The Gentle Art of Hypocrisy

With a general election looming, my thoughts turn to those of hypocrisy. This sounds like a neat way to burst into social commentary, but as I’m sure you are aware I am woefully under-qualified to make even such a broad political statement. My own political views are a sloppy amalgam of laissez-faire liberality and socialist tendencies, mixed with a cynical view of humanity I got from reading too much Hemingway. Nope, in predictably solipsistic fashion it is my own hypocrisy I’m going to be talking about.

I have been struggling of late to resolve two different concepts in my mind. They have been dredged up by my own actions (which, as always, have been less than spotless recently) and the fact that I just read through all my old Preacher comics again and found the protagonist struggling with similar issues.

I like to consider myself a feminist. Whether I actually am or not is probably a matter for someone else to decide, but I give it a jolly good try. It comes naturally to my thinking that people should be treated equally, and in situations where contextual evidence suggests otherwise, allowances should be made. We live in a society with the ability to level the playing field of achievement in the majority of cases. We don’t use that ability often enough, but it is there. Therefore, the idea that someone might find their ability to achieve and be fulfilled limited by something as non-specific as their gender strikes me as ludicrous.

But, gentlemen walk on the outside of the pavement. My granddad always used to say that (R.I.P. mate), and I do it without really thinking. When I’m walking with female friends I walk on the outside so if someone gets hit by a bus it’ll be me. I go out of my way to help ladies in distress, even at the times (admittedly few and far between) when I’m not trying to get into their knickers.

Are general ideas of chivalry incompatible with a true understanding of the feminist movement? Am I being misguided and a little patronising? This question gave me pause. I was perturbed to realise that I might be being hypocritical and condescending even when trying to do a good thing for other people (even when I WAS trying to get into their knickers).

It is upsetting to realise how far this double-think extends into your everyday life. I say ‘yours’ meaning, of course, ‘mine;’ I am sure you lot are paragons of clean-living consistency. As far as I am concerned, I seem to be operating under several contradictory operating parameters at pretty much all times. My attitude to meat is one: love burgers, but consider myself an environmentalist. My attitude to narcotics is another: generally disapproving of the effect they have on social units (families etc), and won’t specify my own usage in case my Gran is reading this (since when do you use the internet, Nanny?).

For someone with a pretty high opinion of themselves (admit it, I AM pretty amazing), all this was a severe prod to the old ego-balloon. Can you still be a good person if you say one thing and do another? Are you being ridiculous if you persist in holding beliefs that you know to be contradictory to other beliefs you actually hold? I spent a solid five minutes feeling like a bit of a ballbag, I can tell you.

Luckily I came to a few conclusions that made me feel a bit better. When I sat down and thought about it, I was perhaps jumping the gun in condemning myself (either than, or my ability to rationalise my own failures has increased to monumental proportions, and I’ll never be self-reflective again).

Firstly, well, at least I’m practising, rather than preaching. I consider myself a relatively amiable dude, and I’m definitely not going to push my choices onto anyone else. If I say I think one way and then act another than it may be something I have to work on, but I’m not telling anyone else how to think or act. True hypocrisy occurs when you demand of others what you fail to deliver yourself (there’s a political comment in here too, but I sure as hell can’t find it).

Secondly, and most importantly, things are always more complicated than you imagine. My chivalrous intentions are not limited to the lay-deez. I make an attempt to do nice things for everyone, but the realisation of these attempts takes different forms. If I got out of my car and ran round to hold the door for a male friend, they might look at me strangely. The attempt at chivalry would backfire in awkwardness. If society were a little different, maybe I MIGHT do it. I think, or at least, I hope, that my attempts at chivalry are not made because they are what woman need or deserve but are what they will accept, and I’d like to do as much for everyone as I can. Most men wouldn’t mind me holding a closing door for them, and so I do that for everyone.

So perhaps I can consider myself a feminist and still help people with their shopping, and perhaps I’m still a hypocrite, but I’ve put a fair bit of thought into it. The alternatives? Either live a life of extreme consistency (apparently impossible for me) or ignore it, and risk being caught out and justly judged by others. Neither of these is particularly gratifying to me.

So I’m a hypocrite, as there are surely examples of incongruous thinking that I’ve yet to realise or deal with. But I feel a little better knowing that in areas where my own actions wander out into moral and societal grey areas, I’ve at least had a good think about why I act the way I do. If I come across something too inconsistent to rationalise then I need to do something about it.

In the meantime, I shall continue to walk on the outside of the pavement, I’ll just do it for the dudes I like as well.

Anchorage

I haven't posted a story on here in a while, and seeing as that is certainly one of the functions of this blog I suppose it's high time. Therefore...

It's quite short, I ran it off on a wet afternoon in the coffee shop. Any thoughts to verbalslapstick@gmail.com. Hope you enjoy it.

Bushes, barbecues and blatant sentimentalism

My last post was largely about sunshine, and the thought of sunshine can only lead to thoughts of barbecues. Surely eating outside, under the virgin sky, with a slab of meat thick enough to make your arteries shiver clenched between sauce-smeared fingers, surely this is the only way to be. Unless you’re a vegetarian. Or an agoraphobe.

Obviously barbecue season is a way off yet. It would be prudent to wait until the weather is a little more predictable in its generosity. No one likes eating in the wet and the cold; there are few things as pathetic as a rain-sodden barbecue. But I had a quick shufti outside at my back garden and thought to myself: “Yes, this is a beautiful and fertile land, here I may master the element of fire to enhance my repast. And probably have a few tinnies as well, and maybe watch the football through the living room window if I move the telly round a bit.”

It made me a bit nostalgic for other favourite barbecue spots as well. Firstly, the garden at my old house, which was a tangled and overgrown mass of briars and nettles when we moved in. I and my saintly, hard-working housemates transformed it over a weekend into a well-groomed and gravelled al-fresco paradise. I had the ‘before and after’ photos on my phone, and I would often amuse my friends and colleagues (and people on the tube. And sometimes people in the street) with the transformation, until I got wasted and lost my phone’s memory card in a club. Let that be a lesson to you, brethren.

The best place I ever had a barbecue was not particularly beautiful. Actually it was a scrubby patch of poured concrete and rotting litter out the front of my mate Mike’s house. It was bordered by a wall low enough to be fundamentally useless as a barrier, but high enough to fall over in the dark to comedic/painful effect. It was, therefore, completely open to the street.

So we’d kick back in ugly deck chairs, drink rubbish beer from warm cans and eat a beguiling but potentially lethal mix of frozen and scorched meat. Sometimes we’d chuck a vegetable kebab on there as well, although we would invariably burn that too. Tinny music would play through knackered speakers and all would be generally right with the world.

The best thing about it? People in the street would stop and say hello, with surprising frequency. Occasionally they’d be people we knew, and they were never too busy to scarf down a free burger, but more often than not they would be strangers who would pause and make time with us. It wasn’t anything particularly profound and I think we talked about the weather in every single case, but it was still pretty cool.

The front garden at my new house has a bush in it. It only needs the one, because the bush is unashamedly, ludicrously big. It takes up the entire space. I don’t really have a front garden, I just have an enormous shrub separating my kitchen from the street. It is so big and entrenched it could plausibly have already been there when construction began, and so the builders simply decided to build my house a metre of so further back. It’s straggly and itchy and I’m pretty sure it once ate a kid that was walking past. The only way I could have a barbecue in my front garden is if I threw a sheet over it and balanced on top, like a cloud from a Super Mario game.

So my front garden is, basically, useless. And it’s not the only one on my street that I would classify as such. Quite a few of them have impractically large pieces of arboreal nonsense taking up most of the space.

But, some might cry, the function of a front garden relates to more than its ability to contain a barbecue and a few chairs. This is a fair criticism (one which, as I hope I’ve made plain, I do not personally believe), and I will address is thus: what, in that case, is your front garden doing?

Is it beautiful? Is it a well kept and watered Eden, one that will both entrance and delight passers-by and show the whole world what a frightfully clever and organised chap or chapess you are? If so... well, good for you, I guess. You can go.

Or is it a grotty little mudhole that you barely have time to set foot in, let alone look after? Is it slowly filling up with crap and rubbish because you haven’t the time to get out and tidy it up? And it’s no good looking out of the window or up at the ceiling Mr. And Mrs. Majority, because I can see you back there looking sheepish.

All this got me thinking about wasted space, and how depressing we seem to find it. There’s always something nice about space which is being put to use, even if that use is simply letting nature do its thing. Apart from the 'hardy perennial crisp packet' and the rarer 'summertime used condom' there aren’t that many species flourishing in the front gardens of my street, and it’s a little disquieting to look at.

Picture a nasty, rain-soaked alley between two high-rises. All it has at the end is a crummy, tagged fence and, I don’t know, some mouldy cardboard boxes. Chuck some binbags down there as well. Looks rubbish, doesn’t it? Now picture the same alley, but build a solid little hut at the end, out of plywood, and put a motorcycle in it. Now it’s not just a crummy old alley, it’s a crummy old alley where you keep your motorcycle.

Am I the only one that seems to find the latter option preferable? Perhaps. But it always seems to me that a space being used for something is more... comforting, maybe, than one clearly going to waste.

Now, going out and tidying up your front garden is going to be a massive bugger. For one thing it’s probably still rainy outside, and it’s a whole lot of extra work that you could probably do without. I sympathise, I really do. I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to do about that bush.

But maybe somewhere down the line you might have a moment to step outside, and when you do, maybe you could give some thought to what you want the space to actually do. Obviously if I had my way you’d just gravel it, chuck some pot-plants on it and start making barbecue plans with your neighbours, but I can appreciate (just about) that that might not be everyone’s idea of a jolly.

There might be another use you could put it to, though. Or there might even be something you would quite like it to say about you, something you could achieve with a day or so’s hard work and then largely forget about. You could just plonk a sculpture out there. Or a birdbox. Or a plastic chair so that sometimes when the weather’s nice you can sit there with a cup of tea and watch the world go by. Just something, anything, that when you walk past it on the way back from work reminds you that this is my space, and this thing is what it is for.

I’m going to show that bush who’s boss at some point. I’ll probably shape it into something humorous first just to cripple its fighting spirit. And when I walk past where it used to rest I’ll occasionally think: “That’s where that bastard bush used to be. I remember how I laughed as I chucked its mangled carcass into the skip.” And, very briefly, I’ll smile to myself. It might work pretty well for you too. And if you do decide to put a barbecue out there, just remember who gave you the idea. I’ll bring buns, and mine’s a Kronenbourg. Cheers.

Grass is riz

For the first time in months, a shining beam of glorious light escapes from gunmetal cloud. The tiniest sensation of warmth tickles across bare skin and with it comes a sense of well-being and satisfaction that we had almost forgotten. We incline our collective faces to the sky for an instant before going back to what we were doing before. A circle of daffodils rise on a grass verge. We decide to leave the raincoat in the car. Spring is in the air.

And how welcome it is. On behalf of you, dear reader, allow me to raise my middle finger to rain, scream obscenities at snow and plant my metaphorical boot right in the metaphorical nadgers of winter in general. In six month's time the idea of snowy fields, cold noses and winter evenings might fill me with a wistful longing, but for now I’m happy for winter to piss off for good. It’s been a long, cold slog (I need not provide a link confirming this, you’ve all seen the flippin’ papers. We almost ran out of grit for the roads. Grit for the roads, people).

The cold months are of particular difficulty for sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder (known colloquially as the winter blues). S.A.D. is a mood disorder that may either contribute to clinical depression or affect people who have normal mental health through the rest of the year. I’ll give you the Wikipedia rundown to save you the time:

“Symptoms of SAD may consist of: difficulty waking up in the morning, tendency to oversleep as well as to overeat, and especially a craving for carbohydrates, which leads to weight gain. Other symptoms include a lack of energy, difficulty concentrating on completing tasks, and withdrawal from friends, family, and social activities. All of this leads to the depression, pessimism, and lack of pleasure which characterize a person suffering from this disorder.”

Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? Although S.A.D. is a recognised condition the symptoms above might sound familiar to many more people than have been actually diagnosed. The most important sufferer from these symptoms is, of course, me, and this weekend’s worth of sunshine has done me no end of good.

S.A.D. is generally believed to be related to the amount of light (specifically sunlight) that people are exposed to, largely because of the success rate of ‘light therapy,’ a treatment involving (shockingly) very bright lights. In as many as 85% of cases exposure to bright lights for a timed period each day leads to a reduction in symptoms, a pretty good statistic even allowing for the placebo effect.

Obviously there isn’t as much sunlight around during the winter, but even the average cloudy day is normally brighter than being inside. The problem is winter being such an icy bastard, and conditions generally keeping us indoors. This means less vitamin D (normally obtained from sunlight) and crucially, less exercise.

There are multiple studies linking exercise to increased well-being. Not only does the occasional run around make you physically fitter it also releases the delicious endorphins the keep you cheerful. Anybody that regularly goes jogging knows the feeling of satisfaction and self-righteousness that kicks in after you’ve been running for a while and it’s become clear you aren’t going to die. Very few of us do as much exercise as we ought to, and the rain and cold provide a huge stumbling block even if we were so inclined.

This leads to a depressive cycle that can, in some cases, become self-sustaining. You feel like crap because you aren’t getting enough exercise and vitamin D. So you can’t summon the strength to face the weather and go outside for longer than you can get away with. But the more depressed you get, the more you crave sugar and carbs (another acknowledged effect of S.A.D). Eating more combined with less exercise leads to weight gain, which makes you even more depressed, making you even less likely to face the weather and get some exercise.

Now, running around a bit isn’t going to fix all your problems. It is, however, a good way of reversing the above trend, and also serves to illustrate the following point:

In a self-sustaining cycle, removing one contributing factor may be enough to cause the system to decay entirely.

This is often proved, much to our detriment, in the various ecosystems that humanity likes to play merry hell with around the globe. Remove one element of, say, a food chain, and the rest of the system begins to degrade. A recently noticed and popularised example is the poor old honeybee, whose mysterious disappearance could lead to a devastating effect on world food sources.

However, sometimes a system that is generally agreed to be corrosive can be upset by the introduction of only one positive element. A mixture of problems that together are insurmountable can be rendered mundane by the loss of only one one. Just one action can be enough start a new, more amiable trend.

Knowing is, of course, half the battle, and the above realisation sure comes in handy. It certainly isn’t going to be blue skies from here on out (it’s only March) and there’s always the next winter to come. But taking one single action might prove to be the tipping point on a slide that is positive in nature. I would suggest using that as a motivating factor the next time the weather’s getting you down. Every run around, every visit to the gym, every minute spent out in daylight, every healthy meal you eat is... well, it’s nothing, on its own. But it’s the start of something else, a tiny part of a positive process, and I think remembering it makes things easier. When the weather outside is draggin' you down, it might make it easier if you think to yourself:

“Every moment spent outside is a bit more vitamin D, a bit more exercise, that will make me marginally fitter and marginally happier, and I’ll eat marginally less crap and so be more inclined to exercise, and if it keeps going like this I’ll be a fucking supermodel in six week’s time.”

Spring is sprung. Go outside and see.

The Grid

Hello again. Sorry about the break, but my tupping laptop packed in. AGAIN. This is the second machine in less than two years to go down the electronic plughole, and I’m not best pleased about it.

The first frustration is that my laptop may not actually be quite dead yet. It’s entirely possible that my complete lack of computing knowledge is preventing me from taking the right course of action to fix it, and I don’t really have the funds to keep securing outside help only to find that it truly is kaput.

The main annoyance, however, is the fact that I don’t really like my laptop. At all. Or, for that matter, any computer that isn’t controlled by a brightly coloured set of buttons and joysticks. I’m a big fan of my Xbox, but computers in general can 10001101010101010 right off.

My laptop was essentially an evil little box in the corner of my room, that distilled stress from the ether and printed it on a screen to ruin my life. Or a glorified typewriter, that as well.

I’m not good at the internet. I use it for email. I read online comics. I read about comics. I look at stupid videos on youtube. I watch pornography. I (occasionally) blog about the stupid stuff I think about and my own personal disasters. I use Facebook, although I’m pretty crap at it – I don’t really contribute to the community as a whole and then get sulky when I am ignored as a result. Apart from the first two and the final two, there’s nothing I really miss when I don’t surf the web every day.

So I spent yesterday trying in vain to fix my old lappy, stressing out hugely about an object that, even if I fixed it, would only serve to open up another minor avenue of stress into my life. It sounds like the simplest thing would have been to just smash the offending machine with a claw hammer and light a joint from its smouldering carcass.

Unfortunately life doesn’t allow this, at least at the moment. Maybe some day when I’ve secured my dream job (failed novelist), I’ll be able to use the computer on my terms, and use email in the same way I might a nice stationary set. At the moment the world clamours to contact me through the net, and I don’t seem to be able to make plans or learn anything new without resorting to computers. I can’t hand in my essays without typing them up first (partly because it’s university policy, party because my handwriting absolutely stinks).

But there’s a big upside to all this: I’ve got a sexy new Notebook! It’s what I uploaded all this crap with, AND I can watch pornography again (hell, I’m probably watching it now!).

I feel pretty sorry for my old laptop, banished to beneath the bed. It might still work, might have the resources deep inside itself: only it doesn’t know it, sort of like a washed out boxer in a Sunday special.

Still, I feel better now that I’m back on the grid, instead of more stressed out. It allows me to share my ponderous musings with the world, for one thing. And it’s difficult, knowing that there’s an avenue of communication you aren’t currently a part of. I’d better get used to it, I doubt this is the last technological jump I’ll witness in my lifetime, and I can’t be a crotchety old git forever. I’m only 23, for one thing. So internet, meet my new computer (I shall call her Christine). Hopefully we’ll have a good time together, until I spill beer on her, or drop her in the bath, or download a crippling virus trying to find naked pictures of Christina Hendricks.

Teapot

I have, of late, been puzzling two serious mysteries. They are related, and both are far beyond my mere mortal understanding. The first is:

Why can’t I find a teapot that just pours tea into the cup, instead of all over the table?

And the next, quite obviously, is:

Why won’t they let me road test teapots in the shop?

Now, these may not strike you as serious laments, but for one thing, I drink an awful lot of tea. I blame my caffeine addiction on my mother, who started me drinking tea at the age of, I think, 18 months. The older I get the more delicious and comforting a good ol’ cuppa seems to become, and now every morning I clutch at my mug like it holds the elixir of life.

I had assumed that when I left home for university the volume of tea I consumed would decrease (presumably replaced by alcohol). Instead, the opposite occurred; all the people I moved in with were serious tea drinkers, and the cycle of tea-making and tea-drinking soon became self-sustaining. Someone made everybody a cup of tea, and eventually someone else would feel motivated to make one by way of thanks. Finally, after seven or eight people had made you a cup of tea, you would suddenly be seized by guilt and make another round. With twelve people living in a flat, I wound up drinking roughly six thousand cups of tea every day.

A teapot, then, seems like a useful idea. Tea tastes better out of a pot, and you can put a tea cosy on it and maybe have another cup later. Plus there is something civilised and refined about pouring from a collective vessel into smaller ones. It makes you feel like a Japanese daimyo.

Or it would, if the bloody stuff didn’t just spill all over the worksurface. I must be on my fourth model by now, and that’s all they seem to do. It isn’t enough to just rely on the standard teapot shape, either, the last one I bought from Sainsbury’s betrayed me at the first opportunity.

Now, if you bought another product and it failed to fulfil its primary function, you would be well within your rights to complain and get a replacement. If you bought yourself a fridge and filled it with food, only to discover that the fridge was failing to keep things cold, you would understandably be annoyed. You’d get another fridge.

If the teapot just failed to pour out the tea, well, that’d be a bugger and I’d still probably want another one, but I suppose there are ways around the problem. You could get the tea out with a straw, and imagine how louche and bohemian you would look drinking out of a teapot! Can you imagine it? I certainly can’t, and it’s my blog!

But seeing as the tea actually does pour out, but all over the table, you’re actually getting a new, inferior function, that you certainly didn’t pay for. It’d be like if you filled the fridge with food it couldn’t keep cold and then when you opened it a boxing glove came out and smashed your face in.

The solution, obviously, is to test the teapot in the shop, but for some reason proprietors seem to have a problem with this. I can’t see why, frankly. I’m allowed to have a drive in a car before I buy it, just to make sure the wheels don’t fall off after I get out of the garage. Admittedly a teapot is less likely to plough off the road and kill me, but my point stands.

The moral of this story? If you get a teapot that works like it is supposed to, you should hang onto it forever and ever. Or send it to me in the post, as I’m clearly in desperate need of it, and apparently have little else with which to occupy my time. Well, as I said, I do drink a lot of tea.

Worryman

It’s been following me for years. Sometimes I feel like I’m outrunning it, sometimes it’s breathing down my neck, sapping my strength. Sometimes I almost forget about it, so small and manageable does it seem. But it never seems to go away.

There are three components to my insomnia. The first is largely self-inflicted, and involves a continued disruption of my natural sleep patterns. It occurs when I drink to excess, and exchange sleep for a few hours of stupefied unconsciousness. It occurs when I take drugs, and find I can’t sleep at all for what feels like a fortnight. It occurs when I make the conscious decision to stay up all night playing Mass Effect 2 (worth it!) and find the dawnlight creeping spitefully around the blinds on Monday morning.

The second is a biological and possibly hereditary component. Sometimes it just takes ages for me to drop off. I’m not exactly exhausted, but I am pretty tired, but I just lie there dozing for hours on end. Sometimes I wake early for no reason I can find, and doze for hours until my alarm goes off (at which point I hit snooze and fall deeply asleep). I require good sleep hygiene. My father suffers from a similar complaint, as do some of my brothers. It can be managed by regular, timetabled exercise and what could be broadly termed cognitive behaviour therapy (I refer to it as “not fucking around anymore and sorting stuff out”). It could be a LOT worse. I am always grateful that my insomnia is not linked to a more concrete and less manageable cause like clinical depression or pain-related conditions.

The third and most irritating cause is my anxiety, an admission that upsets me on several levels. To begin with, it’s a massive bugger. I mean, seriously Brain, can we not come to a better working arrangement here? I’ve got a job interview tomorrow. I need sleep in order to perform well at said interview. Acquiring said job will give me better access to funds with which to procure goods and services we can both enjoy. Help me to help you. What do you mean we’ve discussed this before?

I also don’t like the fact that my anxiety keeps me awake because it’s a wussy condition I try to not to give credence to. I do not, let’s make this absolutely clear, have any major problems in my life. I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. Life, in short, is sweet.

And yet… it’s been following me for years. A nebulous cloud of half-formed worries and associations, sometimes gaining a toehold in my mind, sometimes relegated to the fringes. Again, none of them are particularly grievous. Bills left unpaid. Important forms lost. Friends and acquaintances upset. Love lost and unlikely to be recovered. The vague feeling that, at some point in the near future, I’m going to get in trouble about something.

It’s bollocks, innit? It really is all in my head. And yet there seems to be some gap between my hearty rationalisations and the feeling in my gut. Even though I know this stuff isn’t important, it still keeps me awake at night. It makes me hide from my responsibilities, and shy from acquiring new ones. It makes me moan constantly to anyone who will listen. It fills up my blog with self-indulgences when I should be writing funny lists about parties and stuff.

There is, however, a bright side. Sometimes it goes away.

Occasionally I emerge from this ridiculous cloud, always unscathed. It happens at key turning points in my life, those moments when you get the feeling that this could be it, this could be the fresh start the marks the beginning of everything else. From now on, you will be a new man. You will pay those bills on time, you will file every letter. You will be virtuous in thought and deed and not watch nearly as much porn on the internet. You will visit your gran regularly and find a nice girl and cease telling pointless lies to everyone you meet.

It doesn’t last. I fall back into old habits. I let things slide away from me until they begin to swarm and amalgamate, returning to me bigger and more menacing than they even seemed in retrospect. I let it happen because I’m lazy, and because, perhaps, I’m not the person I think I ought to be yet.

The potential, however, is there. The potential to make it all stick this time, to make the next big change mark the start of my adult life. When problems will be assessed, analysed and finally crushed under the mighty engine of my self-belief and maturity. When I wake up early every morning having slept the sleep of the just and look life right in the face even as I kick it in the nadgers.

Inspiring stuff, eh? Unlikely too, but it’s nice to have a goal. And the main thing, as we’ve already explored, is that it’s no big deal anyway. It keeps me up at night sometimes, but I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. And I have you, dear reader, and next week I shall be funny again. I promise.*

*Author's note: may not actually be funny.

Smartest man in the room

When I was a kid I always thought I was pretty smart. This fondly held belief stemmed from several places, all of them destined to take firm root in my childish psyche.

Firstly, I think that during significant portions of my childhood, I was probably better educated (or at least better read) than children of my age. I spent most of my early years in bed after contracting juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and all I did was read. This meant that when I finally got back into school, I knew a whole lot about a whole lot of stuff. This contributed to a slightly inflated sense of my own intelligence, largely because being slightly smarter than a group of children is no great feat. Kids are idiots.

Secondly, I valued my social standing too much to hang around with the children who were noticeably intelligent. This meant that I could exist in a state of heady solipsism, never running into anybody who could challenge my intellectual mastery (except teachers, and they clearly did not count).

Thirdly and most importantly: my mum told me I was clever. All the time. And I believed her because, as previously mentioned, kids are idiots.

I don’t think this erroneous belief is limited to yours truly. I think a lot of people go through their early lives secretly knowing themselves to be the one smarty-pants in a world full of durr-heads (please forgive these technical terms).

Then you move out, go to uni, go to work, go and see a bit of the world, and it slowly dawns on you that perhaps you are not the towering mental colossus that you always thought you were. At first it’s a gradual process: people get consistently better grades than you or they mention books and films and people that are apparently important but of which you have limited knowledge. Then you find that more and more people seem immune to your charms and manipulations. You find yourself outsmarted by your boss, your lecturers, the postman. Finally you end up in a pub on a Thursday afternoon in the midst of a heated debate about globalization and you realise, with a flailing horror akin to loosing your grip on a ladder, that you don’t know a single thing about what they are talking about and furthermore, may not have had an original and/or interesting thought in your entire life.

It’s a rough moment. I pray, for your sake, that it occurs but once. The sad fact, however, is that you are probably destined to stumble through these moments a score of times in your life. In fact, fuck it, I take back my prayers, if it happens to me (me! A tupping genius!) then I bloody well hope it happens to you.

If you want the cake of shame to taste really awful you need a good few spoonfuls of arrogance in there first, and your own intellect is an easy thing to be arrogant about. Firstly it is the limit of your own consciousness, which makes it difficult to accurately map what lies beyond it. To paraphrase another famous idiot, it’s hard to know what you don’t know you don’t know. Secondly, knowledge is a tricky thing to define – what is important for someone else might not count for you and vica versa. It’s easy to dismiss what others know as useless or indulgent, and see your own way of thinking as vital and dynamic. Finally, it’s really, really hard to admit the plain truth – that quite a lot of people are much more intelligent that you are.

Actually, there is perhaps one more point: that a lot of people in your immediate vicinity seem to be idiots. I mean honestly, they’re everywhere. On the telly. In the newspapers. Writing the newspapers. Advising the most powerful man in the world. The most powerful man in the world. When the majority of the educated world hold themselves to be more intelligent that the President of the United States of America (who is, let us not forget, basically the king of the world; when the aliens arrive they aren’t going to be visiting Kevin Rudd first of all), then we might be forgiven for holding an inflated sense of our own mental acuity. OK, so they’ve got another one now and he seems quite bright, but the point still stands.

The problem is that you cannot measure your intelligence by comparing yourself to people noticeably thicker than you. It might be easy to feel clever in a room full of numpties, but you aren’t necessarily that smart of the general scale. If you play for a men’s football team, you cannot claim to be the best in the league if you only play against girls under-13’s squads.

This would normally be where I would try and draw the whole post together with a relatively positive, upbeat solution. Well, not this time, thicko. You’ll just have to accept the fact that quite a lot of people are quite a lot more cleverer than you, innit. And unfortunately, the only way to advance on the road to cerebral progress is to consistently interact with those people, even if it means getting your mental faculties rubbed in the metaphorical dirt every so often.

On the other hand, you could just hang around with your mum all day. Every mother tells her child that they are the sharpest knife in the drawer. But remember she’s only saying it because you are her kid, and if we’ve learned anything today it’s that (sing it with me folks!): kids are idiots.

Stuff to read

OH HAIY!!

Yup, another big break, another miserable fortnight without my humorous guidance and comment. But fear not, dear hearts, I have been busy in the interim. Firstly, there's an updated (and much changed) version of the Annulus story that I posted here ages ago. This one is a bit less sexy and quite a bit more... unpleasant. Secondly I have another short (2k ish) story, a sort of mythic conceptual... thingy. It's fluff, really, but you'll get through it in five minutes. It's called The Tale of Tan Lushan.

The real reason for my absence was an essay on surveillance as an ideological fantasy that took forever to write, but it's a pile of old wank and I certainly wont be boring you with that.

Normal service resumes as soon as the next personal disaster befalls me.

Return of the Mac

On New Year’s Eve – or more specifically early on New Year’s Morning – my friend Shortround and I were discussing a mutual interest, in one of those life affirming conversations where you both express your love for a shared person or thing, reaffirming both how good that thing is but also your friendship and what it is based on. It was a good talk, and it was about how much we both fucking love Annie Mac.

I doubt it’s necessary to go into detail as to our reasons. She plays good music, she plays good shows, she’s introduced me personally to a lot of really great tunes that I would not otherwise have heard (well, not me personally, obviously. Although that would be brilliant). It doesn’t hurt that she’s really fit and has a voice like a honey fondue.

We were, inevitably, pretty smashed. The night had been good to us. And, because I have a tendency to get over-sentimental when I’m high and also because I never know when to let go of a conversation thread, I began to imagine what I might say to her should I ever get the chance to meet her.

I’d probably tell her that I think she’s pwetty, but I think I’d save that until the end in case she immediately loses interest or has a bodyguard or a stun gun in her bag. Firstly I would say that even though we’ve never met, she’s done quite a bit for me, sorted me out with some really good times, and that I and all her other fans (and let me tell you, we are legion) really appreciate that.

Now, Annie Mac gets this all the time. I am not (shock horror) the first person to think of thanking a famous person for being in their lives. I am also not the first person to get over-sentimental just because I have a little crush on said famous person.

What I REALLY would have wanted to say was that listening to her has brought me closer with some other people I care about, Shortround in particular. I probably wouldn’t say that if he was there with me, because that’d be a bit embarrassing and might possibly lead her to believe we were a couple (which clearly would damage my, admittedly slim, chances with her and let me get this straight: I’d beat up Shortround to get with Annie Mac. Fact).

It’s a mushy sentiment, and one that, by that point in the night, I was well beyond expressing in such a coherent manner. If I had run into Annie Mac, I probably would have just given her a high five, and then maybe gone off to have a cry. And I doubt I’m going to get up on the radio and say it either – she almost certainly has people screening her calls for people that just want to gush over her.

The point is: that I like Annie Mac so much partly because my friends like her too. I love Metal Gear Solid because my little brother loves it, and can do all the voices. I like dubstep primarily because of the people I listen to it with. There are hundreds of books I cherish, but the icing on the cake is having a fulfilling, positive talk about one of them with someone I care about that likes it too.

Wanting to keep something to yourself is something we’re all guilty of. In times gone past I’ve been secretly disappointed when bands I like have become more popular, and I have to share them with other people. And with the New Year already under way I’ve come to a decision: that’s just the kind of elitist crap we can do without.

I think art is about sharing; I think I’ve said this before here. Although yes, I truly and sincerely believe that an artefact can communicate with an individual on a personal and private level, and that this is part of what art is and what it always should be, I would always want to turn to a friend and ask what they thought of it.

We didn’t get to see Annie Mac that night. We’d overstayed on one place and couldn’t get into the next place, and although we were disappointed, we knew there would always be next time. The main thing was- I’d gotten together with Shortround and half a dozen or so others, and we’d shared something for a bit. Now, January is a pretty crummy month, in my opinion. The weather stinks, and no one has any money. So, if you could do with a little flash to cheer you up, even only briefly, I would like to posit this: that there’s stuff to share, and people to share it with. There will always be someone out there who has shared an experience with you and would be willing to talk about it for a spell, even if it’s something as mundane as a book or a film or what you did on your New Year’s.

So at the risk of sounding trite, get out there and share a little; it’ll make you feel better.

Stay the fuck away from Annie Mac, though. She’s mine.