I have a problem with the idea that the older you get the more respect you should be paid. The only assertion I can make about someone who is older than me, is that they are closer to death, and even at that this assertion can not be made categorically because there will be many factors that will determine who will die first - I could end up dying before them.
I don't believe that anyone younger than I should pay me any respect due to my age alone. I want people to respect me for who I am, not what I am. The idea that with age you should automatically be granted respect is in itself disrespectful. It promotes the idea that all you have to do is survive in order to be considered reverent.
You can live to a very old age and be a cruel, callous person. You could live a life filled with bile spouting nothing but hatred. Age in and of itself draws absolutely no conclusions on the nature of your character. It cannot be used to imply any great achievement other than survival which in and of itself is not something that is deserving of reverence. A life of survival can be plentiful or repetitive. It can be one filled with achievement or it can be one defined only by a cycle of eat, drink, sleep, repeat.
If your life was to be expressed as a progress bar, with your age only representing the percentage complete, to have a higher percentage is no achievement other than one of having endured long enough to reach that point. If respect is something that has to be earned then you should be reasonably expected to do something worthy of that respect.
While many people say that younger generations have no respect for their elders, as I have grown and aged I find myself in a middle ground. Although I am not middle aged, I am old enough not to be considered young by those who identify as such, and likewise I am young enough still not to be considered old by those who likewise identify as such. In this middle ground I can see both sides and ultimately declare that as much disrespect for young people is displayed by older generations as they so often criticise. I think the revelation here is that respect has nothing to do with age. Both who cry on both sides of the lack of respect from either side are as naive as each other to believe that they should be given respect without earning it first.
As age does not imply wisdom, and neither does knowledge, so too then age should not imply respect nor reverence.
Can you trust a Gay Man?
Let me preface this with two things, firstly I am a gay man if that wasn't obvious enough, and secondly, I have some major trust issues which if you've read some of my previous posts you'll already know and be familiar with the problems it causes.
I had a thought today about trust, more specifically I had a question, can you trust a gay man? The immediate first reaction to this question for me was why should gay men be considered any different and that led me to consider something. Most gay men will spend a part of their lives in the closet. For many this enclosure is self imposed out of the fear of how others might react to knowing they are gay. Fear is a powerful motivation. People will do incredible things when they are afraid and go to extraordinary lengths. However, to be in the closet, at it's most fundamental definition is to actively hide something. While many people post-coming out will say in hindsight that what they were hiding was not such a big deal after all, in the moment however that one aspect of who you are can be the most monumental truth, an Earth-shattering statement that you fear being known for the destructive power that it seemingly holds.
What has all this got to do with trust? Some of you may have already figured out where I am going with this - if you can devote every fibre of your being to hiding something from the world, and still live your life acting as if nothing is happening then you are ultimately demonstrating your capacity to hide and to deceive.
I was never a fan of the idea that you "have to come out" but the more I think about it, unless you do it while you are young, and therefore demonstrate that the weight of hiding such a thing was too much for you to bear, you risk the countenance of mistrust. If you meet someone who is Gay and in the closet and much older, then the apparent conclusion you can draw is that they have spent the better part of their life hiding something from the world, and doing it pretty well if they are still in the closet and no-one knows. That throws open the question, can you trust a partner that you knowingly accept has the ability to hide something so intimate?
If you discovered your sexuality when you were 15 and you are now 45 and still in the closet, with the people who are closest to you having no idea, having spent 30 years hiding who you are not just from the world but from the ones you love and the ones who love you - regardless of motivation and intent, can you see how your honesty and integrity could be questioned?
I had a thought today about trust, more specifically I had a question, can you trust a gay man? The immediate first reaction to this question for me was why should gay men be considered any different and that led me to consider something. Most gay men will spend a part of their lives in the closet. For many this enclosure is self imposed out of the fear of how others might react to knowing they are gay. Fear is a powerful motivation. People will do incredible things when they are afraid and go to extraordinary lengths. However, to be in the closet, at it's most fundamental definition is to actively hide something. While many people post-coming out will say in hindsight that what they were hiding was not such a big deal after all, in the moment however that one aspect of who you are can be the most monumental truth, an Earth-shattering statement that you fear being known for the destructive power that it seemingly holds.
What has all this got to do with trust? Some of you may have already figured out where I am going with this - if you can devote every fibre of your being to hiding something from the world, and still live your life acting as if nothing is happening then you are ultimately demonstrating your capacity to hide and to deceive.
I was never a fan of the idea that you "have to come out" but the more I think about it, unless you do it while you are young, and therefore demonstrate that the weight of hiding such a thing was too much for you to bear, you risk the countenance of mistrust. If you meet someone who is Gay and in the closet and much older, then the apparent conclusion you can draw is that they have spent the better part of their life hiding something from the world, and doing it pretty well if they are still in the closet and no-one knows. That throws open the question, can you trust a partner that you knowingly accept has the ability to hide something so intimate?
If you discovered your sexuality when you were 15 and you are now 45 and still in the closet, with the people who are closest to you having no idea, having spent 30 years hiding who you are not just from the world but from the ones you love and the ones who love you - regardless of motivation and intent, can you see how your honesty and integrity could be questioned?
I have loved, and been loved
There are people in my life who I love, and there are people in my life who love me. The two don't always correlate. There are also people who are no longer in my life for various reasons, some I lost figuratively and some I lost literally. They vary in terms of the type of love, platonic vs romantic etc.
The one thing that remains constant however is that those people I came to love, I have never stopped loving. Even now years later, and in some cases decades.
There were some who hurt me, so badly, who cut so deeply I could never forgive them. They will never be allowed into my life again and the pain they caused and the scars they inflicted will never fully heal because despite the pain they caused I can't stop loving them. I have enough self respect to walk away and stay away.
There were some with whom I parted ways as our paths led in different directions. Some partings were bitter-sweet and others were just plain bitter - these people I don't rule out the possibility of them entering my life again in the future but it would need to be for a very good reason.
Then there are the amicable few, with whom I parted ways on good terms. These are often the people I miss the most, because we parted ways with no real reason other than simply drifting apart.
There is an argument that some will raise, that if you truly loved someone you would do whatever you could to keep them in your life. To them I would simply retort "if you truly love something, set it free, if it was meant to be it will come back to you"; the sad truth is that they don't always come back, but that doesn't change how you felt about them. In many cases my love was unrequited - some platonic and some romantic. I won't try and keep people in my life who do not want me in theirs, no matter what I feel for them.
All this I know yet it brings back one thing that others often find difficult to understand. Although I will always love, I am not "in love" with these people - even those who are still in my life who I would not want to leave it. For many of these people my endearment comes from the support they have given me and the bonds we have formed. Some have helped me through some quite dark times in my life and while I look forward to the day when I fall in love with someone who can accept all this, they must accept that my feelings will never change, but they hold no danger, no risk, no threat to my love I would show them. For all of these people, I could never be with any of them, and they know that. I am quite adamant about that, I do not like to live my life in circles. For those that were romantic they had their chance and that has now passed - they'll never be anything more than close friends.
This may seem like a random post throwing together a myriad of emotions, but the truth, as is so often the case with anything I write here, is that there is a story untold that lies behind these words. It's actually quite ironic that despite the openness, the heart on my sleeve, and the soul bearing you may read on here, there is so much more unsaid. I used to think if I wrote an autobiography I would call it "The Boy Who Cried Love" but as I have grown and come to understand myself more and more I think a more apt title would be "The Other Half of The Story"
The one thing that remains constant however is that those people I came to love, I have never stopped loving. Even now years later, and in some cases decades.
There were some who hurt me, so badly, who cut so deeply I could never forgive them. They will never be allowed into my life again and the pain they caused and the scars they inflicted will never fully heal because despite the pain they caused I can't stop loving them. I have enough self respect to walk away and stay away.
There were some with whom I parted ways as our paths led in different directions. Some partings were bitter-sweet and others were just plain bitter - these people I don't rule out the possibility of them entering my life again in the future but it would need to be for a very good reason.
Then there are the amicable few, with whom I parted ways on good terms. These are often the people I miss the most, because we parted ways with no real reason other than simply drifting apart.
There is an argument that some will raise, that if you truly loved someone you would do whatever you could to keep them in your life. To them I would simply retort "if you truly love something, set it free, if it was meant to be it will come back to you"; the sad truth is that they don't always come back, but that doesn't change how you felt about them. In many cases my love was unrequited - some platonic and some romantic. I won't try and keep people in my life who do not want me in theirs, no matter what I feel for them.
All this I know yet it brings back one thing that others often find difficult to understand. Although I will always love, I am not "in love" with these people - even those who are still in my life who I would not want to leave it. For many of these people my endearment comes from the support they have given me and the bonds we have formed. Some have helped me through some quite dark times in my life and while I look forward to the day when I fall in love with someone who can accept all this, they must accept that my feelings will never change, but they hold no danger, no risk, no threat to my love I would show them. For all of these people, I could never be with any of them, and they know that. I am quite adamant about that, I do not like to live my life in circles. For those that were romantic they had their chance and that has now passed - they'll never be anything more than close friends.
This may seem like a random post throwing together a myriad of emotions, but the truth, as is so often the case with anything I write here, is that there is a story untold that lies behind these words. It's actually quite ironic that despite the openness, the heart on my sleeve, and the soul bearing you may read on here, there is so much more unsaid. I used to think if I wrote an autobiography I would call it "The Boy Who Cried Love" but as I have grown and come to understand myself more and more I think a more apt title would be "The Other Half of The Story"
Riddle me this :: 1
It takes two people to give me, but I can only be given to someone who has never had me before.
I am something you can take, but you can never give back once taken or lost.
I do not last forever.
I am both the most resilient and the most fragile thing in the world.
I am found throughout the world.
What am I?
I am something you can take, but you can never give back once taken or lost.
I do not last forever.
I am both the most resilient and the most fragile thing in the world.
I am found throughout the world.
What am I?
Lost
A lot has been said over the years about fate and destiny; even I have shared my feelings on this and through it all while many disagree about issues of free will and predetermination, the one thing most people can seem to agree on is that life is about finding out what you're meant to do with it.
In many ways life is a puzzle handed to a child which they do not know anything about who is then asked to figure it out. In the same way as the literal sense where a child is often given such things to stave off boredom or to occupy it's time, you can argue that this is all that life is to us. Whether you believe in a God and believe they bestowed this gift upon us, or whether you have no belief in any deity and believe that life simply arose from circumstance, you can still agree that no-one is born with an innate understanding of their purpose of being.
Life is a puzzle. It's a puzzle I can't figure out and I am lost. I know I am not alone however. I know some people have mastered the 3 D's - determination, drive and direction - but I know many more who, like me, don't know where their life is headed. Without having direction it's hard to pursue anything with determination and drive.
Whether you are 14 or 42 one thing also rings true - no-one can tell you what to do with your life. Others can try and control it and in some cases they do that all too well, but under the skin, flowing through your beating heart, there remains to be an all-present, all-aware sensation of knowing whether something is right or wrong for you. Incidents and circumstance allow us to hide these feelings and cover them up; some people are very good at burying these feelings deep inside, but that increases pressure and in time when the pot runneth over you eventually melt down. If you deny who you are for long enough, these feelings will envelope your soul until you can take it no more.
There are many ways to live your life. Embracing who you are is a big part of finding happiness and being content. For some groups there is a tradition of repressing this which later leads to mid-life cirses in which they have a breakdown and come out the other side as the person they were meant to be - others don't make it out intact and instead emerge as a shell of their former selves and find themselves in a depth of darkness or vast emptiness where they live only for the sake of living.
There's a lot to be said about the acceleration of our lives that our society is embracing more and more; the concept of a quarter-life crisis for example is something that has only existed within the last few decades. You can make of that what you will but the point I want to address is that these crises all share the same thing regardless of where or when they actually happen, and that is, the shattering of the shell that we have built around ourselves.
Life is about finding your way and when you can't, and you find yourself lost, it's very hard to shake the feeling that you are a failure. Not a failure at anything specifically but simply a failure at life.
This is how I feel right now because I don't know where I am anymore and I don't know where to go. I am lost.
In many ways life is a puzzle handed to a child which they do not know anything about who is then asked to figure it out. In the same way as the literal sense where a child is often given such things to stave off boredom or to occupy it's time, you can argue that this is all that life is to us. Whether you believe in a God and believe they bestowed this gift upon us, or whether you have no belief in any deity and believe that life simply arose from circumstance, you can still agree that no-one is born with an innate understanding of their purpose of being.
Life is a puzzle. It's a puzzle I can't figure out and I am lost. I know I am not alone however. I know some people have mastered the 3 D's - determination, drive and direction - but I know many more who, like me, don't know where their life is headed. Without having direction it's hard to pursue anything with determination and drive.
Whether you are 14 or 42 one thing also rings true - no-one can tell you what to do with your life. Others can try and control it and in some cases they do that all too well, but under the skin, flowing through your beating heart, there remains to be an all-present, all-aware sensation of knowing whether something is right or wrong for you. Incidents and circumstance allow us to hide these feelings and cover them up; some people are very good at burying these feelings deep inside, but that increases pressure and in time when the pot runneth over you eventually melt down. If you deny who you are for long enough, these feelings will envelope your soul until you can take it no more.
There are many ways to live your life. Embracing who you are is a big part of finding happiness and being content. For some groups there is a tradition of repressing this which later leads to mid-life cirses in which they have a breakdown and come out the other side as the person they were meant to be - others don't make it out intact and instead emerge as a shell of their former selves and find themselves in a depth of darkness or vast emptiness where they live only for the sake of living.
There's a lot to be said about the acceleration of our lives that our society is embracing more and more; the concept of a quarter-life crisis for example is something that has only existed within the last few decades. You can make of that what you will but the point I want to address is that these crises all share the same thing regardless of where or when they actually happen, and that is, the shattering of the shell that we have built around ourselves.
Life is about finding your way and when you can't, and you find yourself lost, it's very hard to shake the feeling that you are a failure. Not a failure at anything specifically but simply a failure at life.
This is how I feel right now because I don't know where I am anymore and I don't know where to go. I am lost.
Bound Again
I spend my life in dream awake
And think of paths I did not take
Of lives unlived and truths untold
In place of tears and hearts run cold
On earth by day and in heaven by night
In deepest darkness and holy light
My soul is bound and wrapped in chains
Until once again freed by love's eternal flames
And think of paths I did not take
Of lives unlived and truths untold
In place of tears and hearts run cold
On earth by day and in heaven by night
In deepest darkness and holy light
My soul is bound and wrapped in chains
Until once again freed by love's eternal flames
I don't know
"You really know what you want" - I've been told this many times by people but it's usually in the midst of a conversation about something I have figured out. There's a lot that I haven't figured out though and when it comes to those things, I don't know what I want - or if I ever did.
You can say I'm making problems for myself, or thinking about things too much, but I would argue that my concern is valid. I haven't figured out many things, but as an example let's take relationships. I've never had a relationship, I have wanted one, but I have only ever met guys who wanted one with me when I didn't want one with them, or guys that I have wanted one with who didn't want one with me. The two have never lined up for me.
When I first came out I wanted commitment, but I was 18 at the time and no-one my age wanted the same thing, they all wanted no-strings-attached [NSA as so many love calling it]. Fast forward a few years to my time at University and tired of guys only wanting one thing and nothing more I thought fuck it all - literally. I jumped on the NSA band wagon and I had my fill - again, literally. During that time though there were a few guys who wanted a relationship with me, none of whom I wanted one with, I don't want to sound like a slut, though that's inevitable when talking NSA - they were guys that I wouldn't have considered if I wanted something serious, I only said yes because it was NSA. Then came along a guy I really liked and fell pretty hard for, I wanted so much from him but he didn't want the same - not from me at least.
After that my desire to do anything with anyone died. It was a year or so before it woke again. Nowhere near what it was before I had a few encounters but I felt the same emptiness that NSA left, the feeling of being incomplete.
Fast forward to the present, half a decade later and you would think I would know by now what I want. I don't. I know what I don't want - I don't want a string of NSA encounters that will leave me feeling empty as they did before - and I know what I would like - a committed relationship with someone I love who loves me. So what's the problem? Well the problem is the question - does wanting commitment mean you have to be abstinent and wait for the one you're going to commit to? What if you spend all that time waiting, however long it is, before you finally meet someone you want to commit to and then things don't work out? Did you deny yourself the possibility of something good by closing yourself off to the world? Can NSA ever evolve into something more?
More than this the fact that I don't know what I want seems to be a heinous crime in the LGBT community - "what are you looking for?" - if you can't answer that question it seems you're wrote off completely. Why!? I'm fucking 25 years old I should not be expected to have life completely figured out by now, even if I live until I am 80, I am less than 1/3 of the way through; at 25 I've been out and able to accept my sexuality for 7 years - that's not a long time, what great revelation or lesson in life have I missed in that time that I'm expected to know by now, someone tell me please?
You can say I'm making problems for myself, or thinking about things too much, but I would argue that my concern is valid. I haven't figured out many things, but as an example let's take relationships. I've never had a relationship, I have wanted one, but I have only ever met guys who wanted one with me when I didn't want one with them, or guys that I have wanted one with who didn't want one with me. The two have never lined up for me.
When I first came out I wanted commitment, but I was 18 at the time and no-one my age wanted the same thing, they all wanted no-strings-attached [NSA as so many love calling it]. Fast forward a few years to my time at University and tired of guys only wanting one thing and nothing more I thought fuck it all - literally. I jumped on the NSA band wagon and I had my fill - again, literally. During that time though there were a few guys who wanted a relationship with me, none of whom I wanted one with, I don't want to sound like a slut, though that's inevitable when talking NSA - they were guys that I wouldn't have considered if I wanted something serious, I only said yes because it was NSA. Then came along a guy I really liked and fell pretty hard for, I wanted so much from him but he didn't want the same - not from me at least.
After that my desire to do anything with anyone died. It was a year or so before it woke again. Nowhere near what it was before I had a few encounters but I felt the same emptiness that NSA left, the feeling of being incomplete.
Fast forward to the present, half a decade later and you would think I would know by now what I want. I don't. I know what I don't want - I don't want a string of NSA encounters that will leave me feeling empty as they did before - and I know what I would like - a committed relationship with someone I love who loves me. So what's the problem? Well the problem is the question - does wanting commitment mean you have to be abstinent and wait for the one you're going to commit to? What if you spend all that time waiting, however long it is, before you finally meet someone you want to commit to and then things don't work out? Did you deny yourself the possibility of something good by closing yourself off to the world? Can NSA ever evolve into something more?
More than this the fact that I don't know what I want seems to be a heinous crime in the LGBT community - "what are you looking for?" - if you can't answer that question it seems you're wrote off completely. Why!? I'm fucking 25 years old I should not be expected to have life completely figured out by now, even if I live until I am 80, I am less than 1/3 of the way through; at 25 I've been out and able to accept my sexuality for 7 years - that's not a long time, what great revelation or lesson in life have I missed in that time that I'm expected to know by now, someone tell me please?
I want to help but you have to ask
I am different. I have known it all my life. I am different in many ways but one way in particular, and it's not being Gay which you might have thought.
I am different because I am capable of things that most people aren't. Normally I would feel the need to insert self degradation here and praise the many skills of others but fuck that. I am different and I am capable of many things that others aren't and all my life I have had to hide it and self censor myself not because I am afraid that others will find out but because I know that others will recognise it. I have to hold back because of the expectation of modesty. That expectation has been well and truly fucked out the window for this post. I am confident in my abilities and that has been labelled cockiness on occasion by friends, by people I worked with, by teachers even and I have always felt like I have been made to feel ashamed of that and I don't like that because I don't see why I should have to apologise for being good at something and recognising it.
I know where my strengths are and I know what I am capable of doing. I don't ridicule others for not being able to do things the way I can and I have never felt that someone was less than me because I knew something they didn't. If someone can do something better than me my first instinct is to ask them as many questions as I think of in an effort to completely understand their methods and practices. I seek to learn from others.
I have met people capable of incredible things and I have tried to learn myself and failed. That failure is not what I hold onto in bitterness, if someone is capable of something that I can not do I can respect that and rely on them for their support if I need it. If I can't do something myself but someone else can I will ask. When I can do something that others can't I don't usually offer to step in or show them simply because I have been conditioned to think that this is rude and that the person I offer to help will take offence. This is the thing this entire post is about, pride. Why is it that pride is seen as such a bad thing? It's considered one of the 7 deadly sins in Christianity, and abhorred in many cultures, societies and groups. If pride wasn't seen as such a bad thing maybe we could learn to appreciate our differences and learn to help and be helped.
All this is born from my discomfort in the situation where someone is doing something and struggling. Where I know how to do what they are trying to do, and where ultimately I don't offer unless asked, because I feel really uncomfortable offering help to people who don't ask for it because I feel rude, arrogant or condescending. I want to help but you have to ask because if you don't ask then in most cases I won't offer and I hate that this is the way I am because I would like to be able to offer help to those who wouldn't ask but I never learned how to do that without feeling really uncomfortable.
I am different because I am capable of things that most people aren't. Normally I would feel the need to insert self degradation here and praise the many skills of others but fuck that. I am different and I am capable of many things that others aren't and all my life I have had to hide it and self censor myself not because I am afraid that others will find out but because I know that others will recognise it. I have to hold back because of the expectation of modesty. That expectation has been well and truly fucked out the window for this post. I am confident in my abilities and that has been labelled cockiness on occasion by friends, by people I worked with, by teachers even and I have always felt like I have been made to feel ashamed of that and I don't like that because I don't see why I should have to apologise for being good at something and recognising it.
I know where my strengths are and I know what I am capable of doing. I don't ridicule others for not being able to do things the way I can and I have never felt that someone was less than me because I knew something they didn't. If someone can do something better than me my first instinct is to ask them as many questions as I think of in an effort to completely understand their methods and practices. I seek to learn from others.
I have met people capable of incredible things and I have tried to learn myself and failed. That failure is not what I hold onto in bitterness, if someone is capable of something that I can not do I can respect that and rely on them for their support if I need it. If I can't do something myself but someone else can I will ask. When I can do something that others can't I don't usually offer to step in or show them simply because I have been conditioned to think that this is rude and that the person I offer to help will take offence. This is the thing this entire post is about, pride. Why is it that pride is seen as such a bad thing? It's considered one of the 7 deadly sins in Christianity, and abhorred in many cultures, societies and groups. If pride wasn't seen as such a bad thing maybe we could learn to appreciate our differences and learn to help and be helped.
All this is born from my discomfort in the situation where someone is doing something and struggling. Where I know how to do what they are trying to do, and where ultimately I don't offer unless asked, because I feel really uncomfortable offering help to people who don't ask for it because I feel rude, arrogant or condescending. I want to help but you have to ask because if you don't ask then in most cases I won't offer and I hate that this is the way I am because I would like to be able to offer help to those who wouldn't ask but I never learned how to do that without feeling really uncomfortable.
Taking our own advice
This blog is filled with advice, observations and criticisms and some general musings on the way the world works. For all that I have written you'd think that I had it all figured out or that I was a man of the world that could use all this to his advantage, the truth is, knowing and doing are two different things. It's one thing to know what you should do but it's another to actually do it.
I'm not alone in this respect I know a lot of you will have experienced this, particularly when it comes to relationships and dating you'll probably have experienced at one point being the source of advice for your friends. Solving other people's problems it seems is easier than solving our own, perhaps the reason most prominent for this is when it comes to other people's problems we don't focus too much on what can go wrong or the negative ramifications instead we focus on the problem and a possible solution - in business this ignorance is known as blue sky thinking, where only the positive outcomes are considered and the constraints that normally apply are ignored and you come with an ideal world solution.
Life is not filled with blue skies unfortunately and when it comes to our own problems we often focus too much on what can go wrong as opposed to what can go right. Meaning when it comes to solving our own problems we look at them from an entirely different perspective than those of the people we help. 'Do as I say and not as I do' comes into play here; if we would only look at our own problems the way we look at others then maybe we could solve them more easily, if only we could take our own advice.
I'm not alone in this respect I know a lot of you will have experienced this, particularly when it comes to relationships and dating you'll probably have experienced at one point being the source of advice for your friends. Solving other people's problems it seems is easier than solving our own, perhaps the reason most prominent for this is when it comes to other people's problems we don't focus too much on what can go wrong or the negative ramifications instead we focus on the problem and a possible solution - in business this ignorance is known as blue sky thinking, where only the positive outcomes are considered and the constraints that normally apply are ignored and you come with an ideal world solution.
Life is not filled with blue skies unfortunately and when it comes to our own problems we often focus too much on what can go wrong as opposed to what can go right. Meaning when it comes to solving our own problems we look at them from an entirely different perspective than those of the people we help. 'Do as I say and not as I do' comes into play here; if we would only look at our own problems the way we look at others then maybe we could solve them more easily, if only we could take our own advice.
The Final Refrain
The Jensen household was always filled with music. Anna and Einar had met in college, she was a singer and Einar was a Cellist. It wasn't exactly love at first sight, in fact the first words Anna ever said to Einar were "Get lost", though Einar would insist that was due to his social awkwardness and not out of any wrongdoing on his part, Anna on the other hand would never let him forget that the first time he ever spoke to her was when he had drained half a distillery. Nevertheless their courtship eventually found its footing, with Anna being the dominant partner in their relationship it was always her word that would be final. It was no surprise then when their little boy was born she refused to let Einar name him for his father, insisting on the name of Mark instead.
Mark was outgoing and filled with dreams, with creativity flowing through his veins. Anna and Einar set about shaping their child enrolling him in countless classes, learning how to play every instrument you can think of and learning to speak English, French, Spanish and their native Norsk. Mark grew up in Oslo, in a medium sized semi-detached house in Gyldenløves gate. The house was perfect from the ground up. The house had 4 bedrooms, one taken by Anna and Einar, one taken by Mark, one taken by his little sister Emilia and a permanent guest room. As well as a study and the obligatory music room the house had two receptions, two bathrooms and a kitchen that opened out onto a small garden to the rear. The house nestled into the street basking in the shade of several large trees whose age was a secret known only to them. Warm in the winter and cool in the Summer it was a true family home. It was no surprise then that Mark did not leave until he was in his early thirties.
After several years of studying, achieving a bachelors in Education and a Masters in Psychology Mark finally set out to pursue a career in teaching, the subject would naturally be Music, but Mark was unable to find a place, in the end he would become an English teacher. At heart he yearned to teach music, and made every attempt he could to incorporate it into his lessons. His appetite was not appeased and so he took up a part time job teaching piano. Many of his students from school became his first music students. Through them his reputation spread and eventually he had no need for advertisements in the local paper and flyers scattered around colleges, instead he had a steady stream of pupils willing to learn.
One day in August Mark got a phone call from a woman in her late seventies named Mildred who had recently lost her husband to cancer. In his absence she found her time was wasted, and set about to do something that would give her something to occupy her mind. Mildred's husband George had left behind many things but perhaps the most impressive was a solid oak grand piano that was polished to within an inch of its life, with keys as white as snow and as black as coal. It was his pride and joy and in his wake it had sat lonely and longing to be touched, longing to utter sweet symphonies and melodies that would entrance anyone who cared to listen. Mark would not usually accept older students as he found them the most difficult to teach, set in their ways they would often sit as he guided them, his words going in one ear and out the other and the shrill strikes and harsh contrasts of mismatched notes piercing and screeching like nails on a blackboard. For Mildred however Mark made an exception, partly as the student who had referred her, a young man named Peter, begged in earnest that he give her a chance and partly because he felt the sincerity in her voice, the courage and the devotion that she would give.
The first few weeks with Mildred were hard, as he had expected she found it hard to grasp many of the concepts he was trying to teach and at a point he spoke to her softly one quiet afternoon and suggested that it may not be the best way to remember her husband. Mildred was taken aback, she protested, yet she knew that she had not given it her all. She begged Mark to have patience and give her one last chance. Mark set out a routine of practice that would occupy almost every waking moment of Mildred's time. Part of him wanted her to give up, perhaps if he gave her too much she would give up herself. What happened however was that Mildred played, day and night, surviving on a few hours of sleep. A month passed and when Mark returned he found Mildred sitting in the sun room staring off into space. Peter told Mark of the hours Mildred had spent practising. When she finally registered his presence she slowly stood, without a word and moved to the piano. She sat and sighed softly. Resting her fingers gently on the keys she set into playing, within a few notes Mark recognised the tone and progression as Ludovico Einaudi's Le Onde. The piano sang with such grace as the music filled the air, the room was still, Peter and Mark looking on in amazement as their hearts were cusped in the hands of angels. The music played as Mildred sat entranced her eyes welled as a tear ran down her cheek, she looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes and she played the final note. A moment of silence passed and Mildred fell forward slumping onto the piano the keys letting out a sudden clash of notes. Peter and Mark rushed to her but there was nothing they could do. As the piano fell silent, so to did Mildred.
Mark was outgoing and filled with dreams, with creativity flowing through his veins. Anna and Einar set about shaping their child enrolling him in countless classes, learning how to play every instrument you can think of and learning to speak English, French, Spanish and their native Norsk. Mark grew up in Oslo, in a medium sized semi-detached house in Gyldenløves gate. The house was perfect from the ground up. The house had 4 bedrooms, one taken by Anna and Einar, one taken by Mark, one taken by his little sister Emilia and a permanent guest room. As well as a study and the obligatory music room the house had two receptions, two bathrooms and a kitchen that opened out onto a small garden to the rear. The house nestled into the street basking in the shade of several large trees whose age was a secret known only to them. Warm in the winter and cool in the Summer it was a true family home. It was no surprise then that Mark did not leave until he was in his early thirties.
After several years of studying, achieving a bachelors in Education and a Masters in Psychology Mark finally set out to pursue a career in teaching, the subject would naturally be Music, but Mark was unable to find a place, in the end he would become an English teacher. At heart he yearned to teach music, and made every attempt he could to incorporate it into his lessons. His appetite was not appeased and so he took up a part time job teaching piano. Many of his students from school became his first music students. Through them his reputation spread and eventually he had no need for advertisements in the local paper and flyers scattered around colleges, instead he had a steady stream of pupils willing to learn.
One day in August Mark got a phone call from a woman in her late seventies named Mildred who had recently lost her husband to cancer. In his absence she found her time was wasted, and set about to do something that would give her something to occupy her mind. Mildred's husband George had left behind many things but perhaps the most impressive was a solid oak grand piano that was polished to within an inch of its life, with keys as white as snow and as black as coal. It was his pride and joy and in his wake it had sat lonely and longing to be touched, longing to utter sweet symphonies and melodies that would entrance anyone who cared to listen. Mark would not usually accept older students as he found them the most difficult to teach, set in their ways they would often sit as he guided them, his words going in one ear and out the other and the shrill strikes and harsh contrasts of mismatched notes piercing and screeching like nails on a blackboard. For Mildred however Mark made an exception, partly as the student who had referred her, a young man named Peter, begged in earnest that he give her a chance and partly because he felt the sincerity in her voice, the courage and the devotion that she would give.
The first few weeks with Mildred were hard, as he had expected she found it hard to grasp many of the concepts he was trying to teach and at a point he spoke to her softly one quiet afternoon and suggested that it may not be the best way to remember her husband. Mildred was taken aback, she protested, yet she knew that she had not given it her all. She begged Mark to have patience and give her one last chance. Mark set out a routine of practice that would occupy almost every waking moment of Mildred's time. Part of him wanted her to give up, perhaps if he gave her too much she would give up herself. What happened however was that Mildred played, day and night, surviving on a few hours of sleep. A month passed and when Mark returned he found Mildred sitting in the sun room staring off into space. Peter told Mark of the hours Mildred had spent practising. When she finally registered his presence she slowly stood, without a word and moved to the piano. She sat and sighed softly. Resting her fingers gently on the keys she set into playing, within a few notes Mark recognised the tone and progression as Ludovico Einaudi's Le Onde. The piano sang with such grace as the music filled the air, the room was still, Peter and Mark looking on in amazement as their hearts were cusped in the hands of angels. The music played as Mildred sat entranced her eyes welled as a tear ran down her cheek, she looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes and she played the final note. A moment of silence passed and Mildred fell forward slumping onto the piano the keys letting out a sudden clash of notes. Peter and Mark rushed to her but there was nothing they could do. As the piano fell silent, so to did Mildred.
Shared Passwords
Most people will be able to tell you that when it comes to passwords the three things you should never do are, pick an obvious password, write a password down, or share that password with anyone. There a many reasons for this but ultimately security is the primary objective, that is what passwords were created for - to prevent access to a system so that only the person who created the password would be able to access it.
The problem with passwords is that there are often times when you do need to share a password with someone else so that they can access a system, and often that system may be shared by multiple people who all use the same password. An example of this would be a wifi network key - this is a password that serves the purpose of restricting access to a wifi network only to those who know the key - dismissing for now the multitude of ways you can bypass this or break the encryption let's just focus on the basic principle, that is, that the network is locked using a single password that everyone who uses that network will use. On top of that if the password ever needs changed then everyone needs to know the new password. In this scenario you are only as strong as your weakest user; that is to say the person who flaunts security the most is the weakest link in your system.
According to BBC News, Police in India failed to act on hundreds of complaints of corruption over 8 years because of a forgotten password. This is an example of what can happen when access to a system is lost. While the issue of sharing passwords in error or being insecure is serious, the issue of not sharing passwords at all is equally as damaging. Take for example a System Administrator working in a school. He would have access to the primary server within the school and he would access that via a user-name and password combination. Logic would dictate as the System Administrator he would be the only one with those access details. So what happens for example if he takes a heart attack? If he never shared those details with anyone then the system would become inaccessible. These types of systems which rely heavily on security often won't have any method of resetting the password, more over what little fail safes are in place would also be secured, again the person responsible for that would likely be the System Administrator who had a heart attack.
These are valid reasons for what is known as White Hat Hacking - this is a term used for security specialists who are essentially hackers but do so legally through paid employment. These people can be hired by the School in our example and can hack the server as there is legitimate reason to access the contents. If we move away from a digital setting for a moment and consider a shop with a safe in which all the money is stored. The manager and a few others would have access to that safe via the combination. In the unlikely event that all of those people were unable to provide the combination then the contents would be lost. In this scenario you would need to employ a security specialist who can crack a safe [brute force physical attacks on the safe would not really be an option since they are designed to withstand those attacks] ultimately opening the safe and setting a new combination.
Another less extreme example would be a staff locker secured by a padlock, the member of staff quits and take with them the keys. In the event that there are no spare keys either a lock smith would be needed or a pair of bolt cutters strong enough to remove the padlock. The physical key of that padlock represents the passwords we need in order to access the systems we use.
The problem of providing a secure method of sharing passwords is one that is not easily solved. Ultimately each system for sharing those passwords that is created will invariably weaken the system as they provide another method for accessing a system you should not - why attack a system that is heavily locked down when you can attack the location of those keys and then simply open doors at your leisure.
The problem with passwords is that there are often times when you do need to share a password with someone else so that they can access a system, and often that system may be shared by multiple people who all use the same password. An example of this would be a wifi network key - this is a password that serves the purpose of restricting access to a wifi network only to those who know the key - dismissing for now the multitude of ways you can bypass this or break the encryption let's just focus on the basic principle, that is, that the network is locked using a single password that everyone who uses that network will use. On top of that if the password ever needs changed then everyone needs to know the new password. In this scenario you are only as strong as your weakest user; that is to say the person who flaunts security the most is the weakest link in your system.
According to BBC News, Police in India failed to act on hundreds of complaints of corruption over 8 years because of a forgotten password. This is an example of what can happen when access to a system is lost. While the issue of sharing passwords in error or being insecure is serious, the issue of not sharing passwords at all is equally as damaging. Take for example a System Administrator working in a school. He would have access to the primary server within the school and he would access that via a user-name and password combination. Logic would dictate as the System Administrator he would be the only one with those access details. So what happens for example if he takes a heart attack? If he never shared those details with anyone then the system would become inaccessible. These types of systems which rely heavily on security often won't have any method of resetting the password, more over what little fail safes are in place would also be secured, again the person responsible for that would likely be the System Administrator who had a heart attack.
These are valid reasons for what is known as White Hat Hacking - this is a term used for security specialists who are essentially hackers but do so legally through paid employment. These people can be hired by the School in our example and can hack the server as there is legitimate reason to access the contents. If we move away from a digital setting for a moment and consider a shop with a safe in which all the money is stored. The manager and a few others would have access to that safe via the combination. In the unlikely event that all of those people were unable to provide the combination then the contents would be lost. In this scenario you would need to employ a security specialist who can crack a safe [brute force physical attacks on the safe would not really be an option since they are designed to withstand those attacks] ultimately opening the safe and setting a new combination.
Another less extreme example would be a staff locker secured by a padlock, the member of staff quits and take with them the keys. In the event that there are no spare keys either a lock smith would be needed or a pair of bolt cutters strong enough to remove the padlock. The physical key of that padlock represents the passwords we need in order to access the systems we use.
The problem of providing a secure method of sharing passwords is one that is not easily solved. Ultimately each system for sharing those passwords that is created will invariably weaken the system as they provide another method for accessing a system you should not - why attack a system that is heavily locked down when you can attack the location of those keys and then simply open doors at your leisure.
Wild
I have wrote before of the nature of design, of how it invades our lives in every way, of how everything right down the clothes you are wearing and the food you eat has been created by design. One part of our lives where that is most ambiguous is perhaps in the food we eat. I said it was created by design and it is true, not just of processed foods and food that does not occur naturally, but of the things we don't really associate as being unnatural.
For the sake of this post I define unnatural as being anything that you could not find in the wild. When you have that definition and you start to take a closer look at the things we eat we start to realise that most of it we would never think of being wild. Even the products that come from animals, like chicken, we don't imagine being wild. The image of a wild chicken for example isn't one most people in the UK could picture, the image of chickens that we think of are those on farms, or in battery farms depending on how much you pay for it. The idea of chickens running through fields is completely alien to us, yet wild chickens do exist, not so much in the UK but in other countries and they are not a case of chickens kept for food escaping - that would be putting the cart before the horse, the chickens we eat after all are descended from chickens that were wild and were caught and kept to provide food.
Go beyond the meats we eat and enter into the realm of vegetables, something we consider wholly more organic and earthy - when was the last time you saw a wild carrot? Would you even know what a wild carrot looks like or where you would look? Before writing this post I didn't either. This whole post came from the thought of growing carrots and thinking I would need seeds then thinking where do carrot seeds come from - carrots of course but I've never seen a carrot with seeds, or even a flower from which to harvest them. The carrots we eat today are descended from wild carrots. They would not occur naturally in the wild, not in the form we eat. The common carrot today is the result of a long and arduous selective breeding process that eventually produced what we eat today.
The word 'wild' inspires visions of feral animals but we forget the fruits and vegetables and all else we eat. The truth is that there is so much that we survive on that has been designed, even the food we call organic is still the product of human intervention, it may be grown free from additives and preservatives and pesticides et al but they still wouldn't occur in nature in the form we eat so can we really call them organic?
For the sake of this post I define unnatural as being anything that you could not find in the wild. When you have that definition and you start to take a closer look at the things we eat we start to realise that most of it we would never think of being wild. Even the products that come from animals, like chicken, we don't imagine being wild. The image of a wild chicken for example isn't one most people in the UK could picture, the image of chickens that we think of are those on farms, or in battery farms depending on how much you pay for it. The idea of chickens running through fields is completely alien to us, yet wild chickens do exist, not so much in the UK but in other countries and they are not a case of chickens kept for food escaping - that would be putting the cart before the horse, the chickens we eat after all are descended from chickens that were wild and were caught and kept to provide food.
Go beyond the meats we eat and enter into the realm of vegetables, something we consider wholly more organic and earthy - when was the last time you saw a wild carrot? Would you even know what a wild carrot looks like or where you would look? Before writing this post I didn't either. This whole post came from the thought of growing carrots and thinking I would need seeds then thinking where do carrot seeds come from - carrots of course but I've never seen a carrot with seeds, or even a flower from which to harvest them. The carrots we eat today are descended from wild carrots. They would not occur naturally in the wild, not in the form we eat. The common carrot today is the result of a long and arduous selective breeding process that eventually produced what we eat today.
The word 'wild' inspires visions of feral animals but we forget the fruits and vegetables and all else we eat. The truth is that there is so much that we survive on that has been designed, even the food we call organic is still the product of human intervention, it may be grown free from additives and preservatives and pesticides et al but they still wouldn't occur in nature in the form we eat so can we really call them organic?
Failure
When I want to write, but I do not know what I want to write about, I just start writing. Even if it is complete gibberish, meaningless or a plethora of clichés mixed with stock sentences the point isn't what I am writing but the fact that I write something, anything.
I do this, because if you try to think of what to write and never put anything down in the hope that the perfect idea will come to you, then at the end of the day what you will most likely end up with is a blank page. This extends beyond writing though, into every part of our lives. If you do nothing for want of waiting to know what you want to do then you'll end up doing what you are doing - nothing. If you want to do something then you have to do just that, you have to do something.
When it comes to writing as I start to write I often think that something is wrong, or that something doesn't work, or that I would rather it take a different direction, at which point I rework what I have done. Changing things, adding more, or sometimes starting over. The point is the more you do it the more the wheels of thought turn. Doing something even if it is something that isn't worthy of your skills or your talent opens your eyes to what you want to do. Knowing exactly what you want to do is as much about knowing what you do not want to do. The more you know what you do not want to do the narrower the possibilities become until you realise what it is you do want. With writing this takes the form of abandoning various story lines and concepts that you know would never work, but in trying them out you often discover what would work better than what you tried. In Mathematics this is called trial and improvement, in life we call it trial and error, in either case the key word is trial. If you don't try then you will never succeed, yes, you may fail, but if you never try then you have already failed before you have even begun. As they say the only true failure is the failure to try.
We often look on our failures as things which we would rather forget. As things that are negative, that have no merit and no place in our lives. The truth is that the learning process no matter what it is we wish to learn, involves repetition, it involves accepting our failures and trying again. No human ever crawled across the floor as a baby, stood up and walked and never fell over. Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to read and write, these are all things that we try and fail and try again and keep trying until we get it right. We may not remember the trials we went through to master these skills, but we do not think anything less of anyone who made the same mistakes. Making mistakes is part of what makes us human. Why then do we try to hide our failures from others? Why is it when we meet people we feel embarrassment about admitting the things we did wrong? No matter who you are, no matter where you work, or play, or study, or dream, or think, or plan, or scheme, we all make mistakes at some point.
There are two types of people I do not trust instinctively, those who say they have never failed at something, and those who always smile. I don't care how happy you are in your life if you constantly smile all it tells me is that you have something to hide and you are dishonest. You can be as defensive about that as you want. I am not the only person that thinks this way either so if you are one of those people then all I have to say is you are fooling no-one but yourself. At the end of the day if you can't be yourself and be true to yourself how can you ever expect anyone to trust you to be honest to them.
I do this, because if you try to think of what to write and never put anything down in the hope that the perfect idea will come to you, then at the end of the day what you will most likely end up with is a blank page. This extends beyond writing though, into every part of our lives. If you do nothing for want of waiting to know what you want to do then you'll end up doing what you are doing - nothing. If you want to do something then you have to do just that, you have to do something.
When it comes to writing as I start to write I often think that something is wrong, or that something doesn't work, or that I would rather it take a different direction, at which point I rework what I have done. Changing things, adding more, or sometimes starting over. The point is the more you do it the more the wheels of thought turn. Doing something even if it is something that isn't worthy of your skills or your talent opens your eyes to what you want to do. Knowing exactly what you want to do is as much about knowing what you do not want to do. The more you know what you do not want to do the narrower the possibilities become until you realise what it is you do want. With writing this takes the form of abandoning various story lines and concepts that you know would never work, but in trying them out you often discover what would work better than what you tried. In Mathematics this is called trial and improvement, in life we call it trial and error, in either case the key word is trial. If you don't try then you will never succeed, yes, you may fail, but if you never try then you have already failed before you have even begun. As they say the only true failure is the failure to try.
We often look on our failures as things which we would rather forget. As things that are negative, that have no merit and no place in our lives. The truth is that the learning process no matter what it is we wish to learn, involves repetition, it involves accepting our failures and trying again. No human ever crawled across the floor as a baby, stood up and walked and never fell over. Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to read and write, these are all things that we try and fail and try again and keep trying until we get it right. We may not remember the trials we went through to master these skills, but we do not think anything less of anyone who made the same mistakes. Making mistakes is part of what makes us human. Why then do we try to hide our failures from others? Why is it when we meet people we feel embarrassment about admitting the things we did wrong? No matter who you are, no matter where you work, or play, or study, or dream, or think, or plan, or scheme, we all make mistakes at some point.
There are two types of people I do not trust instinctively, those who say they have never failed at something, and those who always smile. I don't care how happy you are in your life if you constantly smile all it tells me is that you have something to hide and you are dishonest. You can be as defensive about that as you want. I am not the only person that thinks this way either so if you are one of those people then all I have to say is you are fooling no-one but yourself. At the end of the day if you can't be yourself and be true to yourself how can you ever expect anyone to trust you to be honest to them.
Like
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked. I think most people want to be liked. It's part of growing up, we want to have friends and we want everyone to like us. As we get older though we inevitably meet people we don't like, people who no matter what we do we just do not like. It takes a little longer for us to realise that this is a two way street and that the same applies to others - namely that there will be people that do not like us. No matter what we do, they will never like us.
One of the hardest things to learn is perhaps the ability to recognise people who we should avoid. We all have first impressions of people that often grow as we see more of those people. The problem with taking first impressions as the basis for how we treat someone, is that our first impressions are often wrong. If you are in any way shy or reserved you will know from your own experience that you will find it hard to open up to people and that you will be acutely aware that the first impression you give others is not accurate. People who are shy by nature are usually not shy at all around people they know and feel comfortable with. Around these people they can be the exact opposite.
For those reasons the first impressions we experience are often judged and banked - whether good or bad we want to see more of that person before we form our conclusions. How long it takes us to realise whether our judge of character was accurate will vary - not just between you and I but between people we meet - some people show their true colours sooner than others.
It's natural to want people to like you, and it's natural to want to like others. After all we don't actively seek out conflict - unless you're a troll. Accepting that some people just aren't worth it is something that is hard, because it goes against what we want - our desire to be harmonious.
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked, now that I have grown older and wiser I don't care whether people like me or not. I treat people the way they treat me. Be nice to me and I will be nice to you. Be a cunt to me and I will be a cunt to you. Do not play games with me because I am capable of more than you could ever know. As the saying goes:
One of the hardest things to learn is perhaps the ability to recognise people who we should avoid. We all have first impressions of people that often grow as we see more of those people. The problem with taking first impressions as the basis for how we treat someone, is that our first impressions are often wrong. If you are in any way shy or reserved you will know from your own experience that you will find it hard to open up to people and that you will be acutely aware that the first impression you give others is not accurate. People who are shy by nature are usually not shy at all around people they know and feel comfortable with. Around these people they can be the exact opposite.
For those reasons the first impressions we experience are often judged and banked - whether good or bad we want to see more of that person before we form our conclusions. How long it takes us to realise whether our judge of character was accurate will vary - not just between you and I but between people we meet - some people show their true colours sooner than others.
It's natural to want people to like you, and it's natural to want to like others. After all we don't actively seek out conflict - unless you're a troll. Accepting that some people just aren't worth it is something that is hard, because it goes against what we want - our desire to be harmonious.
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked, now that I have grown older and wiser I don't care whether people like me or not. I treat people the way they treat me. Be nice to me and I will be nice to you. Be a cunt to me and I will be a cunt to you. Do not play games with me because I am capable of more than you could ever know. As the saying goes:
"It's the quiet ones you have to look out for"
1 Billion Breaths
Imagine if you will, a world where the length of our lives was predetermined by our number of breaths. That is imagine a world where every human being breathes 1 billion times, with the 1 billionth breath being their last.
If you maintained a constant rate of breathing that consisted of you taking 1 second to breathe in, 1 seconds to hold, 1 second to breathe out, that would amount to 3 seconds per breath. At that rate you would live for 3 billion seconds - or 95 years, and 1 and a half months give or take.
This of course relies on the unlikely scenario where your breathing remained constant your entire life. That's not likely to happen regardless of any degree of self control as we are not always conscious of our breathing - we're not always conscious either for that matter. When we are in an agitated state, moving about a lot, doing exercise or playing sport, or even just sleeping our breathing changes pace.
Imagine a world where we knew that we would at most live to exactly 1 billion breaths. This isn't conducive to a fixed time period. The more active we became the shorter our lives would become. If this were a reality for humans, our behaviour could dramatically change. For one neonatal style classes teaching people how to breathe would probably be taught in our schools. Having children and raising them would be one of the biggest blows to your breath allowance. Having sex would also have a big impact on how long we live - would that stop us doing it so much?
Would people shift geographically? Would you move to a climate that made it easier to breathe or one that was conducive with a relaxed state. Or would you just say fuck it all and live your life like nothing was any different and know that your days are numbered and there's nothing you can do about it?
If you maintained a constant rate of breathing that consisted of you taking 1 second to breathe in, 1 seconds to hold, 1 second to breathe out, that would amount to 3 seconds per breath. At that rate you would live for 3 billion seconds - or 95 years, and 1 and a half months give or take.
This of course relies on the unlikely scenario where your breathing remained constant your entire life. That's not likely to happen regardless of any degree of self control as we are not always conscious of our breathing - we're not always conscious either for that matter. When we are in an agitated state, moving about a lot, doing exercise or playing sport, or even just sleeping our breathing changes pace.
Imagine a world where we knew that we would at most live to exactly 1 billion breaths. This isn't conducive to a fixed time period. The more active we became the shorter our lives would become. If this were a reality for humans, our behaviour could dramatically change. For one neonatal style classes teaching people how to breathe would probably be taught in our schools. Having children and raising them would be one of the biggest blows to your breath allowance. Having sex would also have a big impact on how long we live - would that stop us doing it so much?
Would people shift geographically? Would you move to a climate that made it easier to breathe or one that was conducive with a relaxed state. Or would you just say fuck it all and live your life like nothing was any different and know that your days are numbered and there's nothing you can do about it?
11
Your mobile phone number is 11 digits long. All I need is those 11 digits to be able to speak to you, hear your voice, see you, and for you to see me. Not to mention a whole host of other forms of communication that our smart phones now open up to us.
I think about the people in my life and how much we stay in touch. I think about the impact they have had on my life and I often wonder and sometimes wish that I had met them sooner than I did. It's incredible to think that 10 years ago my life could have been so different if I had been in touch with the people I am today. All it would have taken was a phone number, their number, obviously since I knew my own, what I needed was theirs.
11 digits separated us, well if you're in the UK it would be 9 actually since all UK mobile numbers begin 07, so all that would have been needed was the other 9 digits. I think it's human nature to look back on your childhood, or your teenage years or your young adult life and think if only I knew then what I know now - that sentiment is usually connected with some deep understanding of the world we have gained or some invaluable experience or sometimes just a warning not to do something. We often think of those messages we would give our past selves as something magnanimous, the thought may not ever cross our minds that something as incredibly simple as a string of digits could completely change the course of our lives [unless you're a lottery dreamer].
I look at my phone and the numbers of the people I speak to most and it makes me smile when I think that whoever I meet in the future, wherever they are now, if they read this, their 11 digits are all that separate us. Posting mine would be the easiest way to remove that separation. I am not going to do that though because for every person that could come into my life and make it better there are hundreds that could make it worse. This isn't really aimed at anyone in particular or an effort to reach out to people it's more of a contemplation of the reality that those lyrics - "somewhere just beyond my reach there's someone reaching back for me" - once meant a lot more than they do today, our reach is far wider than ever before and that gap between yours and mine, or whoever you are reaching out for is a lot narrower than we realise.
There is however a question which allows us to dance with destiny, that is, how different would our relationships with those people be if we had not met at the exact time and place and under the circumstances that we did? Would we ever have even engaged with them?
If you really want to wank your mind then think if you ever had a text from a number you didn't recognise had a brief conversation establishing they had the wrong number and parted ways. What is the likelihood that you would text the wrong number? For one don't most people have contacts saved in their mobiles, even our old 'brick' phones had that capacity. If a future version of yourself had ever travelled through time the one number you're probably most likely to remember is your own and if you take into account the paradoxes and causality complications that arise from meeting a past version of yourself, communicating by text would probably be the safest way. I'm sure at some point you've lived somewhere and moved, whether it was into University halls of residence or whatever, had a phone number that years later you rang out of curiosity to see who had moved into your room - I know dozens of students from my halls of residence that did this, most simply hanging up when someone answered, some actually having conversations with the people who took their room after them.
The temptation to know that your past self was indeed alive would likely compel most people to try it. I will admit I would try it, I still remember my first mobile number.
Yahoo Answers and Death by Design
I've been a member of Yahoo Answers since 6th of June 2006 - I know, ominous date - I've seen the site be quite busy at times with the rate of questions being asked too much to keep up with. My regular haunt was the Programming and Design section where I was often a top contributor and still hold my place in the top 10 contributors for that section.
In the last year or so Yahoo has slowly changed the design of it's site, and in the last few months it has begun migrating each of the regional variations to the new design. The old one was green and instantly recognisable, to the point where many of you who were no doubt sent there at some point by Google can probably recall. The new design however in my opinion is horrible, and it would seem I am not alone in that opinion, to the point where the backlash from users has been quite vocal. A backlash which Yahoo has decided to ignore.
Many sites redesign themselves periodically and while sites like facebook often have outspoken critics who reject their new designs, the masses eventually "like it or lump it" - however in most of those scenarios I would argue the redesign is most rejected due to the fact it's a change, not because it's inherently bad. Yahoo answers I believe falls into the latter category.
Earlier today I had a look at the activity on Yahoo answers and found that in a 2 hour period there had been 18 questions asked in the programming and design section. Looking at the All Categories page there had been around 140 questions asked in 5 minutes across all categories on the site.
There are 23 categories devoted to Yahoo Products. There are a further 1,522 categories totalling 1,545 categories in English alone - I might have missed some, and many of them were empty when I was looking through the site.
These figures are all taken from Yahoo Answers, set to show all English questions. Looking at those figures as a whole if that rate is maintained then there's approx 1,700 questions being asked per hour in English across all categories on the site that's just over 1 question per hour per category. Restricting the view to questions from the UK only there had only been 200 questions in the preceding hour - that's 16 questions ever 5 minutes in comparison to the 140 asked across all English sites [11.4%]
As for the engagement of people answering the questions, across all English questions within the last 3 weeks there have been approximately 600 questions that have received 20 or more answers. That's approximately 30 questions per day that manage to get more than 20 responses. The same search restricted to UK only returned 100 questions in the last 3 weeks that gained 20 or more responses, approximately 5 questions per day.
For a site that had 200 million active users worldwide, with 25 million unique visitors in the US per month alone, racking up 62 million visits to the site, that's incredibly low levels of engagement, far below the 1% rule which I have mentioned on this blog before.
It beggars the question, has Yahoo killed Yahoo Answers?
Addendum:
Upon request for date and time clarifications I have gathered new data. At 15:00 on the 23rd of January, there had been:
13 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [All English]
2 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [UK only]
120 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [All English]
This extrapolates to 1,440 questions being asked per hour across all English sites.
18 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [UK only]
This would extrapolate to 216 questions per hour for the UK only however the time period and number of questions was low enough to count, there have been 137 questions in the UK in the preceding hour - approx 64% of the extrapolated figure so if that applied to the global rate too then that 1,440 would be reduced to 922
Update:
It will come as little surprise to anyone but Yahoo Answers formally shutdown on May 14th 2021 after a period of sustained decline. The writing was on the wall it seems now looking back at this post.
It Gets Better
Life has its ups and downs, and sometimes it can seem like you're being dealt more downs than up. It can seem like there's nothing on the horizon or like your life is never going to change. For some of us that's a hard thing to consider and it scares us. People do incredible things when they are scared both good and bad.
I am a survivor. There aren't many who know my whole story and I don't think there are many who ever will. What I went through, and what I did, are not things I feel comfortable sharing with the world so you'll forgive me for not going into detail here. What I do want to share with the world is hope.
At my lowest, I did not believe it was possible to meet anyone in this world who had compassion. I did not believe my future could bring anything that would make me happy. I was fixated on everything that was bad and everything that had gone wrong in my life and I had been trapped in a vortex of negativity surrounded by dark clouds.
No-one knew and I never told anyone how I felt. I survived, but for a time that's all my life was, survival, I lived for the sake of living with nothing spurring me on. I ate and I slept, day after day. My monotony was eventually broken, little by little things changed. Small glimmers of hope shone through. Fast forward through the years up to today and I look back on all I have been through and the one thing I take away from it all is this, the future is never as dark as we fear it will be.
I know where I am today, I know where I was that day and I know that I couldn't imagine being here at the time. I am glad I survived because my life did change. I had more and more ups and less downs to contend with. I have had moments since, when I have felt like there is nothing on my horizon - but to borrow from something my teenage self once wrote - "A world exists beyond the horizon, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing" - just because it may seem like there's nothing coming, doesn't mean that's the way it is.
You just have to make it through. It gets better, it really does, you've just got to hold on and believe and it will come to you. I felt alone, I felt afraid, I felt like no-one cared - but I was wrong. There were people around me who cared about me, I was just too blind to see it. When I think about the people in my life now, I am eternally grateful, and to all of them I care deeply for them. I know a few of them are having a hard time at the moment and that things may seem dark or bleak, but I believe in them, I believe they are worth so much more than they feel right now. Even the most beautiful, precious and magnificent diamonds in this world were all found in the midst of coal, surrounded by darkness and buried deep under mountains of Earth. Where you are does not define who you are and how you are treated does not define how you deserve to be treated.
I am a survivor. There aren't many who know my whole story and I don't think there are many who ever will. What I went through, and what I did, are not things I feel comfortable sharing with the world so you'll forgive me for not going into detail here. What I do want to share with the world is hope.
At my lowest, I did not believe it was possible to meet anyone in this world who had compassion. I did not believe my future could bring anything that would make me happy. I was fixated on everything that was bad and everything that had gone wrong in my life and I had been trapped in a vortex of negativity surrounded by dark clouds.
No-one knew and I never told anyone how I felt. I survived, but for a time that's all my life was, survival, I lived for the sake of living with nothing spurring me on. I ate and I slept, day after day. My monotony was eventually broken, little by little things changed. Small glimmers of hope shone through. Fast forward through the years up to today and I look back on all I have been through and the one thing I take away from it all is this, the future is never as dark as we fear it will be.
I know where I am today, I know where I was that day and I know that I couldn't imagine being here at the time. I am glad I survived because my life did change. I had more and more ups and less downs to contend with. I have had moments since, when I have felt like there is nothing on my horizon - but to borrow from something my teenage self once wrote - "A world exists beyond the horizon, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing" - just because it may seem like there's nothing coming, doesn't mean that's the way it is.
You just have to make it through. It gets better, it really does, you've just got to hold on and believe and it will come to you. I felt alone, I felt afraid, I felt like no-one cared - but I was wrong. There were people around me who cared about me, I was just too blind to see it. When I think about the people in my life now, I am eternally grateful, and to all of them I care deeply for them. I know a few of them are having a hard time at the moment and that things may seem dark or bleak, but I believe in them, I believe they are worth so much more than they feel right now. Even the most beautiful, precious and magnificent diamonds in this world were all found in the midst of coal, surrounded by darkness and buried deep under mountains of Earth. Where you are does not define who you are and how you are treated does not define how you deserve to be treated.
Smart
Smart used to be a superlative, a definitive term for something that was deemed to be clever or marked as an improvement over the subject's contemporaries. The term however has evolved into a pejorative term thanks to the wonderful world of marketing. The most prominent example of its use would probably be the term "smart phone." Originally a smart phone was a new generation of mobile phones that offered something clever, and a substantial improvement over other phones on the market. That's not what it has come to mean though. Today it is a pejorative term, it marks a distinction between phones that are deemed functional and those that are deemed inadequate.
The use of the word smart however has invaded the consumer conscious, to the point where our products for the most part are having chips stuck in them and an Operating System slapped on them to make them a "smart" device. The original distinction between what would be referred to briefly as dumb phones and what were considered smart phones was that the latter incorporated most of the functions we associated with personal computers. et strangely we have never used the term 'Smart PC' save for the literal brand by Samsung, which was again just a PC with one of the same Operating Systems slapped onto them as smart phones used. The brand didn't last long however and now almost 2 years on it has more or less been abandoned, namely because a PC is already capable of PC functions so labelling one 'Smart' when it provides nothing different, improving, or clever was a dead horse to begin with.
We are however reaching a point with mobile phones, and some would argue that we have been there for a while, where our smart phones aren't smart. Not in the original sense of the word. We have a market saturated with devices that are essentially clones of one another. Now you can argue the merits of mobile platforms all you want but one thing is clear, Android, Apple, et al under the hood are all made from the same physical hardware components. The device configurations offer a limited scope for diversity and marginal gains at best in terms of technical capability. Our mobile phone market is divided by software not hardware. As such there is no distinction anymore between the capability of these devices - the term smart, has become irrelevant, to the point where we assume any new phone coming to the market will be a smart phone we don't even bother using the term anymore and ask the real question of what specification it has and what operating system it will run.
So where does that leave smart? Well it leaves the term as one that has been disposed by the mobile phone industry, and left it to be pecked at by the vultures of the remaining manufacturers in consumer electronics to use on their new devices as it was originally intended - to mark a distinction between smart and dumb technology. Take smart watches as an example. The term here is used to distinguish devices that now incorporate much of the same functions as our mobile phones and our PCs, although nowhere near as capable and nowhere near as popular as they are still in the early adoption stage although 2014 is being eagerly anticipated by those manufacturers as the year when they became 'a thing' whether that happens remains to be seen - I don't see any real reason why it wouldn't but at the same time I don't see any real reason why it should either.
The point was that smart was once a term we used to define a step forward or a step up in our level of technology, and, while smart watches and TVs etc are making improvements over their contemporaries by incorporating much of the same hardware; our level of technological advancement is stagnating. Everything is being brought 'up to a level' where everything is expected to be a connected device, everything is expected to have an interface that can show you as much information as it can, even our processors and memory chips are decreasing in physical size and form factor to be able to fit into anything we want to stick them inside - despite all this there is nothing that is really 'new' about anything these devices can do. All we are doing is making their existing functions more conducive and compatible with the tech we use the most.
The use of the word smart however has invaded the consumer conscious, to the point where our products for the most part are having chips stuck in them and an Operating System slapped on them to make them a "smart" device. The original distinction between what would be referred to briefly as dumb phones and what were considered smart phones was that the latter incorporated most of the functions we associated with personal computers. et strangely we have never used the term 'Smart PC' save for the literal brand by Samsung, which was again just a PC with one of the same Operating Systems slapped onto them as smart phones used. The brand didn't last long however and now almost 2 years on it has more or less been abandoned, namely because a PC is already capable of PC functions so labelling one 'Smart' when it provides nothing different, improving, or clever was a dead horse to begin with.
We are however reaching a point with mobile phones, and some would argue that we have been there for a while, where our smart phones aren't smart. Not in the original sense of the word. We have a market saturated with devices that are essentially clones of one another. Now you can argue the merits of mobile platforms all you want but one thing is clear, Android, Apple, et al under the hood are all made from the same physical hardware components. The device configurations offer a limited scope for diversity and marginal gains at best in terms of technical capability. Our mobile phone market is divided by software not hardware. As such there is no distinction anymore between the capability of these devices - the term smart, has become irrelevant, to the point where we assume any new phone coming to the market will be a smart phone we don't even bother using the term anymore and ask the real question of what specification it has and what operating system it will run.
So where does that leave smart? Well it leaves the term as one that has been disposed by the mobile phone industry, and left it to be pecked at by the vultures of the remaining manufacturers in consumer electronics to use on their new devices as it was originally intended - to mark a distinction between smart and dumb technology. Take smart watches as an example. The term here is used to distinguish devices that now incorporate much of the same functions as our mobile phones and our PCs, although nowhere near as capable and nowhere near as popular as they are still in the early adoption stage although 2014 is being eagerly anticipated by those manufacturers as the year when they became 'a thing' whether that happens remains to be seen - I don't see any real reason why it wouldn't but at the same time I don't see any real reason why it should either.
The point was that smart was once a term we used to define a step forward or a step up in our level of technology, and, while smart watches and TVs etc are making improvements over their contemporaries by incorporating much of the same hardware; our level of technological advancement is stagnating. Everything is being brought 'up to a level' where everything is expected to be a connected device, everything is expected to have an interface that can show you as much information as it can, even our processors and memory chips are decreasing in physical size and form factor to be able to fit into anything we want to stick them inside - despite all this there is nothing that is really 'new' about anything these devices can do. All we are doing is making their existing functions more conducive and compatible with the tech we use the most.
This is me
You and I have never met, and all that you have, to judge who I am is this blog. The truth is I am a writer, and one thing holds true for most writers - what they write versus what the live are rarely the same thing. So in that vein this post is about me. I've tried to "write" an 'About Me' post several times, but I realise now that was the wrong thing to do. So instead of writing a post about me, this post is me.
I write of philosophy, of psychology, of behaviour, of religion, of spirituality, of my interpretation of the world, but what you read are the thoughts in my head, they are not what I say in life. The truth is I'm incredibly shy when you first meet me - even then it takes me time to open up. I have tried to rush that with people before and open up sooner than I felt comfortable doing and it didn't work out well for me. I guess the reality is that most people don't want to know your life story, that most people have one thing they want whether that be physical, emotional, or maybe just a mentality, ultimately they have one thing more than anything they are looking for and if they don't see it they walk on by.
I'm incredibly cynical at times when I write, that much is true of my real life. I often focus on the negatives and I often find it hard to 'look on the bright side' but as much as that side of me often shows, all this is based on my experience. My life hasn't been a bed of roses, and I'm not saying that as a sob story. There are few people I have confided everything to, and I regard them as my closest friends. I try to treat others with respect, and I try not to judge but I am only human. I make mistakes just like everybody else. Despite all I have been through I still have faith in people, because those that have been there for me through everything have shown me that there are people out there who are just like you. People who are kind, compassionate, caring, and try to be fair - who also have their moments when they dwell too long on the negative.
I am happy. I am happy with who I am. I have made peace with my past, something which took me a long time to do but I accept that I can't change it. I would never want to go through it again, but I wouldn't change anything, because without everything I have been through, I wouldn't be the person I am today and I wouldn't have met the people I care so much about.
I don't want to change who I am, but finding someone who feels the same, at times feels like an impossible feat. I don't know if I ever will. One thing is for sure though, if the Universe does work in the way that we receive what we project, that we can only attract what we put out there, then the chance of me finding you, Mr Right, are slim. I still have hope, but it feels like if I forever focus on the things I want and forget to live then I will waste my life. So I think it's time I stopped looking. If you are out there, you're going to have to find me, because I can't find something I'm not looking for. That sounds arrogant, and I hold my hands up, yes it is, and I make no excuses.
There is a famous quote, often attributed to Marilyn Monroe, I don't know if she actually said it but it is something I have come to live by:
“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
So I'm not going to change. This is me.
I write of philosophy, of psychology, of behaviour, of religion, of spirituality, of my interpretation of the world, but what you read are the thoughts in my head, they are not what I say in life. The truth is I'm incredibly shy when you first meet me - even then it takes me time to open up. I have tried to rush that with people before and open up sooner than I felt comfortable doing and it didn't work out well for me. I guess the reality is that most people don't want to know your life story, that most people have one thing they want whether that be physical, emotional, or maybe just a mentality, ultimately they have one thing more than anything they are looking for and if they don't see it they walk on by.
I'm incredibly cynical at times when I write, that much is true of my real life. I often focus on the negatives and I often find it hard to 'look on the bright side' but as much as that side of me often shows, all this is based on my experience. My life hasn't been a bed of roses, and I'm not saying that as a sob story. There are few people I have confided everything to, and I regard them as my closest friends. I try to treat others with respect, and I try not to judge but I am only human. I make mistakes just like everybody else. Despite all I have been through I still have faith in people, because those that have been there for me through everything have shown me that there are people out there who are just like you. People who are kind, compassionate, caring, and try to be fair - who also have their moments when they dwell too long on the negative.
I am happy. I am happy with who I am. I have made peace with my past, something which took me a long time to do but I accept that I can't change it. I would never want to go through it again, but I wouldn't change anything, because without everything I have been through, I wouldn't be the person I am today and I wouldn't have met the people I care so much about.
I don't want to change who I am, but finding someone who feels the same, at times feels like an impossible feat. I don't know if I ever will. One thing is for sure though, if the Universe does work in the way that we receive what we project, that we can only attract what we put out there, then the chance of me finding you, Mr Right, are slim. I still have hope, but it feels like if I forever focus on the things I want and forget to live then I will waste my life. So I think it's time I stopped looking. If you are out there, you're going to have to find me, because I can't find something I'm not looking for. That sounds arrogant, and I hold my hands up, yes it is, and I make no excuses.
There is a famous quote, often attributed to Marilyn Monroe, I don't know if she actually said it but it is something I have come to live by:
“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
So I'm not going to change. This is me.
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