I knew there should be a way to be a nerd and seductive. All I need now is a bright red jacket and a PHD in astrophysics.

Thanks to 9gag.com

No, I don’t believe all the stuff that I write. I consider the established wisdom, assault it with logic, and see if it stands. It’s all a bit of a game to evoke some emotional responses, to see what works. I don’t lie or misrepresent my position, but overstate it to get a reaction. And it’s only those blogs that get read.

I wrote a piece on sleeping with men too soon and got many heartfelt reactions, some from women who I’d slept with and fallen in love with – which completely contradicted my point and upset them in the process (not to mention totally ruining my sex life).

I wrote a piece on language and sensitivity, posted it, and then on the telly popped on the episode of South Park about redheads. Socially acceptable redhead bashing is currently an area in which I do feel a desire to coddle and protect people. I can’t understand why the rest of the world is tiptoeing around religious prejudices, and yet it’s okay when MIA makes a film clip about rangacide.

I was at home with my housemate and closerest friend Dave, who’s a redhead. I wanted to turn it off or make a comment. I couldn’t think of anything funny to say. I just sort of sat there for a bit waiting for him to laugh because that seemed to sign a social contract that I should too. I started echoing his laughter in a weird and unnatural way.

It seems thoroughly hypocritical. I am.

I was shooting a film in India with Lucas, a Nigerian Bollywood mate, and we met a South African guy who was white. They were having a chat about some upcoming sporting match, when suddenly the South African chap said ‘fuck you nigger’ and I almost fell over. Later I asked Lucas about it, and he said “No, he was just being friendly. ‘Kaffir’ is what he would have said if he was trying to upset me”

It’s only okay if black men say nigger? You expect to overcome intolerance… By dictating, based on race, what things can be done by whom? On ya. Sounds like a plan.

I don’t suggest that there is a solution… I don’t pretend to know. All I do know is that humour might be part of it.

Kieran is a mate from uni who rather bravely decided to come out during our last year at uni. It would have been a difficult choice, because there’s a lot of public humiliation and bitchiness in a course for thespians. I felt closer to him, simply because I felt like I understood him better. He reacted to my use of ‘gay slurs’ with indignation. I upset him – and Kieran, mate, I’m sorry for that.

I don’t know how it would happen, but imagine what it’d be like if it did: Imagine you were walking down the street holding hands with a dude (a really attractive, funny, smart dude that loves Phantom of the Opera and gives great massages), and someone stops in the street, stares at you two and screams “Faggots!” (stay with me) – imagine then you both just doubled over in laughter.

Imagine you buckled at the knees and collapsed in a fit of hysterical giggling, gasping for air, looking through tear-filled eyes at your partner who’s doing the same. Cackling, guffawing, hooting. Then straightening up with cramps forming in your abdomen, wiping the tears from your eyes, making that ‘Wooo’ sound after a good laugh, experiencing something simiar to post-ejaculatory exhaustion and euphoria.

His face changes from disgust, to confusion, through anger, wonder and then laughter. Imagine it is possible and it just may be – because if your mind can believe it then so can others.

What would it take for that to happen? How would it be if you did?

You won’t ever stop scared, bigoted morons from being scared and bigoted by telling them that there are things they shouldn’t say. You can make them feel safe, accepted, you can challenge them to overcome their bigotry, but you cannot pretend that all people are equal but that some words are evil.

Working two jobs is rather exhausting and is draining my creative talent. Here is a repost of a blog I made many moons ago:

I just lived through the most annoying day out of all the days I’ve spent here on the subcontinent. I woke to plan on going to collect my bike from the pimp-your-ride Indian style fellows. They’d made my back fender completely opposite to my requirement, even so I’d quite liked what I had seen when I went there yesterday. I’d asked them to do some changes, which was lucky because I ran out of Australian dollars on that day, so couldn’t pay him anyway.

So yesterday, the day after I’d run out of money, I went all the way up to Andheri to collect some money owed me by my agent. Two hours on the sweaty packed train, in to Warren’s office to find out that The Flag has now been postponed to November. To go with it, I find that the southern film, Pazhassi Raja, has also been delayed. Both were meant to by fighting for me by now, and neither seem interested in making a film at all. I collect my money and go back down the train line to get my bike.

I am already in a bad mood, underslept and grumpy seems to make me a walking comedy act for Indian people, who are fascinated and incredibly amused by me when I least want them to be. I think there is something funny about seeing a huge, cowboy-hat-wearing white guy storming around in a fury. Getting pointed at and laughed at is something that only further enrages me.

I get to the mechanic to find that he’s not changed it at all like I’d asked. I wanted the back mud guard to cover the back wheel, so that it guards the mud, as mud guards, by definition, ought. Otherwise you end up with a big skid-mark up your back. Instead of moving the guard back, he’s daubed it with welding solder and told me he’s moved it back – I decide not to argue, and instead ask why he’s changed my electrical amp-meter. He tells me he changed it because the last one wasn’t working.

I tell him it was working because it wasn’t connected, but he ensures me that it wasn’t, and that’s why he replaced it. The new one doesn’t work either, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. I then notice that my clutch lever has been broken, and he tells me he’ll sort it out. An hour later, he hasn’t sorted it out, so I do so myself, getting one out of his shop and fitting it on myself. Then he asks for the money for the lever. I explain that he broke it so he should pay for it, and he agrees to pay, for the labour. I did the labour.

Then I notice that my petrol filter’s missing, and this I do get replaced for free, only to watch the new little glass jar half-fill with petrol before the tank runs dry. I am bemused, because I left it with 10 litres in the tank, and that would usually take the bike a good 330Kms, so I assume the fuel has been syphoned out. I ask him to refill it, and he gives me two coke-bottles worth of petrol. I press the point, and after two hours of haggling, I get 4 more litres out of him.

Notice the thin white tube from under the petrol tank? That’s where my petrol filter should have been. Notice fender doesn’t come out over the wheel, and the right (clutch) lever is broken.

During the haggling for my own petrol, I get a call for an audition. I have to go right away, back to Andheri. The same annoying smelly sweaty train line back, only this time in peak hour. I get my petrol (well, half of it) and park my bike near the train station and head up.

The train’s pulling in when I get to the station so I dash on. Finally up at Andheri later, I get off and get ticket checked. My earlier two trips I’d bought tickets, but in my dash this time I didn’t buy one. I am fined. I am almost ablaze with fury getting into the rickshaw to go to the audition. You know the kind of fury that begs people to piss you off enough to warrant being beating them with their own dismembered limbs? I had it, that fury that makes you painfully shoulder past people in crowds.

Usually little men ping off me like skittles, but today I’m myself bouncing off round-bellied men in my haste. I am always surprised when I bump into a fat man and find that his tummy is actually quite tense, like a large drum skin around his engorged internal organs, it’s robust elasticity sends me reeling, and further fuels my fury.

I get the rickshaw and tell him where to go, trying to restrain myself. I have a particular dislike for taxi drivers and rickshaw drivers in India. I am not being racist, because in Australia, I quite like Indian taxi drivers. Just to clarify, I know I am racist, but just then I wasn’t being racist, I was being career-ist. I really restrain myself from reaching up to pull out the rickshaw-wallah’s hair, or smashing their face against their handlebars when they claim to not know where something is so they can drive you in circles, or pick you up at the station, drive you a few blocks from the rickshaw rank and demand three times the price.

Pulling out of the station street I notice the rickshaw in front of me has a common Hindi saying printed on it’s canvas cover. It says “100 me 99 beiman hai, phir bhi Bharat mahan hai”, which means “Out of 100 people, 99 are cheats. Even so, India is great.” I grin to myself in agreement, and work on my philosophy.

My philosophy is that there isn’t any great spiritual thing in India that brings people here to find themselves, they come here to find cheap drugs and wierd stuff to look at and be spiritual around. My idea for personal development is that India is, at heart, intensely annoying. Things are done the wrong way, the long way, or not at all. It’s corrupt, hot, smelly and slow. It’s always late, but constantly impatient. The trick to becoming a better person is to let these things affect you, but rise above them and retain a sense of calm.

Any hippie can go live in an ashram and be calm and spiritual, there’s nothing to it, you’re in a calm and spiritual place. Try doing it on a rush-hour train compartment when the guys squashed to your front keeps ‘accidentally’ stroking your balls.

So my idea is that India’s lesson for me is to teach me the patience and self control to live through the worst days of everything going wrong, and not let it affect me. To wash off the angry thoughts without the aid of drugs or sanctuary, through conscious mental control. Let each thing happen, and let yourself be angry. Know that being angry achieves nothing, seek for resolution, not retribution. So many people get caught up in tail-chasing demands for fairness. Don’t.

It’s important to remain open to positive things that might be happening right now, particularly funny things. Humour is the base upon which a good mind can be constructed. That’s the idea anyway. Looking at this quote I tried to let the irony sneak in, that this rickshaw driver in front was a cheat, and knew it, and excused it by printing it on his rickshaw. That the passenger in that rickshaw couldn’t read it from where they sat inside the rick, and I only could because I was in a different rick. Hilarious. Laugh damn you.

It didn’t really work, so I just sat back and indulged in my cranky pants.

I arrive at the place, get out and tip the rickshaw driver (another paranoia I have, that Karma doesn’t work when you want good stuff to happen to you – because then it’s not selfless. I can’t tip or give to beggars on my way to auditions because the reasoning is too selfish, so I wait till I’m pissed off or not auditioning to pay out. So I’m in a shit mood and I tip). I walk five paces and get my phone out to call the production house and see where they are. My phone’s not there. It’s fallen out of my pocket into the rickshaw. I pissbolt after the rickshaw, but he’s gone.

I find a public phone, and call it. It’s ringing, but no-one picks up. After five attempts, the payphone steals a rupee off me. I use another rupee to call my agent and tell him to find out where the audition is. I have another rupee stolen trying my phone again. I have another rupee stolen trying to call Warren again. I am out of rupees.

I try to get change, but the guy in the shop is out, so he opens the cashbox of the phone and gives me some of my own rupees back. I have two more stolen trying my phone before it picks up, beeps, shuffles and hangs up. The next attempt tells me the phone is ‘unavailable’ which means it’s been stolen by the rickshaw driver who I just tipped and didn’t smash face-first into his handlebars.

I have lost all the numbers of production houses, directors, girls, friends and family, photos, the lot. I just hope I can get the number back, or I’m really screwed, production houses only know me through my number, and I doubt they’d break their backs to find me on another one.

I get through to Warren, my agent, and find the audition, but am told to shave for it. I hate shaving and have been determined to grow my beard for weeks, but people keep making me shave. I don’t even own my own facial hair. I shave. I go to the audition. A gorgeous Aussie-Indian girl is there and giggles at me being shirtless on a beach with my hideous birthmark and pudgy tummy.

I go home. At least my bike wasn’t stolen. What a day. I’m sexually frustrated and lonely and cranky. Pete and Chris, my friends from the hotel left for Calcutta a few days ago, and my sugar-momma leaves me this weekend. WAAA! I’m all alone.

No, my philosophy didn’t work. I am still seething today, my butt-cheeks are fatigued from clenching in my sleep. I guess I have more to learn from India.

Technorati Tags: India, motorbike

It really does look very nice.

I saw a job on Gumtree: Nice people for nice pub W3

So I applied:

Hello, I hear you’re looking for nice people to work in your nice pub. I’m relatively nice. I smile a lot, I don’t tell racist jokes, and haven’t ever tortured an animal.

Exactly how nice is this pub, and how nice must I be to work there?

I used to own an ant farm, but I don’t think that amounts to ‘torture’. One of them died from unknown causes (who ever really knows why ants die?) so I freed them.

I suspect their cushy ant-farm life didn’t prepare them from the harsh realities of lawn life. Most of them died within minutes of their release in the updraft of a lawn-mower (okay so it’s more apparent why those ants died).

I will understand if after reading that story you come to view me as ‘not nice’ and that causes you to reject my application.

My psychiatrist told me I was ‘unhinged’ and ‘evil’ to the ants but I think he was just disappointed because I hadn’t become a psychiatrist like him. He said ‘You’re no son of mine!’ and disowned me, then continued with the mowing.

I now owe him for a hefty therapy bill that his secretary sent me. He’s back-dated it from when I was 2 years of age. I calculate that I’ll need to work for you 429 hours a week for the next eighty-two years to pay off his bill, so you can understand why I’m eager to get started right away.

He wanted to start charging from the day I was born, but I pointed out that I wasn’t capable of grasping the complexity of cognitive dissonance because as a baby all I did was cry, vomit up Prozac and soil myself.

He agreed, and pointed out that I haven’t changed much since then.

I will need one day of holiday per year to visit my mother on her birthday. She was committed to a mental institution last year for wearing too much beige.

If you have any questions regarding my application, please feel free to e-mail me on the above address.

The Reply:

Thank you for your response to my advertisement for barstaff. I am sorry that your application has been unsuccessful on this occasion. Bearing in mind the effort you put into the application I feel it is only fair that I offer you some feedback.

Whilst you clearly have many of the attributes we are looking for, sadly your admission that you are unprepared to tell racist jokes let you down. This is one of the key attributes we are looking for is the ability to tell racist jokes- but only in a “nice manner”. The caring face of racism if you will.

To conclude then, I am afraid I have offered the position to a gentleman whose previous job at The Fridge in Brixton has clearly left him embittered and twisted.

Good luck and kind regards,
General Manager,
CENSORED

Here’s a fascinating TED talk on the nature of robot artificial intelligence. I am still amazed that people don’t believe it’s going to happen, when the evidence indicates that it already is happening.

These machines are about as intelligent as amoeba, but far more powerful, and the speed of their evolution is far faster – as it doesn’t wait for biology but can be sped up on supercomputers. It is legitimately scary and exciting in equal parts – for their pattern of self-replication would put them in direct competition with us!

Tehcnorati: 4TUVCYBTXRTU

I wrote an article on Self-Confidence for PickTheBrain.com, check it out!

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/the-self-confidence-con/

Please ignore this (unless you’re Technorati): X4RZ9T4J8EC5