I'm wearing nail varnish. I was wearing nail varnish in Kempo class earlier. (The reason - I'm between two Halloween parties, and I'm dressing as a schoolgirl). The sad thing is, I think it looks good on me but I can't possibly bring myself to deliberately wear it. In real life, I mean. I already have earrings.



I like my earrings.

More random encounters

I seem to have been drunk a lot recently.

Heading out on Friday to see if anyone was at the main event at our student union, Cheesy Pop, I bumped into someone I recognised, but I couldn't say why. Turns out I knew Nick from a while back when I used to drink in Opium on the Cowgate as part of our regular Friday night routine. He'd gone out with a girl called Heather for a while. Anyway, after we'd established this I kept on probing, cause for the life of me I still couldn't exactly remember him (till he brought up the Heather connection). Unfortunately for me, he also brought up the whole rest of the Heather connection. 'Cause, see, I only knew Heather at a remove. I should have stopped prying at some point, because Nick got onto the girl I knew Heather through, and, naturally enough given the history of this girl while I knew her, mentioned how he still held a grudge against and would happily beat up her 'wanker ex-boyfriend'.

Oops.

Guess who?

The Art Of The Pun

BMEzine posted this picture on their surpassing Modblog this morning:

Insect Attack!

What response could I possibly make other than 'That's just not bloody well cricket, old chap.'?
Triple British Pun Combo!!!

Incidentally

Incidentally, I wrote that last post while listening to Sisters of Mercy, which goes perfectly with both Hellblazer and my writing mood.

Blast from the Past

I think I must, subconciously, believe in fate a lot more strongly than I think I do.

Once upon a time, I read a comic book and was shocked and amazed. I was intrigued and gratified and I barely remember why. I don't recall much of it, for if I did I would surely also remember where, when and why I came across it. Regardless, one of the most powerful, haunting (and strangely detached) images that has followed me - one of those things that just latches in your brain - was of a graphic image of president Kennedy holding his brains in as he wandered through a strange bizarre empty landscape. Later on in the book I may have encountered an image of a bear with blood round its mouth and a slumped woman in white.

Unique in my experience enough to stick in my head for God knows how many years, cropping up on and off and making me wonder if I would ever see it again, this image was powerful and affecting and I didn't know why. Both although and because I did not entirely understand the story - though I'm now sure I must have read it all - I found it enormously affecting, backed up by my own incomprehension, my enthrallment at this amazing image (and at the dawning disbelief that people created books like this), and by the enormous sense of space and possibility and the incredible world this man with the head wound implied. Perhaps this sense of utterly absorbing and deeply affecting scale that latched the pictures firmly into my developing brain was in fact fuelled by my lack of grasp of the exact niceties of the book and its mythos.

Because I found it again. You have to understand that the vagueness of my recollection is almost complete. I was certainly quite young; I may even have been in primary school at the time. I have certainly never made the effort to seek it out, though I did on occasion wish quite hard I could complete my knowledge. But the fact that I had no idea where to start looking wasn't even the first obstacle.

So I had completely forgotten about it. In recent years, I have added to my literary knowledge with what I consider to be the higher class of comics - the stuff that can arguably be termed 'graphic novels'. Watchmen; V for Vendetta; Black Hole. Collections such as the Sandman and Preacher.
And now Constantine. The issue collection is incomplete and a little arbitrarily ordered, so I've been putting off buying the various collection books. I bought the first two earlier this year sometime, and was more impressed with the second book than the first, because the writer had changed and it held together better. Then today I decided on a whim to buy what I pretty much had to guess were the next three in the series: Fear and Loathing, Tainted Love, Damnation's Flame.

I also picked up the new series of Battlestar Galactica on DVD for a mate's birthday present.

On the subway home I picked one of them at random and opened it, curious as to the value of my new wares. Anyone who cannot guess what was on the first page it fell open at gets another try. And here's the thing: half forgotten as it was the memory was still very powerful. The chance was, again, incredible. See below for my views on coincidence; even on two high coincidences in the same location in two weeks. But I don't remember even feeling surprised that it had just turned up before me, and this happened only a few hours ago. It just felt like things had fallen into place. Admittedly it was not the guiding factor in my life; admittedly something like this was bound to happen and there are other similar items that I may never find in the same way. But I loved the memory-book for its incredible possibilities and the simple displaced weirdness in a literary life that had not previously known many such things, and I should have been momentarily stunned that it just rose from the depths into my life like that.

But I wasn't. It almost felt destined; like this powerful icon had simply, matter-of-factly found me again like it was always going to do. Like fate. My subconscious obviously has a different view of the world from me. And I almost feel like I have been deprived of a gratifying sensation of reunital by my brain's calm acceptance of the printed pages before me. Compared to the staggering, dizzying newness of my first experience of that book, I can't say the reality holds up. But then it never does, and it's still enjoyable for its own sake.

Regarding Hyperbole, Coincidence and Obscenity.

I swear too much. Too much for my liking, anyway. I use the nastier words (you'll have to guess which ones, as I intend to hold to my promise never to use a swearyword on this site, though I rarely venture as far as the C-word except in extreme circumstances like banging my funny-bone) as mere sprinklings in my general conversation, even at conversation round the dinner table. As a result, hyperbole is commonplace, and even when I'm not actively swearing I tend to exaggerate, because I think it's funny. Leaving aside the social implications, the main problem with this is that I, personally, feel I have a lack of emphatics to use when they are actually necessary. More refined usage of language would probably bring more effective descriptive powers and maybe better observational ability. Even if that would be a reverse of how you'd expect it to run, things like that often have a certain symbiosis. That's why I refuse to swear here, and believe me if you heard me talk you'd notice the difference, as I want to see if it makes my observations more pertinent.

I'm probably hyperbolising how much I swear. Meta-analysis messes with my head.

Anyway, my ex-girlfriend lives in Aberdeen when she's not in a small town outside Edinburgh. She says the last time she was in Glasgow was in March. Today she was visiting for a day, ferrying her mentally disabled brother to see her other brother who studies here. Heading into town, I sat on the same subway carriage as her. As part of my fatalist/materialist/eventualist beliefs, I don't consider coincidence significant, certainly not as a signifier of anything special - I figure that so much stuff happens in the world that concurrence is bound to happen eventually, and sometimes it just happens to you...

Look, what people call coincidence is just statistics. You're thinking of a tune, you walk into a store and it's playing - yes, great, now compare it to all the times that didn't happen. You encounter a mention of the same obscure book/film/programme two or three times in quick succession - great, but imagine all the other pop culture you were thinking of recently that didn't crop up and you didn't notice because it didn't do anything special and you forgot about it.

But the odds against that are huge. It's not a part of the country she hangs around in a lot, and when she does I sit on the same small subway carriage during the same short journey. And after I'd managed to stop idly fantasising about seeing her hanging round Glasgow as well (yes, I did for a while, but I was bored.) Impressively, I'm not even worried about what impression I made now. Despite the fact I wouldn't be surprised if she disapproves of the tattoo & piercing thing, or would have done at one point.

Yes, this is just a larger, slightly more stastically improbable even than most coincidences. Nevertheless it's hard not to be weirded out when something like that happens to you personally, because, after all, you're only human. Does this indicate hypocrisy? Less dedication to my theory of coincidence than I affect? Who knows. My point is, even if I were to rein in my hyperbolic exaggeratory tendencies, would I be justified in using excessive language on an event like this?

Regarding Humour

I had a thought about humour the other day. As you may or may not be aware, the whole human sense of humour is, evolutionarily, very, very weird indeed and largely defies exact explanation. Attempts at defining the reasons for humour are generally either incomplete or impenetrable. Not to claim that I have made the ultimate insight, of course, but I did come up with something that sort of explains why we find what we find funny, funny. The theory goes as follows:

Along with our unique higher reasoning functions, we developed humour as a coping mechanism for the incongruities, paradoxes, difficulties and outright bizzarreness that the new perspective allowed us to experience. A sense of humour is the by-product of this protection against the mental damage the callous viscissitudes of life would undoubtedly inflict on those intelligent enough to appreciate it.

Or in short; we have to laugh at the weirdnesses of the world to avoid being crushed by it, and finding jokes funny is a by-product of that system, scaled down. Put like that, it's not such an outlandish thought. I have to wonder what the exact mechanism for that development would be, as we progressed from flint-whittling semi apes to well, far more advanced tool users with slightly more advanced social systems (another aspect of humanity I intend to address at some point). Anyway, I like the idea that the enormous amounts of effort poured into creating comedy are merely aimed at satisfying an offshoot of our inbuilt methods for psychic survival.

About the blogs 2

There's also the fact that I like writing, just in general. Especially on the computer. Usually in the sort of diary format common to blogs. I've done it for a while on and off, but decided to start doing this blog after I lost a useful and expressive piece of writing about a girl recently, when I turned off my computer without saving, which I cannot in good conscience attempt to recreate.
In keeping with my natural talent at English and the ease with which things like spelling just gel in my head, my love of long words and abstruse vocabulary yet also of concise and cutting explanations, and my love of other people's good writing, I like to try my hand at writing myself occasionally. I also tend towards the lengthier end of the sentence spectrum.

When you factor in the problem I have with maintaining this efficient use of language in real time, during an actual conversation, this may seem slightly weird, but - have you guessed what's coming? - the difference is that it's that much easier to express yourself when you have time to think and an edit function. Even if I do tend to write in one long stream rather than in carefully considered fragments, I have more time to consider my writing than my speaking. A corollorary problem is that my high speed brain and insufficient attention span often conspire to distract me from what I was planning to say and I find myself heading down unplanned if not entirely unexpected paths of thought, but since I write, like I said, in a stream when I'm doing this sort of personal reflection, I usually find that although I didn't write what I planned to write, I end up writing what I wanted to write. It's amazing how writing something down can help clarify one's internal position to oneself.