I have media-induced concentration span diminution. I spend my days in semi-lucidity, never pursuing a thought to any logical conclusion, and staring into space whilst vague images flit in and out of my unfocussed mind, as the pictures from the television reach, but never quite converge on the retina of, my unfocussed eyes. It’s all my own fault. Well, mostly.
My first action in reversing this brain atrophy, which began when I finished my degree, should be to foreswear the internet. The internet serves in many ways to make its miss-users thick. Not that long ago, only a couple of years, in fact, I would have instinctively gone to the bookshelves to find something out. This took longer, but I have always prided myself on the efficacy of my book-research, and had got it down to an art form. Nobody could ever describe a Google search as ‘art’.
Books have several obvious advantages over the internet. Their reliability is infinitely easier to judge than that of a website. Their pigment has a more pleasing and indelible effect on the mind than the transitory pixels of light which assault the brain for milliseconds, before being disposed of in the space/time continuum. You can never step into the same bit of internet twice, but books are there until the dust mites get them. If you write a rude comment in a library book in pen, you can’t just calm down, sober up, and delete it the next day.
The very act of trawling through a book in search of an elusive fact leads to sidetracking, lateral shifts, cross-referencing initially non-pertinent subjects, and general enhancement of the thought process and intellectual curiosity. Whereas looking something up on the internet will most likely end in a frankly juvenile pursuit of the stupidest common searches Google users make which are alphabetically similar to the one being performed – you all know what I mean – or just plain getting distracted by something of no use to one’s research whatsoever. I will demonstrate by taking an entirely random example. Let’s say I want to find out about The Black Hole of Calcutta. After typing only two words, Google suggests that I may be looking for information on The Black Crowes. At this point I probably remember a Black Crowes song I once quite liked, but would, and should, have never given a second thought to, had I been looking in a PROPER BOOK. I will then spend the rest of the day in some kind of Youtube 80s rock nostalgia-fest, culminating in the purchase of a highly priced genuine period Quireboys t shirt from Ebay.
The attempted acquisition of facts from the internet is like Odysseus’s half-remembrance that he probably had some kind of boring thing to get back to which didn’t involve all this lovely lotus-eating. Information from the internet, quickly attained, is also quickly forgotten. (As a side note, I should point out that when double checking that it was Odysseus and not Jason who met the Lotus Eaters, I was inadvertently reminded by Wiki of 80s band The Lotus Eaters, who once had a song I quite liked. I resisted the siren lure.)
On the subject of forgetting, I would like to express dismay at my complete inability to spell these days. If writing by hand, I can still muster up a coherent and syntactically correct sentence. I imagine. But since I haven’t written at any length by hand for six months, I can’t be sure. I was a late adopter of typing straight on to the computer. For over a year of my degree, I wrote my essays by hand, before typing them up. It was only laziness, and a natural love of leaving things until the last minute, which forced me to try my hand at this typing as I went along business. At first I used Microsoft Word only as a word processor – the type available when I sort of learned to use a computer in about 1995 (though it’s now occurred to me that I only passed that course due to a friend doing my coursework for me – you know who you are). I barely conceived of such science fiction capabilities as ‘look up’, ‘synonyms’, or ‘copy and paste’. So I continued to type with a paper thesaurus and dictionary to hand, in anticipation of the inevitable event of my inability to remember a word. It took longer, but was more intellectually stimulating, and the end result was often the retrieval of a more appropriate or apposite word.
Grammar and spelling have been rendered unknowable, rather than being clarified by Word. I know that the green line is trying to tell me something, but I sure as heck don’t know what. Neither does its programmer, I’d wager. The red line mostly provides an excellent service. Apart from its not knowing really obvious proper nouns, and plenty of perfectly correct other words, I appreciate its informing me of my errors. What I do not like is when it doesn’t tell me of my errors. By this I mean the auto-correction of words only slightly misspelt, where there is only one realistic alternative available, the one clearly being striven for by the scrivener. Consistently spell "either", "iether", and you won’t find out about it unless you watch the screen as you type.
My reliance on spell-check has left me a spelling neurotic. I second guess my every word. A sentence I could have confidently written at the age of twelve becomes a minefield of fear. I spend minutes floundering around on Facebook, attempting to compose the simplest status update without the aid of spell-check. I have made this worse for myself by my semi-ironic insistence on pedantically correcting the grammar, spelling, or punctuation of former classmates in their messages/comments. Semi-irony is notoriously difficult to convey via Facebook. Tthe upshot of this is that I now have to be extra vigilant, so as not to leave myself open to syntactic and grammatical mockery. Which is the worst kind of mockery, you know.
I will conclude with a point which my sister would no doubt contend makes me “sound like an old person”. People cannot spell anymore. I’m sure schools still teach that it’s “i” before “e” except after “c” (oh, except not in “their”, they never told me that, and it floored me for years), but as soon as people leave education, and they no longer have need of spelling rules, they forget them. I have difficulty figuring out when to use effect and affect. It’s been explained to me, and I remember in theory that one is a verb and one is a noun, but to my confused and illogical mind, both words seem a bit too abstract to be either. Instead of making a concerted effort to straighten this quandary out in my shrivelled brain, I instead take a stab in the dark, and trustingly rely on Word do the rest. Likewise, homophones, such as stationary and stationery. At one time I would have made up some mnemonic, such as thinking that the “e” in “stationery” looks a bit like a paperclip (yes, I know it doesn’t really, but bear with me, I’m trying to make a point), to aid remembering. Nowadays I wouldn’t bother, and neither would anybody else. Because it’s not necessary to remember anything anymore. Retain something in your head for the time it takes to enter it into the computer, then empty it out of your brain. Because logically, isn’t this freeing up more space for more information, like emptying the Recycle Bin?
Coming up next time, Sky TV, because I’ve nowhere near finished yet!
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Lindsay Horne is Unwell. No, actually ill, with a cold.
I am ill, and being ill makes me grumpy. I’m really too ill to write, but too grumpy not to. The most infuriating thing about being ill, for me, is my absolute inability to accept it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of these people who soldiers on through thick and thin, valiantly honouring existing commitments like some massive bloody martyr. By my estimation, about 95 per cent of women (and yes, it’s mostly women), think that they’re oh-so-much-cleverer than everyone else for doing this, as if they’re uniquely put-upon and long-suffering, and have no choice but to keep going, against the odds. Well, yes you have, you have got a choice. I, for example, have chosen to spend the day lying on the sofa in my pyjamas and dressing gown.
No, if you think you’re being heroic for going to work/whatever when you’re ill, then you are, in fact, not properly ill. Because let me tell you, if I tried anything like that, I would pass out. Today, my normal pallor has gone off the scale. I feel like a character from an Edgar Allan Poe story. Perhaps that guy from “The Fall of the House of Usher”, who lounges about the place seeing visions in the curtains. About an hour ago, I think I had a little nap, but could not really be sure, since my brain was just doing its own thing at the time, so I was uncertain as to whether or not I had lost conscious, or was just awake-dreaming.
Anyway, back to the people refusing to lie down and be ill. For one thing, it’s presumably an evolutionary advantage to have a nice rest in the metaphorical cave when you’re sick. You don’t want to get your whole gang of cavemen gored by a mammoth because you slowed them down with your pathetic coughing and hammy sighs. No, better to have a kip by the fire, and get them to bring you back some nice mammoth broth, or whatever they had instead of Lucozade in the olden days. Also, we all know that those who won’t take time off work when sick are just doing it to make themselves feel indispensable. Well, here’s some news: You’re not that important. Nobody is. Just sit still and shut up. You’ll get better much more quickly.
If this has perhaps a touch of hypocrisy about it, I would like to point out that I am typing on a netbook, which is so light, and has such a little keyboard, that I am really not having to physically exert myself at all. I’m supposed to be going to a jobsearch seminar thing tomorrow, but I’m buggered if I’m going to. Shame actually, because there was a free lunch involved. Anyway. I just wanted to make the points that soldiering on through your supposed illness does not make you a superhero, and that being ill makes me even grumpier than usual. But I’m tired now, and my mother’s just arrived with a box of Lemsip and some Flora. The Flora’s for toast – I wasn’t completely delirious when I asked for it. I will be writing more, on a less self-indulgent subject, when recovered.
No, if you think you’re being heroic for going to work/whatever when you’re ill, then you are, in fact, not properly ill. Because let me tell you, if I tried anything like that, I would pass out. Today, my normal pallor has gone off the scale. I feel like a character from an Edgar Allan Poe story. Perhaps that guy from “The Fall of the House of Usher”, who lounges about the place seeing visions in the curtains. About an hour ago, I think I had a little nap, but could not really be sure, since my brain was just doing its own thing at the time, so I was uncertain as to whether or not I had lost conscious, or was just awake-dreaming.
Anyway, back to the people refusing to lie down and be ill. For one thing, it’s presumably an evolutionary advantage to have a nice rest in the metaphorical cave when you’re sick. You don’t want to get your whole gang of cavemen gored by a mammoth because you slowed them down with your pathetic coughing and hammy sighs. No, better to have a kip by the fire, and get them to bring you back some nice mammoth broth, or whatever they had instead of Lucozade in the olden days. Also, we all know that those who won’t take time off work when sick are just doing it to make themselves feel indispensable. Well, here’s some news: You’re not that important. Nobody is. Just sit still and shut up. You’ll get better much more quickly.
If this has perhaps a touch of hypocrisy about it, I would like to point out that I am typing on a netbook, which is so light, and has such a little keyboard, that I am really not having to physically exert myself at all. I’m supposed to be going to a jobsearch seminar thing tomorrow, but I’m buggered if I’m going to. Shame actually, because there was a free lunch involved. Anyway. I just wanted to make the points that soldiering on through your supposed illness does not make you a superhero, and that being ill makes me even grumpier than usual. But I’m tired now, and my mother’s just arrived with a box of Lemsip and some Flora. The Flora’s for toast – I wasn’t completely delirious when I asked for it. I will be writing more, on a less self-indulgent subject, when recovered.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
A rather angry tirade against Jobcentres. Without any jokes. Because that’s the mood I’m in.
If the government genuinely want to see an end to long-term unemployment, the most effective and economical way would be to fire the entire staff of every Jobcentre. Not all of them are terrible human beings, in fact recently I’ve been surprised by the sympathy and humanity of quite a few of them. But unfortunately, this is more than negated by the condescending and supercilious attitude of the few. They clearly believe that since they have jobs, it makes them intellectually and morally superior. Or that everybody should. Whereas the fact of it is that the jobcentre staff should not have jobs either.
The other day I was bordering on rude to an “advisor” (from whom I certainly don’t remember getting any advice), on account of his inflexible and accusatory attitude. I have to pay to travel to my Jobcentre. And for some unfathomable reason, for a six week period I am being made to attend every week, instead of every two weeks. And, yes, that costs me twice as much of my scrounged money (which I’m probably going to spend on crack, anyway), and wastes a hell of a lot of my time (when I could be shooting up with my unemployed friends).
Anyway, I nonchalantly rolled up to my “signing” time 20 minutes late. It having been at 9 am, and my proposed bus of catching being the 8.50. I missed this bus, presumably through its being early, or not showing up. I thought that the Jobcentre would see the reasonable side, and agree that no, there was nothing I could have done about it, and that it wasn’t my fault. Needless to say they didn’t, and to cut a long story short, I was made to feel genuine anger by a civil servant (uncivil servant more like!! LOL!!!) whose job, by his apparent reckoning, is to belittle the unfortunate. I should know better than to let myself be affected by them, but then I’m sensitive like that.
Upon first becoming unemployed, after graduating in June, I was optimistic. In fact, for the first time in my life I felt that things were really going great for me. I had got a First Class degree, through actually making an effort for once, and I had got the work experience placement at the BBC that I had held out no hope of actually getting. Yay, I thought, perhaps I’m not the worst and most useless person to walk the earth after all. Then I suffered three months of visits to the Jobcentre.
It’s called Jobcentre Plus these days. The added bonuses must be the free dream-trampling service, the complimentary feeling of being insulted, and the gratuitous self-esteem-lowering provision on offer. Because I’ve certainly never know these people to go above or beyond their own job descriptions to actually assist you positively. No, their remit consists of stretching their workload out to fill as much time as possible. I know this is the case in many jobs, but in the current economic climate, and especially in a week when a drastic and far-reaching benefit shake up has been announced, one cannot help but feel that the government should be looking at the administrators of, rather than the recipients of, social security benefits.
Politics aside, though, the culture in Jobcentres is one of oppressing the scrounging and workshy. Their regime fails to realise that there are better ways of helping people to find jobs than depressing them into submission until they voluntarily become people of the streets, just to escape being called before the existence-justification panel at least once every fortnight. Of course, on top of this biweekly ordeal are myriad unexpected tortures. The rules will suddenly be changed, leaving one’s seminar of soul-destruction rescheduled at the last minute, just to make sure that you can’t successfully make any plans with the remaining bit of your life, and the pitiful amount of money so graciously bestowed on you.
As you can see, being unemployed has started to make me feel a little depressed. Not the actual unemployment, I can handle that. There is no end to the inexpensive, self-bettering ways with which one can fill one’s time. I feel no embarrassment in telling anybody that I don’t have a job – because I have plans, and I have back-up plans. Trying to force me to get a full-time job at Iceland (this is a budget supermarket, not a country, for my foreign readers), is not going to be helpful to me, or to society, at this point in time.
Injuring people’s sense of sense worth, leading them to be convinced that they are not even worthy of being employed, and generally revelling in the fact that you have a job and they don’t, are not psychologically sound ways of getting people back into work. For this reason, when I’m in charge of the country, all civil servants will be the first to be rounded up and put in the gulags. And that includes my brother. You see what they’ve done to me? They’ve turned me into the type of person who makes plans for their hypothetical dictatorship.
In fact, though, I have a motivation in writing this lament. It may be depressing to write, and it’ll be depressing to read back. But I have to go to the Jobcentre tomorrow, a visit obligated by the aforementioned seminar re-arrangement (by an external agency), and necessitating some complex explaining of the situation on my part, and a tiny degree of flexibility on theirs. So if I’m rude about them today, they’re bound to confound me tomorrow with their reasonableness.
The other day I was bordering on rude to an “advisor” (from whom I certainly don’t remember getting any advice), on account of his inflexible and accusatory attitude. I have to pay to travel to my Jobcentre. And for some unfathomable reason, for a six week period I am being made to attend every week, instead of every two weeks. And, yes, that costs me twice as much of my scrounged money (which I’m probably going to spend on crack, anyway), and wastes a hell of a lot of my time (when I could be shooting up with my unemployed friends).
Anyway, I nonchalantly rolled up to my “signing” time 20 minutes late. It having been at 9 am, and my proposed bus of catching being the 8.50. I missed this bus, presumably through its being early, or not showing up. I thought that the Jobcentre would see the reasonable side, and agree that no, there was nothing I could have done about it, and that it wasn’t my fault. Needless to say they didn’t, and to cut a long story short, I was made to feel genuine anger by a civil servant (uncivil servant more like!! LOL!!!) whose job, by his apparent reckoning, is to belittle the unfortunate. I should know better than to let myself be affected by them, but then I’m sensitive like that.
Upon first becoming unemployed, after graduating in June, I was optimistic. In fact, for the first time in my life I felt that things were really going great for me. I had got a First Class degree, through actually making an effort for once, and I had got the work experience placement at the BBC that I had held out no hope of actually getting. Yay, I thought, perhaps I’m not the worst and most useless person to walk the earth after all. Then I suffered three months of visits to the Jobcentre.
It’s called Jobcentre Plus these days. The added bonuses must be the free dream-trampling service, the complimentary feeling of being insulted, and the gratuitous self-esteem-lowering provision on offer. Because I’ve certainly never know these people to go above or beyond their own job descriptions to actually assist you positively. No, their remit consists of stretching their workload out to fill as much time as possible. I know this is the case in many jobs, but in the current economic climate, and especially in a week when a drastic and far-reaching benefit shake up has been announced, one cannot help but feel that the government should be looking at the administrators of, rather than the recipients of, social security benefits.
Politics aside, though, the culture in Jobcentres is one of oppressing the scrounging and workshy. Their regime fails to realise that there are better ways of helping people to find jobs than depressing them into submission until they voluntarily become people of the streets, just to escape being called before the existence-justification panel at least once every fortnight. Of course, on top of this biweekly ordeal are myriad unexpected tortures. The rules will suddenly be changed, leaving one’s seminar of soul-destruction rescheduled at the last minute, just to make sure that you can’t successfully make any plans with the remaining bit of your life, and the pitiful amount of money so graciously bestowed on you.
As you can see, being unemployed has started to make me feel a little depressed. Not the actual unemployment, I can handle that. There is no end to the inexpensive, self-bettering ways with which one can fill one’s time. I feel no embarrassment in telling anybody that I don’t have a job – because I have plans, and I have back-up plans. Trying to force me to get a full-time job at Iceland (this is a budget supermarket, not a country, for my foreign readers), is not going to be helpful to me, or to society, at this point in time.
Injuring people’s sense of sense worth, leading them to be convinced that they are not even worthy of being employed, and generally revelling in the fact that you have a job and they don’t, are not psychologically sound ways of getting people back into work. For this reason, when I’m in charge of the country, all civil servants will be the first to be rounded up and put in the gulags. And that includes my brother. You see what they’ve done to me? They’ve turned me into the type of person who makes plans for their hypothetical dictatorship.
In fact, though, I have a motivation in writing this lament. It may be depressing to write, and it’ll be depressing to read back. But I have to go to the Jobcentre tomorrow, a visit obligated by the aforementioned seminar re-arrangement (by an external agency), and necessitating some complex explaining of the situation on my part, and a tiny degree of flexibility on theirs. So if I’m rude about them today, they’re bound to confound me tomorrow with their reasonableness.
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