I had the “pleasure,” yesterday, of watching the TV programme, 10 Years Younger, in which two ladies in their seventies were given a so-called “make-over,” in order to make them look… um… 10 years younger. Basically, the programme makers succeeded in doing so (obviously) – in fact, said Bus Pass Holders were delighted to have approx. 20 years knocked off their apparent age. But…

I don’t even want to talk about the lady who opted for the plastic surgery route; resulting in indeed looking (by some definition) “younger,” but being so nipped, tucked, peeled, injected and what-have-you that she ended up looking like her skin was about to fall off and she was in constant pain.

I do, however, want to talk about the other lady, who chose a “treatment” involving the overhauling of her make-up, hairstyle and fashion sense – oh, and a little bit of “non-invasive” laser treatment to smooth out her old lady wrinkles. Upon completion of said “treatment,” Lady No.2 also appeared approx. two decades younger… but at what price?! Prior to the overhauling, she had a Little Old Lady Perm, Little Old Lady Specs and wore drab, shapeless Little Old Lady Clothes. But she had sparkly eyes, a warm smile and a voice you could listen to for hours, reminiscing about Way Back When. Thankfully she kept the voice, but she ended up looking like a fifty-something Human Resources Manager! “Younger” indeed, but losing her softness, her friendliness, and becoming incorrigibly, cloningly fashionable!

Fashionable, I tell you!

Why are we so obsessed with being fashionable, sexy and looking youthful?

Why, goddammit!

Okay, there is obviously a value in helping people to feel good about themselves, but I can’t help it… if she was my nan, I would feel intimidated!

I would feel uncomfortable in her presence!

It’s all about, make yourself feel good by looking good…

But what about, make yourself feel good despite how you look…?

Well I suppose that wouldn’t make such good TV…

:-/

What a difference (as they say) a day makes!

Life, for yours truly, has been a little, shall we say, “complicated” of late – as I have touched upon in my last piece (re redundancy and related gubbins). As I was walking home from dropping off (in a manner of speaking) my daughter and her mum at playgroup, however, it occurred to me what a beautiful, bright, crisp autumnal day it was.

And so I was inspired to take this pic…

And all (as they say) is well with the world!

I haven’t blogged for a while. As you might have noticed. I thought it was about time I did…

It really has been a while!

Things have changed quite a bit since I last blogged. For me, that is – the world has pretty much stayed the same. I was made redundant. My daughter is on the brink of running. And speaking of “running,” I am working on getting my writing career “up and…” – erm, running, that is. I have decided, as far as office-work is concerned, as far as spending my days doing boring old accountancy-type-stuff is concerned… that… that’s that! Well, we shall see how it goes, but I’m feeling positive about it all at the moment. I have created a decent-looking Writing CV, during the process of which I realised I have done more than I thought I had done (write-ingly speaking), I’m getting myself registered on freelancer websites and what-have-you, and I am pretty much ready to start bidding for jobs…

And I can hardly start putting myself out there as “A Writer” without resuming my frequent bloggery, can I?

So consider this my Getting Back to Blogging piece!

Or my Taking the First Steps Into Properwritersville piece!

Or something.

Just walk through or get out of the way! What’s so difficult about that?!

Grrr…

Today’s paper reports that, in a worst case scenario, 65000 people might die in the UK of Swine Flu. This is bad. Undeniably. I would, however, like to see some comparative statistics…

How many people die in the UK each year from “normal” (if there is such a thing) Flu?

How many people die in the UK each year on the roads?

And so on.

It may be a storm in a teacup. It may be the media exploiting our fears to sell their newspapers etc… but…

What angers me about this sort of thing is that the spreading of infectious diseases could be reduced (probably significantly) with a change of attitude. Let’s not beat around the bush… if “we” in the West were less concerned about working hard and making money, then fewer people would die. Who can deny it? Even without considering the serious health detriments of stress, and the exploitation of the weak by large corporations, we simply don’t have our priorities right as far as the so-called “work-life balance” is concerned. I am personally seeing, and it seems to be an emerging pattern on a wider scale, tougher sickness policies in companies, along the lines of “Three Strike and You’re Out” and suchlike – where “Out” is thankfully not as harsh as “Fired,” but rather “On Statutory Sick Pay” (and if one has a look at what SSP is in the UK, “paltry” is a word which comes to mind). Even aside from official policy, however, how often do we see these stories, in our manipulative media, about how many people are “pulling sickies,” the damage this does to “our economy,” and so on? Presuming there is a core of truth in these tales (and I suppose there must be some truth), does anyone stop to ask why so many people are (allegedly) “pulling sickies”? And what about the cost to the population’s health (and by extension, inevitably, to “the economy”) of stress and overwork and so on? All this leads to a pervading unhealthy attitude towards ill health and what to do about it…

“One must struggle on!”

“I’ll battle through!”

…and so on.

…with the nation’s workforce feeling (or being made to feel) guilty for having any time off for any reason. Endless justification and forms to fill in and “back to work interviews” and the like. An utter lack of trust for people to tell the truth and have as much time off as is needed to recover from whatever ails them… which, by the way, may not be physical, but may be equally or more debilitating than a bout of Swine Flu or whatever (how pathetic is 3 days off for “compassionate leave”?). Particularly in the case of infectious diseases (such as Swine Flu), doesn’t it make more economic sense to actively encourage (through policy and through a more general change in attitude) people to go home and stay home if they have an illness that they may spread around a company, thus causing more people to have to take time off, and so on? I’m speaking in economic terms here, because this is the kind of language Western Capitalist Corporations and the servants thereof understand, but I personally happen to believe “we” have our priorities utterly arse-over-tit, and that economic factors shouldn’t override all else… far from it… but still… change the world one step at a time and all that.

One last point I want to mention is that, being as I am now a dad (and have been for one year and one day, as of today, the 17th of July 2009), although I was concerned about such things as the above previous to my dadhood, my concern for such has increased several fold, and this kind of issue is much more personal and emotional to me now. I want to protect my child and my family. I want to protect our present and our future. Reconciling my “responsibilities” and my beliefs/principles was always a tricky tightrope to walk… that tightrope has now got a whole lot thinner and more wobbly! I am working on improving my tightrope-walking skills day-by-day…

Shape yoghurts now have a “Hunger Control Formula” – which means you “stay full for longer.” And of course, since they have used the word “formula,” this gives their claim the respectability of science, so it must be true.

Are we really to be taken in by such transparent means of getting us to buy their products?!

Apparently, yes…

In the so-called “Xeelee Sequence” of the science fiction author, Stephen Baxter, we meet alien races who are known less by their physical forms than by their technological artefacts. Bearing in mind that I personally still have a few books to go before I have completed the reading of the Xeelee Sequence, so far I have personally had the pleasure of being introduced to…

The Qax: an alien race who subjugate humanity, who are known by their ships (being the adapted physical bodies of the whale-like Spline, who swim through the oceans of intergalactic space) and their actions (the aforementioned subjugation, etc). Very few humans come into contact with or even know the form that individuals of the Qax race take (which happens to be a consciousness distributed through cells of turbulence in the liquid water oceans (or separated portions thereof) in which they dwell).

The Xeelee themselves: the god-like super-race who “own the universe”… whose individual forms (I suspect) never become known to Baxter’s fictional humanity or indeed to the readers of his works… over whose discarded technological artefacts genocidal wars are fought.

And this has made me wonder whether us humans (in the real, factual world) will, at some point (inevitably?), be superseded by our technology? I am speaking not (necessarily) about some Terminator- or Matrix-like scenario, where humans are (virtually) wiped out by the machines we created, but rather… It could probably already be said that, if we are being observed from afar by an alien race of a roughly equivalent level of technology to ours, they are probably “getting to know us” not by our individual forms, but by our far more significant and indeed relevant cultural, social, artistic and technological artefacts. What does it matter what shape our physical form takes? Also, how much more difficult would such a thing be to discern or calculate, at a distance of (probably) tens or hundreds of light years, than the aforementioned artefacts, particularly the technological, which leave a far more measurable impact upon our environment?

Of course, get closer to planet Earth, and you see that we are not our buildings, our vehicles, our satellites, our radio waves, our Information Superhighway, etc, etc, etc (or are we?)… upon physically landing upon our world, an alien race may actually be surprised to discover who we are…

But that aside… what about the future? What will we (“we”) become? Will our physical forms (like those of the Qax or the Xeelee) become (relatively) insignificant? When we have downloaded our souls into computers, when we exist not in a physical space but at a URL of a future version of the Internet, what becomes of the individual? Will the physical walls of the “I” collapse into incoherence, as our consciousness spreads further and wider amongst the nodes of an Information Universe?

A chilling thought… or…

Liberating???

…is all it takes…

…for the crowds to clear…

…for the hoards of commuters to vacate the platform…

…to be left standing, to breathe…

…to turn and look back down the track from whence I came…

…and then to turn back, to resume my journey…

…to stroll, to amble, to mooch…

…back up the platform…

…up the escalator…

…through the ticket barrier…

…and onwards, forwards and beyond…

I think these are the keys to happiness. Well, two of the keys. By which I mean to say that there may be millions of “keys to happiness” (or perhaps just a handful), of all different shapes and sizes, of which “Imperfection” and “Self-Reliance” are two of the most… erm… substantial ones. Or the biggest. Or the ones most likely to open “The Door of Happiness.” Or something. Well anyway, you get the gist (hopefully). So…

Imperfection… specifically the acceptance of. The saying on my desktop calendar t’other day was something like, Seek perfection in everything you do. To which I say, Nay! Nay! And thrice nay! Too much pressure! What’s the point? Surely life should be about prioritising those things which are worth “putting your all” into and those which aren’t? Which is, of course, different for each individual human being on the planet. If I, for example, “seek perfection” in the arrangement of my paperclips, if I take the time to make my paperclip collection the greatest, tidiest, most well-organised paperclip collection in the world, what have I gained? And furthermore, what more worthy parts of my life have suffered from my spending so much time on paperclips? So no! Do not seek perfection! Seek imperfection! Accept imperfection! Accept that to be a happy, well-rounded individual, imperfection is inevitable and indeed necessary!

Self-reliance… I wrote the first part of this blog entry on my mobile phone, which I then copied onto a computer, upon completion of which I will post onto my blog on the Internet. I take pics of my little one (and other things) on my mobile phone, which I upload to Facebook. I communicate with my bro, my gf and others via email, text and things. I watch TV and DVDs and play on my PlayStation (not much these days, but still occasionally). I catch a train to and from work five days a week. I work 35 hours a week at an office. Etc. Etc. And etc. So you see, a pretty big proportion of my life involves the reliance on external agents. Agents external to myself. Technology which I have little or no knowledge of the internal workings of, vast and complex social and economic systems, my employer, and so on. This does, on occasion, trouble me. How much real and direct control do I have over my life? What would I do if these agents broke down or their structures changed to an unacceptable degree? To what extent would I be able to “get by” in life, to be happy, to “provide for my family” and so on, if I had to rely on my own inner resources and skills and so on, outside the context of these agents? And furthermore, even without the breakdown or significant changes of these agents, how easy would it be for me, if I so choose, to live a more self-reliant lifestyle? I feel that increased self-reliance would lead to increased happiness. On this I shall therefore “think on”…