"The trouble with first impressions," someone once smugged, "Is that you only get to make one."
The irony here, of course, is that any swan-necked debutante who happened to waft within earshot when this epigram gushed forth would have formed the first impression of its provider being a nob. (Incidentally, who do you think came up with this maxim, sharper than lemon eye drops? Oscar Wilde? Stephen Fry? Nope, it was a character from that generational moral compass, The Simpsons.)
As the hot-headed hue of youth fades to pale grey resignation of the terribly boring twenties, I feel my intolerance for other people fading like a backstreet tattoo. Bombarded by nostalgia pangs and reunion invites, I am starting to reassess those people I may have been a teensy bit hasty in labelling tossers.
At primary school, I hated a girl called Jessica Necci. She was horrid, with tightly coiled hazelnut hair delicately piled atop her porcelain face. Her milky skin, cheeks blushed with a tinge of Botichellian pink, tenderly dusted with demerera brown freckles. Like I said, horrid. I was very mean to Jessica; I used to call her 'Jessica Smelly' (not one of my best,) chase her in the playground with wet sticks and generally do things that would nowadays be tantamount to harassment.
You see, I didn't hate Jessica at all - I was hopelessly and completely in love with her. But you're not supposed to show it at that age. It's called 'playing really hard and rather roughly to get'. The first impression Jessica gave me was on of being both gorgeous and not interested. This immediately damned my fragile heart to years of lonely exile as the girl of my dreams played hopscotch with my best mate.
Since that fateful jilting I have never paid too close attention to first impressions; the more I do, the more I see that they not only matter, but they are nearly always erroneous.
Your very first impression of someone can come in a variety of ways. You could meet them face to face, receive an email from them, or hear from them on the phone - you could wake up lying next to them in a stuffy haze of Neurofen and regret.
The old-fashioned, visual way of summarising and judging a person by what they look like and what they wear serves only to compartmentalise the diversity of the human race - and usher forth stereotyped ideas. For example, categories could exist such as 'fat', 'ugly', 'hot', 'stylish', 'fleet-footed' or 'grotesque and offensive to all five senses'. Within the category of, say, 'fat', we have sub-categories such as 'jolly', 'self-loathing' or 'on the rebound'. All this unauthorised categorization is done instantaneously, with each of us having utter conviction that the lump we see wobbling before us is the very embodiment of our pre-judgement.
These prejudices go on to temper our opinion of every person we meet. First impressions from a nice fat person will be different from a nice, skinny and stunning one. We expect the fat person to be nice: they are fat, they need to be. We expect the skinny one to be a bitch and when he or she isn't, our first impressions of 'mmm, good looking' are compounded by a pleasant peripetaia of expectation.
Visual first impressions don't just count apply to people. Every metallic blue Porsche that roars past depicts to us not a finely-tuned harmony of German engineering verve, but a hollow shell of a man on his way from the place where he leaves his integrity at night to a Cristal party where he snorts drugs off a midget's head before collapsing in the foetal postition and lamenting the loss of his soul while gently rocking and sucking his thumb.
Even website impressions are made within the blink of an eye. So please don't be put off by my blog's colour scheme, chosen by Robert Mugabe's wardrobe stylist. If appearence matters, it matters instantly.
Why have these expectations derived from appearence at all? We, as busy and immensely important people need a way of rapidly differentiating people from the faceless human masses, even if first visual impressions only serve to provide a rather insular sub-category.
But such first impressions are usually wrong; that a person is fat doesn't make them any more or less likely to be a bastard or a flirt.
(As I write, I hear myself sounding more and more like a Chakrabartian limpet, extolling the tired argument that their is inherent good in everyone, regardless of appearance. That's not what I mean. Judge people on their looks by all means. And use that judgement to inform your subsequent interaction. The important thing to prevent that becoming irreversible.)
It is a good thing that first impressions are wrong. As our expectations are confounded, we feel the electric thrill of surprise. We smile at the downright quirkiness of the situation. I have been guilty of sticking doggedly to first impressions of people I know (formed, admittedly, from interaction and not just visual factors,) even when they are proved by many others to be woefully misguided.
So I am slowly beginning to reassess and question my first impressions of people I have reviled since I first laid disparaging eyes on them. The first came yesterday, when meeting up with someone who, at a push, could be termed an acquaintance if I really needed a favour. I spent time with this man, and he was charming, fun, effervescent. I'd never given him a chance - so blinded was I by a first impression of idiocy and narcicissm. He also has a peirced ear which, to my uninitiated prejudice, proved he was either gay or a criminal.
He was neither. He is nice. I was wrong.
Of course, this reappraisal of friends and enemies is a two-way thing. Just as I am beginning to enjoy the company of people I've held nothing but disdain for, I could conceivably start spontaneously hating my friends.
So be nice. I'm impressionable, after all.
Friday 27 June 2008
Monday 23 June 2008
Cycle Like You Mean It
There can be few things more exhilarating than cycling hopefully to work each morning.
Beaming with the full promise of a productive day, giggling to yourself as you think of those poor colleagues with their faces pressed into a tramp's armpit by the sheer weight of commuters, you are rewarded with fresh air and an eco-smugness that can only be otherwise achieved by wearing pants made out of hemp (the chafing is probably similar).
Cycling back from the Cambridge News today, fresh from hearing that the local council has shelved a planned congestion charging zone, I felt far less fulfilled than usual. I felt isolated, as if everyone else on the road and in offices were idiots for not seeing the obvious physical (and irrefutably environmentally friendly) benefits of riding a bike everywhere.
Please don't assume that I'm some green paragon of virtue, pontificating about how good for the environment bikes are. I'm not. If I could afford to own a car, I would, even if it were only to travel outside of London, because traveling by train is marginally more expensive than being held upside-down by the ankles and vigorously shaken. It's just that bikes are quicker and I feel the need to extol them, as should motorists.
Those pudgy, wheezing millions sitting themselves and three empty seats in a noxious jam for two hours every morning and night shouldn't shake their jowly heads disapprovingly as some young whippersnapper whizzes by on a bike. They should welcome them and ask for more. Not only would more cyclists force a re-think in carbon neutral urban infrastructure, but it would take more cars off the road. This would, in turn, make it easier for the most stubborn and miserable of drivers to actually move whilst listening to the Five Live phone-in.
Traffic jams would be a thing of the past, so those people who need a car for their job (only farmers, plumbers and racing drivers, off the top of my head) could work better and more efficiently. Everyone's a winner. Except the Government, who would face a huge windfall in taxes and would inevitably invent a novel way of taxing bikes on top of VAT - some sort of 'high visibility helmet tax'.
Still, most of the Shadow Cabinet are cyclists, and we all know what they'll be doing in three years time.
For all the government initiatives, high-profile cyclists and that Queen video, cycling anywhere in any town is still unspeakably inconvenient.
Cambridge, one of the most bike-friendly towns in the UK, is a prime example of cyclists being treated as an afterthought, riding in spite (not because) of infrastructure. There are not enough cycle lanes (any that exist are continually clogged with buses and parked cars,) the road surfaces are pockmarked like Dean Gaffney's face and exhaust fumes mean that even the briefest two-wheel jaunt leaves one with lungs like Amy Winehouse.
But there are more fundamental reasons that not enough people cycle. For a start, it's incredibly dangerous. In the unspoken hierarchy of vehicle pecking orders, it roughly goes: lorry, bus, limo, van, car, motorbike, horse, mule, bendy bus. Bicycles are somewhere down there between magic carpet and Smart car. Drivers of lorries and vans are so concerned with hooting and laddishly ogling pedestrians, that they contrive not to see the cyclist that's just been smeared across their dashboard.
Someone - possibly a cyclist - told me that it is statistically safer to not stop at traffic lights than it is to stop. If by 'statistically', he means 'anecdotally', then he could be on to something. But it doesn't sound awfully plausible, even in view of how dangerous traffic lights can be for cyclists. It's a contentious issue, with many motorists growing apoplectic at cyclists nipping through on an orange. They'd do it if they could get away with it, mark my words.
Motorists and cyclists shouldn't hate each other, they should see them as friends who could help one another get from A to B quicker and without dying - either from obesity or impact.
Until all commuters become more accepting to different (and superior) means of traveling, cyclists will have to endure angry drivers, unsuspecting pedestrians and some really quite steep hills. Such dangers and annoyances are enough to make you scream loudly at passing buses like the homeless lady who sometimes dines out in your bins. It's driving me cyclepathic.
Beaming with the full promise of a productive day, giggling to yourself as you think of those poor colleagues with their faces pressed into a tramp's armpit by the sheer weight of commuters, you are rewarded with fresh air and an eco-smugness that can only be otherwise achieved by wearing pants made out of hemp (the chafing is probably similar).
Cycling back from the Cambridge News today, fresh from hearing that the local council has shelved a planned congestion charging zone, I felt far less fulfilled than usual. I felt isolated, as if everyone else on the road and in offices were idiots for not seeing the obvious physical (and irrefutably environmentally friendly) benefits of riding a bike everywhere.
Please don't assume that I'm some green paragon of virtue, pontificating about how good for the environment bikes are. I'm not. If I could afford to own a car, I would, even if it were only to travel outside of London, because traveling by train is marginally more expensive than being held upside-down by the ankles and vigorously shaken. It's just that bikes are quicker and I feel the need to extol them, as should motorists.
Those pudgy, wheezing millions sitting themselves and three empty seats in a noxious jam for two hours every morning and night shouldn't shake their jowly heads disapprovingly as some young whippersnapper whizzes by on a bike. They should welcome them and ask for more. Not only would more cyclists force a re-think in carbon neutral urban infrastructure, but it would take more cars off the road. This would, in turn, make it easier for the most stubborn and miserable of drivers to actually move whilst listening to the Five Live phone-in.
Traffic jams would be a thing of the past, so those people who need a car for their job (only farmers, plumbers and racing drivers, off the top of my head) could work better and more efficiently. Everyone's a winner. Except the Government, who would face a huge windfall in taxes and would inevitably invent a novel way of taxing bikes on top of VAT - some sort of 'high visibility helmet tax'.
Still, most of the Shadow Cabinet are cyclists, and we all know what they'll be doing in three years time.
For all the government initiatives, high-profile cyclists and that Queen video, cycling anywhere in any town is still unspeakably inconvenient.
Cambridge, one of the most bike-friendly towns in the UK, is a prime example of cyclists being treated as an afterthought, riding in spite (not because) of infrastructure. There are not enough cycle lanes (any that exist are continually clogged with buses and parked cars,) the road surfaces are pockmarked like Dean Gaffney's face and exhaust fumes mean that even the briefest two-wheel jaunt leaves one with lungs like Amy Winehouse.
But there are more fundamental reasons that not enough people cycle. For a start, it's incredibly dangerous. In the unspoken hierarchy of vehicle pecking orders, it roughly goes: lorry, bus, limo, van, car, motorbike, horse, mule, bendy bus. Bicycles are somewhere down there between magic carpet and Smart car. Drivers of lorries and vans are so concerned with hooting and laddishly ogling pedestrians, that they contrive not to see the cyclist that's just been smeared across their dashboard.
Someone - possibly a cyclist - told me that it is statistically safer to not stop at traffic lights than it is to stop. If by 'statistically', he means 'anecdotally', then he could be on to something. But it doesn't sound awfully plausible, even in view of how dangerous traffic lights can be for cyclists. It's a contentious issue, with many motorists growing apoplectic at cyclists nipping through on an orange. They'd do it if they could get away with it, mark my words.
Motorists and cyclists shouldn't hate each other, they should see them as friends who could help one another get from A to B quicker and without dying - either from obesity or impact.
Until all commuters become more accepting to different (and superior) means of traveling, cyclists will have to endure angry drivers, unsuspecting pedestrians and some really quite steep hills. Such dangers and annoyances are enough to make you scream loudly at passing buses like the homeless lady who sometimes dines out in your bins. It's driving me cyclepathic.
Tuesday 10 June 2008
Staggering Behaviour
On Saturday night, I should have been drunk. I should have been riding a Tesco trolley chariot bedecked with a traffic cone helmet. I should have been laughing at a friend fending off the advances of a creaky stripper with hernia-inducing alacrity. But I wasn't.
I wasn't indulging in any such cliche because, although I was on a stag night for a very dear friend of mine, I wasn't having very much fun at all.
Stag nights, that last bastion of debauched overindulgence and questionable moral behaviour, blurring the line between manly bonding and legal perversion, can go one of two ways - they either fizzle out in a blaze of nudity and men taking turns to roast a crumpet between the stag's goose-pimpled buttocks, or fizzle out in a whimper of yawns and muffled excuses.
This one, for all the valiant intent of the best man and self-imposed fiscal constraints of the groom, was unequivocally the latter. For in the space of sixteen measly, unchallenging hours, our party went from twenty-five, to just seven willing souls, two of whom were very much over the age where mailing someone to John O'Groats with their VISA card cellotaped to their back is still funny.
The sad, depressing fact is that eighteen supposed 'mates' cancelled on the day of the stag night, ladened with affected apologies, anaemic excuses and promises of future liver-damaging forays into public drunkenness. Yes, when the stag becomes the groom, he's bound to want to wee through a police station letter box. Obviously, that's going to happen.
But it's easier to cajole and seduce a disappointed 'buddy' than succumb to the inevitable truth: friendship doesn't matter to friends any more.
I awoke to scudding grey clouds. A fine drizzle carpeted the grass with opaque dew and it did not look like a good day to be dicking about on a golf course with a dodgy back. (We had arranged for a drunken round of 18, before heading off into our adolescent nobbing ground, Loughborough, for the obligatory spiced ethnic food and fizzy lager. All of us, that is, not just seven that made it.)
But, buoyed by the promise of seeing several friends that I had either gone months without seeing or lost contact with altogether, I trudged into what promised to be a day and a night of laddishness, japes and casual innuendo.
As soon as I arrived, I was greeted by the stag, who cheerily informed me that one of our oldest friends was not attending. He had a job interview. On Monday.
Not having been to a huge amount, I'm not certain that job interviews usually give such short notice. It would prove counterproductive to choose an employee on the basis of their speed of preparation; you may as well organise a candidate footrace, whereby the victor takes the job, leaving fellow applicants flailing in his dusty wake as they limp to the the job centre and limber up for the next round of interviews.
This would not be a productive means of appointment, but could go some way to explaining how Seb Coe managed to hurdle his way onto the Olympics Committee. I digress.
I have no doubt that our friend had an interview the coming Monday and so deemed drinking his own body weight in cider before boarding a freightship to Macau to be unsympathetic to his job prospects.
However, I find it hard to shallow that he was only informed, with staggering inconvenience, of said interview on the morning of the stag do. It's just that such a short-noticed pull-out would give the stag very little space to ruminate on what a shower of shite his friend was, for fear of ruining what is supposed to be his last taste of the single life.
Another, even closer friend didn't even manage to muster an external or prior commitment as he bowed disgracefully out of proceedings. He "would, but [was] absolutely knackered". There are several responses to that. "Well, sleep in tomorrow then," would have sufficed. As would, "I don't really think that's a legitimate reason for not showing your support in my last official night of single life. I will interpret this either as a rebuffal of our long and dear (at least to me) friendship or a tacit disapproval as to my choice of bride and course in life." Equally effective would have been a curt, "So, what?"
There are certain occasions that 'friends' can, I believe, legitimately duck out of, if they genuinely have a more important task to be performing. Birthdays are one.
It might seem impolite to ditch your friend amid the mountains of wrapping paper and cards from confused relatives; but in reality your friend wont mind. He will (hopefully) have a few more birthdays in his life, some of which you wont be able to think of an excuse to miss.
Assuming you've not been at the Liza Minelli book of commitment, you only get married once. One ceremony, one engagement, one preparation and one stag-do per lifetime. So friends, who either wish to be considered as such or believe that in this ever accelerating and increasingly superficial world of Facebook, mobile phone rejections and disparate personal encounters, there needs to be some things that actually mean something, should make a cocking effort.
I'm struggling to remember a night when I was so depressed, save for the time Fabianne Way ignored me walking on my hands in a bid to impress her at her sixth birthday party, so I just sat cross-legged in the corner of the bouncy castle and wept hot, salty tears into my Strawberry jelly and ice-cream. I was also six at the time, before you ask.
When did life get in the way of relationships? It can't have happened immediately upon leaving college/school/the dole queue. Every cancelled night out, every last minute text explaining your recently installed headache, every time you favour a night in front of the telly instead of a night nourishing the acquaintances that nourished you when you were growing up, unencumbered by dress-down Fridays and council tax bills - every time you choose convenience over friendship, you miss out.
Friends can inspire, infuriate and motivate you. You have to listen to your stupid head all day long. You have every opportunity to say what you think throughout the long computer days and TV-dinner nights, but you never have as good a chance to listen as when you are with like-minded individuals. Friends, to you and me.
So put down your pen, stop watching that sixty-fifth series of Grand Designs (you'll never afford it anyway) and go and see someone, talk to them, laugh with them, discuss the last series of Grand Designs with them, if you must. But most of all, please, let them mean something to you. Because, if last Saturday is indicative of the state of our friendships, you've already started meaning a little less to them.
I wasn't indulging in any such cliche because, although I was on a stag night for a very dear friend of mine, I wasn't having very much fun at all.
Stag nights, that last bastion of debauched overindulgence and questionable moral behaviour, blurring the line between manly bonding and legal perversion, can go one of two ways - they either fizzle out in a blaze of nudity and men taking turns to roast a crumpet between the stag's goose-pimpled buttocks, or fizzle out in a whimper of yawns and muffled excuses.
This one, for all the valiant intent of the best man and self-imposed fiscal constraints of the groom, was unequivocally the latter. For in the space of sixteen measly, unchallenging hours, our party went from twenty-five, to just seven willing souls, two of whom were very much over the age where mailing someone to John O'Groats with their VISA card cellotaped to their back is still funny.
The sad, depressing fact is that eighteen supposed 'mates' cancelled on the day of the stag night, ladened with affected apologies, anaemic excuses and promises of future liver-damaging forays into public drunkenness. Yes, when the stag becomes the groom, he's bound to want to wee through a police station letter box. Obviously, that's going to happen.
But it's easier to cajole and seduce a disappointed 'buddy' than succumb to the inevitable truth: friendship doesn't matter to friends any more.
I awoke to scudding grey clouds. A fine drizzle carpeted the grass with opaque dew and it did not look like a good day to be dicking about on a golf course with a dodgy back. (We had arranged for a drunken round of 18, before heading off into our adolescent nobbing ground, Loughborough, for the obligatory spiced ethnic food and fizzy lager. All of us, that is, not just seven that made it.)
But, buoyed by the promise of seeing several friends that I had either gone months without seeing or lost contact with altogether, I trudged into what promised to be a day and a night of laddishness, japes and casual innuendo.
As soon as I arrived, I was greeted by the stag, who cheerily informed me that one of our oldest friends was not attending. He had a job interview. On Monday.
Not having been to a huge amount, I'm not certain that job interviews usually give such short notice. It would prove counterproductive to choose an employee on the basis of their speed of preparation; you may as well organise a candidate footrace, whereby the victor takes the job, leaving fellow applicants flailing in his dusty wake as they limp to the the job centre and limber up for the next round of interviews.
This would not be a productive means of appointment, but could go some way to explaining how Seb Coe managed to hurdle his way onto the Olympics Committee. I digress.
I have no doubt that our friend had an interview the coming Monday and so deemed drinking his own body weight in cider before boarding a freightship to Macau to be unsympathetic to his job prospects.
However, I find it hard to shallow that he was only informed, with staggering inconvenience, of said interview on the morning of the stag do. It's just that such a short-noticed pull-out would give the stag very little space to ruminate on what a shower of shite his friend was, for fear of ruining what is supposed to be his last taste of the single life.
Another, even closer friend didn't even manage to muster an external or prior commitment as he bowed disgracefully out of proceedings. He "would, but [was] absolutely knackered". There are several responses to that. "Well, sleep in tomorrow then," would have sufficed. As would, "I don't really think that's a legitimate reason for not showing your support in my last official night of single life. I will interpret this either as a rebuffal of our long and dear (at least to me) friendship or a tacit disapproval as to my choice of bride and course in life." Equally effective would have been a curt, "So, what?"
There are certain occasions that 'friends' can, I believe, legitimately duck out of, if they genuinely have a more important task to be performing. Birthdays are one.
It might seem impolite to ditch your friend amid the mountains of wrapping paper and cards from confused relatives; but in reality your friend wont mind. He will (hopefully) have a few more birthdays in his life, some of which you wont be able to think of an excuse to miss.
Assuming you've not been at the Liza Minelli book of commitment, you only get married once. One ceremony, one engagement, one preparation and one stag-do per lifetime. So friends, who either wish to be considered as such or believe that in this ever accelerating and increasingly superficial world of Facebook, mobile phone rejections and disparate personal encounters, there needs to be some things that actually mean something, should make a cocking effort.
I'm struggling to remember a night when I was so depressed, save for the time Fabianne Way ignored me walking on my hands in a bid to impress her at her sixth birthday party, so I just sat cross-legged in the corner of the bouncy castle and wept hot, salty tears into my Strawberry jelly and ice-cream. I was also six at the time, before you ask.
When did life get in the way of relationships? It can't have happened immediately upon leaving college/school/the dole queue. Every cancelled night out, every last minute text explaining your recently installed headache, every time you favour a night in front of the telly instead of a night nourishing the acquaintances that nourished you when you were growing up, unencumbered by dress-down Fridays and council tax bills - every time you choose convenience over friendship, you miss out.
Friends can inspire, infuriate and motivate you. You have to listen to your stupid head all day long. You have every opportunity to say what you think throughout the long computer days and TV-dinner nights, but you never have as good a chance to listen as when you are with like-minded individuals. Friends, to you and me.
So put down your pen, stop watching that sixty-fifth series of Grand Designs (you'll never afford it anyway) and go and see someone, talk to them, laugh with them, discuss the last series of Grand Designs with them, if you must. But most of all, please, let them mean something to you. Because, if last Saturday is indicative of the state of our friendships, you've already started meaning a little less to them.
Monday 2 June 2008
Time Sates For No Man
I have recently retired. Not retired in the post 65 year-old sense of the word; I've not already embarked on an ever decelerating cycle of Littlewoods catalogues, Werther's Original wrappers and calling my Grandson by his brother's/sister's/the dog's name. I mean I've left paid employment and shall soon be back to the gratification-free world of work experience.
It's a world of making tea, inputing data and trudging home after a week of what is essentially modern-day slavery (except without the overcrowded ships and Cat-o-nine tails,) devoid even of the satisfaction of opening your wallet and pulling out a crumpled tenner, before having it whipped out of your hand by a gelled barman.
However - and this will sound like stating the blindingly obvious - it's better than doing nothing. But, is doing nothing better than going to work?
I've been looking forward to finishing for the past few weeks, building up in my head rapturous images of walking into a sunset of unencumbered freedom, inflatable lylo in one hand and a strawberry daiquiri in the other.
Such thoughts of hedonism arose partly from my own MTV ravaged brain's inadequacy to conjure up anything more original than a sepiarised Hollywood replication of freedom, and partly from the the utter lack of alternative stimuli my office had to offer.
The monotony that simmers as your eyes sear ever hotter into your ancient computer screen arouses thoughts of something, anything else. You spend so long lumped behind your workstation that your silhouette becomes burned on the back of your chair.
Again, the colleague who insists on singing along to every track on the office jukebox, even the unattainably high noted sequences, helps precipitate a 'grass is always greener' mindset. Nervous looks are exchanged and eyebrows patronisingly raised, but no-one ever has the heart to tell him to keep his fat mouth closed and his prepubescent voice to himself. I found myself faced with the choice of silently imagining better times, or inducing a keyboard-throwing office holocaust.
This boredom is not unique to my erstwhile workplace - every office is, by definition, not a fun place to spend your days. You are there to work, not play naked Twister. People who say they enjoy their job are either lying or secretly employed as a roller coaster tester.
Going to a work essentially joyless. If you're lucky in the office, you'll either get a window out of which you can forlornly stare, or nab a monitor positioned so no-one can see what you're looking at. I had neither.
Since being handed a painting of a Spitfire and my P45, I've realised that free time can be just as uninspiring and, more worryingly, far more formless. This second point is particularly tender for me.
I have a genetic inability to do nothing all day. Like a lovingly treated petty criminal, I crave structure and (some forms of) discipline. Even when I'm as free as Sharon Stone's agent's diary, I find myself setting-up artificial time-limits.
My free time is represented by a conflict between that which I should do and that which I would love to do, but am afraid of how I'll hate myself if I do it. The paradox is that free time isn't free, there are still rules, still more dos and do nots than the list of guidelines given to you whenever you receive a lap dance. (Which is never, Mum.)
For example, you must get at least five items of fruit and veg, 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and less than four units of alcohol a day. That's fine. This is health advice and, however spurious and mollycoddling it may seem, it's probably a good idea to stick to it. You don't have to be happy about it though.
Then there are more abstract mantras that have become unwritten rules of free time. You shouldn't get up late, or you're a bum. You shouldn't sit on your unmotivated behind and play computer games all day. Or watch daytime television. Society's general consensus is fairly disparaging toward this kind of profligate behaviour. The body public looks down on sitting on your sofa in your pants eating last night's fried chicken. But this comes from a body that, overwhelmingly, has their time organised for them, by bosses with thick-framed glasses and questionable halitosis.
You go to work to earn money; you only earn money if you go to work. So you can't spend two hours a day reading the paper in the bath, or stay in bed till lunchtime, or even watch the entire second season of The Cosby Show back to back. It's easy not to do these things when circumstances make them impossible. It's much harder to not work, to empty your day of commitment and then attempt to fill it with productive activity.
To fill the arid days until my work experience begins again, I'll do some writing (a good thing, given that sitting at an office desk is akin to being slowly lobotomised; I feel I've lost much of my...er...*) and some exercise. I won't drink during the day, or on my own. Or in the shower. I will eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I will essentially live to a structured timetable, as if I were at work, somehow destroying the very notion of Adornoesque free time.
But. That's not to say I shan't be acting pretty damn naughtily at some points. For example, I'll definitely shower with the door open this morning. And I'll listen to music at a volume akin to a Christian rock concert, free from unwanted accompaniment from the singing workmate. I'll play computer games if I like and I won't feel guilty, not even when running over innocent pedestrians in GTA IV.
All such activities need to be rigorously timetabled however, to prevent the risk of me looking down on myself as a social subservient, like a self-loathing City banker on a cocaine hangover. I'll be lazy, gluttonous or downright unhygienic, but not for longer than I'm being 'productive'.
This structuralism/non-conformity is preferable to going to work; things are better when they're your choice: like voting, or sex. I never would, but it's comforting to know that I could drink milk out of the carton or beer before lunch and watch replays of Gladiators if the urge ever took me. Which it does. All day long.
*perspicacity, thanks dictionary.com.
It's a world of making tea, inputing data and trudging home after a week of what is essentially modern-day slavery (except without the overcrowded ships and Cat-o-nine tails,) devoid even of the satisfaction of opening your wallet and pulling out a crumpled tenner, before having it whipped out of your hand by a gelled barman.
However - and this will sound like stating the blindingly obvious - it's better than doing nothing. But, is doing nothing better than going to work?
I've been looking forward to finishing for the past few weeks, building up in my head rapturous images of walking into a sunset of unencumbered freedom, inflatable lylo in one hand and a strawberry daiquiri in the other.
Such thoughts of hedonism arose partly from my own MTV ravaged brain's inadequacy to conjure up anything more original than a sepiarised Hollywood replication of freedom, and partly from the the utter lack of alternative stimuli my office had to offer.
The monotony that simmers as your eyes sear ever hotter into your ancient computer screen arouses thoughts of something, anything else. You spend so long lumped behind your workstation that your silhouette becomes burned on the back of your chair.
Again, the colleague who insists on singing along to every track on the office jukebox, even the unattainably high noted sequences, helps precipitate a 'grass is always greener' mindset. Nervous looks are exchanged and eyebrows patronisingly raised, but no-one ever has the heart to tell him to keep his fat mouth closed and his prepubescent voice to himself. I found myself faced with the choice of silently imagining better times, or inducing a keyboard-throwing office holocaust.
This boredom is not unique to my erstwhile workplace - every office is, by definition, not a fun place to spend your days. You are there to work, not play naked Twister. People who say they enjoy their job are either lying or secretly employed as a roller coaster tester.
Going to a work essentially joyless. If you're lucky in the office, you'll either get a window out of which you can forlornly stare, or nab a monitor positioned so no-one can see what you're looking at. I had neither.
Since being handed a painting of a Spitfire and my P45, I've realised that free time can be just as uninspiring and, more worryingly, far more formless. This second point is particularly tender for me.
I have a genetic inability to do nothing all day. Like a lovingly treated petty criminal, I crave structure and (some forms of) discipline. Even when I'm as free as Sharon Stone's agent's diary, I find myself setting-up artificial time-limits.
My free time is represented by a conflict between that which I should do and that which I would love to do, but am afraid of how I'll hate myself if I do it. The paradox is that free time isn't free, there are still rules, still more dos and do nots than the list of guidelines given to you whenever you receive a lap dance. (Which is never, Mum.)
For example, you must get at least five items of fruit and veg, 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and less than four units of alcohol a day. That's fine. This is health advice and, however spurious and mollycoddling it may seem, it's probably a good idea to stick to it. You don't have to be happy about it though.
Then there are more abstract mantras that have become unwritten rules of free time. You shouldn't get up late, or you're a bum. You shouldn't sit on your unmotivated behind and play computer games all day. Or watch daytime television. Society's general consensus is fairly disparaging toward this kind of profligate behaviour. The body public looks down on sitting on your sofa in your pants eating last night's fried chicken. But this comes from a body that, overwhelmingly, has their time organised for them, by bosses with thick-framed glasses and questionable halitosis.
You go to work to earn money; you only earn money if you go to work. So you can't spend two hours a day reading the paper in the bath, or stay in bed till lunchtime, or even watch the entire second season of The Cosby Show back to back. It's easy not to do these things when circumstances make them impossible. It's much harder to not work, to empty your day of commitment and then attempt to fill it with productive activity.
To fill the arid days until my work experience begins again, I'll do some writing (a good thing, given that sitting at an office desk is akin to being slowly lobotomised; I feel I've lost much of my...er...*) and some exercise. I won't drink during the day, or on my own. Or in the shower. I will eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I will essentially live to a structured timetable, as if I were at work, somehow destroying the very notion of Adornoesque free time.
But. That's not to say I shan't be acting pretty damn naughtily at some points. For example, I'll definitely shower with the door open this morning. And I'll listen to music at a volume akin to a Christian rock concert, free from unwanted accompaniment from the singing workmate. I'll play computer games if I like and I won't feel guilty, not even when running over innocent pedestrians in GTA IV.
All such activities need to be rigorously timetabled however, to prevent the risk of me looking down on myself as a social subservient, like a self-loathing City banker on a cocaine hangover. I'll be lazy, gluttonous or downright unhygienic, but not for longer than I'm being 'productive'.
This structuralism/non-conformity is preferable to going to work; things are better when they're your choice: like voting, or sex. I never would, but it's comforting to know that I could drink milk out of the carton or beer before lunch and watch replays of Gladiators if the urge ever took me. Which it does. All day long.
*perspicacity, thanks dictionary.com.
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