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"Life Rant"
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.
About four years ago now the postman delivered one of those little cardboard box packages designed to carry a couple of CD’s. There was no sender details written on the thing, only my name and my address in black pen on the front. Inside the box was this black disc in a clear plastic CD cover. The disc itself was one that started off its life blank, and was burned like a real music CD, with actual (raw) wav files on it, not stripped down compressed mp3′s or anything like that. There was nothing written on the disc; not the names of the tunes, not anything. I didn’t even know what it was until I put it in a computer, after scanning the hell out of it for general bastardware that turns computers into expensive boat anchors. When I got around to listening to the music I could tell someone had made it for me, because it was all awesome music that I just so lurved to listen to. So the question that begged answering was, who the fuck sent it?!
I was sure it was this one friend of mine, Pete. (Name has been changed to protect his privacy… unless his name is really Pete, in which case, you know his name). So I called up to thank him for the wicked tunes, and why didn’t he just put his name on it somewhere so I would know it was him.
There was a moment of silence on the phone. “You’re a real freak sometimes, McDowell. You know that”!
Okay, so it wasn’t Pete.
A couple more rounds of phone calls to people that I pinned as likely suspects turned up the same kind of responses. Good to know what my friends thought about me, but not really helpful to find out where this CD came from. It started to itch not knowing who sent it, and why. It wasn’t my birthday, or Christmas, I hadn’t broken up with someone, or got marriend, or come back from a long holiday; none of the usual shit that we give presents to someone for. The itch turned into a burn, and for months I sent out emails to everyone I knew who could have sent that CD, and it turned up nothing. Either someone was lying, or none of these people actually sent the damn thing.
To this day I’ve never found out just where it came from. It remains the greatest mystery of my life; my own personal Mary Celeste. Every so often when I pick the CD up and turn it over in my hands new theories come to mind about its origin, but now they’re starting to take on bizarre edged fantasy twists. Maybe it was delivered by a future me that had travelled back in time to give me the CD to start me on a journey of obsession that would lead me to somewhere I’m meant to be in the future to get to the time machine so I can go back in time to give myself the CD – but the CD was never made by me, it was made by another entity to start the cycle for a purpose that can’t be understood by me yet. Okay, granted it’s not very original, but it would make for a cool story… because it’s goddamn true!
It’s good to have mysteries in our lives I reckon. Something that we can ponder on that will defy conventional understanding so you can stretch your mind and push back the boundary of what’s possible. It’s these kind of things which lead us to the true heart of imagination and creativity. And quite possibly drive you a bit mad in the process!
Andy.
Every so often I go through this stage where I feel that life needs a sense of danger to really let me know I’m alive. And I’m not just talking about having a bit of a scare like I might not make it to the train station on time to make my train to work in the morning. No, I’m talking about some shit scarey thing that makes your heart pound like a bastard and not knowing whether or not you’re going to make it out alive. Kinda like what the ultimate adrenaline junkies chase I guess, when they do stuff like extreme base jumping, or extreme crocodile taming Steve Irwin style.
I developed this danger need during my first trip overseas after leaving Australia when I was travelling in Egypt from Dahab to Sharm el-Sheikh in a taxi with three Palestinians I had met in a cafe on the beach while stoned out of my skull. They said they new the owners of a night club there and I could drink for free if I came along. All I heard was free drinks, and I was sold! As was pretty typical we passed through military checkpoints in the car every 50 kilometers or so, which normally wasn’t a big deal, except for this one checkpoint where we got pulled over for a passport check. One military guy came out with a huge fucking assault rifle in his hands, takes one look at the car and the next thing he is screaming at the guard house and these five guys all come running out armed to the teeth with big fucking guns and grenades strapped to their chest. We all got pulled out of the car – except for the driver – and I was pushed onto the car bonnet (front) and the other three were put face down on the ground. Everyone is screaming in Egyptian – or Arabic, I just couldn’t recall clearly afterwards – and then the gaurd on me put the barrel of his rifle about an inch from my face. I honestly thought that was it; siyonara, goodbye, see you all in the next life. My mind went blank, and the only thing I could think of was, I hadn’t even told mum I was in Egypt, the poor woman wouldn’t even know where to tell the Australian Embassy where to look for me. I couldn’t help but stare at the end of the barrel like an acid tripper will stare at a spot on the wall. When you’re faced with the end, it’s funny what will hold your concentration. Well the very next thing, the three Palestinians are being picked up off the ground and their passports are being checked. A minute passed, and then everybody starts shaking hands and patting each other on the back like their old pals. This gaurd who I thought was going to blow me away, gives me this big smile and asks for my passport. I just about drop the thing handing it over my hands were shaking so much.
“Ahhh… Australian… Home and Away… Neighbours… Very nice shows. I love beautiful beaches you have”.
What the fuck is going on? Was pretty much what I was thinking. All I could actually say was some grunts and a few, yeah right’s!
“How you like Egypt? Very beautiful country. Are you having a nice time”?
The warm smile; the eagerness of his friendly conversation; it was all just too much. I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. So I smiled and said, ‘yeah right’.
After that the gaurds opened up the car doors for us like chauffeurs and we got in and drove off. Just to add to the bizarreness, they all waved us off with big smiles as if farewelling good friends.
Nobody said anything for about a minute, until I turned around (me being in the front seat, and three amigos being in the back) and asked just what the fuck happened, and why the fuck did that just happen to me? One of the guys that that happened all the time, unfortunately he really closely resembled a high profile Middle East Terrorist wanted in several countries, and it was a case of mistaken identity. He apologised, and hoped that my shirt wasn’t too covered in dust from the road. But not to worry, I could enjoy free drinks when I got to the club.
I was dumbfounded, and shocked into stupidity, and just let it go. The rest of the night was a total blast. I had so much fun because it was as if something was liberated inside of me. I felt free and alive. Every drink tasted like the best drink I’d ever had, and every song was like my favourite. Nearly 10 years on, I don’t know what it is, but every so often I think about going out and finding danger like that again just so I can feel alive like that again! Pretty stupid because at the time that happened I never ever wanted to go through that again. But that feeling of liberation was pretty intoxicating.
Funnily enough, since that event, I’ve never actually been scared in my life since. Sure I’ve had adrenaline rushes from exciting times, but I’ve never felt fear since that night.
I wonder if it’s too late to apply for international jetsetting spy jobs with ASIO?
Andy.
I’ve been pondering for a while the next direction in life. Turning 40 has had some sort of profound affect on me in the way I view the world. It’s as if all of the value systems I was using suddenly underwent a massive shift in order in the same way that an apartment block will undergo a massive shift in order when an 8-on-the-richter-scale earthquake hits. Everything is picked up and thrown asunder, reassembling itself into something unrecogniseable, and awaiting reconstruction back into something meaningful.
Being in my 30′s was easy. The first few years of that decade was about launching myself into the big unknown wide world and experiencing everything for the first time, all up close and personal and raw. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing back then, but I didn’t really care either, each day was exciting and I was learning about the world as I went along. By my mid 30′s I’d found some stability and made a life in a foreign country and was exploring a new relationship that while I knew wasn’t ever going to be long term and stabile, it was fast and furious and intoxicating. The last part of my 30′s was this period of consolidation when I earned my right to live in the country I had chosen as home, and putting a foundation down that was security for now and the future. It represented the end of a time of being able to up and move at a moments notice, but then, I’d moved past that desire as well, so it wasn’t a loss.
Then I turned 40.
It’s funny, but sometimes lying in bed at night just before going to sleep I feel like all the lessons I’ve learned in the past decade are all coalescing into one place in my mind. They are pulling together into a framework that I can use like a ladder to take me somewhere. But I just feel like there are a few things I’m still not aware of to use that framework in any meaningful way. I’m still waiting for something. Which is frustrating when I feel like I want to be more in a hurry to get where all this is taking me.
If I leave myself idle for too long though, I start to realise that I’m bored with all the things in life that used to be interesting. I don’t mean bored in that I no longer like the hobbies I have for fun, or with the people I know. No I mean bored in that in my 30′s I was happy enough for life to lead me from one week to the next because I felt I had time and something interesting would come along. Now though, time is a premium, it’s something not to be wasted, so I get bored easily if weeks pass and nothing interesting happens. Perhaps that’s it; the thing that is boring is not the time between events, but the lack of direction that is still the way I live life. Being more in a hurry means actively taking a direction where I want to go, and make things happen, rather than wait for things to happen in a passive way.
Maybe the boredom is with the way I live life.
Something to think about.
Andy.
When I was in early teens I got my first flat top haircut. Razor sharp on the sides, with rounded edges and a bit of a fringe. Back when I was surfing a lot it was a fully functional hairstyle, no care necessary. It was all the rage back in the day. But then when I got to my late 20′s life changed and I grew my hair out, first in a shortish same length neckline cut, then shoulder length cut, finally to a long mane that came a quarter way down my back. My 30′s was the time of long hair, sometimes messy, sometimes neat, but always flowing never pulled back in a ponytail at all, because I found that too restrictive. I found that my hair was a statement of my nonconformity, it showed externally my internal nature that – I always thought – was slightly wild and not to be tamed. Hair it seems can come full circle just like life. Over my last two hair cuts I’ve returned to short hair, tight on the sides with a bit of a fringe. It’s not the old flat top of a bygone surfing age, but instead a modern messy-neat cut being sported by all the hippest trendsetters in the young European celebrity circles.
To look at me you would think me like any mainstream society person, whose life is lived in happy conformity. Once that would have worried me, back in my early 30′s, but now it’s not so important. It seems to me returning to short hair is an external sign of a life come full circle and a change of attitude to the way I live and think about the world around me.
It does make me think that maybe radicalism is a young mans game.
Andy.
So Christmas and the New Years holiday was lovely, and thanks very much for asking. I had a wonderful time doing bugger all, staying up late until the wee hours of the morning playing WoW, watching Stargate Atlantis seasons 1 to 4, getting absolutely wasted on potent weed, and completely forgetting about work. Which is a good thing because working at a startup can be total stress and pressure, which isn’t healthy if you don’t get a release from it. Fortunately Gawd invented the bliss of Mary Jane to help take our cares away. (I would advise those with obsessive personalities to take this in moderation, and not mix with heavy machinery operation – consider that my warning to you young’uns reading). I didn’t go back to work until the beginning of the 3rd week of January and I found that in my new heavily relaxed state it took me 2 weeks to really get the work engine revved up into high gear. By which time the calendar flipped over a month and it’s now February!
February already!? But seriously, where the fuck did January go? I didn’t smoke that much Northern Lights and Jack Herrer. It was quite a modest amount, all in all, compared to the bud consumption of your average casual practicising Rastafarian, so that doesn’t explain how 31 days can by in a blur. No, I’m actually inclined to believe it’s just how January is; one big blur of cold weather (for those of us living in the northern hemisphere). My theory is we spend the last 3 months of year moving a such a high speed break neck pace, firstly preparing for Christmas and New Year, and then actually having/enjoying/tolerating Christmas and New Year, that come January 1, we’re like a Formula 1 car hitting the breaks at 300 kilometers per hour; you come to a hard stop, but only after a 500 meter uncontrolled skid. Or in this case, a 31 day uncontrolled skid.
I find I really enjoy that January downtime though. It’s pretty necessary to have a balancing month where you can move a lot slower and take your time to recharge your batteries. The modern world moves all too fast these days, and it’s speeding up – to the speed of light – thanks to all the new fangled technology we invent at a faster and faster pace. All with which to communicate and amuse ourselves in ways not possible even a few years before. [But what's it all for? I hear the more enlightened among you ask! That being another story entirely]. If we don’t take the time to slow down and move at a more leisurely pace, we risk losing the purpose within ourselves at moving as fast as we possibly can in the first place.
Deep, hey?! *grin*
So yes, I had a total blast during January, didn’t do a fucking thing, can’t remember half of it, and enjoyed every minute of it. And for it I feel such an abundant flow of enthusiasm for new projects, and creativity for new ideas, that I don’t possibly have time to keep up with them all.
Hence the cycle starts again!
Maybe I should really spend some time trying to work out that trick to staying more balanced all year round, this year.
Andy.
Back when I was in university, I joined a group of friends in starting up a Rolemaster RPG campaign on the weekends. There was a steady group of five to six of us, with guest heavy sessions where we would have anything up to ten or eleven all crammed into a study room. Admittedly back then the guest sessions were generally curious geek guys from our computer science course who gravitate towards this kind of pasttime, and even more curious women trying to work out what kind of game would make guys scream bestial roars at one another and then roll dice. We played in earnest for nearly three years, and I can honestly say I had some of the most entertaining times of my life in those grey cement brick study rooms with Rolemaster manuals scattered over the tables, living out tales of high adventure!
So at the end of that time of my life, it was with a touch of sadness and more than an hour of screaming and ranting when a friend of mine who promised to sell me his Rolemaster manuals (all fourteen of them) ended up giving them away to another (very undeserving) friend for free. It took me nearly a month to get over the shock, and about three more to stop schemeing these Machavellian schemes to get those manuals back while simultaenously dropping both of those bastards into a volcano in a seemingly freak accident. It was more than losing a couple of books, it was losing the tangible history and icons of those magic days and nights of our friendship and unbounded imagination.
For the past few years I’ve been on ebay, scowering the dusty corners of online bookshops and the private collections of sellers looking to put back together my small RM 2nd edition library. And I’ve been largely successful, with now nine of the fourteen books in my possession. With each new addition that arrives I savour opening it, because as I turn over every page the memories come flooding back and I smile at the vividness with which I can almost hear the tabletop echoes from decades ago. I think it’s been more fun this way, having to collect the books one at at time over a period of years as it does make me feel a little bit like a collector in some small way. There’s a pride when other people who share the same hobby look at the books and remark how wickedly cool it is to see them together. I’m pretty sure I never would have appreciated the other books had they all have been sold to me back in the day. And I’m not one to hold a grudge at being fucked over now by that old bastard mate! I can’t hardly remember it at all… the fuckers!
I think with things like this, we aren’t so much collecting items, as collecting the fun parts of our past, and bring the good times to life again, if only for fleeting moments!
Andy.
