Category: People Studies

Party Like It’s 2011

By and large parties fill me two urges.  The first is to vomit.  Violently.  The second is to spend the night played sociological games with the attendees.  It’s very difficult to explain why I detest the party going experience so much.  I don’t know whether it’s the false expectation that everyone should have a good time or the statement it makes on your age.

One type of party which is often the most infuriating is the over enthusiastic host party.  This is when the host gets tipsy and starts trying to introduce everyone to everyone else and tries to make every guest dance.  The older I get the more it makes me want to commit murder.  First off dancing isn’t fun.  For men it never is, it’s something we have done to please women.  If a man does enjoy it, they are often either Billy Elliot or Boy George.  Where as with women it’s an age marker.  When they were younger it was fun.  As grown adults they do it to have that same feeling again.  The trouble is the closer you come to the middle-ages of your life the more absurd you look.

Eventually there comes a time in your life when you are invited to parties where nobody dances.  And that is even worse.  Everybody stands around brushing elbows in previously established groups.  As the night wears on these groups will slowly integrate, in the meantime topics will range from work, stuff my kid does and the importance of the third revolution of the Pompadours to the time we live in.  There will be at least one baby at the party, stuffed in a corner with an antsy mother and a father who wants to stay longer.  There will be at least one man drinking wine from a glass who will almost certainly be wearing spectacles.  All the while the only genuine bonds which are made are between the smokers as they grab strangers to accompany them outside, to the garden or the balcony.

I often struggle at these social gatherings.  I hate dancing and I steadfastly refuse.  I don’t have an interesting job to blather on about.  I don’t have a child to use as a subject every time a conversation drops into silence.  I quit smoking half a year so I have no reason to extradite myself from the mundane conversations which make up a party.  Inevitably I am the idiot who ends up on the receiving end of an explanation as to why fedora hats  were vital in the Spanish revolution.  Often I feel as though I should oblige the other person by debating whatever obscure theme happens to be the subject of the day as if I know something about it just for something other to than dance, talk about work or children.  Therefore I have gained a truck load of absolutely useless knowledge which I can fall back on an either look like a nerd or a complete arsehole at any party I attend.

Yet still it is not enough.  When I look around at a party I see rats in a science laboratory.  I see a mass of humans which I must study and investigate.  I am fascinated by humans.  One of my favorite pastimes at parties is a game named after the French film ‘Amelie’.  For those who have not seen it, every new character is introduced by the narrator, using their name and then three things they like.  It can be absolutely anything.  So I will look at someone and try to hazard guesses about this person.  For example they may bite their nails, they like going on bike rides and they like walking around their home with their pants on their head.  To conclude the game you must approach the person and try to introduce these topics into the conversation to see if you are right.  You can play this with friends too, it’s actually much easier to approach the person with someone alongside you.  Most people are surprised about how after you play it a few times it is surprisingly easy.  I have played it in bars, cafes, clubs and many other places.  Only once did it go wrong, when my partner in the game had alleged that one man liked to wear women’s underwear.  After much discussion about how to approach the subject I decided to go back to school.  I stealthily approached him and gave him a wedgie, my friend was wrong and the poor guy was quite angry.

Tonight I am going to a party.  I don’t know how many people will be there.  I know maybe 5 of the guests.  I have an incredible sense of foreboding which is often right.  I know if we are to have any fun tonight, mischief is the key.  It’s ironic how when I was a teenager and I went to parties I would do my best to be mature and grown up.  Now I am attending adult parties I do my level best to be immature.  It’s as if I haven’t evolved in my life, like I am clinging onto my youth by my fingernails.  And that’s alright by me.

Apocalyptic Airports

I am writing this from the discomfort of an airport in the early hours of arse o’clock.  It never ceases to amaze me how god fucking awful and depressing airports are, that shiteness literally trebles when you are travelling alone. 

Surrounded by shuffling zombies, none of them rushing but all in a bigger hurry and slightly more important than the next. 

The trendyness of the 21st century traveller is infuriating.  When I was a kid I envisioned airports being full of men in suits and bearded hippies.  Nowadays its trendy people with their trendy haircuts and their trendy clothes making calls on their iphones whilst listening to their ipods whilst mulling over the fact that they don’t have any i-personality. 

You never see children reading anymore.  They sit at the airport playing on little boxes of light and sound shooting fictional aliens from outer space in the face.  If they do read it’s because they are part of a family of four and there name is Tarquin or something modern like Apple or fucking strawberry and their dad wears suede shoes with no socks and their mum went to an all girls school and wears floral print dresses.

The fact that air travel has been common place for so many years yet people still are thoroughly unprepared. Shorts and sandels may well work fine in a tropical climate but in a pressurized air cabin thousands of feet in the sky will inevitably make you feel cold. 

I guess what I am trying to stay is that within the confines of an airport you will come face to face with the fact that the human race is utterly stupid, as there are so many examples around you that you wouldn’t be able to ignore, even if you are an ostrich.

Waxing Lyrical

One of the nightmares caused by the invention of social media is the given ability to demonstrate your bad taste to a wider circle of people.  Whether it be the ability to show add videos to your profile or just the texts you write, the point is now its even easier to show what an absolute Muppet you are.  When I was young, trendy and hip, and needed to make an arse of myself I would go to a party, with a much smaller circle of friends and do or say something embarrassing.  Now all you need to do is copy paste something into the appropriate area.

This 21st century of magic has grown at phenomenal speed.  The major issue with any interactions involving these modern forms of communication is that there are not any rules.  All social rules have been tossed out the window.  It’s perfectly acceptable to write on your friends wall, just underneath his Mum’s comment, it weren’t as funny as the time he took it in the bottom from a lady boy on a lads holiday of Thailand.  There are no rules.  It’s like a jungle out there in cyberspace.  Except there aren’t any animals.  Or trees.  Or remote tribes fighting for their way of life.

One common phenomena which appears to be growing as a standard social media norm is the quoting of song lyrics.  Rather than thinking up something original about how you are feeling you can quote the latest pop singing r and b sensation Arsehole MacDouglas new song ‘Yeah bitches,yeah,yeah,yeah.’ or something equally meaningful.  It would be interesting if the same people used lyrics from different styles of music to demonstrate their emotions but they don’t.  It means it works as a great system of categorizing people.  I understand the urge to share videos but I find the lyric culture a little weirder.  Saying that not so long ago I was disgusted to find that I did the exact same thing.  It was during the riots in Britain that I thought I would try to dazzle my friends by giving them a particularly smart quote to see if I could join the cult of song lyrics.  The song which came to mind was ‘Thatcher Fucked The Kids’ by Frank Turner.  The quote in question was;

‘Whatever happened to childhood?
We’re all scared of the kids in our neighborhood;
They’re not small, charming and harmless,
They’re a violent bunch of bastard little shits.
And anyone who looks younger than me
Makes me check for my wallet, my phone and my keys,
And I’m tired of being tired out
Always being on the lookout for thieving gits.’

So there I was, proud that I had posted a witty social comment using lyrics from a song I love.  I awaited the clamor of comments.  The pat on the back for identifying a song which spoke to the zeitgeist of that moment.  Instead I got an old school friend who commented;

“You was a violent little shit at school lol”

And the moment was gone.  Ruined.  Broken by reminiscence.  Perhaps I am too old to quote songs.  Or maybe it’s a more feminine thing to do.  What I can be sure of is that it’s a phenomenon I don’t understand and I certainly don’t know the rules to and that above all, fascinates me.

Pigeon-Hole Yourself

Language has its limitations.  We expose them on a daily basis and we don’t actually realise it.  Yesterday I finished drafting a synopsis for my novel.  I actually wrote a few different versions varying in length and style.  I actually found it very difficult.  First actually selecting 450 words to describe 80,000 was tough enough.  Second and even harder was choosing exactly how to pigeon-hole my novel.  It is a work of literary fiction.  Well it’s certainly not commercial.  But then how would I know.  If by some miracle my novel was a hit then surely it becomes commercial.  Is it a thriller?  Well it contains some typically thriller like elements?  Is it a comic novel?  Well I never set out to deliberately write jokes but it does have some funny moments.  Is it a satire?  Well it says a lot about the world we live in without being obnoxiously satirical.  So what is it then?

This question, which we value so greatly is meaningless.  Our armoury of weapons we have to describe something consists of adjectives and adverbs which are incapable of telling the entire truth.  Pick three words to describe yourself.  I choose intelligent, funny and moody.  Now ask yourself am I always those three things.  Are those three things a constant about me?  In my case no.  I am sometimes all three.  Never always.  So then ask yourself for one word which describes your character.  One word which is always fitting.  I bet you can’t do it.  And we do this all the time.  In job interviews you often get questions like describe your greatest weakness or strength?  Or a number of seemingly innocuous questions which convince your brain that you need to answer using adjectives which describe your character.  ‘So tell me Mr Scott what can you bring to the position of chief burger flipper at MacDonald’s?’  ‘Well I am dedicated, driven, punctual and have a great team ethic.’   When your brain switches on you realise that what you said doesn’t actually have any sense to it whatsoever and for some reason the person interviewing you is grinning like a rather contented cat.

We don’t only do it professionally.  On a personal level we are always swapping descriptions about people.  It’s as if a human being cannot make their own assumptions about stories which describe someones character.  It’s as if we have to fill in the gaps for each other.  ‘Scott did the craziest thing the other day, but then you know what he is like,  a bit nutty you know.’  In that imaginary sentence there is barely a single piece of information offered to the listener to help them make their own mind up.  It’s our way of ensuring or making sure that the listener is of the same opinion as us.  When you are the listener in that situation automatically you find yourself nodding encouragement or mumbling an ‘ah-ha’ or ‘go on’ to the speaker in order to hurry them along.  However the speaker assumes that your encouragement is actually a validation of the point they were making.  It’s a bizarre habit, a ritual almost which we all participate it at some point.  The weirdest of these situations is when you observe women talking about a new man.  Whether it is after the first date and a friend asks ‘so what is he like?’ which is clearly a stupid question when she is only starting to get know him, or when the speaker looks for validation by adding the words ‘you know what men or like.’  when what she actually wants to say is ‘Help me please my friends.  Is it normal for a man to wipe it on the curtains afterwards?’ .

In one exercise I used to write my synopsis it asked me to try to write a moral which is applicable to the story.  I found this task remarkably difficult as I hope my novel is multi-faceted and I believe it contains more than one.  In the end I tried to choose one which seemed applicable to the ending.  Which seems doubly fitting.  The moral is about how your own judgment is what makes a good deed a good deed and not the action in itself.  However as I have discussed here judgment is blinkered by language, it is often as precise as a nuclear bomb.  And this is why a pigeon-hole is rarely a comfortable home for mice, men and novels.  A much more honest question is to who do you aspire to be or to what do you aspire?  As a person I strive to be good, honest and warm.  As a writer I aspire to be interesting, inspiring and intelligent.

Everyday Diplomacy

Earlier today I returned to the hospital where I spent a week of life earlier this year for yet another test.  Being unfamiliar with many medical words in Polish, it was yet another reminder of my failings and a reminder of the frustrated helplessness people fell when under the care of someone else.  It is very difficult to put your health in someone elses hands, even more so when there is an obstruction in the shape of a language barrier.  I am blessed to some degree as my Doctor speaks some English.  However there are times when my Polish and his English isn’t enough to enable us to understand each other.

Today was one of those days.  The doctor needed a word in couldn’t find.  It happened to be a word which I did not know.  After the test he walked me out of the room, sat down and uttered the words no patient ever wants to hear.

‘Take a seat.’  He looked nervously at the floor and back to me.

‘No thanks I’d rather stand’ I replied, alarmed by the fact that my Doctor’s discomfort clearly meant one of two things.  Either my Doctor has hemorrhoids or he had some bad news to give me.

‘Really I think you should seat down.’  He looked me in the eye, holding my gaze until I obeyed.  It only confirmed my suspicion.  It was bad news.  Shit I thought, I am going to die.

I am not.  Not even close.  The news was bad, my not anything which is going to affect my life in the short-term.  I complete misread the situation and panicked.  My Doctor’s discomfort which I had observed was actually him searching for this the right word.

It set me thinking about everyday diplomacy.  How many jobs are there where you can unintentionally strike fear into someones heart like that?  There aren’t many which can make people fear for their lives like that.