London Calling…

I do not mind paying for things. I am not particularly rich, certainly by NY standards, but I am also distinctly not poor. I am not (in my opinion) particularly cheap. I do not resent paying for things that I want unless I genuinely feel like I am being ripped off, in normal circumstances if I feel something is not worth what I would have to pay for it I simply don’t buy it. Ditto for the many things that are more than worth it but which I clearly cannot afford.

So I find it annoying when people bitch and moan about say, the price of popcorn. Yes, it is blatantly ridiculous to have to pay $8 for a carton of dry disgusting lumps of food with the texture and taste of polystyrene foam. Absolutely agreed. (As you may be able to tell, I hate popcorn anyway). But the exercise of disagreeing with the price of an unnecessary commodity, and I cannot emphasise this enough, intrinsically involves not buying any.

By all means complain about income tax. You have no control over how much you are obliged to pay, what it is spent on once you’ve paid it, and not only do you not have a say but you don’t even necessarily know. But do people not understand how ridiculous it is to stand there and bitch about how it can’t possibly be a dollar fifty for a can of coke while paying for the beverage in question?

Allow me to introduce the concept of worth in economics. What something is worth, is what someone else is willing to pay for it. Is a one dollar umbrella worth $4 in a rainstorm? The answer is probably yes. You are paying a dollar for the umbrella, and $3 for the umbrella _now_. You could have bought it for a dollar yesterday when it was sunny and carried it around. You didn’t, and so you pay $3 for the privilege of not looking like a pillock wandering around the park in the blazing sunshine with an umbrella. The vendor is making $1 for the umbrella, and $3 for standing out in the bloody rain. Don’t want to pay $4? Then there is a very simple solution - get wet. Is this approach morally justifiable? I don’t know, but I have had more than one job that involved standing out in the elements and I would dearly have loved the ability to charge my employer extra when it pissed rain.

Granted, there are certain types of socio-economic unfairness that only apply to people who are of very limited means. Wealthy individuals can afford to say, buy a house and pay the mortgage, as opposed to paying rent. On a smaller scale they could also afford things like health insurance, so if something does happen they will not be stuck with insane medical expenses. I freely admit that generally, it is easier for someone with large amounts of money not to spend that money if they don’t want to. Tragic injustice? Probably. It still doesn’t explain why poor people buy more fucking lottery tickets though. Because lets face it, thats just dumb.

Essentially though, this just makes it all the more irritating when someone with a good income writes letters to the Times about the exorbitant price of salted snacks, cinema tickets, or trips to the seaside.

In summary, if you have money, do whatever the hell you want with it. Save the whales, buy a dirtbike, see Star Wars 167 times in the cinema, I could not care less. Just remember that you fucking spent it, not the whales or the bike salesman or George Lucas (may he rot in the specially conceived hell for people who resurrect rejected scripts). So if you don’t like where it went, next time you get your paycheque have it inserted rectally so that you can have something legitimate to whine about.

‘The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.’

Albert Einstein (Washington DC, Einstein’s monument)

Every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty‘

JD Rockefeller (Rockefeller Centre)

I don’t care about politics. Really. I don’t care about them at home because very few irish politicians seem to me to be any different from any other irish politicians, and I don’t care about them in other countries because there is nothing I can do about them. Most of all I don’t care about them because I don’t really understand them except on the most basic level, and I have never cared to try. I vote when it is in my power to do so, based upon the knowledge and understanding I have, because I believe one should exercise an opinion when called upon to do so. But I would never be involved in a campaign unless it was for a cause, not a politician, and the effort I would put into making my decision would be less then an hour’s background reading in the vast majority of circumstances

But if you live in a city in america it is almost impossible not to have an opinion on the election. If you don’t have one, you need to make one up, because you will be asked about it anyway. And for the first time, I find myself giving a shit. Not a massive stinky floater of a shit or anything, but certainly a medium sized turd. I actually think it might make a difference to the US and the world who gets elected this time.

So though it is entirely irrelevent, my non-existent vote goes to Barack Hussein Obama. May he somehow find a use for it.

So I went to Ikea for the first time yesterday. Oh yes. You see, I had this marvellous theory on buying furniture. I thought that it would be, if not easy, then at least a relatively straightforward exercise. One goes to a furniture store, one looks at the furniture on display, measures it, debates a little with any accompanying parties, and then orders it to be delivered on a particular date to a particular address. Hah.

Like many huge and glaring misconceptions it all began with a single completely inaccurate assumption. This assumption was that Ikea was based on the same principle as for example Argos, just on a much larger scale, and would therefore work approximately the same way. Obtain catalogue number of item, order item for collection or delivery, pay, and receive item. To be entirely honest, I presumed I could have just done it all on the internet, the only reason I intended to go to the store at all was because with such a major purchase as a couch or bed I wanted to physically see the thing I was buying. Essentially I assumed I was being overly cautious by not just ordering online. Oh the slightly manic laughter as I look at this thought retrospectively.

The Ikea display store is like what a giant warehouse would look like if you converted it into a labyrinth whose walls and passageways were constructed entirely of household furnishings. Essentially that’s exactly what it is, in fact. In a way this is ingenious, it forces you to look at every piece of crap in the entire place before getting to the end. In another, more relevant way, it is frustrating, annoying, and engenders a passionate hatred of slow-walking people with giant carts that I find it hard to describe in words. When we finally reached the end of the labyrinth (which geographically is about 2 minutes from the start, we just didn’t figure that out until later) we were dehydrated, irritated, and generally just glad the experience was over. On our travels we had seen a couch, bed and mattress that I was happy to purchase. I queued for the information desk, thankful that the ordeal must be almost at an end.

Alas, it was not to be. Upon making some enquiries I discovered you cannot order online, because they do not deliver online orders. (What?!?) Which meant that I would have to order right then. Ok, not ideal, but acceptable, where can I find a catalogue to get the numbers from? There aren’t any. Because as we walked through the giant furniture maze we were supposed to have noted down the article numbers of the items in question so that we could pay for them at the checkout. Back to the labyrinth, where we spend about 10 minutes actually locating the article numbers of anything, as for some reason instead of being printed in a bold font and labelled “Article Number, pay attention to this!” they are printed on the reverse of the price tag, in a font small enough as to be almost unreadable, and without a descriptor of any kind.

We subsequently discovered that this is probably due to the following fact. What they _tell_ you to do is write down the numbers and then pay. What you are _actually_ supposed to do, is find one of the rare and elusive employees on the display floor, tell them what you want, confirm when they show you the image on-screen that yes, you are not a moron, that is the thing, then specify what colour, size etc you would like it in, because the all-important article number written on the display item merely signifies precisely that item, ie. colour and size also. So to order say, a full-size bed frame in black, when the display item is a queen size version in pine is impossible to do without the assistance of a furniture monkey, or as they prefer to be called, ikea employee.

One part of the exchange went thusly:

Me: …and I would like this couch.

FM: That item is self-serve

Me: Wait, I can’t get it delivered?

FM: Oh no, you can get it delivered, you just have to bring it down to the checkout.

Me: You mean physically bring it? But… it’s a couch…

FM: Yeah, you need to load it onto a cart and bring it down to the checkout, and pay for it, then they can deliver it.

Me: There is no other way of doing this? Can’t I pay someone to bring it down?

FM: No, sorry. So you don’t want the couch ma’am?

Me: Oh no, I want it. I’m just horrified.

FM: Oh, we’re actually pulling that item ourselves at the moment.

Me: So I don’t have to bring it down?

FM: No.

Me: Great.

The last part obviously rendering that entire minute of shock and awe entirely pointless, but on the plus side, I didn’t have to carry a couch. When I finally managed to get my official “already talked to a monkey” form, and queue and pay for all this, there was then an entirely separate queue for organising and paying for the delivery of all my crap. By the time we left I felt like Persephone escaping Hades, and was afraid to look behind me lest I somehow be sucked back in, black hole style.

I have never been so drained of life energy by a retail experience.

In the past I may or may not have ranted about the determined stupidity of my ISP, which incidentally if anyone wanted to know, is Bulldog. If I haven’t written anything down, it is probably because I have been seething too much with rage and frustration to actually commit to using words which might limit my emotions to merely “disgusted fury”.

The actual broadband and phone service itself is almost always satisfactory. It is merely absolutely everything around said service that is utterly and completely pants. For example, I had to set up a direct debit with these people 7 times, the first three of which resulted in one payment going out successfully and then all the details disappearing, two of which didn’t work at all, one of which had 3 months worth of successful payments before vanishing off the face of the earth, and the last of which finally, mercifully, has worked for the last year. Except of course, for the time when they randomly cut me off, presumably because paying 4 bills in a row is suspicious behaviour.

Alas it was pretty much obligatory to pay by direct debit, because when I tried to pay by credit card this was not possible approximately 95% of the time because their system was down. Their system only seemed to be up at random moments of celestial import, like when a full moon falls on the second tuesday of the month. or when a partial solar eclipse was in progress.

I wouldn’t mind so much except for the blatant, badly executed lying. For example, the below conversation:

Me: Hello, you appear to have cut off my phone and internet with no warning whatsoever.

Indian chick: We sent you out an email to inform you madam

Me: You sent me an email, to tell me you had cut off my internet access?

IC: Yes madam

Me: Do you see anything wrong with that statement? Like the fact that my receipt of the email might involve the internet in some way? Besides which, you haven’t sent me an email, because I was able to check it from work and I haven’t received anything.

IC: Well madam we have also sent you a letter

Me: Assuming that I have not received that either, which I haven’t, since you cut it off today, which is a sunday, can you tell me why that is?

IC: There is an overdue bill

Me: But I have a direct debit, its been working for months

IC: Well there is an overdue bill madam, would you like to pay it?

Me: Yes! I would! Please take my money.

—-Ensuing bill stuff and assurances that connection will be restored within 3 working days—-

…..

—-Ten working days and one trip to sweden later—-

Me: Hello, you appear to have either cut off my phone and internet again, or not restored it.

IC: Yes madam there is an unpaid bill on that account and it is blocked.

Me: no there isn’t, because despite your failure to take my direct debit, I paid you 2 weeks ago by credit card, and the money is gone from my account, so there is no outstanding bill.

IC: Yes madam I see you have paid that bill.

Me: Right, so why is it that I do not have an internet connection?

IC: It is a technical fault.

Me: What?

IC: It is a technical fault on the line madam

Me: Em, ok, what is the fault? What is the problem with my line?

IC: I dont know exactly madam that is for our IT team to deal with

Me: well when will they deal with it, I’ve had no connection for 2 weeks!

IC: It will be fixed within 24 hours

Me: But if you dont know what the fault is, how do you know it will be fixed in 24 hours?

IC: because I have removed the block from the account madam

Me: So the account was blocked?

IC: Oh no madam, there was a technical fault.

—-

Since I am moving countries, today I decided to find out what would be needed to transfer the account to a housemate. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello, I am moving to another country soon, and would like to transfer my account to another name, what do I need to go about that?

English Guy (???): We can’t actually do house moves at the moment I’m afraid, because of a system migration.

Me: Well I mean its not a house move, I just need to transfer the account

EG: we consider that a house move, because we can’t transfer a contract, we have to cancel it and start a new one.

Me: So you cannot cancel my contract either?

EG: Oh no, we can cancel it.

Me: But you cannot create a new one?

EG: No

Me: Can you create any contracts, or just not renewed ones?

EG: No, we can’t create any at all

Me: How long is this system migration going on for?

EG: We don’t currently know

Me: So for an indefinite period of time you can neither transfer accounts to a new house, transfer them to a new person, or set up any new customers whatsoever?

EG: Yes, thats correct.

——–

I think at this point I almost lost the will to live, and so felt compelled to terminate the conversation. What the fuck? Yes, lets allow our company to atrophy in the process of moving computer systems, despite the fact that the old one was slower and less reliable than writing things down in calligraphy, on papyrus, and sending them off via carrier pigeon

And now to try and convert my phone contract to pre-pay. Stay tuned….

I loved the movie. The first time I saw it I was deeply impressed with the storyline, and the characters and direction were fresh and fascinating. Brad Pitt as an antisocial weirdo’s hot alter ego in low cut jeans didn’t hurt either. Subsequently I also read the book, which delighted me because so much of the script was faithful to the books narrative, though the essential plot seems to be somewhat squished and twisted into movie form.

But sometimes I find it vastly irritating. Not in and of itself, but in people’s interpretations and the depth they see in the shallowest parts of the idea. Fight Club as I see it was a demonstration of how easily society could theoretically be subverted. That in elevating man so far above the level of an animal we have so thoroughly lost touch with instinct and real emotion, that the slightest contact with either sends us into a frenzy of desperation for more.

It tells us we go to soulless offices every day, and never challenge our own personal hierarchy. That we do not understand what we do, or its place in the world, and so we do not really care and cannot bring ourselves to. That the slight snub of a co-worker is a major event in our lives, that we seek to perfect ourselves through obtaining material things, and that in the end, none of these things truly matter. That we allow ourselves not to matter either, and be trampled by the world and all the other pointless soulless people in it. So when we are offered the chance to feel something real, or passionate, it becomes the centre of our lives, an addiction. If we face losing it we will kill, or die, or subjugate ourselves to keep it.

“You are not your fucking khakis�?. I’ve heard it so often as a rebellion from materialism, an assertion that who you are is deep inside you, and could never be defined or contained within something you buy, or want, or go to work to do. Newsflash kids, you are most definitely your fucking khakis. Do you really think your underwear, suit, and Ikea couch don’t say anything about you? That they aren’t an expression of who and what you are? If you bought it, keep it, or do it, it’s you. Because you chose it, you chose how to behave and how to live. You chose to work in a multinational, you chose to live in the suburbs, you chose your bathroom tiles and your couch. You chose your life, and if you drifted into it without noticing, that’s your fault, not the fault of society.

Fight Club makes the excellent point that no matter how much you happen to like say, your kitchen table, you don’t need it to be happy. The part people seem to miss is that neither do you need to reject it to be happy. The only thing you really need is the knowledge of what is important, and what isn’t. Astonishingly, thats the part most people manage not to have.

Mostly, the difference is that feminism is conceptually stupid, whereas being a bitch is just conceptually nasty. Besides which, I don’t really see myself as a bitch, I just know I am seen as one by other people, presumably because I’m verbally agressive and I don’t beam sunshine out my arse.

Feminism, as I understand it, is a movement that believes women are superior to men in some way. Possibly every way, I’ve never manged to get that far into the argument. If this is not the case, then they should stop calling themselves something so dumb and be egalitarianists. Or another theory I’ve heard is that feminism is seeking to even things out after the centuries of oppression by men, and therefore the goal is simply for women to have the advantage in circumstances like the workplace.

What a pile of utter drivel. I don’t give a damn what happened previously, you can do the right thing _now_. So why would anyone decide to ignore equality and logic for the sake of some sneaky honourless vengeance? I would be understandably pissed if I wasn’t given a job or a promotion purely because of my gender. But I’d be just as insulted if not more so were I to discover that I had been given something _because_ I was female.

Then there’s the “feminism is just the celebration and empowerment of womanhood” bit. Great, good for you. Have a fucking medal for being born with a uterus. Women aren’t special. Either everyone is special or no-one is. Men and women tend to be differently talented and have diverse personalities, these are inclinations rather than set rules.

I suppose the crux of this rant is that I don’t understand why people are proud of something they have no control over. You can’t be proud of being a woman, or from your country, or beautiful, or smart. You can only be proud of what you do with those things. Anything you are born with is, depending on how you look at it, a gift, or a random chance.

If you’re a woman, and you’ve overcome huge diversity to be where you are in life, congratulations. If you’re a man and you’ve done that, same deal. If you’re beautiful, and make millions as a model, hell even a stripper or a porn star, then you capitalised on what you had. Well done. If you have a 180 IQ and you put together boxes for a living, you deserve a slap. Preferably a slap from someone with half your intelligence, who’d love to be doing anything other than putting boxes together, but just doesn’t have the wherewithal.

Generally speaking, I am unimpressed by suicide. I don’t care how bad you feel. I really, really don’t. I’m leaving out the question of whether its actually morally wrong or not, because I’m not sure what the answer should be. I will happily argue however, in favour of it being selfish, stupid, and incredibly cowardly.

It is not a brave venture into the unknown, it is not a resolution of your own destiny by your own hand. Its fucking retarded. It an admission of weakness beyond any other, you are saying that you cannot handle _living_, the most basic and simple of functions in modern society. It the easy way out of the worst situation, and it is the ultimate shirking of responsibility. It is fucking pathetic to take your own life in an overwhelming majority of circumstances.

But by all means, if thats your decision, feel free to do as you choose. Your life is not subject to any rule dictated by myself, your life belongs to you and you alone, to dispose of as you see fit. But for the love of fucking anything at all, please do not fucking kill yourself by jumping on the tracks of the London fucking Underground. You fucking stupid asshole. Have I used enough expletives to communicate my rage? A resounding maybe!

There must be a million ways to kill yourself in this golden age of humanity. Heroin overdose, hanging, bullet in the brain, sleeping pills, falling on your fucking sword, walking into a chav pub and asking for tea and biscuits, becoming a security guard in Iraq, to name but a few. So why the fuck would anyone choose to forego all of these convenient and readily available deaths just to be crushed by a filthy train?

First off, the only place you have access to the track is the platform. By the time the train gets to the platform, it is now going much more slowly than normal. So instead of dying a quick squishy death as you are splatted like a bug on the front windscreen of a speeding monster, you are slowly crushed to an agonising end as a circle of slack-jawed gawkers slowly gathers for some human/trainwreck traditionalism. Frankly, it makes no sense.

Unless you consider the fact that by flinging yourself underneath a tube you are not only ending your crappy existence in this world, you are also fucking up everyone else’s day. Is that the dying wish of these morons? “The world is too much for me, so I will take my life while simultaneously annoying several hundred thousand people”. Is it a cry for attention? “My life is hell, so I will make everyone else’s just that little bit worse, maybe then they’ll realise how miserable I was”

Do us all a favour and ritually disembowel yourself instead.

At least thats my question about it. The word itself pretty much explains the nature of it. Something designed to engender terror. Someone asked me today if the current state of affairs in London ever made me worry about being there or avoid using the tube. The answer is “absolutely never”. I suspect a similiar response would come from most people who live here, too.

London has a different attitude to these things than many other cities. I suppose the best example recently of a city shitting itself in terror was NY after the World Trade Centre attacks. Not that those attacks weren’t serious, they involved huge loss of life, but the blow to the american ego and sense of self-righteous and safe superiority was much more severe than the blow to the headcount.

London has been bombed multiple times, for years on end. It has been a centre of violence, intrigue and conspiracy, has survived angry mobs, the great fire of 1666, and the black plague, amongst other disasters.

I will happily concede I was around for none of these events or circumstances, and that neither was anyone else living there today. But living memory is not necessary, the city has its own memory. The way things are built, and the way the police work, the lack of bins on city streets, the reaction to someone leaving a bag unattended on the tube. That is the memory of a society, of a place, the structure which shapes the future and offers an insight into the past.

When the London suicide bombings happened last year, everyone still went to work that day. Within 24 hours the tube was running again. Transport For London did not grind to a screeching halt, nor did everyday life. It was a tragedy, and no-one denied that. But to let everything come to a standstill is to be beaten. The Americans may have come back with guns as well as a major personality disorder, but they did have to run crying to their rooms first. They may win the war on whatever underdeveloped nation they choose, but the war on terror is the one they have already lost. They are afraid.

Perhaps I grossly generalise. I was not in NY then. I have never been there. All I have to go by is news and the speeches made by idiotic politicians. But I am here, and London is not afraid. Apathetic, indifferent, maybe slightly paranoid. But not afraid. The point of all of this is fear and intimidation. By the fuckwits who bomb the tube or by the government who looks to take advantage of public apprehension, its all the same.

I treat the thought of dying from a bomb on the tube the same way I treat the thought of being hit by a double-decker bus. Except that I’m fairly certain the odds of the bus are substantially higher. Those fuckers are dangerous.

So no, I’m not afraid, and neither are most people I know here. Yes, I value my life, and the only thing I value more than it is how I live it. I value it too much to ever live in a way I do not choose, and I do not choose to be afraid of an intangible threat. Though admittedly most tangible ones have trouble penetrating the thick layer of arrogance too.

But I’d rather be an arrogant bitch than soil myself every time I watch the news.

Is anyone familiar with the concept of a gift economy? Well I am. At least, I am now. I went to a talk on various aspects of Burning Man (read: hippie) culture. The worst one by far was the “gift economy” talk which may have been the biggest load of crap I have ever heard in my life. Unfortunately, the speaker was useless. Had she been any less than terrible I would have felt entirely fine about arguing with her, but as things stood any debate between us would have resembled a rabbit being run over by an articulated lorry.

I’ll cover the concepts that were expressed very briefly, and then rant about them at length. First off they claimed that capitalism “believed in scarcity”, the logic of this being that this is why they save, or “hoard” posessions. Gift economists, or worthless hippies as I generally prefer to call them, “believe in plenty”, and therefore share everything.

What the fuck?

Believing in plenty kinda sounds like the act of believing there is more than enough for everyone actually makes some sort of difference to reality. Like somehow, giving away whats yours will magically create more to go around. Except of course for the essential flaw here, because nothing is yours. You have no right to anything, the only things you will have are gifted to you by someone else, someone who has no reason to give you anything except your need of it.

The more capable you are of surviving, the less you will be given, the more you contribute, the less you will receive and the more you must give away, all the time, to those who do less, but need more. Nothing can be earned, everyone is a beggar. The act of giving becomes meaningless, nothing is given but for the sake of need. Nothing is posessed, because that would be hoarding.

Capitalism is based on getting what you earn, on trading value for value. No, its not perfect as a system. But its by far the best concept anyone has come up with. but it means if you want something, and you work hard enough, have enough skills or talents, you can get it. In a gift economy, the only things you can possess are what no-one else needs or wants. What a disgusting waste of human ability and achievement.

Not that such an impractical and ridiculous idea could ever be put into practise anyway. Humans are fools, not suicidal imbeciles. I will never believe humanity is crap enough to really attempt that. I just wish they would stop calling it a utopian fucking ideal. Because if thats an ideal evolved society, then I’ll take back my banana, crawl into a tree, and scratch myself for the rest of my life. It will be more worthwhile.

A very good friend of mine holds this as the eventual end for all of us too selfish or crazy to be in relationships with other human beings. To grow old, and die alone, accompanied by gin and cats. As pathetic deaths go, I like the poetic quality of the idea. Though upon hearing me describe this as my future the other night, another friend suggesting snakes and tequila as an exciting and challenging alternative, so I may take that one on board instead.

What is so terrible about being alone? What is it that we are all so afraid of? I don’t care if I die alone or surrounded by a cast of thousands, I’ll still be fucking dying and I can’t imagine I’ll be happy about it. Frankly, I would rather die alone than spend my life with someone who wasn’t good enough. Someone once told me you shouldn’t marry someone you can live with, you should marry someone you can’t live without. There is no-one on earth that I cannot live without, and I doubt there ever will be.

Now who can explain to me exactly why this should worry me?