For some reason, when I got back from playing a gig in Uxbridge last night I started to worry about my health. It was about 1:30 and I couldn't sleep (and I know I'm going to have a big night tonight since my buddy James is coming down from Cardiff - much beer+whiskey and little sleep will ensue).
So I decided that I needed some vitamins. As luck would have it, I'd bought these tubes of soluble orange-flavoured vitamins at Tesco last week, so I decided to take some vitamin C with zinc. Rather than be bothered to go out to the shared kitchen and find a glass, I decided to drop one of the soluble tablets into a new 2-litre bottle of Sainsbury's water I had in my room. Then I started to think to myself that dissolving that much vitamic C into that much water would have no effects beneficial to my health, so I dissolved another one in there. And another. Well, I drank about a quarter of the bottle, and decided to bring the rest of it with me to work today and was drinking it on my way down Stockbridge Road.
What suddenly dawned on me as I was walking along, listening to Don Cabellero on my iPod, was that it actually looked like I was drinking a 2-litre bottle of urine. Good job I'm not self-conscious.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
I want to be welcome, not just tolerated
As I continue to walk to the tightrope of alienating people who read my blog, I feel that I should move to feelings of being welcome or otherwise.
I'm not sure if this is something that preoccupies me more than other people (and, I suspect that if it does, this might have some grounding in my relatively uncomfortable experience of the 6th form at school), but I often worry about how people perceive me and whether or not I fit in in a given situation.
I've often thought about the dislocation between how we are and how we seem. You only need to see a video of yourself to feel self-conscious (an interesting phrase, when you think about it) and to gain an awareness that your thoughts may be translated into your facial expressions with unexpected results. I remember seeing a video of myself that had been taken on Christmas day a couple of years ago. I was in the front room of my grandparents' house in Cardiff, and was probably in a pretty good mood, surrounded by people I love. But as I looked at my face on that screen, I realised just how bloody moody I must look to other people. I don't want my face to convey this when I'm in repose, as it almost certainly isn't the case. Nervous, maybe, moody, no.
From this thought I move to thinking about how people close to me interpret these things, my face and my body's gestures. I am often a bit uncomfortable in my body. I don't quite know what to do with it sometimes, where should I put my hands?!. What if the person that people know and like or dislike isn't me at all. There's a 'me' beneath these layers, but what if the translation isn't working; what if the accidents and the substance don't match? What if people love me not for who I am but for who they think I am? I write this without irony or self-regard, I hasten to add.
There was a party at Luigi's house on Saturday. I felt a mixture of nervousness and acceptance. New people there, who I didn't know, put me on edge. Nevertheless, having a decent number of friends together (as if I can actually prove either way that they're my friends - I suppose this is where faith comes in!) gave me a very significant feeling of acceptance and wellbeing. It felt good to be there. I probably could have enjoyed the party just as much without the cushion of tequila, and that's important. People taking or leaving you on your own merits (even *if* they're a second-hand interpretation) is a novelty and a luxury I just didn't have until I left school.
Feeling 'at home' is an incredibly important part of this existence, and I aim to learn to recognise it as much as I recognise its opposite.
I'm not sure if this is something that preoccupies me more than other people (and, I suspect that if it does, this might have some grounding in my relatively uncomfortable experience of the 6th form at school), but I often worry about how people perceive me and whether or not I fit in in a given situation.
I've often thought about the dislocation between how we are and how we seem. You only need to see a video of yourself to feel self-conscious (an interesting phrase, when you think about it) and to gain an awareness that your thoughts may be translated into your facial expressions with unexpected results. I remember seeing a video of myself that had been taken on Christmas day a couple of years ago. I was in the front room of my grandparents' house in Cardiff, and was probably in a pretty good mood, surrounded by people I love. But as I looked at my face on that screen, I realised just how bloody moody I must look to other people. I don't want my face to convey this when I'm in repose, as it almost certainly isn't the case. Nervous, maybe, moody, no.
From this thought I move to thinking about how people close to me interpret these things, my face and my body's gestures. I am often a bit uncomfortable in my body. I don't quite know what to do with it sometimes, where should I put my hands?!. What if the person that people know and like or dislike isn't me at all. There's a 'me' beneath these layers, but what if the translation isn't working; what if the accidents and the substance don't match? What if people love me not for who I am but for who they think I am? I write this without irony or self-regard, I hasten to add.
There was a party at Luigi's house on Saturday. I felt a mixture of nervousness and acceptance. New people there, who I didn't know, put me on edge. Nevertheless, having a decent number of friends together (as if I can actually prove either way that they're my friends - I suppose this is where faith comes in!) gave me a very significant feeling of acceptance and wellbeing. It felt good to be there. I probably could have enjoyed the party just as much without the cushion of tequila, and that's important. People taking or leaving you on your own merits (even *if* they're a second-hand interpretation) is a novelty and a luxury I just didn't have until I left school.
Feeling 'at home' is an incredibly important part of this existence, and I aim to learn to recognise it as much as I recognise its opposite.
Friday, June 02, 2006
Thursday night optimism
I went out with Naomi last night to see the Da Vinci Code - in brief:
1. It was more fast-paced than the book. They did well to cover the whole story within the medium of a 2hr film, but the first fifteen minutes actually felt very rushed, and the Langdon character was able to make mental connections at a quite unrealistic pace.
2. It was no less saccharine than the book. The major holes in history, theology and basic logic were glaring, and leapt out of Teabing's dialogue to accompany the plasma screen scene. The problem is that a lot of people will take this stuff as gospel (hehe), and don't actually have a background that allows them to make proper criticism of convenient glossing to support the narrative. I can't be bothered to go into it at length now, but some of it was very far-fetched.
3. Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard. This is flat-out ridiculous for anyone who's been to university (and don't forget, that's supposed to be 50-60% of us now, New Labour kids!!). I suppose Harvard has a whole faculty of 'religious symbologists' for Langdon to preside over as well, does it?
If you want to read more (prolly not, eh?), the New Statesman review isn't too bad, save for its squealing "most people will need a lot more convincing before they start denying evolution and insist that female reproductive organs are public property" rubbish.
Anyway, what brought me to write a blog post here was not Dan Brown's successful leveraging of about £15 for a book and cinema ticket, out of my (and everyone else's) pockets (and against the odds, now I think about it...), but a conversation I overheard in the pub before I went to see the film.
There was a bloke a little bit older than me talking to a middle-aged feller about a visit to a museum he'd recently made on holiday. I didn't catch the beginning of the conversation, but I got the impression it was probably a French museum somewhere. He was saying how it had only cost him 6 Euros, "that's only about four quid isn't it", and what good value for money he felt he'd had. He went on to tell the older man how he would happily pay this to go to museums in the UK, which were of a much higher quality still, in his opinion. The older man agreed. Their conversation moved on to other things, and they left the pub.
Listening to them, I realised just how reasonable they both were. Both men who, from their brief exchange that I'd overheard, put a value in things that are edifying. I realised that, however reasonable their feelings towards paying for a valuable heritage service, these views were isolated in a vacuum of ignorance of the motives and dogmas of modern politics. These men were probably a little too old and a little too Middle England to be aware of the creed of 'access' that now drives our taxpayer's pound. I'm sure museum curators the country over are only too aware of the problems this brings.
Anyone visiting museums in London would see that the chief beneficiaries of New Labour's free museums policy (admittedly, conceived with a good will) have been foreign tourists who no longer pay admission. But they still bring the same wear and tear to the buildings, and now the museums are funded less than they were when they were able to charge. This is a classic case of the unintended consequences of an 'access' policy. In the headlong rush to be seen to address the interests of the UK's welfare/low income or minority ethnic populations, a very different beneficiary group comes out the other side of the equation. What I'm trying to illustrate here is that the two museum-goers in the pub are actually not the demographic the politicians want to go to museums, and are actually quite different again from those who stand to gain from wrong-headed 'access' policies.
1. It was more fast-paced than the book. They did well to cover the whole story within the medium of a 2hr film, but the first fifteen minutes actually felt very rushed, and the Langdon character was able to make mental connections at a quite unrealistic pace.
2. It was no less saccharine than the book. The major holes in history, theology and basic logic were glaring, and leapt out of Teabing's dialogue to accompany the plasma screen scene. The problem is that a lot of people will take this stuff as gospel (hehe), and don't actually have a background that allows them to make proper criticism of convenient glossing to support the narrative. I can't be bothered to go into it at length now, but some of it was very far-fetched.
3. Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard. This is flat-out ridiculous for anyone who's been to university (and don't forget, that's supposed to be 50-60% of us now, New Labour kids!!). I suppose Harvard has a whole faculty of 'religious symbologists' for Langdon to preside over as well, does it?
If you want to read more (prolly not, eh?), the New Statesman review isn't too bad, save for its squealing "most people will need a lot more convincing before they start denying evolution and insist that female reproductive organs are public property" rubbish.
Anyway, what brought me to write a blog post here was not Dan Brown's successful leveraging of about £15 for a book and cinema ticket, out of my (and everyone else's) pockets (and against the odds, now I think about it...), but a conversation I overheard in the pub before I went to see the film.
There was a bloke a little bit older than me talking to a middle-aged feller about a visit to a museum he'd recently made on holiday. I didn't catch the beginning of the conversation, but I got the impression it was probably a French museum somewhere. He was saying how it had only cost him 6 Euros, "that's only about four quid isn't it", and what good value for money he felt he'd had. He went on to tell the older man how he would happily pay this to go to museums in the UK, which were of a much higher quality still, in his opinion. The older man agreed. Their conversation moved on to other things, and they left the pub.
Listening to them, I realised just how reasonable they both were. Both men who, from their brief exchange that I'd overheard, put a value in things that are edifying. I realised that, however reasonable their feelings towards paying for a valuable heritage service, these views were isolated in a vacuum of ignorance of the motives and dogmas of modern politics. These men were probably a little too old and a little too Middle England to be aware of the creed of 'access' that now drives our taxpayer's pound. I'm sure museum curators the country over are only too aware of the problems this brings.
Anyone visiting museums in London would see that the chief beneficiaries of New Labour's free museums policy (admittedly, conceived with a good will) have been foreign tourists who no longer pay admission. But they still bring the same wear and tear to the buildings, and now the museums are funded less than they were when they were able to charge. This is a classic case of the unintended consequences of an 'access' policy. In the headlong rush to be seen to address the interests of the UK's welfare/low income or minority ethnic populations, a very different beneficiary group comes out the other side of the equation. What I'm trying to illustrate here is that the two museum-goers in the pub are actually not the demographic the politicians want to go to museums, and are actually quite different again from those who stand to gain from wrong-headed 'access' policies.
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