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.

Strangeness and charm

[If you haven't listened to the title song by Florence and the Machine, do! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFpKwQBkJqQ]

There could be nobody more dysfunctional about romance than I. No, really.

For someone who reads a lot of literature steeped in the culture of sentimentality, romance and the marriage plot, I’m astonishingly awkward when it comes to the mundane business of real people. If there was a list of what not to do, it would probably be a description of my exact behaviour in any situation approaching the romantic. Ugh, even the word ‘romantic’ makes me break into a cold sweat.

you’ve got to soldier on

Solitude may just be my natural state.

A man who is ‘a university in himself to me’. Yes, that’s what I want. Someone who makes apathy and silence impossible.

hiatus.

There seems to be nothing to say here except awful, self-pitying trash and I’m tired of seeing my idiocy splashed out on the Internet. Yes, yes, I was a champion of confessional blogging; waxed lyrical about its therapeutic effects, and quite unashamedly wrote my heart out here, but I think I’ve finally outgrown that need – or have I? Isn’t this pandering to the same adolescent desire to be heard? Either way, I’m sick of whining about my ordinary/boring/unattractive/whateverthefuck life.

So, until I have something half-intelligent to say, or something that really ought to be heard, something I am not going to be ashamed of having felt the next day – I am going away.