How I spent my afternoon.

I feel really sorry for the poor bastards who work for big corporations, you know the type: banks, utility providers etc. When us folk on the 'other side' call in pissed off because we have been billed £450 too much for a bit of electric or our internet connection promises it is indeed 'connected' yet the little circle on the web page just slowly rotates, they have to sit and listen to us whiny dickheads ruining their Tuesday.

The thing that fucks me right off is that the staff at these places are so tied up in procedure that they are rendered nothing more than people who say 'I can see where you're coming from but...' and then proceed to get a verbal shit-kicking from us folk who just want to pop onto google without it being a long drawn out affair. The ones that should really be receiving a big fat piece of their clients' minds are the big-wigs who create these fantastically 'efficient' departments' procedures - that curiously seem alien to any other department within the same organisation (?) - then proceed to sit in their offices wanking over the cornflower blue icons whilst the staff in their call centres are being ripped apart by someone who needs but a modicum of sense and reason to see that the billing procedure is fundamentally flawed in that it seems to base most of it's 'facts' on random dates and figures plucked from the air.

If I didn't view Fight Club (the movie) as little more than pro-capitalist irony I would say that Brad Pitt was onto something...

Hello, how are you? No seriously, how are you?

Today I am disturbed by the volume of perfunctory engagement we humans have with each other. Case in point, a colleague in the office I work in just addressed a fellow employee:

'Hi Jane, alright?'

'Oh hi Lou, I'm ok thank- oh he's gone' (embarrassed giggle)

Now this is viewed as quite a common, natural even, exchange in a busy-busy-oh-so-busy office but I think it's odious. Really I do.

People ask how you are without giving a shit and, even worse, people respond knowing that person doesn't give a shit yet put themselves through it in order to conform to damn social norms. I refuse to engage in conversation with anyone who is either looking at their FUCKING PHONE or has glazed over. I mean it, I will just say 'oh you're not listening, forget it' to which they reply 'no, no I am you were saying (then they are able to recall the last word you said which proves nothing other than that they have ears and short term memory)'. This sounds like I am desperate for attention, that I WANT TO BE LISTENED TO BECAUSE I HAVE GREAT THINGS TO SAY, in a way that's true, we all want to be heard if we feel we have something worth saying but fundamentally I just get really really annoyed when people choose to engage with me then proceed to mentally check out. Why have you asked me out for a drink? Is it to tick the part of this weeks list that says 'Do something sociable this week, don't just go to work then lie on the settee as this makes you look boring/you're wasting your oh so short life?'

I'm not saying we all have to live our lives staring deeply into the eyes of everyone we meet addressing them with the utmost sincerity as a means of creating a connection and therefore reminding each other that you do exist; it sounds great but who has the time? What I am saying, I think, is stop fucking asking each other how we are whilst tapping away on laptops or leaving the room before having the chance to response. It's humiliating and infuriating to think that a photocopier is worthy of more attention, especially if it's only printing a spreadsheet that keeps records of all the other spreadsheets you need to maintain for your boss who will never actually read them.

That is all.

I love this...

"Nothing I do is ironic. I am post-Ironic. Irony is the ultimate cop-out way of turning something you did not mean into something you did. Like bands that put big tits on their album sleeves and say it's an ironic comment about sexism. Like bands that put car shit on their album sleeves and say it's anti-car. Bollocks. If it glorifies then it's bollocks. Irony is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

Julian Cope

"Choose or be a victim"...

...my dad's words, said to me and my sister from a very young age. Little did he know that his way of getting us to pick a flavour of ice cream/what to have for dinner/what to watch at the cinema would have such a profound effect.

Since my 'Girl Talk' post I have been reading and researching on the topic of gender. The lecturer I emailed with my thoughts basically hit the nail on the head by suggesting that not being marginalized by gender takes a big dose of personal accountability and a huge step away from 'victimhood'. The words ‘personal accountability’ and ‘victimhood’ seem especially relevant given the latest happenings in the U.K. don’t you think?

This notion of personal accountability seems an important idea within the writings of existentialists in that the individual is responsible for giving their own life meaning and, therefore, living ‘authentically’: a word seen time and time again within existentialist writings. An example of this comes, again, from Simone De Beauvoir - I've developed an obsession for various reasons. Her fiction and non-fiction work is permeated with ideas on what it is to be a 'woman'; one of the main ideas seems to be that a major thing us girls can afford ourselves is choice; not to live one way or another but to, instead, choose how to live as it suits us. Lucky for our society the majority of people have not yet cottoned on to this and still turn up for work and await instructions, it’s ‘safer’ that way, for all involved.

Personally, I love this idea of choice and freedom and I don't mean the hegemonic freedom of the weekend I mean the knowledge that it really is all on your shoulders how you live your life which brings with it the responsibility to give that life meaning before it gets snuffed out. I discovered the extent of my freedom – which, curiously, actually feels a lot like abandonment – at a young age resulting in most of my life being punctuated with bouts of depression and anxiety: like I said, it’s safer on the other side. That said, I would never return to 'bliss'; I’ve made my choice in that respect. In terms of being a woman, my main anxiety in both everyday life and the more specialist areas of academia involved knowing where I should ‘stand’ and what I should say in order to assert myself and be seen as equal. I.e.: “do I need to mimic the men I encounter or do I need to be ultra 'girly' in a bid of irony…make up or no make up?” The answer: do what the fuck you want to do you idiot! Think about how you want to live your life as ‘you’, not a gender and disorganize this means of organization. Of course, years of 'conditioning' via the media and various discourses floating around makes taking responsibility difficult, i.e. I am taking responsibility for my life!...or am I? Are the choices I make my own or have I been influenced? The answer: yes, of course we have all been influenced but doing nothing for fear that it is not really your choice or moaning that there’s no point in even trying seems to be verging on victimhood once again.

If I write it, will it come?

My 'silence' of late is a product of a little back and forth I've been having with myself with regards to the inspiration/work dynamic; in other words: can you force inspiration and, if so, does doing so only produce work of contrivance and, worse, inauthenticity in that it was not born for the sake of itself but instead to satisfy something else? This question seems to highlight, perhaps, an irony of creativity in that it should not actually be 'created' but instead create itself. This line of thinking reminds me of a conversation I had recently concerning an artists work assuming it's own meaning and identity once it is offered to an audience. For example an audiences interpretation of an artists work can be the complete opposite of the artists initial intention see South Park's 'The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs' for more on this topic.

Girl Talk

Due to the Summer break from University I am back in the office full-time to earn some extra cash. I have been back on full time wages now for 2 weeks yet am as skint as I was before. I think this boils down to my 'spend what I have' approach to money. It may not be 'wise' within our society to not have some money stored away but what I have taken from all of this is that money really does not mean a great deal to me - something I have always suspected - because I adjust my lifestyle accordingly. I admit that my increased revenue has allowed me to indulge what I enjoy most: reading, cooking, drinking great wine and entertaining friends at my home but, to be honest I could have done this on my part-time wages. The only thing that has really changed for me since I upped my working day to 8.5 hours of officedom is the fact that I am bored, tired and frustrated. There are two positive things to have come out of all of this though: the first being that it has validated my decision to exchange a meaningless job for full-time education and the second: the office is so quiet right now that I am able to take the time to read and research various topics that arouse intrigue.

The main source of reading and research has been linked to my increasing interest in existentialism. Today, though, my fingers do not tap the keyboard as a means of regaling you with my web based meanderings but, instead, my observations and subsequent fear of what it seems I am letting myself in for by daring to be both female and a ‘thinker’. I’ll induct you into my anxieties via an anecdote: several weeks ago I was out with some friends I have made through University; all involved in philosophy, society and culture in some capacity. All male. We had a splendid day eating, drinking and talking; I was in amazing company both academically and socially speaking. However, a closer friend of mine in the group, whom I suspect views himself as superior to me based on both intellect and gender, raised the topic of female students getting better grades from male lectures based on them ‘having a cunt’ and that ‘not having a cunt’ means men have to work so much harder. I looked around the group and discovered that my friend was not alone in this and that it appeared to be a common idea within the realms of academia and the student lecturer dynamic where gender is concerned. Now, to see this from both sides would be for me to suggest that my friends aren’t sexist; they are stating a fact based on evidence and in fact the sexism lies with the lecturer who compliments a student with an A in pursuit of a blow job by way of thanks. However, this anecdote is one of many in a line of hours of conversations in pubs that have been undercut with notions of a gender divide. The divide being horizontally with women being the bottom half. So now not only am I pre-occupied with the meaning of our existence, I also have to consider it terms of being a female, being Other. Whether I like it or not. To ignore it is to allow prejudice to prevail. It fucks me off that I am having to direct my thinking and writing towards questions of gender – questions not only do I now feel the need to answer but that I wish were never raised in the first place.

Compensation for being a chick that thinks, unsurprisingly – as I am talking existentialism and feminism - is Simone De Beauvoir, or: Sartre’s missus. A woman amongst a mass of men, snubbed or antagonised by Camus who, it seemed, left any rational thought or humanist convictions at the door when faced with a pair of tits. I admit that it does concern me to read that she referred to herself as the midwife of Sartre’s ideas, suggesting that her part in her work was little more than in it’s presentation. He bought the food; she just scurried into the kitchen and stuck it on a plate, perhaps. But, she also said: ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one’. I view this as a reminder of the responsibility women have to not adhere to this notion of us being 'Other'- assuming the word 'woman' in this context does in fact mean 'Other' - we are born and it is out responsibility to choose where to go from there. With this in mind, I have considered the idea that sexist behaviour in men arises from them viewing women as ‘Other’ as a result of women conforming to stereotypes that facilitate this idea of gender differences; perhaps the responsibility of equality lies with 'us' and not 'them'. Of course, such stereotypes have been helped along by the media, it’s not original to blame the big bad media for something yet within this media saturated society it has a part to play, and a big one at that. It seems that to be ‘equal' women need to be like men which itself suggests that the blueprint of how a human should be is male. The notion here is that women become equal to men by ignoring all that is unequal about them (I'm sure Nietzsche is creeping in here). What I am interested in, then, is how to not equalize but neutralize gender within contemporary Western society. This seems a difficult notion to contemplate even amongst the most unique minds I have encountered; speaking of my male peers, I find it rather bizarre that with such abstract thoughts about our very existence they sign up to created concepts such as gender division.

I have emailed a female lecturer regarding my thoughts on this and have asked her what it is like to be a female in a male saturated profession, specifically, academia. I will post any insight she provides.

Chatterley, L. (2011)

It was awful, I hated it; I couldn't get enough...