willc.me

So today I got handed the keys to my first ever rented flat. An era of sofa surfing has come to an end and a new one is being ushered in.

It brings with it exciting new prospects and a certain freedom that many people take for granted. For there is a downside to sofa surfing that is overlooked.

Despite the sense of freedom and adventure, there is always that uncertainty of where you’ll lay your head for the night. Life becomes the ultimate blag as you traverse friends sofas or manage to blag a house sitting situation. Everything is exciting whether it be the massive highs or the unwieldy lows.

Having said that, having a place brings a massive burden of responsibility. There are bills to be paid and the ultimate consumer of wage; rent. And that’s all very grown up. To a certain extent, it robs you of your freedom to go anywhere and do anything.

And being a man, we all know how much we fear responsibility. Whether in the form of relationships or bills.

Although it’s probably safe to say that the pros outweigh the cons. Bring on the new era of responsibility and stable living!

Following on from yesterday’s topic of vanity I thought today would be a good day to talk about preening. Usually associated with what we think of as the animal world it’s a wonderful part of social interaction.

Preeening involves:

b. To trim or clean (fur) with the tongue, as cats do.

2. To dress or groom (oneself) with elaborate care; primp.

3. To take pride or satisfaction in (oneself); gloat.

2. To swell with pride; gloat or exult. 
Normally associated with animals in the human world we do this by getting ready for a night out. Doing our hair and putting on respective war paints and tribal clothing.

Yet what happens when we’re fully dolled up and ready to roll. We have preened and in my friend group we use the world to describe what happens next.

You know that moment when you walk down the street with your mates and you’re having a good hair day. You feel, no, know that you look good and your sex is on fire (did I just say that?).

You see members of the opposite sex strutting down the street in the same fashion. They feel good and have confidence and own the pavement around them. It’s like mean girls in real life. That ‘blue steel’ expression fastens on their faces as they go into catwalk mode.

No one will look at each other yet they’ll all walk a little taller. They’ve already perved from afar and now as they pass it happens with the gracefulness of swan. Preening rocks.

Lacking in inspiration today I merely glanced out the window, deciding to write about whatever first caught my gaze. Unfortunately, the view from the window is that of scaffolding and the green mesh that makes the rest of the world distant and murky. So today’s little thought for the day will be on scaffolding.

Scaffolding is one of those fascinating things that our urban landscape has spawned. Ever temporary and ever functional it crawls across the city, temporarily engulfing a building or spawning one from the ground. This has been the case for Millennia. In fact, the first human depiction of scaffolding was The Berlin Foundry Cup which depicts Scaffolding in Ancient Greece around 500BC. That’s 1500 years ago. 

But what do we know about scaffolding? Beyond the sheer aesthetics of it. Well, you may not think about scaffolding being particularly aesthetic and admittedly it’s not on the most basic of ends. Yet some scaffolding is hidden by sleek advertising hoardings and those scaffold projects covering historic buildings are virtual works of art, creating an alluring mirage on the facade of the building.

Beyond the aesthetics, there’s the functionality of scaffolding, which admittedly I know very little about apart from closer inspection of the scaffolding out the window. There are three pieces. The poles, the things that hold them together and the boards keeping them in place. Well the poles are actually tubes, the things are couplers and the boards. Well, they’re just called boards. 

Boards and tubes are obvious in their purpose. To hold and add height. But couplers enter a new world entirely in their complexity and design. I quote from Wikipedia:

“Couplers are the fittings which hold the tubes together. The most common are called scaffold couplers, there are three basic types: right-angle couplers, putlog couplers and swivel couplers. To join tubes end-to-end joint pins (also called spigots) or sleeve couplers are used, or both together. Only right angle couplers and swivel couplers can be used to fix tube in a ‘load bearing connection’. Single couplers are not load bearing couplers and have no design capacity.”

Crazy. Well there you go. Some random tidbits about scaffolding. Now don’t go forgetting your boards, couplers and tubes.

Forms are one of those peculiar things that humanity has managed to wrap and indulge themselves in. And the more advanced we get as a species, the more obsessed we get about filling in forms. It seems like we fill in forms to do anything these days.

There’s nothing fun about filling in a form. It’s hardly glamorous and, more importantly, filling in a form very rarely involves fun, unless you’re signing away your life to do a parachute jump and death may be on the cards.

So apart from signing away your life for a potentially deadly activity, lets have a look at what else filling in forms gets you. Well, an operation, a mobile phone contract, a flat or even insurance. It’s always functional and not often that exciting.

Its so abstract in its need for us to communicate and put order into our complicated and modern lives. Can you imagine that cavemen would have ever thought that they would have been filling out endless little boxes in BLOCK CAPITAL. Probably not as they wouldn’t do a great many things.

But few things could be more different from what our animal instincts revolved around. There is nothing to do with sex or the need to feed ourselves, it’s either to consume, seek to consume or protect our consumption.

The worst thing about it, at it’s most extreme, is that there are the bureaucrats and pencil pushers who spend their whole lives filling out forms. How can it be that these people find joy in their lives? God damn forms.

As I sit here in the lull, the achingly slow void between Christmas and New Year, I’ve realised that we have almost a full week of nothingness. Who’d have thought that there was a week between Christmas and New Year and that means that I have something rare. Free time. But now I have the thing we all crave for, what is there to do with it? And is it even good at all?

People value free time so highly. It’s something that is greatly valued. Nobody wants to work but everyone wants to play. But when you have a whole 24 hours free and a whole week of it, what are you meant to do.

You can watch TV, though that becomes boring after 5 minutes of dismal viewing. For example today they had a fake Titanic on Channel 5. Well not fake but an older, and obviously less famous one than the one with Leo and Kate. Then there’s Facebook. What else to do when you’re bored but sit and make idle conversation with people you don’t really know.

Then there’s always meeting up with friends. This is the best option for killing free time. Meeting up as a commune of the bored and all of a sudden you are entertaining each other.

But in that previous sentence, I touched on another view. Killing free time. We kill it because it isn’t all that great. At least when you’re working you have something to do and a series of challenges to work though. Your brain is active and engaged and it stops you thinking too much about “problems” in your life.

For if you have too much free time you become a depressed mess. Normally an unemployed depressed mess. Humans aren’t meant to have too much free time. We’re meant to be out hunting and gathering or looking after the home. Bring back work, all is forgiven. Can’t wait for the lull to end.