Tag Archives: mediocrity

Things I’m Average at No. 7: Being in any real way a “grown up”.

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I am ageing.

I know this comes as a shock, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am awkwardly side stepping out of my twenties now, something I’d so infrequently thought about when reading the Babysitters Club or fatting my way through high school. I’m courting age, something that is outside of my control, moving stubbornly alongside me (or standing stock still as I run in stupid meaningless circles around it, depending on your perspective) stuck to my skin like a fungus (ew?). It’s a hand perpetually on my arm, blah blah blah, ooh inevitability, blah blah, happening to us all blah bliddy blah.

It’s the circle of life blah.

But– despite the continuous and unpermissioned propelling toward my grave, my adult self has, in an alarming display of self sabotage, largely refused to play and is sullenly sitting in a tree house, batting half dressed barbie’s heads together and muttering about how “it’s a dumb game anyway”.

I grow older, but not up. While I inhabit the body of a 29 year old, my old skool, puerile habits rear their heads with shocking frequency. Honestly if they continue to just let people grow older without any sort of standardised testing, there’s really no one to blame but the system.

Here’s what I mean.

I will continue to like boys

Boys, though. Like, why, when all other women over 25 started dating bankers and marrying and having children I completely missed the memo and thus am still mooning about, glaring at my phone, whining to my friends about how I just don’t knoooow and giggling over text messages, is of course beyond me. And, how many 21–23 year olds can I possibly meet, you know? A constant parade of kontiki aged males who go to uni and maybe shave a bit does not a mature, Austin-esque heroine make.

I will continue to giggle inappropriately

This guy in one of my classes last semester would insist on pointing out the surname of another girl in the class which was, unfortunately, Wang. I wanted to tell him to stop and that it was not cool, man, but I had to wait till I stopped snickering like a child first.

I will continue to be stunned that I have a job that carries any sort of actual responsiblity

Seriously. Who’s idea was this? I’m not like, endangering anyone, and some days I actually feel like I’m doing it well, but just the whole “do the things when they need to be done”, “best attend to those emails now”, “Oh I’ve got another meeting that night” thing is something that’s taking a lot of getting used to. It’s odd for a girl who’s used to filling her hours with a variety of dalliances with a variety of characters from a variety of fictional media and the assembling of an occasional sandwich. Very odd.

I will continue to throw my money away

I just love to spend money! Or more accurately, I just don’t care. I’ll just spend it. I shouldn’t go to brunch again, but I will, because I don’t care. I shouldn’t buy another stack of paperbacks from the second hand book store but I will, because I don’t care. I shouldn’t use my phone as a modem without pausing to think about the cost and then end up paying a $1300 bill. Whoops. Other people I’ve heard of or read about, they keep some of their money all together in a pile of some sort and sort of, save it, if you will. From the spending. Heroes.

I will continue to like candy

I gave up sugar for about two months. Then I started eating it again because my life is infinitely better when I can have the odd chocolate bar, gob stopper and bowl of vaguely sweetened breakfast cereal. I don’t know if I’m supposed to stop liking junk food at some point and move on to just nibbling daintily on olives and pesto or whatever but I just can’t see how that will happen without some sort of combined tongue/brain transplant. Presumably when I’m 40 I’ll get the package containing my new tastes in fashion, television and food along with my Opinions and Responsibility that got sent to the wrong address about five years ago. Then I’ll eat it.

And I will continue to HATE homework

Because it suuuuuucks sooo harrrd. I don’t WANT to research. And everyone knows it’s lame and whose idea was this anyway and no one ever says to smart people “prove you’re good by making a totally sweet sandwich or playlist” so how is it faaaair? Huff.

So… Done now.

Just wanted to get this all registered (you know, on the internet) before I’m actually a 30 year old. Ludicrous.

 

 

 

He ain’t boring, he’s my brother*

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While a lot of the TV I watched when I was younger has become part of the fuzzy clothes dryer of my brain, half remembered bits of twins? something about destiny? something about medallions? and gold? all flying around together and moulding into an indistinguishable mass, some has stuck in there, clear as day. I can still remember Penny in her green pants and sturdy sneakers opening her computer book (computer book! I KNOW, right?!) and Vanilla Icing the hell out of Inspector G’s problems, I remember wanting to date Michealangelo SO HARD (though now I’m more into Raphael, I feel like he gets me) and having no small amount of envy for April O’neills yellow jumpsuit. Oh man. She was the straight up– COOLEST.

I also remember digging on Sesame street, something that hasn’t changed a lot.

I always loved the street more than the school (it seems to be one or the other, a sort of Home and Away v Neighbors polemic). Playschool was adults talking to kids, taking time out of their busy days to condescend to me, whereas Sesame Street was friends (my friends, the crazy ass monsters) talking to friends.

I don’t remember if there was a character I resonated with more than any other, I just remember enjoying the hell out of it. And the ladybug picnic.  As I have grown older, someone stuck with me, grew sharper and more focussed through the haze of my childhood and has taken his place as my favorite from the street.

I have a crush on Bert. My mono-browed, skivvy wearing hero. Sure he’s oft overshadowed by his more fun, more imaginative, more easy going bud Ernie, but in Bert I’ve sensed something worth noticing, worth celebrating. When I picked up the above issue of T-WORLD magazine I realized what it was that kept me coming back** to an oval-nosed paper clip obsessed freak.

There was this article celebrating Sesame Street and they got several different artists to create original designs based on their favorite characters. The one that did Berts wrote that Bert was the guy that told us it was ok to not be the life of the party.

YES.

Everyone knows that Ernie is more likeable. He is fun and silly and innocent and joyful where Bert is dour, boring, practical and snappy. But everyone also knows you can’t always be Ernie. Sometimes you need to be practical. Sometimes you’re sleepy. Sometimes your room mate is talking to an invisible person on a banana and it plain shits you off.

What is wonderful about this skinny little man-puppet (aside from his love of pigeons, which is something we have in common) is that he offers an alternative to the go go go crowd pleasing of the other residents and permissions kids (and 28 yr olds) to be proud of their face eatingly boring habits, eg bottle cap collecting, their lack of constant childlike joy and their visionary dance moves (pigeon dance anyone?).

There is nothing wrong and in fact a lot that’s right with being an Ernie. I’m not going to knock that kind of lifestyle (tee hee). But I’m voting team Bert, because skivvies are sometimes a practical and stylish wardrobe choice.

*Nothing depreciating or untoward should be read into the title as far as my actual brother goes, he is great and fun and helped foster an understanding of the brilliance of S Street and all other Jim Henson associated media.

**and seriously, coming back cos once when I was travelling I left my Bert doll in Gimmelwald, this town on the side of a mountain in Switzerland. And I took a cable car, a bus and a boat across the country before realising. So then I took a train, a bus and a cable car back to fetch him. No one gets left behind. I’m oddly sentimental about things.

Does My Blog Look Big In This?

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So, as with any of my entries, one about design is a bit of a fine line. My blog is essentially about the idea of being kind of ok at stuff and in general. But it’s also a blog that I wouldn’t be violently opposed to people reading. So when making the design choices afforded to me by WordPress, I could choose something to go with the “average” vibe of my niche, or I could make my blog all fancy pants so unsuspecting readers are lured by my shiny shiny background and clean, crisp finish.

Cos that’s what comes to mind when we think of a nice looking blog, isn’t it? It is for me, anyway. Clean, neat lines, not too many colours, a kind of readable but ever so slightly personalized font. I guess I have been brainwashed into the Facebook=good looking camp, standing notably opposite the MySpace=hideous camp, with it’s glittery dirt tents and cat graphed port-a-loos.

Veering back ever so slightly to the subject of my blog in particular, the design choices that I have made, I have done so to line up with my niche. Fonts are of course the stationary lovers dream playground, and I did start to think about what font could properly do my particular brand of self indulgent drivel justice. My blog is about being average, so perhaps a font that seems more handwriting-esque would convey the right vibe, conjuring up images of me seated, pen in hand, tongue jutting out the corner of my mouth as I labour to ineffectively chronicle my thoughts. I however found Typekits fairly difficult to use, and then was distracted by my theme.

Originally I dug the idea of a picture across the top of the page, as I think it looks neat, but sort of stylish and individualistic. I love a white background too, I feel it is suggestive of a blog that doesn’t take itself too seriously and relies on its content to make any point it chooses to. But then I was seduced by a Paperpunch, a theme with nice big letters at the top, and an uncomplicated layout. I made the background a slightly apricot colour so it didn’t look too flat with the large white text panels. And I really like the result. Giggle. Deciding not to worry about the font as it’s nice and readable, I have ended up with a sort of normal font, and sort of normal layout, which I feel is sort of appropriate.

So many things are communicated by presentation. I was looking around my room before, and realising just how much crap I have in here.  There’s colours, and postcards and books and huge trashy framed pictures everywhere, and I love it that way because I think it reflects me, and all of my loud, soft, garish and pastel bits. In every part of our lives we make decisions about what we want to represent, and we also make assumptions about everything we see, based on what we see.  This is the way society works, a lot of the time, and people and blogs are not different.

I wish I didn’t judge by appearances, but its so easy and usually partially accurate. If I ever let an errant gaze wander over to a guy I might think is cute, the first thing I do is look at his shoes. Trashy example? Well how about this?

radparty1 by Jonathon Mayhew.

Some might say this is a tacky gathering of tacky pictures to make a larger, tackier picture. Others might say someone was having a laugh. On appearances, and depending on your viewpoint, either of those could be true. It could also be said that this is an artwork put together using old and or discarded pictures that are often considered tacky or kitsch to make something new. This is actually true. While Jonathan Mayhew’s work is not technically dirtstyle,  it does bring to mind the it’s so bad it’s good vibe that dirtstyle represents.

The whole dirtstyle thing can be approached from either the “oh Lord, why would I want a dancing baby/ starry night background/cat anywhere near my blog or the the ones I love?!” point of view or the “I believe dirt style graphics are an ode to where we once were technologically, and also are cool, as all that once was lame, is now excellent” point of view. It’s all about perception.

And so I could create a page full of bits and bobs and colour and flashing stuff (had I the money and the technical know how), to maybe give more of myself as an author away, or to appeal to those that like the dirtstyle asthetic, but I won’t be doing that.

As stated previously, I prefer a “neat” looking page. And neat for me means no dancing anything,

no huge cats,

and totally, definately no glitter.. as I think it looks like crap.

The moral of the story being, whilst dirt style graphics and retro themes are fun for some and a useful method of expression for others, I missed the first wave of the old www, so I don’t really feel the need to be nostalgic and I believe less is more. In relation to my blog, anyways. If you want to see tacky crap, you can come over to my house.

Can you dig it?

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Average is obviously a relative term. One needs something they’ve attempted in some way, something presumably others are more than average at, to try out and to feel like they’ve not done real good at (when compared to aforementioned others).  There are so many things one can be average at, so many levels of done-ness, or aptitude to compare to that for the average connoisseur can be difficult to navigate. This will be my attempt to chart my own mediocrity in all its wonder, an examination of why it is we feel the need to excel, and a celebration of the many, many things that I am average at and hopefully a journey into more.

Can you dig it?