Assorted Notes

SUNDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2013

Appearance is a nasty business. On your own, in the privacy of your own rooms, you are near perfect. You’re not too fat, you’re not too poor, you’re not too stupid or too boring.

And then you realize you need milk.

The moment you appear in public, you realise you’re fat – compared to the slender person who passes you on the sidewalk. You realise you are actually quite unattractive, compared to the much more attractive person standing next to you at the traffic light. You realise you are actually quite broke, compared to the amount and variety of groceries the person behind you in the queue at the supermarket has in their trolley.

WEDNESDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2013

1. Is it not strange that, as adults, we are almost by default under the impression that we are not free to do what we want. We have to make ourselves valuable in order to justify our existence. We hope someone is so gracious to give us work as soon as we finish school, or after we have undergone some training to make ourselves more valuable. We hope somebody sees what we can do for them and are willing to pay us for the value we can deliver so that we can survive. Freedom, we’ve been told time and again from childhood, is like a private beach: a privilege reserved for the wealthy few.

2. You want to be a good person; you want to support your fellow travellers through life in their struggles. At the same time you want to detach; you want to free yourself from the mess that society is at times.

MONDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2013

Over the past couple of weeks I discovered I am suffering from some kind of disturbance. I considered possible causes: money … my approaching holiday … my plane ticket, and so on. I think maybe it’s not about money. I think maybe it’s appearance.

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MONDAY, 21 JANUARY 2013

Yesterday morning my Smashwords account indicated that I had sold two copies of A shorter version of a longer book (which I had just made available a few hours previously) overnight. By last night, though, the sales appeared to have been the result of a “fraudulent payment method”. What does this mean? A criminal tried to purchase an obscure collection of essays with a stolen credit card? It’s either an interesting comment on my description of the book, or it says something about the criminal.

I did make use of the opportunity to remind myself of a few things:

1. Some people who are going to buy your book are not going to like what they read, and they will attempt to recover their money from the place where they had bought it.

2. Some buyers of your book will not like what you wrote or how you wrote it, or they will be alarmed to see what your opinions are on certain matters, and immediately seek an outlet for their revulsion, which they usually find by leaving mean but what they regard as honest comments on a public forum so that other potential buyers can see what they think of your book (or how little they think of it).

3. Some people will buy your book thinking it would be amusing, then after reading a few pages realise it is indeed not amusing at all – or not enough for their taste or expectation – and then be upset that they have wasted their money.

There, a few thoughts for those who might be considering making a living with words, or any other method of conveying thoughts or opinions to the population outside his or her comfort zone. It is probably the price one has to be prepared to pay if you are not satisfied with merely capturing your thoughts or opinions, but if you actually go so far as to make available what you have written for other people to purchase and read.

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SATURDAY, 5 JANUARY 2013

I usually stand in the front row of the choir when a lament is being sung about how time flies. One year … five years … a decade! Twenty years … As you’re standing there in shock, wondering what you have done and what you still wanted to do, you see the images of ten and twenty years ago in your mind’s eye – clear as crystal, as if it was yesterday.

It is therefore sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the actual numbers:

5 years: almost 2,000 days and nights

10 years: more than 3,500 days and nights

20 years: more than 7,000 days and nights; more than 7,000 times you ate breakfast, more than 7,000 dinners; more than 20,000 trips to the loo; if you worked full-time for a 20-year period, that means perhaps as much as 5,000 days … more than 5,000 times stuck in traffic (maybe twice as much) … thousands of times you talked to people you really wanted to avoid … maybe more than a thousand barbeques in the backyard … maybe as many as 10,000 programs watched on TV, or even more.

Time doesn’t really fly.

In fact, if you look at it closely, over five or ten or twenty years, you have thousands of opportunities to do good, to fix what is wrong or what you have done wrong, and to produce something or to help create something that will eventually have value to other people.

Every day you get a chance to enjoy a little something of life, and every day you get a chance to mean something to someone else – someone who may remember you long after you have enjoyed the last of more than 25,000 breakfasts.

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