Wankers

I’ve got a very mixed up accent—part Southern US, part francophone south Louisiana, part Irish and part English—you put it together. When anyone ever comments on it, I usually defend myself--that its not my accent that’s weird, but my vocabulary. In truth, it’s both. But, of course, being away from ‘home’ makes me more interested in claiming that the ways in which my linguistic patterns have changed, have been under my own control. And in some way, a word choice seems more under your control than the way you say your words.

I’m comfortable with wanker. It is a word that I have chosen to adopt. I use it both consciously and as a genuine expletive. It seems to be a kinder way of saying asshole, but always with an undercurrent of humour to it too. Maybe this is because it’s a ridiculous thing to accuse some one with these days. Identifying someone as “one who masturbates” is really an ineffective insult. Everyone does, and this is widely referred to on popular television.

So when this child stood brazenly and replied to Liz asking him, Whats the first thing you think of when you think of Americans? With a resounding “Wanker” I was not at all insulted. I thought, how appropriate. What an English expression, what an English expression, that I have chosen, what an expressive expression, and vapid one as well. I thought, well, that that was enough said.

Burgers

I ABSOLUTELY adore barbecue--no, I'll take it further, I love meat. I have been known to wax on and on about how to treat a piece of chicken with love and respect while you season it, before cooking, and to insist that you will only get the best flavour from an experience of mutual respect between you and your food. It was, in fact, this immense appreciation of meat that led me to give it up for six years. I realised, that perhaps its actually limiting to love something too much. Perhaps, when we have something we want too readily, we begin to take it for granted, and treat it too lightly.

Consider this: while I am no stranger to fantastically cooked food--including great cuts of meat cooked to gourmet standards--for the first two years after I gave up meat, I dreamed of Wendy's spicy chicken sandwiches. Why was that? Why had the spicy chicken sandwich become emblematic of my sacrifice, rather than a beautiful fillet steak?

I think there could be a connection between taking food for granted and the popularity of fast food. If we think that we can have a great steak when we have time, we will treat ourselves to a fast food Hamburger to tide us over. Pretty soon, with hectic lives, we may find ourselves more familiar with the Hamburger or chicken burger than we think.

I love Americans--They make life easy

"Invention is the mother of necessity." --Thorstein Veblen

How did we ever get along without the internet? Or mobile phones? Or cars for that matter? They make life so much more manageable--or so it seems. Then you hear tell of things like that the average speed of travel in cities has not changed over the past hundred years. What do all of these inventions and time saving devices do for our quality of life? Sure, we're able to work from home, and we can wiki anything, but has this made life easier? I'm not convinced.

But just couse i'm not convinced, doesn't mean that I'd rather not have them.

Trying to Control Everything

The truth is undeniable.

I once had to make up a bed for guests coming over to stay. I was very busy and trying to get things done quickly. I had one fitted bed sheet and one bed to dress with a fitted bed sheet. There was no other way. One problem: the bed was a queen sized bed, the sheet was full sized. I could say that I did not know this before spending twenty minutes wrestling with the two inanimate opponents, but that would be a denial of truth. In spite of this, I was determined to make that bed sheet do what I needed it to do—to be something that it was not—and to actually fit the bed. I was so convinced that I could control this impossible situation, that I flung myself from one side to the other of the bed, using feet and hands, lifting and bending the mattress with a surprising amount of force, for twenty full minutes.

Did the bed get made in that way? No. Did this prove a disaster? No, of course not. I was left, at the end of it all, gasping and laughing, sprawled over an unmade bed, tangled in a much abused sheet. I honestly don’t remember the outcome of this episode—how the bed got made, if I told the guests of the hilarity that had emerged from arranging a place for them to sleep. I do vividly remember the episode. And any time that I find myself trying to control an impossible situation, I can see the doomed white elastic on the edge of the beige sheet, I can feel myself staring down the folds of the mattress fabric like a cowboy with his fingers dancing around his holster, I can sense that determination, and I await the flying failure, and, of course the laughter.

Nice

Nice is one of those words that completely depends on context, isn’t it? Most people think of being nice as a good thing, but with the right intonation, and appropriately placed pauses in the cadence of the delivery, being called nice can be a huge insult. The word itself is innocuous—it hedges bets, it fails to take a stand, and sits on the fence. It is very, very, civilized.

And I say that because I’m thinking about Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I first read that small book, when I was about 19. I was in the back of the car with my family, travelling the 12 hours back from Georgia to Louisiana to see my grandparents for Christmas. As I sat cramped, seatbelt cutting into me, needing to pee, I read Freud’s thoughts about how we have to do things that are against our natural instincts, in order to live a safe and, ultimately, better life. I found a lot of truth in that.

Freud points out that it is all a balance—a balance between our instinctive drives and our need to be social creatures, ultimately leading us to living on a fence, and maybe therefore, to being nice. So, I wonder if the way that we are nice to each other—I wonder, is this as context sensitive as the word itself? Can our nice actions be just as cutting as they can be kind?

Funny

My boyfriend often tells me, “you’ve got the funniest head.” I think this is because you can read anything that I’m thinking in my face—a quality that is both a joy and at times a recipe for disaster. It is difficult for me to conceal my thoughts, because they’re legible on my face, usually before I even know what I’m thinking. So, I’m often caught out, “saying” something that other people normally would not. Is that what makes funny, funny? That someone is out on the line? I think about stand up comics and the different routes they take to be funny: They often pull people out of the audience and put them on the spot with personal questions or comments. This makes people laugh, because someone is caught out—is put out on the line, and exposed to public scrutiny. And in that public scrutiny, a single person’s thoughts or actions, bumbles and mistakes, can stand for things that everyone else has thought or done before, but wouldn’t want to admit aloud. Is being funny just a revelation of our humanity?

George Bush, I'm sorry to say

Confusion is the main sentiment I feel about George Bush, and what has happened with US federal politics over the past seven years. The shambles of the first election, 911, bombings, war, the economy the second elections, Katrina—its just all surreal, or hyper real or something other than straightforward real life.

Its predictable to think about George Bush and think about his powerful political actions. But he is just a man, isn’t he? But even thinking on his humanity, I’m utterly confused by this man—by what he stands for, by who he could possibly be, by his actions and what thoughts his actions can possibly ascribe to him. I did a project that involved going around in different countries and vox popping people with a few questions, based around the one simple one: what does it mean to be a good human being? And the resounding consensus between people everywhere seemed to be that, no matter what your definition of good, people think that other people try to be good. The question to answer here is, however, what is good to George Bush?

I don’t know that this will ever become clear, or legible. I wonder, however, what will happen in the ensuing years, to the average citizen’s reality of politics in the US? Will the dream like, surreal state of affairs continue to spread more and more thickly over our lives, or will the veil be lifted? And even more frightening may be, if the latter happens, what will we find to be revealed as reality?