The Trouble with Being English

I was at the Irish pub for quiz night (trivia they call it), and I got into a bit of a discussion with this bloke and I think I managed to offend him while being entirely friendly. He had been hitting on my friend for about 20 minutes - she was pretty drunk, but her boyfriend works behind the bar and he's also built like a brick shithouse, so I figured it wasn't my responsibility. Anyway, he didn't know that, so he came over to me and my other friend to smooth the waters and check he wasn't treading on anyone's toes.

As soon as I opened my mouth, I got the usual "Hey, where are you from?", and I readied myself for one of the three standard responses:

1) "But where are you from, originally?" (translation: but you are black and this does not compute with my notion of Englishness)
2) "Oh that's so cool - I'd love to go there / went on vacation in Europe once etc."
3) "Where in London?"

Now when you get answer no. 3 you know you are probably dealing with someone who has lived in London, or spent enough time in one or two areas to think they know their way around (a bit like living in Manhattan lol). Anyway I'm always interested to find out an informed American's opinion on English culture and this guy wasn't shy about volunteering his:

"Oh the damn class system there, it's so messed up etc. We don't have that here"

I 95% agree and I told him so, but I also said that there are some posh americans, that money was the governing class factor here because America was founded by rich men, and that the racial divide is just as bad as the class divide in England.

Now he didn't agree. Obviously he said he did - liberal white americans are generally really scared to confront race or say something which could make them seem racist, but I could tell there was something eating away at him which made him not really agree with me. It turned out, after much beating around the bush, that he had been tried to join an English gentleman's club when in London - he had the money so he thought, as an American does, that this was all he needed to buy his way in to 'class'.

Oh no no no no.

Oh no no no.

No.

That's the thing about the gentry - they hate new money. They associate it with cheeky upstarts trying to gain favour with them. You really can't break into those sorts of places unless you, and about four generations before you, went to the right school (Eton or Harrow), the right university (Oxford or Cambridge), and you talk like the Queen of England (not the King, he's just a racist Greek).

So anyway he had paid his dues to one such club, and was in attendance at one of their parties. He was not having a good time and was about to leave, I think because he found out they were all right wing toffs who didn't share his lily-livered liberal philosophies, when one of the toffs stopped him in his tracks.

"You are not a real gentleman, and therefore you may only take the ladies exit."
How humiliating. It's no wonder he has a problem with losing an argument with an English person - there is clearly an inferiority complex going on there.

So anyway - what's the trouble with being English? It's that everyone has their preconceptions of who you are and how you view them, and they're usually wrong. So this guy now dislikes me (I heard him telling my friend), I think because I'm not posh but I still owned him in a disagreement about the House of Lords vs. the Senate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk91m3WxR0c

Apple - the final rant

Ok, if you are reading this it's either because:
(a) you are a fan of my blog - unlikely based on the current subscriber count, or
(b) I have directed you here because I don't want to waste my energy having the same argument over and over again, and I have definitely heard your point of view before, sorry.

So first thing's first. I'm not trying to turn you against Apple - really I'm not. For some reason, you have fallen in love with your iPhone/Pod/Book etc. and I don't wanna break you guys up. But I'm also not interested in joining the relationship.

There are 3 main reasons I hear people love their Apple products so much and I am about to give you my reasons for disagreeing with all of them, and politely ask you to stop shoving your iOpinion down my throat
.
(1) "Apple is cool" (compared to microsoft / pc / blackberry etc.)
You are an advertiser's wet dream. You appear to be caught up in the notion that you are somehow "taking on the system" by using an Apple product. This is not true. Apple also make money by selling products to people. The history of Apple being perceived as "cool" has 2 origins:
a) when pc's were not powerful enough to handle desktop publishing, music production and 3d rendering, and other legitimately "cool" applications, apple was the only real choice. You don't actually need a power book to put your holiday photos on facebook.
b) when apple's market-share was small enough to actually be considered part of a counter-culture. This underdog notion has pervaded into the present, even though Apple now provides a Windows emulator as standard on new machines. Face it, the world would not function properly without Microsoft Office. You would be out of a job.
Apple is not cool, and neither are you for using their products.

(2) "It's so easy to use"
Congratulations, you are a retard. The reason iPod caught on so quickly was because of the way it was marketed to twenty something's with a very basic grasp of technology at a time when the future of digital media was very uncertain, and the music industry was desperate to impose restrictions on how people could access music and thereby safeguard their corporate profits. By creating a device that synchronises seamlessly with a free music playing and ripping application, iTunes, Apple have succeeded in doing the music industry's bidding by ensuring any music you download for your iPod cannot be shared with anyone, or listened to on another non-Apple device. So much for your counter-culture. Because you were too busy, or unable to get a basic grasp on encoding formats and you loved those little silhouette adverts, I had to start paying for music again. Thanks.

(3) "The apps are awesome"
Yeah it's amazing how you can get your phone to make fart sounds for a dollar - Alexander Graham Bell must be filling his pants in his grave right now. Or that cool app you can hold up and find the name of that tune playing at Starbucks so you can download it directly to your iTouch/Phone. Ever heard of Deep Capture? It's not an app.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv5e464aztc

The Competition

So I finally worked it out, with a little help from my friends. The reason people in this city are the way they are. Put simply, this city is one big competition.

I went to the wedding of a good friend of mine last weekend - a great guy who took me under his wing when I was new to the city, through whom I have made other good friends. On the bus I was sitting next to a guy I've met a few times before and we were talking about London and NY, and how long we thought we would end up staying here.
"The trouble with New York is, there are too many alpha people here. I don't want to end up in a club at 40, and wonder if it was worth caning my liver for the last 10 years just to shag some beautiful women"
Wow I thought, this guy is pretty alpha - a banker, works too hard, plays a lot of sport, and generally comes across as one of life's achievers - and here he is explaining how he is sick of the competition and longs to be back somewhere where you're not constantly competing with other people. So what's the deal?

Well then at the reception I was talking with an American guy who's been here for a long time, and he put it like this:
"Everything in this city is a competition. Every bodega owner, every gym, every taxi driver knows that if they can't offer you the best you can get for the least expenditure, then you're gonna go somewhere else. And it's exactly the same with women. When you're sick of playing the field, you'll realise that all the girls you thought were fighting over you weren't actually competing for you at all - they were competing with each other"

Now on the face of it that seems like the same thing, but the difference is, it's not about you it's about them.
He came to the apparently cynical conclusion that people here only settle down when they're ready to settle. When they think they've done as good as they can do. That reminded me of an answer my boss gave me a couple of years ago when I asked him why there were so many single people here.
"You know, if you look around on the subway enough, you'll realise that it's full of people who thought they could do one better"
And a conversation I had with a colleague at lunch the other day, where she talked about her friend's boss, a 40 year old guy with an amazing apartment, no close friends, and a book on how to fall in love.

So when will I get out of the competition? Not for a couple of years yet. As damning as the above all sounds on the prospects of meeting a nice girl here, not so jaded by experiences with alpha guys that she can't trust anyone, or so determined to succeed that her life passes her by, there's plenty of new blood around to keep things interesting for a while. And the wedding showed me that as the song goes:
If I can make it here, I'll make it anywhere

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx1Fg0Fmazo

Guns

So apparently there was a shooting in my hood tonight. I've been working way too many late nights recently and I decided to go out and blow off some steam with some workmates in SoHo. Then when I got back to my road I saw that there was a cop car parked around the corner from my house, and some flourescent tape blocking off the end of the block.

I assumed there'd been a car accident or something and I stopped off to get a soda from the deli on the corner. From what I could tell from the upset girl in the shop, it seemed that someone had done a drive-by and had hit a fast-food delivery driver and another guy in the arm.
So anyway, while this is pretty freaky and definitely doesn't occur very often back at home, at the end of the day it doesn't make me scared. It was definitely a score-settling. Why would you do a drive-by unless the guy owed you money? I feel really bad for the delivery driver though - I hope he wasn't from my local!

Anyway I digress - what's with this x amendment right to own a gun? Wasn't that written during the times of the Minutemen, when there was the need to defend the newly born Republic from remonarchisation by the oppresive British? Not to mention the Native Americans, or the imported African and Chinese plantation and railroad workers. There's really no need for civilian guns anymore.

Okay so I'm not anti-hunting or anything. I don't get buzzed by the idea of hunting for the sake of killing an animal, but it's not something I've ever done either so I'm pretty laissez-faire about it. So let all the hunters in states where you can go out shooting animals keep their shotguns. But seriously, who really needs a handgun to defend themselves unless it's from someone else with another handgun? And don't even get me started on assault rifles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkuOAY-S6OY

Ignorance is Bliss (aka what you don't know can't hurt you)

So I was in the bar a couple of Fridays ago, and talking with 2 of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless. We were discussing current events and one of them said "I don't really watch the news". I kind of didn't believe him - thought he was trying to give off an air of cynicism ("maybe he only reads blogs, or maybe he is addicted to NPR"). But no, I found out today he was being absolutely truthful, as he asked me what was going on in Iran that he'd seen something about while passing by a news stand.

I proceeded to give him a 5-minute summary of the events of the last weeks events, skilfully (or so I thought, smugly) relating them to US foreign policy and the overthrow of the government by the CIA in the 1950s, and pointing out that because of Twitter and YouTube, both American inventions, that the revolution was not televised, but digitised. He seemed to appreciate that I was so keen to share my knowledge of the situation with him, but I also got the impression that he really didn't care, that he couldn't even see the dots that could be joined between this distant land and his own life working as a consulting engineer in the big city.

For him, hailing from the MidWest and working in the Big Apple, life is probably daunting enough without worrying about some innocent protestors being murdered on the street by their own police for protesting at an obviously rigged election in a pseudo-democratic dictatorship, with legitimate grievances against his nation. This is the same guy who didn't vote for Obama, not because he didn't think he was the better candidate, but because Obama was a shoo-in in both NY and Michigan, and he didn't think that adding his vote to the many others to bestow as great a mandate as possible was worth taking 4 hours out of his day.

But I'm not here to condemn, only to diagnose. We Europeans have a sterotypical view of the US as insular self-obsessed people, who too often fail to see or care about the consequences of their actions on others, or come to terms with the possibility that American exceptionalism is not just born of entrepreneurial initiative and their blessed constitution (written by rich, slave-holding male land owners, and so perfect it has been amended umpteen times), but due to the fact this resource rich land was stolen from its native population, and worked by unpaid slaves for hundreds of years to gain its wealth.

So of course, the truth is somewhere inbetween what we think of them, and what they think of themselves. This is a country where a mixed-race man can become president, but also a country where a supreme court justice nominee with more judicial experience than anyone else can be labelled a racist for expressing the opinion that her poor upbringing and experience as a Latina woman could give her a different (better?) perspective than an old white male born into money.

I don't think you can blame people for not wanting to know about other countries if their upbringing and education has never related their own nation's history to other places on the globe. This is simultaneously a strength and a weakness.

So what is my point here? If you don't bother to investigate someone else's motives for doing something, then you will never understand why they act the way they do, or why they think what they do about you. If this works for you then cool, carry on your own way, my dear cousins. But you'll be missing out on something special.

Ah that was cheesy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IQxhkVIEw

Being resolute = achieving resolution?

Ok, it's time to regain some focus - here are my 10 resolutions for the rest of the month, the effectiveness of which will be assessed at the start of July:

1) I will not buy any cigarettes and will not smoke any tobacco unless I am drunk
2) I will not look for excuses to get drunk so that I can smoke
3) I will not go out for drinks during the week as this will jeopardise resolutions 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10
4) I will be in bed by 1am every schoolnight
5) I will aim to be in work before 10am every day
6) I will not bunk off work to avoid breaking resolution 5
7) I will prioritise the most urgent things at work, whether I like doing them or not
8) I will be friendly and helpful to everyone at work, no matter how much their attitudes, methods or philosophy on life fill me with disgust or make me want to stab them in the eye with a pencil over and over and over again
9) I will play guitar for at least 1 hour every day
10) I will do 50 push-ups and 50 sit-ups every 1-2 days

Having reviewed these resolutions, it seems that tobacco and alcohol are the root of many of my problems - who knew?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGE4uDzclQ0

What's with all the torture?

Okay this really gets my goat, or however the expression goes.

We know it happened, we know it was authorised. So prosecute someone already. I can't believe people aren't more pissed off about this.

Look it's like this - Obama's not gonna do anything cos he's got so much more shit to push through in this administration, and he wants some Republicans to support it. In my view he's wasting his time since they have opposed every major piece of legislation he's proposed so far, but I get it - spirit of bipartisanship and all that malarkey.

The only way to guarantee things get done in government, is for people to get so pissed off about something that it will cost votes to oppose it. So the American people need to get angry about this. Ok I get that it's a shameful thing, and people in this country (and the West in general) don't like talking about shameful things (re: slavery, annihilating indigenous populations, exploiting the third world), but this is not something that you can brush under the carpet - it's not going away. People died.

It's like the whole Iraq war thing. People were all gung ho about it when it kicked off, like "USA USA" shit, and then when it was costing thousands of lives, and $10B a month, people started getting all antsy. Even Obama opposed it only as a strategic blunder. That's not the point! No-one has a right to invade a sovereign nation except in self-defence.

Empires rise and fall and I think this one's falling right now. You just have to look at the facts, all the indications that are being indicated by the indicator, or whatever that Bush guy used to say. But there's an opportunity to strengthen the framework that makes sure the next empire (China) doesn't completely fuck you over when they snatch the baton. These are embodied in the UN and the Geneva convention, so start playing by the rules and you'll be able to call someone out if they break them too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4E0UtxI7b0

Wise Words / Guiding Principles

So the older I get, the more I seem to notice myself using the phrases that my Nan and Grandad used to say to me when I was a bairn visiting them in Norfolk. So here's my take on a few:

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"
Total understatement - a bird in the hand is worth a gazillion in the bush! They say you never know what you have until it's gone, and man when it's gone, it blows.

"Actions speak louder than words"
SO true. What people say and what they do are often 2 different things. Language is often used to communicate your conception of something that you will make happen in the real world. So make it happen! I know this guy who is always talking about what he will do but he only folllows through on it about 50% of the time. So whenever he tells me something I simultaneously believe him and not believe him - very 1984. I get it - you're a dreamer - it's like a play, you're playing a role and even you think it's real - that's why it's so convincing. But please don't get pissed off when people call you out on it.

"A stitch in time saves nine"
Also true. I'm totally guilty of ignoring this one in my professional life. Maybe that's why I am where I am in my career and not "higher" despite being a total ninja. I do the things I take pleasure in and neglect the things that require a little bit of forethought, hoping that they will all take care of themselves, or someone else will do it. Of course they usually go tits up and then I end up steeling myself against the inevitable backlash of why I didn't do such and such. And you know what? I couldn't care less. I'm very selfish in that if I don't want to do something, you'll probably never get me to do it, or I'll do it really badly just to piss you off, smiling sweetly all the way.

"You can't see the wood for the trees"
This ones a zinger. Life's forest is a very bewildering place, and sometimes you don't know you were in a situation until you're out of it. Going home always gives me a better perspective about what I'm doing in this country. It's true that "there's no place like home", but at the end of the day you've got to make your own life wherever it has lead you. So while this year there was a promotion with no pay raise, and my engineer wage totally sucks compared to the bean counters on the hill, I'll take solace in the fact that I kind of like what I do, and that I'm in this totally unique country with my own apartment, have enough money do go out pretty much whenever I want, an accent and good enough looks not to scare women off too fast!

"All that glitters is not gold"
Birds love shiny things. I'm always amazed at the high correlation between whether a girl likes something and how shiny it is. But all that glitters is not gold. Anyway I sort of get this one - I guess it's trying to say that things that have the characteristics of something very valuable are not always that valuable after all. No shit Sherlock, there's SO many fake people out there (I hate that word but I can't think of a better one). I saw this dude walking down Fulton Street a couple of weeks ago with a HUGE fake gold chain on. Who are you trying to kid, man? You're not rich, and even if you were I wouldn't respect you - people earn my respect or they don't get it - full stop. Anyway that's why I wear zero bling on my person, apart from my watch which works pretty much every time - thanks Grandad!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR_YtF9uFpA