Audience of One

S is for Spontaneous

Events often take a lot of planning. Making sure people are able to come well in advance so everyone you’re inviting can make it. Deciding on a menu in advance so you can be sure you have the right ingredients and know how to make it. Organising a guest list so that you have a variety of different people whose personalities complement rather than clash.

So when I decided one afternoon that I was going to have a dinner party the next evening, I had many things to think about at very short notice. This is what comes of being spontaneous.

The process of thought goes something like this:

1. Realise it’d be nice to do something at some point (like have some friends round for a meal).
2. Realise that there’s almost nothing stopping me from doing it quite soon (like having the meal in the next week).
3. Decide to do it (it’s tomorrow!).
4. Realise, once it’s too late, that spontaneity creates quite a few problems. (Like guests not all being able to turn up at such short notice just after all the food has been bought.)
5. Attempt to solve problems. (Call up other friends half an hour before the meal just in case they can make it.)
6. If problems overcomable, bask in knowledge that spontaneity has created an event not easily repeatable. (The four guests, though there’ve been last minute changes, get on very well.) If problems unsolvable, hide for a few days before another scheme occurs. (I can just imagine what would have happened if only two people could have made it, and subsequently got food poisoning, leaving me with large amounts of leftovers.)

On Wednesday I was cycling home from work when I got a text message sent a few hours before – “I’m going to London to stay over at Martin’s new flat, do you want to come?” If I was to go it would mean getting home, getting changed, and leaving pretty much straight away. I texted back saying “sure!” I had four hours sleep on Martin’s wooden floor (the two girls got the bed in the next room) before leaving with one of Martin’s pilot friends in the morning. Shooting down the motorway at ninety-five miles an hour a couple of hours later (there’s something in pilots that makes them think seventy miles an hour is far too slow), I reflected on whether what I’d done had been sensible.

The conclusion I came to was this: if I’d stopped and thought about whether the trip had been sensible, or indeed enquired about the sleeping facilities, I wouldn’t have gone – and I would have missed out. Spontaneity can be stupid, but sometimes it can give you experiences that you never would have had otherwise. The evening, however exhausted I came out of it, was fantastic. Jokes were made, laughs were had, food was eaten and (some) sleep was had, eventually. (The girls decided at midnight to watch American Pie in the room I wanted to sleep in.)

Somehow, my spontaneous decisions have just enough thought in them to come out alright – the dinner party being a brilliant example. As a result of that night, I’ve started a regular meeting of friends which should keep me sane in the coming weeks when all my friends are off at uni. Impulse buying is another matter however. (Two weeks or so after leaving school, I bought three A level text books because I wished I’d done those subjects for the past two years. I’ve opened one of them since and got stuck ten pages in.)

One of the questions I was asked at my recent interview (for the camera shop) was: “If your friends had to describe you in three words, what words would they be?” The first word that came to mind was “spontaneous”. Those of you who’ve seen a lot of me in recent years – would you have picked that word?

Matthew @ 14:46, September 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (5)

J is for Joker

There aren’t many people who don’t have senses of humour, and of course I’m not one of them. Finding things funny doesn’t necessarily equate to making people laugh though. I like making people laugh.

Round the meal table I’m almost never serious. (Come to think of it, it’s not just at the meal table that I’m hardly ever serious.) My brain is constantly, without me even directing it consciously, looking for jokes and laughs in everything that’s said. It’s rubbed off on my brother too, and he’ll often get the jokes in first.

I could never be a comedian. I’m not funny enough, nor do I really have enough material. I can, however, be the joker in almost any group that I’m in – often at inappropriate moments by accident as well. There’s also very few people who share some parts of my sense of humour, so when I’m with people who don’t I get funny looks.

One of the things that I do a lot is to play devil’s advocate, or deliberately reveal “truths”, or argue heatedly about something which means very little. Often a whole conversation someone has with me, seemingly on equal terms, will involve me revealing nothing about what I really think. It’s all a joke, and I’m just playing for responses. I joke around in conversations not just in an obvious, up-front way, but in ways that no-one notices but me (and occasionally others in on the joke). That’s another reason I’d never be a comedian – too many of my jokes are for me or those who share my sense of humour only.

This is one of the reasons that people don’t think of me as a joker – they don’t notice. I’m never mean or spiteful about it, but most of the time people just don’t notice that I’m doing it. They’ll always figure it out at some point, but it’s often hours or days later.

There’s another side of this that does involve other people that I’ve made reference to already – that of deliberately revealing things that aren’t true. Not in a sense of lying for personal gain but letting people tease me for something untrue and playing up to it. The first time I really noticed this was when members of a particular forum I helped run decided that I had an unhealthy obsession with ducks. At first, I denied it, but subsequently played up to the rumour without ever actually stating anything to confirm or deny it. (Unfortunately it’s now four years later and I still hear it mentioned occasionally.) It’s happened again recently in relation to a particular fictional character and the actress who plays her, and also in smaller situations such as me “admitting” that the reason I wasn’t going punting is because I’m petrified of the water.

Does any of this make sense to you? Just accept it if it doesn’t, because this is how I am, though it may not be visible on this site. If you ever find an entry completely incomprehensible though, I was probably trying to be funny and failing rather publically. I probably wouldn’t care, either. As James Thurber said: “The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself”. I’m certainly good at the latter.

Matthew @ 11:11, June 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)

I is for Inquisitive

inquisitive, adj.: Inclined to investigate; eager for knowledge.

Many of my teachers at GCSE were incredibly frustrated with me because I hated simple work. Or rather, I hated simple work when I’d already understood more complicated things.

I was inquisitive and still am, and found out many things (particularly in physics) that went far beyond what we learnt at GCSE. I learnt about relativity (both special and general), quantum physics (though not in complex detail of course), red shift, wormholes, four-dimensional geometry, imaginary numbers, nuclear fission and fusion, star life cycles, and speculations about gravitons and a unifying Theory of Everything. So when it came to GCSE Physics and we were doing gravity, I expected something more than Aristotle, Galileo and Newton. Where was Einstein? Apparently he didn’t feature until Physics A2 level, and then only briefly. I switched off after that. We weren’t moving fast or deep enough for my inquisitive nature.

It was my inquisitive nature that led me to install Linux, and still leads me in finding out as much as possible about the inner workings of my computer. I am eager for knowledge and always have been; I find chemistry so interesting that I am terrified of forgetting it after I start my music degree.

When people hear I’m only doing one science and am going to do an arts degree they can’t reconcile it with the Matthew they used to know. I was the science geek, who always had questions and was never satisfied, who wanted to go deeper. It’s such a pity that cynicism about exams turned me off that, and directed it away from school subjects. My inquisitiveness towards programming, web design and computing has distracted me far too much from schoolwork, and leaves me now with very little time to revise.

I’m also very inquisitive about theology, and while I’m not doing a theology degree (some of my friends are) I’m still reading books about it avidly (and can hold a discussion full of -ologies with my dad almost without asking what some of them mean).

Learning new things about God and his creation still fascinates me, however technical or geeky the bits I choose to look into are. It’s a life’s work, learning, and one I look forward to.

Matthew @ 15:12, June 12, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4)

H is for Hacker

Some people think hacking is all about breaking into others’ computers, and while that is something I have done (just the once, and the lesson has been learnt) this is not what I mean when I call myself a hacker. A hacker is someone who hacks, and hacking can mean many different things.

I am a hacker because I have an interest in the workings of my computer, and enjoy fiddling around to get things working just right. (This is one reason why I’ve switched to Linux from Windows – you just can’t customise Windows enough.) I also like deconstructing other people’s computer code to see how they’ve done things, and have taught myself all of the programming needed to create this site by doing just that. Circumventing limitations in software is another aspect of hacking that I’m interested in, though never to the extent of it becoming illegal.

I am not, however, a very good hacker. I just don’t have the time to commit to learning non-web programming, for example – or indeed the patience. Even when it comes to something I understand, I often struggle to figure out what’s going on (when it comes to deconstructing PHP scripts for example). I know next to nothing about networking or networking protocols, and probably have an incredibly unsecure system if it wasn’t for the fact we’re behind a secure router with a dynamic IP address. I’d like to become a better hacker, but as I don’t have the patience to learn programming I probably never will.

Becoming a better hacker is often dangerous as well. For example, I recently got talking to people at school who knew their way in networking to an incredible degree – and could teach me how. It was in being taught how that I broke into my first (and only) computer system, something I now regret having done. I did it, though, because the opportunity was there and I didn’t know enough about exactly what I was doing. Who is to say that in experimenting with other forms of hacking I won’t do something similar? I’ve already had to reinstall Linux on two occasions because I’ve messed something up. It gets more scary when you’re dealing with other peoples’ computers though – and there’s only a limited amount you can do on your own.

So I am a hacker, not in the criminal sense (though I have gone down that road briefly, only to run far away from it afterwards) but in the other sense: that of being interested by technology, wanting to mess around with it and being reasonably successful at doing so. The mere fact that I’m writing this from Gentoo Linux shows that to some degree I am a hacker – though, and I am the first to admit it, not to a great degree.

Matthew @ 19:44, May 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (5)

G is for Green

Green (n.): The hue of that portion of the visible spectrum lying between yellow and blue, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 490 to 570 nanometers; any of a group of colors that may vary in lightness and saturation and whose hue is that of the emerald or somewhat less yellow than that of growing grass; one of the additive or light primaries; one of the psychological primary hues.

Okay, so obviously I’m talking about being environmentally green, not the colour green. So why am I green and what does it mean to me?

I consider myself to be green because I care about the environment. I care about the environment because God calls me to. The Bible teaches that humans are called to be stewards of creation; we are to look after it. I want to do the best job I can of looking after the amazing world God has created because he’s told me it’s my job to do so.

This has an impact on many different areas of my life. One of the primary reasons I first supported the Liberal Democrats was that they were the only big party that seemed to care about the environment (and look where that support has taken me). I have practically promised myself that I will never buy a car that runs purely off petrol (in other words, I’ll buy a hybrid or even a fuel cell powered one if the technology advances enough). My house has solar panels (not that that was my decision), and we recycle practically everything that can be recycled efficiently.

This isn’t me trying to show of my green credentials – I’m mentioning these things because I believe that we all need to have similar attitudes if the world is going to settle down. It’s on the individual level that progress needs to be made. Governments can legislate but until they legislate on how energy efficient citizens must be, or how much they have to recycle (think Germany’s waste laws – if only Britain would introduce something similar…) it’s down to individuals. The environment should be important to everyone, and the more green people there are out there the less of a negative effect we as humans will have on the environment.

Another thing I can say to convince you I’m not trying to show off is by admitting how much further I have to go. I forget to switch lights off; I leave CD players on all night by accident; I travel by car when I could easily cycle. Actually, I don’t do much – notice that all the things I mention two paragraphs above have been instigated by my parents or haven’t actually affected anything yet. It’s like my life as a Christian (in fact, it’s part of it): I have green values but I constantly betray them. I’m a Christian yet I constantly mess up. The environment is but a small part of that monumental mess-up. (It’s also a big part of our monumental mess-up as humans, but that’s something for another time.)

Again, like my life as a Christian, the fact that I mess up doesn’t make me any less a green. It’s still a big part of who I am – a subset of my life as a Christian. It’s a very important issue, and one that I hope you’ll all agree with me on.

Matthew @ 21:05, May 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

F is for Feeler

Following on from the Extrovert of two weeks ago comes another Myers-Briggs preference, the Feeler. According to my personality profile, Extroverted Feeling is the “dominant function”.

I’m slightly sceptical about how applicable this test is to a lot of people with less extreme tendencies, but I seem to be quite strongly described by this. I feel, and it’s not something I can keep internalised. I am “predisposed to closure in matters related to people”, and I am “concerned with the likes and dislikes of others”. Feelers also go for more subjective things in making decisions, and see things less in terms of black and white.

Enough of the Myers-Briggs, though. While psychology can tell you a lot about yourself, it can also tell you a lot wrong about yourself (especially if you just took an online test and didn’t even get a proper psychologist to test you).

For a long time, I’ve felt things quite extremely. Not in terms of pain – I’m sure my nerves are just as sensitive as everyone else’s – but in terms of emotion. If I’m disappointed, then I’m often inconsolable. If I’m happy, then I’m ecstatic. If I’m depressed, it affects not just my mood but my energy. If I fall in love, I fall in love hard. It’s always been this way, and has just been complicated by teenage hormones and mood swings in recent years.

So what? Lots of people feel things strongly. Well, with me it’s combined with impatience, apathy and maturity. I try not to be arrogant (and fail most of the time) but I’ve always seemed to be at a higher maturity to a lot of the people I’m friends with – not in terms of being more adult than child and more responsible necessarily, but spiritually and mentally. Maybe it is arrogance, but I’ve gone for years with no-one but adults able to talk on my level about spiritual things. Christians whom I know and love make mistake after mistake that I try and warn against but yet they think they know better. It’s possibly because I’m not older and wiser: just wiser. You can see how I often fall into arrogance, if this is what I believe. I believe it because of what I’ve experienced and what I’ve heard from others who I know are far wiser than I am.

Maybe people need to learn things for themselves. As one who feels things strongly, though, I empathise with them when things go wrong, yet my counsel goes nowhere – and that hurts. As one who feels so strongly (and is as strongly extroverted as I am), lack of those on the same level leaves a hole, one which I feel constantly. I’m impatient for it to be filled.

I’m also apathetic about work, or have been up until now. It’s not a good combination. Suddenly I’m faced with the prospect of having to work hard, and far from driving feelings from my mind, it becomes even more of a struggle because the feelings are still there, and they’re combined with the unpleasantness of actually getting down to work for the first time since I helped with the nine- to eleven-year-olds on Sunday mornings.

This weblog is intended (in part) to be a record of my struggles as a Christian. The foremost struggle is when I feel things so strongly, I find it hard to rely on God for all my needs. It’s all very well saying that he can provide them all, but I believe sometimes he chooses not to (in some ways) to make us hunger for him more. As a feeler, this is amplified, and I do hunger for him more; as ever, that doesn’t make the feelings any less painful and hard. Impatiently, I have to wait to see what the future holds.

Matthew @ 11:50, April 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

E is for Extrovert

Some people, when they’re tired or worn out, just need to collapse away from people. They need to recharge. They may enjoy large meetings or going out with friends, but they might find it a bit tiring. Some people might be content to sit back and listen while others do the talking. Some people might be much more reserved until you really get to know them.

I am not any of those people. I am an extrovert.

To me extroversion is natural, and it’s taken me most of my eighteen years to understand how it’s possible not to be extroverted. People are so interesting! Talking is so much fun! Making friends is easy! It took a long time to sink in that for some people, while they may enjoy talking that didn’t mean they always wanted to be talking; that whereas other people agreed that people were interesting, that didn’t mean they were going to expend the energy needed to talk to them when they had their own friends right next to them; that some people liked having small groups of close friends, and striking up new intimacies around the place was their idea of a nightmare of stress and completely stupid.

I open up to people easily. If they’re of a nice, caring disposition (so as you can immediately see I’m talking about girls here) then I’ll tell them almost anything if they’re willing to listen. This blog in past incarnations was incredibly candid. I can’t mull over stuff inside: I need someone to talk to about it. I’ll explode otherwise (and have done).

Oftentimes (is that actually a word?) I’ll come home late, exhausted and really low. I’ll probably have been with a group of friends having a fantastic time, then as soon as I have to leave and walk home alone I’m down. Often when I come in late I’ll have something on my mind that I need to talk about to someone, and there’s no-one. I’ll stay up even later (even though I’m shattered) just so I can write it all down. There’s always a frustration within me when I can’t talk, and when I can’t let it out it builds up.

Other times I’m with someone and I have loads of things to say, yet they’re too tired to cope. For me, I thrive off conversation. If I come from school tired to the Youth Office and there are people there, I gain energy just by being with them. If there’s another strongly extroverted person there we’ll spark off each other and keep going for hours. (I’ll then walk home afterwards feeling incredibly depressed because we couldn’t continue the conversation longer.)

It’s amazing how completely differently people are wired.

Matthew @ 12:01, April 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3)

D is for Distractable

As an example of how true this is, I began writing this entry ten minutes ago and have only just started writing. I decided on a whim to talk to someone on MSN Messenger. One of the reasons Audience of One wasn’t released back in 2004 is because I used to get bored coding and go browse Wikipedia or a forum. The main reason I found the time to install Linux is because I got distracted from revising. I’ve been meaning to write an email all day but I keep on getting distracted. Even this entry is a distraction. In fact, even that email is a distraction. I should really be doing some schoolwork.

Schoolwork is so time-consuming. I say that, in reality I don’t let it consume time and complain that it’s so time-consuming because I always feel like I should be doing it rather than what I’m doing at the moment. I was writing a music essay the other week and started talking to Nick about George Bush. I wrote the essay in ten minutes and still got nine out of twenty. Imagine what would happen if I’d spent twenty minutes on it, the time it’s expected to take in an exam.

Ah, yes, exams. I’m supposed to be revising for them, aren’t I? That’s the annoying thing about A levels. Further down the school I could get away without revising. In fact, the only French test I got less than 100% on aged 12 was the one I revised for. I got lower grades in the subjects I revised the most for at GCSE. At A level though, I actually have to revise, and it’s really frustrating because I’ve never learnt how. Even at AS I didn’t have to revise that much. I revised about two hours for music – about as much as I’d done for the GCSE. True, the exam is only a third of the course, but that still isn’t much revision.

That’s one of the reasons I love the music A level – there’s quite a lot of coursework but it’s not too much of a challenge getting it done. I’ve had two compositions to do this year, which have only been a problem because I can’t work on them at home. Then there’s performance which has been easy, as jazz improvisation can get quite good marks. It’ll be less the case at university though – there’ll be a lot more essays to do then, and much longer exams. That’s the one thing I’m not looking forward to about university – that and the endemic drinking culture. What is it about alcohol that is so appealing?

In conclusion… what was I talking about again?

Matthew @ 13:39, April 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3)

C is for Christian

It’s an obvious choice for the letter C, but I’ve already written about what I believe elsewhere on this site. To do something different, this entry will have to take a different slant, so I thought I’d go into more detail about what Christians are and what Christians aren’t.

Firstly, being British doesn’t make you a Christian. People claim that the UK is a Christian country, and so if you’re British you’re nominally Christian. It’s a load of rubbish. A lot of emphasis is placed in the Bible on it being an individual’s choice to become a Christian. To be a Christian you must accept that you’ve messed up and that Christ’s death for you cleanses you from all wrongdoing, then commit your life to him. Those who haven’t done all of the above cannot rightly call themselves Christians.

Secondly, Christians are not homophobic, sexist or warmongers. You will get those who call themselves Christians (and may well be – only God knows what’s in their hearts) who are homophobic, or violent, or misogynistic, or many terrible things. They might even claim that it comes from their faith. They are wrong. The Bible is clear that we should love one another (which includes homosexuals); it’s clear that we should not be violent (and I won’t get into the just war debate); it’s also clear that everyone is equal (Gal 3:28). This doesn’t mean that it’s okay to be a practising homosexual (just as it’s not okay to be a practising adulterer), or that men and women have exactly the same roles (it’s clear from the Bible we were created to complement each other rather than mimic each other), but that showing any kind of hatred, dislike or differing attitude based on gender or sexual orientation is unbiblical and hence not Christian.

Thirdly, Christians are sinners. A common misconception (and one unfortunately reinforced by Christians) is that Christians are all perfect and we look down on those who aren’t. This is also unbiblical: we’re reminded frequently in the Bible that we are all sinners. Christians are just as likely to sin as others, but often the Christians are the ones noticeably doing something about it – hence the misconceptions.

Finally, Christians are divided. There are many different denominations, none of which I feel I belong to. Different denominations often have different styles of meetings, difference emphases on different things and are sometimes plain wrong. Then within the denominations you have different groups again, such as the traditionalists, evangelicals or liberals. It gets confusing, but you often can’t assume that people are true Christians, even if they go to church (or lead a church). Some whole churches can be completely dead. Often churches are filled with non-Christians who just don’t understand what it means to be a Christian and so think they are one.

I’m a Christian. I’m not homophobic, sexist or violent, but I am a sinner – I mess up all the time. I’m a Christian because I choose to be, not because I was born that way. (I’m also a Christian because God chose me to be, but that’s another matter.) I’m not a Baptist, an Anglican or a Methodist. I’m a Christian.

Matthew @ 22:14, March 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (11)

B is for British

Different people use the word “British” in different ways. It can describe a way of life; it can describe a nationality. Some think that retaining “Britishness” is incredibly important, and that it is being eroded.

I was born British. My family are mainly English with some Northern Irish connections. I’ve been brought up in England and have been affected with Englishness without realising it all my life.

This is something that many people get confused over – usually the English. Being British does not mean being reserved, or having a “stiff upper lip”. That’s much more being English. The British nations have their own distinguishing marks but there are few generally British ones.

Still, the British way of life holds a particular importance to some people (whatever that is). Often to these people being British is a mark of honour – you’re a cut above the other lot (the un-British). It’s these people that are often the ones against immigration (even of refugees), the EU (for all the wrong reasons) and vote for ridiculous parties like UKIP or (dare I say it?) the Tories.

The British are a funny mix. Ancestrally we’re a mix of Celts, Angles, Saxons, Normans, Scandinavians, Germans and a few other groups. The very foundations of Britishness were in this multicultural mix and now the proponents of Britishness say it is under threat. They’re right – by excluding people of other countries we threaten the nature of being British, and by reacting against the EU we weaken the international influence that has always been with the Brits.

Okay, I’m labouring a point – I’ll move on. I am glad to be British, but not because of some belief in British superiority. As a Brit I’ve grown up speaking English and consider myself lucky to have it as a first language. I have a British passport. (For some reason I’ve always been told British passports are very good at getting you into other countries – maybe people think Brits are unlikely to stay away from home for too long.) I have the good fortune to be in a very rich country. This doesn’t give me any particular love for my nation though: I feel sure that were Britain part of a federal Europe I would have similar things. I like being British because of the opportunities it gives me, and am under no illusions that this is necessarily something Brits have sole claim to. I can’t see that Britain has anything special in itself: I’ve never understood patriotism for anything other than sport.

If the EU came together into a federation of states rather than just a collection of individual countries like at the moment I would have no objection. It is entirely possible to keep British individuality while part of of federal Europe. It would make travelling in Europe so much easier and would get rid of the terrible isolation that the Channel has given our nation.

So, I’m British. This doesn’t mean I’m a patriotic (or even nationalistic) right-wing fanatic. It does not make me racist. It makes me part of a multicultural society with a large minority who dislike its multiculturalness (but will still go down town for a Chinese takeaway). It makes me a European – and even though I think British comedy and rock music can’t be bettered, it does not make me special.

Matthew @ 09:23, March 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (13)

A is for Author

For as long as I can remember I’ve been writing stories. I remember when I was five or six being taught about speech marks for the first time and not understanding the point. I grew up wanting to write a novel, a desire now countered with realism (I’m not especially good at writing fiction) but still present. My love of creative writing led me to take English at AS level, as a third of the subject was original writing. However, writing about why I’d written something a particular way didn’t come naturally to me and I missed the top A grade because of it.

I’ve also been writing for the internet for almost as long as I’ve been using it. Writing online can be very different from writing anywhere else; then again, it can be very similar. There is no real equivalent of the weblog away from the internet, but weblogs can include the same kind of writing as newspaper columnists, for example. I tend not to classify weblogs on the fiction–non-fiction scale – they can be both, even within one entry. As a weblog author, I try to get a mix.

If I ever write a book it’s much more likely to be non-fiction than fiction; I find writing fiction more enjoyable though. The freedom to create characters how you want, to build up a picture of them in so many different ways; using words to convey subtext or explicit meaning or both; there are so many things to enjoy in writing fiction that I wish I had more ideas for stories. Maybe it’s busyness that keeps them from me, I don’t know. Writing stories is a fantastic feeling. I’d love to have the time just to think and write, but somehow I doubt that even with the time I’d write anything good. It’ll stay a dream, though.

Matthew @ 20:29, February 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)