From the monthly archives: September 2009
I’ve never gotten along with my father; we’ve never understood each other and we’ve always been very different people. When I was 13 he left, and thus ended the time when we would be in each others lives on a day to day basis. He tried his best to maintain some semblance of parental control by enforcing a set of rules on my sister and I from outside our house, but as the first couple years passed and we got used to him not being there, his authoritarian grip quickly loosened, and eventually was removed. From then on my father became someone that I was related to, but not someone I would know anymore than an acquaintance.
However the older I get in this age of my life, the more I come to realise the things that he had to face and better understand what kind of choices he had in front of him. I still find that I don’t agree with the things that he did, but at least I feel I can appreciate what his circumstances were and how he could have taken the forks in the road that he did. I also feel I understand why he had such problems relating to his own father, and why they spent nearly a decade not talking to each other.
Funny how history repeats itself.
Andy.
Tonight I was watching that movie Lesbian Vampire Killers, which just happens to be at the top of my favourite comedy films of the month list. If you haven’t seen it I would recommend getting a hold of the DVD and rounding up some friends and beers, and get ready to laugh your collective arses off for 2 hours. Personally if I was you, I’d ignore the fact that it got 5 odd out of 10 on IMDB, that’s just totally shit for what it is. That’s one of those bizarre anomalies of statistics that you can’t explain but they just happen sometimes, like the English cricket team winning The Ashes once every 20 years.
Watching this film totally reminded me what it is that I really want to do with my life, and that’s write! Everything else seems to be so much a life support for my life, but what I really live for is writing. The irony is I always put my writing behind everything else because it just doesn’t seem as important as all the stuff that pays me money and keeps me in a lifestyle that I’ve become accustomed to.
I’ve heard that writers have to suffer for their art, so maybe I need to do some decent starving and living on the borderline of poverty to have that right proper grungy lifestyle that gets you taken seriously.
Maybe!
I just don’t think I could go there now. My Bukowski days while not over, are really getting more spaced out, with lots of recovery time in between binges.
I guess I’ll put this one in the “long term goal” bucket, and throw it five years into the future to pick up then.
Andy.
Feeling tired today, didn’t sleep at all last night. I hate it when insomnia takes you the moment you crawl into bed. Going to be a long day today.
The whole working for my own startup is starting to kick in, this morning being Monday I didn’t even think once about how shit it is that a new week has started. This is much better than that forced servitude feeling that seems to be the norm for a standard nine-to-five job. If we don’t succeed in anything else, it will have been worth it for the enjoyment alone.
Lunch soon. Then I think I’m going to sleep on the office couch for a bit.
Andy.
Watching this schmaltzy stupid romantic comedy on TV, while I burn time before heading out of the flat. It’s got Heather Graham in it, so it’s watchable just for her… just! But everytime I see something like this on TV I am reminded how much we sell this dream to kids who grow up to be adults who believe in this dream so much they make it their mission in life to make it their reality.
At least that’s what I think. Maybe it’s got something to do with me still being single, and if I don’t believe this then I’ve failed in some essential goal in life. Well given how many people I know who have been married and then divorced, I feel that I’ve made the right choice.
Today being the 9th day of the 9th month of 2009, I feel stars aligning. Maybe I’ll change my mind about something.
Andy.
Currently in the office working on the business plan for spriteCloud. Every time we go through bizplan discussions I come to realise just how broad a knowledge of business you have to have to do these well. As much as anything I am quickly gaining an appreciation for the art and science of good business practice. Our group is not so skilled in general business tactics yet, we’ve got a lot to learn and we have to learn it in a short time. I get the feeling our success as a startup will depend on it.
Things are going well though, and the lethargy that I felt a couple of weeks ago has gone. But I know what caused that; the past coming back and bringing with it old habits. I’m glad some things change.
Andy
The thing that bothers about what I’m doing is that I never seem to have the time to do anything else. I wonder if it’s something that I will come to regret in later years, as so many people have in the past. There is a razors edge to being focused on one thing to almost single minded exclusion of everything else; it can bring great reward, but it can also lead to a life that is empty of other rich experiences which make us happy.
I don’t think I’m going to change what I’m doing though, a point of no return has been reached, the rollercoaster has left the platform. Now the only thing to do is hang on and see how wild it gets on the turns.
Which makes me think, giving your everything is in itself a sacrifice.
Andy
so last night, while it was very late, i tried an experiment that proved in some part a social hypothesis that a high school teacher of mine told a class i was in back when i was something like 15. this guy said, beautiful people have more friends because socialising is more important than study, while smart people have less friends because they are always involved in solitary study.
nothing like a cutting edge education to give you the big questions to ponder through life.
anyway, it was late and i was checking updates on facebook when this memory spontaneously popped into my head. i decided that i would put this theory to the test and be my own myth buster. in case you’re really wondering, i’m talking about beautiful people as in physically attractive good looking people. beauty as in skin deep. not beauty as in someone who is a really great person but is scare-your-dog butt ugly. (yes this is a shallow politically incorrect post just for something different).
facebook makes it pretty easy to browse the world of digitally connected people, who as we all know come from all walks of life. gone are the days when the internet was the playground of the tech elite, now any idiot that can work out how to open a laptop can get online and be part of a digital community.
starting with one pretty face, i followed a trail of friends – almost exclusively women – that lead me to every nook and cranny of the first world. at some point, i did take a moment to reflect how behind each digitized face there was actually a person with a life and emotions and a story to tell, which did reiterate to me again something i learned for myself a long time ago; we are all ‘just’ people with everything that implies. some of the numbers of friends though were quite astounding. most beautiful people had a minimum of around 250 friends, 400 wasn’t uncommon, with some people topping 900+ for the really popular folks. wow! i ‘only’ have 120 and i thought that was a lot.
then it was time for the benchmark, the ugly people. now before anyone reads this who might get upset by me calling someone ugly, i truly believe we are all beautiful on the inside, and beauty is no judge of character. mind you if you’re butt ugly, bad luck. join a gym to compensate. just like i did because i’m compensating for being butt ugly too.
making my way through the god-gave-me-a-face-only-a-mother-could-love girl crowd i was very surprised to notice that most of them had very small numbers of friends, completely the opposite of the beautiful people. 20 to 30 was normal with the higher range topping out at about 100. some individuals though did have quite big numbers like 600+ but they were exceptional, or prostitutes.
what to make of it all? there really was something in this theory of my old school teacher after all. the years of alcoholism brought on by the incessant suffering at the hands of cruel teenagers who would deride him with jokes behind his back yet within earshot, had not dulled his acute sense of human nature. i thought some time on it and came up with the following explanation.
beautiful people are more likely to be shallow and only interested in the facade of an individual; beauty is attracted to beauty, so only a superficial or casual encounter is enough to gain someone membership to a friends group. as long as you look the part you’re in, kinda like a club with a strict fashion policy. ugly people though have come to understand that quantity of friends does not make up for quality of friends, so having a small group of good people that enrich your life is better than hundreds of no name space fillers who annoy the crap out of you with their endlessly boring updates about which maybelline lipstick goes with their iphone. that or they truly have no social skills and can only make friends within the same subculture they belong to. my friend jens wrote a pretty good post about social behavior, genetics and virtual communities that really seems to have played out to be true based on my real world scientific results.
okay so i’m not really a scientist (i was faking that), and this hardly qualifies as a scientific experiment (because i’m not a scientist) but anecdotal evidence does suggest that there is some corresponding direct relationship between your maybelline beauty quotient and the number of friends you have on FB. which does represent a very cool hypothesis for starting some social science research to debunk or validate it. i’d do it if i had time, but i can’t even find the time to follow up on jens’s posts (this is an unpaid advertisement for http://www.unwesen.de/), so hopefully someone else has picked it up already.
but at the end of the day it’s not the number of friends you have on FB, but really how much cleavage you show if you’re a woman. this is really what men want to see, and they will friend anybody that caters to them. shallow insensitive beasts that we are!
andy.
ps: for those of you sitting here deriding me on my inability to spell, the exclusive use of lowercase alpha characters is me following a trend set by the great moby; artist, philosopher, philanthropist and blogger. one of the original bloggers, he was writing blogs before they were even called blogs, but rather online journals. secretly it’s also a fashion gimmick to attract more attention.
