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"Life Rant"
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.
Lately I’ve found that I have this rush of things that I want to do; write more blogs, write movie reviews, start up another website for fun, take up a new exercise regime, and a bunch of other stuff like that. This is all in addition to getting a new business up and running, which on it’s own is probably the most demanding thing I’ve seriously attempted. It’s all part of a new life where I feel happy to wake up in the morning and be doing things that I really want to do, as opposed to doing something you have to do because you need the money. But now I find myself in this strange situation of being strapped for time to do these things that I really want to do, so what to do?
Well, I went online (as online types do) with the idea of finding out some secret technique possessed by kung fu masters as to how I could achieve all my goals. I went to Google and put in the search phrase, “how to acheive all your goals”, and the first thing Google did was ask me if I wanted to spell the question properly. I could almost see the smarmy smile on its face as I said, yes please correct my crap letter arrangement and help me achieve my goals.
BINGO! 84 million hits (and a few hundred thousand extra, but who cares about the loose change?) Obviously there is a system to achieving goals – most likely from kung fu masters – and here it was in front of me. Let’s see, where to start. All the first page links were about the process of goal setting. Some were six point plans, some were ten point plans, and the wiki howto page about goal accomplishment was a full 20 points long. To be honest I hadn’t really expected anything in the way of practical advice and was a bit surprised it could be found.
This lead me to the realisation that if I want to actually follow through with achieving a whole bunch of goals that I was going to have to bring about a lifestyle change to a part of my life that I’ve always been crap at; time planning. As a person who has always loved the spontaneous life to the point of making it a religion, time planning goes against my very core beliefs. I’m always someone that wants to go with the flow and just do whatever feels good at the time. Which is great but it can sink a lot of time into the ground as waste. When you’re younger this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but being 40 and realising that the next ten years are really the time to make it big, losing time starts to look a bit criminally insane. Because let’s face it, time is the most precious commodity we have. It’s truly the one finite resource we are all given a portion of, which we can spend any way we want, but once it’s gone there aint getting any more of it; not for love nor money.
Which brought me around to the idea that maybe I’ll try something new in my life and give this goal setting thing a go. I figure, what’s the worst that can happen? I don’t achieve any goals. Well without trying something new that’s going to happen anyhow, so it’s not a loss. Looking at it like that, there is no point not trying.
So onwards and upwards, time to see if that howto wiki really has something worthwhile. Maybe this could lead to a whole new life as a motivational speaker to rich useless people who need to give their money away to highly motivated types such as I’ll proclaim to be.
Andy.
It’s seems now, looking back, that it was somewhat fitting that my last blog post three months ago was centered around death; or to put it another way that isn’t so morbid, about endings. I didn’t know back then with any surety that something foul was happening, but I could sense in the wind that things were changing with work. The rock that had been my standing stone for going on two years was suddenly starting to tip and roll. If only I had’ve been able to see the cruel fall that was to come. Perhaps if I had’ve taken off the rose coloured glasses I was wearing, or maybe adjusted my world view to something more akin to our waking reality I would have. But alas, I was blinded by my hope and desire for my brutal relationship with Joost to continue. So it came to pass that on a fateful Tuesday – the week before this particular entries publish date – our estranged leader personally came to us in Europe and dropped his corporate ‘Fat Boy’ on the assembled masses. The result: total anhilation! In his wake he had left the complete and utter destruction of our dearly beloved Leiden office (metaphorically speaking).
That weekend saw a rampage of emotions playout within my humble flat back in Amsterdam. It was like a medium term relationship with a psychotic abusive girlfriend had come to an end; I still loved her, even after all the shit she had put me through, and I didn’t want it to be over. In the end, she gave me a half hearted hug and pat on the back by way of apology, and then she walked out the door. I walked the hallways of my apartment in a pissed off swager wishing a face would present itself that I could slap with a closed fist. I wanted something tangible I could vent at, some focus for the built up negativity that was swimming in my blood. That we were wronged was without argument, we had in fact been fucked pretty badly on a number of different levels. But really, by staying as long as we did, we’d all agreed to be corporately fucked. Deep down, we all knew it was going to come to this, so we had noone to blame but ourselves. Maybe that’s what hurt me the most, the fact that I didn’t want to see what was inevitable, but rather surround myself with delusion made out of fluffy hope.
I struggled through Sunday and Monday. When Tuesday came around I had reached the final end; I lay myself down on a bed of ashes that was my nuked Joost carreer and calmly smoothered the last of the self pity. It was over, and there was nothing I or anyone else could do that was going to change that. For all the ex venice chat griping rhetoric, and endless games of what-if, Joost was gone, never to be seen again.
I suppose it’s when life is at its lowest ebb that you tend see the lifelines that are thrown to you from outside the mists of uncertainity. Three of us that day took a train ride up to Amsterdam for a meeting with an unlikely pair of allies; a young company of two guys spinning up an outsource venture, who brought with them a tempting offer. They had a promise of work, and desire to partner with the company that so far we’d only talked about. Who would have believed such luck was possible with such auspicious timing? Certainly not me.
While the future still has vast tracts of uncertainity, I’m feeling a heightened sense of excitement and enthusiasm that I’ve only felt on very rare and momentous occassions; such as when I left Brisbane for the first time on a one way plane ticket to London. It’s during times like these that there is no such thing as mindless repetition, each day presents challenges that are immediate reward when you overcome them – and you do overcome them, you sometimes don’t even know how, you simply do.
At the risk of being overly poetic, I feel that my own personal pheonix has risen from the ashes, and while he is very small with only a few feathers, he’s definitely in the air and moving!
Time to give thanks for all blessings great and small, I say!
Andy.
I’ve just finished watching a TV program on station Nederland Twee (Netherlands Two), about the assisted suicide of Craig Ewert, a 59 year old university professor who was a sufferer of ALS. The show was a poignant journalistic peice following the last period of time of his life, and finished with his death. The story was told in a very sensitive and low key manner, devoid of any form of sensationalism or dramatisation that is the staple of our mainstream news diet. Indeed, I found it to be a moving tribute to an intelligent man who wanted to choose for himself the manner of his own passing, rather than let nature run its course and reduce him to not much more than – in his words – a living tomb. At the end I found myself in tears, as I was very emotionally involved with his life and his death, and was thankful to him for letting me explore in a meaningful way just what death means to me as an individual. I think that’s really only how death can be explored, as an individual, because death is something deeply personal for all of us.
As I was reading some of the comments on the news articles concerning the show, I become angered at the petulant statements made by some people in the right to life, or ‘Care Not Killing’ camp, who apparently were angered by the show being televised at all. With one comment made, that this could actually give people ideas! To which I say, I hope it does!
I try not to go down the path of very politically sensitive discussions on my blog because I don’t want my blog to be a political discussion board, but I’m going to break my own guidelines on this issue and speak my peice. So here’s the fair warning label. If anyone has strong views on Euthanasia supporting the pro life position, or simply cannot take part in a discussion of this nature, leave now. From here on in, I’m going to discuss why I believe they are wrong, and the individual right to choice is morally right. Anyone who feels even slightly mentally challenged on this issue should seriously back out now.
It is in fact an appalling state of affairs when one individual can pass judgement and determine for another terminally sick individual the manner in which they will die. It is quite simply, wrong! Any society that proclaims to be civilised will have built into it a legal framework for allowing an individual to choose an assisted death to preserve dignity and end suffering when a natural death will do neither. The fact that there are individuals who have the audacity to proclaim that this is wrong, are in fact contributing to the suffering of those whose wish to opt for euthanasia. How dare they! The most basic of all human rights, is the right to live and the right to choice. As a person of sound mind and body, noone has the right to tell me how I should live. As long as I live my life within the bounds of the law of the society I choose to live in, I should be free to live to do as I want without interference from another. Similarly I should be allowed to choose the manner of my passing. There is no moral or legal argument that can be made that is sufficient to take that choice away from me. And should anyone dare to impose on me that it is “Gods law” that implicitly denies me my right to choose my end, then I would say it is a choice taken away from me by ignorant savages incapable of intelligent thought. Hence by the very extreme extent of their stupidity they should not be allowed to make decisions at all, let alone one that affects me in such a profound way.
So this is my stance on the issue itself. I make no apologies for the strong manner in which I present it, as it is a deeply philosophical topic that doesn’t deserve anything less than a strong opinion.
Concerning the show itself there were a lot of claims that this was a media stunt designed to promote the channel, and pull in ratings. Having seen the show, I completely disagree with this opinion. In an age of spoonfed sensationalistic drama TV, this program was quiet, sensitive and thoughtful. Most importantly it was made at the request of Craig and his wife. This was absolutely the opposite of Big Brother, which is the very definition of a media stunt that uses sensationalism to create a vortex of drama designed to capture audiences and ratings. Craig’s ending was emotional, but for those who chose to watch it, it made you reflect on your own life and consider what it is that ‘a good life’ means.
Perhaps the best summation of my feelings I found was from an article in the UK’s, The Guardian newspaper
Watching a man drink liquid through a pink straw, ask for apple juice and music, then close his eyes and lie back on his pillows is intense, moving and tragic. It should make us think and talk about death, as we did when we were children and asked our parents if we would ever die. Too many grown ups push away that question forever – dispensing with the memento mori, the reminder of mortality, that has been part of human culture for thousands of years.
As I finish this peice, it’s late, with the clock striking into the wee hours of the morning, and I feel a sense of happiness at the thought that I will wake up tomorrow with my good health and a new day of possibilities before me. I’ll cherish for a while that I still have time to live and chase dreams and I’ll hopefully appreciate for a little while longer that life is a gift and should not be wasted or taken for granted. For it doesn’t last forever and we all have to come to terms with, and face, our own ultimate end.
When I do, I hope do so with the same courage, dignity and calm that Craig Ewert did. Peace be with him.
Andy.
