Monday 5 July 1999

For a while I kept the painting in wraps. But as time convinced me that it would never be used for its expressed purpose, I unpacked it and hung it on my wall. It has been there for some years now.

"Just another manic Monday." I overslept a little, and as the buses go only half as often in summer, I was noticeably late to work. Not that this is likely to surprise anyone. The bosses are trying to gather excuses for our scandalous treatment of the clients, so I had to dig up some proof that some of the work we should have done long ago was not possible (or at least not reasonable) to do before just lately. Sifting through thousands of client files manually because the database is not ajour, for instance, is not considered reasonable for an understaffed office. Having an excuse makes the bosses feel better, the way human nature works, but it won't affect the clients much.

On the [journals] mailing list, Al (of Nova Notes fame) asked us about the most embarassing thing we ever did. Needless to say, there has not been an instant and overwhelming response. Still, it had me thinking. It's a good bet that my childhood was full of embarassing events: Even though I have managed to suppress most of them, I still remember many. I can't see how people can glorify childhood. Now I had these great parents and quite acceptable family otherwise too, but I still remember my childhood with something like dread. Even if I put aside the terror that was school (or rather my fellow pupils) there remains the fact that childhood is a time of ignorance. You simply cannot do the right thing because you don't even know the right thing. The laws of cause and effect are still vague, and things seem to "just happen". Of course, for the less cognitively gifted this is the way of things well into adult age. Even so, as a child you simply do not have the training to handle it.

As an adult, I have embarassed myself less routinely, but still with some quite remarkable results. Being as I have an overly positive self-image, it does not exactly weigh me down. Sometimes it can even be funny, like the logs story. But there are areas where it could really really hurt, and I would not be surprised if I have one of my life's largest humiliations waiting for me in the near future. An event that might leave me with some bad scars for as long as the people involved still remember me. I do not look forward to it, and wonder if I can possibly avoid it.

And now for something entirely different! Again.

I support the idea expressed in this Sunday comic of Second Chances, that we need more we's. Some personal pronouns are still pretty effective, such as I and thou. But already at you things get messed up to the extent that you (the generic you) sometimes have to explicitly state that you're talking about "you" (the individul reader) or "you" (the group of readers) or "you" (the generic human). And similarly, there are lots of we's and they's.
In fact, with the murky languages we have today, it's a near miracle that we can think somewhat clearly at all. Not to mention that we sometimes manage to communicate some of our thoughts. Of course, it often fails spectacularly. No wonder there is war in the world.