May, 2016 - Ina Disguise

Self Imposed Aging

May 17, 2016 No Comments

Self imposed aging

I read an article this morning with a title along the lines of ‘Millennials have the key to future business development, as only they have an idea how to innovate for future customers.’ It was not much catchier than this, but I am a bit unwilling to bother finding the link. These are the same millennials who graduated at the same time as me, who were denounced as incapable of knowing when to agree to make other people a cup of tea or do the photocopying rather than impressing everyone with their vast knowledge of nothing.

Personally, since at a whopping ten years older than them I was discounted entirely as a colleague, and was asked by Rothschild’s why I would even want to work with such people, I have limited experience of them, but I do not think they have exclusive knowledge that anyone else fails to grasp.

One of the things the article touched on was our unwillingness to think like children as we get older. We lose our curiosity about the world, and prefer to develop intensive knowledge streams. Well duh, you can’t follow every path, otherwise everyone would look a whole lot more like me, and a lot less like someone with a mortgage and children. At some point you have to use the principle of opportunity cost to decide what you want out of life.

Having said this, there is no reason why you cannot devote some of your time to being aware of what you are turning down. I, for example, cannot be bothered getting a smartphone in order to know all about apps, instagram or snapchat. I detest mobile phones, and had to be forced twice by an employer to accept one. I do not see why I should be forced to be on the end of a connective string all the time, and I do think that there is value in maintaining your hand/eye coordination in the form of physically making 3 dimensional objects. In the same way that a great chef creates something with colour, texture, flavour, overall design, an artist balances much the same principles with whatever medium they use. I happen to be very good at 3d modelling, so I dabbled a bit with that online in the course of messing about, and as it turns out this is what I should probably be concentrating on if I want to make any money.

So, instead of playing computer games, all someone older than a Millennial has to do to maintain their current managerial and innovative capacity is learn a few computing science skills, app development, programming, game design etc. It is not a hard overall concept to get your teeth into, everything works pretty much like your average, common or garden tree. Millennials are not the only people to have seen a tree. Whilst I do not see the value in endless photo sharing apps, so I am unlikely to come up with the next billion dollar format, I can just about manage to figure out how to take my ideas to a new generation, thanks all the same.

I had a friend years ago who despite being younger than me, said that I did not act the way a 32 year old (at the time) woman should act. This is understandable, since my life has consisted of creative focus on seemingly random dudes, percolated with appalling long term relationships with people I shouldn’t have bothered either trusting or wasting time with. On the other hand, who made the rules on how a 32 year old woman should act? Do they hand out slippers and a cardigan on your 30th? My family tend to peak very late in life, so I have always had my peak to look forward to, maybe this is making the difference?

At this point in my life, I notice that even one bad meal makes a difference to how I look, so I am aware that I am getting older, but apart from the now screaming urgency in terms of having a child, I do not feel in the slightest bit older in terms of my curiosity. Am I really that unusual?

It certainly seems so, since most of my male friends seem to have settled into a disgruntled state of dissatisfaction with their lot and a kind of grumpy complacency that means they actually need to be shaken into thinking about changing anything. It is most dispiriting.

Maybe my obsessive focus on work has helped me avoid this. The lengthy concentration on a task, to the point where you are thinking you might get finished in the next five years or so, rather than constantly looking back and thinking things were better when you were 28. They weren’t better at all. Men aren’t really worth bothering with before 35 or so, and you have to actually save money to get anything done when you are that age because there is always someone waiting to charge you for learning the things you later find out are available free. You have more patience when you are older too, so the driven quality that seems to be admirable calms down to a more steadfast and skillful plod. That is a good thing, not something that should be undervalued or maligned.

Perhaps I am lucky that my life has gone in a different direction to the one I actually worked for. Perhaps a career and a family would have made me miserable, old and defensive. Perhaps the people that seem so happy are hiding behind the thought that they did what was expected of them, and now don’t have to think at all. This seems to me to be like a slow death. Maybe being lonely and trapped at home is actually freedom, from conventional worry, loss of self and inflexible aging.

I can say for certain that deciding to effectively marry myself to a person that I do not know was the best decision I ever made in terms of endless self-doubt, so perhaps it is a case of making a decision outwith reality to prevent the crippling stiffness of age. I can say with equal certainty that willingness to learn and change is a major factor in the aging process.

If you do not tweak the product, the product becomes obsolete, which is as relevant to yourself as it is to any product.

Uncategorized

Perfection is for failures

May 16, 2016 No Comments

There is an intense strength about the creative mind that transcends reality in order to achieve something better.

I did not realise this, when I still spent time with Aldous and Harry, and wondered why I was not completely discouraged from doing anything, since they did not appear to either understand what I was doing, nor want to understand when it was explained to them.

Twisty, who is a finisher rather than a creator, is more encouraging as a rule, but I have detected the familiar sneer of contempt even as he sits watching me make a piece for weeks knowing perfectly well that everything I make looks as if a five year old is working on it until it gets to completion. I have a very low failure rate, some would say too low, but I do tend to get the job done, even when the items I work on tend to be experimental in nature. Better this than not trying at all.

Honey, I made you an icon, for example, is a form of orgonite, which I discovered in the course of experimenting with coloured grout and a vague idea I had about glorifying Wolfe in precious metals and gemstones. It was only after I started the work that it occurred to me that all the gemstones had reiki meanings, and so I simply went for the relevant stones to create a message within a rather flashy and childlike rendering of Wolfe’s face. (I do love this picture of him, but I suspect it is because I see the genetic pointers that my father imprinted on me, so I guess it is a little vain of me. He also looks a bit tired, which is very cute indeed if you happen to be a chick.)

Twisty has some amusing pictures of the making of the icon, which he takes great delight in showing me now and again. I am reasonably pleased with the glorious kitsch imperfection and quasi-medieval effect. I was very surprised that it was so popular in Russia. I was afraid that they would be slightly offended that I had borrowed some Russian Orthodox imagery, but they passed the blog post around Russia for weeks.

I am now working on a cameo and 3d rendering of a statue which I found at Versailles, which has been slightly modified to look suspiciously like him, so I am getting more representative as I develop my creative stamina. I do not want to go too far down this route, however, as my work is really about emotional imprinting. The point is to allow the hands to do what you are feeling, rather than muck around with yet more new mediums.

Anyway, to return to the actual point. Perfection is not something that successful creators or innovative thinkers really care to address. It is up to a finisher like Twisty to worry about perfection and adding additional details to further egg your pudding, so to speak. To someone like me, innovation involves mess, mistakes, and lots of them. Fear of mistakes is therefore, fear of working at all.

Wolfe’s unwillingness to waste even a bad day at work, littered across youtube, was extremely useful in unlocking this tendency. I am less likely to put things on the back burner until I have subconciously figured out a way of getting it just right. This could be a wasteful new trait, but so far it has worked out well. I do, of course have a lot of experience of how to get out of trouble these days, but I still retain the roughness that I crave in terms of the finished product.

I was the same as a chef. Some chefs want their items to look mass produced or ‘perfect.’ I always wanted things to look as if your mother had slaved over the stove all day, and not quite managed to copy the picture. Strangely, I have found most people, like me, associate this imperfection with love. I was ‘denounced’ as the ‘flavour queen’ by a disparaging former chef at one point in my career. To refer to something that tastes unusually good as not so proficient as something which looks perfect may seem churlish, but this is the nature of cooking at the higher levels. They need to find something wrong with your work, otherwise there is something wrong with them.

And here is the key to those people who seek to discourage you by saying that your early efforts in terms of learning an instrument, learning to draw, learning to cook etc are worthless. They are the sort of people who do nothing, learn nothing and pay for someone else’s efforts in terms of years of mistakes to achieve something new. They are not the world’s innovators, and they fear their own mistakes. There is an entire culture of admiring expertise which involves an abdication of personal responsibility. It occurs to me that I too am guilty of this, since I am unwilling to spend more than two or three minutes on recording a blog post in case I do it well and annoy Wolfe. Oratory is his thing, and I am unwilling to rain on his parade.

This is a terrible attitude. I should want to make it better. I just don’t want to. I want to get the job done, and move onto the next, considerably more worthwhile task. I have tried to explain this to Twisty many times, but he would rather spend four weeks on getting one thing perfect, in one memorable case missing the boat entirely in terms of topicality, than put out a rough product on the basis of building up an audience. This is the trade off you have to make. One of the many things I got from my ponderings on Wolfe, was that you are never going to be ready. Something is always going to be wrong, so you might as well put your ‘better than most’ effort out and work on perfection later.

Perfection is for failures and people who don’t try. A master of an art is someone who has learned to accept a margin of error that probably only he/she can see. It doesn’t matter how hard you work on a creative concept, you will always see the problems. Michelangelo would probably point at all the rough parts if you asked him about his work too.

So, my thought for the day is – Learn to love your mistakes, and you will learn to love you. Forget everyone else, forget the negative voice and blunder away. Smile at your errors, believe in your mistakes and don’t ever stop trying, because if you do, the only thing you will learn is how to be a perfect failure.

creativity, motivation

Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

May 15, 2016 No Comments

Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

The good thing about having a temper is that you get things cleared up now and again. I tend to have a long fuse and nuclear sized blast, personally, which means that my relationships go through a lot of interruptions, unless I am in a particularly unusual situation. Wolfe may be surprised to learn that I have actually been quite subdued in my response to our various misunderstandings and mishaps, since it is usually unclear whether he is doing it himself, or delegating it to a minion.

If you have a look at the welcome page, you will see that Ina Disguise is a lengthy response to a rather rude, arrogant and complacent individual, who felt quite safe to assume that it was OK to insult a stranger. Your staff reflect you.

The fact that this stranger had already devoted a lot of time to something relatively important was entirely meaningless, and as a side product it wasted a lot of my emotional energy and time. This is not his fault, however, that much I do agree with. I come from a fairly narcissistic family, so I am used to the ‘what do you mean I upset her, it is her fault for being upset’ response.

So I was left with a pile of emotional rubble, no family, nobody to look up to, which is out of character anyway as I am not in the habit of investing emotionally in fame whores. People choose fame for a variety of reasons, and until I came across Wolfe, I did not have much respect for any of them. There are several reasons for his particular love of being well known. Pretty girls, money and providing people with health information, probably in that order.

So I was left with a number of alternatives:

I choose to accept that I do not deserve any common courtesy and am a nobody.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by bothering to do a lot of intense academic work with the intention of offering it to a stranger who probably does not deserve it.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by trying to give somebody a present.
I choose to believe Wolfe, my friend in London, or in fact Aldous, that I am way too ugly to be seen by anybody, and that women like me should crawl under a stone and die.
I choose to accept that by belief in any alternative hypothesis means that there is something wrong with me, and the evidence points to my having some sort of disorder, despite there being far less talented individuals out there promoting inferior values and work.
I rebel against a life history of being suppressed and do what the hell I feel like doing for a change.

It took several months to figure out the best course of action. I settled on Ina Disguise. There are a number of branches to the project, seen or unseen. The main theme is, that I refuse to accept that I am either one of thousands of ‘fans,’ (there are many aspects of his work that I utterly hate, and I do wish that he had a completely different life, so I do not think that this is relevant at all) or sufficiently inferior to the rest of the human race that I am not entitled to say what I feel, when I feel like saying it. In the unlikely event that he does any more than check in now and again and read everything at once, which is what he has been doing since I made initial contact with him, then it is his look out. He certainly didn’t care about upsetting me.

It would have been extremely unhealthy of me to agree to be a nothing, in order to do nothing, feel unhappy, and agree to be less than I actually am. I have, in many respects met my match, and it is likely that I will spend the rest of my life alone as a result, presenting a further range of responses. My personal choice is to enjoy the work and ignore everything else, and it benefits at least two people, never mind the thousands that have been entertained by my work so far. I am astonished at the number of young people and men, in particular, who have been touched by my alternative take on love, life and work.

Whatever your approach to life, next time you self-evaluate, think about what I have just said. Are you agreeing to be less than you are? Are you agreeing to be second rate, in order to please someone that did not really know or like you in the first place? Do you accept that everyone else is always right, and you are always wrong? If the answer is yes, then you are the equivalent of a battered partner. You are agreeing to be life’s punchbag. Just say no.

motivation

Social Conditioning is a bitch, ain’t it?

May 14, 2016 1 Comment

Social Conditioning is a bitch, ain’t it?

Someone on Facebook actually wrote this into their book. I presume they are American. I am sure it is relevant to a macho culture, where women are still expected to spend the equivalent of a small car on looking pretty so that some big hairy bloke pays for a date, but it is not terribly relevant in my country, where the women were expected to fight off English soldiers at home whilst the men ran for the hills to plan the counter attacks.
You can imagine that your social conditioning has some relevance in nature, but it would not be true. Women are just as capable of doing the running as men are. Some women prefer it. Some men prefer it. Some people don’t actually want to be together at all, and prefer to remain in a stalemate situation forever.
It depends on what you want. I was in very responsible positions from a fairly early age, so men became relatively minor figures. A good kitchen runs a bit like a beehive, so you get used to several of them running about at your feet. Whilst I freely admit that men are often confused when you openly do the chasing, regardless of anything else that is going on, it is absolutely not true to say that all men hate a straight talker. A small majority prefer it, unless it involves faintly embarrassing social situations, like explaining their existing girlfriend.
What is annoying is the time they expect you to spend waiting to find out whilst they struggle with the new concept. Women just don’t have the time to waste.
The situation I have now, which is perfect for me, and advantageous for Wolfe, since it comprises of a form of ‘showmance’ which does not need to actually go anywhere, generating some entertainment in the course of producing permanent work, is partially as a result of my not wanting what Wolfe traditionally goes for.
He is probably aware of this, but confused about my methodology and the time I am spending on it. This does not matter, since I have no intention of doing any actual chasing in person. If he makes up his mind that he believes me to be superior to an entire harem of willing supplicants, that is his decision. (Probably a stupid decision, but clearly I do not think so.) I am certainly not planning on doing any begging, demanding or requesting. Real people are a different kettle of fish to passing ships in the sea, and there is a necessary requirement for tolerance, understanding and fluctuations in emotional state. That is Ina’s entire raison d’etre.
I have experienced men with hang-ups about being objectified in the past. This is laughable, since if asked they will always say they love being objectified. Many, if they actually experience it, are so shocked that they assume that there is something wrong with you doing exactly what they do on a daily basis. Eye them up, attract their attention, ask. What is so freakish about that? If we all broke the rules, rather than manipulating some unwitting dude into doing the asking just to follow a rule we never agreed to, then the problem would not exist.
So, I was less than impressed by this person’s idea of ‘the rules.’ There aren’t any, end of story. If you agree to be a little woman, expect to be treated like one. It may be fun in the sack, now and again, but I can assure you that men run out of imagination a long time before you do. Better to be a wild and dangerous filly, than a placid mare.
So, next time you see some quiet lonely man, especially the ones your friends laugh at your looking at, try being a bit more assertive. Winkle out the information you require to make the move. You might win, you might not, but it is better than agreeing to a social contract that you did not participate in constructing.
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health, motivation

Blog readers note

May 13, 2016 62 Comments

Blog readers note….

Reading on a screen before bed might be killing you
Reading on a laptop or tablet can alter the way you think
Too much screen time damages the brain
Five things too much screen time does to your body
Before you start panicking and switching off your device, most of what is said in these articles refers to things we already knew – too much sitting about is bad for you, too much light from non ambient sources is bad for you, being too intensely interested in what you are doing is bad for sleeping, electrical devices near you damage your sleep, etc etc. I am personally quite careful to keep things like sewing, gardening, driving, decorating quite far away from any functional computers so my time is divided between separate areas of the house.
This takes up quite a lot of room, and I am fortunate to be able to do this. It will not always be the case, when my mother is not around any more I imagine that I will be struggling to pick up my long lost career, never mind afford somewhere that I can actually fit into.
A female friend from school, who coincidentally looked a bit like Daniel Vitalis’ identical twin, worked on a study with Stirling University in the 1990s, which was based on the premise that rural people are more affected by the full moon than city people. Eventually the study narrowed down the reason for this to be the amount of electricity used in cities. The brain tunes in with the electrical rhythm of the moon, other people or with the fridge, computer or other electrical device if they are in the same room, which is why people like me prefer to create at nighttime, when most people in the area have switched everything off.
Many artists and writers have noticed that they work much better at night. I am not sure what implications that tapping away on a laptop might have for your writing, as opposed to avoiding devices, but even if we were not using computers, we would still be battling the light bulb. Perhaps further studies on this are necessary. In any case, when I told a few people about this, they were relieved to discover that they were not imagining it. Stirling University has apparently not posted the study as it was conducted prior to the internet revolution, but I for one would be delighted if they would, since it makes some sense of a rather ‘woo’ sounding theory.
The physical implications of spending time in a chair are obvious, you will get a fat ass and a fat tummy if you do this too much. The wrist and hand problems are another thing entirely, and you should be extremely mindful of making sure your ergonomics are better than mine (I am usually lying in bed covered in militant cats, which is no better for you.)
As I have previously mentioned, it is wise to leave your gadgets at home now and again, and if possible get away from your computer entirely once in a while. It really does not matter if you do not see who has tweeted you for a week or more. It does not matter how many likes you have on facebook, and it actually makes no difference to my figures whether I have a facebook following or not. My book readers, in particular, tend to come from elsewhere.
If you are concerned about your abstract thinking, here are a few tests you can run
Free Aptitude Tests
Diagrammatic Reasoning Tests
Abstract reasoning test
If you are concerned about your emotional well being
Happiness test
Empathy test
Positive psychology test
And I am sure you can find some more by yourselves. I find I self-regulate, on intellectual and creative as well as whether I am spending too much time with my computer. I do not like to combine my care of mother with computer use, so again those things happen in separate rooms where possible. If I have been writing for a few weeks, I crave sewing, and vice versa, so despite my having been heavily involved with computers for nearly twenty years, apart from a couple of binge periods when life was not otherwise worth living, I have had pretty moderate exposure. I do feel sorry for the younger generations who do not remember life without them. As with the curse of the mobile phone, I am sure they feel naked without their connection, when the truth is that you are a lot more naked with it.

health

Die if ya do

May 12, 2016 No Comments

Die if ya do

Don’t wanna do nothin’ new,

Wanna sit here and take an antacid

Keep your evil salad,

Wanna eat cake and feel a bit flaccid,

Don’t challenge my opinions, or ask me to do anythiiiiiiing!

‘Cos if you tip up my boat, I’ll just not bother to swiiiiiim

Yeah! Leave me to rot, I just cannot change my world view!

No, no, no, no, no

I hate everyone, and nobody’s gonna get throuuuuuugh

Chorus

‘Cos I’ll die if ya do, die if ya do, if the stroke don’t get me

I’ll have a heart attack on you

Die in your kitchen, die in your car,

You think you’re goin’ somewhere but you will not get far

Burst a blood vessel all over the seats,

To carry me out, you’ll have to stain all your sheets.

Leave me alone, or you’ll be sorry as hellllllllllllll

Don’t wanna learn nothin’

Wanna sit here watchin’ Hitler instead,

I hate richer people, and I hate poor sick people in bed,

You can keep all your herbs, and your superfood too,

Nothin’s gonna help me, or my sore, sore head

Gonna wear my dark glasses, and sit here in pain,

Anything you’re gonna try, you’re gonna try it in vain,

There’s nothin’ you can do, so you might as well eat some cake toooooo

‘Cos I’ll die if ya do, die if ya do. Diabetes ain’t got me, but it’s gonna get you

Die in your bathroom, die in your hall

Nothing you can do to help me at all

I’ll sit here in my armchair, watching Nazi vids

Hating everybody, soon you’ll be on the skids

Laughing at misfortune, smiling full of hate

Nothing you can say is gonna clean up my plate

Give me more cake, or I’ll trip you up on the stairs,

Then I’ll laugh my head off, burst an arteryyyyy,

Bleed over the antiques and hid my head on a shelllllf

There’s nothin’ you can do, you broke your ankle when I tripped you upppppp,

No, no, no

Cos’ I’ll die if ya do, die if ya do,

Bleed everywhere forever, make a mess outta you,

You’ll feel like you’ve been cruel, feel like you’ve been bad

Nothing’s gonna help you feel any less sad,

Skull fragments in the garage, in the studio,

Dead body in the garden maybe on the patio,

Blood in the pink roses, in the pussy willow

You’ll need a full squad just to move me real slow

Ya know, it’s much easierrrr

If ya just give me the caaaaaaaake,

Yeah, yeah,

Even though I’ll die if ya do, die if ya do,

Give me all the cake, else I’ll complain about you

Black forest gateau, strawberry cheesecake.

You can keep your evil veggies and the spooky fruit too,

Take the herbs and grass away

Take the raw chocolate too,

Give me all the cake or I’ll complain about you.

Deep fried potato, a gallon of milk

The pains in my stomach are something else too,

Don’t force me to live, don’t ask me to think

I’ll just throw up my fries in your nice new clean sink.

I’ll pretend I’m not tired, pretend I’m not sick,

No I don’t want no smoothie it looks way too thick.

Don’t force me to do anythiiiiiing……

Cos’ I’ll die if ya do, die if ya do,

Collapse in the lounge, or in your nice tidy loo,

Rigor Mortis in your doorway, stiff limbs on your floor

Put your pedal to the metal getting right out the door.

Give me all the cake, and all the fries too,

Oily mayonnaise, salty sausage and ham

I’ll eat what I want, and it’s better if you eat the cake toooooooo

Don’t challenge my opinions, or you know what I’ll do to youuuuuu

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Die if ya do, die if ya do

Won’t pay attention to your views, won’t listen to you,

I just wanna moan, wanna complain too

Wanna eat some more cake, and take some painkillers too

Blood quality’s for sissies, and for dumb hippies too,

Wanna complain until midnight and then after that too.

Give me back my Hitler, my antacid world view,

Life is too short, and I don’t want a mess,

Don’t challenge my opinions or make me wear a dress,

Fetch me my slippers, and some more kaolin,

My plan is to expire over your violin.

You’ll be tidying up my fluids

Mopping up my blood,

But at least I’ll have eaten some more of that food.

The post Die if ya do (song, think Dixie Chix) appeared first on Ina Disguise – Author.

health, motivation

Accept that you are alive

May 12, 2016 No Comments

Accept that you are alive

When I was 32, and finishing up at university, my best friend was 89 years old. She was a naughty, vital, very intelligent old lady whose doctor still tried to tell me was ditzy after she died, although if you had been on the receiving end of as many phone calls at 1am as I was, you would have known, as I did, that she was entirely lucid.

She had a twisted, sick and extremely sharp sense of humour, and used to like telling care providers that she planned to end her life with a sharp knife in the shower. She used to do this out of boredom, as towards the end she was bored with humans, bored with manners and bored with social convention.

Sometimes accepting that you are alive is a lot harder than accepting that you are dying, hence my previous post.

My mother, in particular, has benefitted enormously from my friendship with Elizabeth. My annoying Tory neighbour might have benefitted (agggh, how do I get rid of an American spellchecker?) also, but he too is choosing death over life.

What do I mean by accepting that you are alive? As long as you are alive, there is always more to learn, more to experience and more to do. One of my more annoying exs once asked me what scared me the most. I replied that having nothing to do was the most frightening thing in the world, but since this is coming from someone who wrote a book at the age of ten because I was confined to bed for ten months, you can see that I am pretty flexible about finding things to do. His reply was having nowhere to go. This is less flexible, and although this particular ex was younger than me, he is now a snobbish, inflexible old man who cannot form relationships effectively.

The Candy Crush Saga fans are avoiding being alive. If you claim that you are addicted to facebook, you are avoiding being alive by looking at other people, and probably falling short. If you like celebrity culture, your avoidance of being alive involves investing heavily in information about other people. Celebrity culture, in a political economy, is immensely important, because it keeps you unhappy, unsatisfied and it keeps you shopping and voting a certain way. Breaking out of this paradigm is going to become harder and harder the more entrenched you allow yourself and your children to become, especially now that the internet, via ever developing gadgets, follows us everywhere.

So, today’s thought for today is to rid yourself of influence. Stop caring what other people are doing. Look inwards and find yourself. Accept that you are alive, and rid yourself of distractions. Life is short, on one hand, but it is also long and very boring, especially towards the end. The only solution is to find something that you can do sitting down, that absorbs you and removes you from the limited world of other humans. People get boring, once you are in your dotage. The trick to longevity, therefore, involves ensuring that you have something less worldly to interest you, alongside your comparatively superficial connections to others to keep your visitor and contact count up.

As I have said before, to avoid the stiffness and inflexibility that goes with age, it is important to keep learning, to keep growing, and to keep finding new things to widen your outlook. I have now lost count of the number of middle aged exs that come here and talk about immigration and their fears based upon social change. Social change is something that is out of your control, unless you plan to start a civil war. We have to exert pressure to apply the rules fairly, rather than take recourse in barbaric and negative approaches to change. I do not speak from the standpoint of a multiculturalist, I speak from the standpoint of someone from a country which has developed from centuries of infiltration.

Once you have accepted that you are alive, things like making a fool of yourself are meaningless, since you will seek to attain your goals at the pace you set. You will lose your willingness to conform to other’s ideas of you, and you will truly master the art of making your own path. One step closer to true freedom.

So, before you too get suckered into a resentful state of incapacitated rage at the things you cannot control, think about yourself. Have you accepted that you are alive, and that there is a finite amount of time to complete the tasks you have set yourself? Have you even managed to set them? If the answer is no, get on with it, because time is always shorter than you think, and you have to do it before you get bored, because once you are bored, you are accepting your death.

health, motivation, politics

Stranger in a hat Disease

May 11, 2016 No Comments

I come from a country which suffers from this to a ridiculous degree, as a way of preventing people from developing any pride or ‘giving themselves airs’. It is a form of low self esteem which is particularly prevalent with people who wish to avoid responsibility. I cannot tell you how stultifying it is when it is a national characteristic.

Another form of it is small person’s disease. I don’t mean that the suffers are small in stature, they are small in outlook. Some people don’t get it until they get older, some people always suffered from it.

Stranger in a hat disease

In this form, the sufferer refuses to listen to any new information unless it is conveyed via a television set, or physically attractive stranger in the case of many men. Any information imparted from people that they know is instantly refuted, making it pretty much impossible to converse at all, in some cases, since they will argue with anything you say. Elderly people get suckered into this one, even when all the evidence points to you knowing exactly what you are talking about. ie. You have a postgraduate degree in the subject, versus a minor celebrity mentioning it on TV.

There is no known cure. You are doomed to being disrespected as a seven year old child for the rest of your life with a sufferer of this problem.

eg. “No, of course it isn’t autumn, it is spring.”

“Would you like me to find a stranger in a hat to tell you what month it is?”

Small person’s disease

This is the one all motivational speakers seek to cure, in a myriad of expensive and time consuming ways. This is the assumption that anyone in a public arena or position of any power whatsoever is different from you, special, untouchable and morally superior. Even if the celebrity in question has committed a murder, they are still deserving of a mysterious form of worship that makes anything they do of considerably more importance than actually doing anything yourself. This one is more dangerous, since the sufferer abdicates all responsibility for their progress and self worth, in favour of accepting a perceptive state where everyone is luckier/better/more important than they are, and end up playing hours and hours of Candy Crush Saga, Farmville etc., whilst seeking validation from a group of similar peers. If challenged, they become fearful and retreat into these futile pursuits, effectively becoming a form of zombie. The idea of actually challenging anyone with any status at all is effectively rendered to mean the challenger is in a state of insanity. This is what befell most of my friends after the Wolfe saga started, since I can see no reason why I am not just as important/talented/capable/worthy of being loved as someone on the grounds of a few hundred youtube videos. Many would say considerably more so, despite my aversion to fame.

This is the kind of problem that causes civilisations to crumble unnoticed, since nobody accepts their ability to actually do anything, no matter how small.

This is the reasoning behind the Better Person Project. If everybody spent ten minutes a day inputting information from wherever they were, it would be considerably easier for people looking for more worthwhile ways to spend their time to actually find those things. As I have said, until the artwork moves, I am unable to redesign the site, so it is a bit clunky at the moment, but perfectly usable.

It applies just as readily to your daily life. What exactly stops you from taking your ten minute walk, reading for an hour a day in a subject of interest, perhaps doing a few blogged reviews etc? As someone who does not get out because of my caring, I recommend you do so, just in case you are unlucky enough to end up in the same miserable position I am in. Failing that, you can easily change the world if you stop telling yourself you cannot. Such is the nature of the world. If you do nothing, you only have yourselves to blame and all those excuses will look very silly indeed.

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Beware of Positive People

May 11, 2016 No Comments

Today I have an example of why I have a problem with all those memes that suggest that Team America are to hang together, cheer everything on each other’s behalf and AVOID NEGATIVE PEOPLE. I have several cliquey groups of low denomination authors who regularly validate each other on every topic from contempt for the poor to ‘authors must write in only one genre.’ I kid you not, the culture of self-congratulation stifles creativity to such an extent that they actually try to tell you what to write to be in with the cool kids.

There is nothing wrong with writing rotten romances, or hackneyed mysteries over and over again, provided you can find an audience, or find a catchy way of engaging your audience. Two self-published authors that I know of became millionaires simply by adding their email address to their work and requesting that their readers email them when they found any errors. They simply ploughed the time they should have spent editing into relevant forums, investing in marketing and generally getting their name out. Personally, I would not recommend this, since at least one science fiction author I know writes books that are effectively unreadable, and then entreats a massive number of other authors to become beta readers, ignoring any attempts at editing and repeatedly requesting positive reviews. (I am afraid that after only one attempt at beta reading, when I discovered that my editing notes were longer than her text, I had to leave this exclusive gang.)

The problem with positivity, or even your closest friend absent-mindedly saying yes to everything and avoiding giving an opinion for fear that you will not like them any more, is that one day, they will let the mask slip and your poor fragile ego, which you have been relying on to get the job done, will temporarily shatter and it is not until you find some way of assuaging your angst that you can get writing again. This is kind of what happened with the original academic essays I was attempting to talk to Wolfe about. As it happens, it is probably just as well, since my reconnected synapses are having a lot more fun than they used to, but losing your sense of self, and in my case, my maudlin and cynical seriousness, could be pretty damaging, depending on what you are trying to do.

It is also not a good idea, unless you are in an actual team situation, to go shattering egos on a frequent basis, since the ego you are shattering may be the one that ultimately makes yours fly higher. As a creative chef, I was quite keen on the whole ‘leave your ego at home and rely on mine’ scenario, but now that I am in a situation where I work alone, I am becoming quite phobic about any interruption to the flow at all. It is simply easier to just avoid people altogether. The loneliness means that I get more work done, and can employ a lot more stamina since there is no deadline.

The most recent attempted attack by a writer was on the grounds of my work being free, which is hysterical. Asking a modern author in a market where 400k books are being published every year, to charge for their early work is a bit like telling a singer to make sure everyone knows they can sing, but not to actually prove it unless they have a thousand bucks in their hot little hand. It just won’t work. You can choose to pay for marketing, or you can choose to network with yet more people, but the actual problem with an unknown is the number of clicks you are asking the customer to make to get your product. In my case, the nature of the project being extremely personal, (I really write for an audience of one, in the case of the Best Ever series) I do not feel I would want to charge. Besides which, my stories lead people back to look at my artwork. Interestingly, the artists that I have shared the project with love the idea. The only people who seem to have a problem with it are the very same low denomination authors that club together in miserable cliques, reviewing each other’s work and wondering why the numbers are not improving.

So, I am, ironically, developing a bit of a temperament, in the course of escaping the results of a family-induced state of utter misery. Most of the time I am happier than I was before, but my temper is probably worse, since I cannot tolerate rocks in the river, so to speak. I am not entirely happy with this, but perhaps with time I will be less fragile and my love of growth through dissent will return. In other words, the old adage of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ which has been something of a central theme in the past, will perhaps be reduced to the size of a mere tributary.

economics, motivation, politics

The British Class System is unemployed

May 11, 2016 No Comments

As someeone who studied eleven centuries of international economic history in the course of my reading, I am a bit of a fan of feudalism. Feudalism is under-rated. On a good day, feudalism works a lot better than capitalism.

Contentious, qui moi?

It may surprise you to learn that after the Black Death, when many villages and feudal settlements were empty as a result of the deaths of the occupants, the contents of the cottages revealed, in many places, a far higher standard of living than expected.

Ask an unemployed urban dweller now whether they would feel hard done by with their own rabbit warren, space for a cow and some hens, hand me down crystal, clothing and metalware from the ‘big house’, a four day working week for the local lord, followed by a day for the church to cover education and medical treatment for the family, their wives doing cottage-based piece work for the travelling merchants, and they will admit that our marvellous capitalist system is not treating them particularly well compared with medieval peasants. Capitalism and socialism are mutually dependent. If you believe otherwise, you are being conned.

The difference with feudalism and the reason that it could not be sustained, was that it was based on the availability of land, which is why the British strove so hard to acquire quite so much of it. The British class system, complete with privilege, horse skills, hunting etc was set up for exploration, not industrialisation. Given a chunk of uncharted territory, your average toff was able to feed his workers, organise them to build shelter, reroute rivers and eventually plan out a wider agricultural and transport strategy thanks to their having been given land to manage over several generations, something I touched on in Best Scandal Ever.

Now, of course, there are far too many people for us to benefit from a feudal system with a local landowner to blame if things go wrong. In the event that the reformation had not happened as a result of urbanisation, the catholic peasantry would have been starved and tithed out of this formerly comfortable life. The British class system, which worked so well for the Georgian and Victorian explorers and their military-imperialist tendencies, has now been reduced to a small number of corrupt individuals who, rather than believing in duty, the preservation of land, and the glory of the nation, now believe in reducing those who do not benefit from capitalism to criminal behaviour in order to survive. Instead of national pride, we have a system which supports contempt for the poor and disabled, offering benefits to cronies in the fields of banking, weapons manufacture, construction and of course, the politicians who ensure that their instructions are carried out.

What happened then, to the idea of ‘things being better when gentlemen were in charge,’ a cry uttered by my neighbour within my lifetime. When the gentlemen were in charge of my city, they dutifully gifted their estates on death to become parks. Can anyone imagine George Osborne gifting his wealth to anyone? I have met some of the older members of David Cameron’s family, and whilst they would not gift their wealth, they certainly donated quite a proportion of their property for the benefit of the military during World War 2 and had a sense of humility whilst doing it. I cannot imagine the same can be said for the Head Prefect, who spends his time whining to his local council whilst recommending that the rest of us get fracked.

So why retain faith in the Great British machine, when the Great British machine no longer works? Clearly the answer is to remove cronies, whether they be Tories, sustaining each other’s family businesses by promoting war, forgiving banker’s errors, indulging in not-so-secret talks with corporate lobbyists before promoting policies that serve only themselves? In the meantime, they feign caring by retaining some of the worst Labour policies. Labour, as a party, is all but dead, they wait to be told what to think. Consensus, as I have always said, is not a healthy or progressive state of affairs for any party, nor is attempting to centralise a country that cannot, and should not, be centralised, particularly not for the benefit of London, at the expense of the entire UK.

Honesty, in addition to duty, have gone out of fashion, unfortunately at a time when we are more aware than ever before exactly how many lies, and how many mistakes, we are at the mercy of. Is it not time that we took some initiative to get our country back on track? We used to be great, not a puppet sideshow, whispering in the ear of the USA to scrape a few arms sales to line the pockets of a few more fat cats, smoking in the private member’s club right next to your politicians.

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