Koh Phi Phi

Added on 23/02/2007

Distant Memories of a Distant Holiday - Part 1

Japan was superb - jetlag passed pretty quickly and all the planning worked out like clockwork. Had several "Bill Murray moments" where I just ripped the piss out of people but soon decided that it was too easy and doing it solely for my own amusement had limited value... Everyone makes up for their lack of English with a real willingness to help. Took shitloads of photos in fact - great city and lots to see, food was problematic at times but I tried to limit my fast food intake in favour of Sushi, Soba and all that jazz.

I went to an Onsen (Japanese steam bath thing), and, in my haste to blend in with the locals, I under-ordered in terms of towels (you're supposed to take in two - one to cover your cock/ wipe yourself down, and the other as a bath towel for after). I didn't get the cock one - I just hopped around completely naked and got a lot of funny looks.

Also went on a mountain trip – climbed a good 850m and got extremely sweaty at the top, where the temperature was dramatically lower = very uncomfortable. Luckily I had a change of top with me...

Tokyo finished nicely with Tepanyaki and Mr. Jones at Karaoke - I "scored" 71% according to the machine, but I was secretly disappointed I didn't get a higher score...

Anyway, on Koh Phi Phi (set of islands where that shit Di Caprio film was... filmed) right now, just getting OUT of the sun for a while cause I'm burning up.

I think I'm going to go for "Option number 2" on the woman front - fucking around out here would be pretty easy (though admittedly slightly harder when travelling alone) - plenty of hot girls - but I don't really think I want to. More up for meeting the woman of my dreams, becoming infatuated, trying to sustain it back in England then getting broken-hearted when it all blows up in my face. Sounds like a plan.

It's incredible here, just the right balance of relaxation and activity before I hit Phangan: blue skies, white sand, turquoise water... I'd send you photos but the ones I have are probably the same/ worse than any you can find if you Google Koh Phi Phi. Accomodation is good but quite expensive, especially for Thailand - I suppose I've earned it. I think I'm going to get a (legitimate) Thai massage this afternoon, then there's a "half-moon party" tonight. Food is dirt cheap, and they have quite a variety.

[~3 days later]

The "loose woman amnesty" lasted approximately 12 hours (from writing the e-mail) - cute French nurse. I have thus far resisted all self-congratulatory admissions – however subtle – to the lads I have met over here, even when they've been telling me of their conquests: I completely avoided the subject when it came to the inevitable psuedo-competitive male chats. I fucking hate it when people - especially guys - just casually drop into conversations who they've slept with/ which drugs they've been doing/ how hard they've been partying/ how late they've stayed up... in order to gain the respect of their peers. "Yeah, a couple of nights ago we had 3 massive bottles of Vodka before we went out, met a couple of cheekies and stayed up 'til 8 in the morning going at it, if you know what I mean... Then we dropped some pills and got back on it, that's why we're cool..."

Snatch 22

Personal life update: I am no longer seeing the sex-for-comfort girl. It ended (about a month ago - I keep forgetting to write) with a rather frank series of admissions on both of our parts - for her, that she'd started seeing someone else and had lied to me about this and a couple of other details on several occasions, and for me, that I really didn't care enough about her to bother being anything like a boyfriend. Or, for that matter, a friend - she proposed that we keep in touch but I flatly refused, declaring that she didn't offer me enough as only a friend to be worthy of taking up any of my time. A little harsh, but ultimately true.

So that would make me single again: oh, you lucky girls - now you can look forward to either my feigned and contrived arrogance in intoxication or my mock-apathy, awkwardness and self-ridicule in sobriety. What a marvelous catch...

I often wonder exactly what I'm looking for in the opposite sex. For one thing, I obviously want somebody who is capable of being a best friend, or else I would begrudge electing to spend time with her over other, closer friends. The problem here is this: I make real friends neither quickly nor easily, and even when I do, I'm terrified that I can't sustain the kind of constant contact with them that they seem to share elsewhere, either with their other friends or with their partners.

So what qualities would those people capable of being a best friend to me have? What qualities do my closest friends have? Independence; confidence and self-esteem enough not to adversely affect their day-to-day living; loyalty; reliability; humility; the capacity for abstract thought (a phrase admittedly stolen from a chat with CM); the capacity to either encourage or ignore my erratic, occasionally tiresome sense of humour... But this is not all.

I have recently been seduced by the theory that relationships are made significantly easier when they are between individuals of a similar outlook and understanding. How might two people happen to have a similar outlook and understanding? At this time, I really do believe that my best shot at a decent relationship would be with somebody of a similar background to me, as this would imply (but not guarantee) that their outlook and understanding would be similar. I also believe that the more unique somebody's background, the more difficult it is for them to connect on anything beyond a superficial level with another person.

So, ok, what defines my background? My religion and culture are a good starting point: on a general level, I was raised as an informed free-thinker in an ethnic/ religious-minority family, in which the level of religious observance has decreased exponentially over the last two generations. The traces of guilt caused by this decrease in religious observance have also diminished but are still recognisable, even within me. In addition, there is a persistent, Damoclean obligation to appease the tight-nit, exclusive and judgmental community from which it is almost impossible to escape.

Were it my religious and cultural background that substantially defined me, things would be fairly simple, but most of the women I meet of a similar religious and cultural background remind me of those esoteric religious and cultural stereotypes from which I recoil.

On the other hand, there has always been a barrier between me and those women who do not share a similar religious and cultural background: I have always felt marginalised from the Anglo-Christian culture because I grew up knowing that I was different and that we didn't participate in their culture. Examples I have cited in recent conversations include: having Sunday lunch, celebrating Christmas, and calling one's Grandma "Nanna".

The same is true in reverse: my Anglo-Christian (girl)friends did not grow up with the customs which were and still are a part of my life, and so they will perhaps feel a little alienated when I am either carrying them out or discussing them, especially with friends of a similar background. For some, the process of learning about my religious and cultural background and its psychological implications has proven difficult, and in any case, I honestly don't think I can go through educating another girl as to why I do this and that, what one should say to family when a relative dies, what to do at a wedding, what certain foods are etc.

This is partly the debris of a childhood which, while it encouraged cultural identity (which I would never attempt to portray in a bad light), was also steeped in an us and them mind-set.

Moving on, I am also defined, in terms of background, by: my privileged education, recycled philosophies and Socialist ideals, albeit pock-marked by the familiarity of comfortable, Capitalist living; the loving, occasionally overbearing and reciprocally guilt-ridden relationship I have with my family; my father's illness and my impotence to help him, myself or my family deal with it emotionally...

There are certainly more aspects of my background to consider, but I am already setting a specification so detailed that it would be impossible to match. In any case, I said similar, not identical.

Does anybody out there match up? If so, could I lose the veil of vanity currently obscuring my vision in order that the contents of her mind alone made her sufficiently attractive to me?

It's going to be funny looking back on this series of thoughts in 20 years, as I'll either be single, bitter and lonely, or married and inevitably enduring a degree of compromise. The question is, of just how much compromise am I capable?

Peace, Love...

Empathy is a powerful faculty (and by far my favourite of the pathos derivatives), but it does not come effortlessly to a lot of people. Indeed, the effort involved in empathising with another human being, or even animal - depending on its perceived cognitive aptitude - is often considered too great for the masses, unless a catastrophe manages to take up enough newspaper columns to force the required levels of consideration (and, failing or in addition to that, guilt).

We certainly do not have the time or perhaps even the emotional capacity to shed a tear for every life ruined or unfairly taken, but the West has often been accused of attaching more value to the lives of its own citizens than it attaches to the inhabitants of war-torn or third-world countries. I can hardly agree more with this view, and while stories continue to be published of scores of Iraqis killed every day in bombings, gun-battles and abductions, the real headline-grabbers seem to be of the lone British soldiers killed in action. I am deliberately discounting the ulterior political motives newspapers have for prioritising their stories, for example as an emotive condemnation of war (and therefore the government), because this would only seem to strengthen my argument: people are more moved by the death of Corporal John Smith, son of Mr. and Mrs. Smith from A-small-town-near-you, than the 28-or-so Iraqi unknowns killed in a car-bomb in a suburb of Baghdad.

I was looking only recently at the BBC's obituaries to those killed in the 7/7 bombings, and was quite moved. Why? Because it was easy to imagine myself in many of the victims' situations: I live in central London, I regularly use the public transport system, and, had things have been very slightly different, I, like many others, could have been on one of those trains. I cried a little when I read some of the obituaries, partly because of the things I seemed to have in common with some of the victims. Again, the tears were not hard to muster...

Surely empathy should transcend that which is so easily imaginable? Surely the desire and intellectual capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody so far-removed from our own sickening, affluent lifestyles in order to understand what it must be like for them to have lost something they cherished is not beyond us?

Our commonalities as a species (and beyond) are far more important than our commonalities as a race, religion, nationality, or culture: do we not all laugh, cry, love, grieve and envy? It is only a disparity in our emotional triggers that differentiates us according to those societal subsections.

Without empathy, we are lost in a lonely world...

Meme-Lag

Yeah, so about seven years ago Ambrose meme-tagged me. This means I have to tell you what music I am listening to at the moment, which gets a little difficult as I have recently joined the masses and imported my digital music collection into iTunes, where I have it permanently set to shuffle. I'll try though:

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 6 other people to see what they're listening to."

In no particular order then, with a brief and uncalled-for commentary:

1. Dorothy at Forty - Cursive
I share Ambrose's initial disappointment with the new Cursive album, Happy Hollow - Tim Kasher's lyrics are usually so original, but this album seems to be littered with the kind of tired pseudo-existential angst I would have thought him to be beyond. This is one of the highlights though.
2. Beautiful World - Colin Hay
Heard this on an episode of Scrubs. Liked it.
3. Fucker - The Brian Jonestown Massacre
A friend introduced me to The BJM, through their Tepid Peppermint Wonderland album and the film/ documentary, Dig!, both of which are worth experiencing.
4. Leif Erikson - Interpol
Great finishing song to a great album, Turn on the Bright Lights (I don't care what they say about Joy Division having already done it better).
5. On Any Given Night - 36 Crazyfists
I'm going to see 'Crazyfists in concert tomorrow night. Very good Scremo (I think - I've never been too good with genres). New album not as good as the last, which is highly recommended (A Snow-Capped Romance).
6. Lying Through Your Teeth - Head Automatica
Shameless pop song from that Daryl Palumbo dude from Glassjaw and that Dan Nakamura dude from... everything (Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modelling School etc.), but a lot of fun.
7. Wings for Marie (Part 1)/ 10,000 Days (Wings Part 2) - Tool
Mind-blowing - all seventeen-plus minutes of it. According to Wikipedia, "Marie" is the middle name of [frontman Maynard James] Keenan's deceased mother, Judith Marie Garrison. As Keenan explains in his commentary on A Perfect Circle's aMOTION DVD, Judith suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. The two-part song, "Wings for Marie", is an opus dedicated to her. The length of time between the paralysis and her death was 27 years, or approximately 10,000 days. Great new album too (10,000 Days), much more accessible than the last one.

That's it. Unfortunately, I don't know any other untagged bloggers in order to meme-tag them...

It's That Time Again

One year since I started this. Just thought I'd mention that - I have no introspective "How have I changed?"/ "What have I achieved?" dialogues planned, just the fact alone. A while ago I thought of revisiting my New Year's Resolutions on here for a public evaluation of my integrity, but decided against it due to the fact that to do so seems rather formulaic and predictable. Suffice it to say that, even as my own most spiteful and damaging critic, I am confident that I have followed up on most of the list, save eating less meat and not picking my nose in public. Oh, slap my wrists...

I've been thinking a little too much recently about how (I imagine) other people perceive me, particularly in comparison to the way I perceive myself. When I think like this, I am reminded of a scene in Godard's Le Petit Soldat (I watched this film as a part of my French course at University, though regrettably I didn't pay much attention to it, aside from this particular scene of course), in which the protagonist looks at himself in the mirror for an extended period of time, periodically covering his eyes, then uncovering them, then recovering them. He is assessing, not without a sense of bewilderment, the gulf of difference between how he looks and how he feels.

I guess people do this kind of thing all the time, most notably when they are scrolling through photographs and linger on the ones in which they feature. This isn't necessarily narcissism: true, it is a fascination with how we appear, or even sometimes the fact that we appear at all, but this is because we are not accustomed to a third-person perspective of oursleves.

There's a fine line between insecurity and vanity: let my accusors think what they like, but I need this to make me feel good.

A Little Respect

An hour until the cleaner gets here - what better an opportunity to catch up on a bit of blogging? I have to let her in because nobody else is in the flat and she doesn't have keys, then I can go out for a morning run. Admittedly I haven't written anything in ages, but this is because I feel a bit like I have been swept up into the London whirlwind again, and in addition, as I mentioned to CM the other evening, I am trying to channel my creative energy into music at the moment (without any overwhelming success, but picking up my guitar twice in the last week is a start...).

So not much change, globally speaking, in my life at the moment, though I find myself more often than not on the verge of clinical disappointment. It occured to me last night that one of things with which I am not satisfied is that, while I look around at all these people who seem to have reached a certain stage of adulthood, I really don't feel like I'm there yet. Yawn. But when I look in the mirror, all I see is the same skinny boy I saw when I was a teenager. I've subtly changed as a person, but my relationships with friends have the same basis in mockery and derisory comments they had when we first met (i.e. when we were kids), and often no more sophisticated. With some of my work colleagues, I am conscious that I am not taken seriously or respected - this isn't paranoia - and some of them, after almost two years, still rely on the same old tired jokes based on the confusion between my metrosexual outlook/ refusal to be an old-school alpha male/ lack of obviously manly physical traits (for want of a better phrase, I am a pretty boy) and their prejudice against homosexuals. This is most likely in order to try and strike some kind of chord with me - I play along with it to a point, but I've started snapping back at them recently, complaining of a lack of originality and that their obsession with my alleged homosexuality is probably rooted in their own closets. Still, this doesn't do my office credibility any good, but then I'm finishing this contract - perhaps without return - in November so that I can go on my mammoth trip around the world (well, a couple of months, mostly in Asia)...

I've also just had a week of confrontations, with two at work and one with a friend. Let's start with work - these were quite ridiculous. The first was with a black colleague, who, when I asked why there was another (black) man in his seat, said, infront of several other people of different ethnicities, in a very accusatory manner, "It's because we all look the same, isn't it?" I was a little dumbfounded, but felt like I had to break the silence somehow. "Easy, easy" (English slang for calm down) didn't quite say all that I wanted to say, neither did my quiet word with him afterwords asking if he was ok by referring to his "bitter comment". What I actually wanted to say was something like,

"I don't appreciate you making me out to be a racist on the back of my recognition that you had changed seats with another black man. If you have a big fat fucking chip on your shoulder because you still haven't come to terms with the fact that you are black after almost thirty years then that's your fucking problem - just don't bring it to work with you, and definitely don't inflict it on other people, ok?"

Though I suspect the little man in my head would want me to say, "Ok darkie?" at the end for purely comic effect. Talk about a fucking persecution complex - I thought my lot were bad...

The reason I didn't come back with a speech like this is because I'm basically very bad at confrontations: I like to take the time for considered rational thought before getting angry - this makes me pretty useless in arguments too. Until such point as I have decided I can rightfully counter-attack (and figured out exactly how I would like to phrase said counter-attack), my priority is usually to defuse the situation as quickly as possible and make sure that I haven't caused any undue offence. The unfortunate consequence of this is that I often get angry well after the event and never have the chance to air my feelings, and this type of unilaterally unrequited argument does not make an ideal host for forgiveness/ resolution. I guess I have a lot of half-arguments stored in my head. I am, in this sense, completely lacking in emotional drive*.

The second confrontation at work is hardly worth mentioning - a paranoid free-thinker (though one for whom I have a lot of respect) getting the wrong end of the stick and subsequently asking if I had a problem with him. No I don't, so go back to the fairies and tell them everything is fine (I think what I actually said was, "Absolutely not" before checking - 20 minutes later - why he thought there may have been a problem).

The third is more significant. A friend, A, asked me last weekend - allegedly as a representative of a couple of the other guys in our friendship group - why I had been so distant recently. So they're finally sitting up and taking notice! I admire him for having the stones to ask, and had a long chat, basically telling him I'm doing my own thing at the moment and I'm doing ok, and that I don't really like the fact that within our friendships everything is up for mockery and that some things I'd prefer to keep to myself. In addition, I also said that I felt that - and this was the crucial bit - he and the others did not pay enough respect to the fact that, while a joke is acceptable amongst those who know it is only a joke and that there is only a small basis in truth, other people present might not fully understand because they do not know the subject of the joke (i.e. me) well enough, which would lead them to form potentially damaging opinions of the subject. We are so quick to escalate an innocent action or comment into a wildly exaggerated and perpetuated label for our friends - all borne out of a desire for unity through esoteric comedy - that we forget that some people just aren't in on the joke.

This came to my attention recently when the fiancée of one of my friends - who I don't know all that well - took issue with something quite innocent that I had done and inappropriately accused me of always doing that, whatever "that" may have been. The context of the situation, and the fact that she didn't know me well enough for me to have always been doing anything, lead me to only one conclusion - that she was unknowingly jumping on the "Ben is x" exaggeration bandwagon, which she could only have picked up from her fiancé and my other friends. My point to A was this - I'm all up for a joke, but be careful how far you take these jokes and in front of whom.

In other news (I think I used that phrase a while back - I'm just waiting for the paperclip to reprimand me for using a stock phrase) I am kind of seeing someone else now - what a great few months it has been for my soulless sex-life. It's going nowhere - for one, I don't really like her all that much (how despicable). In addition, she says she doesn't want anything serious as she's just come out of a long relationship. Fine, so couple this with my first admission, and conclude that all I want is sex: while she knows this, I am not allowed to overtly state it, nor is she willing to accept that if she doesn't want a serious relationship, and she doesn't want a solely physical relationship, then she's just using me to comfort her. What a mess - I'd give it another week, maximum.

The cleaner's here, so off I trot...

* The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley (1997 ed. pp134-136) has a very interesting discussion on why acting on our emotions (and others' expectations that we do so) can be more advantageous in the long run than considered rational thought.

The Beautiful Game

The relationship - if you can call it that - is finally over. It was dying a slow death anyway as both of us eventually lost the will to maintain any kind of regular contact. We finally got round to discussing us last night, at which point I jumped in and offered a white lie - that the distance was too great and we didn't really have enough time/ opportunities to see each other - as a decent and credible excuse for us not seeing each other anymore. The truth is slightly different, but at least with this explanation both of our egos stay in tact.

As dating is an art form - one about which I am pretty sceptical - so, they say, is football (...seamless...). As I sit on the couch (perhaps the longest time I have spent on the couch since I moved in, as I like to think I usually have better things to do than passively vegetate the evening away, and in any case our living room is usually dominated by A, my mildly depressed diversion-seeking lawyer flat-mate who sits for hours on end flicking from one appalling American comedy or gritty, life-replacing, morale-sapping drama to the next...) watching the football - and in the time in between games, the news - I am pleasantly surprised to see the relatively few reports of violence. Doubtless this is because of the huge police presence in Germany, but it really is refreshing to see fans, and especially England fans, behaving moderately well.

Football fanaticism to the extent I have seen it in England, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Turkey (need I go on?) has long been one of the phenomena of modern Western society I have never understood. It may even surpass racism for its level of incomprehensibility. Anybody who would want to physically or verbally attack another person based solely on the football team they wish to be successful, or even the team they manage or for whom they play, is frighteningly close to insanity.

Hillsborough; Heysel; death threats to Steven Gerrard and his family based on speculation that he might leave Liverpool; the murder of Andrés Escobar for scoring the own goal that knocked Columbia out of the 1994 World Cup; the sacking of Ahn Jung-Hwan by Perugia for scoring the goal which knocked Italy out of the 2002 World Cup... None of it makes sense.

Chanting - I can see why, at the ground, some would want to shout words of encouragement to the team they supported, but why bother chanting in a pub, hundreds of miles away? Because it creates a good atmosphere? Because it's fun? Because it encourages unity? I'm not convinced I really want unity with these neanderthals. As I look round, most of my middle class friends don't chant, and the ones who do, look - and, I sense, feel - a little out of place.

In addition, the emotive and provocative content of many of these chants baffles me: perhaps I'm guilty of taking the words too literally but I am in no doubt that many people honestly hate rival supporters and players. Why do I feel I can't take my future son to a game without him hearing a catalogue of profanity and indecency? A little conservative perhaps, but fuck it, politics is just another buffet...

It seems that, for many, football fanaticism really has become religion, and along with it come the seemingly inevitable tribalism and mortal evangelism that have somehow persisted through the millenia.

According to Riverbend, Muqtada al-Sadr has issued a fatwa against football and the World Cup - I guess this is just the other side of the same coin: a pedantic and uncompromising devotion set against an alarming backdrop of hatred and intolerance for all those who do not conform. I'd like to think though that he secretly gets one of his mistresses to dress up in an England shirt at bed time, you never know...

May You Dream the Sweetest Dreams

There are a lot of thoughts I have during the day that probably ought to end up on this blog, if only to add colour to what is ostensibly a patchy outline of my character. They rarely do, and I have a terrible memory anyway.

One thing I'd been meaning to explore a little more fully (if only in my mind) is my lack of a will to trust people, and my even stronger denial of complete forgiveness to even the most potentially deserving of candidates. In the immortal words of George W. Bush, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

In any case, I think the miniature relationship I have been having with the girl from the party is about to end - I'm just not excited enough about her to continue seeing her. Ironic, since we recently watched Les Poupées Russes (Russian Dolls - the mediocre sequel to Cédric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole) together, in which the protagonist explains that for many men, meeting women is very much like a Rusian doll experience: you spend your time in relationships that don't work simply because you can't settle for the girl you are with, which is in turn due to a desire to see if the next Russian doll is a little more suitable/ desirable. One day you have to realise what you have and stick with it. Not today I guess.

I think that I am also guilty of/ suffering from a perpetual feeling of apathy in many aspects of my life. If this is a step towards the kind of disconnected objectivity over which philosophers and self-professed spiritualists fantasise, then they can keep it - I don't want it.

On the other hand, despite all these feelings, I have finally come to accept that a couple of my work colleagues really could be classed as friends now. It's taken over a year, and has been punctuated by inevitable fallings out, but essentially we get along quite well. One of them got a little peeved the other day when, in response to some kind of benevolent gesture, I said, "Well, we're practically friends, so..." I don't blame them for picking me up on this, but then I've never been into the pretense of good friendships where they don't exist.

Just Not Here, OK?

As I allow the distance to grow - for whatever reasons - between myself and some of the people I once considered close, I find myself alternating between self-sufficient apathy and dreadful feelings of loss and loneliness.

But let's not get lost in self-pity...

I'd like to say that the girl I'm seeing thing is going quite well. Is it? I really don't know. Anyway from talking to her, I've realised that I'm far more calculating than I ever gave myself credit for. I even tell her this. Maybe CM's right, and by gradually exposing your full set of attributes early on, you're giving someone half a chance.

Creeping to a Peak

Where were we?

I feel I ought to mention that things are really going pretty well at the moment. Several factors involved:

CM is in London
He's in the next room, asleep. I'll save the full note of appreciation for his ears only, but suffice to say I really enjoy his company and miss him when he's not here.

I've booked holidays
A long weekend in Sweden at the beginning of June, a long weekend in northern Italy in August and an extended trip around the world (mostly Asia) for two and a half months from mid-November to the beginning of February. Hooray - I miss out most of the British winter!

I have a love interest
A girl I met at a party. More to follow perhaps...

All of this, plus I'm exercising regularly, work's going quite well, family seems to have stabilised a little (condition still pretty critical though), I've picked up my guitar again, I'm eating/ sleeping well (though not at the same time), and I generally feel quite positive. Could it get any better?

Bad Form

The John Ralston Saul post has just reminded me to have a rant about a phrase that seems to have become increasingly common in usage amongst young adults/ twentysomethings...

On Good Form

A "I saw B today."
C "Oh yeah, how was she?"
A "Yeah, she was on good form."

This is an exchange I hear far too often, and it honestly makes me wince. I think that there are several things going on here, some more universalisable than others.

Social acceptability by appeal to a fashionable and recognisable term

Examples of this include:

Rock up as a synonym for arrive
Take it easy as a way of saying goodbye
Kip over as a synonym for stay/ sleep over (verb)

I'm certainly not immune to this type of behaviour, but at least I know what's going on. Luckily some of my friends will pick me up on this and mock me accordingly...

Bite-size summation

Closely linked to CM's theory of the one-sentence summary i.e. that we are all afforded a single phrase by each other which can be given as a response to the question, "What's B like?" (the most bland of which would presumably include the word nice. I hope I'm never described as nice in other people's one-sentence summaries).

Where the one-sentence summary is pretty static, often frustratingly so if you feel somebody has you all wrong, the bite-size summation has the potential to be far more dynamic. Most importantly though, its scope is often limited to a shallow inference by its subject: "She made a couple of funny jokes so she must be happy"; "He didn't say very much so he must have things on his mind"; "She scrutinised the bill so she must be uptight". What makes you so sure? Did you ask how she was really doing? Have we lost the ability to communicate?

People as a means to an end

I think that many people are generally uncomfortable with other people's problems and unhappiness (or should I say discontentment). I also think that this is largely because first, many people are so afraid of consciousness and responsibility that they would rather suffocate their minds with material distraction to avoid the possibility of contemplation on this kind of level (I'd like to thank the Academy... and Pascal...), and second, as pointed out by Mr. Saul, people now see the pursuit of mindless and selfish hedonism as a god-given right: tales of woe are seen as a pollutant.

By saying that B is on good form, you give the public exactly what they want.

A Cigar Called Hamlet

Happiness

A tired and twisted notion which has become an increasing embarrassment in a confused society.

Happiness rose to great social and political prominence in the eighteenth century, when it was used by most European philosophers as one of the essential qualities of a reformed society. It was legally consecrated at the highest possible level by Jefferson who, in the American Declaration of Independence, made it one of the citizen's three inalienable rights: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Thanks to its philosophical and legal position, happiness has stayed at the forefront of social and policital policy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the meaning of the word has gradually changed.

Its Aristotelain sense was spiritual harmony. But Aristotle was the justifying genius of the Scholastics* and spiritual harmony was one of the concepts which helped them to maintain a state of intellectual and social stagnation. It was no accident that the Enlightenment's attack on scholasticism included the reorienting of this word to give human harmony a more practical, active meaning. As a result, in the eighteenth century happiness came to include basic material comfort in a prosperous, well-organised society. As the Western upper-middle and solid middle classes gradually accomplished this for themselves, the word's meaning declined into the pursuit of personal pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment. Both the spiritual and the necessary material were forgotten. Few writers and public figures have dared to point this out or suggest that, since the meaning of the word has changed, it no longer needs to be treated as a question of primary importance.

President de Gaulle responded to pressure from his ministers to give in to policies which might be popular in the short run, but were fundameneally damaging, by retorting that "happiness is for idiots." He wasn't proposing unhappiness or a loss of material comfort. Much of his time in power was spent creating social services and prosperity. Rather he was protesting the confusion of happiness with a state of mindless contentment. He was arguing against happiness and in favour of consciousness which, the world being what it really is, might not involve contentment, but would involve Reponsibility*.

Nothing has happened in the last quarter-century to clarify this confusion. As economic and social conditions have gradually sunk, happiness, with its twisted meaning at the ethical and legal centre of our society, has seemed increasingly lugubrious and out of place. In a more practical world, there would be a formal process for retiring a word from active use until it finds itself again.

John Ralston Saul - The Doubter's Companion (A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense)

* Denotes a term that is qualified (i.e. satirised) elsewhere in the book.

B****day Update

A couple of the girls from work just collared me for not letting them know it was my birthday - I told them I just didn't want to make a big deal out of it and, although a little peeved (for show?), they seemed to accept it.

In any case I may have slightly misjudged the gift aspect. Today we celebrated a couple of colleagues' birthdays with a cake - a very nice gesture. It seems present-buying is no longer the order of the day in our team (when the team was more numerous, and in all of my other jobs for that matter, it was definitely a bigger thing).

Then again, this was only a consideration, an aside from the main point - I'm still apathetic and I've already wasted far too many words on it.

Case closed - until next year.

La Honte!

The office toilet: where men become men once again and farting at an audible level (often anonymously) returns to the status of a pleasurable competition. All these suits just letting rip - it's hilarious. Especially because I know that the second they leave that room, they have to be a collective paradigm of respectability.

I, on the other hand, abandoned the office persona long ago, though I suspect that I shall have to re-inherit it for my next contract (whenever that may be). Today I am dressed in baggy ripped jeans, white trainers and a Puma t-shirt - I wouldn't even be allowed to work on a shop floor looking like this, let alone a private bank...

Yesterday curiosity and the realisation that I'm not meeting anybody new drove me to sign up to an online dating agency. So this is what I am reduced to. I don't hold much hope for it, and though I was contacted almost immediately as I signed in for the first time after setting up my profile, I'm generally pretty sceptical about these sorts of things. Imagine telling your kid that you met mummy online:

"Yeah, I loved her comical use of the word desperate, and her photos practically told me her legs would be wide open, so I decided to message her. Four years later, out you popped... Any questions?"

Apart from my snobbish tendencies, I think that what I dislike most about online dating is its contrived nature. In fact, I hate anything contrived. I hate feeling that my or anyone else's actions are contrived... So much so that a few years ago I declined preparing a speech in advance of my grandma's 80th birthday celebration on the grounds that at the time it seemed too contrived. My sister did it instead. On reflection, a recent bout of appreciation for my grandmother may well force me to regret that particular decision.

Anyway, I'll let you know if anything comes of this online dating thing, but I'm not holding my breath.

At the Pulpit

To coin a cliché I feel increasingly entitled to use, experience has taught me that people who seek to strengthen their case by any appeal to what is or is not an alleged fact are suspiciously likely to be both incorrect and incapable of accepting the remotest possibility of their inaccuracy. Such people are, in short, either arrogant in the most proper sense of the word, blind conviction being a trait common to the truly dangerous and despicable, or pitifully proud.

Birthday Blooze?

So my promise of more regular postings didn't really yield much fruit. In fact, it didn't really yield any fruit. It was fruitless.

Yesterday was my 26th birthday. For the last couple of years (three when I come to think of it), I have had very little motivation to actually celebrate my birthday, least of all in the traditional manner society dictates to be appropriate (special dinner, big night out, private party etc.). Do I really want to oblige people to celebrate my existence? Are their lives intolerable in a parallel universe in which I don't exist? Excessive self-pity aside, playing a birthday down is the best way to avoid the almost inevitable disppointment of being let down. If you apply this kind of attitude on a more general level, you might come to the conclusion that it is really best never to expect anything from anyone - perhaps then you can only be pleasantly surprised?

Well, this year proved to be one of my least celebrated birthdays to date. I didn't tell anyone from work. For one thing, to tell them would carry an additional tacit expectation on my part that they would club together and buy me some kind of rudimentary gift. I would then, if only for a split second, subconsciously judge the gift as a measure of my value in that particular social sphere - its estimated price gauging my popularity, its non-materialisation an outright declaration of my worthlessness. Have I really stooped to these levels of shallowness and insecurity? Well, no, not exactly. I'm much closer to apathy, and the truth is that I would far sooner avoid the entire siutation. I don't need gifts and good wishes from work colleagues - their only substantial effect on my life would be (im)material. On the other hand, maybe I regret not telling one particular colleague, as he's perhaps more worthy of the friend title than that of colleague, and as such deserves the remission of my latest façade. I may well point him in the direction of this blog when we finish working together and the regularity of our contact decreases substantially. A note to you: you know who you are - if you ever read this, this constitutes an apology...

The tacit expectation of a gift applies far less when it comes to close friends, at least for me and my circle of chums, who happen to be mostly male (ever since my ex-girlfriend accused me of being sexist in an overly-drawn-out break-up speech via several hundred miles of telelphone wire, I have a tendency to consciously avoid making gender generalisations). Amongst close friends, the acknowledgement is far more important than the form. I suspect that this is because acknowledgement carries with it a confirmation of their respect and their consideration, without which a close friendship soon becomes an acquaintance. Anything else is of course welcome, but in no way defining.

So, returning to my original point, namely that playing a birthday down is the best way to avoid the almost inevitable disppointment of being let down, you might be tempted to ask exactly what this awful disappointment is that I am trying to avoid, potentially at the cost of F.U.N. I've worded that carefully though: what I have called inevitable disappointment does not necessarily constitute a reason to play down your birthday, rather if you're at a point where you feel that you would be disappointed with anything less than your expectations of the event, should you choose to have one, being met, then it is not necessarily negative not to have one despite society's decree to the contrary. By giving autonomy to people, setting your expectations lower and celebrating more intimately and discreetly, I would say that you can find far more out about the nature of your relationships.

Most of my closest friends, where possible, made their own efforts to spend time with me around my birthday, which were appreciated and filed accordingly in my mind. Most also communicated their good wishes, which is important for reasons I discussed earlier. My family sent heart-felt words in their cards (none of them are in London), which I found surprisingly touching. Acquaintances and other friends had little if any involvement. My personal celebration amounted to a night out with my flatmate to someone else's birthday party, where we knew very few people and drank heavily (but not to the point of the kind of student depravity I'm trying to avoid). My actual birthday was a fragile Sunday in my dressing gown.

Perfect in its imperfection.

There Were Lots of Invitations

A quick post to say that I haven't given up on the blog... I've accepted another contract extension (and another pay rise - yay! The mind boggles...) on the condition that I'm based in London for the majority of the time, so with any luck I'll be able to blog a bit more frequently.

I'm just listening to a bit of Leonard Cohen, and am completely taken by the song Waiting for the Miracle. A pseudo-intellectual interpretation of the lyrics can be found here.

[Why am I] Always on a Plane or a Fast Train

Maybe this is going to turn monthly...

I've barely walked in the door of my London flat after another week of work in Glasgow - this time I was sent up there alone to do what was ostensibly an impossible task. Luckily I flashed the hazard lights early in the week, the outcome of which being that the company re-employed a former colleague (the only person with enough knowledge to do the work) for a couple of days to help me, and ultimately the project manager of this sinking ship, out. My colleague - a thoroughly likeable chap - told me he's charging £xxxx (i.e. a four-figure sum) per day for his expertise. What's more, I don't really blame him, but then I've never been one to condemn supposedly wrongful monetary acts upon the corporation: in times of desperation, I'd far sooner steal from a big-name supermarket than from the local grocery store. But then that doesn't exactly make me special now, does it?

Hey, how's it going? How was Christmas? Yeah? Did you go home? Glad to be back?

Yeah so Christmas was much better than I thought it was going to be. Had CM over for Christmas lunch with my family, which was probably the best Chrismas Day I've ever had, and generally spent a lot of decent time with my friends and family: an effort in itself, but an effort worth making. November and December were quite difficult months, and I now feel I've come out of them OK, largely because I got away from the non-stop working environment and had the chance to exhale. Now I am working better, and I'm on my way to becoming the person I think I can be once again.

The Blog

I have also been considering exactly what I am doing writing a blog. That doesn't mean to say that I shall soon stop writing, but rather, that I am ever-conscious of what I am writing and where this is (or is not) going. So far, I think this has been more of a casual diary than I expected it to be - I had originally intended to post more of my opinions or explore the opinions of others, to amateurishly continue where my Philosophy degree left off. This has not really happened! Again, I am not unhappy with the results - I just wish I had more time even for thinking on that level, let alone writing...

Another consideration: on my very first post, I implied a no holds barred approach to blogging, that I would fearlessly write whatever I wanted, irrespective of the consequences. I have since realised that there are certain things about which I don't feel comfortable writing here. This basically covers two areas: family, and deepest darkest me. My family deserve the respect and consideration such that I should not be advertising their intimate details in a public arena, especially as there are people who read this blog who also know my family. As for me, well, I know what I am, but there's a limit to how much I can spell that out here.