Is incommunicado even possible now?

It’s easy to see why I haven’t embraced mobile phones. I don’t even like landlines much sometimes. A useful tool and an evil necessity often ignored. I don’t like that I’m always available to friends, foes and family….

I would like a button on my phone that sends a message saying I am here. This is not personal, but I just want to be incommunicado for a while….

Yesterday was my birthday and I was probably quite rude to people I like. I don’t have many friends and I can’t afford to rebuff them when they are offering me happy wishes, but I don’t think I view birthdays quite the same way as everyone else.

For a start I believe a birthday is a day for you. You don’t go to work whatever the motivation. It’s a day where you should be able to choose what you want to do. I lacked both the freedom to do what I would have chosen and the ability to define my choice, but by default I decided to stay home and be alone, to meditate upon my life and try and sort some sense out of the tangle.

It was unfortunately just like being at work, without a moment’s peace – phone calls and emails and interruptions until you can’t think. At the moment I can’t stand the frantic, busy nature of my life and I’ve been screaming inside for weeks at the futility of it all. Even minor responsibilities seem to weigh like lead. Frustrated, feeling sick and at wits end I wanted the whole week off but could only take one day with the excuse that it was my birthday. People then assume you have some merrymaking project in mind. Escape was my project and it failed mostly.

Half-assed it turned out to be. I didn’t succeed in getting some quiet tranquillity, I didn’t achieve anything and I rebuffed the few people who bother to continue to know me, which makes me feel guilty and completely counteracts any relaxation I might have had. What a winner of a day. Things can only look up I suppose.

Birthday blues, greens and other sombre tones

Yes I have achieved ‘old’. I may in fact be half-way through my natural life. It’s weird to think about. I suppose other people have survived it. Really it’s the attention that’s annoying – I just want to hide, but then, I generally do….

Dad always said to use elbow-grease (I never knew where to buy it)

It’s official*. Genius isn’t born – it’s created through a synthesis of encouragement, mentoring and hard yakka. No longer can some of us slack off in the pure knowledge that we were not born smart.

How anyone, in this modern world, would be able to find the time and quiet to practice anything enough to achieve excellence, is the big question.

*New Scientist 16 Sept 06

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

Live small, save much

Stephen Meyer says we should get used to the ‘end of the wild’. He says that the only way we can keep the biodiversity we have requires ‘unprecedented changes in human aspirations and societal organization’ – ‘a global spiritual epiphany of unimaginable proportions’*.

He’s right, of course, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least try to salvage something of the world-as-we-know-it. One of the best things you can do for the environment is to breed less and train the children you do have to ‘live small’. Be like Grasshopper and aim to leave no footprint. Get working on that epiphany people and try to pull a few others along with you no matter how stupid you think they are.

*New Scientist – 9 Sept 2006. Stephen Myer is author of The End of the Wild

Today’s thoughts

Scraping the unused margarine on your knife back into the tub is grounds for divorce/machete murder.

What about people who sell fake prescription drugs then? How come we don’t hear about them as much as people who earn a living selling illegal substances to people who want to consume them…. Surely this is a worse crime?

So much dust and so little housekeeper….

I am going to make a stand. I am going to throw out those floppy disks.

Meanwhile at the university....

Germaine Greer. I've spent years defending her for things she's said, (if only there was someone to defend me) , so it's very hard for me to say anything, but seriously I wish she would look before she leaped(or is that leapt?). She has come down a notch in my estimation and I won't be spending any time defending her in future, if I can break the habit.

Great conservationist dies….

It is not fair of Steve Urwin to die. I had great plans for his future. He should have had a lot more years of influencing people to do the right things rather than take the selfish choices. It’s not fair. Now he will never outlive his created persona and so many people will just remember him as goofy or loutish rather than see his greatness.