WillWybrow.com

Wearing things is such a bastard. Everybody’s so happy to have the temperature inside buildings sky-high, and seemingly more so when it’s the winter. I can’t keep dealing with this. To go outside and get to places I’ll put on a jacket and be warm but inside places I’ll have to take it off and be encumbered by it to not be too hot. What’s the answer?

As far as I’m concerned, the solution was worked out long ago back when we were schoolkids and used to tie our school sweaters around our waists by the arms when it was too warm. And if it was cold enough to warrant a coat, there were nice secure coat-pegs you could leave it on during the day. I guess what I want really is for trying jumpers around your waist by their arms to not look so ridiculous and also for university to have (possibly named) coat pegs inside lecture rooms.

It’s hassle at gigs as well. Nobody wants to be bundled up in clothes in the middle of a room full of hundreds of dancing bodies. But the walk back to the train station at the end is always an icy choke-hold that can’t be avoided (unless you bring a coat and put it in the cloakroom at venues which a) aren’t always there, b) aren’t always free and c) require you to queue up for ages at the end with all the other chumps who risked taking advantage of the facilities).

Marty McFly’s jacket in the future was able to automatically adjust size. That’s a pretty shitty feature really, but what I’d like is some variation where clothes can adjust how well they insulate you. That would be just fine by me. But until someone works it out, I guess I’ll just resign to be hampered by lugging a jacket around inside or cold because I didn’t bring one out with me.

I was watching a film just lately, and one of the guys in it told one of the girls in it that she was beautiful, or whatever, and she said thanks and whatever, they hook up or something and live happily ever after. I guess that’s how these things work in film. Oh yeah, before we go any further, this is my warning that nobody is going to agree with what I’ve got to say because, like a lot of my ideas, it’s just too different and will undoubtedly be expressed badly. But even if you do agree in theory, I don’t imagine you will in practice. Hell, I’m not ever going to think about this in a real-life situation, so I don’t expect anyone else to.

Breakdown of a Compliment

When Person A says something flattering about Person B’s looks, Person A can be saying a number of things. The first and most obvious one that comes to mind is that the “compliment” Person A is paying means literally that Person A finds Person B to be visually appealing through whatever it is between people that facilitates that reaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s innate or learned through “society’s standard of beauty” or something like that. What Person A could be saying is that he (for the sake of argument, let’s say Person A is male and Person B is female) likes the way Person B looks through no action on Person B’s part.

Person A might also be making a point about Person B’s specific appearance at that point: “you look nice today” for a (weak) example. Coming across in this instance is the implication that Person A has recognised the fact that Person B has either deliberately or inadvertently made a difference in her appearance and Person A approves.

Person A might also be saying that he finds Person B to be attractive even though most people wouldn’t. I wanted to avoid saying the word “objective” here, because I don’t think there is an “objectively” good-looking person, but there are people that an overwhelming majority of peers would consider attractive, and there are people that an overwhelming majority of peers would consider not attractive (plus, obviously, the whole range in between). If Person A is sincere when he pays his compliment to Person B, he is saying that even though most people think Person B is unattractive, she happens to be to Person A’s personal taste.

For the sake of the argument, I am going to make two assumptions. The first is that people cannot actively choose which physical traits they find to be attractive and which ones they don’t. I don’t think this is too far from the truth, and while taste may change over time, I feel it is largely out of the control of people themselves. That first assumption now lets me make my second, which consists of me lumping together my first scenario (where Person B is “objectively” attractive) with my third scenario (where Person B is not “objectively” attractive, but is to Person A’s personal taste) under the heading of Inadvertent Attraction, and leave scenario two (where Person B has made an effort) as Deliberate Attraction.

So, in this film, the line was something like “you have really pretty eyes,” it doesn’t matter about the specifics. This line fits into my category of Inadvertent Attraction — it wasn’t through any effort on Person B’s part that Person A liked her eyes. Given this, her next line, “thank you,” doesn’t entirely make sense. A compliment is praise or even congratulations for something, but if it’s a compliment for something that isn’t deliberate, why the thanks afterwards? Person B didn’t choose to have nice eyes, so the compliment doesn’t deal with her. The compliment goes to whoever is responsible for Person B being attractive to Person A. Which is nobody.

What am I saying? That nobody should pay each other compliments anymore? No, of course not. They’re nice things to say, and everyone wants nice things said to them and about them. But I am remarking on the realisation that Person B doesn’t get to say “thanks” afterwards. Nothing nice has been said about her, just the unchangeable circumstances that mean Person A likes Person B’s appearance. Person B can’t really take pride in having an arbitrary facial arrangement any more than I can take pride in being white. It’s just genetic make-up that we have no control over.

Of course, the thanks may have only been out of polite courtesy, and that’s maybe how it is the world over. But people flush with pride when they hear something good said about them — I know I do. I just wanted to say to everyone that, on paper, it’s just incorrect to be proud about such things.

Then we get into murky waters with things like nice hair or make-up, which can be part Inadvertent and part Deliberate, and then there are things which are totally Deliberate, like picking clothes or picking perfume. Paying a compliment to deliberate choices people make to please each other is like saying “good job, I approve.” In this society where having free will is an assumption we all live by (even if it’s not true), we are allowed to be proud of the choices we make. So that’s fine.

But good-looking people, beware. I’m on to you.

The film was Hitch, if you were wondering, and it was quite enjoyable.

When you were a child and your parents took you to buy shoes, do you remember the care and effort put into measuring your feet? There’d be a number for a measurement, given to one binary place’s* accuracy, and a letter for the breadth of your foot. Maybe this is because the growth of children’s feet is important to keep uninhibited (since we must all be familiar with the barbaric ancient Chinese practices of foot-binding). Maybe having half-sizes in children’s shoes is just a way to sell more shoes. Either way, the practice seems to drop off in later years.

I know that when I have bought shoes, I rattle off a number and am given a pair of shoes that fit. That’s it. Even a size too big will fit fine, really. You’d have to go a few sizes too big (but maybe just one too small) to notice or have any inconvenience.

I want you to think back over some shoes you have purchased — ones that fasten with laces. After your shoes were initially laced up across the six or so pairs of eyelets on top, how many times have you re-laced them?

If you have at all, it’s more than I have, and more than I suspect most people have. Do we not just throw them on? If you’ve ever been bowling, you won’t see anyone undoing all the laces on the borrowed bowling shoes just to do them back up a bit more loosely or tightly.

Given all this, what, then, is the point at all in having laces that reach all the way up to the opening in the shoe?

Two or three eyelets, tops, is what I’d say is really necessary to get the right degree of customisability. The other half? Useless. If there’s going to be anything, it could be unremovable but elasticated bindings across the top, but I would expect there to be no difference at all if the shoe were made a little more solidly.

Why does it matter? Well, it doesn’t really. But shoes come unlaced, and the laces need to be applied to places where they don’t make a difference. We’ve gone through more trouble as a society to achieve lesser improvements in convenience, so why not this? What am I really driving at here? Alright, you’ve twisted my arm. When I was admitted to the holding cells in the Leamington Spa Police Station just prior to my police interviews, they told me I had to remove my shoes. But my feet would get cold. I hate having cold feet, so I just asked if removing the laces was ok (since they’d confiscated the drawstring on my WordPress hoodie by this point). Time grudgingly passed, and when the time came for me to leave, I had to re-lace my whole fucking stupid shoes again. AND that was with the somewhat limiting use of one good hand and some extra fingers. God damn shoelaces.

*Here, of course, I mean the accuracy you can represent with a binary number using a single digit after the radix point. This would give a degree of accuracy allowing you to express whole numbers and whole-and-a-half numbers, but nothing more accurate than that (like quarters or thirds). I wanted to use a word that ended in -al instead of “binary” here, such as decimal or octal, where denary is to binary as decimal is to… something. But I couldn’t find the word or it doesn’t exist. If you can shed any light, please do. It maybe the case that I am too lazy to find it out.

Hey guys… I think I might have ruined my finger.

When I got it re-dressed last Monday, the nurse phoned the specialist to see if she ought to re-apply a plaster strip between my fingertip and wrist in order to restrict my finger’s movement and ensure that no strain was put on the healing nerve. This presumably would give it the best chance of healing. Well, the specialist, or someone on the specialist’s behalf, said that it would be fine to omit such a construct, and that I could have some use of my finger — it would be “fine as long as it’s not bent back.”

I mention this because at some point recently, I noticed that there was no more pain when I stretched my hand out a bit. Earlier in the week, I’d feel a stinging tug in my finger when I was getting close to stretching it out too far. It felt like a kind of warning that I was close to undoing all the plastic surgeon’s hard work in the operating theatre when he repaired the nerve.

Now that I notice that the pain has gone, I also notice that it doesn’t feel like it’s getting better anymore. Where before, I would put gentle pressure on the outside of my right index finger (along the edge adjacent to the thumb in the endmost segment) and sort of feel it; there’s now nothing. It doesn’t feel completely numb — if I apply pressure then I can feel it, but if I touch it lightly, there is nothing.

I have been acting quite irresponsibly, I’ll be honest. Getting crushed up against jumping bodies at the Carling Academy last Thursday probably didn’t help any. Neither did hoisting the idiot crowdsurfers (I fucking hate crowdsurfing) up off my face when they were inches from kicking my teeth in as a matter of course of their blatant disregard for anyone else’s enjoyment (we all know for a fact that if you crowdsurf, a band will think you are the coolest of all their fans and pay you lots of special attention…). Also causing more harm than help would be my recklessness in trying to get my finger back in use. Reaching for things with my right hand because it was slightly more convenient hurt, but at the time such things seem trivial.

I don’t mind a bit of pain. I like to think I am ok at dealing with pain if it’s something I know about. That’s to say: not unexpected things like receiving an injury, but the prolonged pain afterwards that’s associated with it healing. I’m good at recovering. But while I’m ok with pain, I hate the idea of damage. I sprained my wrist once. Not really aware of what the results were in terms of pain and mobility of breaking a bone there (since it would have been six or seven years since the most recent break at the time, and that was a collar bone and not really involved in movement), I noticed that it was a lot easier to deal with knowing that the pain was only a sprain and not a fracture or a break. This sprain was simply stretching a ligament a bit too far, so the psychological effect of knowing that there was no serious damage was that I could take it in stride more easily. Sprains are commonplace and they heal fine on their own.

When I was told at the hospital that there was potential tendon damage to my finger, it was a much worse feeling than the actual pain I was in (and that’s not just due to the numbing effects of the alcohol that night; trust me). The idea that I could have ruined my finger made the injury seem more real. If there had been no damage at all, I could deal with any amount of pain from the cut skin.

So, as it stands, I think I might have broken whatever fragile repair work has been undertaken on my digital nerve. I’m going to voice my concerns at the hospital when they remove my stitches. I’ll probably also tell Dr Srivastava, my plastic surgeon, when I see him in three weeks’ time. The day after my birthday!

If that’s the case, I will definitely ask him to have another crack at it. The NHS’s substance abusers’ overdose responses demonstrate its willingness to help people fix themselves even in the event that the stupidity of the people in question is the cause of the problem. If they can pump the stomachs of passed-out alcohol-soaked kids on Friday nights, they can certainly take another shot at trying to give me the top-left corner of my finger back.