m missing, but mainly it just makes me dangerously cocky.
Because the thing is, if you strike lucky 3 times, people won’t believe you that that’s genuinely all you know about things. Someone will list three books that they’ve read and they’ll merely happen to be three that you’ve also read, or read reviews of, or heard about on the bus, and they will assume you know every other book they ever read.
I failed to get away with it once when someone quoted a Jason Mraz song at me (long ago, before I had ever heard anything other than The Remedy, the one everyone knows) and asked if I knew any of Jason Mraz’s stuff. It’s a funny look you get when, asked about a singer you answer “it’s a familiar name, I think maybe I’ve read some of his stuff”. (Also, oh my, so embarrassing).
But with music in particular this is always happening to me. Music is a little like the Cranial Nerves in this respect; I feel like I managed to miss out on some kind of essential information that everyone else got. I’m just absolutely not in the loop except occasionally by chance. I’ll know the obscure band (by chance) which leads people to assume that I’m down with the scene, and then I’ll be all “The Kinks? Weren’t they on the Juno soundtrack?”.
Essentially that’s the thing, that’s the knack to getting away with these things. It’s exactly like having a towel in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you have one thing (a towel, a working knowledge of String Theory, a recognition of the works of The Kings of Convenience or Darren Hanlon), people will naturally assume that you’ve merely forgotten whatever else is in question and happily lend you the relevant stuff (a toothbrush and place to sleep, Newton’s 3rd Law, or who the hell Deerhunter are).
The funny thing is, I never pretend to know more than I do (not since I wised up at the age of about 13) except in exams, when that’s the whole point. But it’s funny how disconcerting it is when people suddenly realise that you weren’t just being all false-modest and faux-naïf when you said that you didn’t really know anything about this stuff.
*****
So, uh, there you go?
In Which the gathering Dark presages, presumably, more thoroughly gathered dark
You guys, when I got up this morning, it was dark. Not that grey insipid morning light which one greets with resignation of a morning toward the end of summer, knowing what it inevitably heralds, but full on, have-I-accidentally-set-my-alarm-to-go-off-in-the-middle-of-the-night-because-it-is-clearly-still-the-middle-of-the-night dark. This is not something which I relish. I like the cold, I do. I like winter. I like rugging up, I like skiing, I like scarves and cups of tea and jumpers and ugg boots (in their place). But there are two things about the coming time of year that I do not like even at all. I do not like getting up in the dark, and I do not like being too cold.
Not ‘too cold’ in the sense of “ooh, it’s not too cold today” in the same way you might describe something of particular niftiness as being “not too shabby” (assuming you’re Australian, of course, I don’t know if the English do this, but I suspect that they do, although presumably less so. Surely no other country can have embraced “average” as in “it’s a bit average” as its highest term of censure. This confuses me every time, and I managed to survive the era of “bad”-means-good), but too cold in that seeping, creeping way, where sitting at your desk leaves you convinced that you’ll just never be quite warm enough for comfort ever again. The kind of too cold where all the sensory input you receive from your extremities is discomfort, and where even a nice-warming-shower or nice-warm-bed has dangerous cold zones so that if you stand or lie in anything but the precisely right space, one bit or other of you becomes frustratingly chilled.
It’s not so bad, really. I mean, I was getting up for a fun reason today, and I didn’t even wear my cardigan most of the day, and I’m sitting here in the quite pleasant breeze as I type this, with no particular urge to shut the window. But it’s the ominousness that gets me. The awareness that if I decide not to ride my bike to uni tomorrow merely on the grounds that it’ll be close to dark by the time I get home, then that’s admitting defeat for a good eight or nine months. The inevitability of it getting much worse before long.
Not even that would be so bad, really, it’s just that I was foolish enough to read a book on the bus for a couple of blocks on the way home, which meant that I arrived home feeling miserably motion-sick, in the dark. There’s something particular about our bus route, I think. I never get motion sick usually, which is why I routinely forget and accidentally read on the bus, but I think that there’s something somehow terribly visceral about the sequence of turns and hills and swinging curves that are dreadfully unkind to the unwary reader. Plus the home-in-the-dark thing. I get used to that pretty quickly, and it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as leaving home in the dark, but at the end of summer I always sort of feel that if I’m going to be getting home after dark, I’d better have had a jolly good evening already.
At this point it becomes very obvious that my idle fantasies of how nice it would be to live in England or Europe and all that are based on the most profound lack of understanding of my own limitations, especially with regard to this issue, on reflection. Still, it’d be a good place to go for a bit of nice subdued summer during a winter, at least. They have buttercups, and downs, and robins which are a good honest red, there. It’s sort of the promised land, really, so long as you’ve been deriving your land-based promises from a very specific subgenre of literature. Not the Arabian Nights, for instance.
In completely unrelated news, though, I’ve just come across a sort of half blog post I must’ve written late last year, and which has, in the intervening months, lost all currency. Nonetheless, I append it herewith, just in case you really have absolutely nothing to do with your afternoon.
A couple of times in the past month I’ve made Facebook status updates about language usage. Because, y’know, I’m a bit of a pedantic dweeb. Amusingly, these have both caused a flurry of comments, with friends weighing in strongly for or against a prescriptivist view of language or whatever (usually “for”, with reservations, because that’s the sort of person with whom I tend to make friends. The kind of people who use the word “whom”, or at least know about it.) It’s funny, even just thinking about these things makes me self-conscious about my sentence structure. Oh no! I can’t end a sentence with a preposition! Not in the middle of a discussion of prescriptivist language! Such tragic irony! And so on. (Although this is one of the few rules of grammar which I think may be bollocks, at least I know about it. I just don’t think it’s necessarily worth bothering with.)
The thing is, it’s all very well to say that it doesn’t matter how you spell things or how you structure your grammar, provided you convey the spirit of the meaning, but it’s just not true. If the internet age has taught us nothing else (apart from “cats, man, what a laugh!”) it’s that text inadequately conveys tone and inflection, and that can be bad. Fortunately, we have punctuation for that. Or at least, for a lot of that (I mean, there’s at least one facebook group about the difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!”). Without it, so little of what we mean can be known for sure (inasmuch as anything can be, in this postmodern blah blah blah). This is mainly a problem because we also live in an age of giant advertising and fine print.
Since so much of what is said has no objective meaning, false advertising suddenly stops being a worry for advertisers. Some chicken fast-food joint, for instance, is currently advertising a range of what I understand are basically milkshakes. (Which seems like a distressing juxtaposition to me, but that’s by the by) The slogans all over buses read proudly “full of real bitz!” That means absolutely nothing. Like, not anything at all. That space would equally well say “words about the drink!” for all the accountability in it.
First up, “Bitz” with a z. That’s not a word, so they don’t have to be full of real anything in particular. Secondly, even if we’re charitable and pretend to believe that “bitz” means “bits”, that still means nothing unless you say what they’re bits of. Full of real bits of bark/person/rock/paper/drink; what? Thirdly, we are earnestly assured that the “bitz” are “real”. Are we all on the same page, here? Bitz is not some desirable brand name that we would fear being given counterfeit versions of, as the ad implies. The other sense of “real”, i.e., “genuinely existent” is surely a given. “Full of imaginary bitz” is presumably the opposite, unless it’s “full of fake bitz”. The only words that have any meaning here are the “full of”, and they’re wrong, since the drink is not “full” of the blasted things anyway.
I realise that maybe I’m overthinking this, but how do these people get away with this sort of crap, with excitedly telling us nothing, and spelling words with a Z for no good reason at all? I can’t think of a single non-suspicious reason a company would have for misspelling a word in it’s advertising in that deliberate sort of way. It can only be because the word which means something is unavailable to them, or because they’re patronisingly trying to connect with some imaginary young-and-dumb demographic.
Similarly, I am suspicious of “natural ingredients” in products. I’m pretty much unconvinced by the idea that the word “natural” has any meaning at all, much. Even if it did, the artificial thing isn’t necessarily worse. Lots of synthetic things are structurally analogous to naturally occurring things, just built so as to have less side-effects or whatever. Snake venom is natural. Refined penicillin is artificial. And so on. And not all the Vitamin E in the world, be it natural, artificial, or occultly unnatural, is going to make you look ten years younger when you rub it on your face.
{So there you have it: present me has mixed feelings about Autumn, and past me felt that KFC was suspect. Good to have that established, isn’t it?}
Not ‘too cold’ in the sense of “ooh, it’s not too cold today” in the same way you might describe something of particular niftiness as being “not too shabby” (assuming you’re Australian, of course, I don’t know if the English do this, but I suspect that they do, although presumably less so. Surely no other country can have embraced “average” as in “it’s a bit average” as its highest term of censure. This confuses me every time, and I managed to survive the era of “bad”-means-good), but too cold in that seeping, creeping way, where sitting at your desk leaves you convinced that you’ll just never be quite warm enough for comfort ever again. The kind of too cold where all the sensory input you receive from your extremities is discomfort, and where even a nice-warming-shower or nice-warm-bed has dangerous cold zones so that if you stand or lie in anything but the precisely right space, one bit or other of you becomes frustratingly chilled.
It’s not so bad, really. I mean, I was getting up for a fun reason today, and I didn’t even wear my cardigan most of the day, and I’m sitting here in the quite pleasant breeze as I type this, with no particular urge to shut the window. But it’s the ominousness that gets me. The awareness that if I decide not to ride my bike to uni tomorrow merely on the grounds that it’ll be close to dark by the time I get home, then that’s admitting defeat for a good eight or nine months. The inevitability of it getting much worse before long.
Not even that would be so bad, really, it’s just that I was foolish enough to read a book on the bus for a couple of blocks on the way home, which meant that I arrived home feeling miserably motion-sick, in the dark. There’s something particular about our bus route, I think. I never get motion sick usually, which is why I routinely forget and accidentally read on the bus, but I think that there’s something somehow terribly visceral about the sequence of turns and hills and swinging curves that are dreadfully unkind to the unwary reader. Plus the home-in-the-dark thing. I get used to that pretty quickly, and it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as leaving home in the dark, but at the end of summer I always sort of feel that if I’m going to be getting home after dark, I’d better have had a jolly good evening already.
At this point it becomes very obvious that my idle fantasies of how nice it would be to live in England or Europe and all that are based on the most profound lack of understanding of my own limitations, especially with regard to this issue, on reflection. Still, it’d be a good place to go for a bit of nice subdued summer during a winter, at least. They have buttercups, and downs, and robins which are a good honest red, there. It’s sort of the promised land, really, so long as you’ve been deriving your land-based promises from a very specific subgenre of literature. Not the Arabian Nights, for instance.
In completely unrelated news, though, I’ve just come across a sort of half blog post I must’ve written late last year, and which has, in the intervening months, lost all currency. Nonetheless, I append it herewith, just in case you really have absolutely nothing to do with your afternoon.
A couple of times in the past month I’ve made Facebook status updates about language usage. Because, y’know, I’m a bit of a pedantic dweeb. Amusingly, these have both caused a flurry of comments, with friends weighing in strongly for or against a prescriptivist view of language or whatever (usually “for”, with reservations, because that’s the sort of person with whom I tend to make friends. The kind of people who use the word “whom”, or at least know about it.) It’s funny, even just thinking about these things makes me self-conscious about my sentence structure. Oh no! I can’t end a sentence with a preposition! Not in the middle of a discussion of prescriptivist language! Such tragic irony! And so on. (Although this is one of the few rules of grammar which I think may be bollocks, at least I know about it. I just don’t think it’s necessarily worth bothering with.)
The thing is, it’s all very well to say that it doesn’t matter how you spell things or how you structure your grammar, provided you convey the spirit of the meaning, but it’s just not true. If the internet age has taught us nothing else (apart from “cats, man, what a laugh!”) it’s that text inadequately conveys tone and inflection, and that can be bad. Fortunately, we have punctuation for that. Or at least, for a lot of that (I mean, there’s at least one facebook group about the difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!”). Without it, so little of what we mean can be known for sure (inasmuch as anything can be, in this postmodern blah blah blah). This is mainly a problem because we also live in an age of giant advertising and fine print.
Since so much of what is said has no objective meaning, false advertising suddenly stops being a worry for advertisers. Some chicken fast-food joint, for instance, is currently advertising a range of what I understand are basically milkshakes. (Which seems like a distressing juxtaposition to me, but that’s by the by) The slogans all over buses read proudly “full of real bitz!” That means absolutely nothing. Like, not anything at all. That space would equally well say “words about the drink!” for all the accountability in it.
First up, “Bitz” with a z. That’s not a word, so they don’t have to be full of real anything in particular. Secondly, even if we’re charitable and pretend to believe that “bitz” means “bits”, that still means nothing unless you say what they’re bits of. Full of real bits of bark/person/rock/paper/drink; what? Thirdly, we are earnestly assured that the “bitz” are “real”. Are we all on the same page, here? Bitz is not some desirable brand name that we would fear being given counterfeit versions of, as the ad implies. The other sense of “real”, i.e., “genuinely existent” is surely a given. “Full of imaginary bitz” is presumably the opposite, unless it’s “full of fake bitz”. The only words that have any meaning here are the “full of”, and they’re wrong, since the drink is not “full” of the blasted things anyway.
I realise that maybe I’m overthinking this, but how do these people get away with this sort of crap, with excitedly telling us nothing, and spelling words with a Z for no good reason at all? I can’t think of a single non-suspicious reason a company would have for misspelling a word in it’s advertising in that deliberate sort of way. It can only be because the word which means something is unavailable to them, or because they’re patronisingly trying to connect with some imaginary young-and-dumb demographic.
Similarly, I am suspicious of “natural ingredients” in products. I’m pretty much unconvinced by the idea that the word “natural” has any meaning at all, much. Even if it did, the artificial thing isn’t necessarily worse. Lots of synthetic things are structurally analogous to naturally occurring things, just built so as to have less side-effects or whatever. Snake venom is natural. Refined penicillin is artificial. And so on. And not all the Vitamin E in the world, be it natural, artificial, or occultly unnatural, is going to make you look ten years younger when you rub it on your face.
{So there you have it: present me has mixed feelings about Autumn, and past me felt that KFC was suspect. Good to have that established, isn’t it?}
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
In Which Tropes are rather hard on Blondes (pun removed due to poor taste)
I watched something the other day which drew my attention to a rather distressing trope. (I won’t tell you what it was in case it spoils it, but obviously it could’ve been practically anything except Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Archie, for which the only difference is a hair colour reversal). It’s something I’ve noticed before in all sorts of movies and books and Broadway shows and whatnot, but it struck me afresh over the weekend as being just a smidgin reprehensible.
The story, in its simplest form, goes like this: the audience is introduced to three people (either a trio of friends or a dude and two ladies who interact exclusively as rivals), a dude (whom we’ll call Dude), and blonde, and a brunette (hereinafter known as Blonde and Brunette, respectively). Both ladies dig Dude, and he dithers (sometimes for series after series) before choosing the Blonde. Later, he leaves Blonde for Brunette, whom he has always known, in his heart of hearts, is his True Love, and the two of them live happily ever after.
Taking the obvious issues in order, more or less, we begin with the Choice, which we might also view as being essential to the characterisation. A choice between a Blonde and a Brunette is always presented as Style versus Substance. Redheads are rare, since the hair colour is crucial, but if they’re around at all, it’s odds-on that they’ll be in some way “fiery”. Blondes are a bit silly or flighty, shallow, either mean or just stupid, and are generally held to be the “cheaper” choice. It’s easy to want a beautiful Blonde, but they’re either shrewish or just generally lacking in Worth, is the point here. Conversely, the bookish, funny (or more often “funny”) Brunette is sweet and patient and good and smart and very probably talks to puppies and kittens and what have you, but she’s not really that attractive, due to her serious lack of blondeness. She always likes the Dude’s pet, if he has one, or Interest if he has one of those instead. The Blonde, naturally, abominates these things, considering them smelly or silly or just generally annoying (depending on whether it’s a dog or white water rafting or weak puns).
Speaking (well, typing) as a flighty brunette who’s allergic to cats, I’ve always felt that there was some considerable undue pressure happening here. Clearly, though, it’s worse for blondes, and I’ve known several blondes dye their hair to escape this whole business, or else somehow tragically internalise the message, convince themselves that they really are somehow cheap, and that whatever Dude is in their life is just constantly waiting to abandon them for a smarter, secretly-prettier (lurking, traditionally, behind glasses, a ponytail, and in extreme cases, unattractive but easily fixed eyebrows) generally Higher Quality Brunette. That’s... that’s pretty bad, you guys. Plus, I’m pretty sure that this caused actual problems in my childhood: I was (and am, obviously) a brunette and my little sister was a blonde, when we were children, and people were always treating us as a smart one and a beautiful one (not my family, though, naturally, because of how they’re really pretty great), which I’m sure must’ve had weird impacts on our interactions and sibling rivalry and stuff. Plus, she’s grown up to have brown hair, so where does that leave her, trope-wise? Honestly, if I were a Blonde, I’d be pretty pissed about this sort of thing.
Next, we have the “choice”. That’s less problematic, but it’s still a bit weird. Have you ever really seen a situation where a guy had an actual “choice” between two girls, as if they were two canapés on a platter being handed out by obsequious waitstaff at some function or other? As if all he had to do was choose between the vol-au-vent and the little skewer? As if he was the only person who had any volition? I mean, this is a pretty common thing, what if this is being internalised by dudes and Dudes everywhere, and they come to actually think that way? What’s even going on there? Is it that the people who wrote this sort of thing originally had never ever been rejected by a lady whom they “chose”, so that it didn’t occur to them that it could happen? Or is it that they were rejected so consistently (especially, presumably, by ladies privy to their scripts-in-progress) that they needed to imagine the sort of world where two whole chicks at once might really dig them? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it happens, although I’ve never seen a real example. I mean, shear statistics says that there must sometimes be two people digging the same third person at exactly the same time. But even then, surely it’s weird to have a set-up like this. Those two people are going to be a “good” and “bad” choice pretty rarely, surely?
The way it’s set up is handy for the Dude, though, who never seems to have thought his choice through thoroughly in the first place. Also, mysteriously, unlike every other major choice made in such movies (where the difference between a Coke and a Strawberry Milkshke can be portrayed as being so telling as to make every snack fraught) his decision to go with the beautiful but vapid option does not apparently reflect on his character at all. He hasn’t chosen Blonde because of being a shallow jerk who just wants to get laid, it’s because of Feminine Wiles or something. When he inevitably breaks up with the Blonde for the Brunette, this always seems to work out too. Regarding which: as if. If the girls are set up as friends in the first place, then the Blonde always just has to lump it, with no right to be peeved for more than just a scene. If she’s lucky she’ll get an explanation along the lines of “it wasn’t like that”, but that’s usually it.
The Brunette is even more complicated here. First of all, despite being good and decent and funny/smart, she sees no apparent problem with hijacking her best friend’s boyfriend (and they’re never just sort-of-friends, either; if it’s not full-on cheerleader/nerd rivalry, then they’re bosom buddies who’re going to have to resolve their BFF situation before the end of the film, usually by means of the Blonde just “getting over it”, as if the Brunette was perfectly in the clear, morally, and the Blonde should stop kicking up such a fuss and learn to accept that she’s not really good enough). Secondly, and really this has always seemed stranger to me, Brunette has no problem with someone who, having had the free choice between her and someone else, didn’t pick her. Because she wasn’t the “beautiful” one, or whatever.
Really? Have you ever known a chick like that? One who wouldn’t then spend the rest of the story secretly angsting about what it was about her that made her so much less pretty? One who wouldn’t be in the least fazed by the fact that this allegedly perfect dude, given the choice between what’s set up as Cheap Tackiness and Real Quality, picks the former first? What sort of women are these? Do you reckon any of them have equally gullible and un-shakeable hot brothers, who might like to be chosen between? Because I would way rather be the Dude(tte) in this scenario than either of these strangely over-focussed women.
At this point it strikes me as being necessary to state again that I’m ranting about a fiction trope here. I’ve had many reasonably close male friends date blonde girls, and I would hate any of them to think that I thought them cheap or arrogant, or that I was pining for them, or any of those things. That would be really quite unthinkably frightful. (Especially since, whoa, the more I think about it, the more I realise that there must’ve been nigh on ten such couples with whom I’ve been friends. I can only imagine the sort of awkwardness which would be unleashed if everyone went about trying to find poorly-hidden meaning in my blog).
In fact, there’s really only one weirdness left to point out. In one particularly notable example, which featured Uma Thurman as Blonde, some reasonably attractive young man with a British accent as Dude, and Janeane Should-Seriously-Know-Better Garofalo as Brunette, one of the scenes toward the end has a weirdly telling bit of dialogue. Dude speaks to the chicks and says something like “You’re beautiful and dumb, and you’re brilliant and...” whereupon he trails of significantly. As if (leaving aside the fact that I’ve never noticed Janeane Garofalo being unattractive) saying that a girl is unattractive is somehow so much worse than saying that she’s dumb that even in the heat of his anger, no gentleman could ever do so. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be a long way from relishing feedback like that myself, but seriously? We should both, at the same time, admit to ourselves that we’re better off being unattractive and clever than vice versa, and also agree that it’s ok to slight a girl’s intelligence but never, ever, her looks? What the hell is that? How 1950s do we need to be? This isn’t just that movie, the same thing is implied in every “the brunette becomes beautiful so it’s ok to find her attractive really” scenes since well before The Breakfast Club to well after She’s All That. If attractiveness really isn’t important, why is it a Beauty in Beauty and the Beast rather than just Nice Girl and the Beast (alliteration is not the answer, I’m pretty sure it’s originally French, that story)? This trope wants to have it both ways: unattractive Brunettes are better than shallowly pretty Blondes, but only if they’re still pretty bangin’. You don’t cast Rachel Leigh Cook or Anne Hathaway if you’re really talking about Plain Janes. For all it’s distressing I-won’t-say-such-a-terrible-thing posturing, at least the Truth about Cats and Dogs didn’t add bonus points to the Quality Brunette to make her more appealing (as far as I remember? I’m beginning to worry about this too). That’s just cheating on what’s already a pretty dodgy basic message.
The story, in its simplest form, goes like this: the audience is introduced to three people (either a trio of friends or a dude and two ladies who interact exclusively as rivals), a dude (whom we’ll call Dude), and blonde, and a brunette (hereinafter known as Blonde and Brunette, respectively). Both ladies dig Dude, and he dithers (sometimes for series after series) before choosing the Blonde. Later, he leaves Blonde for Brunette, whom he has always known, in his heart of hearts, is his True Love, and the two of them live happily ever after.
Taking the obvious issues in order, more or less, we begin with the Choice, which we might also view as being essential to the characterisation. A choice between a Blonde and a Brunette is always presented as Style versus Substance. Redheads are rare, since the hair colour is crucial, but if they’re around at all, it’s odds-on that they’ll be in some way “fiery”. Blondes are a bit silly or flighty, shallow, either mean or just stupid, and are generally held to be the “cheaper” choice. It’s easy to want a beautiful Blonde, but they’re either shrewish or just generally lacking in Worth, is the point here. Conversely, the bookish, funny (or more often “funny”) Brunette is sweet and patient and good and smart and very probably talks to puppies and kittens and what have you, but she’s not really that attractive, due to her serious lack of blondeness. She always likes the Dude’s pet, if he has one, or Interest if he has one of those instead. The Blonde, naturally, abominates these things, considering them smelly or silly or just generally annoying (depending on whether it’s a dog or white water rafting or weak puns).
Speaking (well, typing) as a flighty brunette who’s allergic to cats, I’ve always felt that there was some considerable undue pressure happening here. Clearly, though, it’s worse for blondes, and I’ve known several blondes dye their hair to escape this whole business, or else somehow tragically internalise the message, convince themselves that they really are somehow cheap, and that whatever Dude is in their life is just constantly waiting to abandon them for a smarter, secretly-prettier (lurking, traditionally, behind glasses, a ponytail, and in extreme cases, unattractive but easily fixed eyebrows) generally Higher Quality Brunette. That’s... that’s pretty bad, you guys. Plus, I’m pretty sure that this caused actual problems in my childhood: I was (and am, obviously) a brunette and my little sister was a blonde, when we were children, and people were always treating us as a smart one and a beautiful one (not my family, though, naturally, because of how they’re really pretty great), which I’m sure must’ve had weird impacts on our interactions and sibling rivalry and stuff. Plus, she’s grown up to have brown hair, so where does that leave her, trope-wise? Honestly, if I were a Blonde, I’d be pretty pissed about this sort of thing.
Next, we have the “choice”. That’s less problematic, but it’s still a bit weird. Have you ever really seen a situation where a guy had an actual “choice” between two girls, as if they were two canapés on a platter being handed out by obsequious waitstaff at some function or other? As if all he had to do was choose between the vol-au-vent and the little skewer? As if he was the only person who had any volition? I mean, this is a pretty common thing, what if this is being internalised by dudes and Dudes everywhere, and they come to actually think that way? What’s even going on there? Is it that the people who wrote this sort of thing originally had never ever been rejected by a lady whom they “chose”, so that it didn’t occur to them that it could happen? Or is it that they were rejected so consistently (especially, presumably, by ladies privy to their scripts-in-progress) that they needed to imagine the sort of world where two whole chicks at once might really dig them? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it happens, although I’ve never seen a real example. I mean, shear statistics says that there must sometimes be two people digging the same third person at exactly the same time. But even then, surely it’s weird to have a set-up like this. Those two people are going to be a “good” and “bad” choice pretty rarely, surely?
The way it’s set up is handy for the Dude, though, who never seems to have thought his choice through thoroughly in the first place. Also, mysteriously, unlike every other major choice made in such movies (where the difference between a Coke and a Strawberry Milkshke can be portrayed as being so telling as to make every snack fraught) his decision to go with the beautiful but vapid option does not apparently reflect on his character at all. He hasn’t chosen Blonde because of being a shallow jerk who just wants to get laid, it’s because of Feminine Wiles or something. When he inevitably breaks up with the Blonde for the Brunette, this always seems to work out too. Regarding which: as if. If the girls are set up as friends in the first place, then the Blonde always just has to lump it, with no right to be peeved for more than just a scene. If she’s lucky she’ll get an explanation along the lines of “it wasn’t like that”, but that’s usually it.
The Brunette is even more complicated here. First of all, despite being good and decent and funny/smart, she sees no apparent problem with hijacking her best friend’s boyfriend (and they’re never just sort-of-friends, either; if it’s not full-on cheerleader/nerd rivalry, then they’re bosom buddies who’re going to have to resolve their BFF situation before the end of the film, usually by means of the Blonde just “getting over it”, as if the Brunette was perfectly in the clear, morally, and the Blonde should stop kicking up such a fuss and learn to accept that she’s not really good enough). Secondly, and really this has always seemed stranger to me, Brunette has no problem with someone who, having had the free choice between her and someone else, didn’t pick her. Because she wasn’t the “beautiful” one, or whatever.
Really? Have you ever known a chick like that? One who wouldn’t then spend the rest of the story secretly angsting about what it was about her that made her so much less pretty? One who wouldn’t be in the least fazed by the fact that this allegedly perfect dude, given the choice between what’s set up as Cheap Tackiness and Real Quality, picks the former first? What sort of women are these? Do you reckon any of them have equally gullible and un-shakeable hot brothers, who might like to be chosen between? Because I would way rather be the Dude(tte) in this scenario than either of these strangely over-focussed women.
At this point it strikes me as being necessary to state again that I’m ranting about a fiction trope here. I’ve had many reasonably close male friends date blonde girls, and I would hate any of them to think that I thought them cheap or arrogant, or that I was pining for them, or any of those things. That would be really quite unthinkably frightful. (Especially since, whoa, the more I think about it, the more I realise that there must’ve been nigh on ten such couples with whom I’ve been friends. I can only imagine the sort of awkwardness which would be unleashed if everyone went about trying to find poorly-hidden meaning in my blog).
In fact, there’s really only one weirdness left to point out. In one particularly notable example, which featured Uma Thurman as Blonde, some reasonably attractive young man with a British accent as Dude, and Janeane Should-Seriously-Know-Better Garofalo as Brunette, one of the scenes toward the end has a weirdly telling bit of dialogue. Dude speaks to the chicks and says something like “You’re beautiful and dumb, and you’re brilliant and...” whereupon he trails of significantly. As if (leaving aside the fact that I’ve never noticed Janeane Garofalo being unattractive) saying that a girl is unattractive is somehow so much worse than saying that she’s dumb that even in the heat of his anger, no gentleman could ever do so. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be a long way from relishing feedback like that myself, but seriously? We should both, at the same time, admit to ourselves that we’re better off being unattractive and clever than vice versa, and also agree that it’s ok to slight a girl’s intelligence but never, ever, her looks? What the hell is that? How 1950s do we need to be? This isn’t just that movie, the same thing is implied in every “the brunette becomes beautiful so it’s ok to find her attractive really” scenes since well before The Breakfast Club to well after She’s All That. If attractiveness really isn’t important, why is it a Beauty in Beauty and the Beast rather than just Nice Girl and the Beast (alliteration is not the answer, I’m pretty sure it’s originally French, that story)? This trope wants to have it both ways: unattractive Brunettes are better than shallowly pretty Blondes, but only if they’re still pretty bangin’. You don’t cast Rachel Leigh Cook or Anne Hathaway if you’re really talking about Plain Janes. For all it’s distressing I-won’t-say-such-a-terrible-thing posturing, at least the Truth about Cats and Dogs didn’t add bonus points to the Quality Brunette to make her more appealing (as far as I remember? I’m beginning to worry about this too). That’s just cheating on what’s already a pretty dodgy basic message.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
In Which Size is Power and Tim Burton is less than wholly Compelling (here be spoilers)
It may be that this whole blog thing is getting out of hand. I suspect this on the grounds that this evening I went and watched Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton style, and really didn't focus. This is not just because I've read a number of reviews of varying degrees of pithiness written by my eloquent and well-read friends and acquaintances (which were much more interesting and thus intrusive to my viewing than the professional reviews which were all "that Mia girl is so hot right now" and "Oh Tim Burton, you wacky aesthete you" rather than "dude totally misquoted the Jabberwocky poem", "you call that consistent imagery and characterisation, do you?" and "Tim Burton is to Alice in Wonderland as 5ive is to We Will Rock You".) Mainly it was because I was sitting there acting like some terrible combination of an Arts Grad who takes themselves too seriously, a Year 12 English student and an early xkcd comic; intead of trying to immerse myself in the film, I was contemplating a blog post discussing the interface between size and power.
Basically - and Spoiler Alert, dudes and dudettes (or at least, for those of you who have never engaged with the Alice in Wonderland story in any way, there will be big spoilers, and if you haven't seen the movie then sort of moderate spoilers, but as if this platter of aesthetic indulgence is "spoilable", it's totally one of those journey-not-the-destination things) - Alice has to fight any number of oppressive forces, most relevantly a huge dragon thing, as well as an evil monarch who is self-concious about her unusual appearance. Fine. Also Alice repeatedly solves things in the "problem solving" type areas of her adventure by getting a bunch bigger or smaller. This is apparently perfectly normal in Wonderland, where people always seem to have the relevant potions or whatever handy, although no-one else actually uses any at any time.
But at no point does anyone, either Alice or any of the other characters, just go "sod this for a game of soldiers; I'm going to eat enough cake to be a total giant (while keeping the shrinking potion on hand to avoid plot devices) and just step on the damn Jabberwocky beast thing". Or even just evade capture or prison by growing or shrinking. The Hatter sits in prison and is all "it sure is a pity that I'm manacled and behind bars and doomed to be executed" even though we know that he had become-tiny-juice in his pocket (or on his person) 10 scenes ago, and that he was arrested in the same clothes as he was wearing when he had it last. And he never goes, "man, bugger it, I'm going to become tiny and escape, and enormous if I'm attacked".
Why is this? Is it because once anyone starts messing about like that, all bets are off? Like all the inhabitants of Wonderland have a Gentlemen's Agreement not to start down the road of getting enormous and trying to step on one another, on the grounds that the consequent oneupmanship would cause irreparable damage to the infrastructure? If so, are the potions they all have on hand just for defusing emergencies, like an OH&S sort of thing? Why else would a 2 foot rabbit in a page's uniform be carrying an untouched piece of become-large cake with him, despite maintaining a completely constant size for the whole time?
Size is Power. All you have to do is get bigger or smaller, and everything can be solved. Or could be, if they just, you know, ate cake or drank apparently-gross-tasting fluids made of unspeakble ingredients. Maybe it's all just an elaborate metaphor? Like cake makes people bigger and detox diets and wierd laxatives make them smaller in the world Tim Burton actually inhabits. Because obviously size is power in real life. Cosmopolitan sells millions of copies around the world every month (caution: statistics may not be to scale. Who the hell knows how many Cosmos they sell? I assume millions. Surely. I mean, there are a lot of waiting rooms out there, and people have to read something. God forbid anyone should bring a book to a hairdresser or doctor's waiting room) predicated very largely on the idea that the buying demographic all feel like they're too large, and their lips and shoe collections are too small. The girls on the cover are smaller around but also larger in height than many of us could ever be. "Be like this," the magazines urge, "but be yourself".
Because that's the thing about Alice too. She can be any size, but she can only fit the champion's armour when she's her own size. You can't just use artificial size to win, you have to win whilst 'being yourself'. Or your own size, anyway, since Alice spends the whole movie trying, very reasonably, to explain to the rest of the characters that Beast-slaying and sword-fighting has never quite made it above watercolouring and quadrille on the 19th Century Debutante Curriculum. Her "real self" might be all about adventure or whatever, but neck-stabbing is not a core part of Alice's sense of self.
And this fits in too. A model has only to reach size 10 to be lauded and applauded as being a "real woman", as if "real woman" models are somehow that much more accessible as role models to those of us who only wear makeup for special occasions and never spend more than $60 on a pair of jeans. More pressingly, as if thin women are either not really "real" or not really "women". This implication that becaause "size doesn't matter" but doesn't matter in a very specific and value-judged sort of way, it doesn't-matter so hard that people who fall into a slightly different set of size parameters no longer count. I'm never going to be a size 4, but I pretty strongly resent the implication that if I were, I wouldn't be a real woman any more. (Is it binary, one wonders? If you weigh more than 55kg, are you suddenly "real" then, until you reach maybe 100kg? Is it a sliding scale? Is a 54.5kg woman not real because she's not over the line, or is she only semi-real; evanescent and Cheshire Cat-like?)
And this, of course, leads us to the point of breast size and the fact that according to the people who are actually allowed to be in charge of things like the question of whether Internet Censorship is a good idea or not, women who have size A cup breasts or smaller are so far from being "real women" that they aren't allowed to be in legal pornography in this country any more, due to "looking underage" (honestly, it's like these guys have never seen a 15 year old with breasts, which I fear may be commoner than they've assumed) and essentially being a fetish object. "Why," asked Barnaby Joyce (I think it was him? Someone more douche than dude, anyway), "would anyone want to look at porn of small-breasted women anyway?".
I, uh, I actually have to move on here slightly abruptly before this airily theoretical post becomes aggressively political, because this whole internet censorship thing makes me so very, so incoherently, so unamusingly angry. I just... ugh. How horrible.
But back to size! Is size portrayed as being power because it actually is, in a completely unacculturated non-gendered way? Like, the bigger person will usually win in a fight, tall guys are attractive, and people get larger in times of plenty.
People have been getting bigger over the recent centuries. That's not even a theory, we have the tiny low-lintelled doors of ancient cottages to prove it. Interestingly, this was a big, noticeable change in the 19th century , when the industrial revolution meant that suddenly a bunch of people were getting the sort of balanced nutrition you can only really get by being able to get fruit even when you don't have an orchard in your village. This, as I mentioned with the olden-times-people-had-tiny-doors thing, meant that everyone got taller over a generation or so. It was at about this time (like, very very roughly about this time. I think it was about then, but my error margin is about 2 centuries) that Whigs (you know, of course, that these are a political party in the UK, or rather were a slightly looser sociopolitical construct in England at the time our anecdote takes place) came up with the fabulously self-indulgent theory we call Whig History.
Whig History is the way that everyone secretly thinks about history, no matter how hard they swear to you that they don't, or that they don't ever think about history at all. It goes like this: "I am alive right now, and I have this great sextant/digital watch/high speed broadband connection. People 100 years ago did not have access to these things; I am ahead of them. In the future, people will maybe have hovercraft skateboards or whatever, but that's all imaginary at the moment, and may not even happen, in fact won't happen for me personally at all, if I die before they hit the market. Therefore, I am at the crest, so to speak, of the gathering wave of human history, and am the pinnacle of evolution [this is secretly the subtext of those shirts with monkeys evolving into people evolving into either Homer Simpson or a guy at a computer]. I, effectively, win history. There are so many wildly unlikely random chances and coincidences that occured over so mnay millenia to have me, here, thinking about this, that it's pretty special that I am alive today. Really, it feels like Providence, or fate. In fact, clearly all of human history has just been building towards us; towards me and my friends hanging out and coming up with theories about history. Everything points to us and leads to us, so to speak. Let's go to the opium den, you guys, we've solved History, I think we can take the afternoon off."
And, you know, fair enough. The Whigs made a very valid point, (in this rendition) about the fact that all past folks are totally trumped by us present dudes, whereas those future bastards and their space tourism can just sod right off with their possible-non-existence. But I wonder, was all this fed into by the fact that everyone was genuinely bigger than the past people had been? Like, looking at a to-scale family tree with portaiture would only have encouraged that sort of thinking. It's maybe a bit of a long bow to draw, but I reckon it totally could be that, you guys.
Certainly it's more plausible than Alice coming back fom Wonderland and suddenly acting as if she wasn't in the 19th century at all, but actually had totally late-20th, early-21st century views of a woman's place in society. And if Tim Burton can get away with it, I can. Especially at 12:45am. So there.
Basically - and Spoiler Alert, dudes and dudettes (or at least, for those of you who have never engaged with the Alice in Wonderland story in any way, there will be big spoilers, and if you haven't seen the movie then sort of moderate spoilers, but as if this platter of aesthetic indulgence is "spoilable", it's totally one of those journey-not-the-destination things) - Alice has to fight any number of oppressive forces, most relevantly a huge dragon thing, as well as an evil monarch who is self-concious about her unusual appearance. Fine. Also Alice repeatedly solves things in the "problem solving" type areas of her adventure by getting a bunch bigger or smaller. This is apparently perfectly normal in Wonderland, where people always seem to have the relevant potions or whatever handy, although no-one else actually uses any at any time.
But at no point does anyone, either Alice or any of the other characters, just go "sod this for a game of soldiers; I'm going to eat enough cake to be a total giant (while keeping the shrinking potion on hand to avoid plot devices) and just step on the damn Jabberwocky beast thing". Or even just evade capture or prison by growing or shrinking. The Hatter sits in prison and is all "it sure is a pity that I'm manacled and behind bars and doomed to be executed" even though we know that he had become-tiny-juice in his pocket (or on his person) 10 scenes ago, and that he was arrested in the same clothes as he was wearing when he had it last. And he never goes, "man, bugger it, I'm going to become tiny and escape, and enormous if I'm attacked".
Why is this? Is it because once anyone starts messing about like that, all bets are off? Like all the inhabitants of Wonderland have a Gentlemen's Agreement not to start down the road of getting enormous and trying to step on one another, on the grounds that the consequent oneupmanship would cause irreparable damage to the infrastructure? If so, are the potions they all have on hand just for defusing emergencies, like an OH&S sort of thing? Why else would a 2 foot rabbit in a page's uniform be carrying an untouched piece of become-large cake with him, despite maintaining a completely constant size for the whole time?
Size is Power. All you have to do is get bigger or smaller, and everything can be solved. Or could be, if they just, you know, ate cake or drank apparently-gross-tasting fluids made of unspeakble ingredients. Maybe it's all just an elaborate metaphor? Like cake makes people bigger and detox diets and wierd laxatives make them smaller in the world Tim Burton actually inhabits. Because obviously size is power in real life. Cosmopolitan sells millions of copies around the world every month (caution: statistics may not be to scale. Who the hell knows how many Cosmos they sell? I assume millions. Surely. I mean, there are a lot of waiting rooms out there, and people have to read something. God forbid anyone should bring a book to a hairdresser or doctor's waiting room) predicated very largely on the idea that the buying demographic all feel like they're too large, and their lips and shoe collections are too small. The girls on the cover are smaller around but also larger in height than many of us could ever be. "Be like this," the magazines urge, "but be yourself".
Because that's the thing about Alice too. She can be any size, but she can only fit the champion's armour when she's her own size. You can't just use artificial size to win, you have to win whilst 'being yourself'. Or your own size, anyway, since Alice spends the whole movie trying, very reasonably, to explain to the rest of the characters that Beast-slaying and sword-fighting has never quite made it above watercolouring and quadrille on the 19th Century Debutante Curriculum. Her "real self" might be all about adventure or whatever, but neck-stabbing is not a core part of Alice's sense of self.
And this fits in too. A model has only to reach size 10 to be lauded and applauded as being a "real woman", as if "real woman" models are somehow that much more accessible as role models to those of us who only wear makeup for special occasions and never spend more than $60 on a pair of jeans. More pressingly, as if thin women are either not really "real" or not really "women". This implication that becaause "size doesn't matter" but doesn't matter in a very specific and value-judged sort of way, it doesn't-matter so hard that people who fall into a slightly different set of size parameters no longer count. I'm never going to be a size 4, but I pretty strongly resent the implication that if I were, I wouldn't be a real woman any more. (Is it binary, one wonders? If you weigh more than 55kg, are you suddenly "real" then, until you reach maybe 100kg? Is it a sliding scale? Is a 54.5kg woman not real because she's not over the line, or is she only semi-real; evanescent and Cheshire Cat-like?)
And this, of course, leads us to the point of breast size and the fact that according to the people who are actually allowed to be in charge of things like the question of whether Internet Censorship is a good idea or not, women who have size A cup breasts or smaller are so far from being "real women" that they aren't allowed to be in legal pornography in this country any more, due to "looking underage" (honestly, it's like these guys have never seen a 15 year old with breasts, which I fear may be commoner than they've assumed) and essentially being a fetish object. "Why," asked Barnaby Joyce (I think it was him? Someone more douche than dude, anyway), "would anyone want to look at porn of small-breasted women anyway?".
I, uh, I actually have to move on here slightly abruptly before this airily theoretical post becomes aggressively political, because this whole internet censorship thing makes me so very, so incoherently, so unamusingly angry. I just... ugh. How horrible.
But back to size! Is size portrayed as being power because it actually is, in a completely unacculturated non-gendered way? Like, the bigger person will usually win in a fight, tall guys are attractive, and people get larger in times of plenty.
People have been getting bigger over the recent centuries. That's not even a theory, we have the tiny low-lintelled doors of ancient cottages to prove it. Interestingly, this was a big, noticeable change in the 19th century , when the industrial revolution meant that suddenly a bunch of people were getting the sort of balanced nutrition you can only really get by being able to get fruit even when you don't have an orchard in your village. This, as I mentioned with the olden-times-people-had-tiny-doors thing, meant that everyone got taller over a generation or so. It was at about this time (like, very very roughly about this time. I think it was about then, but my error margin is about 2 centuries) that Whigs (you know, of course, that these are a political party in the UK, or rather were a slightly looser sociopolitical construct in England at the time our anecdote takes place) came up with the fabulously self-indulgent theory we call Whig History.
Whig History is the way that everyone secretly thinks about history, no matter how hard they swear to you that they don't, or that they don't ever think about history at all. It goes like this: "I am alive right now, and I have this great sextant/digital watch/high speed broadband connection. People 100 years ago did not have access to these things; I am ahead of them. In the future, people will maybe have hovercraft skateboards or whatever, but that's all imaginary at the moment, and may not even happen, in fact won't happen for me personally at all, if I die before they hit the market. Therefore, I am at the crest, so to speak, of the gathering wave of human history, and am the pinnacle of evolution [this is secretly the subtext of those shirts with monkeys evolving into people evolving into either Homer Simpson or a guy at a computer]. I, effectively, win history. There are so many wildly unlikely random chances and coincidences that occured over so mnay millenia to have me, here, thinking about this, that it's pretty special that I am alive today. Really, it feels like Providence, or fate. In fact, clearly all of human history has just been building towards us; towards me and my friends hanging out and coming up with theories about history. Everything points to us and leads to us, so to speak. Let's go to the opium den, you guys, we've solved History, I think we can take the afternoon off."
And, you know, fair enough. The Whigs made a very valid point, (in this rendition) about the fact that all past folks are totally trumped by us present dudes, whereas those future bastards and their space tourism can just sod right off with their possible-non-existence. But I wonder, was all this fed into by the fact that everyone was genuinely bigger than the past people had been? Like, looking at a to-scale family tree with portaiture would only have encouraged that sort of thinking. It's maybe a bit of a long bow to draw, but I reckon it totally could be that, you guys.
Certainly it's more plausible than Alice coming back fom Wonderland and suddenly acting as if she wasn't in the 19th century at all, but actually had totally late-20th, early-21st century views of a woman's place in society. And if Tim Burton can get away with it, I can. Especially at 12:45am. So there.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
In Which it becomes Obvious that I only hang out with Certain Types of people.
So, I was talking the other day to someone from MIT, which, as I am sure you know, is in Cambridge, near Boston (I think? My American reader assures me that I have the wrong end of the stick, here. Apparently they're adjacent, but not actually the smae thing), as is Harvard. Since that's more or less the sum total of my knowledge about MIT (I also know that Owen is doing a PhD in computery things there, and that they are the only big University which doesn't give out Honorary Degrees. So if someone tells you they have a degree from MIT they're either well eductaed or lying, whereas if they nominate any other uni, they might merely be famous or a world leader or humanitarian or something. Because in my mind it's possible to be a famously humanitarian world leader without being educated, apparently?), ok, so since that's the sum total of my knowledge of MIT, the only conversational gambit I had available to me was "a friend of mine went to Boston and said that it was awesome; all the boys were so nerdy and geeky that you could just tell that they all read xkcd or something similar." (Obviously it would have lacked conversational fluidity to have paused here to explain that this friend actually has a very nice boyfriend, so that this was more of an anthropological observation than an answer to "what did you do on your holiday?", but you, Dear Reader, should know that the Honour of my America-Visiting Friend was naturally not compromised.)
Dude was all "what? sure there are a lot of guys there but they have a saying: 'The odds are good, but the goods are odd'. Are there really chicks who actually like geeky guys? Surely not." Leaving aside the issue of "that's a pretty neat saying, that sort of worplay shenanigans is exactly the sort of thing that makes boys attractive, surely! {Also: devilish good looks, bein' an Earl or similar, digging me, being nice and also clever, etc. These things are also plusses for a boy's attractiveness rating. But wordplay is still right up there.)... Leaving aside, as I said, that issue, I realised that my first reaction was "What are you talking about? All girls like geeky boys best!"
It was at about this point that I realised that I've been hanging out with such a specific sort of person that this is genuinely the case, as far as I know, for most of my female friends. Although they make up a majority of the Chicks I Know, though, these are apparently a total minority in the Real World, still. Isn't that wierd?
I mean, I guess, on consideration, I probably have girl friends who have no preference, and even maybe some who would actually prefer a non-geek, but not many, surely? The only one I can think of off the top of my head totally dated the geekiest boy in my course last year. (Well, the geekiest one I knew at the time. Dude does a lot of exercise and is really more a nerd than a geek when you get down to brass tacks, but points for effort, nonetheless.)
Is this because I don't bother befriending people who don't fit my worldview? Is it because only the geeky types look at someone with a Trogdor badge on their labcoat and say to themselves "I'm going to talk to that girl"? Is it the fault of the internet, which allows us to filter our friends (and "friends") by interest? Is it because of the Clubs and Societies which allow us to find our own kind? Or is it some combination of these with an infinite feedback loop: you meet a geeky dude, he intoduces you to his geeky friends, they befriend you and you meet their geeky friends etc etc etc?
Is that even a good thing? I mean, it's a convenient thing, since if you want to date someone who knows their Jabba from their Boba (note: this is not actually a criterion for me) then you have all those people right there and convenient to hand, but on the other hand, who knows who I'd be now if that original geek had been someone who surfed the ocean rather than the internet? To what extent are we defined by the people we know? I mean, I'm a bit geeky. Quite geeky, even. And I like geeky people because they reaffirm that it's ok to be that (or so Psych 101 told me), but I'm not all that good at being geeky. I don't like card games all that much, and role playing is not something at which I've ever had the urge to try my hand. I wonder if, had I met a different type of person, I'd now be a different sort of person, and also be better at being that sort of person? I wonder, am I reaching, so to speak, my full social potential? Have I wasted the potential to become really good at being the popular bitchy cheerleader type you see in Teen Movies?
Probably not, let's face it, if you cut me in half you'd probably find the word "geek" written through my core. You can tell, because this post ends here: I have a lecture which started 5 minutes ago, to which I have run myself late so I could write this blog post. If that isn't geeky, what is? Also, holy crap, you guys, I'm totally late!
TTFN!
Dude was all "what? sure there are a lot of guys there but they have a saying: 'The odds are good, but the goods are odd'. Are there really chicks who actually like geeky guys? Surely not." Leaving aside the issue of "that's a pretty neat saying, that sort of worplay shenanigans is exactly the sort of thing that makes boys attractive, surely! {Also: devilish good looks, bein' an Earl or similar, digging me, being nice and also clever, etc. These things are also plusses for a boy's attractiveness rating. But wordplay is still right up there.)... Leaving aside, as I said, that issue, I realised that my first reaction was "What are you talking about? All girls like geeky boys best!"
It was at about this point that I realised that I've been hanging out with such a specific sort of person that this is genuinely the case, as far as I know, for most of my female friends. Although they make up a majority of the Chicks I Know, though, these are apparently a total minority in the Real World, still. Isn't that wierd?
I mean, I guess, on consideration, I probably have girl friends who have no preference, and even maybe some who would actually prefer a non-geek, but not many, surely? The only one I can think of off the top of my head totally dated the geekiest boy in my course last year. (Well, the geekiest one I knew at the time. Dude does a lot of exercise and is really more a nerd than a geek when you get down to brass tacks, but points for effort, nonetheless.)
Is this because I don't bother befriending people who don't fit my worldview? Is it because only the geeky types look at someone with a Trogdor badge on their labcoat and say to themselves "I'm going to talk to that girl"? Is it the fault of the internet, which allows us to filter our friends (and "friends") by interest? Is it because of the Clubs and Societies which allow us to find our own kind? Or is it some combination of these with an infinite feedback loop: you meet a geeky dude, he intoduces you to his geeky friends, they befriend you and you meet their geeky friends etc etc etc?
Is that even a good thing? I mean, it's a convenient thing, since if you want to date someone who knows their Jabba from their Boba (note: this is not actually a criterion for me) then you have all those people right there and convenient to hand, but on the other hand, who knows who I'd be now if that original geek had been someone who surfed the ocean rather than the internet? To what extent are we defined by the people we know? I mean, I'm a bit geeky. Quite geeky, even. And I like geeky people because they reaffirm that it's ok to be that (or so Psych 101 told me), but I'm not all that good at being geeky. I don't like card games all that much, and role playing is not something at which I've ever had the urge to try my hand. I wonder if, had I met a different type of person, I'd now be a different sort of person, and also be better at being that sort of person? I wonder, am I reaching, so to speak, my full social potential? Have I wasted the potential to become really good at being the popular bitchy cheerleader type you see in Teen Movies?
Probably not, let's face it, if you cut me in half you'd probably find the word "geek" written through my core. You can tell, because this post ends here: I have a lecture which started 5 minutes ago, to which I have run myself late so I could write this blog post. If that isn't geeky, what is? Also, holy crap, you guys, I'm totally late!
TTFN!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
In Which the Rolling Stones are sort of Right (but still funny-looking)
The other day, I lost my phone. You've probably heard me whinge about it, in fact. A nice lady in the Physiology Department thoughtfully picked it up and locked it in her office overnight, but then rather frustratingly took the next day off sick and didn't give anyone permission to open her office with the spare key. The upshot of this was that yesterday after waiting rather more than an hour, I was allowed to see my phone through a window, and hear it ringing, but not actually get it. Something about this was really really frustrating. Maybe it was the fact that I could easily have obtained it if the security guard were less of a Letter of the Law guy. Maybe it was the immediate presence combined with the unobtainability. Maybe it was the fact that the other girl in the office was not sure whether the office'd be accesiible at all this week. Maybe it was just that she suggested I ring to see if the woman was in today, but couldn't grasp that that would be difficult while they held my phone prisoner and at the same time was unable to understand why I might really sort of need my phone back within the week.
Probably, though, what it was was the helplessness. It was enough to almost make my eyes mist up, the frustration of it all. Everyone hates feeling helpless. I mean everyone. Like, this is a big enough deal that they use it to give rats depression when they need to test their antidepressant meds and stuff (obviously, the rates of success with therapy alone in rats are poorer, presumably due to the language difference). Maybe it's especially bad for me because of how I'm spoilt and usually can get things that I want. Not, like, a pony and a yacht and an iPhone, but I have a lot of nice things, and very rarely do I ever really suffer, I guess.
I almost feel guilty listening to that song "Common People"; so far in my life, ultimately a lot of the time it's a case of "if you called your Dad he could stop it all" (I assume.I mean, I've always found it better not to test this hypothesis; what if it's a one-time privelage? Or not really the case at all? I'd rather keep my illusory safety net intact, in this case). Possibly, of course, it's not 'worse for me because of living such a nice life' but actually 'not worse at all'. Possibly it only seems that way to me because of the self-absorption which could well be a symptom of that very (putative) spoiling.
Plus, it really sort of annoys me that after all this ridiculousness, when I finally do get to get it back, all I'm likely to say is "thanks for keeping it safe, sorry about the billion alarms and stuff". You know, rather than saying even so much as "maybe handle that differently if it ever comes up again, eh?".
It really reminds me of that (other) song, the one by the Rolling Stones which has the refrain "you can't alway get what you want; (you get what you need)". But I wonder, is that necessarily true either? Sure the meaning of the word 'need' is perhaps a little plastic. I "need" to be at uni today, but I could live if I never went again. I need food and drink, but I could probably go a day or so without it. But what about air? You definitely need air, but people suffocate, right? They don't get what they need. So, does Mick Jagger just not write for those airless losers, or is death a mere nothing? Does it still not count as a "need", because those people could totally surmount their "desire" for air if they just manned up a little? Or am I wildly overthinking a lyric by the same people who brought us "Brown Sugar" a love song which casually uses the imagery of a slaver raping his slaves? Probably it's that last one.
Still! Obviously the take home message here is that while we're unanimously certain that you can't always get what you want, you probably don't always get what you need. Unless.... unless it's a cunning use of the continuous present tense? So, "you get what you need", can mean that you are so far in receipt of what you need, which, given a specific enough definition of "need" must be true for all listeners. Since if the only things you really need are the things which are stopping you from dying, then if you're alive to listen to the Stones at any given time, you're fine at that particular time? Unless you're dying while listening, in which case we'll call it poetic irony.
Maybe this is the same as religion? Or rather the problem solved by religion. Once you have the construct of an eternity to work with, you can overcome the problems with saying that the deity gives you "everything you need". In fact, you just sort of add cred to the "not what you want but what you need" thing, since the less of the air-that-you-want you have, the closer you are to acheiving the enjoyable-eternity-that-you-need. (Note again that this does not constitute a comment on the validity or otherwise of religions in general or particular.)
*****
{This row of stars is one of those ones which symbolises either a total break in subject or the passage of a longer amount of time than you might otherwise think.}
So, what with my desperately unpredictable internet connection it has taken me so long to be able to upload this that I've actually gotten my phone back before I've had a chance to post. But! All's well that ends well, and I'm going to do the sensible thing and end this post here and start a new one to do any new subject nattering.
Probably, though, what it was was the helplessness. It was enough to almost make my eyes mist up, the frustration of it all. Everyone hates feeling helpless. I mean everyone. Like, this is a big enough deal that they use it to give rats depression when they need to test their antidepressant meds and stuff (obviously, the rates of success with therapy alone in rats are poorer, presumably due to the language difference). Maybe it's especially bad for me because of how I'm spoilt and usually can get things that I want. Not, like, a pony and a yacht and an iPhone, but I have a lot of nice things, and very rarely do I ever really suffer, I guess.
I almost feel guilty listening to that song "Common People"; so far in my life, ultimately a lot of the time it's a case of "if you called your Dad he could stop it all" (I assume.I mean, I've always found it better not to test this hypothesis; what if it's a one-time privelage? Or not really the case at all? I'd rather keep my illusory safety net intact, in this case). Possibly, of course, it's not 'worse for me because of living such a nice life' but actually 'not worse at all'. Possibly it only seems that way to me because of the self-absorption which could well be a symptom of that very (putative) spoiling.
Plus, it really sort of annoys me that after all this ridiculousness, when I finally do get to get it back, all I'm likely to say is "thanks for keeping it safe, sorry about the billion alarms and stuff". You know, rather than saying even so much as "maybe handle that differently if it ever comes up again, eh?".
It really reminds me of that (other) song, the one by the Rolling Stones which has the refrain "you can't alway get what you want; (you get what you need)". But I wonder, is that necessarily true either? Sure the meaning of the word 'need' is perhaps a little plastic. I "need" to be at uni today, but I could live if I never went again. I need food and drink, but I could probably go a day or so without it. But what about air? You definitely need air, but people suffocate, right? They don't get what they need. So, does Mick Jagger just not write for those airless losers, or is death a mere nothing? Does it still not count as a "need", because those people could totally surmount their "desire" for air if they just manned up a little? Or am I wildly overthinking a lyric by the same people who brought us "Brown Sugar" a love song which casually uses the imagery of a slaver raping his slaves? Probably it's that last one.
Still! Obviously the take home message here is that while we're unanimously certain that you can't always get what you want, you probably don't always get what you need. Unless.... unless it's a cunning use of the continuous present tense? So, "you get what you need", can mean that you are so far in receipt of what you need, which, given a specific enough definition of "need" must be true for all listeners. Since if the only things you really need are the things which are stopping you from dying, then if you're alive to listen to the Stones at any given time, you're fine at that particular time? Unless you're dying while listening, in which case we'll call it poetic irony.
Maybe this is the same as religion? Or rather the problem solved by religion. Once you have the construct of an eternity to work with, you can overcome the problems with saying that the deity gives you "everything you need". In fact, you just sort of add cred to the "not what you want but what you need" thing, since the less of the air-that-you-want you have, the closer you are to acheiving the enjoyable-eternity-that-you-need. (Note again that this does not constitute a comment on the validity or otherwise of religions in general or particular.)
*****
{This row of stars is one of those ones which symbolises either a total break in subject or the passage of a longer amount of time than you might otherwise think.}
So, what with my desperately unpredictable internet connection it has taken me so long to be able to upload this that I've actually gotten my phone back before I've had a chance to post. But! All's well that ends well, and I'm going to do the sensible thing and end this post here and start a new one to do any new subject nattering.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
In which Loveliness and Shyness are Contemplated
What is it, Dear Reader, that makes someone really, properly, Lovely? Not just lovely, you understand, but capital-L lovely? I mean, I personally think that almost all of my friends are quite lovely. You are all dreadfully nice and clever and attractive and so on, but all of us, we mere mortals, you and I, have our flaws. And people love us despite and occasionally because of those flaws, but there’s no pretending that they aren’t there at all. Even the Really Lovely people must have flaws, of course, but somehow, whenever you try to think hard about them, they slip out of focus like one of those magic eye things which were so popular in the 90s. Obviously these things are always subjective, and Stephen Fry certainly had a lot to say on the subject of loveliness and its origins (if I was actually connected to the internet at the moment, or even as tech-savvy as an average 35 year old, I would here hyperlink to a Youtube clip of that skit in “A Bit Of Fry And Laurie” Season 1, where he has a monologue about his loveliness and gorgeousness, but I’m not and I don’t, so you’ll have to use your imaginations). But the thing is, there’re a very few select people, the capital-L Lovely ones, about whom everyone seems to agree so reliably that it really begins to seem like they possess some kind of objective quality of Loveliness.
In my mind, these people are always to be thought of as Louise-Harrises, since the first one I met, and the one I’ve known for the longest, was named Louise Harris. If you’ve met her (and practically everyone seems to have done so, somehow) then you’ll know what I mean. That thing where she comes up in a conversation or anecdote and everyone goes “Yes! Oh she’s so lovely, isn’t she? So lovely!”. You never seem to hear a story to the discredit of a LouiseHarris, they seem to be forever giving people thoughtful little gifts, and sewing birthday sashes, and dressing impeccably, and liking the nicest sorts of music and things, in every story, all the while being charmingly down-to-earth and modest and so on. And they really seem to like everyone almost as much as everyone automatically likes them.
I don’t know how common LouiseHarrises are in general, and it’s possible that I’ve merely been very lucky, but I can bring 3 to mind even just off the top of my head. Obviously there’s the eponymous Louise, but also Charming Caitlin, who always has a similar effect on people (“How can anyone so perfectly nice and so impressively intelligent and motivated and such also have eyelashes like that? How is that even fair?” is a common theme here.) I rather suspect that the girl named Alison in my yeargroup at uni is another such individual.
[So, although the timeless magic of text means that this sentence follows with tolerable immediacy after that last one for you, Dear Reader, for me it’s been about 24 hours. During that 24 hours, I happened to hear unprovoked the confirmation of this suspicion.] A young man of my acquaintance has volunteered the opinion that this aforementioned Alison is probably the Loveliest girl in all of the yeargroup. (So not only am I right, it appears that I can influence events using only my mind, which information is handy to know.) So it looks like she probably is another LouiseHarries. Also, reassuringly, like this phenomenon actually does exist outside my head, which is reassuring. Plus, this opens up a whole new area of speculation.
I don’t know if you’re in the habit of receiving those circular emails that seem to get sent throughout the world by ladies aged between 20 and 80 who have nothing better to do, those motivational sorts of ones with poor formatting and every line of text a different colour and very often interspersed with animated gifs of hearts or kittens or suchlike. As you can tell, it has not always been possible for me to avoid them, and one of the more popular sorts of messages took the form of parable-style extended metaphors explaining to unfortunate single ladies why it was that they were so blighted. ‘Ladies,’ such emails often opine, ‘are like apples [NB: except less crunchy, surely?]; the good ones are hard to get to because they’re high up in trees, while rotten one fall to the ground and are easily picked up; one day a nice boy will bother climbing the tree to pick you.’ Leaving aside the obvious bitterness and arborial inaccuracy of such a theory, and even ignoring for the moment the pretty serious barely veiled insult to everyone who’s ever dated ever and the sexist nightmare that is embodied by this whole idea, let’s look at the outcome.
Essentially, it’s trying to say “if you’re single and not by choice, if no-one ever asks you out, it may be because they’re too intimidated by how great you are, not that they’re repelled by your awfulness” (or something). And obviously that’s sort of true (although a very unfortunate dichotomy to go about the place setting up, to say the least), and certainly bound to be true some of the time. It really seems like the Lovely people are the ideal contol group with which to investigate this question. Since they’re objectively viewed as nifty by 100% of the surveyed population, either there’s something unscientific in the method (and I’ll grant you that there are what I believe are called Demand Characteristics in phrasing a question “I think Caitlin’s really wonderful, and so does everyone else: do you agree, or is there something terribly wrong with you?”) or this shows something. See, if they’re definitely great, but also single, then that means that it’s genuinely not them that’s the problem, y’see. So everyone who’s ever read a “Here’s what’s wrong with you and why you’re alone (buy this GHD)” article in Cosmopolitan and secretly wondered can rest easy. And also possibly stop wasting their money on terrible magazines and expensive hair straighteners.
I’m not actually sure of the relationship statuses of 2 out of 3 of the LouiseHarrises I’ve come across, but I wonder, if they’re single, do they angst about it? Do you suppose that they’re aware that they’re listed as being the most desirable chick by a majority of guys (well, at least some, and any at all is frankly a win in this fraught life of ours)? That rather than being uninterested, guys are just dazzled by their apparent perfection, and would no more proposition them than they would Angelina Jolie (or whoever). I bet that even if you told them, they’d think you were just trying to be nice, or possibly that you were some kind of unspeakably creepy stalker. Poor Lovely, oblivious, things.
It’s a funny thing, shyness, especially that specific type of “you’re so great, I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you by asking you out or trying to befriend you in any way” shyness which crushes the masculine admirers of these ideal girls. Sometimes I worry that the non-romantic subgenre of that makes me seem like a jerk, occasionally. There are people to whom, as soon as you meet them, you take an instant shine. Not just the LouiseHarrises, the regularly lovely people, you understand. You meet them and think “gosh, you’re pretty awesome, I’d love to be friends with you”. The thing is, I don’t want to be annoyingly encroaching and pushy, so I tend to then be careful not to make too many overtures of friendship. (Note to people with whom I have obviously and deliberately made friends: don’t feel bad, I was probably just in a pushier mood when we met.) The problem with which is that I have been known to overdo it rather and look like I’m being deliberately distant. I often feel like I’m achieving the wrong level of friendliness, really, like I’m either barring people by failing to make eye contact and smile or chat when we walk past one another, or else by making eye contact too early or smiling at people who are all “do I know you?”.
Worse, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, I never seem to properly differentiate between friendliness levels. Apparently the difference is not clear to anyone outside my head between my being quite friendly but a little shy and my being perfectly self-confident but trying to as nicely as possible keep someone at arm’s distance. Essentially, as far as everyone else is concerned, it’s a continuum between “flirting outrageously”, “being pleasantly friendly” and “trying to shoot someone down without being rude”. And not like a long continuum, either. We’re talking eye-of-faith distinctions here. I hope, by the time I am old and grey, to have solved this to some extent, but in the meanwhile, no dice.
In related but better news, our year group seems to have rapidly developed from a Year-7/American-Teen-Movie level of cliquey interaction (“We are the people with iPhones, you cannot sit with us, yours is an Android p hone”) to a more pleasantly Year 11-ish level of interaction (“You and I are not friends per se but I recognise you so I will nod and smile if I see you out and about”). We’re not yet at the Year 12 level where everyone knows everyone else’s name and could comfortably chat for 20 minutes with any given classmate, but with luck we’ll make it eventually (also, it’s possible that time has added an unrealistic flavour ti my recollections of Year 12 interaction). It seems a great pity that as of the end of this year we’ll be permanently segregated into our Clinical Schools and never more see the people who’ve been assigned to different hospitals. I don’t know how that hothouse environment of only 40 classmates for both years 3 and 4 will go, and I’m sort of worried about it. Still, sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, as the misleadingly negative-sounding saying goes, and with luck it will all work out.
In the meanwhile, it’s perfectly charming to be on nod-and-smile terms with almost everyone, I actually really like it. Not least because it solves that “ought I nod-and-smile or should I just look preoccupied and hope for the best” quandary which I was talking about earlier.
Good grief, one and three-quarter thousand words. I really am dreadfully sorry!
In my mind, these people are always to be thought of as Louise-Harrises, since the first one I met, and the one I’ve known for the longest, was named Louise Harris. If you’ve met her (and practically everyone seems to have done so, somehow) then you’ll know what I mean. That thing where she comes up in a conversation or anecdote and everyone goes “Yes! Oh she’s so lovely, isn’t she? So lovely!”. You never seem to hear a story to the discredit of a LouiseHarris, they seem to be forever giving people thoughtful little gifts, and sewing birthday sashes, and dressing impeccably, and liking the nicest sorts of music and things, in every story, all the while being charmingly down-to-earth and modest and so on. And they really seem to like everyone almost as much as everyone automatically likes them.
I don’t know how common LouiseHarrises are in general, and it’s possible that I’ve merely been very lucky, but I can bring 3 to mind even just off the top of my head. Obviously there’s the eponymous Louise, but also Charming Caitlin, who always has a similar effect on people (“How can anyone so perfectly nice and so impressively intelligent and motivated and such also have eyelashes like that? How is that even fair?” is a common theme here.) I rather suspect that the girl named Alison in my yeargroup at uni is another such individual.
[So, although the timeless magic of text means that this sentence follows with tolerable immediacy after that last one for you, Dear Reader, for me it’s been about 24 hours. During that 24 hours, I happened to hear unprovoked the confirmation of this suspicion.] A young man of my acquaintance has volunteered the opinion that this aforementioned Alison is probably the Loveliest girl in all of the yeargroup. (So not only am I right, it appears that I can influence events using only my mind, which information is handy to know.) So it looks like she probably is another LouiseHarries. Also, reassuringly, like this phenomenon actually does exist outside my head, which is reassuring. Plus, this opens up a whole new area of speculation.
I don’t know if you’re in the habit of receiving those circular emails that seem to get sent throughout the world by ladies aged between 20 and 80 who have nothing better to do, those motivational sorts of ones with poor formatting and every line of text a different colour and very often interspersed with animated gifs of hearts or kittens or suchlike. As you can tell, it has not always been possible for me to avoid them, and one of the more popular sorts of messages took the form of parable-style extended metaphors explaining to unfortunate single ladies why it was that they were so blighted. ‘Ladies,’ such emails often opine, ‘are like apples [NB: except less crunchy, surely?]; the good ones are hard to get to because they’re high up in trees, while rotten one fall to the ground and are easily picked up; one day a nice boy will bother climbing the tree to pick you.’ Leaving aside the obvious bitterness and arborial inaccuracy of such a theory, and even ignoring for the moment the pretty serious barely veiled insult to everyone who’s ever dated ever and the sexist nightmare that is embodied by this whole idea, let’s look at the outcome.
Essentially, it’s trying to say “if you’re single and not by choice, if no-one ever asks you out, it may be because they’re too intimidated by how great you are, not that they’re repelled by your awfulness” (or something). And obviously that’s sort of true (although a very unfortunate dichotomy to go about the place setting up, to say the least), and certainly bound to be true some of the time. It really seems like the Lovely people are the ideal contol group with which to investigate this question. Since they’re objectively viewed as nifty by 100% of the surveyed population, either there’s something unscientific in the method (and I’ll grant you that there are what I believe are called Demand Characteristics in phrasing a question “I think Caitlin’s really wonderful, and so does everyone else: do you agree, or is there something terribly wrong with you?”) or this shows something. See, if they’re definitely great, but also single, then that means that it’s genuinely not them that’s the problem, y’see. So everyone who’s ever read a “Here’s what’s wrong with you and why you’re alone (buy this GHD)” article in Cosmopolitan and secretly wondered can rest easy. And also possibly stop wasting their money on terrible magazines and expensive hair straighteners.
I’m not actually sure of the relationship statuses of 2 out of 3 of the LouiseHarrises I’ve come across, but I wonder, if they’re single, do they angst about it? Do you suppose that they’re aware that they’re listed as being the most desirable chick by a majority of guys (well, at least some, and any at all is frankly a win in this fraught life of ours)? That rather than being uninterested, guys are just dazzled by their apparent perfection, and would no more proposition them than they would Angelina Jolie (or whoever). I bet that even if you told them, they’d think you were just trying to be nice, or possibly that you were some kind of unspeakably creepy stalker. Poor Lovely, oblivious, things.
It’s a funny thing, shyness, especially that specific type of “you’re so great, I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you by asking you out or trying to befriend you in any way” shyness which crushes the masculine admirers of these ideal girls. Sometimes I worry that the non-romantic subgenre of that makes me seem like a jerk, occasionally. There are people to whom, as soon as you meet them, you take an instant shine. Not just the LouiseHarrises, the regularly lovely people, you understand. You meet them and think “gosh, you’re pretty awesome, I’d love to be friends with you”. The thing is, I don’t want to be annoyingly encroaching and pushy, so I tend to then be careful not to make too many overtures of friendship. (Note to people with whom I have obviously and deliberately made friends: don’t feel bad, I was probably just in a pushier mood when we met.) The problem with which is that I have been known to overdo it rather and look like I’m being deliberately distant. I often feel like I’m achieving the wrong level of friendliness, really, like I’m either barring people by failing to make eye contact and smile or chat when we walk past one another, or else by making eye contact too early or smiling at people who are all “do I know you?”.
Worse, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, I never seem to properly differentiate between friendliness levels. Apparently the difference is not clear to anyone outside my head between my being quite friendly but a little shy and my being perfectly self-confident but trying to as nicely as possible keep someone at arm’s distance. Essentially, as far as everyone else is concerned, it’s a continuum between “flirting outrageously”, “being pleasantly friendly” and “trying to shoot someone down without being rude”. And not like a long continuum, either. We’re talking eye-of-faith distinctions here. I hope, by the time I am old and grey, to have solved this to some extent, but in the meanwhile, no dice.
In related but better news, our year group seems to have rapidly developed from a Year-7/American-Teen-Movie level of cliquey interaction (“We are the people with iPhones, you cannot sit with us, yours is an Android p hone”) to a more pleasantly Year 11-ish level of interaction (“You and I are not friends per se but I recognise you so I will nod and smile if I see you out and about”). We’re not yet at the Year 12 level where everyone knows everyone else’s name and could comfortably chat for 20 minutes with any given classmate, but with luck we’ll make it eventually (also, it’s possible that time has added an unrealistic flavour ti my recollections of Year 12 interaction). It seems a great pity that as of the end of this year we’ll be permanently segregated into our Clinical Schools and never more see the people who’ve been assigned to different hospitals. I don’t know how that hothouse environment of only 40 classmates for both years 3 and 4 will go, and I’m sort of worried about it. Still, sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, as the misleadingly negative-sounding saying goes, and with luck it will all work out.
In the meanwhile, it’s perfectly charming to be on nod-and-smile terms with almost everyone, I actually really like it. Not least because it solves that “ought I nod-and-smile or should I just look preoccupied and hope for the best” quandary which I was talking about earlier.
Good grief, one and three-quarter thousand words. I really am dreadfully sorry!
Monday, March 01, 2010
In Which everyone feels secretly a little bit smug
It's wonderful thing to be at uni for the first day of the year. Wonderful in that very special, hectic, the-queue-for-the-computers-is-siddenly-hours-long sort of way. Today is the very first day of uni ever at all for hundreds of tiny first years, many of whom (most of whom?) genuinely believe themselves to be actual people despite having demostrably been born in the nineties.
This makes them very excited, in that nervous sort of way where you have to pretend desperately to be totally cool and comfortable and down with everything despite not actually knowing what building you're standing in. So that makes them all very pleased with themselves, in between torrents of hyperventilation in hidden corners.
Similarly, the second years suddenly feel themselves to be filled with worldly wisdom; they know exactly where Manning is, and even if they're not actually quite sure which building the Marjorie Oldfield Lecture Theatre is in, they certainly feel that they trump every obvious fresher they see.
Where it gets interesting is the 3rd years, way laid back, and the biggest people on campus, apparently unaware that many people have degrees that go for longer than a basic 3-year span. Their superiority is only marred by the fact that those of us who've been around even longer remember them as Ickle Firsties.
The tragedy, though, is that even now (and this is my 8th year), one still feels a bit that way. Or I do. I know I oughtn't, but I keep catching myself feeling smug about how at home I am, and thinking of all the undergrads as "little". I didn't actually notice this until my On-The-Ball Friend James showed me the earnest and young-reading blog of a first year medical student. I'm pretty sure that last year I was swanning around going "I'm in 7th year, bitches, I'm so all over this uni", but reading the writings of anyone who is that excited to have gone to a clinical day puts my erstwhile assurance into sharp perspective; I may have known where the Bosch building was, but I really did have very little idea about a bunch of stuff. On the upside, at least this year I've noticed. I know that I know barely more than the whippersnappers who are excited to learn that the Vestibular Canals are vital in balance, I remember practically nothing of the things they're learning at the moment, so I guess I ought to get down and get humble.
But obviously not as humble as anyone who was born in the 90s, because really, isn't it just as important not to get carried away?
This makes them very excited, in that nervous sort of way where you have to pretend desperately to be totally cool and comfortable and down with everything despite not actually knowing what building you're standing in. So that makes them all very pleased with themselves, in between torrents of hyperventilation in hidden corners.
Similarly, the second years suddenly feel themselves to be filled with worldly wisdom; they know exactly where Manning is, and even if they're not actually quite sure which building the Marjorie Oldfield Lecture Theatre is in, they certainly feel that they trump every obvious fresher they see.
Where it gets interesting is the 3rd years, way laid back, and the biggest people on campus, apparently unaware that many people have degrees that go for longer than a basic 3-year span. Their superiority is only marred by the fact that those of us who've been around even longer remember them as Ickle Firsties.
The tragedy, though, is that even now (and this is my 8th year), one still feels a bit that way. Or I do. I know I oughtn't, but I keep catching myself feeling smug about how at home I am, and thinking of all the undergrads as "little". I didn't actually notice this until my On-The-Ball Friend James showed me the earnest and young-reading blog of a first year medical student. I'm pretty sure that last year I was swanning around going "I'm in 7th year, bitches, I'm so all over this uni", but reading the writings of anyone who is that excited to have gone to a clinical day puts my erstwhile assurance into sharp perspective; I may have known where the Bosch building was, but I really did have very little idea about a bunch of stuff. On the upside, at least this year I've noticed. I know that I know barely more than the whippersnappers who are excited to learn that the Vestibular Canals are vital in balance, I remember practically nothing of the things they're learning at the moment, so I guess I ought to get down and get humble.
But obviously not as humble as anyone who was born in the 90s, because really, isn't it just as important not to get carried away?
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