The Inadvertent Blog

"A nation of shirkers"

2011-07-05T23:32:00.002+10:00

So, since I last blogged, many moons ago, I've half-thought-out about a million (or, like, 7) blog posts to write for you, Dear Reader, but somehow, with one thing and another, I haven't followed through with any of them. I think this is partly due to the structure of classes this year; somehow after a day in hospital I feel less inclined to natter in text form than after a day of enforced silence in lecture theatres. Plus people ask more "pop quiz, hotshot!" type questions in hospital (and they never seem to be looking for the answer “shoot the hostage”, somehow), so I suppose maybe I get tired of having to think on my feet? (Also, immediately subsequently, of consultants looking at me as if to say "How did you get this stupid? Were you dropped on your head a lot as a child? Are you even really a medical student? You're not lost, are you? Are you perhaps in the hospital by accident, or actually a patient? Did you by any chance steal that stethoscope from some hapless registrar whom you've left stunned and semi-conscious in a supply closet somewhere, having lured them in and coshed them like people in old movies dressing up as policemen or prison guards or similar?" I mean, it's all in the eyebrows and the jaded, jaded eyes, but that's definitely the look they give me. And it's very tiring, spending all day resisting the urge to show them where it says my name on my stethoscope and go "See! I belong here! I'll be an ok doctor, if I ever make it, I swear! Even if I’m a crap medical student! Which, by the way, is a subject on which the jury is still out!")

Plus, I've been staying with my grandmother, who is, as I'm sure you are tired of hearing, 99, which is, as I'm sure you've noticed, at least moderately venerable. That's 3 nights a week I spend without reliable internet access, going to bed super early and getting up super early to drive all the way to hospital, and 3 evenings a week having short loops of conversation with someone who has minimal short term memory function at best. Long story short, I haven't been filled with that creative zip and blogging zing which I'm sure you will agree are necessary for me to pen the great work of literature and social commentary that is this blog.

I can't remember, to be strictly honest with you, what many if any of these nascent posts were to have been about, but I was telling someone the other day about how I have a blog, and I realised that I just barely do, at the moment, so I thought I'd sort of check in here and say hi.

One that I do remember, though, at least in part, was this infuriated rant about a Telegraph heading which I kept seeing all over the place one day. The thing about being in hospitals on the ward is that you see the front page of the Daily Telegraph a large number of times (Always the Telegraph somehow, not other papers. Maybe people who read really awful newspaper get sick more? Or possibly they hold forth to people about things like hoe foreigners are taking all our jobs or whatever it is the Telegraph tells them, so other people injure them? It could definitely be that.) This headline was irking me enough that I actually went to their website to read the article before I blogged about it, because I've sort of learnt (learnt? learned? Is it like burnt and burned, do you think? How do I not know this?) my lesson about ranting on here about things without checking that I haven't got the wrong end of the stick completely. Which then (the reading it online thing) was even worse, because then I'd actually boosted their recorded readership by hitting their website, and so on.

Anyway, what this is all building up towards is the actual headline, which read "A NATION OF SHIRKERS" with a subheading explaining that what they were referring to is the fact that there are more Australians on disability pensions now than have been killed at war in the last 2 centuries. In fairness to the Telegraph (what a phrase to have to type), although I read the article, I think my computer crashed (presumably in protest) before I finished it, and I just couldn’t bring myself to look it up again and boost their hit count further, so it’s possible that I’m annoyed by something they weren’t actually trying to say.

Still, though, even if the article itself was in some way radically different in tone and content to the heading and subheading, the fact remains that this “shirkers vs. diggers” dichotomy thing that they’re tapping into there is definitely a philosophy many people seem to ascribe to, so it seems reasonable to engage with that .

First up I would like to say, in response to the sentence “there are more Australians supported by taxpayer-funded disability pensions in the past year than there are/have been Australian soldiers killed at war ever”: good. That is a good thing. What that means is: not that many people from this country, in the grand scheme of things, have died at war. What that means is that we have a pension system that works, that not too many people are slipping through the net and begging on the cold streets or whatever because their illness or disability or whatever it is precludes them from gaining adequate employment, rather than being supported by the public purse, which is what the public purse is for. Plus, of course, people are often supported on these pensions briefly, so that “having been on a disability pension at some point in the last year” is a very different thing to being on one permanently. Then you have the fact that you can draw a long bow (and it’s the Telegraph, so it seems naive to assume that they wouldn’t have) and include carers under the heading of “people who receive some sort of government funding as a result of disability (their own or others’)”.

Secondly, and this should really go without saying, but obviously it bears repeating: having a disability doesn’t make you a “shirker”. They don’t hand out disability pensions like they’re going out of style. It’s not that easy to get one, you pretty much have to have, - and you’ll kick yourself for not seeing this coming, Telegraph, when I tell you – you pretty much have to have a disability of some kind. And since we’ve come some distance, as a society, since beggars used to give themselves fake sores deliberately to get more money on the Elizabethan streets, there are not as many people as you might imagine lining up to get themselves one of them there sweet sweet disabilities. Because, funny thing, most of them suck? Even leaving aside the fact that being unable to do normal things, which is a reasonable working definition of “disability”, which obviously is less than great, there’s more to it. They’re either obvious, in which case you feel self conscious when you go about the place, which isn’t much fun, and in which case you clearly have a disability, or they’re not obvious. These latter include things like mental illnesses, which (a) also suck, and (b) mean that you spend a lot of time with nasty Telegraph-types looking at you suspiciously to check that you aren’t just faking. Because a perfectly healthy person would totally bother to imitate a crippling mental illness of some kind, presumably, and also of course doctors are morons who wouldn’t suspect anything. It’s way fun to pretend to have social phobia or an anxiety disorder! All you have to do is not leave your house or see your friends or do any of the things you used to enjoy, and make sure that even when you have to go out for necessities like food, to be totally self-conscious and stressed-seeming the whole time! I bet perfectly fine lazy people are lining up around the block for that sort of one of a kind opportunity to scam free money, to the value of one (1) pittance, from the government, for the tiny price of giving up basically all the things in life which are fun!

Or perhaps (as Bob Ellis would put it) that’s completely stupid.

Having a disability doesn’t make you a “shirker”, it makes you a person with a disability, who may or may not be on a pension depending on the extent, nature and severity of your disability. And even being a non-disabled person on a pension doesn’t make you a shirker, it just makes you someone whom we, as a society, are helping in some way. That’s why we have pensions in our system. If only bad people applied for or received them, instead of sending you money when you applied for one, Centrelink would send you a stern pro forma letter telling you to ‘man up and pull your goddamn weight, we don’t care if you’re 85 or whatever, son. Make an effort or don’t eat’. Fortunately, we, as a society, have decided that some people being supported by the state either briefly or permanently is valid and acceptable and appropriate.

Next up, of course, there’s the entirely important point that being a soldier sucks. (Be patient, this is relevant, I promise). So, if you’re a soldier in active service, and you don’t die (which, according to the binary logic of the Telegraph, is presumably the ideal outcome) you either come back fine and dandy, or you come back with some sort of disability, either of the PTSD type or the “dude, someone totally shot me” type. Since, as I understand it, modern warfare has been designed since the American Civil War with the aim increasingly of maiming rather than killing (for a bunch of obvious and terrifying-that-people-are-able-to-think-like-that sort of reasons, like it’s easier to avenge a dead friend than one who’s screaming and crying and begging you to take them to the hospital, and the fact that a dead person is, when you get right down to it, cheaper for a society to support than one in an iron lung with catastrophic sepsis, or even just a missing limb), so that it makes sense, fiscally speaking, for an enemy to try to drain your war-funding by simply giving all of your soldiers really big owies. What I’m saying here is that even non-shirky soldiers have a higher-than average chance of ending up on a disability pension. Ultimately, the Telegraph seems to be employing a distressingly with-your-shield-or-on-it sort of approach to soldiering as a profession or pursuit, like the only good soldier is a dead one. Which is interesting, given that they also seem to think, at least at some level, that a dead soldier is also better than anyone else of any profession of aliveness-status (if you’ll excuse the technical language).

This really all seems too easy. Like there’s no point even bothering to argue against the Telegraph categorically, they always take enough rope to hang themselves, pretty obviously. It actually feels sort of cheap, bothering to tell you how wrong I think the Telegraph is. It’s like taking candy from a baby, or like criticising disabled people by telling them that they’re not as good as dead soldiers. Cheap and easy.

In fact, to make it up to you (and because I don’t have any internet connection, so I can’t just stop typing and hit “post”, I just have to save all this as a Word document and copy-paste it later, so that there’s no properly defined end-point and thus no reason to stop typing) this next paragraph will be about disability pensions as a phenomenon, rather than the Telegraph per se. Isn’t that nice?

The problem with a disability pension is that it’s like strong pain relief. When you injure yourself, with luck, you can get by with a couple of panandol and a few days off work, but if it’s bad, you need more support. Maybe you need an opioid prescription painkiller, maybe you need to take a lot of time off work and be supported by the public purse for a while. Which is a great relief when you start, because it suddenly takes away all the pain/hassle. The problem is, it means that for a little while, it also takes away the little background niggling pains/hassles you’re used to putting up with. You know, like the little headaches everyone gets briefly every few days, but which go away when you ignore them, or like the terrible dreariness that is getting up when your alarm goes off early on a cold Tuesday morning to go to work. Which means that it’s then very difficult to bring yourself to give up your pension or your morphine. Because those things which start out as a useful crutch can all too easily become an inescapable crutch (huh, that’s not really a thing, is it? Sorry), or maybe one of those super deep soft feather beds in royal suites in old movies. You know, comfy and soft at first, but so soft that you sink in and can’t get out even as you’re being smothered. It seems like making your whole life a little easier for a little while is a dangerous thing.

I, for instance, pay very low rent, because I live in an apartment which my parents own. I should move out; it’s not a convenient place to live, and I know that I’m being a burden to them, but somehow radically increasing the amount of rent I pay for no really discernible benefit is something it’s very hard to get motivated to organise. Similarly, at the moment I get paid an allowance of sorts to look after my grandmother. This means that I basically have a job at the moment where I hang out with a really lovely old lady in the evenings then lie about and read a book or write obscenely long blog posts, and then sleep. So, if I get paid to have a pleasant evening and sleep, how will I adjust to getting a job which is actually work? It’ll be do-able, and obviously I’ll have to move house and get a real job one day, but I’ve managed to make that an awful lot harder for myself, by making my life too easy in the meanwhile.

Look at that, it’s like some kind of incredibly obvious and clunky metaphor for modern society. Or possibly a microcosm? Anyway, I guess my real point is this: speaking as an actual shirker, I think the Telegraph should pick on people like me, rather than people who have actual problems. Only ideally not me personally, because all this easy living has made me soft, and I would deal poorly with that sort of 45-point-font criticism.

"Why don't you have a boyfriend?"

2011-02-20T20:41:00.007+11:00

Hey guys, long time no blog, as has apparently become standard. Sorry! Still, new year, new chance write really long things on the internet, as they say. With this in mind, I'm breaking with my tradition of post titles starting "In Which..." not because of the fact that so few people these days seem to have read the sorts of books which have chapter titles like that, and not because it isn't awesome, but because it was sort of difficult, given that this isn't the sort of blog which is about things actually happening, as such, so it seemed inapt and sort of clunky.
In what seems to me to be a much more intuitive appraoch, I'm going to go ahead and give this post a title which explains what it's actually about. Crazy, I know, but what can I say? I'm just a wacky and spontaneous chick.

So! Last week was Valentine's Day. (Not the entire week, thankfully, although can you imagine how few people would be glad if it were? Thank goodness for time-limited... holidays? Celebrations? Events? What is Valentine's Day even classified as?) Which meant that it was, as you know, the traditional time for relationship dissatisfaction. The single mutter embitteredly to themselves, and anyone else who'll listen, about manufactured holidays and Hallmark conspiracies; the folks in relationships secretly feel gypped because either their loved one didn't get them anything, or got them something inadequate, or something over the top, or expected them to give something, or whatever.

The people who actually enjoy Valentine's Day for what it is (not like I did, which is to say: I had a quite pleasant day, but not because of it being Valentines)must be a tiny tiny minority. Mainly smug highschool girls who get to carry flowers around all day (whose boyfriends must have had to get up really early to get roses to their girlfriends in time to get to school afterward), and some tiny percentage of people who enjoy a romantic evening with their spouse/partner/[gender]-friend and genuinely prefer to do it in crowded pink locations, surrounded by other people doing the same thing.

I guess, ideally, for Valentine's Day, you'd be one of those midcentury teenagers who enjoyed making out in their cars at the local Lovers' Lane, with similarly occupied cars around them? Like in Pleasantville! Anyway, possibly I am some kind of embittered husk of a human being or something, but I really can't see the fun in Valentine's Day. If someone gives you soemthing, then they've done so out of calendar-based duty rather than as some kind of spontaneous outpouring of affection, and if they don't it's just like all the other days when people don't give you anything, only worse.

Anyway, either because of Valentine's Day or for some mysterious other reason, last week about 5 different people independently asked me whether I had a boyfriend or was married. Since none of those people did that endearing pop-culture thing of brightening perceptibly and asking me of I was busy Friday when I said that I was single, it seems reasonable to rule out the most optimistic interpretation of this sort of question. If nothing else, it looks a lot like all of the people who took it upon themselves to enquire were either married or similarly attached. You can tell, because no single person, surely, no single person in the world, would do what they all did next.

What they all did, when I said that I didn't have a boyfriend, was entirely perplexing to me. Without fail, every one of them said "why?".

What is that even about? What are you expecting when you ask someone "why don't you have a boyfriend?"? I seriously cannot think of a single acceptable answer, a single answer someone asking a question like that could possibly want to hear.

I suppose that maybe what they're trying to imply is that you, the hapless single victim of their take-no-prisoners approach to social interaction and small talk, are simply so wonderful, so beautiful, so devastatingly attractive, that you must be constantly beating off suitors with a stick.

"Why not give in to one of them?" they presumably hope to imply, "There are so many wonderful single dudes all vying for your hand, why are you so stubbornly refusing to give any of them even a chance? The odds are very high that most of the myraid gentlemen besotted with you at any given moment are entirely eligible and would make excellent boyfriends! Why not succumb? I assume that you must have a reason, what is it? If that's not too personal a question". (Which, even in that situation, it obviously would be) But what it ususally sounds like is, more succintly "Why, what's wrong with you? How is it that you've repulsed the entirely of mankind? Is it bad? Should, uh, should I be standing further away from you? It's not leprosy, is it?"

Seriously, what answers are even possible? I tried "I'm too young to have to worry about being married yet" but that not only managed to offend the young-marrier in the room but also caused me to be regaled with a "when my mother was your age she had already had five children" story. This is an awkward conversational gambit at the best of times, but worse in a professional situation like this was, because you're not allowed to cheerfully respond "Gosh! I guess I've dodged a bullet there, then!".

I tried "I'm too busy, what with uni 12 hours a day, plus 3 hours of commute daily (minimum) and this foolish self-indulgent thing I have where I like to sleep more than 6 hours per night. All that only leaves 3 hours' leeway in each day, and I already use that time for such fripperies as buying groceries, cooking and consuming dinner/breakfast, dressing myself, and bathing." this was greeted with the even-more-bizarre-than-the-"my-mother-is-totally-beating-you"-approach: "I used to use that excuse," said the young man of my acquaintance, "that's just what it is, an excuse." I mean really, what? Are you trying to say that I insist on bathing every day to avoid meeting young men? Are you perhaps attempting to imply that it is my duty as a right thinking young woman to want to be in a relationship, that excuses will get me nowhere, and that, irksome as the task inevitably is, I really must stop being selfish and start going on dates? Since this was around Valentines, is it possible that they were suggesting that I was too lazy to carry flowers home with me?

I guess it's true that love is always portrayed as a burdensome duty in our culture, something, with it's tiresome "kisses" and, ugh, "affection", which girls are always trying to avoid. Oh wait, my mistake, that's complete bollocks. Firstly, as if I'd make up excuses to avoid having to date (in general. I'm totally not above making up excuses to avoid dating specific people, but that's an entirely different question), and secondly; even if I were, that's totally valid. Who wants to go out with someone who's only there because they couldn't come up with a proper excuse and knew that "I can't come that night I'll be washing my hair" is fooling nobody? Not me, and not anybody I'd want to date.

What else might you say to a question like "why don't you have a boyfriend"? People generally suggest "I'm a lesbian" if you ask them what would be a goood response, but that only loops back to "Why don't you have a girlfriend, then?". Plus, in giving an actual excuse, you're giving credence to the validity of an entirely unjustifiable question.

Other options include "all the boys I know are married, gay or miscellaneously unsuitable", "I'm afraid I'm simply too repellently unattractive for anyone to ever love", and "I'm currently conducting a torrid affair with your Mum, and she's too jealous to let me see other people". And somehow, none of these seem likely to do the trick.

It all just mystifies me. Do people contract some kind of amnesia, upon entering a relationship, where they forget that there was ever a time when they were single, either by (valid) choice or bad luck? What answer could you possibly be expecting?
I really do feel like someone is missing something. It could be me, but I'm pretty sure it's them.

In Which folks are probably not really 'Simple' (except maybe the simple ones)

2010-09-10T12:18:00.003+10:00

Today, a friend of mine shared this article on twitter:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/
which I encourage you to read, because seriously, you guys, this stuff is so fascinatingly ridiculous. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's basically an analysis of the dating site OkCupid with regard to what people list as their interests and how people describe themselves, as plotted against their self-identified race. And also, to some extent, their literacy, gender, and religious creed.

A lot of it is pretty fascinating, naturally, but the bit that really caught my attention was the "people describing themselves" trope. Apparently black dudes often use the phrase "I'm cool", whereas the latino dudes want you to know that they're "funny" and asians "simple".

I love the idea of bothering to say any of those things. Is there anything much less funny than someone earnestly telling you that they are a funny guy? I, uh, I'd have thought not. Surely you'd be better off just, oh, I don't know, being funny. Or better still, just writing how you normally talk and letting the reader judge how funny she thinks you are for herself? I suppose this is difficult if your particular brand of funniness is a response-type thing. Like you're quick with conversational banter or whatever? I don't know, I just think "I am funny" as a deadpan descriptor is unconvincing. Everyone knows that everyone wants a "good sense of humour" (but they all have different ideas about what that means, so just suggesting that you'll appeal to everyone is always going to be unconvincing), so it seems like it's on a par with "I am goodlooking" or "sensitive" or "like walks on the beach". "I am an oldfashioned romantic who likes giving flowers and thinks hand-holding is underrated". This sort of thing sounds like you just read an article on "what women want" and copied it out, a bit. (Although I do in fact like handholding and flowers and wordplay, I should mention. Also goodlookingness and sensitiveness, I guess?)

Next up: "I am cool". What. Who says that? (Well, I mean, black dudes apparently) This is like the "funny" thing, but turned up to 11. "I am cool" is only marginally cooler than "my Mum says I'm cool". I'll go further; it's even less cool than that, because "my Mum says I'm cool" has a higher likelihood of being an ironic joke. It's so earnest and foolish sounding, again. Plus, what the hell do you mean by "cool"? Do you mean "hip to the latest trends"; "I have an asymmetrica haircut"? Do you in fact mean "I wear a lot of Ed Hardy clothing"? Do you mean it as equivalent to "chilled" or "calm"? "Unheated"? Or do you mean it like you might say "Oh, Steve, sure, bring him to the party, he's cool"? "He's a cool guy, is Steve". (Note: no Steve I have ever met ever was this sort of cool in my opinion. Sorry if you're reading, anyone named Steve.) Like, he's a nice guy who is pleasant to be with? Doesn't "cool" essentially boil down to three completely distinct meanings?

If you are cool, you either
(a) share many of my interests: and are pleasant ("He seems cool")
(b) are trendy and fashionable ("look at that girl's cool boots")
(c) i: are calm and composed ("it was a bit hectic, but I stayed cool")
ii: are coldly dispassionate and frigid ("relations between North Korea and the US cooled this week...")

I guess we might conceivably add (d) literally cool; "I am an Edward Cullen type, cool to the touch, with icy lips and marble fingers", but that's just so deperately uncool according to all the other definitions that I'm not even going to think about it.

The problem is that the type (a) cool people are, in my case, practically the opposite of the type (b) cool kids. I think things that are a bit dorky are cool. Sometimes I worry that my appreciation of kitschy things is insufficiently ironic.

Anyway, what I'm saying here is: saying that you are cool conveys no meaningful information to me except that you probably aren't.

Lastly, the most complex one to broach: "simple". What does it mean to say that you are simple? I think we can discard the possibility that they mean it in the mental sense, like Forrest Gump is simple. Especially since it's mainly said by a demographic who rate "being a software developer" highly on their list of interests. But what does that mean, then? That they are simply a software designer, and have few or no other interests? That they have old fashioned, "simple" ideas (men should work, women should cook), the values of "simpler times"? Perhaps that you are caveman-like and are operating at a low level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs: "I'm a simple guy, give me food, shelter a lack of immediate danger, and I'm content"? Maybe it's like "crude", like toilet humour is "simple"? Maybe these people just can't handle "complicated" women, relationships, etc? I mean, that's understandable, folks are complicated and that crap can be tiring.

Maybe this is the thing; people describe themselves as "simple" either because they don't like the fact that people (including themselves) are actually complicated, or because they fear that they look boring on paper. (As an aside, I think that the more interesting people probably all look boring on paper. I am suspicious of people with a a super-diverse and super-exciting range of interests and activities. What are they up to? I suspect them of taking up wind-surfing and cliff-diving and merenge and safe-breaking just to look interesting.)

And this brings me to perhaps the most worrying part of this whole thing: what's the go with this contrariness on my part? Why is it that the more emphatically someone insists that they are simple and cool and funny, the more convinced I am that they are just the opposite? It seems a little harsh, really. And fairly unfounded, I mean, people haven't been attempting to obviously and systematically deceive all my life, or anything. My life has not been filled with betrayal or similar. It makes no sense that I should be so distrustful. I mean, yes, there are all the institutionalised deceits that we all deal with, like ads and stuff, but that hardly counts.

Maybe I'm just extrapolating from the people you meet who insist that they are "weird" and usual and "crazy"? I mean, those boring, predictable, ordinary folks are everywhere, and they are just deadset wrong almost all the time, because they've failed to notice that everyone else is all those things too.

Maybe this is the problem with Interesting Looking Girls? Like the love interest in 'Scott Pilgrim vs. the World', such girls are instantly and easily identified as different and interesting (and "cool") but this relies on the fallacy that everyone whose hair is a naturally occurring colour is totally uninteresting, which is clearly untrue.

I saw a poster the other day that said "A little bird told me that if I looked like the other girls, you might come back to me. I don't want you that badly" (or words to that effect) which is great and all and probably includes excellent subtext about body image and self worth and so on, but what is this implication that all the other girls look the same? Speaking as a girl other than the writer of the poster, I'm going to have to go ahead and say "way harsh". I mean, it was appealling, but it was obviously sort of wrong in its assumptions, and you can tell it's wrong precisely because of it's broad appeal. Also it had a cartoon of a dead bird, which seems like maybe an excessively aggressive response. Don't shoot the messenger lady! Especially if it's a talking bird, those things take ages to train!

Hmmm, I've ended up a bit off-track here, and I've run out of break in which to blog, but the important thing is that I've written something again, having been totally at a loss for what to blog about for ages. Sorry if you've been waiting on tenterhooks, obsessively refreshing or similar!

In Which it seems reasonable to conclude that the Apocalypse would probably suck

2010-07-18T15:41:00.008+10:00

Have you ever read a book by John Wyndham? Surely you must've done, Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (which they made into the rather melodramatically named movie Village of the Damned). They're usually sort of quasi-post-apocalyptic end-of-the-world stuff, where the heroes have to try to fight off/survive the ravages of terrifying monster plants, alien possessors, and people who've got completely the wrong end of the stick eugenics-wise in post-nuclear worlds of mutations, extra toes and explosions.

The thing is, they're sort of fun, yeah? Same as zombie movies and disaster movies and such. Sort of an 'Oh no! The end of the world as we know it! How awful! So, uh... so what you're saying is that I don't have to go to work on Monday?' kind of thing. Like, secretly, we all believe it would be a little bit awesome. And that's sort of great, really. It would be a brief comfort to us if it ever did, as well as being a pleasant way to pass a rainy afternoon in the meanwhile.

Because the odds of the world ending during our lifetimes are pretty slim, right, so there's not much risk of us having to face the reality of how it would actually be if everything and everyone we liked caught fire or drowned. Or both! At once! (See this is the problem, if you think about it too superficialy, it sounds like a Michael Bay movie, all exciting and explodey, rather than like being terribly uncomfortable and distressing, like a Michael Bay movie that you have to watch more than once, while completely sober.) Conversely, if it does happen, then as long as we don't get distracted by our awareness of our own terrible hubris for long enough for the zombies to get us, then there's really no harm done.

Unless, of course, we somehow get carried away with our enthusiasm and accidentally bring about the end of the world just because it sounds like a laugh, I guess. I think, though, we can probably avert that particular brand of disaster if we all just pinky-swear right now to definitely not, in any way, bring about the end of the world in any way shape of form. This means you especially, Dear Reader. You guys are both smart enough and excitable enough to accidentally-on-purpose set a bunch of velociraptors loose just to see whether your house meets the standards set by International Secure Your Home Against Raptors Day. (For Science!)

But the problem is, right, that last week I went skiing. (Bear with me, this gets relevant, I swear.) At the snow, the place where we stayed had really good central heating (and heaters AND an open fire! From my shivering vantage point here in my chilled flat, this seems like unimaginable luxury, as indeed it was), and it's not that I would miss that sort of thing in the event of an unscheduled return to a pre-civilised world (although I sure as hell would). The thing is, I failed to keep my week's worth of thyroxine (that's my anti-hypothyroid medicine for those of you playing at home) in the fridge while I was away, like I was supposed to. Usually, n my aforementioned chilled flat, this wouldn't be a problem, but in that toasty snowside apartment, the warmth straight-up denatured the whole lot. I didn't actually realise this until this week, when I was back to being all slow and morose unexpectedly, and I realised rather late what had happened. Obviously, this is not a serious long-term problem, because I have the rest of my medicine here at home, and it's been kept in the fridge.

But this really brought it home to me: I'm sort of reliant on modern technology a bit, now. I mean, obviously I always was, I probably couldn't live a week without recourse to things that were invented in the last 150 years. I certainly never have so far. But I reckon that I could probably take a crack at post-apocalyptic living on a good day. I'm pretty good in a crisis, and once I've resigned myself to a life without caffeine (which would take a while, what with the crippling caffeine-withdrawal headaches I'd be having for the first week), I think I could probably scrape together a coping strategy, as long as that's actually in some way possible. (So, obviously I don't expect to beat a world covered with lava, or something. I just think I could give fighting-off-giant-alien-spiders a shot, y'know?) But really, I'd only be at my best for maybe a month or so before I ran out of medicines and just wound down, like one of those battery-powered rabbits that the Energizer Bunny is always owning. And I'd like to see me fighting off man-eating killer plants while running at one-fifth speed and angsting about how now that 98% of the world's population was dead I would probably never get to live out the plot of a chick movie.

(Actually, I kind of would like to see that; until the bit where I inevitably get supped on by the agents of Armageddon, it might make for an amusing 8 second vignette.)

It's a pity, really, because if we discounted the thyroxine bit (and while we're at it, we'd probably better discount all the charming conveniences of modern medicine; I think we're likely to die of something pretty rapidly, otherwise, what with the Death, War, Famine and Pestilence that'd be going about) it could be a tiny bit neat. If nothing else, there'd be fewer delicious Maltesers, and probably a great deal more exercise, so I figure that after a little while we'd all be looking svelte and terrific. It would sort of level the playing field: those of us who usually keep in shape by baking cakes and watching Doctor Who would shrink, and those unsporting types who go to the gym all the time and take supplements and whatever it is such people do would lose at least the more pointless muscles. To keep it fair and reward them for their hard work, they'd be in much better zombie-outrunning condition, but on the other hand, the chubbier amongst us have reserves of energy to allow us to survive post-apocalyptic famine. Like camels, living off their humps! (Sorry, Skinny Nerd Readers, the only consolation for you is that you're brainy enough to outthink the zombies and contain little enough nutrition that they're unlikley to try that hard to eat you.)

Plus, like I said, very little to do by way of paperwork. The entirety of federal and state politics, as well as pop-up ads, telemarketing and The Twilight Saga would be things of the past! We would look back nostalgically and be all "remember public transport? Man, I miss those times".

Still, do not let such considerations tempt you into bringing about the end of the world, please. Remember, we Pinky Swore, and that, my friend, is a sacred vow.

In Which the Reader is deflected rather than actually addressed, per se

2010-07-02T18:19:00.002+10:00

You guys, I was going to write this whole thing before I go away for the week, but I've run out of time, and also I've found this video on Youtube. It addresses almost exactly what I was going to blog about, in a more succinct and fantastic manner than I'd've been able to do. Also, almost all of this series are just as good, and just as much things I totally dig/agree with.

In Which most people keep it to themselves

2010-06-20T22:24:00.007+10:00

Amazingly, it's taken me until now to wonder about something really obvious. As you are doubtless aware, I say a lot of things. I write a lot of things. Like, a lot of things. More than a lot of people. And sometimes I say something unusual and then either I or someone else opines that everyone thinks/does whatever that was, but most people don't say it out loud.

So someone says something nice to/about me and I'm all "Really? Truly? Awesome! Yessss!" etc. Then I get just a smidgin self-conscious and say "sorry, I just get so excited, I love it when people say nice things" and sort of metaphorically twirl a toe on the ground. And people always (well, often. Sometimes. When I haven't gotten too disproportionately pleased) say "no, I'm the exact same, but secretly. I think everyone thinks that! Most people just don't say anything."

Same goes for the overthinking. Like I said in my last post, I totally bet that everyone, or at least almost everyone, does that. Most people just manage not to say anything to other people, and cunningly hide their crazy. Also, they usually manage not to write thousand-word blog posts about it. Presumably they just don't have my mad typing skills or something.

So, here's my point: why not? Or, to put it another way, why do I? Why am I different to everyone else? I've never been real good at feigning indifference when people are nice, and I've never known why you would. Maybe it's a coolness thing. But why is it cool to pretend that you like things less than you do? Is it part of the original "cool", being carefully unenthused about everything? Is it a self-protection thing, like if you admit that you have a strong reaction to something, then others have power over you, or something? Is that really how you think about people? Surely not. Surely. Most people are alright. And this way you weed out the jerks who think you're weird for saying things like "Wow!" nice and early, before they can kill your life buzz.

I mean, I guess it is sometimes inconvenient, in that on a similar basis, when I like something, I say so, which probably comes across as insincere sometimes. It's bad when I run into a few people at once, and all of them have something nice going on in their outfit. If you say "Wow, I love your earrings!" to one person, they're pleased, but if you then like the next person's shoes and the next's hairdo, then you look like you're just making it up. "The eyes, the hair, pick a feature!" But I really only say those things when I mean them. Firstly because people so often have something great about them which is pretty obvious if you're actually looking at them at all, and secondly because I really like it when people say nice things to me. Also, because I'm so aware of how suss it often sounds that the idea of further muddying the waters with insincere compliments just terrifies me, so of course I would never say these things when they weren’t called for. If I sound foolish mentioning the things I do like, imagine how much worse it would be if I started adding to that, and mentioning more things! Especially if they were clearly rubbish, I suppose.

Anyway, the question is: why do I say these things naturally, when everyone else seems to naturally hide them? It's not that I don't like the idea of playing my cards close to the chest and seeming mysterious, it's just that I can't pull it off. I always want to talk to people about how my new play-the-cards-close-to-the-chest-and-be-mysterious thing is going. Tell them how intriguingly difficult I'm finding it not to tell them things. That sort of palaver.

Well, at any rate I assume that everyone else thinks things all the time, but is just heaps better at playing it cool than me. But then, every now and then, this happens. This is the facebook status (about Doctor Who, in case you’re out of the loop) which a Friend of mine made the other day, and the comments on it (or some of them):

TB says: "Vincent Van Gogh with a Scottish accent...sorry but no."
RW comments: "Ach laddie, mah fookin' ear!"
Ang comments: "It's the Tardis translating, buzzkill! Besides, I don't speak Dutch, so it had to be some kind of accent. Unless you want to get all Mel Gibson pseudo-realism, and use subtitles, in which case we have bigger problems.
TH comments: "Yes because the Dutch sound so Scottish, it hurts...
And why are the French from Somerset?
Ang comments: "Again: because they have to be from somewhere other than France, and it should be all the same place so you can tell who's different, so it might as well be Somerset as anywhere else. You can't hire actors who have no accent whatsoever, they sound foreign to EVERYONE. Or would, if they existed."
TH comments: "Wow, clearly you have put a lot of thought into this."

...what? I mean, isn't that just the obvious answer to the question at hand? I didn't put any thought into it at all, I just answered (which is why my answer reads so oddly, in retrospect). I mean, I appreciate that maybe the dude was being deliberately facile and whatever, and that's fair enough, maybe I shouldn't've gone "I will try to answer the question you are begging but not asking", because that's just me being a bit socially odd (which is still a mystery), but what is this thing where people imply that you had to be up late into the night, tossing and turning as you ponder the question or whatever? I mean, it leaps to the eye. And in this case, it has been leaping to the eye, no thought required, essentially ever since we were old enough to watch movies and TV. This issue is the same for every story ever set in a place where they don't speak English. Surely we all nutted it out when we were about 11? I just... I just have no idea what the go is with this sort of interaction.

Leaving this aside, I still have no idea why it is that I seem to be sort of full of words compared to everyone else. It worries me a little, since "pressure of speech" is a symptom of mania and schizophrenia and heaven only knows what else besides. It does sort of seem a little like that, doesn't it? Like some person or event scratches the surface of my mind and words just spurt and spray everywhere, like the blood coming out of the limb-stumps of that knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

It's pressurised enough that I have to carry a whole notebook for it. It turns out that you're not allowed to just talk out loud to yourself or others (and yes, I do talk out loud to myself. It's rarely silent in my car when I'm driving alone. If I'm not singing along, I'm talking to myself. I think maybe it's a habit I got from driving when I was tired, trying to keep myself awake) during lectures and stuff, you're supposed to sit quietly. So I carry a little notebook to vent words, and relieve the pressure, so to speak. It's full of disjointed half-thought phrases and song lyrics and lists and so on. Which is weird, because I also use it for passing notes in class, and it's a strange thing to hand to a curious friend a repository of your half-formed thoughts and absent-minded musings. It makes me nervous when people flip the pages back (because they don't want to waste paper, people often do this; as if an 800-page "Fat Little Notebook" is not already wasted paper, a sunk cost) because I usually have no recollection of what things I've written in there disjointedly, and how they will seem when strung together.

I particularly always want to write down nice things that I remember, (and they look especially mad when read back out of context, I assure you) to sort of crystallise the memory. There are so many things that I can only really remember once they've been said out loud a few times, or written down. And it makes me sad to think that I won't be able to remember how it was when that nice boy in my class said that he thought I was really really cool and had impeccable dress sense, or that lovely girl said that she thought I was so funny that when we became facebook friends she went and read all my old statuses on my profile page. Because without crystallising, those sorts of things get lost, filed vaguely under "Oh, how nice!". And then when you have a rough day and you need to access that sort of memory, you're out of luck.

Obviously it's difficult, because putting a memory into words is like trying to put something soft into a box. It's protected there, and you can find it, but it's changed. The bits that don't fit get squashed in, some of the shape is lost faster, squished into the shape of the box, formed and deformed by the words which protect it. Or maybe it's mosre like hanging a coat on a skeleton? Anyway, like a metaphor which isn't quite right. Exactly like that.

Anyway, I don't really have an answer to my question of what makes me respond differently, maybe it's just that once you start thinking like that, once you start, it sort of snowballs. I mean, you can tell it snowballs, look at this blog. Since I started Medicine, I've been told a couple of times by lovely, apparently perfectly sane people, that they never read books because they don't have the time. (Lovely, apparently sane people who get much much better marks than I do, obviously). In that time, just since I started this highly intensive etc. course, I've written about 70,000 words of blog alone. (Never mind emails, facebook statuses, notebook, etc). That's about the same length as the novels my compatriots don't have time to even read.

See? Takes but a scratch and there's pools of words all over the place! Whoa.

In Which it may or may not be appropriate to care what people think of you

2010-06-16T22:03:00.008+10:00

The idea in my last blog post (what is morality blah blah blah) sort of links in with another conversation I had last week. My Delightful Friend Belinda was singing quietly (and endearingly, naturally) to herself in a corridor or something, and so we struck up a discussion about Caring What Others Think Of You. She, she said, does not much care what anyone thinks of her, and therefore does not object to singing in a corridor. She reckoned that she thinks maybe even too little about what others will think, and that I probably thought too much of such things. (It may have been me who said that I was an overthinker, I do not wish to give the impression that she was being critical). This is something movies and such are always advising us: Be Yourself, and Who Cares what Anyone Else thinks? This strikes me as maybe being a bit of a trap, just like Dream Big and Follow Your Heart (regarding which, see previous posts). Well, not as much of a trap as those two, obviously, because those are either actively pathological or just meaningless, in my opinion, whereas “Don’t care what others think” is more just a matter of striking a delicate balance, rather than being just completely stupid to even think about in the first place.

Note: I am now engaging with the Moral of so many parts of our culture: “Don’t care what others think (of you)”, not with Belinda’s very sensible unselfconsciousness. So if you’re reading this, Belinda (and hi Dave), I am not arguing at you. I am arguing inspired by you. It’s totally different, honest (no, really!).

Because, right, you have to care a little what others think of you. Otherwise you’re a sociopath. Or something. You’d act without consideration for others all the time (unless maybe you didn’t care what others think of you, but did care what they thought/felt otherwise? This seems a trifle elaborate). And what would be the point of ever saying anything? I mean, why do you talk? To get your thoughts into other people's minds, essentially. It'd be silly if you didn't care what was in their minds, or if they didn't care about your thoughts.

On the average day at uni I talk in fairly predictable ways, we could go through them systematically if you don’t believe me. The first thing I say most days is “Good morning” (Or just “Morning”, often, because I’m a rebel that way, and variety is the spice of life, yeah? Also, my flatmate gets up at a different time to me most mornings, so it is totally not tragic that this is usually the first interaction of my day) and then about 45 minutes later “Thanks mate” to the bus driver. And if I didn’t care what he thought, then I wouldn’t bother saying that, because it’s not a conversation which does anything for me, I get nothing out of that, so what would be the point? So then the first thing would be greeting people at uni, and why do that if I don’t care what they think? (Actually, it’s almost completely pointless, since the sole function of the interaction is to say “I have seen you and acknowledge your presence/existence”, which could technically be achieved with eyecontact, and which is again pointless if you don’t care what they think. If it was just me not caring, then maybe their feelings would be hurt, but if neither of us cared what the other thought, then why would either bother? They don't care that I like that they eixst.) So we skip ahead to tutorial, where you might legitimately say things to further discussion, but again, why bother engaging if you don't care what your classmates think? You know what you know, you can learn from them, you don't need to contribute. (You know what, this is getting a little dull, but you see what I'm saying. Possibly I am wrong to conflate "not caring what people think of you" and "not caring what people think at all" and "not caring about anyone at all, who needs those jerks". But if I am, then so are thousands of teenagers across the globe even as we speak. Millions, maybe! Millions of grumpy hormonal little misanthropes). Plus, in a sense, you could read it as being madly arrogant to ever contribute to academic discussion, implying that everyone else is less knowledgeable than you are and so on. But I wouldn't recommend going too far down that line of inquiry, because that's one of those things where if everyone does it then it ends in tragedy. Like Living your Big Dreams, in that sense.

Anyway, what I'm saying is; it's pretty clearly possible to care too little what people think of you. People (not Dear Lovely Belinda, obviously, Other People) who claim not to care what people think of them usually fall into one of two categories. People who do not care what anyone at all thinks of them, and people who claim not to care about people whom they dislike or do not respect think of them.

The former are usually the people one does not meet, but does come across, in public spaces, like on buses or in art galleries (especially small artist-operated art galleries, somehow). Even though you do not know them, you know that they do not care what you think, because they are usually saying so loudly to someone. Which does rather beg the question, I've always thought, why they feel it so important that people know that they don't care. Like "I don't care what you think unless you erroneously think that I care about what you think. It's important to me that you do not think that". Anyway, this tends to manifest itself as just being rude and inconsiderate. You know, talking on the phone really loudly about personal things (usually the personal things of their interlocuter, people tend to especially not care what people think of them when it's someone else who is the one likely to be embarrassed), or smoking next to someone who is holding an asthma puffer in their hand, or loudly talking about how unattractive someone or something is. The explanation that they do not care what others think is often in response to the look of acute embarrassment on the face of their acquaintance when they say or do something which might be perceived as rude or thoughtless by others. Acquaintances and their sympathisers all think "you may not, but I do, and so I suspect does that woman who just heard you refer to her as 'painfully unattractive'".

The second type, who do not care about the opinions of those whom they actively dislike, are more likeable. Because usually the people whose opinions they "don't care about" would otherwise make them sad. Because 80% of the time, they're right to dislike people, or they have a good reason not to respect the thoughts of the person in question (like who cares what a girl wearing jeggings thinks of your sartorial choices? She is already wrong before she even says anything). Maybe that 1 in 5 leftover would surprise them, but really, once you try to get that ellusive last skerrick of niceness out of the opinions of the world, you get more of the negative too. Still, this sort of thing is difficult if for instance you're trying to introduce a new love to cantankerous parents in any movie ever, or more pressingly if you're a mutual friend of the two folks who do not care what the other thinks.

Plus this is the one that has any real relevance to me. You may have picked up in your time bein' aquainted with me, but I tend to sort of overanalyse things. (Don't feel bad if you missed it, it's totally subtle and hard to tell. But if you reread, for instance, the post in which I "considered" that innocently friendly comment in late May, or, I don't know, any other post ever, you might start to pick up the tiny telltale hints.) Which is fine. Because I genuinely just do it for kicks. I may sound like I'm angsting to death about the tone of someone's "hello", but really, I've got to think about something, so t may as well be that, and it's sort of a hobby. Also, it may have taken me more than a thousand words to say "here are my initial thoughts on hearing that someone said something nice about my blog", but I didn't spend hours on it. It took maybe 45 minutes to type out, but I thought all those things within 2 seconds tops. I'm systematic that way. Problem is that sometimes I forget myself and say these things out loud to people, or write them on my blog too obviously or whatever, and then people get all concerned about me. They worry that I care too much what others think, and they earnestly explain to me that they don't care what some Cool Kid or other thinks of me, and neither should I. Which I totally appreciate in that it shows that they care and all that, but which is often not where I was really going with my line of thought. (Although, fair's fair, sometimes I really am just having a moment of crazy).

I don't know, though. I can't possibly be that bad. I reckon I just articulate what a lot of people do all the time without realising it (or with realising it, but secretly). Also possibly most people haven't crafted it into an actual hobby of thought-experimentation. I mean, if I was really paranoid about what people thought about me, would I really post thousands and thousands of words of blog post about it? Wouldn't I be more likely to sit quaking quietly in the corner? Similarly, I have repeatedly dressed up foolishly for uni for no good reason. Either I don't mind when people look at me and go "that girl is totally odd", or I care what they think so deeply that I need to show them my inner pirate or whatever. I choose to believe that the former is more plausible. (Note: show-off attention whore is not one of the options, so tough bikkies.)

Mind you, I was talking to Easily Amused Matt a few weeks ago (you remember him, Dear Reader), about that thing from post a few weeks ago, about how the Cool Folks sometimes Look Through people a trifle, and he said that it would be worse for me because I have insight into it. Which seems strange; surely everyone notices these things, most of them just maintain the Code of Silence about it? Surely. Most people, at least, notice these things.

Which is not to say that I don't then go away and totally overthink things. Like it only occurred to me hours later, after the conversation I talked about in my last post, that there was a whole other thing to overanalyse. Dude claimed superiority because of being a Christian Virgin, fine. But only way later did I suddenly wonder what the heck made him so sure that I was neither of those things. The fact that he was right is esentially beside the point. Either he has exactly as much "insight" into the little things people say and do as I do, or else I've come up in conversation or he reads this blog. Any of which is odd, frankly. Unless, of course, I just have the look of an irreligious floozy, I suppose. I mean, I was wearing a corset at the time. Still. So, having waited until so much later to overabalyse that totally gives me not-overanalysing-things points, surely? Plus I was totally succinct.

Whoa, this has gotten really long, as usual. But one last paragraph, and then I swear I'll go to bed. One last little overanalysis. A little one:

This is the other half of the argument, essentially ("think less about what others think"), and I'm affording it way less space than the "think more" because all of popular culture essentially has this covered. You can't let what you assume others might think, especially when you don't respect their judgements anyway, govern how much you enjoy your life etc. etc. etc. More specifically, I'd say it's worth exercising caution because sometimes overthinking things gives you displeasure where there never needed to be any. So the other day at uni, I was talking to 3 young men, or rather standing there vaguely while they talked, about girls. One of them described a girl whom he knows, a friend of his girlfriend, as "really nice but not at all attractive. Totally not hot" (or somthing like that). At this point, all of them glanced slightly guiltily at me. The same way you might when someone tells a blonde joke and you glance at the blonde in the group to make sure she's cool with it, or something. In my overthinking mind, I instantly went "Oh yeah, so 'nice but unattractive' as a phrase makes you think of me, huh? Thanks, jerks. Although thanks for the 'nice' bit I guess. Huh." (although I'm a bit of a Psych geek, so what I actually though was more about being Primed with that phrase making me more Salient, but whatever). Which is crazy, because in retrospect it was clearly not a glance of "oh no, Ang is nice but unattractive, what if she's offended on that other unattractive girl's behalf?" but rather one of "this is a pretty dirrspectful way to talk about a girl, I hope the girl who is here is not offended on the basis of feminine solidarity or something". Or so I choose to believe. Otherwise, I stand by my "jerks" asnalysis. Also, it's always worth bearing in mind the vicissitudes of casual eye contact. It could be that they were all just doing that thing where you look at everyone in the conversation in turn, and the timing was just unfortunate.
Anyway, it's probably the "girl" thing, yeah?

Anyway, this post has gotten ridiculously long even for me, so the TL:DR version of this post is "watch that movie Stardust". It's supergreat and also the moral of the story is not to care what people think of you if you do not share their values and ideals, because you don't respect their ideas about other things, so why let them influence your ideas about you?" Also the moral is "all boys look better with slightly longer hair and a sword". Or that was what I took out of it, anyway.Plus, there were Sky Pirates and Dexter Fletcher was in it a bit.

In Which 'Morality' proves to be too big a topic for a blog

2010-06-12T15:49:00.003+10:00

Have you ever wondered about how much of an effect the people you know and talk with have on your lexicon? Obviously we all try to talk in a way which is appropriate for the situation (so we wouldn't always choose the word "lexicon" for instance), but it's weird when you notice those things that you and your friends say and always take for granted. This happened to me on Friday. I have a friend who used to always describe his team's soccer losses as "moral victories". In his case this was almost fair, since the other teams had the unfair advantages of talent, training, being-Sydney-FC-that-one-time, etc. Problem is, I never even noticed that I'd absorbed the use of the word "moral" as an almost meaningless adjective until Friday. I claimed (obviously spuriously) that my hat was "morally superior" to some other hat. Which is clearly stupid. Problem is that this had become a thing I just say without my even noticing it.

Naturally, this then devolved into an argument as to whose hat was superior and more specifically whether it was possible for a hat to be "morally" superior to any other hat not obtained by crime or similar. I don't know how it happened, but I managed to end up arguing the clearly untenable position that they could, and mine was. (Note: it really is a pretty awesome hat, you guys). This was difficult on the grounds that it's difficult to have a bantering argument when you have absolutely nothing to argue because you are absolutely wrong.

The problem is that in this situation, the only thing is argument ad hominem, basically. So it ended up in a possibly even more foolish debate as to which interlocutor was the more moral person. That's pretty much not somewhere you ever want to go, conversationally. Either you're arguing that you or that your opponent is in some way a genuinely bad person (so as to be "morally" not superior), and then the fun wears off about as fast as you'd expect.

So that was pretty silly.

But even though it was yet another case of attempted social suicide by yours truly, it still raised an interesting point: how can you judge the moral worth of a person? What, in fact, is morality per se? (Now seems like a good time to note that I'm aware that greater thinkers than I have thought about this, this is just an idle musing, because that's what we do here. And also, a girl's got to think of something to write about, and I went with carefully not thinking through the obviously innocent hyperbolic humour of emails and suchlike last week, and that wasn't really super successful). The dude I was arguing (for want of a better word) with claimed that he was the more moral person because of being Christian and virginal, and I wondered: is morality an external thing, bestowed by religion and an honour code handed down from God or the gods, or is it more an adherence to your own standards? (Obviously, given that I was busy wondering these things, we can take it as read that I had no better counter arguments than "Oh yeah, well... ha." Neither of these issues proposed as the lynchpins for morality are points on which I can make these sorts of sweeping claims. Also, I have an allergy to making the sorts of personal remarks it takes to really commit to arguing against that sort of thing. “Well, I think, from what very little I’ve seen, you have some dubious attitudes about people in general and also sometimes you seem just a trifle thoughtless. But I do think that on the whole you’re a good guy” is both much too strong and much too weak, all at once. And I can’t just argue pro-myself instead of arguing against him because “Yeah, well I try to be nice to people, even if it is not always particularly successful because sometimes I am accidentally thoughtless or carried away. Also someone told me I was ‘cruel’ that time, so maybe it’s just wildly unsuccessful. I guess that could be a thing. Anyway, I like to think of myself as someone who tries.” is desperately weak.)This at least is an advantage of religion and black-and-white sweeping claims. You don't feel that you need, in good faith, to qualify them to death.

I suppose the whole point of religious faith is that you basically have your answer to that point (the one before those brackets: “is morality internal or external?” who those of you having difficulty keeping up). But are personal values not still important, even if not, according that viewpoint, as vital? I suppose that Holy Writings of various kinds have been thorough enough that that there really are official positions on what the Right Thing is in most situations. Still, I would argue that there are always new situations, so that some degree of autonomous decision always has to be undertaken. There are no Biblical writings dealing with how to deal with Facebook dramas, for instance, except maybe analogously. And then you have the problem of interpretation. So everyone is, to some extent, a law unto themself. Plus, it’s maybe worth acknowledging that once you have accepted the precepts of your religion as your personal moral framework, you still need to make the effort to adhere to that, so it’s not just free “morality” points. Folks get at least as much cred for doing right by their external frameworks as their internal ones. Maybe more, since a lot of those things will tend to be more challenging to what you might personally prefer to do, either on the basis of moral dilemmas or on the basis of that-chick-is-totally-slammin-maybe-it-would-be-ok-to-have-just-a-little-bit-of-sex-now.

Plus, if you think that moral frameworks are internal (as I think we can agree that they must be, to some extent), then where do they come from? A lot of that is just acculturation and the ideas of your society and possibly the Disney movies and Sesame Street viewing of your childhood. (I read a thing once about how watching Sesame St really does make small children better people, if by better people you mean “people who try to accept differences and be nice to people and suchlike and also people who can recognise the letter F”.) Looks like it’s a combination of factors. Like any 5 year old (especially a Sesame St viewer) could have told me 300 words ago.

The problem is that even if you decide to go with an internalised moral framework, lucky is the person who can claim never to have broken their own rules. There are things which are absolutely part of my moral framework and standard which I've been hazier on than I ought, and there are points where, although I can categorically state that I have never wavered, I've hardly been challenged. (Like, I’d never cheated on anyone, and never would, but I guess I’ve been complicit in others’ cheating. By accident, I hasten to add. Also, I’ve never really had anyone try to seduce me into cheating on someone, so maybe it’s cheap of me to be smug about something I’ve never had to try hard to achieve.) So, for instance, it’s difficult for me to say “I may not adhere to a specific religious code, but I make it a very definite point to try not to judge people on the basis of their beliefs and religion (or age/sex/sexuality/creed)” without, in all honesty, having to add “unless their beliefs are ‘obviously wrong’ or mean or I don’t like them.” Which makes it a difficult point to argue. So sure, I think that most of the modern religions, as generally understood, are pretty good. But I’m not in favour of people who like the idea of female circumcision, or stoning homosexuals, or Nazism or whatever.

I guess that’s sort of the central tenet of my “moral framework”. Be nice to people and try not to object to them doing things you would not do yourself if it doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s that second bit where I come into some conflict with a lot of religion, because my idea of what’s victimless is different to the ideas of a lot of those guys’. Plus, once you add an omniscient loving God into the mix, there’s suddenly a whole extra way to hurt someone. If there’s a being who can see/hear your thoughts and who has strong ideas about a lot of issues, then you can easily hurt their feelings by thinking inappropriately lustful thoughts or blaspheming in your mind or whatever. So that’s a bit of a difficulty.

I was going to have a whole second half of this discussion here, but I fear that this post is already a trifle top-heavy. So that’s all for now, and I’ll pick up this line of thought in my next post, probably.

In Which the internet is not such a looker that it should presume to judge.

2010-06-09T22:07:00.016+10:00

So, I got a weird email last week. Years and years ago, I signed up to a dating site called OkCupid, mainly because my Strong-Willed friend Sophie said that I ought to because they had a good chat function and we could, like, hang out online or something. Which is fine. Of course, it was rendered obsolete almost immediately by the advent of Gmail as a thing which everyone had, since it had a much better, less annoying chat function. Also, it was in a sense preemptively obsolete, since I actually hate chatting online. I don't know why, I know I liked it in highschool or thereabouts (remember ICQ?) but I've found it strangely clunky and awkward pretty much my entire adult life. Anyway, the point is, I still have this old account that I can't figure out how to properly delete (also, if I'm honest, although I don't actually use it, I kind of love the ridiculous long thing I wrote for my profile for that site, and I don't want to just discard that. I mean, it could hardly be relevant to anything else, since it's essentially an embedded blog post on the subject of one of those stupid profile questions they ask on those sites; "What are 6 things you couldn't live without?". Maybe I should just copy it across to here and properly deactivate my account? It's just very hard to be bothered. Plus, what if I re-read it and it turned out it was a bit lame? Much better to keep in in reserve, thinking of it as awesome and never really accessing it.

I never log in these days except when the email notifications really pile up and I get curious as to what the second halves of all these messages which begin "I read your profile and you seem really interesting although did you know that alligators actu.... To Read More Log In Now!" say. Because I actually cannot imagine a situation where I would ever feel comfortable meeting up with someone I had only met online, so I feel removed from the entire thing, like logging in to my account would not be logging in to my own account but into that of some other girl who looks and writes like me but is in any way whatsoever interested in the idea of “internet dating” as a thing which applies to her. I’ll happily talk to someone online (except that, like I said, I’m not a “chat” fan) but meet up? Oh no, I don’t think so, not at all. It feels like it would be essentially the awkwardest thing ever, and I hate and fear awkwardness. Even thinking about trying to meet up and converse in a deliberate premeditated fashion with someone whom I’ve never actually met, but for whom the standard desultory we’ve-just-met conversational topics have already been used up in emails and so forth, makes me all worried. I get bad enough meeting up with people I actually know after any kind of hiatus.

Anyway, I got this email the other week that was all "Hi, Username! We have data on your attractiveness!" I did not even make that sentence up. They deadset (I keep saying "deadset" this week, also "legit". Apparently I am subconsciously trying to become more ocker by sounding like Ginger Meggs or something. Not that he said "legit" much, as I recall) used the phrase "We have data on your attractiveness", as if that was anything other than desperately creepy.

I was going to just pick out the best bits of this email to eviscerate, but actually, on rereading, the whole thing is so entirely despicable in almost all of its implications that I'm just going to copy/paste the thing en masse. Don't worry, it's not long:

"We are very pleased to report that you are in the top half of OkCupid's most attractive users. The scales recently tipped in your favor, and we thought you'd like to know.

How can we say this with confidence? We've tracked click-thrus on your photo and analyzed other people's reactions to you in QuickMatch and Quiver.
. . .

Your new elite status comes with one important privilege:
You will now see more attractive people in your match results.

This new status won't affect your actual match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match's answers. But the people we recommend will be more attractive. Also! You'll be shown to more attractive people in their match results.
. . .

Suddenly, the world is your oyster. Login now and reap the rewards. And, no, we didn't just send this email to everyone on OkCupid. Go ask an ugly friend and see."

Every one of those sentences is awful in all its implications, good grief. I think my over-all reaction would definitely be a resounding "how dare you!?", and I'm not one to double-punctuate like that unless it's really serious. This is the sort compliment which would earn a ringing slap in an old-fashioned movie. Or any movie with people in it, really. Or, like, reality, if anyone were ever so unwise as to come up to me and say "I thought you were ugly for the last several years, but I think now you're just passable! Isn't that great? This makes you a better person!" in person.

To start with, I've had the same photo for well over 2 years. Nothing about me has changed. Not in that photo, anyway. It's an alright photo, I look dead ordinary, not misleadingly glamourous, but obviously not a wildly unflattering angle or aything. Pleasantly plain, perhaps. But not different, not different to how it was years ago, not at all. The only conceivable change in that unchanged photo is that heavy-framed glasses may now be slightly more trendy than they once were, so that people are looking at it going "eyyy" (like the Fonz) not "ewww" (like Jocks do to Geeks in 80s movies). But the "scales have recently tipped in my favour"? Oh really? Sod right off, website.

Because, right, I’m reasonably ok with not being in the officially “more attractive” category (warning: may be pernicious lies), but when, at the end of the email, they make it clear that the dichotomy is ugly vs. attractive, suddenly what they’re saying is no longer “I’ve just noticed how attractive you are” but “you are only now only just scraping in above the ‘ugly’ mark. Last week we thought you were definitely ugly, now we do not”, which, let’s face it, is unreasonable. Even if you ignore this ridiculously binary idea of physical attractiveness. I mean beauty is subjective and photos are not a reasonable gauge of physical attractiveness as a whole, often, and all that, but also, I am not, in fact, ugly. And I wasn’t ugly last week or any time in the last year or so. At worst, I have been merely not-actively-attractive, and that, I choose to believe, was only on my off-days (why yes, I do respond to a challenge by becoming filled with vain bravado, why do you ask?). I have my flaws, yes, we all do, and I’m not such a fool as to try and list or analyse them here, but they are not serious disfigurements, they are the sorts of flaws which are endearing in loved ones, mainly, I would think. Like the ones most people have.

(I suppose part of the problem here is that there are few people if any whom I would describe as ‘ugly’. Anyone so seriously unattractive that I couldn’t find something nice about them would inspire more pity than name-calling, and before I got to the point of calling a person ugly, they’d have to be pretty much a jerk for me to feel comfortable saying something so mean about them. And then, if they were both very ugly and a really-jerk, I would probably be all “it’s unfortunate for them, being so entirely unattractive, no wonder they’re embittered and jerkish. Still, what a jerk”. This is essentially just not a concept or word that I really ever use. Kind of like how I make an effort not to find bits of people “disgusting”, because again, bits of people are either just ordinary and natural or inspiring of sympathy or pity or whatever (Like innards and ladybits or horrible painful sores, respectively). “Disgust” sounds judgemental and shaming. Same as “ugly”.)

Anyway, moving on, the next paragraph informs me that “my new elite status comes with one important privilege: I will now see more attractive people in my match results”. Ok, how is being in the top 50% of something “elite”? That’s a full half of all the people involved. That’s not elite. 5% is elite, Top 10 is elite. 50% is not elite. 50% is only as elite as a Federal government in a 2-party preference on Election day, and everyone always hates those guys. (This is like the oft-misspelled and constantly misused “stunning” or “divine” on ebay and etsy. “Elite”). More importantly, though, what the hell is with this eugenic business of only showing officially attractive people to officially attractive people? It wasn’t cool when the Nazis tried this, and it’s not real cool now (although obviously this is rather less bad as a whole, I think we can agree). And even leaving that aside, what about individual taste? There were certainly people who they showed me the pictures of before who I thought were pretty attractive. Will I just not be shown those people again unless I drop back below the pass mark somehow, due to random fluctuations in “clik-thrus”? If I do, will I get another email that’s even worse (“Bad news, kid, you’ve been relegated back to the Ugly Corner! The world is neither your oyster nor miscellaneous mollusc nor any other tasty foodstuff. Sorry”)? Or will I just get this same email again if I happen to go down a grade and then back up? Has anyone in charge of anything even thought about this?

The next bit seems much like more of the same, just with some added “don’t worry, we don’t think attractiveness is a personality trait”. But what the hell, has it been keeping the “attractive” geeks to itself, not telling me about them or them about me? This does not bother me per se, inasmuch as, like I said, I don’t actually use the site, but there are people who definitely do. Attractive and unattractive people who may (gasp!) not have the same ideas of attractiveness as the people who are in charge of this crap. I mean, I’ve been shown a lot of people (they send you emails with collections of thumbnails of people you might like) more than once, it’s not like the pool of people the website thinks I might like is infinite. Why would you bother with this sort of wedge politics and not just show everyone to everyone? Especially if you already have “match” algorithms which suggests people who might get on?

Lastly “no, we didn’t just send this email to everyone, go ask an ugly friend and see”. Seriously, what kind of person does this website take me for? ‘Oh, alright then, I guess I’ll just go and ask passive aggressive manipulative questions of one of those friends of mine whom I consider to be ugly. Because that’s how I think about people I like.’ This especially makes no sense given the policy of attractive-people-should-only-have-to-know-each-other-and-not-be-burdened-but-the-unaesthetic-visages-of-the-less-beautiful. Why would the sort of person who want a website to only show them pictures of people who are statistically deemed likely to be attractive have friends they consider ugly? Actually, on consideration, I guess it makes sense. They’re describing there the sort of jerks who probably deliberately hang out with people they consider less attractive than themselves so that they look better in comparison. The sort of jerks who would prize a compliment based on “click-thrus and analyses of other people’s reactions to you” when shown a tiny thumbnail of a self-selected portrait.

Ultimately, it’s a good thing that I have no particular urge to in any way use this site, because man, an email like that gives me a strong distaste for the whole sorry thing. Like 2,000 words worth of strong. Oh my.

In Which you can't drink less coffee than no coffee, no matter how hard you try

2010-06-05T15:35:00.009+10:00

You guys, it is now officially winter. And suddenly it has become much colder (so much so that my fingers keep going numb as I try to type this, so it may have a higher-than-usual number of typos). Which would be fine if this was a book, or one of those montage sequences in a B movie (Twilight: Eclipse, anyone?), but which is definitely odd in real life. Since when does the weather change in line with the seasons? Usually everyone spends the whole first month of each season discussing how "if doesn't feel like Season X at all!" and so on.

I'm, uh, not really going anywhere with that, I just wanted to mention it, mainly because I'm typing at about half my usual speed, what with the aforementioned finger numbness, which is making it it strangely hard to write. Usually I just more or less type as I think, which not only gives this blog that wonderfully unstructured stream-of-consciousness thing you all know and love/tolerate-with-mounting-exasperation, but also means that I don't have to stop typing and try to figure out where I was going, or indeed had got to, with the line of thought I've written down. But mostly typing as slowly as this makes it feel clunky and ungainly. Like by the time I get to the end of a typed sentence, I've forgotten what I was going to say next. Like my thoughts get bored waiting for my hands to catch up and just wander off.

I wonder if this is why I talk so fast too? Surely it must be the same thing. It's odd, because I can never tell when I'm doing it. I'm just innocently talking to someone at what seems like a perfectly ordinary speed when suddenly they go "For the love of all that's holy, will you please just slow down! I haven't heard anything you said in the last 3 minutes, but at that speed, it could easily have been the complete works of Tolstoy! In the original Russian, for all I could make out!" And I'm all "Gosh, really? Uh, sorry. What was this last bit you actually understood?".

Usually at this point I make the spurious claim of having "drunk too much coffee this morning" (which is what you might uncharitably call a bald-faced lie, since usually I have drunk no coffee at all. Although it's almost true, in the sense that any coffee at all is usually too much coffee for someone as excitable as me. I tend to get so hyped that I actually bouce. Literally, not figuratively. Well, both. So in that sense, I've had "almost too much coffee" since any additional amount would be "too much".) Anyway, that seems easier than saying "sorry, I just talk quickly, would you mind trying to listen rather faster?". Because that inevitably leads to the question of why I don't just slow down.

But really, have you even tried that? It always sounds really strange and unnatural to one's own ear. I used to have an Ancient history lecturer, many years ago in the Good Old Days of lectures in the Quad and tutorials about things which were actually exciting and involved swords and so on, who had, I suspect, taken this advice at some point. Probably, when you spoke at a speed which seemed natural to him hesoundedlikethistoeveryonewhowaslisteningtohim. So someone had told him to slow down. Problem is, he didn't then talk normally, like this (with spaces between all the words as standard) or even in that deeply annoying way of many lecturers who talk ... like ... this, ... so ... slowly ... that ... you ... lose ... focus ... between ... every ... word ... because... it ... is ... impossible ... to ... pay ... attention ... at ... that ... speed (which is my most hated thing for lecturers to do, it makes them un-attend-to-able). Oh no, not this guy. He always talked as if each sentence had been caught spying in the First World War and had been marched out of the Tower of London at dawn, stood against a wall, and then shot full of punctuation at random by a firing squad. So strong in,, fact was, ,,, this impression that I ,,, oftencompletelylosttrack . of what was happenening,,, in the lecture because ,, all I could ,,, think about was rifles loaded with 22 cali...bre commas, ,,, and sentences asking to face the squad without,,, a blindfold. It was good times.

What I'm saying here is that it sure is difficult to "just talk more slowly!". Which would be fine if I ever remembered that sometimes I talk so fast that people can't quite hear everything, and tried to be less randomly allusive all the time. I think this may make the task or understanding me near-impossible some times, especially when I blithely assume that people have the same background knowledge as me. It's ok when I talk to patients or people on the bus, or whatever, because then I remember not to assume that they're the same as me. But with people whom I perceive as being similar to me, I fear that I can become dangerously obtuse.

I was at the doctor the other day trying to explain what the symptoms were that I was getting with this crazy hypothyroidism thing (did I tell you about that, Gentle Reader? Apparently I have hypothyroidism. Go figure) and I said "I feel like my mind is falling away like wet cake. It's like Macarthur Park in here!". Honestly, I'm just lucky that the guy happens to be in the right demographic and know his Richard Harris or he would have put me down as having 'clang associations', which are totally a schizophrenia thing (and that I definitely do not have, which is for the best). This is in stark contrast to the time when, when asked in a tutorial what my suggested management would be for a baby of low birth-weight, I answered "washing in a jug". Yeah, turns out that maybe about 7 people in the world are familiar with the last song on Cream's Disraeli Gears album, "Mother's Lament". Everyone probably thought I was a callous fool. Still, that's a nil-all draw there, because I might not be able to guage my audience, but they're missing out on a pretty rad and random song.

All this meta-thought is brought on, in case you're wondering, not only by the numb fingers (although seriously, does there need to be another reason? It's really really annoying to try and keep track of what I was going to say while waiting for the typing to catch up. Especially since I keep having to retype things because of the typos. I spelled "meta-thought" "meat-thought" about 6 times in a row just then) but also by the fact that I foolishly read a bit of that other Med student blog I mentioned back in the day; Sharp Incisions.

Reading that sort of thing always makes me feel terribly self-conscious. It's not bad, it's quite good, even (and hello and sorry for that turn of phrase, if you're reading this, Incisive Blogger). But she refers to her cats as the Feline Incisions, and talks about "shifts" at hospital (I will charitably assume that she actually moonlights as a nurse or something, and doesn't mean her lessons at Clinical School), and she just seems so... so incredibly, wholesomely inspired by her clinical experience. It's a sensation not unakin to watching someone singing a very sincere song with their eyes closed on stage in a small venue.

I read things other people have written within the genre of blogging-about-the-quotidian-minutiae-of-one's-life and I wonder; is that how I sound? If you glance to the right you will see a Blogroll of other blogs friends of mine write, and strangely, I never have that experience reading their stuff. I'm interested, or amused, or pleased, or whatever, but never do I feel self-conscious. Maybe it's because it's so different to my stuff? Spencer's is more a collection of "Works" than a blog per se (and if you haven't read it, do) and Catie's is always really well thought out and articulate (and concise), and usually about something deliberate, and Jordans and Alex's, when they update, which is never, are specific rant-sorts-of-things about politics and philosophy of that wonderful take-no-prisoners-men-this-is-the-internet variety which must be so surprising for the unwary newcomer. Most of the others are travel blogs or similar. Maybe that's all there is to it. The Incisor is just so like me in terms of subject matter that it just throws me into contrast? Plus she makes medicine-themed in-jokes, and I know I should stop making so many in-jokes that no-one could possibly understand, myself. Maybe noticing the speck in her eye makes me more aware of the plank in my own. (Also, man, I hate that translation. "Plank" cannot possibly be the word in the original Hebrew or whatever. That always makes me think of this image and that's not good in any circumstances (it's nothing awful, in case you're worried about NSFW-ness, just that old picture of the moon with a rocket in its eye). Oh my goodness, in the middle of a sentence about how I need to stop making references that not everyone gets, I just did it again. Sorry to all those of you who didn't go to a religious school and are therefore not down with your Matthew 7:3).

Probably the thing is also that I feel condescending and slightly critical of her blog, despite the fact that she (presumably) doesn't know that I might be reading. Which is guess is something that it would disconcert me to actually know (rather than just strongly suspect) of my own writing, again. I deal poorly with criticism, as I think we've established. Or maybe it's just the "Feline Incisions" thing. I mean, it could definitely be that.

It's a good thing I don't have a cat, is all.

In Which only one Event can be Attended.

2010-06-05T12:02:00.009+10:00

This evening, I have been invited to go and see my dear old friends Patrick, Spencer and Tim perform their musical stylings slash poetic readings in Kings Cross. This is all terribly exciting, naturally, since this is terribly Big Time for a bunch of lads whose usual gig is Monday night at Name This Bar on Oxford St. Problem is: Kings Cross is really far away from anything remotely resembling "places conveniently accessible by public transport from my flat". And in none of the Kings Crosses in the world, I suspect, is parking cheap or easy. Also it is horribly rainy, which makes going anywhere by public transport pretty aversive. Still, it is bound to be a super-great performance and all of that sort of thing. And I wish to say in advance that despite the tone of this post, I am genuinely excited about going. I like those guys and their stuff, and it's always a pleasure.

The real problem is that they're performing between 9:15 and 10 at night, at the same time as being on the opposite side of town to everything else that's happening tonight. Now, I don't know about you, but in my experience, any Saturday night when one is invited to one thing, one is invariably invited to two. It's not that I'm some kind of dazzling social butterfly, don't get me wrong, there are many Saturday nights when I spend a charming evening not invited to anything, cozily in my own home watching Midsomer Murders or something. It's just that some Saturdays are apparently more attractive to the event schedulers of the world than others. Usually what one does in this situation is either go "oh well", and just go to whichever event you were invited to first, or else try and juggle events by going to the first half of one and the second half of the other.

Now I won't deny that I'm clumsy at this, and I usually end up dividing the night into two grossly unequal portions, rather than properly halving either. I end up leaving the first event offensively early or else arriving at the second so late that the party is in the winding down phase and it seems faintly pointless. I think this is because of that generalised inertia I have. When I'm at one place, I tend to want to stay there (the same as the reason I stay up too late at night and have difficulty getting up; when I'm awake, I want to stay that way, when I'm asleep, ditto). The problem specifically is that even if I was fabulously adroit at all this and mingled between parties as effortlessly as I do between people at those parties (and, in fact, I essentially am equally good at mingling on both those levels. I'm a very poor mingler across the board. Maybe it's that inertia thing again?), not all the social skill in the world would make it easy to divide an evening neatly in twain when one of the events occurs smack bang in the middle of the evening, a 45 minute commute from the other.

I suppose this is a sign that I ought to just commit to one event or the other. But I really don't want to. You see, on the one hand, we have 3 dear old friends, one of whom is going overseas for a year pretty shortly, whose event is pretty important to them, who have very few confirmed attendees, and one of whom specifically clarified that I was planning to go, (because when your act is equal parts talent, charisma, poetry and injokes, it's good to have a certain quorum of people in the audience guaranteed to start clapping at the actual end of the poem/song, not just keep looking expectantly at you as if to say "Tetris? What's your point?"). Plus, I have an honour code about RSVPing. Once you've said you're going to something, even on facebook, you really ought to go. You're committed. Sadly, this event involves going very very far, largely on foot in uncofortable footwear, and a cover charge, and also foregoing the other event, which is this:

On the other hand we have a housewarming party in Newtown, being thrown by Tall Nice Marcus, a guy from uni. This, on the face of it, is the more easily jettisoned event. Except that I really like house parties, and more pressingly (and tragically?) it always seems terribly important to go to these things. Because it is only by going to an event with these people that you are invited to the next event. And it is only by going to the events that it is possible to in any way socialise with those crazy cats at my uni. It's that fabulously cliquey year 7 vibe all over again. When you're in, it's lovely, and people talk to you, and are charming, and add you on facebook (is it sad that it sort of excites me when folks do that?). Also, I really enjoy hanging out with those people when it works, because they are all terribly lovely and pleasant and so on. Also, apart from my obvious social-climbing, I am facinated by the way the uni folks interact.

It's almost anthropological. Their ways are not our ways, and it's intriguing. Apart from the fact that they all casually touch each other so often that it's fun just to try to figure out who's dating whom (if anyone) (and I like that as a game, anyway, because I like to live vicariously through others), there's also the spotlight phenomenon. When you're in the light, talking to them, attending their events, they welcome you, they are lovely, etc. But if you take a step back, out of the spotlight which illuminates them, you fall into the darkness, and the glare in their eyes makes them unable to see you at all. It's amazing. I have stood in a circle of people and seen some of the Stars of our year group flick their eyes around and make eye contact with all but one or two people. It's as if they literally cannot see the people who don't matter. I don't think they even realise that they do it. And it's confusing to try to figure out who does or does not matter, and why. Beautiful people often fail to make the visibility cut, which throws me, because I tend to assume that that sort of thing will be the heuristic in these cases. Which is nice, I guess, since it means that if you also fail to make it, then you don't need to angst like Kasey Chambers about it. But which makes Staying Visible a very attractive prospect. Otherwise, it's existential angst for all.

Of course, maybe writing this sort of creepy stuff about these people may be why I don't get invited to stuff all that often, really. Sorry dudes and dudettes, if you're reading. Like I said, I don't dislike you, I just find you fascinating and attractively alien. Which, yes, is weird of me.

Also, I really want to go, because this is a bunch of nice people who I would like to get to know better. But this sort of annoying clash keeps happening. The problem is that in my mind, this is essentially one of those stories just like every teen movie or TV show, where a character has to choose between doing something small and a little dorky with their old friends, or going to the party with the Cool Kids. Problem is, once it's framed that way, the Right Choice is obvious. A Good Person does not sacrifice their old friends for the chance at social betterment or a pleasant houseparty in Newtown or whatever. A Good Person treks through the rain to Kings Cross to see the same poems they saw last week, foregoing Michael Jackson costumery (!) and new friends.

The problem is, of course, that in a movie, this only happens once. The character either passes and realises that their old friends are their true yada yada yada or else fails and then has some kind of comeuppance later. And then they're done. But this seems to happen every time, and I end up trapped my my own black-and-white reading of the situation. Regarding which, bugger.

As a coda, I wish to again emphasise that I do actually want to go to the Kings Cross thing, it's just that I'm frustrated that I can't have it all. If this was a twitter post, I'd give it the hashtag #firstworldproblems. Also, again, if any of the uni people are reading this, sorry for overanalysing your social interactions, I realise that it's a bit creepy, but hey, everyone needs a hobby.

In Which an Innocently Friendly Comment is considered to within an inch of its Life.

2010-05-21T21:25:00.009+10:00

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!

In Which actions have consequences. Sort of.

2010-05-18T17:57:00.010+10:00

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.

In Which the Call is heeded mainly by others

2010-05-10T20:36:00.005+10:00

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.

In Which Bucket Lists are a weird concept, sort of.

2010-05-03T18:48:00.004+10:00

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.

In Which a blogger returns after an inexplicably weary hiatus

2010-05-02T17:32:00.004+10:00

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.

In Which there is published a spurious Dispatch from Poetania: Camisole

2010-03-30T20:07:00.002+11:00

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.

In Which a bunch of Fragments are collected

2010-03-24T08:51:00.002+11:00

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?

In Which the gathering Dark presages, presumably, more thoroughly gathered dark

2010-03-24T08:50:00.000+11:00

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?}

In Which Tropes are rather hard on Blondes (pun removed due to poor taste)

2010-03-23T13:47:00.001+11:00

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.

In Which Size is Power and Tim Burton is less than wholly Compelling (here be spoilers)

2010-03-18T23:25:00.009+11:00

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.

In Which it becomes Obvious that I only hang out with Certain Types of people.

2010-03-17T09:39:00.007+11:00

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!

In Which the Rolling Stones are sort of Right (but still funny-looking)

2010-03-11T13:06:00.008+11:00

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.

In which Loveliness and Shyness are Contemplated

2010-03-03T12:02:00.000+11:00

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 Which everyone feels secretly a little bit smug

2010-03-01T11:19:00.003+11:00

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?

In which our Heroine apparently spends months and months lying in a hammock

2010-02-25T15:03:00.003+11:00

Welcome to the New Year, Dear Readers. I know it’s late February, but that’s no reason for you not to feel welcome in the year, so do make yourselves at home. I hope your various summers have been charming, as mine largely was. It wasn’t what you might call eventful, per se, but it did involve lazing about the place for simply ages, not to mention all the hard work I put in to lounging and suchlike.

Any number of the jetsetting darlings at uni have been around the globe (pretty sure the only continent no-one’s casually mentioned having dropped in on was Antarctica, and even that may well be because I haven’t really been listening very hard) but I don’t think I actually went further than Penrith the whole time. No, I tell a lie, I spent a weekend in exotic Wodonga with my family, the various travails of which you will be familiar with if you follow me on Twitter (which I cannot, in conscience, recommend doing). Otherwise suffice it to say that a pleasantly excruciating time was had by all, which is more or less what is supposed to happen at the birthdays of relatives who live far enough away that you’ve never met a single one of their friends before. So that, as far as I recall, was as distant as it got for Your Correspondent, but not by any means the charmingest. (Don’t get me wrong, it was actually pretty nice most of the time, it’s just that it was so very pleasant doing all the aforementioned lazing that it just doesn’t quite compare).

So, whenever anyone has said to me “what did you do over the holidays? (I had a lovely time in little old Canada/Italy/Cambodia/Colombia/New Zealand)” I’ve said “Oh, nothing much, I got a bike and a hammock for Christmas, and that’s pretty much all I did with my holidays; bike and hammock.” But to be perfectly honest (and naturally I always am with you, Dear Reader) this is mainly because about 3 weeks before the end of the holidays I suddenly realised I’d frittered it away so thoroughly, what with working in Penrith and lots of little quests, and generally having a pleasantly vague and uncluttered time of it, that I honestly didn’t remember what I’d done with the time at all. I mean, I live quite literally 5 minutes from the beach (and that’s only if you walk quite slowly), and until the last week, I didn’t go to the beach 2 days in a row.

The upshot of which is that these last couple of weeks featured a little flurry of attempted milestones. I’ve been to the beach at least a little bit every day since rather more than a fortnight ago, firstly to make a point to myself, and secondly so that when people said “what did you do?” I could honestly say “I went to the beach a bunch” rather than prevaricate and say “I don’t really remember” which is an answer which the Youth of Today will tend to assume implies that you just enjoyed yourself pharmaceutically. Also, man, I really like going to the beach when I can get out of my own way enough to actually go.

Also, I insisted on learning to ride my bike as far as uni (which, to me, seems really Awfully Far), and have rather smugly succeeded in riding in 3 days in a row this week, which is not something I’d thought my knees would be up to snuff for, really. Nasty creaky middle-aged knees as they are; never take up Netball, turns out it’s terribly bad for the joints. (Exercise: it’s a trap).

Also, this (not the Netball-Betrayed Knees, the lack of Holiday Memories) lead me to plan a series of(well, it was meant to be a series, it ended up rather more like Two) mini-break things, and these were rather charming. Traditionally, of course, one goes on mini-breaks with one’s romantic Significant Other, or so Bridget Jones leads me to believe, but in the absence of such an Other being available/extant, I simply wussed out and went with friends. The second, in fact, was with my parents, which is always pleasant, not only because with them, everything seems to be free, but also because rather tragically I really rather enjoy their company. This particular jaunt was to Terrigal, where apart from keeping up my beaching, I also went to one of those Day Spa things for the first time. I’ve never much fancied the idea of buying a massage or similar on the ground that it seems like a slippery slope from ‘paying a stranger to touch you (for a massage)’ to 'rent boys' and heaven only knows what all. Well, not that I worried that I’d get caught up in some kind of seamy underworld of prostitution if I ever went to a Day Spa, obviously, but it just always seemed slightly creepy and exploitative. Still, I tried it out, because it turns out that these things never seem quite so exploitative if someone else is paying for you to have one (although obviously rent boys would still be so, even if given as some kind of awful gift). Had some kind of Treatment (somehow that word like that, in association with Spas and such, always says ‘James Bond nearly being killed at the beginning of Thunderball’ to me) which involved being covered transiently in Apricot-flavoured lotion and some kind of too-classy-to-be-just-totally-ordinary-sand,-surely grit, which while quite pleasant made me feel mostly like a Mini-Wheat. (In fact, I was going to call this post “In which Our Heroine gets in touch with her Inner Mini-Wheat”, but it felt like somehow it required entirely too much setup.

I wonder if, if I were to document what TV shows and movies and books and such I absorb, I could look back over the season and feel more like I had achieved something? “Well, yes, I did fail to do anything objectively constructive or impressive-sounding, but I watched the entirety of Dollhouse in about 4 days, so that’s something!” Maybe I will try this with Autumn, although I feel that maybe all that would achieve during term-time might be to make me feel guilty for doing so little work. Still, given how narrow my passing of that exam was, that would not necessarily be a bad thing.

Before I sign off, Dear Reader, one last thing; when I say that I frittered away my holiday by not having anything impressive to recall, I should emphasise that I’m talking about that psychological phenomenon whereby the time seems to collapse in on itself in the memory, like a telescope, not suggesting that I only derive enjoyment of my activities because I feel the need to live up to the extravagancies of my peers. I can’t remember which dear well-wishing friend it was who, when I explained this to them, was all overcome with “you can’t compare yourself to them!” and such, but I would hate for you to misunderstand similarly. Not least because I’ve never got the hang of that sort of advice properly, but because I wouldn’t like there to be any misunderstandings between us, Dear Reader. Because what you and I have is special. Whoever you are.

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

2009-12-01T00:17:00.002+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-10-28T21:32:00.004+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-10-19T21:52:00.004+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Which I vacillate again with regards to the comment thing

2009-10-15T18:35:00.009+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmm....

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

In Which Zooey Deschanel is Pretty Cute

2009-10-11T00:31:00.006+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-10-10T19:58:00.010+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaargh...

In Which Knowledge is Acknowledged

2009-10-07T23:31:00.008+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-09-25T22:32:00.005+10:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Which There Is No Such Thing As Cows

2009-09-07T11:07:00.001+10:00

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

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

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

No.

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

In Which Internet Access Remains Elusive

2009-08-31T22:18:00.002+10:00

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

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

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

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

2009-08-06T11:50:00.005+10:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Which an Upbeat Trend is Unimaginatively Continued

2009-08-05T10:24:00.000+10:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-08-04T12:58:00.000+10:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Which Perkiness Ensues

2009-08-01T14:40:00.003+10:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-07-19T20:32:00.001+10:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Which “Hobbies” are a Ridiculous Construct and an At-best Awkward Conversational Gambit

2009-07-17T09:17:00.000+10:00

It’s a funny thing that so much of our time is spent asking and being asked inane questions. Maybe this is especially the case in Medicine, where you can genuinely spend a day taking histories and asking patients questions like “Oh really? That must have been stressful for you, but what brought you to hospital this time? Not last year, last week.” But it’s definitely also a thing when you get asked to describe yourself for things, especially online things, like profiles for Facebook, or even the website of “biosketches” for people in our course. I’d imagine things like dating websites and stuff would be infinitely worse, but fortunately my experience in that field is limited at best.

All these “tell us about yourself!!1!one!” things seem to have in common the direst question of all: “Do you have any hobbies?”. Tell me, Cherished Reader, do you, in fact, have any hobbies? Really? Any that you would ever actually call “hobbies” unprovoked? I mean, sure, you might say; “I really enjoy photography/music/watching TV/reading discursive blog posts/sewing foolish gifts/swimming in the wintry sea/whatever.” Or you might say; “I spend a lot of time listening to music/making short films about Iceland/doing the crossword/cycling/baking elaborately shaped cakes/talking about people behind their backs/writing soulful songs on my guitar/something.” But are these really hobbies? I bet they aren’t. Hobbies are things like model train landscaping, or stamp-collecting (sorry, “philately”), or maybe whittling or something. They’re not something real people really do.

What does one even do when it comes to stamp collecting? I know that you can get, like, starter packs from the Post Office, but quite frankly it seems like cheating, as well as being unspeakably dull and a strangely unsatisfying and inauspicious way to start. Also, nowadays people can make custom stamps with their kids on them for Christmas or anything, and quite frankly that sucks any conceivable joy out of it for me. Back when there was the Penny Black and maybe 14 other kinds of stamp anywhere in the world, collecting the whole set was achievable, now not so much. Plus, Australian stamps seem like they’re mostly all the same, just a collection of thousands upon thousands of copies of those same 4 wildflower pictures. I mean, maybe if you inherited an old collection o something, that’d be cool, but I still wouldn’t know what to do with it, except sell it to someone who would.

Mainly I don’t think anyone under the age of maybe 60 would describe the things they enjoy doing as “hobbies” because it trivialises those activities. It makes it sound like it’s either an unimportant fad or an unhealthy obsession. Also, dividing things you do into “work” and “hobbies” makes it seem like everything you do has to be one of the two. So the quite-fun-really chores like buying the groceries or doing that thing where you clean your entire house in a day and get all satisfied stop being things you can just enjoy and start being either “hobbies” (which is tragic) or “chores” (which everyone knows are un-fun). Essentially what I’m saying here is that dividing your life up like this cannot possibly be anything but pathological.

Also, what kind of hobbies could possibly meaningfully define us? “Listening to music” isn’t a hobby unless you sit there, alone, for hours and hours, doing nothing but listen, and even then, quite frankly, it’s more of a “thing to do” or a “cry for help”. Otherwise, you just like music. You know, just like everyone else except the tone deaf and the terminally be-migraned. If your hobby was “vivisecting serial killers” or “collecting spleens” or “tearing apart people who ask me inane questions with my bare hands or vicious rhetoric” (or even “alluding absentmindedly to quotes from bad movies no-one else ever saw”) then yes, people might want to be warned in advance, so that they could run away or make documentaries about you, as their own hobbies/inclinations directed. But really, when can this sort of thing ever help?

There are some hobbies which sort of categorise you, so, say, “cross stitch” makes you either a little old lady or one of those hip modern chicks who’re part of that new wave of craft, and who go to ‘crafternoons’, but so what? How does that enrich anyone’s understanding of you? Unless you’re really defined by your knitting or whatever, it hardly seems likely to be relevant to anything much, and if you are that defined by it, chances are it’ll be pretty obvious. The fact that you’d be knitting while you were asked these stupid questions’d be a hint, to start with.

This impatience of mine is probably linked to all those years I spent being a directionless Arts-studying vocational no-hoper. People would always (fairly rudely, when you think about it) ask “But what are you going to do with your life? For a real job, I mean?” and when I said “Oh, I don’t know, something?” you’d be amazed how helpful they would be. “Well, what do you like doing?” they would say in that sincere voice which plans to help you sort out your life. It was only with really saintly self-control that I used to resist getting fairly seriously ironic at this point, because “listening to music and hangin’ out and also being really well-paid” is not a job description. I always, always wanted to say “Gosh! What an interesting and insightful question! I never thought to think about what I like doing. I guess I do really enjoy working with pipes, and unblocking toilets and driving my own ute. Maybe… maybe, do you think that possibly I should become a plumber?! Thank you! Oh my God, you’ve changed my life with your incisive and insightful thoughts!”

Tchah. No-one “likes doing” these things in advance. You learn the parts of your career and get to like them. Sure, everyone likes shopping and having fun and hanging out and chocolate or whatever, but there are very few jobs where people will pay you to do things you like, and even then, people judge those jobs. Most folks enjoy dancing and making new friends and having sex, but no-one seems to translate that into wanting to be a stripper or a prostitute. Really, it seems almost perverse, when you think about it.

I realise that these people were only trying to help and being nice. I know that they had only my best interests at heart, but really. There’s something so very paternalistic about that sort of thing (the “what do you like doing” thing, not the “wanting to be a call-girl when you grow up”{which now I think about it, some people must do, even just as a matter of sheer statistical inevitability, holy crap!} thing) that I makes it very hard to accept in the spirit in which it was offered.

Anyway, that’s enough of this from me for the meanwhile, I’m sure you have some minatures you have to get back to painting or something: reading these very very long blog posts can’t be all you do with your time. Don’t you have a hobby or something?

In Which Romantic Comedies are a Distressing Microcosm

2009-07-16T13:56:00.000+10:00

So, the other evening, My Dear Old Friend Cat and I went and saw that current Sandra Bullock romantic comedy, “The Proposal” which, I grant you, was in a sense our first error {also, this post carries a definite Spoiler Alert: if you feel that in watching this movie you will be otherwise able to suspend disbelief and be surprised by it, as long as it isn’t “spoiled” for you, don’t read on until you’ve gotten that done}. First up, though, a caveat emptor, I know these movies are trashy, and it’s clearly foolish to read too much into them, and also knowing this, I sort of love them for what they are. In the same way that one might know that a McDonalds Sundae is bad for one, and unfulfilling, and very probably made of pig fat or something, but still occasionally you just… you just really want one. Ultimately, I know that I was sort of asking for it, seeing a movie like this, but I swear that sometimes it’s ok.

[Um, this is the point in the post where I’ve reread this before posting, and have cut the next three paragraphs on the grounds of being an excessively in-depth critique of a movie which no-one else is ever going to see anyway. If you feel that your life would be improved by the reading of these paragraphs, let me know.]

I know we all know how it goes and all: they hate each other, blah blah blah, they fall in love, but here’s the thing: the whole point of the movie is to fill in the “blah blah blah” blanks. Going “you know how this works, guys, let’s just take it as read, shall we?” is totally cheating. We can get the beginning and the end from the poster.

This is all kind of by-the-by, though, really. This is just my failure to properly suspend critical thinking. (Which is the feeling I so often get in PopMed lectures, more on which another day). The thing that was really quite odd, and which seemed like maybe it was indicative of more wide-ranging weirdness was this: in one scene, the Heroine Opens Up and confesses and number of slightly embarrassing personal things to the Hero, and one of them is that she hasn’t had sex in a year and a half. The Hero, ‘naturally’, is amused and a little disgusted. “Eighteen whole months?” he cries (well, queries) “Are you serious?”. Um what? This is supposed to be an intensely private woman who’s been on her own for a very long time. Here’s a thought: 18 months is hardly long enough for this sort of lull.

Leaving aside the character problems again, (even ‘what kind of jerk reacts that way to confidences?’) this seems to be very much a broader issue. People are really weirded out by the idea that other people are not shagging basically any time that they’re not with us. Whenever it comes up in movies, people are horrified to learn of each others’ spells of celibacy - spanning sometimes almost whole months! It’s really almost like it’s grosser than some kind of pustulent sore or something. Now, I don’t want to bring my baggage to the fore, here, and I’m not trying to say that people who have sex with people whom they neither know nor much like are a bunch of skanks, or anything, but…. (I have no way to satisfactorily finish that sentence). But really, c’mon!

How is it that we could find it grotesque to not sleep with someone, anyone? I consider myself very lucky to know a wide range of interesting and attractive people. I have literally hundreds of lovely friends and acquaintances. But there is not a single one with whom I currently have the slightest intention of sleeping. No offence. I mean, I’m sure there are one or two whom I could grow to lust after, but seriously, am I expected to just shag one to “keep my hand in”? Because, uh, I’m not planning on it.

What’s the worst that could plausibly happen if I (or anyone) should fail to sleep with randoms so as not to let there be a long lag time? Oh that’s right, terrifyingly, people might judge me, people using a measure to which I absolutely do not subscribe or buy into the validity of. I would be considered maybe a bit prudish and if worst came to worst, maybe someone would speculate that I was “frigid” for some awful reason, and that no-one could ever want to sleep with me. That is seriously the very worst case scenario (and also it’s clealy bollocks).

Conversely, if I shag randoms to keep my numbers up, the worst case scenario involves bits of me falling off, itchily. This worst-case is exactly as likely as the other one, which is to say, still not very, but it seems pretty clearly worse to me.

Far more likely in the ‘chaste’ option is that after a non-specified while, a period of time I can certainly deal with, I meet someone I like enough to want to sleep with, and everything works out for the best in this best of all possible worlds. This is eventually basically a certainty: there’s nothing repulsive about me, and I’m at least passably lovable, and lots of people are pretty cool, so I’m bound to reach a negotiated mutual-liking-type compromise at some point. Conversely, I am certain to feel trashy and regretful if I sleep with someone I don’t much fancy just to zero the meter.

Also, where does it end? Once you zero a count like that, it starts ticking again straight away! The constant pressure must be awful, and surely you’d go slowly mad, trying to stay ahead of your own mounting (hah) paranoia tickticktickisamonthtoolongtickticktick, tickticktickmorethanaweekmaybethere’ssomethingreallywrongwithyoutickticktick, tickticktickit’sbeenthreedaysnow,maybeyou’lljustgrowoveristhatevenpossibleticktickticktick…

Um, essentially what I’m doing here is not advocating chastity as the one true path to happiness and calling anyone who sleeps with people a crazy skank, but I really do kind of resent this thing in movies. It is perfectly valid not to be currently sleeping with anyone. Now I think about it, you even get it in otherwise high quality TV shows like Firefly (actually, now I think about it, the line in question is in Serenity, the sequel to the show, which was a movie, but it’s still totally canon, so it counts as both, so there). Kaylee is all “it’s been nigh on a year since I’ve had anything twixt my nethers ‘tweren’t run on batteries!”. Well, I mean, yes. You live on a spaceship and you have sexual tension with one of the few people you even meet, basically, in an ongoing way. Even leaving aside the of-course-you-haven’t-slept-with-anyone-it’s-deep-flipping-space point, you’re on task anyway . Having sexual tension should totally give you points for effort. Not many, maybe, but some.

So, I was going to write this whole post at this point about sexual tension and crushes and stuff, but this post is already pretty long, so it’s time for bed instead. Especially since there’s enough stuff there for a lengthy post all on its own, so it’d be better not following a post which scares away all the readers by starring Sandra Bullock in the opening paragraphs.

In Which in-class Blogging is Idly Experimented With

2009-07-15T18:00:00.000+10:00

Mnemonic means “a mental trick for remembering something”. Pneumonic, in so far as it’s a word at all, means “characterised by pneumonia”. What I’m saying here is that the first syllable of mnemonic is pronounced “Neh”, not “new”, unless you’re an idiot. If you’ve said it wrong in the past, I’m not judging you, but now, now you know.

Ok, now we’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the business of the day!

So it turns out that it’s actually really difficult to write decent blog posts at the same time as paying a feasible amount of attention in lectures. Who knew? I certainly remember writing some pretty cool stuff (for a given value of “pretty cool”, obviously, maybe even for a given value of “writing”, who can say?) back in the day in my Psych lectures, but I’m almost sure that was because those lectures were considerably more interesting than Pharmacology. Not only were they easy to pay enough attention to, since even a lower amount of concentration ticking over in the background was enough, but it’s amazing how much easier it is to work with material (I say “material” and it makes me sound like I think I’m Jerry Seinfeld. I swear I don’t; I have much too high an opinion of myself) like “the value of having a theory of God is that he can mind your lemons for you” than stuff like “arachidonic acid mediates airway hyperresponsiveness in asthma”.

I’ve reread that paragraph three times now, and so right am I that that sentence is utterly uninspiring that it’s completely ground my writing to a halt. I didn’t even know that was possible except by iron self discipline or fatigue.

This Friday I have been invited to a thing (a birthday party, in point of fact) at The Loft in Darling Harbour, which I’m given to understand is basically like Cargo Bar only a bit classier. For those hypothetical readers among you who enjoy reading my famed “social anxiety” posts, I think we can safely promise a treat in store regarding such an adventure. This is hardly the social milieu in which I am at my best, so introspection ahoy! Ooh, there’s an antidote to the pharmacology-based lack of subject matter: in what social milieu do I believe myself (with whatever degree of reference to reality and accuracy) to function at peak performance, so to speak?

I guess it could be online, and certainly I have the advantage here of being able to be read at any pace you fancy (or not at all, if preferred) rather than at compulsory high speeds, but that seems pretty tragic, and I don’t think it can be right. Also, I suck majorly at “chat”, although maybe everyone does? That might explain it; it does seem sort of counterintuitive in a way, and makes pauses seem strangely unnatural. Maybe hanging around at house parties where I know the people involved, or am only expected to deal with small numbers of new people at once, leaving me spare operating capacity to do things like remember to talk slowly.

Actually, now I think about it, I do better when operating at a tangent to the task at hand. When the only task is “make conversation”, I get distracted, but if we’re supposed to be doing something, like walk along, or decide what the mechanism of wheeze is, or something, then I can happily procrastinate from that by chatting about inconsequential things for hours. Clearly, I’ve missed my calling in life and should be one of those dead-weight panel members on ‘Spicks & Specks’ or similar. How awesome would that be?

Anyway, the point of the Friday thing is that I hope that the lovely people I hung out with at the last party this guy threw will be there again. I assume so, but since at least one of them hasn’t got a Facebook account in any meaningful sense (you know that thing where you suddenly delete everyone you know or similar after freaking out like John Cusack in the backstory for “Grosse Point Blank”, except without necessarily becoming a hired assassin at all), it’s hard to know. I could probably check if Mame is going {that’s right, if I refer to you by name, you either get coded, like this, or referred to by full title, like my Insightful and Culturally Studied Flatmate Georgia. That way no one has to feel too google-able, and I maintain my moral high ground in re. the anonymity thing. Once I crack, I’m sure to start addressing imaginary readers by name (which is to say, people whom I image to be readers, not people who don’t exist except in my mind), which is not only alienating for other readers but also fairly seriously insane. Although I do sort of fancy unexpectedly addressing the Anonymous types by name/title in the middle of something else} –whoa, long parenthetical break, where was I?- either by asking her or checking Facebook. But since I have neither her nor the Internet available at present, my opportunities to do this are somewhat curtailed. Which is good, because I’ll go anyway, and somehow asking someone if they’re going to a party seems dreadfully Teen Movie. Although obviously would not be asking in spirit of I-think-his-name-was-Joey in ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’, which to be honest is the only instance of that that I can think of just at present.

Man, see? Even considering attending an event like this gets me into some kind of sub-clause- and allusion-choked lather of social fluttering. And I haven’t even started yet to consider the question of what one wears to a place like this. Will probably just do what I usually do when am unsure and pretend that there’s a theme and dress to that. Certainly I was happy with how it worked out when I went 1960s-chic to that dinner party that time. It’s great, because even if you haven’t got the dress right for the venue/occasion at hand, you can be damn sure you’ve nailed what you were actually aiming for. This is the secret of hipness, I believe. Certainly nothing else satisfactorily explains what one frequently sees worn in Newtown, especially recently. I think there may even be a quote to this effect in ‘Ghost World’, now I think about it. [Note: ‘Ghost World’ is a movie with Thora Birch and Scarlet Johanssen back when she was young, and Steve Buscemi in it. ‘Ghost Town’ is an unsatisfying and unsatisfactory movie featuring Ricky Gervais, who should stick to standup, Greg Kinnear, who always seems to end up like this, and Téa Leoni, who has the air of just vaguely hoping that no-one will even mention to her that she was in such a movie. ‘Ghost’ is different again, and features a threesome between Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze and a potter’s wheel, and another, tamer, one later with Whoopi Goldberg in loco potter’s wheel. Confuse these films at your peril.]

Ok! It’s after 5, so I’m running late, but I’ll catch you on the flipside (which, on second thought, maybe I won’t take up saying after all), cats and kittens!

In Which a Blogger will Never Learn

2009-07-09T10:46:00.008+10:00

What with all the excitement (well, it seemed exciting to me, maybe you live a life of constant breathless thrill and scorn such petty enthusiasm) of last week, this blog has come up in conversation a bunch of times this week. Certainly more often than usual. And an impressive number of people have said "hey, you should write a controversial Med-themed blog all the time, it'll be great!". Naturally one must dismiss any unworthy thought that this might be inspired by the fact that there can't possibly be that much blather to write about Med, particularly not that much controversy, and that this could be a STFU ploy. All my friends are lovely and would be unlikely to resort to complicated ploys to shut me up, especially since they could just stop reading if that was the go, so that can't be it. The point, though, is that this is Obviously A Trap. There's just no way that that could end well. As traps go, it's not even that hard to see: it's the social equivalent of a tunnel painted onto a rock face with a sniggering Coyote hiding behind a boulder, or a bowl of bird seed with an anvil suspended over it like the Sword of Damocles.

But! And here's the crux of the matter: the roadrunner always seems to end up ok, and since so many people, so much greater than I, throughout history, have failed to learn from their own (or others') mistakes, who am I to flout tradition? In short: here goes anyway.

This is not, in fact, meant to sound critical, of course, since again the subject under discussion is one rather tangentially related to the course, not based on it, per se. If this were a quality literary opus (or maybe a Jerry Bruckheimer film) I would say that it was "inspired by" the announcements between the lectures this morning, but that sounds a bit highfalutin' for my little ol' blog.

Between the two lectures this morning, we had 2 announcements, both of which were everything that is admirable and laudable and good. (Let's get this perfectly clear, yeah?)The first was an advertisement for the "Women in Medicine" Dinner, and the second of which was about leadership and indigenous health, which had a video beginning with a series of inspirational quotes (was going to make an "inspiration" respiratory pun, but what've you ever done to me to deserve such a thing?). To be strictly honest, I got the general gist of that announcement, but the details of its purpose elude me rather. Partly because I tend not to get involved in these extracurricular things (I should, I know, but I feel like I barely have time to sleep, so there you go. Maybe it's the 3.5 - 4 hours of commute every day? If I lived in Camperdown I swear I'd be a better person), and partly because I'm sick, so I'm not really absorbing information very effectively.

Let's take these announcements one at a time. I know that "Women in Medicine" things must be terribly useful, and that people must really feel that they're relevant to their lives, otherwise, why would they exist? Still, it confuses me. It's basically never occurred to me that in this country, in this day and age, my gender would stop me doing anything I jolly well want. Sure, I might not get into Surgery on account of failing Medicine, or because of not knowing which end of the scalpel goes into the patient, or because of alienating my colleagues and superiors so effectively that no-one will work with me, or whatever, but not because of being a female. Surely not? This is just not a limitation that had ever occurred to me, so I really don't feel like I need any "support" about it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later in my career I'll come to see that this was all foolishly wide-eyed naïveté, but at the moment, I don't need to be inspired.

Maybe this is because of my privileged upbringing, or something. Well, let me rephase: of course this is because of my privileged upbringing. I live in a country, in a community, in an era and in a socioeconomic milieu in which the biases have tended to be in my favour. Check out my white upper-middle-class failure to grasp the issues, yeah? But my mother is a doctor, in a surgical specialty which interests her, and all the women in my family are well educated and clever enough to do what they aspire to do. Maybe it's also to do with having gone to an all-girls' school? In an exclusively-gendered environment, gender is irrelevant.

So all this "you can do it, even though you're a girl!" stuff says "because of the fact that you're a girl, your capability to achieve things is questionable, but try not to think about it, okay?" to me. I'm sure that my Very Insightful Feminist Flatmate Georgia would tell me that I have the wrong end of the stick somewhere in here, but unfortunately she's not here, so you're getting the unvarnished confusion: does anyone seriously expect me to worry that I'm too girly to make it in a career I'll be qualified for?

This is something that my Dad has definitely dealt with. People can certainly discriminate in a sexist fashion against male Obstetrician/Gynaecologists. We get it all the time. In fact, now I think of it, I've actually been on the receiving end(as both receptionist and daughter [Whoa! To clarify; not from him, but from people who ask questions like "What does your Dad do?"]) of more sexism directed at a man than at women. Maybe this explains my possibly-odd attitude. It's amazing the weird places people's minds go when you tell them that men can work with the female pelvic area in a professional capacity. Here's the thing: if it's worrying you, are you maybe sexualising something completely, utterly and indeed compulsorily asexual? If you are, you probably need to work on that before you see any doctor. Because it will certainly be a problem eventually. By all means feel a little more comfortable with a female doctor, whatever, but this thing where people look with suspicion on male Gynaecologists is infuriating.

Of course, I suppose the "women in medicine" issue may be be one of juggling maternity leave and motherhood and so on with careers, which actually is an issue with is gendered. And worth thinking more about, even. But still not relevant to me at this point. It's not like I can decide to "have my family" now and then get on with a career. Being as how I'm single, that would be a challenge, and were I not, it would still be rushing things a bit. So this is something which I (and most of us) will have to play by ear. Which is ok, because it's going to be a while before it starts being at all urgent, and in the meanwhile it's both impossible and counterproductive to try to hurry any of these processes.

Leaving all this gendering business aside, what possible issue could I have taken with an announcement which I didn't even listen to properly about leadership in indigenous health? Well, obviously, there are quite a lot of things, really, since this is what my Dad would call a "wicked problem", but not even I am stupid enough to try to thrash out those issues on a blog. It seems like our country has never yet found an easy compromise between a lack of interest in the indigenous community and paternalism, and the internet is not the place to try to nut that out.

What caught my interest here was one of the quotes, which is in fact from the Declaration of Human Rights. (Yeah, I know, how dare I raise my eyes so high? What sort of terrible person would think critically about such a document? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, my friends? It's terribly important to think critically about these things.)

This quote begins "everyone is born free" and this is the thing: no they aren't. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole point. If everyone were born free, we wouldn't need to declare that they were, just like we don't have to say "everyone breathes air". The whole issue is that there are people born in prisons and concentration camps, or born to slaves with their births recorded in stock books along with the livestock. There are people who never in their life have been even a little bit free. To declare that these people are in some special and mystical way free when they're born is to connive at their incarceration. Sure, it looks nice on a fridge magnet, and sure it makes people like you and I, who actually are free, but who are pettily annoyed by such trivial fetters as the need to earn a living and to hand in assignments and to cope with the morning peak hour on public transport feel a little better, but it is ultimately as hollow as all such phrases. It is no more meaningful than "No Pain No Gain" or "Sisters by Chance, Friends by Choice" or "Magic Happens" or whatever. It gives you a little warm glow to think about it, but it doesn't help.

I suppose it's fair enough, really. Even just semantically, a Declaration probably shouldn't say "Everyone ought to be born free and equal". So maybe it's fair enough. (Also, quite frankly, the second bit is clearly wrong too. "Equal" in the sense of being "of equal worth" or some strange sense of "equitable" maybe, but we are not, in fact, all equal as such. We're all different, and some of us are good at some things and some at others. I'll never be very tall-and-thin, and children born with Down’s Syndrome will never be allowed to do brain surgery. This, though, is just natural variation, and it's perfectly ok to placate ourselves, since we cannot change it, and must not try. The Freedom thing is different: we can change that.) Perhaps the Declaration is describing a Utopian future towards which we are meant to be striving?

Hmmm. I guess it's time to wrap this up, but the last rhetorical question is this: isn't it ironic that I'm so naïve about sexism and so over-sceptical about the Declaration of Human Rights? Go figure.

In Which a Holiday is not so much being Wasted as Pleasantly Frittered Away

2009-07-03T13:52:00.002+10:00

(Sorry about the doubleposting: although this post and the one below it are being posted almost simulataneously, this on's only going up now because of the upcoming lack of internet. If Canada Day Adventures are what you want to hear about, but you only have time/inclination to read one post, skip this one. Otherwise, read on!)

Maybe it’s tragic that in the mere week of winter holiday vouchsafed us (oh yes; “vouchsafed”) I look unlikely to achieve any great feats of leisure or of scholarly application. People I know are going to the ski fields (with dubious success, granted), and to Brisbane, Canada, camping, and conferences of more than one mysterious variety. I’m rather enjoying this not-doing-anything-much deal, though. I go to parties and karaoke and smallish gatherings, and get up at 10 or 11, read non-academic books and drink tea in a park opposite the sea and write enormous blog posts. Am I wasting my holiday? Maybe I am, but I don’t know what I would rather be doing which would leave me more relaxed afterwards. A week is scarcely time to have a proper away-holiday like skiing of worthwhile proportions and then get back and unwind in time for Monday, or so it seems to me. If "a week" comes, in my future life, to be the maximum length for a holiday (God Forbid), then doubtless I’ll have to readjust my casual approach to time, but in the meanwhile, there you go. I’m heading to the Farm with my family this weekend, so that’s something, anyway.

In fact, this leisurely approach to time is something which pretty much characterises my life. I did a project for 2nd year Psych on Procrastination once, years ago, which was utterly unilluminating, mainly because all the studies I read seemed to conclude that it was sort of pointless to procrastinate. “Really?” one thought, “Gosh, thanks for that insight, I could probably write a heaps better paper on this, though, one that concluded anything new at all. And I will, just after I finish this game of Spider Solitaire.”

I procrastinate about everything, even procrastination. We have bottles of M&Ms sorted by colour on the top of our kitchen cupboard because of some exam procrastination which we put off until after the exams, once.

I also routinely put off necessary work when it comes to reading maps. I’ll check a route in the street directory and memorise the first two thirds of the way, putting off the last bit until I get closer, and then get completely lost at that point, because what did I think would happen? That I would miraculously have a really well lit red light at the crucial point, giving me a chance to figure out the end of the journey? I’m not alone in this sort of thing, mind. Whenever we go to a restaurant, my sister always insists on having her order taken last, to allow her the maximum amount of time to put off deciding what she wants to eat.

In fact, my entire undergraduate degree(s) could be considered procrastination. Certainly that was how I meant it. I didn’t study Latin because I thought it would make me a better doctor or a culturally enriched individual, I was consciously putting off having to figure out what to do with my life. Which is a decision I’ve ultimately sort of defaulted on. I’m doing Medicine, so presumably I’ll be a doctor eventually, but that’s hardly been the aim of my youth so much as a career I eventually “oh, all right”-ed into. (Note: I am in fact actually rather enjoying it, and think that being a doctor will be swell and all, I’m just saying that I hope I didn’t beat anyone into the course who could only have been happy as a doctor).

Meanwhile, almost all of my school friends have real jobs, and the majority of them are married and real grownups. My friends are buying houses and considering having children (which are about equivalent in terms of real-grownup points, I figure). This is not something I ever thought I’d have done by now, you understand, but the further all these friends advance into the world of mortgages and 9-to-5 jobs, the wider the gap seems to be between them and my petty concerns about assignments not yet done and outfits to wear to quasi-costumed parties. I was going to write this whole post about this point, but it seems that the strangely enormous feeling that this inspires is hard to articulate. I’m impressed with you people for being so on top of your lives. Also, I make no judgement whatsoever about the order in which people choose to set about their life-goals, or what those goals may be (in my case the first goal should presumably be “set goals”), I’m just noting that a lot of the people I know have picked a different order to mine, and sometimes this seems sort of overwhelming. One forgets for a moment that these things can have no conceivable effect on my ability to get things done later in my life (although I guess someone else might buy the house that I’ll only later come to want, or something. But how would I even know?)

Maybe this ‘gap’ is a function of postgraduate study. Half the guys in my course are married (and half the girls engaged, which is sort of odd, since surely there didn’t ought to be a gender divide in the number of people married and engaged? Not until we pass that legislation, anyway), and most of the people have been “in the real world”, working full time at real jobs for at least a year before coming back to the strangely convent-like cloister of university life. Not precisely a vow of poverty, but the attenuated reality of it, and only meeting a limited pool of people, all taught that the ultimate beliefs of the institution trump any petty practical concerns we might individually have. At least in this respect, my comparative failure to achieve any kind of life milestones is an advantage. I’m not new to being told that paid work is as nothing before the altar of the Exam, or to theoretically being by definition inferior to all the people I come across in an educational context. This seems to be something that the people who’ve been highfalutin’ are marginally more likely to struggle with.

Anyway, long story short: I am pretty content with my nice little life, but I sometimes wonder if it looks really tiny from the outside. Fortunately, it doesn’t much matter if it does. Isn’t that refreshing? Your life choices are valid, Reader, so feel affirmed.

*****

This weekend I am going far away to the Distant and Foreign land of Victoria. Sort of. Well, only just. I’ll be on the other side of the border, but not more than 2km from it, I’d reckon, and for fewer than 48 hours. My mother’s family has a Farm (always capitalised, never effectively capitalised upon) there, which has even less internet than my flat. This means that you will be briefly undisturbed by my ramblings, although since it turns out that I have another post that I’ve failed to upload, there will still be one post per day, amusingly.

The Farm is about as rustic as I get: the only building is a little falling-down cabin made of corrugated iron (or to be strictly accurate, it was until last year, and that’s how it will always live on in my mind. Since the process of falling down was finally completed late last year, a slightly more stable and only marginally less primitive shed-like structure now graces that spot). This shed now has a concrete floor, which is a scandalously posh upgrade on the dirt floor of days of yore. In keeping with this ascetic aesthetic, (yesssssss... I’ve always hoped to have a good excuse to juxtapose those words) there is also no electricity, sod all mobile phone coverage, and no running water. (Yes that is an Oxford Comma, what are you going to do about it?)

I love that place (the Farm, not Oxford, although I’m sure both are lovely). Everything is cooked over an open fire, and the chimney smokes outrageously, so by the time you come home you and all your clothes smell like they’ve been smoked too, as if one were some kind of giant side of bacon or kipper or cup of lapsang souchong. As a direct result of this, I have always found the smell of woodsmoke to be really wonderfully soothing and pleasing. I always feel my mood immeasurably improved if I’m walking along a residential street in the gathering dark of a winter evening and smell someone’s fireplace. Does everyone do this?

Also, it’s one of those universal truths that in any student flat (well, any student flat I’ve ever lived in) one of the electrical things is functioning below its ideal level at all times. At present, for instance, our toaster has gone completely insane, and as an added bonus, our DVD player does pictures and background music and sound effects beautifully, but not speech at all. Which is weird, really, not to say extremely mysterious. Anyway, the nice thing about the Farm is that nothing’s supposed to work, nothing electrical anyway. It’s awfully refreshing.

In Which a Voice should have been Familiar.

2009-07-03T13:46:00.001+10:00

Prologue: try to imagine that this was posted yesterday, and that I was not foiled by the lack of internet. If you are successful in doing this the tenses and "yesterday"s will be accurate.

Yesterday was Canada Day, which I must honestly say has never been at all relevant to me before this year. Yesterday, however, I was invited to a Canada Day Party, which was awesome, and which was attended by an interestingly diverse group of Med students. Understandably, I was mildly anxious at this, since as far as I knew, someone there was filled with Anonymous Ire for me. Fortunately for me, my self-absorbed neurosis proved as usual to be entirely unfounded (partly because it’s probably not important to anyone but me, and partly because the Usual Suspects were presumably packing for their trip to Brisbane for the AMSA conference where they are even now painted green or something).

In fact, it was pretty awesome, as I said. The party itself was great, and then wound down is the most highly approved fashion where a small number of you, dwindling to three, amble aimlessly down King St, pause at Istanbul, and then go and drink tea and red wine in someone’s flat. Yea, I say unto thee, humble blog reader; this experience is how you know you’ve been to Sydney Uni; it is the True Core of the Student Experience.

It was at about this point, however, that the evening got to be unusually novel and interesting. Having already discussed with these people that we coincidentally shared a bunch of musical taste, in a nebulous sort of way, (everyone likes The Smiths, surely, and Fountains of Wayne and Camera Obscura are definitely really neat),we got to talking about the experience of liking really obscure bands (yeah, I know, it’s so White of us). I volunteered that I’d always really liked The Crustaceans (weirdly, I can’t find any mention of them on my blog, but rest assured that “I’m Happy if You’re Happy” and that Bright Eyes album “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” were basically the only CDs we listened to in the Lilyfield flat, for basically all of 2005 and a bunch of 2006). And it’s true, what’s not to like about songs about wishing to be a guitar, and how it never rains in Sydney (which is a song which gets stuck in my head every time it rains in Sydney, so I call shenanigans), and going to the library and the beach, and talking about the Doppler Effect in ambulances? Quite frankly, along with Fountains of Wayne and Camera Obscura and Ben Folds, these would have to be some of my absolute favourite songs ever, with good interesting lyrics, both narrative and allusive, which is everything that songs should be. (“Everything that they should be” in the standard sense, not in the sense that that’s all there is to music. That would be wrong. Melody and what have you are also doubtless important, it’s just that I don’t know anything about those aspects of music, whereas I know where I stand with words. In this case I know that I stand in the middle of a hopelessly overlong parenthetical tangent, which is a place I’m very used to being, as I’m sure you’d deduced).

Anyway, this is all by the by, and merely background colour to the fact that at this point we had a fantastically and hilariously awkward moment when it transpired that I’d been raving like an idiot fan at the person who was actually the lead singer of the damn Crustaceans. I cannot emphasise enough how weird this sort of moment was. Felt rather like Carrie Fisher in that double-date restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally.

Part of what amuses me so much about this is that so many people aspire to meet the bands that they like, and I’ve never felt the least inclination to do so. You know, they have those radio competitions: “...And you could win tickets to the sold out Lily Allen concert, and then get to go backstage and meet her! How exciting and awesome! etc. etc...” No. How weirdly awkward and stilted such a conversation would be. You’d either gush and sound like an idiot or not gush enough and sound like a tool. You would know that they felt themselves to be contractually obliged to talk to you, but also know that they’d much rather not. And why should they? All you know about them is that you like their music which for all you know was written by another band member or something, and all they know about you is that you like their music, which would be the case for basically everyone they meet. How could this fail to be just weird and disillusioning?

In fact, the best thing that’s ever said of these meetings is that the “Star” was gracious and kind to the fan and humoured them, treating them like real people. This is another one of those things which I tend to more or less assume as a basic minimum for interaction with real people, but so strangely unequal would such a meeting be that it becomes an exciting Quality.

Conversely, the only weirdly awkward thing here (apart from the bit where everyone else says “are you kidding me?” and you have no idea why, obviously) is that there is no way I’m going to resist blogging about something like this, and the odds are good that one of the people who was there will read it. Which is fine, although maybe just a little odd of me: now it’s my turn to use the internet to be slightly creepy.

Heh, it’s just occurred to me that the situation I discussed yesterday is reversed here. When you listen to a band, you are the anonymous critic listening to the semiautobiographical stylings of someone who doesn’t know that you (personally) are listening. How tidy and balanced! The day before yesterday, I was the (sort of) public figure airing my thoughts while others anonymously critiqued. There you are, it’s all tied in nicely in a meta sort of way.

In Which the Anonymity of the Internet is Fleetingly Considered

2009-07-01T14:39:00.003+10:00

I was briefly determined to update this blog every weekday this week, but yesterday it looked like I wasn’t going to have a chance. Fortunately (in this respect) for me, when I happened to have 10 minutes of internet yesterday afternoon I found that someone had written a comment on Sunday’s post, such that I was able to make quota at the same time as trying to clarify that taking this blog seriously is essentially pointless. Isn’t that nice? For those of you curious about this, the whole kerfuffle is to be found in the comments (and text, I suppose, to be fair) of the blog post 3 below this, “In Which Expectations are Not so much Great as Mildly Unhinged”.

I have been told by a startling number of people (‘startling’ because holy crap, seriously? There are that many of you with nothing better to do than read this bollocks?) that ‘what I ought to do is stand my ground and fight it out because it’s my blog and it’s important to think critically about everything - even and especially things which are done more or less selflessly for the greater good -, and what exactly is the value of “awareness” per se anyway?’ Which is awfully nice and supportive and so on, but not strictly relevant since I wasn’t trying to do any of those things at all. I promise all of you friends who have my best interests at heart that if I’d ever actually meant to take a strong position in a blog post, I’d defend it staunchly, not back down in this craven-looking manner. Let those who doubt this find and take issue with that post about gay marriage or whatever it was last year and then you’ll see a position defended.

Anyway, what’s intriguing here is the function of internet anonymity in this thrilling drama. I realise that since about - ooh, 1998? - this has been the most hackneyed and clichéd subject imaginable, but there you go. In what can only be described as a disturbing turn of phrase, one of these anonymous comments kindly hopes that I have “learned my lesson about public blogging” and promises that “we’ll be watching” which weirds me out to more or less the degree which must have been intended. The only solutions to this sort of thing are to either take it like a man and deal with it maturely or to become so irrelevant and tangential that the hypothetical watchers tire of the whole thing. Since this is how I write anyway, and since the more adult path has never yet come to be the one I’ve preferred, I’m going with option 2, which means that a clichéd and hackneyed post about the anonymity of the internet and its effect on “kids these days” can only be to the good.

Mounting paranoia aside, it’s a strange thing, anonymity; the Dutch Courage of the internet. Drunk on our theoretical inability to be “traced” or held accountable, we say things in ways which we never normally would. Whole theories of human interaction have been built around this. Most famous, of course, is Godwin’s Law, with which I trust you are all familiar (although if people are reading this week in a spirit of keeping an eye on such my outrageous political ideas then maybe the demographic is shifted unusually). Godwin’s Law, then, states that as the length of a conversation or argument on the internet (and the effect of this anonymity and us not bothering to keep our behaviour to our normal levels of reasonableness is that conversations inevitably tend towards argumentativeness) increases, the likelihood of someone being compared to Hitler or the Nazis approaches infinity. Or words to that effect.

Why is this? Are we, in our face-to-face interactions, just constantly keeping our fury in check? Surely not. I pretty much like everyone I hang out with, most of the time. Sure, everyone has occasional grumpy moments, but for the sake of our friendships, we keep things more or less under control, usually. This still holds for internet interactions where we our identities are unhidden. So Facebook isn’t the seething swarm of flamewars that any ordinary internet forum of that size would be. This allows us to deduce that the internet is not necessary-and-sufficient for us to behave like jerks (I’m talking generally, here, not calling anyone who reads my blog a jerk, because obviously anyone with such good taste would have to be charming). It looks like anonymity is the sine qua non of this sort of behaviour.

But surely if given the chance to do small and spiteful things anonymously in real life to the people whom we don’t much like, most of us would not do so? It would be so easy to play small malicious pranks on people in an untraceable fashion, but since Year 7, that sort of behaviour is certainly not de rigeur.

So what is it about this magical combination of anonymity and the internet? Presumably it’s the fact that we’re another step removed from our actions. We don’t actually see the effects of our words, which seem so ephemeral and harmless, and which allow us a luxurious degree of plausible deniability if we feel guilty and take ourselves to task. We can tell ourselves that we never thought that kid next door would actually kill herself, we just wanted to punish her a little bit. (Also, whoa, let’s not even get involved in thinking about the wackiness of that case. Those crazy Americans.) (Heh, Microsoft has underlined the phrase “those crazy Americans” as being wrong. Nice one Microsoft, leave your ideological baggage out of this, verb or no verb. Also, not honestly sure that that was actually in America but checking when I don’t have internet access is much too hard).

In the case of this blog, however, it’s different again, since the anonymity is one sided. My identity is open, I use my real name and link (foolishly, it has become clear) to this blog on my Facebook account. I did wonder about the wisdom of this when I put that link up, all that time ago, but at the time I’d barely blogged in years. When I first started the blog (by accident, hence the name) I only wanted to be able to use it to keep in touch with my school friends, since that was back in the era before Social Networking was a thing. I’ve never taken down that link mainly on the grounds that (a) I can’t be bothered, and it’s never seemed like it might matter, since who could possibly be interested other than people who like me anyway? and (b) vanity is my besetting sin.

Conversely, since I (again foolishly) decided to allow Anonymous commenting on my blog, this means that the people I’m dealing with are coming from a comparatively “safer” place of anonymity (note: I’m going to leave that facility enabled for a few days so that everything can get worked out, but then I’m turning that function off so hard, so if you wish to add your 2 cents without getting a blogger account, time is money at this point); this is rather like standing in a spotlight in a darkened room and having people throw things at you from the shadows.

It would be undiplomatic to enter into the question of whether it is “cowardly” to deliberately remain anonymous in such a situation, but it has traditionally been considered so, with what justification I cannot say, having never really felt it incumbent on myself to do much anonymously at all. Clearly, the original commenter would probably be exempt from any such criticism anyway, since we will charitably assume that it simply failed to occur to them that their input would be anonymous, robbing their opinion of a great deal of otherwise well-earned weight. Let us pass serenely over the people who actually signed “Anonymous” after this was pointed out, and let us especially avoid addressing the issue of how much the inequity is exacerbated by addressing me by name in their post.

What particularly intrigues me is that there are presently 3 comments which would appear to be from Med students on the blog, only one of which, at a stretch, might be likely to have been written by any of the Med students to whom I have mentioned having a blog. I realise that I mentioned the obscene word count in a Facebook status, but I’m surprised that this would prompt anyone to seek it out and read it. This is especially relevant since the first comment reads like it was written by someone involved in the event-organising, but the only Facebook-friend I have who I’m aware of having been at all involved doesn’t strike me as being likely to take stupid things like my blogging, or herself, quite as seriously as it would appear to have been taken (also, I’m almost sure that I’d already talked to her about the idea of handing out condoms at such an event being amusing, as, indeed, it can surely only have been meant to be). Especially the point that I should “try not to offend people” interests me, since writing a barely-relevant comment in amongst a thousand words of self-deprecating blather on a blog no-one involved could be supposed to be likely to read hardly seems to me like going out of my way to slap people in the face (although, obviously, yes, it’s a public blog and the material on it ought to be tailored to that understanding).

More to the point; 3 comments, all purporting to be from different people? This means that either three or more Med people (Med people reasonably heavily engaged with the clique which organised the event, so not the 2 which would have seemed reasonably likely) read my blog but have never mentioned it to me, which seems unlikely, or that one such person read it (which still seems unlikely, but which it seems to me that we must inevitably deduce was the case) and then forwarded it to the others. Which leaves us with people whom I barely know reading it, and which also brings us back again to the topic of last week - the oddness of being the subject of discussion and consideration in one's absence. What a strange impression this blog would give if this was all one knew of me apart from having seen me from a distance in lectures!

Whoa, this post is apparently now 1,770 words long. Obviously it is time to bring this rambling to an end, and the more so since I am sceptical as to anyone’s having read this far anyway. Have a nice day, cats and kittens, and if anything I’ve said has offended you today, but could b read in two ways (eg, one sarcastic, one merely alliterative, like the original post), let’s take it as read that I meant it in the inoffensive sense.

In Which SocialFail becomes Unexpectedly Epic

2009-06-30T16:20:00.003+10:00

So, I wrote a post about the Red Party the other day, and in my failure to proofread (evident in the prevalence of typos on this blog) totally failed to notice how critical I apparently sounded. What I meant to say was that I perfeorm poorly at these events and find them intimidating, and have never quite understood the culture of 'partying for a cause', mainly because I wouldn't have to foggiest clue as to how to organise such an event without running it so hopelessly into debt that no money was raised whatsoever. Clearly, this is really more of an issue with my failure to throw awesome parties or function socially than otherwise.

What it reads like, though, is a criticism of the event and the way it was run, as I have been made aware by someone leaving an offended comment on said post. I'm sorry if I offended anyone, and this was certainly not my intention.

Damn. :(

Also, curse the onesided anonymity of the internet! Someone is annoyed with me personally, and knows who I am, but I have no idea who. Am not sure if am more horrified with the idea of having hurt the feelings of any of my lovely friends who were involved or with the idea of people I barely know having such a negative experience of me.

@#$%^&*(*&^%

In Which Words and Ladies are both Sadly Mistreated.

2009-06-29T11:48:00.002+10:00

What is this thing people seem to do where we use words as if they served a purely decorative purpose and had no actual meaning per se? This question is the subject of today's post, although I'll leave out "literally" and "decimate" just because even thinking about the abuse of these innocent and actually meaningful words makes me twitchy.

Right off the bat, I wish to make it clear that I do this sort of thing as well; I always want to use to word “repine” when I mean “rely on something” when it actually means to pine over something; I don’t know why this should be the case, but it intrudes on my semantic life more often than I’d’ve expected. Still, having admitted that fault, I now plan to completely ignore it and harshly judge others by standards I myself fail to meet. Any questions?

There is a newspaper on my kitchen bench at present open to an article about that football-player (NRL? AFL? NFI) who glassed his girlfriend in the face. Touchingly, but slightly creepily, the aforesaid girlfriend has written him a character reference saying that he “never intentionally hurt her" and so on. Leaving aside only for a moment the weird psychology at work here, assuming the guy is as guilty as he’s been found to be in court, there is a phrase in this reference which irks me. “Greg is one of the most loving, sensitive, yet principled men I have known.”

What? Why “yet”? Do you mean “and” but feel “yet” has more class, or do you honestly believe that being ‘loving and sensitive’ and ‘principled’ are usually mutually exclusive and that his (dubious) juxtaposition of these qualities sets him apart? If this latter is actually what this poor woman thinks, then we may have come to the core of the problem; she’s clearly dating the wrong kind of guys. The kind of guys who glass you in the face or ask you to choose between loving sensitivity and principle. Call me greedy and old-fashioned, but I’ve always kind of fancied only dating guys who combined these characteristics (the lovingness, sensitivity and principledness, not the glassing-you-in-the-face; I’m not crazy about being glassed in the face. In fact, glassing me in the face even slightly is something I’ve always considered to be grounds to strike someone off the list completely).

Really worse, because it’s used in situations where clarity of understanding could be a life-and-death matter, is the “visualise” thing. Surgical reports always use this word wrongly, and quite frankly that freaks me out. Any time I’ve gone to sleep and have been cut open, I want all the people involved to understand one another perfectly. “After making the incision I was able to visualise the liver”. Yes? Well if I close my eyes and imagine, I can visualise the liver right now. This means “to see with the mind’s eye” or “imagine”. If you mean that you could see the liver, then, here’s a thought; just flipping well say “see”. No one will think less of you for using a shorter word on the grounds of it being in any way meaningful or relevant.

And don’t try to tell me that this is “just semantics”, either, because semantics means meanings. And if you don’t think that the actual meaning of what you’ve said is relevant then obviously listening to you at all is a waste of time, since according to that approach all language is merely “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing” (or however that quote goes). Saying “that’s just semantics” in a conversation about meanings or words is like saying “that’s just the holocaust” in a conversation about the deaths of millions of Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, mental patients, unemployed people and miscellaneous Europeans in the mid 20th century. (Godwin's Law! That's right, even talking to myself I get so infuriated by this that it's all Nazism.)

Coming back to the obviously more important question of the acceptance of domestic violence for a moment; have you guys heard that song on the radio recently? The one with the verses describing a ‘he hits her so she hits him and they both up the ante’ scenario and the refrain “a kiss with a fist is better than none”? Oh my, I have even stronger feelings about that sort of thing than about visualising things you can see.

First off; what sort of thing is that to say, potentially and inevitably to the victims of domestic violence? Someone who feels trapped in an abusive relationship doesn’t need that. This is something that could potentially have an actual effect on people’s lives (unlike that Chaser sketch, insensitive as it may have been) given how browbeaten and biddable people often feel in these situations.

Secondly, as a single girl who is perfectly ok with being single and unkissed for lengthy periods of time, I rather resent the implication that this is so pathetic that I should look with envy upon beaten wives. What the hell, you guys?

Less weirdly (but coming on the heels of that song, while I was feeling all enraged, enough for me to notice), I heard a song the other day where a man refereed to his wife as “The Wife”. Does this not weird out anyone but me? Sure, call your wife “wifey” in a jokey way, refer to her as “my wife” to people who don’t know her by name, but why the Definite Article? As if she were some kind of strange phenomenon which were visited upon you, like The Plague. Approximately equally irksome is the thing where people refer to their own and (more creepily) others’ husbands as “Hubby” as if that were his name. Again “my husband” is fine, and “my hubby” if you feel the need to be cloyingly saccharine, but you are aware, aren’t you, that he is an individual with an actual identity and his own name? This used to happen at my work all the time, and always put me in the mood to suggest to patients that Anathema would be a lovely name for a baby girl, just to see what would happen.

Conversely, I’m apparently alone among my friends in not finding it creepy for a guy to call his girlfriend (or wife, fiancée, partner, whatever) “Princess”. I realise that it’s putting her on a pedestal and all that sort of thing, but so does any term of endearment, surely? I’ve always been fond of Beautiful and Gorgeous and endearments, but this doesn’t mean that I’m dating people just because I happen to find them decorative. Maybe this is a hypocritical reversal of my position on Hubby and The Wife, but there you go. Maybe it’s because Princess, Gorgeous, Beautiful, or whatever are always used in the vocative. You don’t say “I’ll talk it over with Princess and get back to you” (a sentence I’ve heard Hubby in all too many times); it’s a private name you call them only to their face. Conversely, “The Wife” and “Hubby” are both used to refer to their signifieds in the third person. That’s the thing. If they were pet names, used to the people, I wouldn’t mind, because I wouldn’t be being made to collude with the oddness, it’d be your own affair.

Who am I kidding? It would still totally bug me. But there you go, sometimes in life, you get to be unreasonable, and there’s no time for that like 2am.

PS: For those of you who are unsure, to "decimate" means to kill on in 10 of. So it is exactly a tenth of the strength of "annihilate". This thing where people say "they were absolutely decimated" is maybe even worse than the thing where people say "literaly" of things they could only ever mean figuratively. If the football team "literally decimated" their opponents, what you're saying is that they genuinely and really, not metaphorically, made their opponents choose one man out of every ten on the team, and then killed those guys. @#$%^&*(

In Which Expectations are not so much Great as Mildly Unhinged

2009-06-29T11:44:00.001+10:00

On Friday it was the End-of-Block Party (not “the end of Bloc Party”, as in, “we decided to kill that band”) which, for all you non-Med kids is sort of like an end of semester party but less so. Anyway, this one was dubbed the “Red Party” ( the previous one having been a White Party, which makes us sound rather like bunches of skirmishers in the Tudors vs. Stuarts War of the Roses, now I come to write it down). Everyone was supposed to wear red (which was done with the usual level of commitment by the various attenders, which is to say that Yours Truly got completely carried away, and many people merely claimed to have thought that the pinkish tint on their black dresses was adequate on the grounds of serving a higher deity than Having-Fun-And-Not-Taking-Yourself-Very-Seriously, to wit: Looking-Hot-No-Matter-What) to support AIDS. Not to support AIDS in its admirable quest for global domination, obviously, but in order to help fight it. You know, because nothing says “serious funding for important autoimmune disease research” like “one free drink with ticket, wear red and be prepared to get lucky!!”. To this end, condoms were also handed out at this most salubrious of soirées, which advanced the cause presumably in the sense of (a) raising the awareness of the Medicine students that condom use reduced the spread of STIs and (b) reducing the risk of any of us catching it on the night. After all, thinking about AIDS is bound to put anyone in the mood (is apparently the gist), so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

ANYWAY. These trivialities aside, a reasonably pleasant time was had by all, and even if getting completely into the costume spirit was about as hip as it ever is, I still had fun (because I always do) dressing up for it. In fact, let’s face it, what with uncomfortable shoes and gigadecibel noise levels (hyperbole aside, is that even a word?) and crowding and expensive drinks and what have you, it’s important to really enjoy getting dressed up for these things because it’s so often the highlight of the evening. Maybe this attitude on my part contributes to the fact that this so often ends up being the case, but insight or any semblance of constructive thinking has never had any real role to play in the realm of blogging, let’s face it.

This is not, in fact, meant negatively, I actually really enjoy the aesthetics of interesting clothes and a chance to wear all the makeup you want without looking like a twit at 8 in the morning. At such an event, you can really go to town on your makeup, which is much more fun than just normal “try to look exactly like yourself only slightly better” makeup. I like doing this occasionally, because although I know I don’t look that different, and although anyone who was so much as slightly interested could find about a squillion (or about 280, which is more in that “a million deaths is a statistic” kind of way) photos of me on facebook, I like to pretend to myself that sometimes someone might go “ooh!” in a teen-movie post-makeover “She’s All That” spirit. I realise that this is dim (not least because that was a terrible movie, and, like I said, I barely look that different) but I lead a small sort of life and I think it is not unreasonable for me to extract these moments of mindless enjoyment from it. I do not, of course, wish for all the Freddie Prinz Jnrs. (heh) to fall for me beside fairylit pools or whatever it is, I just like to look noticeably levelled-up, so to speak.

Anyway, the upshot of this sort of slipshod thinking (and of our internet-filled and feedback-form-formed age) is that a part of me always sort of expects to get feedback about this sort of thing. Not just outfits and social functioning, but the party as a whole. This is probably a function of the fact that I’ve been being “educated” in one way or another for very nearly 20 years now (holy crap, this is the 19th year running, even if we don’t count preschool, whic we totally shoul, right?), and have basically accepted “being marked” as one of the basic precepts of life, I suppose. But this is very rarely something which actually happens for these sorts of social events. If you’re lucky, photos of you will end up on facebook (if you’re very lucky, one or two of them will even be flattering), and maybe some nit like me will write a blog post about how nice it was or something, but ultimately this is not actual follow-up in any meaningful sense.
At least having blamed the school system for this particular bit of oddness I don’t need to really worry about this strangely pathological urge of mine to ask “how I went” after these sorts of thing, I just need to continue to strenuously resist it.

This lack of feedback is probably a good thing anyway, for two reasons, even aside from the obvious ones like “who needs to worry about that sort of thing at a party? You definitely need to get out more, but maybe to different parties to the ones I’ll be at, yeah?”.

Firstly, I catch myself constantly expecting these sorts of big events to be actually momentous in some way. For something really Big and Important and Exciting to happen. In fact, these sorts of things (or things which seemed so at the time, which is enough) have happened in a good way a total of maybe four times in my adult life, despite the hundreds of parties I’ve been to. Usually what happens if you go to a party is exactly what you would expect, which is to say, very little which is out of the ordinary. This has the weird effect, in the meanwhile, that I catch myself at the party feeling like I’m waiting for the Thing to happen, when in fact it’s happening all around me, already, but is not all that momentous.

Secondly, I have a really quite impressive gift for faux pas. Notable this time is that asked if I came to this sort of party often I answered over-honestly, “not really”, and asked what it was that I did do, was utterly unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. The correct response, of course, is “I usually go to house parties” (rather than noisy crowded Event events), but this only occurred to me fully 24 hours later. At the time I succeeded in giving the impression of being some kind of housebound maiden aunt type who only occasionally leaves the house to do anachronistic things like Swing Dancing (which I like, so there). Also, asked what sort of music I actually like, I always seem to fumble inarticulately. “Oh,” (I say), “you know, most music. Lots of stuff. Not this song, particularly, but a lot of things...” And here I get carried away with not wanting to sound like a self-indulgent wanker who thinks their music taste is better than anyone else’s, and claim to have even worse taste than I actually have. What’s that even about, self? Maybe it’s because of the fact that there are, at present, 49.2 days worth of music in my iTunes. Any attempt to typefy such an amorphous mass of music must inevitably fail, but I really should pick 3 bands whose names to plump out on these occasions. Hip, but not alienatingly obscure, appealing but not overpopular. Preferably bands whose music I actually enjoy. On these grounds, Cathy Petöcz, Coldplay and The Presets are respectively excluded. Ok. In the future, I shall say “’The Bird & The Bee’, ‘Camera Obscura’, ‘The Postal Service’ and Lily Allen, this week, but I’m much to fickle to have proper favourites” which has the advantage of truth. Excellent!

In Which Parcels are given their Due

2009-06-22T20:40:00.002+10:00

Today, in the mail, I got a parcel. Not even just a mailed package of some uninspiring kind (honestly, I can’t even think of anything to put after the “like, for instance, a...” which I’d just typed. Is there anything boring to get in the mail?) but a full-on gift, mailed with a card. How awesome is that?*

There’s something fantastic about being mailed things. Letters are interesting and exciting (when they’re actual letters, rather than confirmation of enrolment forms, or bills, or Thai menus) but parcels are the both the brilliant excitements of gifts and mail combined into some kind of ultraexciting superobject. (Usually. There are exceptions to all rules in life, and friends deciding to mail me, say, half a mouse, in hilarious response to this post will be dealt with with unwonted sternness).

I don’t know what it is about the parcel process which makes things so fantastic. It could be the surprise (and certainly expected parcels are less exciting, but they’re still pretty damn fantastic), or the extra effort (thus, when I was mailed the brass plaque of my degree, I was not as excited by it as I would’ve been by something sent by a friend), or it could be that someone-was-thinking-of-me-when-I-wasn’t-there flatteringness (and this is a concept which I find unduly intriguing). I think in all probability that it’s a combination of this last point and the all-encompassing mystery of it. You don’t have any idea what will be in it (or if you do, you’ve been waiting for whatever it was in suspense), you often have no idea who it’s from (although a return address is always a good idea, nay a necessity, in a parcel, an expert in receiving parcels knows not to look straight away), and you have no idea what prompted whomever it was to post whatever it is to you.

Man, the more I think about it, the more I wish I got more of these things. Seriously, the more you think about them, the better they are.

Today’s parcel was a delayed birthday present from Hellena, a beautiful little wallet thing which she bought for me in Hong Kong (I think?). The previous one (a few months ago) had an “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” (which is so great, you guys) DVD and some parfait spoons, from Sylvia as a moving out present. (This gift was sort of meta-brilliant, combining as it did a replacement for the DVD she’s taken with her on moving moved out, - of the first and best season of a show so brilliant that it has entered the lexicon of my entire friend-core - and spoons of a variety which is also unarticulatably awesome. Parfait spoons are like tea spoons but with very long handles, for eating icecream and milkshakes and such (and getting the last St Dalfour’s marmalade out of the jar). It’s hard to quantify what it is that’s so great about them, but I do find them awfully appealing.) Before that, Georgia mailed me a surprise Christmas gift of a soap which looked and smelled like a giant licorice allsort, which was really really nice.

Once, long ago, when my Charming Cousin Alexander was far away on his navy ship (not boat), and had mentioned that he missed chocolate, I mailed him a parcel of every available type of Cadbury chocolate and extra plain Dairy Milk, about 40cm x 20cmx 10cm, which was thrillingly successful. Apparently this sort of gift rapidly makes you the most popular Midshipman aboard, and apart from that, it was heaps of fun to mail, knowing that the receiver would have no idea what was in it until he opened it.

Now I think about it, I don;t know why it should surprise and please me so much to think that the people I’m friends with think about me with fondness when I’m not there. I think fondly about friends all the time, often in their absence, and often see things and think “Ooh, Catie would love that, I should get this!” (usually just before checking my account balance and going “oh” in a small, sad sort of voice). So why should it be surprising when others do so? The more I think about it, the more I realise that I find it hard to really believe that people are thinking of me in my absence. This doesn’t bother me, it just means that I’m always startled when people say “we were talking about you the other day, and...” which is weird given how much time I spend talking about people. For someone who writes such a consistently self-absorbed and introspective blog, I sure do seem to have been standing behind the door when they were handing out the insight.

Ooh, I was about to go off on a tangent here about this point, but I note that this post is now 2 pages long, so I guess I’d better sign out before I fill everyone’s Google Reader up (or however it is that that thing works) but rest assured, dear Reader; you haven’t heard the last from me.

*NB: when I write "How awesome is that?" I want you to read it, not as a sincere question ("What is the exact degree of awesomeness pertaining to this object or event?") but in the excitable tone in which one would say "..and he's got a pilot's license, imagine that!" if one were Vince in the Mighty Boosh.

In Which Blogs and Overanalysis are contemplated in some kind of Meta-Post

2009-06-19T11:51:00.002+10:00

The thing is that blogs are doomed to failure. Not that the institution of blogging is dying out over all, you understand (although it certainly seems that its halcyon days are past, in this era of twitter and sporadic updating), but that each and every blog is, in and of itself, condemned by its own genre. (Blogs are much like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories in this respect. That genre is also infuriatingly incomplete-feeling, and leaves one feeling that in order to fully comprehend one’s reading matter, one would need to reread all the pages in different orders, as well as being something which sounds like a really good idea until you think about it even fleetingly.)

The problem is that blogs are pointless. This is broadly the point of a blog; one “logs” one’s thoughts or whatever, like a ship’s captain or similar. And this would be fine, except that most entries in ship’s logs were/are probably along the lines of “Still at sea, heading North by North West at whatever latitude and longitude. Tired of ship’s biscuit, strangely attracted to Cabin Boy, still not king [or ‘there yet’ or whatever it is that sailors want to be. ‘Free of syphilis’, maybe?].” Even when exciting things happen, they wouldn’t be written down excitingly. “Met the French in battle, engaged at 11:30am, no loss of life” is probably the way thrilling battles get logged, and the Marie Celeste doesn’t have anything like “Aliens or miscellaneous mysterious being here to kidnap us all, even though we’re halfway through dinner, brb”. It’s essentially pointless for entertainment, is what I’m trying to say here.

And that would be unfortunate even in the case of a ship’s log, but most people are not usually trying to discover the Lost Continent or fight the battles of Trafalgar, or sneak Aztec gold past the Armada or anything. Most people get up, go to work/uni, come home, relax briefly, go to bed, rinse repeat. In fact, that’s what’s particularly odd: when something fantastically interesting has happened to one, and one wishes to blog about it, these are invariably the least interesting posts to actually read (or certainly this is the case for this blog). The posts which really work are the ones where one rambles idly about some point of irrelevant thought tangentially related to one’s life. (Or this is what I tell myself, obviously).

My Very Cool Flatmate Georgia recently went to see some kind of interview/talk thing with Christian Lander, the guy who writes “Stuff White People Like” and apparently his advice for successful blogging (and man, that dude knows about successful blogging, he got a book deal within 3 months of starting his blog, or something) was above all to make your blog “about something” not just a collection of ramblings. This clearly works really well sometimes; Stuff White People Like and Cake Wrecks and Postsecret are all fantastic. But are they really blogs in the original sense? They’re kind of more like serialised articles in the newspapers of old, surely. So they’re not so much exceptions to the problem with blogs as cheating by not being really blogs per se, not attempting to record the minutiae of the lives of their writers or really “log” anything.

Also, obviously, there’s the problem of audience. I’ve blathered about this in the past (really, almost incessantly). Blogs are both 100% public - mine’s accessible to people I’ve never even heard of, let alone anyone I’ve ever met - and at the same time unlikely to be read by almost anyone. This post alone is already almost 600 words long, and with everyone on the internet constantly typing, who is there to read it all? So when you write a blog post, you need to write it such that it would be ok for anyone in the world to read it, and at the same time acknowledge to yourself that the odds are that no-one will.

Maybe that’s the problem with the content, and the reason that I keep posting this sort of thing. If interesting things happen to me, they make for very dry blog posts, and if they’re that interesting, I’m too busy doing them to blog about them. This leaves only the idle contemplation which is so often inappropriate for general publication. Thus, I’ve always fancied the idea of writing a blog post about all that fantastically pathological overanalysis which goes with being a person interacting with other people, but blogging about it would by definition make it worse.

I don’t know if anyone else does it (the overanalysis, you uinderstand) to the same extent or if I just really need to get out more, but so much do I enjoy trying to figure out who likes whom and what’s going on in everyone’s lives that sometimes I lose all concept of social normality. What’s the difference between friendly banter and flirtatiousness? I’ve never been sure (and man, not being any good at that distinction has caused awkwardness of both the obvious kinds), maybe because of having gone to a non-co-ed school. (This theory is clearly bollocks, though, since everyone else seems ok at it, probably it’s just me.) How do people tell what’s going on around them?

How, in particular, does one deal with the sort of person who pays people extravagantly insincere compliments, or playfully criticises one? That “Sunscreen” song which was so popular in about 1998 told us to “remember compliments you receive, forget the insults”, and even if it’s hard to do that without sounding ludicrously self indulgent (3 words which perfectly sum up the blogging thing, by the way), when is that appropriate? Someone the other day told me that I was “really easy to dance with, great” which was awesomely spontaneous and probably sincere, so you’d keep that in the mental file (also, awesome!). Conversely, being told that you’re “the hottest girl” in whatever category is always vaguely suspicious. Maybe this is because of some kind of deep seated insecurity, or maybe because compliments like that are so rarely sincere (indeed, the frequency of their being accurate would perforce vary inversely with the size of the category of comparison, yeah?). In this instance, the “hottest girl” category was generously expanded to include basically all the girls present pretty much straight away, which is even more of a red flag in terms of bothering to be properly pleased.

Still, obviously all such things are well meant and have a core of complimentarity to them. Even a car full of guys shouting “show us yer tits” is ultimately complimentary, even if clearly impurely motivated (not to say distressingly pointless, surely?) so maybe it’s foolish to try and weigh these things. But that, of course, is the nature of overanalysis, I guess, and everyone needs a hobby. It’s stupid, but it’s probably my favourite: overanalysis, swing dancing, craft projects. Also maybe tea?

Whoa, this post has gotten way too long, sorry guys, and well done to anyone who’s made it this far.

See? I told you I’d mention you.

In Which an Outlandish Birthday Gift is Fantastically Successful

2009-06-16T11:14:00.004+10:00

This pst, contrary to the usual spirit of this blog (UFOs fighting dinosaurs! Etcetera!) actually has a point; it details the adventures involved in the creation of Andrew's 24th birthday present, the all time best gift I have ever created, or will ever be bothered to create. If this seems like your sort of thing, read on, oh reader...

For reasons that are now largely lost to me, but which apparently have something to do with an episode of Scrubs, it has long been an ambition of Andrew’s to own a “Onesie” to wear about the house. You know the things, they’re basically a pair of pyjamas which are all one piece. Odd rural male characters in old kid’s movies (The Fox & The Hound, maybe?) used to wear red ones with a button-up flap on the back, possibly as underwear. You probably had one in your youth with built-in feet of dubious grip, and pockets, and usually a teddy bear on the left breast.

Well, since Andrew is essentially my best-friend-in-law, and since he is as hard to buy gifts for as all the other boys on the planet (Seriously, why are boys so difficult to buy gifts for? I wish they would just take to wearing earrings, like girls. Not for aesthetic reasons, obviously, because I’m pretty sure it’d look terrible, but at least you’d have a default gift, y’know?), and since I’ve recently taken to doing craft projects to keep me warm while we watch TV of an evening, I figured that this birthday it was time to do something about it.

Finding a pattern was rather more difficult than you might imagine, since the market for adult onesies is limited to say the least, but eventually a pattern was located in the “girls’ nightwear” section of a pattern book in the Spotlight in Penrith. It was decided that a car theme would be ideal, given that Andrew is maybe even more of a Top Gear and Really Fast Car fan than most of his demographic, and miraculously, an absolutely perfect fabric was there; flannelette with cars and racing flags and “Champion” signs all over it, all in the compulsory white-and-primary-colours scheme necessary for such a garment.

Over the next few weeks, during Foyle’s War, a complete series of Doctor Who, and a season and a half of Twin Peaks (due to Flatmate-Thesis, Reality TV, and weird reception such that our TV picks up Prime and Win rather than the usual channels 7 and 9, we mainly watch TV-on-DVD in short crazes in our house) it was cut out, dithered over, and sewn. I’m too lazy to go to the barely perceptible effort of setting up the sewing machine and dedicating the actual time to making things, so it was all hand sewn on the sofa, which may mean that it falls apart on the first wash, but by then it will have served its gift-purpose.

In terms of wrapping, since I got efficient and cleaned my room last week, turning up, amongst a quantity of other junk, a largeish shoebox, it was decided that in order to explain the weird choice of fabric, the box would be coated in pictures from a Top Gear magazine, which turned out to work brilliantly.

Last year, I’d taken it into my head to make him a beanie which looked like a MarioKart chain-chomp, which didn’t actually fit, which was a bit anxiety-provoking for this year, but not only did it fit, Andrew tried it on at his birthday party and didn’t take it off until after the end of his birthday party, which was fantastic.

So, verbiage aside, here’s what we’ve got.
The box, fabric, and the tools of production:

A better view of the box, on our awful carpet:

The fabric itself, with the pocket turned out (I failed to take any pictures which have the collar, cuffs, pockets and soles of feet all in them, but they’re all in this stars-and-stripes fabric, with the stars made grippy with clear fabric paint on the soles):

Andrew in suit:

And a risqué close-up of the back-panel (which I’d had to draft, since obviously the people who designed the pattern where making a slightly less ridiculous garment) – note the great buttons we found, the same colour scheme as the cars on the suit cloth.

Anyway, you guys, long story short, it was basically the most satisfyingly successful thing ever, and was ridiculously awesome.

In Which Postgraduate Education Comes increasingly to Resemble Primary School

2009-05-22T13:44:00.004+10:00

The amazing thing about doing Graduate Medicine is how much it's like Primary School. We all seem to be regressing to a strangely childlike state. Maybe it's because of the fact that we're largely in the same groups for most of our classes, just like in primary (or, ok high-) school. Instead of seeing that girl in your Social Psychology class but rarely other than then, you see the same people all the time. It's like you're back in class 6C, strangely close. Plus, our anatomy homework is colouring-in, which is kind of neat.

Also, it seems to be causing people to act as if we were small again. In lunch time breaks, people play frisbee on the oval, or sit in little circles, eating their lunches out of lunch boxes. Nerds go to the library and study (or, as it might be, write blog posts) in just the same way as we used to go and do tests on TheSpark.com. "How gay are you?" "What will you die of?" "What are the major risk factors in osteoporotic hip fractures?"

At first, shyness abounded, like that first day in a new school, or the first day of year 7, before we rapidly coagulated into little clumps and lumps: the people who went to the same junior school/ undergrad degree over *here*, the people who are delighted to note that they both totally love Hello Kitty over *there*, and those not so quickly absorbed wandering around with their mounting anxiety thinly veiled.

After a couple of months, there are friendly cliques. These lack the impermeability of those of early high school, reminding us of year 12, when we had the shared experience of a common room and a little notional maturity to allow communication between groups. But people sit in roughly the same place in classes, and organise themselves excursions and activities, like hiking or study days or drinking until they fall over, as their various skills dictate.

Perhaps the most obvious sign of all this strange regression, nicknames abound. I think it must be a decade since I last heard someone called something like "Smell-eanor" (all in friendliness, of course). Moreover, the nature of the course means that I've seen (and, indeed, touched) considerably more of my classmates shirtless in the last 2 months than in my entire undergrad degree.

The weird thing about this is that it's not just our interactions regressing, but our behaviour too: everyone seems to act like an exaggeration of their own type. The fidgety one. The quiet one. The loud one. The guy who insists on asking a question in every lecture. The class clown. The slightly odd girl who knits in class (not previously something I'd've listed as a major type). It's a strange thing to feel yourself doing this.

I keep catching myself doing things I've been glad to've stopped in the past. I catch myself showing off, or talking too loudly, or deliberately trying to look interesting. “What is that? Who does that? This is 15 year old behaviour," I tell myself. "Ok, maybe just the one crazy homemade garment."

Maybe I'm kidding myself: now I come to think about it, maybe I'm always like this, but I worked most of the time for so long that I've forgotten what I'll get up to when left unsupervised. I wonder if it's pathological that I always seem a little bit odd, slightly off-kilter. (I wonder how it's taken me this long into this oddly-toned blog post to notice that I'm sort of mimicing the style of the book I'm reading: that explains a lot). Does a normal person feel the need to keep asserting themself (as a "Self") like this? Now I come to ask this, the answer is obviously yes.

If we weren't all self obsessed, and determined to be seen as the unique and beautiful snowflake each and every one of us, to the same extent, is, you wouldn't get fashions. Or 80 slightly different shades of nail polish to ensure that we can express ourselves. Or "skins" for phones and iPods. Or "How well do you know Rachel Jones?" facebook quizzes (who cares? I do not feel the need to define myself by the quality of knowledge I have about 230 of my acquaintances, and even if I did, I do not feel that knowing what your "favourite childhood colour", "most-luvved drink" or "**current** pet" is indicative of the quality of our friendship. (Also, what's with this trick question thing? "Current" pet? Don't let's even begin to dissect the layers of demandingness there)).

Maybe this whole regression thing is just a sort of last hurrah. We all know, we keep being reminded, that soon we will be incredibly responsible grownups, needing to look professional every day, having to take responsibility, working odd hours with no breaks. Perhaps the natural reaction to that is to want to dye your hair purple for the sheer joy of it, or go to Cargo Bar, or play at lunchtime. Still, it's strange to me that so many people are married, and have grown-up jobs, and it's strange and lovely that there are cakes on birthdays, and frisbee at lunchtime. Even if the guy who brought the frisbee is actually someone's Dad.

PS: I accidentally managed to delete the comments on this blog. Sorry mysterious commenters, I do value you, honest!