Every hour hurts, the last one kills.

I have never really been all that fond of holidays; for me the holidays are just like any other day. Yes, you have much more free time to spend doing what you want, but usually by the end you are bored out of your mind and just want to do something, anything.

These holidays however, have been particularly bad for me. A couple weeks before Christmas I had finally reached that point where I had done enough reading and research: now it was time to actually write the thesis. Unfortunately life does not like me that much, and so decided to throw some bricks at me. Life usually throws bricks, but people usually get pretty good at dodging and catching them, and sometimes even are able to throw some back. However, sometimes too many are thrown, and once the first one hits you in the head it gets very hard to get back on balance to get to dodging them again. This is how it felt for me.

I finally start writing thesis, get the introduction down, and write most of the first chapter. Then some idiot, lets call him Mr. R, decides he wants my father’s business to make him 22 doll houses to sell through a toy company. To let you know the size of these evil houses: they contained 4 rooms, 2 top and 2 bottom, each was meant to be able to house Barbie both standing and lying down. So they were not small things! He gives us a week, 5 working days, since that is how long until his deadline. In which time we had to cut build and spray paint these houses. Firstly the wood arrives late. We now only have 4 days, and the cutting with the laser cutter will take 2 days alone, if we cut day and night, which we did end up doing. The parents also want to head up to Durban, which they did that Friday, so the last day of work we were alone to finish, as well.

We then notice on Wednesday that our dog is so ill that he can no longer stand. He had been ill for a long time before that with arthritis in the back legs so we knew his days were numbered. That Friday we do manage to finish, sticking the last bits on and putting the dollhouses into boxes just before Mr. R would arrive to fetch them. We give him the final printed invoice, which he suddenly thinks is wrong and he decides to haggle. I nearly strangled the bastard. The one important point on the invoice was a deposit he had to pay on delivery; which if we did not have we could not pay worker wages and also have the money to survive the holidays. He brings this late, and then also only brings three quarters of the amount he was meant to bring. This means that we were now living alone without the parents and having to watch every cent that we spent, or having to starve.

His arriving late meant that we were in a bit of a struggle with the day. Since it was now late in the day, and we were worried the vet was about to close. So we jumped in the car, raced to the vet and asked how much longer he would still be open. We had about 20mins. So we rushed to the house, raced back to the vet with the incapacitated dog, to wait in queue to have him put down. It was such a rush that we did not even have time to think about it and say goodbye to the poor dog.

Anyhow, to get to some kind of point: People do not realize that they should plan things ahead. Mr. R. did not think ahead, he should have started this project much earlier so that we did not have to rush, and do a shoddy-ish job on his project. It seems that he had this idea in his head and wanted to have it done for Christmas, and then Christmas suddenly was near and he had to rush to get things done. But, by doing this, he put many other people in trouble, and caused them problems. So the moral here is that people should do more planning so that everything does not have to happen in a rush.

Jon

Lovely platitudes

One of the things that I find quite interesting is thinking back on sentences that I have said in the past. Especially the weird and completely wrong and horrible ones. Doing philosophy at university has helped me a lot in being able to analyze them and say how completely rubbish they are. Giving myself good reason not to say them again. One of these sentences that has peaked my interest over and over again has to be a semi-common one that hopefully people will recognize. This is the typical love platitude of: "honey, of course I don't want to change you, you are great, perfect even, the way you are!". This all done on one of those special quiet nights when looking lovingly into each others eyes. Of course, she replies back with more or less the same thing.

I know many others than me know that this is a rubbish statement (sometimes it seems that everybody but me realized it was rubbish straight away), but if I ask for a show of hands who has done this I would not be surprised to see most people have. I definitely have unfortunately. Worse still, at the time I meant it completely. But then again, back then I did not think very much. Reading philosophy, especially the post modern philosophy, that I really struggle with, has actually given me terminology to be able to explain myself and make sense of even a sentence like this. Since, well I would find it pretty hard to imagine someone, anyone, not wanting to change the person you are going out with. I do not mean completely change, but little things, smooth the rough edges if you like. I would even go so far as to say something cute, like saying that even the most hard-hearted thug would like to change their other half to love them more.

As Jeff Foxwothy (I think it was him and that that is how you spell his name) from the Blue Collar Comedy Festival explains in his one section. Is that he imagines himself being constantly and slowly changed by his wife, even imagining his wife calling her mother to explain how well the changing is going. Something else interesting is that people do want to change as well. I would go so far as to say that the couple changes themselves constantly to suit the other, and if they get to a point where both refuse to change themselves anymore is actually where the couple splits up. Basically that it is the point where the individuals decide (Subconscously) that changing themselves any more would mean that they are not themselves anymore, so they have to leave to maintain their identities.

By changing I also do not mean the complete and sudden change. That is why I brought in the thing about even only changing how much the person loves you. You want the person to be intrinsically the same person, because well, that is the person you decided to go out with and like, maybe even love in the first place. The good post-modern philosophy word for this is iterability. It means that things are repeated, but that they never stay exactly the same, yet there is always enough to recognize something as that something. Take for instance writing, and even typing. I can easily say that I have written the letter "t" countless different ways, and that each time I can still recognize it as a "t". The same with typing, and one can even do this themselves, type a word, and then change the font. No two fonts are exactly the same, but in each font one can still recognize the word written (and I do not include the different language or symbol fonts).

The same thing is true about people. They age, they get haircuts, dye their hair, change clothes even. Each time they are different, yet enough stays the same that one can recognize them. I would say the same is true about relationships. You want to change the other person, but not so much that they cease to remain to be that person.

Jon

What men, or is it women, want?

Well this is something that happens every now and then. Although it is usually in a bar when everyone present is either drunk or well on the way to being drunk. One of the women at the table turns around suddenly, sloshing half her drink over the table and the people present at the table. She then glares at all the men present. After glaring a while she says: “You know, I hate all men. Why? Because they expect us to be thin and skinny like the girls in fashion magazines. Men are all just rubbish, since there is no possible way for normal women to look like that!”

There is a big problem here. Most men do not read fashion magazines. The only men that do are the ones who are fashion designers, and there is a high chance that they do not really care for women physically. Fashion magazines are normally written for fashion conscious women to ogle over the pretty and often petty new fashions for next spring autumn or which ever reason. This I assume is so that they can figure out what they should wear next. I admit that I am mostly guessing since I personally really do not know much about fashion or women’s magazines.

The same is true about Barbie dolls (by Barbie dolls here I just mean all dolls that little girls play with, not really saying anything about the Barbie product itself) since those dolls are some kind of “ideal” person. This is not a person that exists, and for a good reason, there is the claim that if a woman were really the shape of a Barbie doll she would be missing half her internal organs, and she would have back problems from her oversized breasts. But here again, this is something that most men, or in this case boys play with, or care about.

So in these cases how can a woman, any women claim that any man causes them to try and live up to these stereotypes? They cannot, it is mean and rude, and completely rubbish for them to do so! If women actually want to know what shape and size they have to be for men to appreciate them then they are definitely looking in the wrong place if what they look at is a fashion magazine. Since because hardly any men look at those they generally do not know what the women in them look like, and it is therefore definitely not the type of women they appreciate.

Where a women who is worried about her shape should be looking is rather at men’s magazines that feature women in them. Something like a For Him Magazine, maybe even a car magazine with a centerfold picture of a bikini clad women washing a car. Actually, even better, pron magazines. If a woman wants to see what shape of women men like then a pron magazine is definitely the perfect place to look. Men look at these magazines sometimes; men appreciate and like the looks of women in these magazines. Even better for women, is that the women in pron magazines are not skinny, in fact they are good and shapely. The breasts are usually a touch big, but not all men like big breasts. So if you are a girl and can handle the nakedness of women in pron magazines then you should definitely take a look at one of these before deciding if the shape you are is appealing to men or not. Trust me on this, most men will agree, curves are much better than ribs showing through skin.

Jon

Morning Confusion

Wake up, switch off cell phone alarm. Yawn. Stand up, rub eyes. Yawn. Scratch that place that always itches just after waking up, on your lower back, just above the right butt-cheek. Yawn. Stroll around with one hand scratching belly the other rubbing eyes some more while looking for clothes. Pick random clothes, head to shower. Yawn. Turn hot water on, undress, get in… Clean head, clean hair, clean arms, legs, stand under hot water a while longer, just because it is hot. Taps off, get out, take towel, dry. Brush teeth, dress, deodorant. Time to make coffee, make coffee, sip coffee, finally wake up. Wait! What the hell deodorant did I put on?

I do not know whether it is something about being a man, or what manufactures think men want to think about their customers, but the names of men’s deodorants do not make sense. The can of deodorant in my bathroom cupboard is called shield men: cool. Is cool a fragrance? To think I thought it was a temperature, perhaps an attitude, although that is just slang. It is not just this deodorant, there are some interesting ones. The axe range of deodorants is a good example of what I mean; here are some names of their deodorants from the Wikipedia article on Axe: Dimension, Apollo, Dark Temptation, Gravity, and Phoenix. Now, are any of these a fragrance? I think the best one I ever saw was a deodorant called shower fresh, but why the hell would I want to put that on? Since it is usually just after showering that I put a deodorant on, and I smell shower fresh already, how can I not? I just showered.

Now on the other hand, for women you can get some much simpler fragrance names. It’s pretty great, women smelling like jasmine or peaches, maybe vanilla or caramel. Something simple and nice that is easily identifiable. Why can it not be the same for men? I personally would not want to smell like peaches or vanilla too much; since I admit that some things do smell feminine, and I would rather sniff at a girl to smell those than at myself. Which reminds me of interesting incident, I was with a friend who was shopping and went to the fragrance section and since she smelled the women’s fragrances I thought I might as well do that too. Unfortunately the first one that I tried to open I mistook a pull off for a twist off and took the whole top off and spilt a good bit of it all over my hands. I smelt like caramel all day long. Why did I not choose the jasmine one? Caramel just ends up smelling too sweet like pure sugar.

Back to the point. How about they make a fragrance for men like cinnamon, or pinewood, or some herb like rosemary or thyme (although I did find an herbal deodorant once that said it was mainly thyme and it was fairly nice in my opinion). Those are smells that I like enough to smell, that I would like to smell like. I would even like to smell like a good Irish stew, but that is a bit much. I do not need anything so mucho that has a name that has no connection to smell that I can think of. It would even be good if they gave a little description somewhere that said what it smelled like Maybe I am just weird, and I do accept that, but surely there is someone else out there that finds deodorant’s names confusing?

Jon

Cigarette Karma

Well, I am a smoker. I am not exactly all that proud of smoking, I know I am addicted and should quit. However, I do enjoy being able to sit back or stand around in the garden and have a cigarette. It really does calm me down and give me time to think, even though it does not make problems disappear. Yet it does not need to, just as a means of being able to stand back for a bit, it is useful.

However this is not the main point, it is just an introduction. I have noticed that there are different types of smokers like there are different types of people. You have your casual smokers and hardcore smokers, there are even those “once in a blue moon, really needs a smoke badly before he throttles someone” smokers. There are also different attitudes to handing out cigarettes. I have reduced these down to two fairly wide groups.

I find this interesting. The first group I call the debt-lenders. These are the ones that only give away cigarettes to people they know they can claim back from. They will also definitely claim the cigarettes back. I am not sure if any go so far as keeping a little debtors book with all the names and amounts of cigarettes they have given out, but I would not put it past some of them. I do have a few friends like this. However, at the same time they do not really care too much about giving back “bumbed” cigarettes unless forced to.

The other group I call the ones who believe in cigarette karma. These I think believe that the cigarettes will come back eventually, even if it is not from the same person and therefore hand out cigarettes fairly freely. You do a good turn and something good will come back. I would even go so far as to say that some of these believe in Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which basically states that one should act in such a way that they wish their actions to become a universal law. In other words I do not harm others so no one should harm others. In terms of cigarettes this means that one believes that by handing out cigarettes everyone should hand out cigarettes and therefore your cigarettes will always come back.

Yep, I know this post is fairly pointless, but hopefully it will be interesting for some non-smokers. Might even be interesting for smokers though, but I think most smokers have noticed smoking habits already.

Jon