Up the Wall

25 November 2011 at 11:45 pm (Education, Insight, People, Plinky Prompts, Rants, Relationships, Self, Wellbeing)
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I'm generally a laid-back girl, usually opting for the path of least resistance. That is the reason that the few things that drive me crazy really push me to the border of certifiability.

Stupidity 2

Actually, come to think about it, there are only two real things that drive me crazy – two major things that branch out into smaller instances, but we're looking at the big picture here.

The first is a lack of personal space and time. I need a corner, if that's all I can get, to build my book fortress and call it mine, with nobody messing with it. Sharing everything really makes me suffer. My old workstation, which I couldn't customise because someone else would be sitting there next shift, made me twitchy. Now I'm putting up with dodgy chairs instead of the comfy sofas, all for the bliss of having my computer desk as my exclusive territory.

Personal time may or may not be associated with my personal space. I really need some time alone each day, away from any kind of responsibility, to read or listen to music and decompress. That's either a half-hour sprawled on the bed with a book after the young one is tucked in, or a bimble to the supermarket with my mp3 player on, or, if I'm really lucky, a wander about town while shortstuff is at school. I become cranky and snappish if I don't get it, particularly long-term, as it tends to happen when we're visiting with my mother, who doesn't understand 'doing nothing time'.

The other thing, which makes me see red and gives me opportunities to exercise my self-control (not always successfully) is human stupidity. I used to spend considerable lengths on time on Yahoo Answers, and the sheer amounts of ignorance and idiocy spouted there were staggering. From the 'Catholic vs Christian' dichotomy to the father who was worried that his newborn daughter would become a lesbian if she breastfed, I would invariably end up debating ways to give that gene pool a good bleaching.

Now I'm on other debating communities, and some of the opinions I hear expressed there make me nearly foam at the mouth. I want to give some of the consistently WTF? authors a good shake (until their teeth rattle) and find out which planet they fell out of and if they maintain any link at all with reality. Just like the claim that public school-quality pizza is a full balanced meal. The stupid… it burns!

And then there's also the cunning stupid, when people attempt to pull a fast one and then wonder why I call them out on it. Like Jerry Springer guests. The bigger the jackass, the louder the bray.

I'll be looking for the latest edition of the Darwin Awards soon. And if I ever find any evidence that the stupid is contagious, watch me go all Ellen Ripley on the morons unfortunate enough to be within range. Really.

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Risk Nothing, Win Nothing

16 November 2011 at 11:43 pm (Britain, Family, Greece, Plinky Prompts, Relationships, Special Days)
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Those who have been reading these ramblings with any consistency will already know that I'm not good with risk and change. I prefer to play it safe and grumble occasionally. But when I do take a risk, it's a big one, bitches.

20 hours of sun

The one big risk of my life so far has been upping sticks and moving to the UK to start a family with someone I'd met on the internet.

Sounds daft, doesn't it? It was. Falling in love with someone I had never seen in the flesh, who was married to someone else at the time, no less, flying over for a first meeting (he told me later his biggest fear was that I wouldn't turn up; I wouldn't have dreamt of doing that, nor that he could have done the same, leaving me stranded in a foreign country – yes, I was naive and trusting), and proceeding to arrange a permanent move… I'd say the daftness of the particular idea covers quite a few years of lesser risks not taken.

Did it pay off? Well, I'm here, aren't I? We've been married for three and a half years and we have a wonderful little boy who is the light of my life. It has been anything but easy, I will admit that. I miss my Greek life something fierce – my family and friends, the language, the food, the shopping and drinking culture, some of the climate. We've been through rough patches in health and finances, and without any real-life support system, I've felt heartbreakingly lonely. The guilt of leaving my mother back alone is constant, occasionally crippling. And I still say the risk paid off.

If I had stayed back, I'd be exactly what my mother was accusing me, at 34, of becoming: a cranky spinster without prospects. I'd have put up with my soul-destroying job to pay the bills, and in the current financial collapse, I may not even have that. If I'm going to be lonely and miserable, I want something back for it, and my own family is that something.

As my husband is fond of saying, we are a miracle. A relationship like ours was not supposed to work, but it does. And if I hadn't taken a deep breath and jumped off the deep end, I'd never have found that out.

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Like a Sore Thumb

1 November 2011 at 12:19 pm (Britain, Greece, Insight, Personality, Plinky Prompts, Self)
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A fascinating expression that suggests what more of us should know: standing out is not always a good thing.

Stand-out

When I moved to the UK, I really stood out in a number of ways that I couldn't help, and which could have been all the wrong ones, if some circumstances had been different.

I would hardly open my mouth, and someone would ask where I was from. (Some followed up with a bit of the third degree about why I was here, and I couldn't, in good conscience, say 'none of your bloody business' to a stranger, especially an otherwise harmless-looking old lady.) Phone conversations terrified me, for the same reason – I hadn't been exposed to dreadful call centre accents yet. And I don't want to think about the treatment my accent could have earned me, if we were in the wrong kind of neighbourhood – one of high nationalistic ideas, that would be.

Exposure and practice have smoothed my rough edges in the years since, but my accent is not completely gone and never will. I'm rather glad of that. I don't get the origin question too much lately, but I'm rather proud of being obviously a foreigner whose English is better than many native speakers'. That is more obvious in writing, but it happens even when I speak; solid grammar and a good vocabulary can't hide. That's most definitely a way I'm glad to stand out in.

Otherwise, I'm still quite the exotic import. Not as much in terms of looks; there are plenty of people around with Mediterranean colouring and figures, natives and otherwise. It's not an exceptionally multicultural bit of the country, but there are enough Asians and Africans around for no batting eyelids. Though I'm still likely to be the one who talks and laughs a bit too loudly, the one who gesticulates a lot, the one who has no qualms about eating and drinking in public (though the natives are improving in that respect, and I'm so glad).

I'm also the one most likely to go around in a fleece jacket when everyone else is in tank tops, but I can't do much about my tolerance for cold!

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No More Heroes?

19 January 2011 at 9:18 pm (Music, People, Rants, Reading, Religion, YouTube)
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Hugely, obscenely misunderstood song. It’s not about nihilism and ‘the age of heroes is past’. It is about calling for more heroes, for a way out of mediocrity. ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ If your English is not good enough to understand the words, don’t critique.

Excuse the fit of pique; I recently came across a series of articles on rock music collected from a Christian youth magazine I used to read. I hadn’t seen them in a few years, and only came across them on my last visit home, while sorting out books to take back with me. I remember reading them when I was a teenager and being rather unconvinced. As an adult, I can fully grasp the extent of their bias and ignorance, and both are monumental. Really, proof that one should leave well alone if they don’t know their subject well enough. Ignorance is no excuse for misinformation. (Yes, I know it happens all the time, but don’t get me started along that track.)

The heart of the matter, however, is that people need heroes. Rather, they need role models, and in the absence of heroes, they’ll opt for antiheroes or villains. So, whatever happened to the heroes in the 21st century?

The short answer is: we’ve grown closer to them, and they no longer seem larger than life, like they used to. With the media covering every corner of the planet, it is easy to find out nearly everything about those who are everything one wants to be, and that makes them appear just human, regardless of their glamour levels. It’s hard to imagine legends of divinity about someone that you know even where they stop for coffee.

It’s not the heroes’ fault if they fail to fill the boots we prefabricate for them. It’s up to us and what we want from our lives. If you want 15 minutes of fame and aim to go on Big Brother to get it, you should be prepared to bitch and whore for attention, and eventually to be shoved aside when the next crop comes up. If you want to be Sir Alan Sugar when you grow up, be prepared to be treated the way he treats his apprentices on the way. We all have a big goal, but it doesn’t matter when we reach it, or even if we reach it at all. What does matters is the how; the journey there and the choices we make along the way. Because the goal is one moment and the journey is, you know, one’s life.

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Only Boring People Get Bored

7 January 2011 at 9:18 pm (Entertainment, Internet, Rants, Reading, Roleplaying, Work, Writing)
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Yeahno. We don’t live in a Hollywood action movie.

I remember seeing the sentiment on a Radio Times coaster: ‘I refuse to be bored because I’m not boring.’ At the time, I agreed with it. Later, I got to thinking more on it, and I was no longer so sure.

You see, everyday life is boring. There are thrilling events for everyone, bigger and smaller ones, those that carry us away willy-nilly and those that we may miss if we’re not observant. But they are the exceptions, not the rule, and there’s plenty of downtime in between. There’s tons of opportunity to be bored at work, or doing chores at home. Boredom is a thing of the mind, and one doesn’t need to be idle in order to be bored. Go do housework, and you will know what I mean.

So it’s obvious that having a boring job doesn’t make you a boring person – only a bored person. I’m not sure how the fallacy arose, but I can imagine it being a creation of the entertainment business; a gimmick to sell more ‘exciting things to do or see’. The Radio Times occurrence certainly supports such an assumption. I shudder to think what we would be like if we were stimulated all the time. Watching kids at a birthday party and, more importantly, at home right afterwards, can give you an idea. We’d blow our fuses in no time.

There’s not much one can do for boredom on the job. I used to go for the evening shifts in the office, when all I had to worry about, from halfway into the shift onwards, was the odd phone call, and got tons of writing done in the quiet hours; during the daytime open hours, workload could fluctuate wildly, and I couldn’t get away with anything fun while I had to be on call. Household chores can be made bearable with music – there’s no reason I can’t scrub and sing or shimmy at the same time!

The internet is another matter altogether, though. One would think it’s impossible to be bored while on the net, not with the tons of places to be and things to see/watch/listen to. This is largely right, although the extent depends on what everyone likes doing on the net. I’m not really into games or streaming shows; most of my time is spent on Elliquiy and WEaT, writing and socialising, and there are definitely slow times – when the writing muse, mine or my partners’, is not cooperating, or when nobody is around to talk to. In such cases, reading is once more my rescue. I don’t like reading on-screen, though I can do it for short periods of time, but the Kindle, or any physical book or magazine lying around (and there are many of those!) can oblige.

Come to think about it, boring people, whatever their flavour, are not good with words – they don’t read, don’t write, don’t have anything to talk about. Words, going in or coming out, one’s own or others’, are always a way out of the bog.

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