#oneaday Day 146: Eve of Something

I have a job interview tomorrow — the first one for a while. Okay, granted, I haven’t been looking for a while due to the fact that I’ve been enjoying the freelance work I’ve been doing, but the position in question (which I won’t discuss for now for fear of jinxing it) is one that would be pretty much ideally suited for me, given my background, skills and indeed what I’m doing right now. As such, I’m looking forward to it.

The whole recruitment process is, a lot of the time, very artificial. I recall one time when I happened to catch a glimpse of a letter that someone had written to the place I was working at the time, asking if there were any jobs available. The language used throughout was all very flowery and took in pretty much every application cliché that there was along the way. Said applicant was “confident” and “enthusiastic” and I’m pretty sure she was “passionate” too. I’m not sure if she was a “talented generalist” (apparently that was the fashionable thing to be a little while back, I’m not sure if it still is) but she probably had plenty in the way of “transferable skills” and “relished” the “opportunity” on offer.

I mock, but I’m pretty sure everyone is guilty of it at times. But where does all that language come from? I remember sessions in English Language classes at school dealing with “formal letter writing”, but that mostly focused on layout and ensuring you put the correct “Yours faithfully/sincerely” at the bottom of a letter — a practice which seems to have fallen by the wayside in the age of the email, incidentally. I don’t remember classes teaching you buzzwords that you should use in job applications.

Perhaps that’s where school career advice is going wrong, though. I remember the whole Careers Week thing, where you took that questionnaire and you laughed when the kids of questionable intellect got “shepherd” and “chimney sweep” suggested as potential career paths for them. But I don’t remember getting any particularly useful advice out of them, barring thinking that I wanted to do something involving writing, even then. And I didn’t need a Careers Week to know that — I had already pretty much figured it out.

Of course, it’s not that easy, and your life follows paths that you might not have predicted along the way. Is it chance? Fate? Destiny? Or is it the result of free will and conscious decisions that you make? Either way, it’s often fairly unlikely you find yourself doing exactly what you’d imagined you’d be doing straight away. You might get there in the end, but there seems to be an awful lot of “paying your dues” along the way initially — unless you’re one of the very lucky ones, of course.

Well, I think I’ve paid my dues by now. It’s time for awesome things to happen. Bring it on, tomorrow.

#oneaday Day 59: Shit Happens, Life Continues

Life is complicated. And I’m not talking about my life specifically, I’m talking about the whole concept of life. People. Society. Everyone together, interacting (or not) and the strange, almost “chemical” reactions caused by one little thing that someone does having a knock-on effect and making other things happen. Chaos theory, I guess, only with less in the way of butterflies and hurricanes and whatnot.

Life is unstable, too. And again, I’m not talking about my life specifically, and I’m not talking about the “I could snap any minute and murder everyone with a claw hammer” sort of unstable, either, though for sure that is part of life’s general instability. I’m talking about things you take for granted suddenly not being there any more, or changing their form, or things that you thought were lost being found once again. All of these things are things that I and countless others have experienced recently. All part of life’s rich tapestry, as they say.

Things change. People change. Relationships evolve. People come together, drift apart. Sometimes stupid decisions get made. Sometimes wise decisions that hurt like hell get made. And sometimes things happen that you don’t understand. Sometimes you can see decision points coming up and you have no idea which road is the right one, if any.

Life is complicated. And people say that it keeps things interesting, that life would be boring if it was predictable. And perhaps it would be. No-one likes doing the same thing over and over again. No-one likes being confined to a routine day after day, clocking in at 9 in the morning, doing the same menial task for 8 hours then clocking off again at the end only to go home to the same old house, eat the same old food and watch the same old crap on the TV. But we do it all the same.

Unpredictability may keep things interesting, but it has mixed results. Sometimes it has great results, like the reunion of two close friends after many years; friends who have the ability to pick up right where they left off as if the intervening silence was nothing but a dream. Sometimes it has life-changing results, for better or worse. Sometimes these life changes needed to happen and were a long time coming, and sometimes you couldn’t possibly have imagined that they would ever happen.

And these things are happening to everyone, not just you. Someone, somewhere, knows how you feel. Someone, somewhere, understands what you’re going through right now. You might not know them yet, or perhaps you do. You may have spoken to them in passing, or perhaps they’re just a name on a computer screen that you’ve glanced before. Or perhaps they’re right under your nose, waiting for the right moment to show you what it is you mean to them, and you never realised.

Life is complicated, unpredictable, strange and frustrating. And however much you think you have yourself, or other people, or the situation in general figured out, things change at a moment’s notice, like a roll of a die. So perhaps you should stop trying to figure things out and understand them, strap yourself into the ride and see where it takes you.

It might be nowhere. Or it might be someplace far away. You won’t know until you get there.

Bill Hicks said it far better than I could.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMUiwTubYu0]

#oneaday, Day 161: Shouting and Screaming

So England went out of the World Cup today. I’m not going to gloat about that, my feelings on football are well-known and well-documented. What I did want to speak about was how the whole experience made me feel as an outsider who wasn’t watching it and could only hear things.

I was terrified. There is nothing else that you hear in relatively “everyday” life that matches the ferocity of someone shouting at football. When it’s the World Cup or even a European tournament and England are involved, you know who’s watching it, because you can hear something which sounds remarkably like a Spartan army blaring out of their living room. Combine that with those stupid vuvuzelas which everyone claims to be playing ironically and you’ve got a not-terribly pleasant noise for a mild-mannered gent such as myself.

Couple this with the sheer rage shown by people over a disallowed England goal (fair enough, from what I could see from reports after the fact) and you have a large proportion of a nation already fond of binge drinking and casual violence set to explode.

All credit, though, after the match happened, I didn’t hear much in the way of shouting, screaming or violence. I didn’t even hear that many police cars go past. That said, the vast majority of the fans would have been further into the town centre, which is a little further away from me. You could not have paid me to walk into town after the match had finished. Maybe I wouldn’t have been assaulted, shouted at or anything. But it’s a risk that I wasn’t willing to take.

Several thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, anarchists are rioting in Toronto. Canadians don’t riot. They certainly don’t set fire to police cars and smash shit up. I can’t even begin to imagine how frightening the experience must be for them if I don’t want to leave my house while a bloody football match is going on. I’ll confess to not having paid much attention to the news for the last few days as I’ve had a huge amount of other things on my mind, so I’m not even entirely sure what the riots are about. I could look it up but it’s terribly late. Whatever they’re about, they’re still fucking riots. Those are never good, right?

It’s been a funny day all round really. It’s kind of passed me by, almost. I wrote my articles from my trip earlier, so those should be popping up online very soon all being well. Suffice to say they will be all over Twitter, Digg, N4G and the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox when they are up.

And then tomorrow? Who knows. Each new day is a mystery right now, a face-down card waiting to reveal whatever Fate is going to throw me next. Technically it’s after midnight now, so I should be able to look at the card. But I tend not to find out what it is until the most inconvenient moment.

God-dammit.