So, today I was talking to someone at uni (at one of those casual social events that happens on a Friday evening, which I attend because of being Cool. That special sort of Cool where you go to casual outdoor pub-based events but nonetheless apparently do not have anything better to do with your Fridays) to someone whom I'd met once before, 3 weeks previously, (and hello if you remembered the this URL and are reading, Easily-Amused-Matt) (Good Lord, I hope his name is Matt, otherwise how embarrassing. But you really can't refer to someone as "The Easily Amused Guy Who Was There That Friday That Time Wearing An Icebreaker Shirt And A Hamas Scarf, Presumably Not Politically, Who Said It Was A Good Thing That He And I Were At Different Clinical Scools Because I Would Be Tiring To Talk To More Often Than Weekly Or Whatever, You Know The Guy, I Think He Had Glasses"; it's not snappy at all, and it would be tiring to hyphenate, and also it totally wouldn't work in the vocative. Plus I'm really pretty sure his name was Matt). Anyway, he said that he remembered me, which is nice, if sometimes a smidgin unconvincing, and then said "so I hear you have a blog which is hilarious?".
Leaving aside the "Gosh! How nice! How flatteringly hyperbolic!" and the instant urge to disclaim any pretentions to hilariousness, this... this always surprises me. Firstly, because, seriously, you mean you actually do remember me? A part of me is always surprised, possibly because it so often fails to happen, especially among the Uni Folks, who are often hampered in their attempts to remember who I am by their own overwhelming indifference on the question of my existance. (Possibly this is unfair, and this is actually a thin veneer of Faux-Indifference masking a core of Really-Caring-A-Lot-ness, or something. Possibly this is just how they roll, sort of barring people until it's been over a year so that they've proved themselves worthy by virtue of persistence. Most likely, of course, is that this, like so many things, is all in my mind, and that people are actually being perfectly friendly and I'm merely failing to process that. I bet that happens some of the time, if not most. A bit of unfair prejudice, a bit of shyness on my and or their parts, a soupçon of misinterpretation, and before you notice it's all "huh, that chick, she has no idea who I even am, and we've totally spoken a bunch of times". In my defence, in my undergrad, I was often exposed to the ravages that are social occasions with SUDS people (Sydney Uni Drama Society! Solipsism for all!), so I'm probably overinclined to think that people are deliberately not seeing folks, because man, that was definitely the de rigeur way to interact with the non-thespians.) Anyway, when someone really remembers me when we've only met once, it always seems nice. Maybe this is odd in me, since obviously I remember meeting him (possibly mainly on account of that slightly odd remark about me being tiring), but to be honest, that's largely random, sometimes I remember meeting people with crystal clarity (that sort of crystal clarity where you remember that someone likes Thing X and would notice if they'd changed their hair, but have not the faintest idea what their name is), other times, I just fail absolutely to remember people at all.
Secondly, it's always awfully flattering to be discussed in your absence. Like, it's already pretty neat when people remember you and talk to you and give the impression of thinking you reasonably likeable when you're there, but it's another thing entirely to have people discussing you when you aren't there to remind them that you exist. My Ever-Flattering-If-Occasionally-Inclined-To-Overdo-It Friend James said the other day that someone else had mentioned that I was a fan of the band Broken Social Scene on Saturday. Which, now I come to think of it, was a bit of a non sequitur anyway, given that I don't know what context there was for him to be all "we were discussing your music tastes the other day!", and also that I would describe my relationship with that band as being more towards the "Oh, I think I've heard of them, that's a band, right? They, uh, they sound... good?" end of the spectrum than otherwise. Nonetheless, the important point is that it somehow seems disproportionately flattering. Sort of "aw, you guys thought about me when I wasn't there? That's so nice!" Which, well, may be a little bit tragic, but hey, it's victimless tragicness, more or less. (Except for those of you who've been around for long enough that you've read blog posts about this same concept 3 times already. Sorry dudes.)
I'm always ridiculously curious about in what context it occurred, this alleged discussion of me (or "mentioning me at all"). Was it good? Were you playing some kind of game called "who is the niftiest person you can think of"? Presumably it's more that the band (or whatever) has come up and someone's gone, "I think Angela likes them, a lot of people do!" or similar. Although now I come to write it down, even this seems strange. That example, for instance, reads as if my putative opinion were the terribly important last word on the matter. Like "well, Angela likes them, so I think we'll all just have to face facts: they are clearly objectively good. I defy you to gainsay that girl's opinion!". This is just my writing, though, and should not be allowed to cause you to think that this is how I really imagine my friends behave. And thank goodness, you would rapidly come to resent someone always referrred to like that. Those of you who really like sad books and movies about torture would always be all angsty, for one thing.
I guess it must happen to everyone a lot of the time (being discussed, not being angsty because someone questions the validity of your liking of the Saw movies). I mean, what is there to talk about, really, except the people one knows? Or, in the case of magazies and so on, doesn't know? Sure, you can discuss yourself (cf. this blog), your interlocutor, the weather, and maybe current affairs if you're really brave and foolish enough to open the can of worms that so often is, but after that, all that's left is other people. Because mainly the landscape and so on is not all that eventful, so you can really only address the topic of "check out those crazy rocks, and what nice trees we've been having recently!" once or twice before people start being all "dude, what is it with you and the rocks? They're rocks. More interestingly, have you heard that a girl in our year is pregnant? You know the one, the one with the hair!".
Obviously, that would be marginally less desirable, that particular sort of being discussed, but don't even pretend that you don't sort of love the idea of being discussed too. The Aforementioned James always gets excited when I even so much as mention him on here (remember that one time I called him On-The-Ball James? Yeah, of course not, but he sure does, it took him most of a week to come down after that one. Clearly the world-wide fame of being read about by possibly up to 10 people went to his head). Similarly, Lovely Jenny checked whether I had been talking about her (because if so, how exciting!) one time I made a veiled reference to her. Obviously there's a bit of a downside, in that when I say things which are foolishly hyperbolic and abstract like "you would have to be naive to be totally unambivalent about anything really important and complex", people tend to read that as "you, Reader, personally, are naive, ha!", which obviously was not how that was ever meant to sound.
This is reassuring, now I think about it, since these 'ideas of reference'(which is a symptom of schizophrenia, but also, one suspects, of "being alive") are apparently a not-just-me thing. People are always concerned about how others talk about them. Surely. I suspect that this is a lot of the appeal of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which allow us to enjoy the excitement of being talked about, and talking about people, without the hassle of first having to have a shower and change into something other than your pyjamas. I would mention here that Oscar Wilde said that "A life unexamined is not worth living" and that "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about", but Oscar Wilde said of lot of thing like that, I think he was just a fan of that sort of pithiness. Also it didn't work out all that well for him, what with the whole scandal/imprisonment/destitute-but-witty-death-in-exile thing.
Thirdly (yes, we are still talking about that original conversation), mysterious and flattering is a great combination. So "some unnamed person told me that you were funny" is sort of ideal, in a sense. Especially when people are all "no I don't think it was Hyphenatedly-Entitled James, I think it was someone else talking about your amusing blog". Because, seriously? Who else would be reading? It's kind of like the mystery around this time last year, about the time of the Incident, except, y'know, good. I could understand if any of the last few posts had been of particularly high calibre, or if, conversely, they had maybe been shorter than usual, but as it is, I just still have difficulty picturing the hypothetical person who goes "my, I don't talk to that Angela girl all that often, but I sure do want to read 1,000 words of her overanalysing something that someone said to her at a pub this evening!". The harder I try to imagine it; the reader (not you, Reader, we're like this, you and I, some other reader) maybe settling in with a tasty beverage and a couple of hours of their life they have no further need of, just whiling away some time with a little benevolent stalkiness, the less convincing the whole picture becomes. (Possibly this is because I went overboard and gave the Hypothetic Reader there a Hugh Hefner-style dressing gown in my mind, but that's perfectly legit, since I know that at least one of my readers (which is to say, about 15% of my total readship) totally owns one of those.
I know I write long things, you see, so I'm just always surprised at the idea of anyone getting so far into one routinely enough that they think of it to talk about.
It's awfully nice of you, whoever you were!
Friday, May 21, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
In Which actions have consequences. Sort of.
This weekend, I managed to chip my tooth. Not badly, it was a pretty tiny chip, barely detectable to people whose mouths did not contain my tooth, but still in a way which was pretty obvious to me. Also, not in any exciting sort of way, such as in a brawl with a sabretoothed tiger, or catching a bullet with my teeth, or even just the more traditional but always classic getting-very-drunk-and-falling-down. Actually I just bit a fork on a weird angle at a wedding reception. (Yeah, I know, you'd think that after all these years I'd be passably adept at fork usage, but I'll have you know that forks are considered newfangled and classy and intimidating in the book I'm presently reading, so, uh, so there's that).
Anyway, leaving that aside, it was funny, because although it happened to be a mere tiny chip, it could so easily have been a crazy huge big-deal type of thing (although probably not as a result of poor fork angling. It was a wedding, though, anything could've happened, there was dancing, so I could easily have been spun into a pole and done some much more serious damage). But the point is, I was all "damn, that's a bit of a bugger, I'll have to get that sorted out early next week", not "oh man, this will sure change the way my face looks for the rest of my life, damn". When did this happen? Presumably before I was born. But definitely these things haven't always been fixable.
I mean, back in the day, tooth damage was it. Game over. You will now look like a hillbilly boxer for the rest of your life. I hope you enjoyed the last time you smiled at someone unselfconsciously, because that's it for that activity ever.
And it's not just teeth. Sometimes I catch myself going "dang, I feel like I've messed up my life/health/youth/whatever (not often, for those of you reading with a view to telling me that I'm too self-deprecating, this is a thing everyone does. If you do not ever ever do so, you are either very lucky or possibly a sociopath. I'm looking at you here, Always-Promptly-Friendlily-Critical-And-I-Guess-Conceivably-A-Sociopath James {Backstory for other Readers: James keeps telling me that my last posts have been too self-deprecating. Attempts to explain to him that they've really been more Tutor-Deprecating and Jack-Nicholson-Deprecating have been bizarrely ineffective}) and then going "oh well, I guess it's a write off, I'll do better next time". Like my life or health or whatever is a dress I plan to take back to the store after wearing it out of an evening, hoping they won't notice where I spilled something on it, and exchange for something more flattering, maybe in a nicer colour. (Note, I have never done that. I'm much too acquisitive. I want to keep all the dresses. All the nice dresses in the land. Also it seems Wrong.)
Is this that "Entitlement" we hear so much about, do you think? Do all of us, individually, and as a culture, expect for the consequences of all our actions to be reversible? (Like the Omega Thirteen in Galaxy Quest!) Seems plausible.
I spilled wine into my phone only a couple of weeks ago and had a very similar response, as if I were demanding restitution from the universe. "It was an accident, and therefore it is unfair for me to have to deal with the consequences." I went to get it fixed, because this is something you can just Do in this miraculous and consequenceless day and age, whereupon the dastardly repair guys charged me $90 to get it fixed. And here's the weird thing, even though that's a fortune (for me) to spend on something which isn't even fun, which doesn't add anything to your life except to bring you back to baseline, I handed it over serenely, because it was clearly not my fault (note: actually it clearly was), and therefore I would not be expected to bear the cost. (Obviously this was subconscious. I didn't really expect my parents or someone to magically decide to "pay me back" for the costs incurred. I have no idea what I thought was happening here.) And although the serenity was clearly some kind of unique one-off weirdness, I'm pretty sure that this is sort of how everyone feels.
Apparently this is a serious problem for people who narrowly avoid death. They feel like they've been saved for some higher purpose, and then feel gypped when they get to deathbed time without ever having the chance to dramatically save a small golden-haired child from an oncoming car/train/lion/Nazi. And people who have bad things happen to them feel like they've done their time and deserve things. I'm sure you do this too. Everyone seems to. You have a crappy day and feel all indignant if the next one is bad too, because you already had your bad day for this section of time. I definitely do that. Same thing as the phone and the tooth: I didn't mean for that bad thing to happen, I don't deserve that! (Ridiculous especially given how minor are my troubles in this instance. Oh no! Slight inconvenience and speedy restitution? You poor thing!)
This is weird, because I don't think of myself as someone who thinks of life being inherently or necessarily fair. Still apparently on some level I resent it when my accidental actions have consequences that actually affect me.
The book I am reading at present is called "The Name of The Rose". Reader, I beg you to suppress the urge to say whatever it is which it occurs to you to say when I say this, because it seems that everyone who doesn't respond "I've never heard of that book", has this overwhelming urge to spoil it as soon as you tell them that you're reading it. Apparently I'm leaving it too late to read for the first time, like some kind of literary equivalent of the Sixth Sense. Which I have also never seen. Even when my sister Alex was supposed to read it for a High School English text, but hadn't quite finished it over the holidays, her teacher began the first (first!) class on the text by describing it basically as "the book where Character X did it" or words to that effect. It's meant to be a mystery, but it seems sort of like the Scarlet Pimpernel (although not to that extent yet, mercifully, I'm managing to suspend what knowledge I was unable to avoid). The Scarlet Pimpernel is a wonderful book with a central mystery/twist which is spoiled on the cover of almost any copy of it printed in the last 50 years. It's a great pity, this sort of thing, because it means that we can never really experience classics the way they're meant to be read.
Which kind of sucks, but which is totally not where I was planning to go with that paragraph. What I was trying to say was that the bit I was reading on the bus this afternoon was about heretics and the inquisition and extracting confessions under torture. Back in- the day, it was totally a big deal to say that you thought that maybe Jesus laughed at some point in his life, just not, as it were, on screen. I mean, people would be set of fire for that crap. (Obviously, this would put Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code in serious danger, with all that Scion business. Which leads us to conclude that sometimes progress is a bad thing, because, man, we could have just avoided that entire ridiculous fad if there had been red-hot pincers in the offing.)
The crazy thing is how hard people tried to root out even the more apparently harmless bits of heresy. And obviously that made it all the worse. It's like the whole Middle Ages was like one of those Whack-A-Croc games in Timezone, and the harder the Church whacked the people who said things like "God may not actually be 100% in favour of setting folks on fire because of trifling differences in belief", the more heresies popped up to replace them. People are funny that way.
Anyhow, it's the torturing thing that's obviously the worst bit. Once you use torture to extract confessions, you don't get any new information, all you get is what people think you want to hear. Extensive data (although presumably not double-blind randomised control trials. Stupid ethics committees taking the fun out of Science) exists to show that torture straight up doesn't work. (Dear America, this means you too). So we can probably agree that it's, uh, bad. And that's the difficulty, because the jerks involved in doing it to people, the ruthless, merciless, callous, cruel, etc, dudes who either wound the rack tighter or ordered others to do so, really tend to think that they're doing it for the greater good. Which is something about which they and I will simply have to agree to disagree.
But here's the thing: according to the inquisitors torturing people for very-good-reasons/their-own-good/kicks, they were headed for heaven. Now I'm not only irreligious and vague about my mediaeval dogma but also a bit vindictive, so I find myself hoping that those guys woke up dead one morning to find the devil looking humourously at them over the top of his glasses, shuffling the papers in their file on his desk and saying "Seriously?" in a hurtfully ironic tone before showing them where their rock of Sisyphus was. Because yes, intentions are important, but so are other factors, such as "not hurting people for what eventually becomes the sheer love of power" and "bringing more hurt and suspicion and distress into the world than was strictly necessary".
And this is sort of where the binary afterlife falls down: it's annoying enough to spend all weekend writing an essay which turns out to be pass/fail, then wondering how much of your effort was wasted. It seems ridiculous to have your whole life be pass/fail. This means that as soon as any one factor becomes the sine qua non of eternity, as soon as that becomes "all you need", then why bother with all that unecessary gilding of lilies which you get with being nice to people? Likewise, once you do something really bad, why bother not killing everyone else too? (Incidentally, this is why I am 100% against the death penalty or maximum prison etc. for rapists and suchlike: if someone rapes me, then they're more likely to get caught and punished if I'm alive to testify against them, right? So I want there to be powerful disincentives to stop them doing the logical thing and killing me as well. Like worse punishments if they get caught having done that as well. "In for a penny, in for a pound" is not the philosophy I think we should ideally be instilling in the poeple who do bad-but-ultimately-recoverable-from things to folk).
Of course, this is not a problem you can really solve. Dante had circles of hell for levels of sin, but that's really just varieties of Fail on the pass/fail dichotomy, it's still an absolute thing. It still doesn't seem to solve the ultimate problem: really an eternity of anything seems like an overreaction to any finite amount of either good or bad behaviour.
Even reincarnation, which at first suggests itself as a solution, really seems to sort of just magnify the problem: the thing where you just try again and again, getting scaled upgrades or downgrades on your life until you finally get it right and graduate to Nirvana, as if the afterlife were basically just that Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, sounds good at first. Graded solutions! Possibility of ultimate reward! No unsavoury eternal-damnation per se, mitigating all the good things you did apart from those things that were just bad enough to tip you into the Fail category!
Except, right, you don't necessarily carry the lessons from one lifetime to the next. So say I'm a scumbag in this lifetime; next time it's ant city for me. So I reform, I live a good ant life, and the next time I'm upgraded to 'person' again. But I lack the proper knowledge of the process, so I'm a scumbag again. Education won't actually solve that, we know; folks've been trying it for thousands of years. Some people just enjoy being scumbags.
Conversely, if I'm superfoxyawesomegreat, I eventually graduate to Nirvana, unlike those sucker scumbag types, right? Which means that essentially the good souls are constantly being decanted out of the world and the percentage of the population who are just dyed-in-the-wool jerks, willing to do their ant time if it means they get to spend more of eternity alive and kicking puppies, steadily increases. Plus, eventually, everyone sort of settles to their level, and you have a population of not-quite-good-enough rich people, less-good-humbler people and so on (maybe this whole thing was designed like this deliberately; to support the aristocracy? Surely not) and increasingly, as you get humbler, the animals are more and more inclined to be jerks. This sort of thing can only lead to crap like that scene in the newest Indiana Jones movie where a whole bunch of ants just up and decide to kill a bunch of dudes horribly as a team. I really don't fancy the idea of actually evil insects and animals all over the place. Ugh.
Ultimately what I'm saying here is: my word, I'm glad that if it's anyone's job to sort out this mess, then it's someone presumably omnipotent and omniscient, because this problems looks like a completely unsolvable bugger of a thing to little old me. I'm going to file this squarely in the "I feel pleased and privelaged that this is not, on a grand scale, my problem" file. Gosh.
Anyway, leaving that aside, it was funny, because although it happened to be a mere tiny chip, it could so easily have been a crazy huge big-deal type of thing (although probably not as a result of poor fork angling. It was a wedding, though, anything could've happened, there was dancing, so I could easily have been spun into a pole and done some much more serious damage). But the point is, I was all "damn, that's a bit of a bugger, I'll have to get that sorted out early next week", not "oh man, this will sure change the way my face looks for the rest of my life, damn". When did this happen? Presumably before I was born. But definitely these things haven't always been fixable.
I mean, back in the day, tooth damage was it. Game over. You will now look like a hillbilly boxer for the rest of your life. I hope you enjoyed the last time you smiled at someone unselfconsciously, because that's it for that activity ever.
And it's not just teeth. Sometimes I catch myself going "dang, I feel like I've messed up my life/health/youth/whatever (not often, for those of you reading with a view to telling me that I'm too self-deprecating, this is a thing everyone does. If you do not ever ever do so, you are either very lucky or possibly a sociopath. I'm looking at you here, Always-Promptly-Friendlily-Critical-And-I-Guess-Conceivably-A-Sociopath James {Backstory for other Readers: James keeps telling me that my last posts have been too self-deprecating. Attempts to explain to him that they've really been more Tutor-Deprecating and Jack-Nicholson-Deprecating have been bizarrely ineffective}) and then going "oh well, I guess it's a write off, I'll do better next time". Like my life or health or whatever is a dress I plan to take back to the store after wearing it out of an evening, hoping they won't notice where I spilled something on it, and exchange for something more flattering, maybe in a nicer colour. (Note, I have never done that. I'm much too acquisitive. I want to keep all the dresses. All the nice dresses in the land. Also it seems Wrong.)
Is this that "Entitlement" we hear so much about, do you think? Do all of us, individually, and as a culture, expect for the consequences of all our actions to be reversible? (Like the Omega Thirteen in Galaxy Quest!) Seems plausible.
I spilled wine into my phone only a couple of weeks ago and had a very similar response, as if I were demanding restitution from the universe. "It was an accident, and therefore it is unfair for me to have to deal with the consequences." I went to get it fixed, because this is something you can just Do in this miraculous and consequenceless day and age, whereupon the dastardly repair guys charged me $90 to get it fixed. And here's the weird thing, even though that's a fortune (for me) to spend on something which isn't even fun, which doesn't add anything to your life except to bring you back to baseline, I handed it over serenely, because it was clearly not my fault (note: actually it clearly was), and therefore I would not be expected to bear the cost. (Obviously this was subconscious. I didn't really expect my parents or someone to magically decide to "pay me back" for the costs incurred. I have no idea what I thought was happening here.) And although the serenity was clearly some kind of unique one-off weirdness, I'm pretty sure that this is sort of how everyone feels.
Apparently this is a serious problem for people who narrowly avoid death. They feel like they've been saved for some higher purpose, and then feel gypped when they get to deathbed time without ever having the chance to dramatically save a small golden-haired child from an oncoming car/train/lion/Nazi. And people who have bad things happen to them feel like they've done their time and deserve things. I'm sure you do this too. Everyone seems to. You have a crappy day and feel all indignant if the next one is bad too, because you already had your bad day for this section of time. I definitely do that. Same thing as the phone and the tooth: I didn't mean for that bad thing to happen, I don't deserve that! (Ridiculous especially given how minor are my troubles in this instance. Oh no! Slight inconvenience and speedy restitution? You poor thing!)
This is weird, because I don't think of myself as someone who thinks of life being inherently or necessarily fair. Still apparently on some level I resent it when my accidental actions have consequences that actually affect me.
The book I am reading at present is called "The Name of The Rose". Reader, I beg you to suppress the urge to say whatever it is which it occurs to you to say when I say this, because it seems that everyone who doesn't respond "I've never heard of that book", has this overwhelming urge to spoil it as soon as you tell them that you're reading it. Apparently I'm leaving it too late to read for the first time, like some kind of literary equivalent of the Sixth Sense. Which I have also never seen. Even when my sister Alex was supposed to read it for a High School English text, but hadn't quite finished it over the holidays, her teacher began the first (first!) class on the text by describing it basically as "the book where Character X did it" or words to that effect. It's meant to be a mystery, but it seems sort of like the Scarlet Pimpernel (although not to that extent yet, mercifully, I'm managing to suspend what knowledge I was unable to avoid). The Scarlet Pimpernel is a wonderful book with a central mystery/twist which is spoiled on the cover of almost any copy of it printed in the last 50 years. It's a great pity, this sort of thing, because it means that we can never really experience classics the way they're meant to be read.
Which kind of sucks, but which is totally not where I was planning to go with that paragraph. What I was trying to say was that the bit I was reading on the bus this afternoon was about heretics and the inquisition and extracting confessions under torture. Back in- the day, it was totally a big deal to say that you thought that maybe Jesus laughed at some point in his life, just not, as it were, on screen. I mean, people would be set of fire for that crap. (Obviously, this would put Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code in serious danger, with all that Scion business. Which leads us to conclude that sometimes progress is a bad thing, because, man, we could have just avoided that entire ridiculous fad if there had been red-hot pincers in the offing.)
The crazy thing is how hard people tried to root out even the more apparently harmless bits of heresy. And obviously that made it all the worse. It's like the whole Middle Ages was like one of those Whack-A-Croc games in Timezone, and the harder the Church whacked the people who said things like "God may not actually be 100% in favour of setting folks on fire because of trifling differences in belief", the more heresies popped up to replace them. People are funny that way.
Anyhow, it's the torturing thing that's obviously the worst bit. Once you use torture to extract confessions, you don't get any new information, all you get is what people think you want to hear. Extensive data (although presumably not double-blind randomised control trials. Stupid ethics committees taking the fun out of Science) exists to show that torture straight up doesn't work. (Dear America, this means you too). So we can probably agree that it's, uh, bad. And that's the difficulty, because the jerks involved in doing it to people, the ruthless, merciless, callous, cruel, etc, dudes who either wound the rack tighter or ordered others to do so, really tend to think that they're doing it for the greater good. Which is something about which they and I will simply have to agree to disagree.
But here's the thing: according to the inquisitors torturing people for very-good-reasons/their-own-good/kicks, they were headed for heaven. Now I'm not only irreligious and vague about my mediaeval dogma but also a bit vindictive, so I find myself hoping that those guys woke up dead one morning to find the devil looking humourously at them over the top of his glasses, shuffling the papers in their file on his desk and saying "Seriously?" in a hurtfully ironic tone before showing them where their rock of Sisyphus was. Because yes, intentions are important, but so are other factors, such as "not hurting people for what eventually becomes the sheer love of power" and "bringing more hurt and suspicion and distress into the world than was strictly necessary".
And this is sort of where the binary afterlife falls down: it's annoying enough to spend all weekend writing an essay which turns out to be pass/fail, then wondering how much of your effort was wasted. It seems ridiculous to have your whole life be pass/fail. This means that as soon as any one factor becomes the sine qua non of eternity, as soon as that becomes "all you need", then why bother with all that unecessary gilding of lilies which you get with being nice to people? Likewise, once you do something really bad, why bother not killing everyone else too? (Incidentally, this is why I am 100% against the death penalty or maximum prison etc. for rapists and suchlike: if someone rapes me, then they're more likely to get caught and punished if I'm alive to testify against them, right? So I want there to be powerful disincentives to stop them doing the logical thing and killing me as well. Like worse punishments if they get caught having done that as well. "In for a penny, in for a pound" is not the philosophy I think we should ideally be instilling in the poeple who do bad-but-ultimately-recoverable-from things to folk).
Of course, this is not a problem you can really solve. Dante had circles of hell for levels of sin, but that's really just varieties of Fail on the pass/fail dichotomy, it's still an absolute thing. It still doesn't seem to solve the ultimate problem: really an eternity of anything seems like an overreaction to any finite amount of either good or bad behaviour.
Even reincarnation, which at first suggests itself as a solution, really seems to sort of just magnify the problem: the thing where you just try again and again, getting scaled upgrades or downgrades on your life until you finally get it right and graduate to Nirvana, as if the afterlife were basically just that Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, sounds good at first. Graded solutions! Possibility of ultimate reward! No unsavoury eternal-damnation per se, mitigating all the good things you did apart from those things that were just bad enough to tip you into the Fail category!
Except, right, you don't necessarily carry the lessons from one lifetime to the next. So say I'm a scumbag in this lifetime; next time it's ant city for me. So I reform, I live a good ant life, and the next time I'm upgraded to 'person' again. But I lack the proper knowledge of the process, so I'm a scumbag again. Education won't actually solve that, we know; folks've been trying it for thousands of years. Some people just enjoy being scumbags.
Conversely, if I'm superfoxyawesomegreat, I eventually graduate to Nirvana, unlike those sucker scumbag types, right? Which means that essentially the good souls are constantly being decanted out of the world and the percentage of the population who are just dyed-in-the-wool jerks, willing to do their ant time if it means they get to spend more of eternity alive and kicking puppies, steadily increases. Plus, eventually, everyone sort of settles to their level, and you have a population of not-quite-good-enough rich people, less-good-humbler people and so on (maybe this whole thing was designed like this deliberately; to support the aristocracy? Surely not) and increasingly, as you get humbler, the animals are more and more inclined to be jerks. This sort of thing can only lead to crap like that scene in the newest Indiana Jones movie where a whole bunch of ants just up and decide to kill a bunch of dudes horribly as a team. I really don't fancy the idea of actually evil insects and animals all over the place. Ugh.
Ultimately what I'm saying here is: my word, I'm glad that if it's anyone's job to sort out this mess, then it's someone presumably omnipotent and omniscient, because this problems looks like a completely unsolvable bugger of a thing to little old me. I'm going to file this squarely in the "I feel pleased and privelaged that this is not, on a grand scale, my problem" file. Gosh.
Monday, May 10, 2010
In Which the Call is heeded mainly by others
I had two conversations last week, randomly, about the same thing, which I shall recount in reverse order (because when I wrote this I got totally carried away after explaining the first one and it's frankly easier to go back and put in what was meant to be my second point first).
So, secondly, on Friday we had our PBL tutor evaluations. Now I've been a bit stressed this last couple of weeks, because, hey, that's how I roll, so when someone asked me a series of leading questions about how she reckoned I was isolated (and apparently some kind of evil genius? More on this later) and then was very sympathetic, I did what any self-respecting person would do, and accidentally agreed that I was terribly unhappy and so on, and really believed it for a while there before I realised that I was acting like a crazy person. The unfortunate upshot of which was that it took flipping ages and I emerged looking all distressed, and feeling all fragile, and having been swept up into agreeing to talk to the sub-sub-dean or whoever it was. The really strange thing, though, was that she said she was worried that I "seemed ambivalent" about the whole Medicine thing.
Well, I mean. Yes. Like, it's a long tough uphill slog to qualify to be very junior in a stressful work environment to then hopefully ultimately do a very difficult and stressful and tiring but, like, enriching and fulfilling, job. Yeah? So: it seems to me that the more you think about it, the more ambivalent you'd inevitably get? Because there are obviously big things for and against it, as a lifestyle choice?
How can anyone have entirely unambivalent thoughts about something like that? Surely anyone that simplistic and naive in their views would've failed the interview process? Like, someone would've said "There are more than one aspects to most situations: true or false?" and then not let in the folks who were like "Man, once I've found one aspect to anything, I pretty much stop thinking about it and go for it! Things are black and white! And by that I mean that each thing is, itself, either exclusively black or exclusively white!". Those people are clearly better suited to Federal Politics, I'd've thought.
Probably that's an unreasonable way to look at it. Well, it obviously is. But the point is: ambivalence surely cannot, (by definition, practically!) be all bad. It just shows that I've got a grasp on the situation?
So that was the second conversation about that subject in as many days.
Also, Firstly, on Thursday, I went and saw Ross Noble (which was superawesomefantastic as always). Naturally, I was telling this to anyone who would listen on Thursday afternoon (because that is also how I roll), during the course of which I said "wouldn't it be great to be discovered or whatever it is that happens and get to be a comedian and a star [ideally without all the actual problems of fame, natch] rather than having to do all this work? I mean, Monty Python seem to have had a pretty ace time, and they were all doctors and lawyers and such, because of meeting through the Cambridge Footlights!" or words to that effect. We'd just been given this huge talk about how over the next couple of years everything would get harder and harder and more and more demanding, and the days would get longer and longer, and so on. So I do not think that "it would be pretty sweet to have to work for only a couple of hours per day and be paid in fabulous sums of money and adulation" was that unreasonable a proposition.
But it was weird; everyone who was there looked at me like I was insane. "But we want to do this," they said "we want to be Doctors." (You could hear them capitalising 'Doctors; in their minds, and although they didn't all speak together like possessed Doctor Who characters, that was kind of the vibe) "We treasure the opportunity to come in at 6 in the morning and not leave until 10 at night, every day. Who needs sleep or a social life or mental health when you could be decompacting bowels and experiencing the sheer intellectual stimulation of paperwork, the boundless joy of breaking terrible news to people?" I mean, these people all seemed to genuinely relish the idea of studying palliative care, while I for one can think of few things more depressing (although worthwhile, obviously).
Everyone else is apparently genuinely excited about the prospect of being woken up to come in at 2am after working until late. It apparently seems perfectly plausible that serious ethical dilemmas will have clearly-right answers, which it will be invigorating, rather than stressful, to deal with. A decade of instant coffee drunk cold out of styrofoam cups, until they've worked their way up high enough to merit better beverages, holds no terror for them.
They, uh, they all really really want to be doctors, is what I'm getting at.
Now me, I'm doing Medicine. Not because I was pushed into it (which was another thing my tutor suspected), but because I happened to get into it. So yes, I want to be a doctor. But a lot of that is that I want a job, I want a career in which I can take some pride, where I can help people and make a bit of money, and which won't involve me having to drop out of the medicine degree I've already started. I'd have difficulty with my self-perception, I think, if I gave up now, or "didn't make it", even if I didn't still think it would be an interesting, challenging, worthwhile sort of deal.
I feel like I'm doing it because I've committed myself. Conversely, everyone else seems to be doing it because they are committed. This is some kind of calling or vocation for everyone else, apparently.
I've never had any sensation of having any calling whatsoever. I really haven't. I feel a bit gypped about it, to be honest. Where the hell is my deeply burning internal fire of passion to do a particular job and No Other? Oh, I'd like to know all the things you learn in doctorin', like what to do if you wake up one morning and can't feel your entire left side, or whether echinacea will actually help fight colds, what to do if your kid falls out of a tree and their ankle swells up. I think it's all terribly useful, but it's not a Vocation. I don't know that I have any "calling" at all. I mean, the only thing I always wanted to be when I grew up was a princess or maybe a superhero.
The only thing I've ever felt any real calling to do was Live Happily Ever After. Sadly, this is no longer a recognised career choice, even for damsels such as myself. {Not only, it turns out, are you supposed to be your own damsel and your own knight, you're also expected to do your own dragoning and also have a Fulfilling Career. And don't forget to Live Your Dreams while you're at it! Woe betide the citizen who fails to Dream Big. (And, presumably, all those of us who dream about things like turning up to maths exams and realising you're naked or whatever.)}
My tutor had a theory about this too, apparently I'm too "gifted" to be able to "settle" on any one thing. This was like that blog post about "getting away with it" all over again. Apparently I accidentally totally convinced her that I understood everything we'd discussed in class, rather than none of it, which is rather closer to the truth. I remind her, I am assured, of someone she described as "brilliant and cruel" amongst a number of other less salient adjectives. When asked for clarification in re. "cruel" (because, man, if I've been mean to anyone without realising, I want to know so I can avoid doing it next time) I was given the ominous but largely unenlightening answer that "oh, it's not evil". Reader, no conversation where someone feels that it needs to actually be seriously noted that you are not evil is not a conversation calculated to help you relax for your upcoming weekend.
It really is terribly inconvenient, this lack of Career-Oriented Passion (also possibly being an evil genius of some kind), but I guess it could be worse: it must be terribly stressful for the poeple who desperately want to do something in particular but can't for practical reasons, like being an amputee, or not getting in to the NASA training program, or whatever. I can see that I'm lucky, honest I can.
It just bewilders me that apparently I'm the only person who's thinking about this whole thing from more than one point of view. I hope those guys are all ok when the novelty wears off, I worry about them. I hope that their Vocations are like a Religion, or like True Love, bringing them deeply meaningful comfort in the hard times of their lives, and not like some kind of fleeting infatuation which will leave them disillusioned at 30, or something like that.
So, secondly, on Friday we had our PBL tutor evaluations. Now I've been a bit stressed this last couple of weeks, because, hey, that's how I roll, so when someone asked me a series of leading questions about how she reckoned I was isolated (and apparently some kind of evil genius? More on this later) and then was very sympathetic, I did what any self-respecting person would do, and accidentally agreed that I was terribly unhappy and so on, and really believed it for a while there before I realised that I was acting like a crazy person. The unfortunate upshot of which was that it took flipping ages and I emerged looking all distressed, and feeling all fragile, and having been swept up into agreeing to talk to the sub-sub-dean or whoever it was. The really strange thing, though, was that she said she was worried that I "seemed ambivalent" about the whole Medicine thing.
Well, I mean. Yes. Like, it's a long tough uphill slog to qualify to be very junior in a stressful work environment to then hopefully ultimately do a very difficult and stressful and tiring but, like, enriching and fulfilling, job. Yeah? So: it seems to me that the more you think about it, the more ambivalent you'd inevitably get? Because there are obviously big things for and against it, as a lifestyle choice?
How can anyone have entirely unambivalent thoughts about something like that? Surely anyone that simplistic and naive in their views would've failed the interview process? Like, someone would've said "There are more than one aspects to most situations: true or false?" and then not let in the folks who were like "Man, once I've found one aspect to anything, I pretty much stop thinking about it and go for it! Things are black and white! And by that I mean that each thing is, itself, either exclusively black or exclusively white!". Those people are clearly better suited to Federal Politics, I'd've thought.
Probably that's an unreasonable way to look at it. Well, it obviously is. But the point is: ambivalence surely cannot, (by definition, practically!) be all bad. It just shows that I've got a grasp on the situation?
So that was the second conversation about that subject in as many days.
Also, Firstly, on Thursday, I went and saw Ross Noble (which was superawesomefantastic as always). Naturally, I was telling this to anyone who would listen on Thursday afternoon (because that is also how I roll), during the course of which I said "wouldn't it be great to be discovered or whatever it is that happens and get to be a comedian and a star [ideally without all the actual problems of fame, natch] rather than having to do all this work? I mean, Monty Python seem to have had a pretty ace time, and they were all doctors and lawyers and such, because of meeting through the Cambridge Footlights!" or words to that effect. We'd just been given this huge talk about how over the next couple of years everything would get harder and harder and more and more demanding, and the days would get longer and longer, and so on. So I do not think that "it would be pretty sweet to have to work for only a couple of hours per day and be paid in fabulous sums of money and adulation" was that unreasonable a proposition.
But it was weird; everyone who was there looked at me like I was insane. "But we want to do this," they said "we want to be Doctors." (You could hear them capitalising 'Doctors; in their minds, and although they didn't all speak together like possessed Doctor Who characters, that was kind of the vibe) "We treasure the opportunity to come in at 6 in the morning and not leave until 10 at night, every day. Who needs sleep or a social life or mental health when you could be decompacting bowels and experiencing the sheer intellectual stimulation of paperwork, the boundless joy of breaking terrible news to people?" I mean, these people all seemed to genuinely relish the idea of studying palliative care, while I for one can think of few things more depressing (although worthwhile, obviously).
Everyone else is apparently genuinely excited about the prospect of being woken up to come in at 2am after working until late. It apparently seems perfectly plausible that serious ethical dilemmas will have clearly-right answers, which it will be invigorating, rather than stressful, to deal with. A decade of instant coffee drunk cold out of styrofoam cups, until they've worked their way up high enough to merit better beverages, holds no terror for them.
They, uh, they all really really want to be doctors, is what I'm getting at.
Now me, I'm doing Medicine. Not because I was pushed into it (which was another thing my tutor suspected), but because I happened to get into it. So yes, I want to be a doctor. But a lot of that is that I want a job, I want a career in which I can take some pride, where I can help people and make a bit of money, and which won't involve me having to drop out of the medicine degree I've already started. I'd have difficulty with my self-perception, I think, if I gave up now, or "didn't make it", even if I didn't still think it would be an interesting, challenging, worthwhile sort of deal.
I feel like I'm doing it because I've committed myself. Conversely, everyone else seems to be doing it because they are committed. This is some kind of calling or vocation for everyone else, apparently.
I've never had any sensation of having any calling whatsoever. I really haven't. I feel a bit gypped about it, to be honest. Where the hell is my deeply burning internal fire of passion to do a particular job and No Other? Oh, I'd like to know all the things you learn in doctorin', like what to do if you wake up one morning and can't feel your entire left side, or whether echinacea will actually help fight colds, what to do if your kid falls out of a tree and their ankle swells up. I think it's all terribly useful, but it's not a Vocation. I don't know that I have any "calling" at all. I mean, the only thing I always wanted to be when I grew up was a princess or maybe a superhero.
The only thing I've ever felt any real calling to do was Live Happily Ever After. Sadly, this is no longer a recognised career choice, even for damsels such as myself. {Not only, it turns out, are you supposed to be your own damsel and your own knight, you're also expected to do your own dragoning and also have a Fulfilling Career. And don't forget to Live Your Dreams while you're at it! Woe betide the citizen who fails to Dream Big. (And, presumably, all those of us who dream about things like turning up to maths exams and realising you're naked or whatever.)}
My tutor had a theory about this too, apparently I'm too "gifted" to be able to "settle" on any one thing. This was like that blog post about "getting away with it" all over again. Apparently I accidentally totally convinced her that I understood everything we'd discussed in class, rather than none of it, which is rather closer to the truth. I remind her, I am assured, of someone she described as "brilliant and cruel" amongst a number of other less salient adjectives. When asked for clarification in re. "cruel" (because, man, if I've been mean to anyone without realising, I want to know so I can avoid doing it next time) I was given the ominous but largely unenlightening answer that "oh, it's not evil". Reader, no conversation where someone feels that it needs to actually be seriously noted that you are not evil is not a conversation calculated to help you relax for your upcoming weekend.
It really is terribly inconvenient, this lack of Career-Oriented Passion (also possibly being an evil genius of some kind), but I guess it could be worse: it must be terribly stressful for the poeple who desperately want to do something in particular but can't for practical reasons, like being an amputee, or not getting in to the NASA training program, or whatever. I can see that I'm lucky, honest I can.
It just bewilders me that apparently I'm the only person who's thinking about this whole thing from more than one point of view. I hope those guys are all ok when the novelty wears off, I worry about them. I hope that their Vocations are like a Religion, or like True Love, bringing them deeply meaningful comfort in the hard times of their lives, and not like some kind of fleeting infatuation which will leave them disillusioned at 30, or something like that.
Monday, May 03, 2010
In Which Bucket Lists are a weird concept, sort of.
Everyone who has ever been alive, I bet, has at some point said to themselves "gosh, isn't it funny the way sometimes time seems to pass quickly, and at other times very slowly?" Or, you know, a culturally and liguistically appropriate equivalent. Everyone notices it, and every 2-bit philosopher or self-help vox-popper has a word of advice about it. You'de think we'd have cracked it by now, and yet somehow they all seem strangely unsatisfactory.
Variants on the "Live every day like it's your last" theme are dreadfully popular, but honestly, that can hardly work out. We'd spend the rest of our lives (even if we thought of them in 24 hour increments) thinking things like "Damn! We've run out of toilet paper!" and "Why do I never have any clean socks?" and so on, because no-one wants to do boring chores on their last day alive. More than we already do, I mean. I for one am always running out of socks even as it is.
The best of these variations is, in my opinion, the one in that William Shatner song: "live life like you're going to die, because you're going to". This has the value of blunt accuracy, which really is delightfully refreshing, I've always thought. Still, what does that actually entail? Getting on with the To Do Before You Die list? Everyone always seems to include a number of strangely unpleasant things on those lists. What if you honestly don't want, even slightly, even secretly, even deep down, to ever go bungee jumping at all? What else other than one-shot extreme sports and visiting far-off foreign lands even goes on a list like that?
I am suspicious of anyone who has a fully formulated list of things that they want to do before they die. What if what they want changes? Are they allowed to decide that they don't actually want to go skydiving after all? Are they saving up to do those specific things all the time? What if the things you want to do before you die are less tickable, can't be acheived in an afternoon, or rely on luck? Do people have "live a long happy life with someone I love and who loves me" on their list? Is that sort of thing allowed?
Also, I for one would be very wary of starting a list like that for other reasons. Suddenly fun adventures become Tasks To Do, not fun adventures. You could be considered to be procrastinating about them, which only lumps "Dance in the rain" in with "get that tax report in before the end of financial year"; on the same level of stress. And wouldn't a list like this only encourage dissatisfaction and disaffection in our quotidian rhythms and pleasant daily lives? Could you really enjoy a breakfast of delicious but standard toast, on a perfectly average Wednesday morning, with "Why aren't you off seeing the North Pole?" hanging over your head?
Plus, and this is even more crucial, what do you do when you finish your list? Are you done, have you got nothing left to look forward to in life? Or will you add other things to it? Doesn't it seem like adding things to the end of a completed list trivialises your acheivement and makes all the effort you went to to Live For A Year In Asia (or whatever) seem futile, like a hamster on a wheel? Or will you never complete the list, but constantly grow it as new ambitions strike you? This last one sounds fine until you realise that it makes the entire thing pointless from the start. If you don't plan to do them all before you die, why the hell are they even on your List? Is your last thought, in this scenario, going to be, as you lie there dying a peaceful death at age 90, surrounded by your loving family, "Bugger, I didn't even get to swim naked in the Mediterranean by moonlight"? I really really hope that my last thought in life is not one of regret and chagrin.
Regret is somehow an even stranger topic for the writers of the sort of quotes which people will insist on putting onto kitsch fridge magnets. It is the deeply cherished belief of these poeple that you only regret the things you don't do, rarely the things you do do. The only really convincing arguement I ever saw for this point of view was this xkcd comic:
And that's a pretty specific case. I put it to you that the people being quoted here have demostrably failed to take their own advice. Anyone who thinks you never really regret doing things has clearly not done enough foolish and regretable things. I mean, I'm a total square, (no, really), and I haven't done many very exciting or dangerous things; I don't take drugs or smoke or engage in any really particularly reckless behaviours, and even I regret more things I have done than things I haven't. I feel that often I have legitimately tried to do the things I regret not succeeding at, anyway. I feel like I don't know or talk to anough people in my course, and so I gritted my teeth and fair-and-square signed up to learn salsa with them. It didn't work, since apparently so did every other girl in the course, and maybe all of 17 guys, but I gave it a legit shot, so I don't feel the need to beat myself up about it. I sort of regret that I never became a teen star sensation or something (I mean Elijah Wood had already signed up for LOTR when he was 18. I've never been in any movies, let alone record-breaking, blockbusting trilogies which instantly become a major part of the public consciousness) but it's not like that's something I ever actually wanted to do.
I think, in fact, that mainly the things I regret are things I've said. I talk too fast and too much and too often, so I regret a lot of things I've said before thinking. Or at any rate, I have regretted a lot of those things. Frankly, I say instantly regrettable things so often that the sheer volume of them makes it difficult to regret many of them for long.
Back to the kissing graph: you know, the more I think about it, the more silly it seems. Of course you regret not kissing him/her. You never found out how that would've turned out, so in your mind it's Cinderella endings and happily ever after. You don't deal with the possible bad outcomes, so you're free to regret at leisure,happy in the belief that you threw away a perfect future, that that would have been a perfect future. I've had a lot of crushes in my time (a lot) and I've probably wanted to kiss more people than I even remember wanting to kiss, but I don't regret not kissing them. (Maybe I regret that they didn't kiss me, but this is hardly a legitimate regret. That's for them to regret.) Conversely, I did once, long ago, kiss someone I had a crush on and (on the cheek) and it was the most awkward thing ever (despite the cheek-ness! Imagine if it had been a proper kiss! it would have been unbearably mortifying), and I regretted that like anything.
Seriously, who are these people walking around going "if I were to kiss a person we would instantly have a fulfulling romantic experience, because I am just that good, but instead, despite this firm belief, I will not kiss people, but will rather refrain and then tell the internet about how I regret my choices"? Apparently there are more than ten thousand of them!
I was going to write this whole thing about how it would be awesome if you could sell the days of your life that you've totally wasted to old people who would treasure it more (I mean seriously, I don't need today, I barely even took any notes, all I did was fall asleep in lectures and on buses and alternate between being excited and disappointed about dancing, some little old lady who wants to spend just one more day with her grandchildren or whatever could totally have it) but then I realised 3 things: firstly that it's very late, secondly that I've written an awful lot, and thirdly that that is essentially the whole basis of capitalist economy and paid labour. So, having invented the industrial revolution and reframed your boring work day as an opportunity for young-you-now to sell a day of life to old-you-in-the-future (who'll need those wages and savings to buy bingo chips and sherry and so on) (you're welcome), I am going to bed.
After all, although, as Douglas Adams said: "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so", bedtime remains the sort of illusion that I really ought to pay some attention to.
Variants on the "Live every day like it's your last" theme are dreadfully popular, but honestly, that can hardly work out. We'd spend the rest of our lives (even if we thought of them in 24 hour increments) thinking things like "Damn! We've run out of toilet paper!" and "Why do I never have any clean socks?" and so on, because no-one wants to do boring chores on their last day alive. More than we already do, I mean. I for one am always running out of socks even as it is.
The best of these variations is, in my opinion, the one in that William Shatner song: "live life like you're going to die, because you're going to". This has the value of blunt accuracy, which really is delightfully refreshing, I've always thought. Still, what does that actually entail? Getting on with the To Do Before You Die list? Everyone always seems to include a number of strangely unpleasant things on those lists. What if you honestly don't want, even slightly, even secretly, even deep down, to ever go bungee jumping at all? What else other than one-shot extreme sports and visiting far-off foreign lands even goes on a list like that?
I am suspicious of anyone who has a fully formulated list of things that they want to do before they die. What if what they want changes? Are they allowed to decide that they don't actually want to go skydiving after all? Are they saving up to do those specific things all the time? What if the things you want to do before you die are less tickable, can't be acheived in an afternoon, or rely on luck? Do people have "live a long happy life with someone I love and who loves me" on their list? Is that sort of thing allowed?
Also, I for one would be very wary of starting a list like that for other reasons. Suddenly fun adventures become Tasks To Do, not fun adventures. You could be considered to be procrastinating about them, which only lumps "Dance in the rain" in with "get that tax report in before the end of financial year"; on the same level of stress. And wouldn't a list like this only encourage dissatisfaction and disaffection in our quotidian rhythms and pleasant daily lives? Could you really enjoy a breakfast of delicious but standard toast, on a perfectly average Wednesday morning, with "Why aren't you off seeing the North Pole?" hanging over your head?
Plus, and this is even more crucial, what do you do when you finish your list? Are you done, have you got nothing left to look forward to in life? Or will you add other things to it? Doesn't it seem like adding things to the end of a completed list trivialises your acheivement and makes all the effort you went to to Live For A Year In Asia (or whatever) seem futile, like a hamster on a wheel? Or will you never complete the list, but constantly grow it as new ambitions strike you? This last one sounds fine until you realise that it makes the entire thing pointless from the start. If you don't plan to do them all before you die, why the hell are they even on your List? Is your last thought, in this scenario, going to be, as you lie there dying a peaceful death at age 90, surrounded by your loving family, "Bugger, I didn't even get to swim naked in the Mediterranean by moonlight"? I really really hope that my last thought in life is not one of regret and chagrin.
Regret is somehow an even stranger topic for the writers of the sort of quotes which people will insist on putting onto kitsch fridge magnets. It is the deeply cherished belief of these poeple that you only regret the things you don't do, rarely the things you do do. The only really convincing arguement I ever saw for this point of view was this xkcd comic:
And that's a pretty specific case. I put it to you that the people being quoted here have demostrably failed to take their own advice. Anyone who thinks you never really regret doing things has clearly not done enough foolish and regretable things. I mean, I'm a total square, (no, really), and I haven't done many very exciting or dangerous things; I don't take drugs or smoke or engage in any really particularly reckless behaviours, and even I regret more things I have done than things I haven't. I feel that often I have legitimately tried to do the things I regret not succeeding at, anyway. I feel like I don't know or talk to anough people in my course, and so I gritted my teeth and fair-and-square signed up to learn salsa with them. It didn't work, since apparently so did every other girl in the course, and maybe all of 17 guys, but I gave it a legit shot, so I don't feel the need to beat myself up about it. I sort of regret that I never became a teen star sensation or something (I mean Elijah Wood had already signed up for LOTR when he was 18. I've never been in any movies, let alone record-breaking, blockbusting trilogies which instantly become a major part of the public consciousness) but it's not like that's something I ever actually wanted to do.
I think, in fact, that mainly the things I regret are things I've said. I talk too fast and too much and too often, so I regret a lot of things I've said before thinking. Or at any rate, I have regretted a lot of those things. Frankly, I say instantly regrettable things so often that the sheer volume of them makes it difficult to regret many of them for long.
Back to the kissing graph: you know, the more I think about it, the more silly it seems. Of course you regret not kissing him/her. You never found out how that would've turned out, so in your mind it's Cinderella endings and happily ever after. You don't deal with the possible bad outcomes, so you're free to regret at leisure,happy in the belief that you threw away a perfect future, that that would have been a perfect future. I've had a lot of crushes in my time (a lot) and I've probably wanted to kiss more people than I even remember wanting to kiss, but I don't regret not kissing them. (Maybe I regret that they didn't kiss me, but this is hardly a legitimate regret. That's for them to regret.) Conversely, I did once, long ago, kiss someone I had a crush on and (on the cheek) and it was the most awkward thing ever (despite the cheek-ness! Imagine if it had been a proper kiss! it would have been unbearably mortifying), and I regretted that like anything.
Seriously, who are these people walking around going "if I were to kiss a person we would instantly have a fulfulling romantic experience, because I am just that good, but instead, despite this firm belief, I will not kiss people, but will rather refrain and then tell the internet about how I regret my choices"? Apparently there are more than ten thousand of them!
I was going to write this whole thing about how it would be awesome if you could sell the days of your life that you've totally wasted to old people who would treasure it more (I mean seriously, I don't need today, I barely even took any notes, all I did was fall asleep in lectures and on buses and alternate between being excited and disappointed about dancing, some little old lady who wants to spend just one more day with her grandchildren or whatever could totally have it) but then I realised 3 things: firstly that it's very late, secondly that I've written an awful lot, and thirdly that that is essentially the whole basis of capitalist economy and paid labour. So, having invented the industrial revolution and reframed your boring work day as an opportunity for young-you-now to sell a day of life to old-you-in-the-future (who'll need those wages and savings to buy bingo chips and sherry and so on) (you're welcome), I am going to bed.
After all, although, as Douglas Adams said: "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so", bedtime remains the sort of illusion that I really ought to pay some attention to.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
In Which a blogger returns after an inexplicably weary hiatus
Hey there Cats and Kittens, sorry I haven't updated in ages, I'm not quite sure what the go was, I just sort of suddenly got very very tired. Like, all-of-a-sudden-I-seem-to-need-9.5-hours-sleep-per-night-just-to-function tired, somehow-I-can-barely-move-my-fingers-to-knit-this-stitch tired. Weird. So, I mean, I guess I'm anaemic or have low something or high something, but the upshot was that I couldn't seem to think of anything to write, and when I could it just seemed like an enormous effort even to contemplate actually writing.
It's not that I'm less tired now, it's just that eventually in life you just have to man up and do things. Like study for your Anatomy test on Tuesday. And it is at those times, as you know, that I tend to man up in the slightly misdirected fashion which entails blogging instead.
So, what's new? Nothing much, really, although I note that I rather mysteriously have 2 new "Followers" (creepiest term ever, somehow. Like you guys are stalkers or I'm some kind of crackpot cult messiah. I do not really feel that it reflects awfully well on either of us, Dear Reader. Still, it's flattering). One of whom is a friend of Beloved-by-all Bish and the other of whom has a name I don't recognise. Which is fine.
It's a strange thing, the idea of new people reading this blog, because it seems so varied (from my point of view) that it really seems as if any kind of disembling would be impossible. The shear volume of text is such that a great deal of my self must somehow be revealed to anyone with the enthusiasm to read it all. A lot of it is wildly out of date, of course, and naturally a great amount of it is just so much parenthetical hot air, but I wonder how clear the distinction would be, to the casual reader, between what is relevant and true now, and what was barely right even all those years or months ago when I wrote it half asleep.
At the moment I'm alternating between studying and procrastinating. Other tabs open at the moment are the Anatomy tutorial videos and the 365 Project, which I joined yesterday in a fit of enthusiasm. I'm not sure how that will work out, but it's fun to try these sorts of things, and although a lot of the people seem to be trying to build some kind of photography fan-base, my aim is, as usual, to try and encourage myself to pay more attention to the little things in life which are beautiful or lovely or whatever. There hasn't been much of that so far, because there're only 2 pictures up yet, and both of those are more of a self-introductory sort of variety.
The anatomy video interests me, I am ashamed to say, mainly because the demonstrator is pointing out neural structures on preserved slices of human brain using what very much appears to be a knitting needle. I love that confluence of prosaic, quotidian domestic item, the macabre, and the carefully detatched scientific structure and voice. Although pens are maybe more common, I really don't think anything would accomplish that counterpoint as well as the knitting needle. With it's traditional femininity and its vibe of handcrafts, it's perfect, somehow. Also it's an excellent pointing shape.
Plus, where did it come from? Did someone in the anatomy lab one day say "I'm tired of pointing to things with these wooden pointing sticks we keep in pencil jars here, it's time to upgrade!" and then go to Spotlight to buy them? You can just imagine the guy, having left his lab coat behind and fought his way past the huge rolls of fabric and the shelves of different yarns of different colours, to the knitting needle rack, looking at the different gauges and lengths and varieties, going "Um, well, I guess neural structures probably need about a number 6 size needle, I mean the basal ganglia is pretty delicate. I guess?" Did they just buy 1 pair, or several, assuming that knitting needles, like pens, eventually evaporate in a shared work environment?
Or did someone's wife or girlfriend or flatmate come home one winter evening to discover that her attempt to knit herself (or himself) a scarf and widen their skillset has ground to a halt because the anatomist in their life had wandered off with the needle which happened not to have wool on it? "What a useful stick! I will take this and point to things with it! How useful! I will take this one, because the other person has two, so I'm sure she won't miss the second one." If you had explained that this was a problem to the imaginary anatomist character, would they bring back your needle? If so, could you ever really feel the same way about it, and finish your scarf, knowing that it had been used to casually poke bits of cold wet spinal cord around?
In related news, I have been knitting again myself, because 'tis the season. (Cunningly, I use double-pointed needles which are afixed to one another in a loop, so you can make round things and also anatomists find it harder to make off with half of the pair.) I started making a baby hat for a pregnant school friend (of which I suddenly have 2), but had to restart about 10 times because of trifling errors such as misjoining the original round and thus making mobius strips rather than hats, and similar. As a result I've run out of steam on that project rather, but am confident that will successfully make other things sooner or later.
Isn't that an exciting thing to read about? No? Well, at least I feel like I've broken the ice on the blog again, and will get back to you again, sooner this time, with another post, presumably a less knitting-centred one.
It's not that I'm less tired now, it's just that eventually in life you just have to man up and do things. Like study for your Anatomy test on Tuesday. And it is at those times, as you know, that I tend to man up in the slightly misdirected fashion which entails blogging instead.
So, what's new? Nothing much, really, although I note that I rather mysteriously have 2 new "Followers" (creepiest term ever, somehow. Like you guys are stalkers or I'm some kind of crackpot cult messiah. I do not really feel that it reflects awfully well on either of us, Dear Reader. Still, it's flattering). One of whom is a friend of Beloved-by-all Bish and the other of whom has a name I don't recognise. Which is fine.
It's a strange thing, the idea of new people reading this blog, because it seems so varied (from my point of view) that it really seems as if any kind of disembling would be impossible. The shear volume of text is such that a great deal of my self must somehow be revealed to anyone with the enthusiasm to read it all. A lot of it is wildly out of date, of course, and naturally a great amount of it is just so much parenthetical hot air, but I wonder how clear the distinction would be, to the casual reader, between what is relevant and true now, and what was barely right even all those years or months ago when I wrote it half asleep.
At the moment I'm alternating between studying and procrastinating. Other tabs open at the moment are the Anatomy tutorial videos and the 365 Project, which I joined yesterday in a fit of enthusiasm. I'm not sure how that will work out, but it's fun to try these sorts of things, and although a lot of the people seem to be trying to build some kind of photography fan-base, my aim is, as usual, to try and encourage myself to pay more attention to the little things in life which are beautiful or lovely or whatever. There hasn't been much of that so far, because there're only 2 pictures up yet, and both of those are more of a self-introductory sort of variety.
The anatomy video interests me, I am ashamed to say, mainly because the demonstrator is pointing out neural structures on preserved slices of human brain using what very much appears to be a knitting needle. I love that confluence of prosaic, quotidian domestic item, the macabre, and the carefully detatched scientific structure and voice. Although pens are maybe more common, I really don't think anything would accomplish that counterpoint as well as the knitting needle. With it's traditional femininity and its vibe of handcrafts, it's perfect, somehow. Also it's an excellent pointing shape.
Plus, where did it come from? Did someone in the anatomy lab one day say "I'm tired of pointing to things with these wooden pointing sticks we keep in pencil jars here, it's time to upgrade!" and then go to Spotlight to buy them? You can just imagine the guy, having left his lab coat behind and fought his way past the huge rolls of fabric and the shelves of different yarns of different colours, to the knitting needle rack, looking at the different gauges and lengths and varieties, going "Um, well, I guess neural structures probably need about a number 6 size needle, I mean the basal ganglia is pretty delicate. I guess?" Did they just buy 1 pair, or several, assuming that knitting needles, like pens, eventually evaporate in a shared work environment?
Or did someone's wife or girlfriend or flatmate come home one winter evening to discover that her attempt to knit herself (or himself) a scarf and widen their skillset has ground to a halt because the anatomist in their life had wandered off with the needle which happened not to have wool on it? "What a useful stick! I will take this and point to things with it! How useful! I will take this one, because the other person has two, so I'm sure she won't miss the second one." If you had explained that this was a problem to the imaginary anatomist character, would they bring back your needle? If so, could you ever really feel the same way about it, and finish your scarf, knowing that it had been used to casually poke bits of cold wet spinal cord around?
In related news, I have been knitting again myself, because 'tis the season. (Cunningly, I use double-pointed needles which are afixed to one another in a loop, so you can make round things and also anatomists find it harder to make off with half of the pair.) I started making a baby hat for a pregnant school friend (of which I suddenly have 2), but had to restart about 10 times because of trifling errors such as misjoining the original round and thus making mobius strips rather than hats, and similar. As a result I've run out of steam on that project rather, but am confident that will successfully make other things sooner or later.
Isn't that an exciting thing to read about? No? Well, at least I feel like I've broken the ice on the blog again, and will get back to you again, sooner this time, with another post, presumably a less knitting-centred one.
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