"Why is it we want so badly to memorialise ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simple attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down." - The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

I'm most of the way through this book now. But a mere 100-odd pages in, this passage stuck in my head. So much so that I noted down the page number just so I could refer back to it at a later date. Why did this passage jump out at me over the previous 100 and what made it linger in my mind a good 400 pages later?

Perhaps it's the relevance of it. Atwood's work is by no means outdated. It was only published in 2001 afterall. Do we still carve our names into tree trunks? Only in love stories, I think. But the idea is the same. We do have an insatiable need to remind others of our existence. Screaming your own name from the top of a mountain is only temporary and with a blink of the eye, it's gone with the wind. Your existence will only be heard by the blades of grass, swaying trees and the rockfaces who will never replicate your cry for others to hear. Who will ever know of your feat unless you take a photo or write it down?

It can be clearly seen on Facebook and other ever-sprouting social networking mediums. Obsessively uploading photographs to tell anyone who's watching what we've seen, where we've been and what we did. Does anyone even care? Maybe a mild curiosity helps fuel the uploading but I'm sure we would carry on doing it even if there was a "dislike" button next to "like". I can't conceal that this post and the rest before it are anything but a trail back to their author. I could just as easily scribble away in a little notebook, hide it under the bed. But then who will ever know?

The question is, why do we have this urge to tell everyone everything? Who first decided to throw caution out of the window and bare all to any voyeur in the ever expanding audience? I guess at the end of the day, all we want is to be noticed. Seen most clearly in the typecast celebrity, we are judged by our actions. So when we do something that defines how we want to be perceived, we do our utmost to ensure that precise moment is immortalised. It's not enough for us to be remembered after we're gone. We want to be remembered right now. We want people to think of us and think of the image of us that we have carefully constructed.

Anyone who knows me, knows of my own fear of being forgotten, left behind. In the fast paced world we live in, people come and go. Life is like a sieve and only the larger than life get caught. It's no wonder we all try to inflate ourselves. The bigger we get, the more noticeable we become. We don't need to work quite so hard waving our hands in the air if we're already the tallest in the crowd.

Anyway, I just wanted to share the passage from Margaret Atwood's book I'm reading. I was impressed with her adeptness. There's not much more to say after she summed it all up so succinctly. I'm not sure whether we're just becoming more obsessed with self-publicity, or maybe we're trying harder because we're just not paying attention anymore. Please take the time to notice those around you. Just because we're quieter, it doesn't mean we've got less to say. Sometimes, we've just got to take the time to stop and listen.

In recent times, I've come to discover that friendship is a bit like playing the stock exchange. To get a good return, you have to take a few risks. You pay big to play big. You have to take the risk and give a bit of yourself away to turn an acquaintance into a friendship.

In the current climate, I'm sure most people are familiar with what happens when you make a bad investment. You lose everything - not only what you put in but also your gains and even a little bit of your reputation. But at the same time, a good investment can turn out great. You can find yourself surrounded by that sense of infectious achievement that everyone vies for.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a smart banker knows when something is worth investing in. They know when to splash out and when to just cut their loses. What can I say? I've never been that great with my money.

For some strange reason, I really liked walking out of the office and into the twilight after work today. With the clocks going back and the days getting shorter, it was the first of many days when I would be stepping out into the dark after my nine to five. Or rather my 8:30 to 5.

With the streetlights flickering to life and the more conscientious drivers switching from sides to headlights, it was hard to distinguish what was lighting my way. Was it natural light or the artificial kind that was pointing me towards my destination? Each time I paused at a crossing and I looked over my shoulder for passing cars, I noticed the fast approaching darkness snapping at my heels and I sped up. Twilight was coming to an end and the night overtaking.

Symbolically or otherwise, the sun was setting behind the train station and I couldn't tell if I was chasing it or it was just running away. Happily, I reached the platform before the train and in time to see the sun wink at me behind the clouds and the horizon. Glancing down the platform, I noticed for the first time what was now the brightest thing in the sky. It wasn't the sun, it wasn't even the artificial lights. Behind me all along was the moon.

Too often neglected, the moon is always behind your shoulder. We are always so busy chasing our future that we end up forgetting where we came from. It's good, in fact it's great, to have goals and aspirations. But if you forget to tend to your roots then there'll be nothing to hold you upright when you reach the sun. Too many of us are rushing so fast to get somewhere that our ever-shining, ever-patient moon gets left behind. It's only when we let the darkness descend that the moon shines brightest and reminds us of what we left in our footprints and in the shadows.

By the time I got off the train tonight, the sun had truly gone to bed and the moon reigned supreme overhead. And I stopped and took a second to remind myself of my past, my history and the people who helped me get to this stage. Tomorrow I will be chasing the sun again but I know that at the end of the day, the moon will be waiting for me to update him on what new things I added to his memory bank when he was sleeping.

I've not updated in a loooong time! Well, I'm back! Best get to it then...

So I stumbled across an article on the BBC website yesterday, the way you stumble across articles entitled Do people fall in love on trains? looking forward to some funny light reading. And it was funny, interesting at least. During my reading, one particular line jumped out at me. The article quoted a co-author of a psychology book saying:

"The interesting thing is that people believe the feeling is reciprocated, that something has been shared and that isn't always the case. Even if it is mutual it's not about romance, it's about lust. Humans are wired up to mate, not be romantic."

If a psychologist says something like that, it must be true right? After having read the article, I couldn't help wondering, what's love got to do with it? Who invented the concept of Love and why do we place so much emphasis on it? In one conversation I had with a friend, I suggested that the thing that differentiates a platonic friendship and a relationship is a sexual connection. He instantly dismissed this idea and I'm sure he was slightly shocked with my brashness, although he'd never admit it.

Love is such an abstract idea. It is subjective and unquantifiable. That question on every adolescent couples' lips 'but how much do you love me?' merely emphasises the strangeness of this concept that we place so much weight on. How do you answer that question? Is there a wrong answer? Would you dare feel the wrath unleashed upon a response of 'I love you as much as I can'? I can only guess how many relationships are ended on far more heroic and well-meant answers to the question on Love.

Is it normal for humans to love? Was it created and circulated by some calculating politician, realising that if everyone was searching for love, they'd forget about the aspects of their lives around them that were not so rosy? Maybe it was designed by some religious leader promoting monogamy and hence order in society. Or am I being far too cynical? Is love a sensation, just like pain, warmth and that itch that you can't quite reach? If so, is it innate within us? Just as organisms are drawn to pro-create through natural selection and survival of the fittest, innateness would suggest that love is the euphemism for lust. Do we love people because at the end of the day, that person is the one we want to start a family with, to carry on our genes and lineage? I think it's fair to say that we are (albeit subconsciously) attracted to those we want to mate with, crude as it sounds. Along the same lines, I suppose love is the nametag we stick on the matured form of attraction, of lust.

Please don't take this to be a bashing of love. I am a strong advocate for being in love, for showing love to others and for romance. But are we wired for love? Is love something that we were born with, separate from evolution and Darwinism? Maybe not. Social conditioning causes us to place emphasis on love. Love is just a idealised way of thinking about reproduction and I don't think there's any other way of looking at it. But it's not necessarily a bad thing. If all we've got to look forward to in our lifetimes is making a copy of ourselves, then we might as well have fun with it.

Long Live Love.

I was chatting to a friend on MSN yesterday and he asked me what >.< meant. Not a little surprised, I explained that it represented an expression of exasperation or frustration. To that he remarked that in his day, they didn't use pictorial expressions to say what they meant.

Ouch.

Does that mean our ability to communicate with words has deteriorated so much that we feel the need to add visuals to get our message across? Disappointedly, I have recently noticed how many times I inject 'emoticons' into my everyday casual written communication. Sticky out tongue to indicate I'm joking or teasing, smiley face to say I'm happy and wink for the cheeky comment.

Back in the olden days, reams and reams of letters would be painstakingly scribbled with perfect margins and identically looping letters. None of these symbols that almost look like a face with a bit of a squint and a lot of imagination. What's changed?

It would be easy to say that it means we don't know how to convey our feelings effectively with pure written word. It would be easy to say that we no longer have a command over language. But that would be to suggest that we have become dumb. It would mean that we literally can't voice our feelings with the very language that we have cultured over the centuries to express what we mean and what we want people to understand.

I have faith in the human brain.

I refuse to believe that our language skills could have gone backwards. Devolution isn't a word in the human vocabulary. To me, it's clear that written language has become far more ephemeral. We don't expect to look back at the messages we sent to someone in the past. In this disposible lifestyle we now indulge, written communication is now an extension of spoken communication.

I remember that statistic people were throwing around in the nineties: body language is x% of communication. I don't remember the exact percentage but I remember it was a pretty high proportion. Scientists analysed the crossing of arms, the flicking of hair and the rolling of eyes - the unspoken words in a conversation. So there's no reason why this body language can't be transferred into the written word.

Any fluent speaker of Instant Messenger or Text will know that you can't write a dictionary or user's guide to the style of language you'd expect to find there any more easily than you can write a convincing guide to the language you'd expect to find in the playground or outside the chippy. At the end of the day, spoken language is full of inflection and idiom. Every speaker is different and so every Instant Messenger is different. It's reasonable, therefore, to assume that some people will use more physical expression in their written language than others.

Looking at it another way, the use of these visual represenations could show a heightened understanding of this cross-over between written and spoken language. The use and comprehension of body language, facial expression and eye contact shows that we're one step closer to understanding not just what people are saying but what they mean. If you put it that way, written language is becoming more of an expression of your feelings than ever before. Poetry is thought to be closest form of human emotion. In that case, I guess we're all slowly becoming poets because these days, there's nothing stopping us from saying what we really mean.

It's Only Words

One thing I've noticed is I don't think people give enough attention to words. It seems that nothing can be conveyed without action - but in my opinion, doing without thinking can never end well. Anyone who knows me will know I will, can and have fallen in love with words. What you say and the way you say it can change everything. It can make someone stay or leave, love you or hate you, cry or smile. Entire empires have been raised (and collapsed) on mere words. So why have people disregarded the strength of it?

Take the phrase 'making love'. Once upon a time, the most physical making love got was passing a perfumed envelope of declarations into the hands of your paramour. I don't need to tell you what the connotations are now. It makes me sad to think that people have forgotten how to get a message across without throwing a chair through a window. And people have forgotten how to make people listen without wielding a trunchon.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that we shouldn't neglect the power of the spoken and written language. Afterall, our ability to interact in this way is what separates us from animals. People can move me in the ways unknown by what they say to me. Action may leave the most visible impact but our capacity to remember means that words will stay with us long after the cracks have healed. I still have hope that we will remember and regain our capacity to evoke these memories so we don't have to resort to smashing another window, picking another fight or hurting another loved one. I have hope that people will take the time to remember how it feels when someone utters those life-changing words to you and pass that feeling on.

~*~

On a completely unrelated but equally emotional topic...either my personal Alan Titchmarsh and/or his helpful gnome pulled out my tulips in my front garden! Ouch! Maybe someone will replace my favourite flowers of all time with a bunch in my vase? That's what you call WORDS speaking loudly!

Moral of the day: Never leave a man unsupervised.

The lines on the digital clock morphed into 00:01 and it was today again. She rolled over and and tried to get back to sleep but the drip-drip-drip continued to remind her of her promise to fix the tap tomorrow.

The digit flicked to 00:09 and she realised that sleep was out of reach for today so she jammed on her scruffy trainers and pulled her oversized cardigan over her goose-pimpled arms. She peeped through the curtains and the sky was still dark. It seemed like daytime was still a distant dream of tomorrow. Her feet shuffled towards the door and she grasped the door handle. Nothing. She realised her pile of mess had been shoved against the door and the door couldn't move. Mentally, she scrawled 'tidy room' on her to do list and kicked her books out of the way.

The landing was eerily quiet and she found herself holding her breath, waiting. Then she heard the deep exhalation of her housemate next door and she released her breath in time. Carefully skipping the squeaky steps and dodging the shafts of moonlight from the window, she finally made it to the front door. The chain rattled noisily as she slipped it off the safety latch and within seconds she was surrounded in starlight and midnight blue and whispering tree leaves.

Pacing the glittering pavement, she slide open her phone and scanned her contact list. Who would be awake at this hour? She clicked down, down, down. Highlighting briefly faceless names one by one. A, B, C...she skipped each one with a frown. No one she could wake up, no one who would appreciate her welcoming them into today. And she realised that although she had started her 'today', everyone else was still in yesterday. She felt buoyant. She was one step ahead of the rest. She had this glimpse into what today would bring her before everyone else. She needed to get someone else to enjoy it with her. Opening her phone up again excitedly, she knew exactly who to call. She jabbed 'call' confidently and held it to her ear.

The ring seemed to echo every direction, invading the night, breaking the peace and she guiltily slid shut the phone. She silently apologised to the lamp posts, the sleeping cars, the dandelions nodding at her ankles and carried on walking. One foot in front of the other, she started to grow bored and her brain read through everything she was meant to do tomorrow. She knew it off by heart, she'd scanned it that many times. The list grew longer by the day, always something to do tomorrow.

She needed to call her dentist, she needed to get her car MOT'd, she needed to visit her sister's new baby...well, not so new anymore..., she needed to sign up for the gym and of course that tap. She wasn't worried though. There's always tomorrow.

And as she counted the tasks on her fingers, she skipped off the high pavement edge into the road. Timed perfectly, another person enjoying today, rounded the corner in his 4x4. As they met, both their minds were thinking about tomorrow. For that split-second, they were both simultaneously isolated in their own futures, one step in front of everyone else.

For her, today only lasted a few minutes. For her, tomorrow will always be tomorrow. For her, tomorrow never comes.




My attempt at fiction!! I don't normally do fiction...as you can probably tell! I know serious writers of fiction are very careful to plan and structure their stories before writing them but I just wrote what came to me so it probably doesn't read well! I thought I'd give it a go anyway :) This theme came to me the other night so...there we go!

Oh yeah, moral of the story - don't leave things to tomorrow. If it's worth doing, do it now! It might not end as dramatically as it did for "Her" but you never know if the moment might pass and you wish you told that person how you felt, you wish you sorted things out with an old friend, you wish you helped your mum move that shelf like you promised.