Heh… the word trailers made me think back to my youth when I first used that word. I remember back in the day my family used to call them shorts. The shorts. “Do you want to fast forward past the shorts?”, I would ask. It’s interesting to notice how and why vocabularies change. I have lived a life where I frequently needed to cross the boundaries of vocabularies. By vocabularies I mean slang, colloquialisms or more generally a subset of words. I stayed in a coloured area and probably had only coloured friends at the time. At about 9 years of age I went to a white school. Not sure if “white school” was the correct terminology for it at the time. I don’t really know what the history of the school was up till that point. Perhaps private school is better. A private school with 99.9% of the children being white. A boarding school. Myself and the kids there pretty much got on like a house on fire. So as one does when one becomes part of any group, I picked up a lot of terminology, or slang. I also picked up some nuances of pronunciation as well as an accent.

I find it interesting that the words I picked up and used was conscious process. It’s also interesting to note that I could have attempted to introduce the other kids to the words I grew up with but rather chose to replace those words for their local counterparts or even omit them from interactions altogether. Right at the beginning when all these colloquialisms were new to me, I would incorporate words that would ease communication or prevent me from having to explain what I meant if I had used my own word.

The other interesting thing was that I found nuances of pronunciation and the accent I picked up were not a conscious process. I only noticed I had one when I visited my grandmother on a holiday a year or two later. My grandmother asked me, I can’t remember the exact words but it was something like: “Why do you talk like you are white?”. As I said in the last sentence, I don’t remember the words exactly but I do remember disgust in her voice. I was taken aback. From the tone of her voice I could tell my accent displeased her and in that one comment made me feel as though there was a chance I could no longer be trusted because I no longer speak like her people. My response was, “I don’t talk like I am white?” and immediately forced myself back into rolling my Rs.

From then on I became conscious of how I spoke. It carried on this way for a long time. I’d have a different accent for school and a different accent at home. To this day actually… I still do it. Around my family I can have a different accent than what I normally do. And what’s worse is that often around coloured people, I force my coloured accent. The problem is that this isn’t how I talk anymore so I don’t get practice using the accent anymore also I never really had the opportunity to study it so I can’t even mimic it that well. If that was not bad enough I also find myself using a half forgotten, dated version of the coloured slang I knew when I was 9. So interactions in this mode feel so fake for me. I feel like every word I say is a lie. Which it is. Even though I am telling the truth, the sounds the words make when they reach my ears feel to me as if they are a lie. Anyways I am in the process of fixing this. I am in the process of merging my accents into one.

So yeah, as you can see, I got horribly distracted. My original article was meant to be on expectations. I wanted to talk about expectations because of the hot-cross buns you get in the shop. Eating them (the experience) is never as good as they smell, or half as good I remember them (the expectation). So, I may start a new quest. I may just take up baking to create a hot cross bun to rival the flavour of the ones in my memory – the perfect hot cross bun.

Happy Easter.

Different. This brings me to my core topic. For a long time I was obsessed with normality and trying to be normal. At some point in my life at least 80% of the people I know have told me I am either weird, crazy or insane. I made up the 80% figure, but enough people have made mention for me to take notice. For me, the strange thing is that this usually happens when I am doing or saying something that I think to be completely ordinary. I would then ask: “What makes you say that?“. I would probably ask this so that I may learn to fit in better. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure of my motivation. I know that at times I do like it when I appear eccentric to others, so another reason could probably be the desire to be able to control my ability.

Anyways, the answer to my question: “What makes you say that?“, would normally be: “No reason, you just are.” or “… in a good way” or a combination: “No reason, you just are… in a good way“. Generally an answer is not gathered. There was the time about 2 years ago, when actually listening to what I had just said, I didn’t need an answer. In that case I had said: “Do you ever look at your hands and think: ‘Are these my hands?‘?“. In my defence, that day I looked at my hands and noticed they had aged a lot since the last time I actually last looked at my hands. They had looked like my older brothers hands. His hands are 4 years older than mine and his skin is a lighter complexion. So too was the complexion of my skin because at the time because I had been living in sunless London for a year already.

Anyhow, these experiences have shaped my personality to a large extent. Well, not my personality, just how talk to people I don’t yet know. I am very restrained. Often I will not say anything for fear of what I might say and how it will be recieved. Also it’s probably affected what and how I say things to the people I do know. But I know that everyone says different things to different people, so that’s nothing to be concerned about. So yeah, it’s made me not say or not do things I might normally have said or done. But, the thing is… how do I know what the normal way to behave is? How does anyone? Yes, there are societal norms. For example not flinging your shit at people. This societal boundary that most people know it exists. And I, like most people, am aware of it. It’s also worth noting that I have no conscious desire to cross this boundary.

The same goes for other societal norms. I know my eccentricities are well within the societal boundaries I know to exist, so what do I have to fear? Surely the concept of normal is not only a societal one but also an individual one? How would anyone know what they would normally do if I they have not previously behaved in that way? Surely the way they are at that point is their normal state? Surely this is the individual normality I mentioned.

Anyhow, from this I’ve learned that there is probably no such thing normality with reference to living your life. I’ve given up on this quest. This is probably a good thing if only to conserve future wasted effort. Rather I have embraced the eccentricities I may have and now relish in the fact that I see things differently to other people. I’m at the stage where I accept that and am now learning to use it to my advantage.

The ideas of eccentricity and using it to my advantage could potentially lead me to another post I want to write entitled: Delusions of Grandeur. However it is almost 23:00 and nearly time for me to go to bed.

Good night.

Gerard’s Life:

• Go to School
• Get a Degree
• Get a Job
• Get a Girlfriend
• Start an online service
• Become really successful
• Profit

Then everyday is a checklist too:

• Wake up
• Shower
• Brush your teeth
• Pee in the shower
• Use housemate’s shampoo
• Get dressed
• Buy coffee and a muffin
• Buy lunch
• Pick up news paper
• Skim read news paper
• Read Star Signs
• Get off train
• Have a cigarette
• Take a taxi to the office
• …

I just noticed that I have two problems as opposed to only the one I thought I had. The one I just noticed being bigger than the original one of seeing much of life as a set of tasks with a tick box next to it. The second problem being that nothing on my day to day checklist puts me any closer to my life goals.

I usually stop writing when I come to a realisation about my behaviour or realise how I can fix something. I have already reached a realisation. I always thought something will happen and TADAA… I am now successful! But looking that the discrepancy between the two lists, I realise now nothing will get done unless I actually work towards it. It’s a simple concept I know.  I have always known this concept to be true, but now I actually understand what it means. I think I assumed that you would automatically work towards your goals and things you wanted badly enough. Looking at the two lists, this does not necessarily hold true. Nothing on my daily list is getting me any closer to my life list.

If the last few posts are a trend, there seems to be a common theme among my realisations – I know a lot of stuff to be true and live my life by them but I don’t understand them fully. That is until I take the time to actually think about them.

So I want to stop here even though I have not addressed the problem of seeing life as a task list. Which I think is a bigger problem and one that requires a level of thought and understanding which I have no idea about. I will have to come back to it.