Below Belief

…and the high knowledge of removing problems from people.

Innocently walking around Shepherd’s Bush, London (that’s where I live) last weekend, a small, quiet man handed me this white card.
What a fabulous discovery – that such a complete personal service is offered IN JUST 7 DAYS by a man gifted at solving problems. And to have such a talented man living so close by is a relief. Next time I need someone to be breaking Black Magic and Evil Spirits in just 48 hours, I’m going to give Mr Khalid a call.
Fearful of giving Mr Khalid too much publicity, lest his powers should leave him if he becomes popular, I had to obscure the contact details. Let me know if you need me to put you in touch.

From Paul Ford at Ftrain.com, I felt just like this yesterday.

I carried much of [my] junk with me to New York, finally coming to rest in Brooklyn. For the last 5 years I’ve struggled with my apartment, as I described. It amazes me, when I walk into the place after a client meeting, wearing an ironed shirt and tie, having presented myself successfully in a PowerPoint presentation, to find my trash can overflowing, crusted dishes resident in the sink, and everywhere books and clothes, with nothing hung on the walls, and a slowly deepening surface of books on all exposed surfaces. The paradox of my exterior self and interior space made me feel that I was presenting a total lie to the rest of the world. The young, capable fellow who was describing the merits of good branding and smart data sharing to corporate souls was a complete fraud who could not keep his bed made.

Paul Ford at Ftrain.com writes on that peculiarly invigorating of activities: cleaning. I am cleaning my apartment this afternoon and it struck a chord…

I find it hard to clean. Certainly the basics are simple. If I can kneel, mix warm water with chemicals, and hold a broom or mop while moving my arms, I should be able to bring a blessed sense of order to my tiny apartment. Yet it’s taken me 5 years in this space to have even the desire to see it organized.
What I need is fundamental order, not nice carpets and fine furniture. I want to let a friend into the bathroom to pee without insisting she wait while I fix a few things first. I want my bed to be sleeved in clean sheets, not cluttered with books and papers, my closet to be a sorted index of good clothing options, not a chaotic pile of shirts and pants, clean and unclean, which must be sniff-tested moments before I run out the door. But keeping any real order has been stunningly hard.
Something always gets me down when I have the broom in my hand. I ask myself, how could I let it get this bad? How can I be such a fuckup? Going through boxes, I uncover photos of old girlfriends; one woman’s face, in particular, crops up every time I clean, and I always put it away somewhere with the idea that I’ll find a place for it in some album at a later date, only to find her again a few months later, her 19-year-old face, framed by blond hair, smiling at me across the table of a coffee-shop in Alfred, New York. I say “hello” to her, now, even though she stopped speaking with me years ago. “How you doing?” I ask. “I hope it turned out okay. Sorry I was such an asshole.”
Usually, after an hour or so of such discoveries, I put down the broom, telling myself I’ve got a good start, and step over the stacks of undershirts and printouts to the bed, where I curl up on the mattress with a random collection of sheets, clothes, pillows, and printed matter. I sleep very peacefully, then, having just escaped the weird emotional territory into which cleaning sends me while feeling I’ve accomplished at least something. Within three days things are just as messy; entropy trumps progress, and I’m back where I started, humbled by my own – laziness? denial? I don’t know.

Ethan Watters writes a fascinating book on Urban Tribes – about our generation and the reasons why we are delaying marriage. In it, I found this piece which, while it rings far too many bells and makes me feel thoroughly ashamed to be male, also needs to be written down and bourne in mind next time this situation arises. I feel sure it is possible to rise above the shallow seediness with which we seem to be programmed…

• There exists a depressing reality behind the cliche that men are often grossly inarticulate in situations where they are expected to talk about their feelings and expectations for a relationship
• Men think that the early stage of a relationship (the point at which routine sexual access is achieved with the lowest possible commitment of time, resources and personal energy) is a fine place for a relationship to remain indefinitely
• A man tends to overestimate his importance to a woman at the moment when she asks him to assess the relationship. Simply put: At these moments, men often assume that the woman has fallen in love with him.
• Men overrate the value of their affection – regardless of its quality, consistency or certainty.
• Men’s tendency towards grandiosity combined with their inability to articulate their intentions reveals them to be the most reprehensible of cowards. Surely, if men so readily perceive themselves to be the be-all and end-all at the moment when their girlfriend wants to know what’s going on in a relationship, shouldn’t that grand self-conception carry along with it some responsibilities for addressing the situation with candor, clarity and honour?
• Men often ride along in romantic relationships with one hand on the doorhandle. This fearlessness of momentum leads them to perform all manner of foolishness, including dangerous stuntman-like dives out of high-speed romances as well as more comical leaps from relationships yet to leave the driveway.

Photo by jessamynnorth.

Don’t you wish sometimes you were able to express your emotions as freely as this! Fabulous photo. (And I’m demonstrating how fascinating viewing other people’s photos is using Flickr!).

My friend Simon has a theory that “blogging is a mating signal, so as
soon as you start getting it regularly the desire to blog goes down
massively”. I tend to agree. In fact I have to agree. That my blogging frequency and general desire to tinker with this site, has gone up recently, says it all.
Despite the acclaimed “altruism” of most bloggers, I suspect our over-arching desire is to be recognised, to be seen, to be part of the blogosphere, to be a part of anything, to be read and to be visited. We love to be commented on, linked to, tracked-back, blog-rolled, googled. We love people who don’t blog to find us and discover the medium. To discover what it means “to blog”. To feel the awkward-voyeurism of reading someone else’s journal.
I was astonished to find the other day that my embryonic photography site beautifulmood.com is doing about 12,000 page impressions a month. No one’s buying any bloody photos but I get a couple of emails a week congratulating me on a nice site, so it must have been worth it. My day job is as CTO for a successful travel website and we’re currently doing about 400,000 page impressions a day, so there’s a way to go yet.