WillWybrow.com

Let me tell you, writing about things these days is pretty much impossible. Thanks to the modern miracles of education and instant communication, hundreds of more intelligent, more well-read individuals than I have complete, unmoderated access to the content of my long-lived, infrequently-pruned blog. Given my awareness of how woefully I stack up against the intellect of close friends, it has become all but impossible for me to feel confident about almost any worthwhile topic. Things interesting me at the moment, for example, include the ongoing state of the negative influence of religion. But there are dozens of popular godless blogs dealing with commentary on that situation, all of them together having covered all the pertinent issues beforehand and leaving the only scope for new ideas as comment on news stories. So any relevant content is going to be second-hand at least, and nobody will want to read amateurish, immaturely-toned blog posts about what they could get on any news website.

Even if I were to come across my own first-hand news, there are those who are far better schooled in language than I who could do significantly more readable work presenting said news. There are plenty of people I know personally with more insight, more imagination and more skill in conveying persuasively exactly what they mean. This means I am ruled out of writing about other things that interest me as well, such as films I’ve seen. All the things I used to be the only one doing are now being done much better by all these new people I know.

It has left me feeling unqualified to write about anything but myself, and I am not such an interesting person that I could create successful content out of that. Nor do I feel like I could create something genuinely humorous for entertainment, even by writing about the topics I used to, but from behind a thick fog of feigned ignorance. Being exposed to real people who can write well has eliminated nearly everything I used to be able to do by showing it up to be so far from acceptable quality that it loses all value.

I still often have brief flashes of inspiration, where I’ll realise that most people are dreadfully wrong about something, but too often they can be summed up in one or maybe two 140-character posts, so never make it this far.

Up until this point, you might be thinking I am just having a little self-pitying whinge about personal inadequacies, but that’s not really what I am driving at. I’m just looking for a new angle to approach writing from, since it’s something I do really enjoy doing, and this is my little way of asking you to bear with me while I come up with something to do.

…but here it is anyway, because I don’t have anything new to write

All the important bits are here, with some context on either side of the year to help you figure them out, if you can.

I didn’t put labels on it because nobody really cares. But you can all look at the fading lines and maybe imagine what your own picture of the year looks like.

This past week, I’ve been (re)discovering the power of a well-structured to-do list.

I always get a surge of motivation just before bed time. I look back on my whole day, which has usually been wasted just trying to find little things to do on the internet to while away the obscene amount of free time I have, and wish I’d done something more productive. This leads to a regular occurrence, the ten minute long future-planning sequence where I’ll think fondly about how different things will be in the future, a habit that started off even before the whole deal with the altercation and the trial that between them have consumed my life this year.

Anyway, aside from a lot of far-off hopes and aspirations that take a form similar to New Year’s Resolutions (and have as much impact), I’ll also come up with some things to do in the immediate future. I might think of something I’ll need to go out and buy, something of mine that needs finding from my scattered and unsorted possessions or perhaps someone who needs to be emailed or phoned (usually before a specific time). More often than not, when I wake up in the morning, I’ll have forgotten, and failing that, I’ll be too apathetic to get it done. And occasionally I’ll oversleep and fail by running out of time in the day.

Enter the humble, hand-written to-do list! Harnessing my nightly dose of motivation when it strikes, I can put down a list of jobs to do the following day. So I tried it for a few days this week. I’ve had lots of little things to take care of as well as one big ongoing task that has earned me money for the two or three Christmas presents I am actually buying this year (it’s not real employment, more on jobs later). Building a list before I go to bed at night gives me a plan for the day, and it is easier to follow the plan than it is to remember all the things I’ve got to do and decide by ear which ones I should pay attention to. It’s also easier than mindlessly bumming around the house filling my face from the fridge while watching TV and refreshing Facebook. Just following the list requires the least mental effort, so that’s what I do. Having motivation strike just before going to bed is useless without being able to carry the motivation over to the next day with a hard plan.

Aside from letting me practise my film title parodies by naming each list as a sequel to its predecessor, having these lists means I have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings. Where, without a plan, I might optimistically aim for a 10am morning, this would consistently become noon or later as I’d stagger out of bed in that state of tiredness that comes from having too much sleep (which I think everyone gets?). If I ever had an ambitious attempt at getting even earlier (due to the reasoning that if a 10am alarm means I get up at 12pm, to get up at 10 I should set the alarm for 8), I ran the risk of not hearing my new phone’s pathetic attempt at an alarm sound or turning it off in my sleep and snoozing right on through.

Well, some of you may know that I’ve had a couple of job interviews this week. The first was at 4:30pm, so not particularly straining on my undisciplined lifestyle, but the second (same place, different day) was in the morning. Not wanting to run the risk of not hearing my alarm go off, I fished out my proper alarm clock, packed away in whichever box it came back from university in, way back in June. Not only is this alarm louder, it is less forgiving with the snooze button, only giving me four minutes of snoozing before piping up again with an even more annoying bleep each time. What’s more, it projects the time on the wall, which is pretty cool. So, thusly armed, I was able to make it to my interview on time. Good thing, too, because I did really well in this second interview, whereas I’d not done nearly as well in the first one.

One of the additional benefits to having this new alarm clock was that, in conjunction with my deferred motivation tactic of penning out some to-do lists, I could now reliably get up at a normal person’s time of morning. I was hitting the 7s and 8s in the morning that I’d almsot forgotten existed.

One other thing I should mention about the faithful handwritten list is the satisfying ability to cross things off it. What’s nice about the analogue system of pen and paper is that you can cross an item off really vigorously when you complete a tough task. It validates and amplifies any sense of accomplishment you get after doing a job to be able to scrawl a huge tick across the words.

So now I am back in practice with regard to motivation and hitting the early mornings, even when still not going to bed until 2 or 3am. What use is that especially to a man whose only time is free time? Not much, you might think. That is, until you find out that nailing the second interview for that job seemed to counterbalance the less successful first interview and has secured me the job title of ‘junior engineer’ at an electronics company. That’s right, your favourite layabout Facebook-jockey, Will Wybrow, is going to be a productive member of society again, and you can attribute it all to to-do lists.

The sequel to the original list, which I had titled Shit to Do.

The third in the series was a flop.

Set years in the future, Shit to Do 4.0 was created with a contemporary theme to appeal to the shifting demographic its predecessors couldn’t ever target.

Hello, friends! It is that time of year again where we all get together and celebrate CJ’s existence! It is something, I am sure, that we all do over and over in our daily lives, but it is nice to have one single day set out for it that we can all participate in.

Please attach the CJR Day Twibbon to your Twitter avatar to show your support for CJ. You don’t have to keep it on for long (unless you want to), but it’s just a wonderful gesture in support of our wonderful mutual friend.

It is customary on CJR Day for everyone to take a little time out of their days to think up one thing about CJ that they appreciate. If you can fit this in to 118 characters, that would be ideal, since you could then post it on Twitter in the format @twistedeuclid [thing we appreciate] #cjrday so everyone can see it.

When I was a child in school, I was not the paragon of popularity you see before you today. I was a lowly peon of social interaction and as such, the sentiment that “beggars can’t be choosers” was the unspoken slogan that accompanied my friend-making sub-quest that ran parallel to those other, more significant ones like “do well in school.”

A guy moved into my primary school class. Let’s call him “Boris.” Boris was a really troubled kid who’d allegedly been expelled from his previous primary school, although the line we were fed is that he was forced to leave because he’d been overwhelmingly bullied. Though I can’t remember the exact steps that led up to us being friends, they happened for whatever reason, and I’m sure child-Will was happy for the company.

I thought it was pretty good that he had a Sega Megadrive. I had one too, so this was ideal. He even let me borrow Streets of Rage 2 for a couple of weeks, and let me tell you, that was awesome. He also was willing to play the Pokémon card game (as opposed to just swapping them, like the other kids all did). And when our school went to Stubbington Study Centre, Boris was the other person in my bunk bed.

At some point, circumstances dictated that I was forced to share Dark Will Wybrow Secret #1 with him, making Boris one of fewer than ten people who knew it (five of whom are family members) and one of two members of the list whom I’ve actually had to tell. I didn’t mind all too much. Child-Will managed to reason that, as much of a social outcast I was, Boris was even more so. It’s fine to tell secrets to those you trust completely, but it’s also fine to tell secrets to those who don’t have anyone else to share them with.

I lied to a woman on his behalf, once. When I told you he was a troubled kid, this was before they invented ADHD to let bad parents off the hook. Maybe he had that; I don’t know. His mother seemed genuinely nice but for all I know his father could have regularly beaten him and molested him so we can’t really be sure of the reasons. Regardless, one time he went down some steps to a lady’s front door and gathered up six empty milk bottles. I was waiting nearby but most insistently out of sight. He then rolled them down the lady’s stone steps and they came to rest in glistening pieces outside her door. We then walked the fifty metres to his front door, outside which we were talking when the woman whose house it was came outside to confront us.

“Did you break my milk bottles?” she asked. She was a young woman and had a nice voice. He denied it. I said to her, “he’s just directing me home,” which was true (it was the first time I’d been to his house), but there was definitely an implicit lie there. At least partially satisfied, she turned and went back inside. I was frightened out of my skin, I’ll be honest. I fucking hate getting in trouble — even now — and being a nervous, awkward child amplified it. I was too young to have ever considered “what’s the worst that could happen?” as a response to doing something naughty or irresponsible, which is why I was such a well-behaved and nice boy in school.

One lazy weekend when I was at home, probably blowing all my time on my computer (some things never change, right?), some police officers came to my door. No, nothing to do with the milk bottles, we’re on a new story now (and besides, I was hiding out of sight when they were broken, remember?). There had apparently been reports of a burglary at my house. Someone had dialled 999 and given my name and my full address to the police as the victim of a break-in, so the police showed up. My parents didn’t know what to think. On the one had was their bright, clever, nice, well-behaved son (that’s how I was, honestly) saying he didn’t know anything about it, and on the other there was some irrefutable evidence that someone who knew my name and full address had telephoned the emergency line.

Boris and I had a mutual friend. Let’s call him “Corbett.” Corbett came to me in confidence one day to basically rat out Boris as the guy who’d prank called the police, pretending to be me. I was so grateful that he had the integrity to tell me, and I thanked him a bunch. But I was also so fucking angry. This unprecedented fury rose up inside me and I actually wanted to hurt him. I remember finding him at school and kicking him. There wasn’t a fight but man I was ready for one. I’m sure I yelled a lot, probably used more swear words than I’d ever done before.

Eventually, Boris came to my house bearing a greeting card with a handwritten apology inside. Nice, lovely Will would accept an apology, right? That’d make everything all better. Well, it meant nothing. I was still burning with a merciless, unforgiving hatred that someone had done something so calculated to damage my perfect reputation. I wanted to tear it up, refuse the gesture. Bin it. Burn it. Go back to hitting him. But I couldn’t. He read it aloud to me and my parents were there. I think his mother was there as well. I had to shake his hand and say “it’s ok.” It was not ok.

I couldn’t be friends with him any more after that. But it was nearly the end of my time at that primary school. I’d be off to bigger and better things soon enough, and I never had to deal with any more shit from Boris again. He went to the same secondary school as I did, but he left very soon after we started. And I never saw him ever again after that.

But there you go, a true story about betrayal and an example of when I started to learn how to be so angry at things.

The Pokémon Village Fête 2009 was broken when I went to Liverpool. The tent in the shopping centre had been put up wrong and wouldn’t support the hundreds of people that’d be walking in and out and through it. So I didn’t get to partake in any of the cool stuff they had available, only the Regigigas download.

Then I found the money to take a day trip up to the Westfield Shopping Centre in Derby, and everything changed. It had already been running in Derby for a few days, so there was no chance that it was going to go wrong or not be on. I arrived and used one of the magical Westfield interactive signs to find the shop I was meant to be heading for and lo — there it was. The set up for the most fun day in the history of days out.

In the front-left corner was the Pokémon Training Academy, where kids gathered to be shown the basics of the new games. Along the left-hand side was the Village Green, where you could get your face or hand painted, and get given balloon models of Pokémon. In the far-left corner was the Photo Station with the huge Pikachu. Along the back wall was the Pokémon Cinema where Giratina and the Sky Warrior was being shown. In the far-right corner was the Trading Card Game table where the lovely PokéGirls were playing a whole load of cards in short, three-prize games. I forgot to bring my decks so I didn’t sit down and play, though I did watch. Along the right was the Regigigas distribution and supposedly a Pokémon Ranger and Mystery Dungeon showcase, though the systems actually all had copies of Platinum in them. And finally, in the near-right corner was Pokémon Battle Revolution on the Wii and a raffle ticket system for assigning groups of four players to mini tournaments. There were a lot of event Regigigas being played on the day, and an equal amount of Action Replay Arceus. Some people have no morals.

I met some really cool people and saw a few of the staff I’d met before. I played against good teams, bad teams, teams full of legendaries and teams of well-trained non-legendary Pokémon. I acquired a shiny Golem and a shiny Uxie, and gave some people things they wanted in return.

I got my promotional freebies and had a decent laugh with one of the staff members who insisted on quizzing me on the games and making up the answers when I didn’t know them. Everyone was great and I had an incredible time.

Token lunch at Subway, of course, and I took a quick look around the huge shopping centre in the morning. To round off the day, I met Keziah for a quick drink in the ever-popular Caffé Nero before walking back to the station (I found my way pretty easily; been doing really well finding my way around places lately) to round off an excellent day’s fun with a pleasant train journey home.

Brilliant.

Well, it looks like early indications suggest that the Wybrow Award for Best Supporting Role in a Holiday Day Out for this season might be going to CJ and Nick Richard for their work in Liverpool Day.

Late entries are looking unlikely in the face of the advancing close of the entry period, and CJ and Nick have edged out their biggest competition, Chris Orr, by a significant margin.

If the experts’ predictions hold true, CJ and Nick will take the joint prize from Francesca Bull, whose sterling efforts down in Basingstoke during the previous holiday period earned her the award last time.

We now go live to our awards correspondent, Bill, with his views:

Well, as you know, this holiday’s themes have been Triumphing over Adversity and Long Distance Collaboration. What we’ve seen this afternoon is an incredible debut performance by Nick, with CJ’s solid, dependable brilliance prevailing over all the difficulties they both faced in this gruelling trial-by-fire. If they place first this holiday, as we all by now expect, it will have been well earned and well deserved. Back to you in the studio:

As you can plainly see, we are in very little doubt of the brothers’ success this time. The small and dignified handover ceremony will be due to take place in just a few short weeks, hardly time for latecomers to prepare and deliver anywhere near a performance of this calibre. CJ and Nick will, I’m sure, be patting themselves on the back this week for a job well done. And, as usual, we offer our commiserations to Chris Orr, who currently stands to take second place.

Ok, here I am at the Pokémon Village Fête! The tent is empty at the moment, but I expect people will arrive and fill it up soon enough!

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.

I am pretty sure if I proof-read everything I said online, be it entries here, instant messages or Facebook wall posts, I’d never actually get anything posted. Every time I read over something, there’s always something wrong with the wording or the tone, or it won’t flow right, or a bit won’t make sense, or I’ll realise I’ve tried (and failed) to be witty. I can’t possibly be trusted to self-moderate, because I either have to do none and live with thoughts as they pour out of my head, or everything gets moderated all to hell and I basically have to start over.

Probably nobody else gives it any thought. It’s just me, worrying excessively about how I sound in informal situations on the internet. But when, for example, I’m talking to someone I don’t know very well, or I am trying to get to know someone, I wonder about the formality of my tone, whether people will understand what I’m talking about (because when you hang around with the same people all the time, you can sometimes forget that not everyone will “get” turns of phrase that are idiosyncratic only to your group of friends), whether I am being too boring… I was seizing up with anxiety the first few times I @replied to Eleanor because I don’t know her that well. What if I’d said the wrong thing? Something accidentally offensive? Something that sounds stupid? Something condescending? Something arrogant? Why does everything I say sound so wrong all the time?!

Unfortunately, this is not a problem that’s limited to just online-land. When I am in a social situation where I’ll really want to make a good impression on someone, I start self-moderating my speech. It doesn’t happen so much with people I already know, or people who getting on with seems less important. The self-moderation-to-the-point-of-self-censorship happens usually at the point just before I open my mouth to speak to someone. I’ll realise — not that I’ve got nothing to say, but what I have to say is just a pile of worthless words that nobody would ever want to listen to. So at that point, I’ll have caught someone’s eye, maybe look like I have something to say, come up short and have to look away awkwardly, or I’ll just be gaping at the other person’s face not doing anything. Then I’ll get surging feelings of inadequacy and self-pity and stuff, and feel a load of regret for not just doing something.

I only barely got the hang of small-talk after working for two years through sixth form at a supermarket on a checkout. Even now, after commenting on the weather or the traffic with someone out in public just to stay polite, I’ll sometimes look back with horror at how foolish what I said sounded. Then my eyes will involutarily and painfully roll back in my head and I’ll give a little groan of agony whilst I’m walking away from a total stranger who probably had to wince a little at how ridiculous whatever-the-hell-I-said was.

My only in with people is laughing at their jokes or agreeing with their opinions on stuff. During that period, as long as I don’t come off like a guffawing retard with no sentience behind the ugly giggling, I might feel comfortable enough that the other person thinks I am ok, and then I can grab that tiny interpersonal crumple zone and plough into conversation, hoping the crash isn’t too bad. Otherwise I will be waiting for them to mention something that we have in common and build on that, but that limits the people I can get along with easily to the kind of person who talks a lot and about themselves.

I’m not going to proofread this entry because it’ll never get posted. If there are errors, read around them. But if anyone’s reading and thinks either “yeah, this happens to me,” or “this is made up, nobody really listens to each other anymore,” or even, “it’s ok, Will, we’ll wait for you to become friends with us in your own time,” by all means comment and tell me so!