I’ve made a kind of promise to myself to do something, anything, that isn’t work, house things or TV (although I usually combine the last two), and at the moment it’s this thing, for want of a better name. Given my terribly dilettante approach to regularity, I don’t want to say “my blog” because I think I’d have to duck my head and gulp at the same time. Which I did, even if you couldn’t see it.
I don’t offer any guarantees that I have anything interesting to say - to all three people who read this (which is, quite frankly, a relief) - but I refuse to only go to work and come home and go to work, occasional dinners out notwithstanding, and feel guilty about how much luckier I am compared to large swathes of others. I refuse, dammit.
I’m having trouble writing (or doing anything) for long periods of time. Used to the brevity of twitter and facebook, that usually isn’t a problem, but I have other things I want to do, and the lack of attention span is a complete pain in the backside.
It’s mostly attributable to my job, where if the phone rings, I have to answer it, and generally stop whatever I’m doing to take up a new thing, and then return to whatever I was doing in the first place. Or go back to the first thing, do the second thing - I don’t always get to decide, because it isn’t up to me whose patient goes first, it’s up to who’s bleeding right now.
As an aside whinge, I can pretty much be guaranteed that if I’m doing something long and complicated and time-sensitive, the phone will ring. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. And if I’ve had to get up more than once, the phone will ring just as I should be reading the end result. For anyone in the know, I’m talking about auto-adsorptions, elutions, antibody things that aren’t in cards and multiple phenotypes - where one patient needs all the things to check all their things. (Why can’t all phenotyping methods be the same? Why dammit, why?)
With most of the things I have to do, it hardly matters whether I have to stop and start a bit, because a lot of the tasks I do are quick, so big whoop, I do it my way. But that intrusion of the phone is like a claw under my scalp, trying to scratch its way out every time.
And whinging aside (see what I did there?), it has taken a toll on my attention span. So here I am, doing this thing to redress the balance.
Having stared at the cursor a bit, I’ve gone on to check twitter and facebook, and holy crap, a passenger plane brought down by a missile? What the shit? To go all sweeping generalisation on everyone’s arse, the people in charge are really screwing this up. How are we still having armed conflicts? Again, why, dammit, why?
What makes me even angrier, and I know I’m going to sound like a lone hippy yelling “hey, man” against the dark, is how this will be turned into a run around complete with sabre-rattling and blame. Continued demonisation of one group of people over another. There’ll be arguments in tea rooms. Please. As if anyone in our happy group of campers (all employed, have roofs over their heads and food on the table) can possibly understand what it’s like to be either a) so desperate that violence is the only light at the end of the tunnel, or b) have violence as the only escape because culturally, that’s all you have had. I don’t think I do, and I try for an open mind.
Violence in large chunks is simple arse-hattery, and understanding why someone acts like a shit doesn’t excuse them, but demonising only perpetuates the shit. And I think around here I’m also ranting about a really crappy graphic I saw on twitter last night about how “Muslims” are trained to be terrorists. To flip that on its head, the largest powers on this earth are primarily judeo-christian democracies: and bombing the crap out of a third-world country isn’t going to win you any trips to heaven, despite the idea that might is right, or rather, God is on OUR side, not theirs. Bollocks.
We’re better than this. We’re smarter than this. The assumption that people doing bad things are a them is a comforting one, but also stupid. Just stupid. We’re all us, kids. All people.
Right, well I haven’t been clear, but I’m going now. Love and peace, peeps.
