How do you make big announcements?
Do you blow trumpets and dance and stuff?
Or pretend like nothing is up and act all blasé?
Which is less pretentious? Which is less gauche? (I am enjoying using all these fancy words, but I have to use the flippin’ spell checker to make sure I get them right, which rather spoils the whole sophisticated air of the thing. Oh well.)
I kind of feel I should respect my British heritage, and get all worked up about the tiniest things (such as toasters, knots, AV, coffee machines, and so on) and drop big announcements as if they’re specks of dust being flicked from ones mess-jacket (not that I have a mess jacket, but it sounds right, Bertie Woosterish).
Enough of this blithering.
I’m engaged to be married to the most wonderful girl in the world! Life is a happy thing, full of kittens and sunshine and gentle summer breezes, and stuff!
Hopefully that somewhat fell between the lines of fanfare and faux pas, hint and hyperbole, I shall now go and dance for a bit.
Good morning, blog. Although, actually, it’s more like evening, seeing as how it’s 7pm and everything.
It’s probably morning somewhere in the world.
I have a friend on this ship who has a fetish for “Awkward moments”. I’m sure he wouldn’t like it to be called a fetish, but whatever, he really loves them. He savours them, as a connesour, specially saving them up and preparing them, finely planning moments of Awkwardness in the same way that a conductor of an orchestra prepares the finale of a grand opera.
He’ll often say stuff intentionally to make people uncomfortable.
So I asked about a week or two ago, why?
And his response was something like,
(a) it’s fun,
(b) I enjoy seeing how people really are.
And the second one is the bit that I took issue with.
He said watching how people react when they don’t know how to respond gives a great insight into them, and let’s you see them without the pretence and acting that accompanies so much of human interaction.
What’s there to take issue with?
Well, seeing people when they don’t know how to react, is that really how they “really are”?
It seems to me to smell slightly of the whole humans-are-nought-but-animals thing.
And also, the “You know the real person by seeing how they behave under pressure”. - Likewise, the same.
There is some truth to it, of course. It’s much easier to act nice and give a good image when you are relaxed and can concentrate on impressing others, or on behaving well, than when things are stressful and you’re under pressure and don’t have time to think about what to do next.
Others have also said that you know how someone is by what they do in their spare time, or when no one else is looking, and so on.
Some people seem to do well under pressure, and be able to think quickly and clearly. Others don’t. Some people find it easy to find jobs to do and to use their spare time productively and pro-actively.
So… it’s often very useful to know how someone behaves under pressure, but I don’t think it really shows who they “really” are.
This would have been all nice and theoretical, and all that, except for this week.
I got sick.
And, it turns out, I don’t act very nice when I’m sick.
Usually, when I’m healthy and fine and everything, I tend to use a lot of hyperbole, sarcasm, and irony in my general day to day language. It tends to be (I hope!) fairly good natured, and over-the-top enough that others realise it’s not intended seriously.
“Could you play this CD for me?”
“Nope. It’s completely impossible - the computer can only play CDs on Thursdays.”
and so on.
Well, the thing is, recently I’ve started to tend to mix double meanings and more biting sarcasm into what I say, and, usually, it doesn’t mean anything - to me.
Ie, “hey, the programme schedule says you’re doing a song later, but you haven’t put a form in saying you want any microphones or instruments or anything, so it’s just a Capella, right?”
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One of the things I love about the “Peanuts” cartoons are the tiny little things that I love. If that makes sense. For instance, this one thing I love about the Peanuts cartoon, is Snoopy’s book that he writes occasionally “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” as part of the whole debate thing with Lucy. I love those books.
Anyway.
Has it ever occurred to you that you might be mad?
It’s been of late the rather disagreeable experience of mine to have occurring to me with disturbingly increasing regularity the possibility that I myself might be in a somewhat insanitous state.
I challenge anyone to diagram that sentence, and send me the picture…
Insanitous sounds rather unhygienic, but it’s not. I just mean “mad”, in a slightly more complex way of speaking.
To take simpler mode of address, I’ll quote Freddie Mercury:
“It’s finally happened, I’m slightly mad.”
Anyway, the current evidence I have towards this conclusion is The Strange Affair Of The Coffee Maker In The Daytime.
I feel remarkably Adrian Plassish as I type this, in a “this is dead serious to me, but I get the feeling people will laugh at me about it, because it’s so stupid…” sort of way. Like his paper-clip story.
Settle back, gentle reader, and prepare thyself for an epic journey into the mind of one convinced that he is no longer all quite there.
It all began like this…
This house is great. I’m really enjoying living here. right now, I’m sprawled across one of the *three* sofas in the living room, with my laptop, and a pot of Earl Grey tea.
Seriously, how can life get more chilled out than this?
What could there possibly be to complain about?
Well, there’s no internet at home. Is this a bad thing? Well, kind of. But also, it does stop me spending inordinate amounts of time online, which I did over the whole furlough, to my shame. 3 months to rest and do anything, and most of the time I spent online. Silly. So, it’s probably a good thing that I’m not online here, and can just write emails that I need to write, and then send them from the Shed. And spend the rest of my time at home cooking, reading, playing clarinet, and exercising. Oh, and sleeping, of course.
Secondly. And far more seriously. There is no coffee maker here.
I say it again, for emphasis.
There. Is. NO. Coffee. Maker. Here!!!
Shocking! But true!
There is a kettle, and a teapot, and plenty of instant coffee, of the “Fair Trade” and the “Nescafe” varieties - both of which are vile - but a brewed mug of the real stuff? Not a chance.
So, how can I solve this crisis, I wondered, then had the brainwave: I can buy a coffee maker.
In the UK they have this really weird store called Argos, where everything is in this funny HUGE catalogue that you can get, and then you write down the item order numbers, or SKU or something, give it to the clerk, and it gets brought in to you via conveyor belt, or so. No browsing around the store, just the catalogue.
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