"A nation of shirkers"

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?"

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.