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so take my hands and come with me, we will change reality

So much has happened in May that I haven’t the heart or the strength to write about it all. Most of it involves people and situations that I couldn’t possibly write about here without sending my internal censor into overdrive. I’m forced to reconsider my usual approach to life: if I can’t write with honesty about the things happening to me, what is the point of this blog at all?

Family, a wedding, new family members, happy cousinhood, drama, drunkenness and happiness. That’s what May has been all about :)

Yes, I can see that I make my slacking off at work conspicuous by the absence of any work stories. One week of work now, and then New Zealand beckons!

you take what is yours and I’ll take mine

One of the many gut-wrenching, innocence-shattering things about growing up is that you lose your belief in the infallibility of people.

You begin to see people for the frail, inconstant, withering creatures they really are and it occurs to you that maybe that’s why it’s such an effort to love someone. Inevitably, you find that fewer and fewer people are worthy of real, soul-twisting adoration.

So let me keep my superheroes, let me have my wizards and witches, magic and faerie, because I need somewhere to rest my world-weary heart.

the tragic heroine act

I feel tragic today. I’ve been sighing, and looking wistful and pensive all morning, and Adam Levine’s dulcet tones are not helping.

eek

Reading an article in The New Yorker some years ago, I came across this definition of sophistication:

A sophisticated person is “knowing, a trifle world-weary, prone to self-consciousness and irony, scornful of conventional wisdom or morality, resistant to enthusiasm or wholehearted commitment of any kind, and incapable of being shocked.”

I was appalled then, and I’m still appalled now. I’d much rather be considered unsophisticated than be any of those things. It occurred to me recently though, when my boss asked me about writing a team blog, that most intelligent people still aim to project themselves as sophisticated in precisely the way outlined above. I told him I’d be happy to blog, but I gave him fair warning that I would probably not be witty, that I couldn’t write if I had to take a tone that mixed mockery, self-referential irony and flippancy.

I’ve got to admit, the more I come across people who exhibit the qualities on that list in the attempt to portray themselves as sophisticated and possessed of a superior understanding of the world and its vagaries, the more I find myself unable to muster the energy for social interaction. I wonder, when did we become a world where earnestness, unchecked enthusiasm and wonder were grounds for mockery?

Perhaps, if our generation was the one whose clapping hands were needed to bring Peter Pan back to life, there would be no miracle.

Also, just because this question occurred to me last night and I can’t for the life of me think why they would do it: why do football players take their shirts off when they’re happy? Not that I’m complaining one bit. But it just seems a bit odd that that’s the first thing they’d do.