Salve frater! (That's Latin for 'sup bro, a seamless fusion of street and snob) Welcome to the readerharbor, readership. Put down your readersails, allow your readersailors to disembark down the readergangway and drunkenly rampage through the womenfolk, leaving in their wake a trail of bastard children unable to accept the fact they are the offspring of a tenuous over stretched pun. This is the blog of myself, Detective Veritable Galanthus, packed full of rants, metaphors, anecdotes and general misanthropy. Enjoy your stay.

Sunday 30 September 2012

Popular

 I've recently noticed that the current trend in advertisement seems to be competition. The most prominent example is that of chocolates. Chocolate companies now emphatically announce several separate flavors of the same brand ranging from caramel to orange to nuts to human despair to broken dreams and then insist people vote and compete against each other in order to prove the superiority of their taste buds over other like minded chocolate connoisseurs. Though essentially even if you were to vote for your favorite flavor of a chocolate and successfully confirmed that you in fact have the same preference of chocolate flavoring as a vast proportion of other chocolate consumers/future diabetics, you still are in actuality a loser since all you've done is basically had a race within a hamster wheel or in this case the cooperate publicity wheel. So everyone, except the chocolate company, loses (Or if you're of an extremely positive mindset, everyone wins since there really is not a jot of difference between the victorious and the defeated in their gullibility, cooperate usability and potential for obesity).
 This competition of flavors within individual chocolate brands is its self a part of competition between separate chocolate brands, each trying to get more publicity and sell more products than the other, a competition within a competition. Even this competition is then swallowed by the larger competition between chocolate and other luxury foods typically consumed by children and lonely adults such as ice cream or cake, thereby creating a competition within a competition within a competition.
 If this trend of creating a marketing battle within another marketing battle continues, much like in a medieval ten bird roast, the subject of each battle would naturally become smaller and smaller. Perhaps in the future there will be voting polls to decide which of the many unhealthy ingredients used to create a certain chocolate flavor within a certain chocolate brand is the nation's favorite. Eventually there maybe surveys to discover which particular electron attached to which certain atom within a chosen molecule composing what preferred chemical contained in an individual ingredient used to create a select flavor within a certain chocolate brand within the large category of various sugary foodstuffs labeled as chocolates within the category of non-essential delicacies labeled as sweets, is the people's choice.
 Though I find this culture of competition irritating I have to admit that it seems effective so perhaps I should use it myself. I have recently noticed that other people may have more friends than I do, in short I need to become more socially popular. Hence, adopting the policy of competition I shall now develop schizophrenia/multiple personality disorder and those people around me could decide which of my changeable personalities they like best.
  However, as people see the social success inducing effects of a serious mental disorder, multiple personality disorder will catch on as a trend. Then very soon everyone will be going around with several different minds hidden within them, each of whom may have a different preference in the electron of an atom of a molecule of a chemical of an ingredient of a flavor of a chocolate of a brand. There would then have to be a democratic vote to decide which personality is most fit to vote before any one individual could even vote for their favorite electron. Inevitably the world will become a dark and dull place of near infinite voting where one must vote for one thing to vote for another thing to be able to vote for a further more important thing, resulting in infinite reams of paper work and long winded government election processes causing indecision, fracture and general anarchy.
 In conclusion, these chocolate flavor votes will more than likely result in the apocalypse. Hence we must start a campaign against voting. Now there are several campaign methods I have in mind but seeing as I'm indecisive about which to choose we can decide through a democratic survey of popularity.

Giving Back

 I am currently taking part (not actually doing much but its the taking part that counts) in a patronizing (in the same sort of condescending and judgmental atmosphere of grandparents attempting to be understanding but nonetheless making their lack of understanding blindly obvious in the process by saying things like "Oh darling, you're a lovely girl, it doesn't matter if you didn't do well at school so long as you can cook" or "You're friend forgot to wipe his shoes when he came in but it's fine, its not his fault he's uncultured, I expect they don't teach their children manners in India") government funded program entitled "The Challenge" which aims to get young people (whom they presume have no morals, intelligence, understanding of the world or social life) to "give back to the community" by doing some sort of community service.
 I will make it clear that I don't have a problem with community service in general and think its great (so long as I'm not actually the one doing it) but what I do have a problem with, what causes me a considerable amount of vexation, is the phrase "giving back" to the community.
 Now, the Community has never done anything for me. If the Community were a parent and I its child, I would have been taken away by social services (or possibly not considering the recent incompetence of the social care system) due to gross negligence long ago. The positive publicity of "the community" seems to be that its an integral part of your life, functioning almost as a family member but as family members go, the community has had much of a presence in my life as an aborted older brother. In summary, I owe very little if not absolutely nothing to the community.
 What's more it seems that people think you somehow owe more to the community if you or your family have more money, which when considered logically makes very little sense. My family is relatively well off (and that's relative to the extremely poor economical situation at present) and I'm relatively fortunate (That's relative to those who were born into Uk families with less money/income and not relative to, say, children in Africa in which case everyone in the Uk would be relatively very fortunate which is a positive way of looking at it in a sense. On that note let us all have a moment of silence for those African children for allowing us the privilege of thinking "Thank god that's not me" every time we see a, no longer shocking, "shocking" image of some dying child which provokes less emotion in us than the death of some rich singer somewhere over dosing themselves on recreational drugs) but there's no reason why that means we owe anymore to the community than anyone else.
 We all reap what we sow and the community directly plays very little part in allowing someone to make money (unless monetary transactions by each individual member of the so called community is seen as the work of the community collectively) so I cannot see how the rich need to "give back" anything to the community. If anything the rich are more likely to have private health clinics that do not rely on the community and attend private schools (as do I) that do not rely on the community, as well as doing the community a favor every now and then by contributing to the local economy.
 I am aware that the above paragraph sounded like the height of snobbery and conservatism so would like to make clear that I do like the welfare system and would support a Robbin hood tax (taxing more from the rich than the poor), however I just object to the incorrect, almost deliberately guilt inducing, phrase "giving back" to the community.
 When I said that to those that ran "the challenge" their first response was "well, have you ever used the NHS?", the answer to which is "yes, yes I have once or twice." However my family pays for that enough in taxes and if the use of the NHS is relative to the amount of community service you should do then there are clearly people who use the NHS more but do nothing to "give back" to the community (those in the NHS permanent or intensive care unit for example... possibly because they're too ill to do anything).
 The second response, in light of my "reap what you sow" remark was that I, as a teenager, had sown nothing of my own and have done nothing to deserve being in the privileged position I find myself in. That is very true, its complete chance that I happened to be born to the family I was born to and I'm very fortunate to have done so considering the statistics. However, what that has to do with the community is something I cannot fathom. Why would my extreme turn of good luck require me to "give back" to the community, what on earth makes me indebted to the community for having very good fortune?
 Do "The community" have powers far beyond my understanding that allow them to control who gets born where? Is that the secret task of the local council, the elected members sitting around a table saying "Yes, I think we'll allow him to be born into a nice middle class family because he seems like a good lad ...though at this point there really is no way of discerning one individual from another since unborn foetuses typically tend not to have much of a personality" In which case I shall change all life dreams I've ever held and strive to become a member of the local council for the sheer power of it all.
 However since I highly doubt that is the case, it seems I owe less to the community than I owe to fate and destiny. And if the very little that I owe to the community (possibly in the form of two public library books which have been left untouched in my bookshelf for the last few months, accumulating dust and library fines faster than a cheetah in a car... that analogy possibly falling down due to the fact cheetah's don't tend to have motoring skills) must be "given back" in the form of weekends spent gardening or litter picking (as I was yesterday. Failing to plant daffodil bulbs in a far from local garden which I had never previously been to and picking up pieces of litter which felt more of a disservice than an aid to the community because their garish plastic vibrancy detracted a little from the bleak dullness of the park. All the while wearing skin tight rubber gloves, the type worn by hospital workers and rapists, which makes any job seem more criminal and perverse. The usage of those gloves could transform "baker" to "dough fondler", "barbar" to "hair mollestor" and "Nursery worker" to "Vanessa George") then what terrible price must I pay for the great debts I owe to destiny and fate. How many daffodils do I have to plant to "give back" to destiny and fate? Is that even the right way of going about it?
 Perhaps I should just start a cult worshipping destiny and fate, sacrificing a goat to their names every weekend followed by ritual dancing, spiritual humming and general mystical prancing about.

Saturday 29 September 2012

To Start On an Epiphany

I have before this time attempted to start and maintain several different blogs but this evening, at precisely around (a combination of words which seem to contradict each other but nonetheless capture my desire for it to have been precisely midnight for my own personal love of dramatics in real life and the unavoidable fact that I do in fact have no way of knowing when exactly the idea appeared in my head as I simply am not the sort of person to regularly look at the time) midnight I had something of an epiphany. Or perhaps epiphany is too large a term for this instance, rather like over wrapping a present with several layers of garishly colorful wrapping paper when the present its self is something small, relatively cheap, appropriately cheerful but not particularly significant to the recipient of the gift, a "cute" object from "Paperchase" for example.
 I have recently gotten into borrowing a "Paperchase" rubber from one of my female underlings, one Underling Spirit, who is in my maths class and although I used to sneer at the pointless brand of "cute" stationary in favor of the far more functional, cheap, unisex and less fashionable WHSmith brand; I must admit I have recently grown fond of the little green rectangular semi-transparent block of broken dreams or whatever rubbers are made of (possibly rubber unless the term "rubber" comes from the act of using the object to rub something and not the material out of which it is made in which case the name "rubber" is terribly deceptive and must be changed immediately)with the name "paperchase" scrawled neatly, almost seductively, in nice curled sloping writing on its melon coloured surface. I may go and buy one of my own Paperchase rubbers in the near future but considering my dignity as a man is always skimming the surface of utter oblivion like some fish-hunting sea bird cruising a centimeter above the dark oceans of extreme male femininity, I suspect going into a Paperchase store may result in me losing all rights to owning a protrusive reproductive organ.
 Anyhow back to the main point, epiphany or not, I came to the realization that so far in my attempts at being a blogger I had gotten everything completely and utterly wrong, I had gotten lost in the maze of the very fundamental concept of blogging to such an extent that it was no longer a matter of turning right when I was meant to be going left but rather continuing to plough head first into the floor of the metaphorical maze.
 I simply had not realized that blogging was all about presenting ones self and ones own experiences in a genuine fashion.
 In my previous blogging attempts I had employed well thought out, plotted and planned methods to attempt to be more amusing than I actually am or to purposefully over dramatize certain events for the benefit of an utterly non existent readership. In doing so my blog had lost all character and voice, essentially becoming a multi-coloured soulless empty husk of a chunk of text. I had lost sight of the fact that people usually observe blogs to see into the lives and minds of other people, like looking into a neighbor's garden. What I had essentially done with my cybernetic mental gardens was, instead of growing plants of my own personal preference in the garden as I should have, conducting thorough research into what my neighbor's botanical preferences were then proceeding to stick lots of garish plastic copies of said plants. Thereby depriving my blog of all life or interest (where the garden analogy falls down is that an entirely plastic garden would, in its own slightly creepy way, be quite fascinating whereas my previous blog attempts had absolutely no such charisma or, consequently, readership).
 Hence I intend to keep this blog, I have no idea how long it will last but I have a good feeling about this one (The primary reason being that I have just enjoyed myself immensely in the last thirty minutes or so of worthless egocentric typing) so i would be honored if anyone would care to stick around for the ride (and as a word of warning to avoid disappointment, the term "ride" gives suggestion of an element of speed and excitement whereas, as you may have guessed from this long introduction, my rides are quite slow and full of utterly irrelevant detours). All aboard.