What I know I don't know

"The more you know, the more you know you don't know". 

Aristotle

Yes indeed. The more I know, the more I know I don’t know. The more I read, the more I realise I have not yet read. But then, why do I persist in measuring my achievements – or rather, my lack of them – by what I manage to put inside my head? Surely it is what we do with such learning - or alternatively, our lack of it - that really counts.

Another quotation: The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them (authorship apparently uncertain). But if we don’t use our knowledge to save or to improve lives, then we have no more right to a sense of achievement than the neither the lazy nor the illiterate.

So from what I know I don’t know, to what I know I haven't done . . . My self-judgements tend to turn rather monotonously around what I have previously called the “tyranny of the everyday”: tasks that are never completed, or never remain so for very long. Washing, washing up, basic household cleanliness, accounts to be counted, bills to be paid, papers to be tidied. If I ever manage to achieve something vaguely long-term, such as sewing on a button, I feel like I deserve a medal. All so trivial, and so very, very boring, but if these chores remain undone life pretty soon becomes very difficult.

How does the average person move beyond this? Through measuring achievements in the workplace? A pay rise, a promotion, a bonus? A commendation from someone above in the hierarchy? The satisfaction of a job well done?

All this conveniently limits the time we have to consecrate to the most important goal I suppose we should really be trying to achieve – namely, being good parents, partners and friends. This delimits almost the entire sphere of influence that most of us can ever hope to have, and as such is our most significant contribution to the health and happiness of humanity. With my misplaced faith in the written word, I sometimes despise myself for not taking more time to read parenting books (or at least sufficiently re-read the ones I have already attempted, to allow me to action their very sound advice on such occasions as, say, when we are late for the school bus). And yet I also suspect that to agonise and intellectualise too deeply over such relationships could be a default recipe for failure.

There are some who have the opportunity to impact many more human lives, either by means of their innovative talents in culture, art, technology or human understanding, or simply by seeking celebrity for its own sake, and thus feeding the bizarre passion we seem to have for vicarious living. (These achievements rather often seem to be, so history and the internet tell us, at the expense of their own personal and/or family lives.) To successfully innovate, there are undoubtedly some that just struck it lucky, but most of the time the minimum requirement must be a rather thorough knowledge of all that has gone before. So now we’re back to where I started.

And so to the usual paradox. Instead of trying to rectify any of the above-mentioned failings, I am wasting time, energy (of all kinds) and yet more words.

If my 4-year-old had a mobile

This morning I had to leave my son at holiday day-care, screaming his head off.

He’s never been too keen on holiday club, for reasons he hasn’t been able to clearly express to us. This morning, he’d grumbled a bit on leaving home, but then seemed to be making a real effort to put a brave face on it, saying ‘don’t worry, I’ll be fine’ to his obviously deeply- concerned baby sister, and even yelling “yay!’ as we pulled into the car park. But as we entered the building, something changed. His face grew serious, then crumpled, then as I moved to go he simply dissolved into tears.

Anything I said only made him worse, so in the end I was obliged to leave him assaulting the ears of the long-suffering, council-employed teenage baby-sitters, and scurry away to leave my daughter with the nanny, then scurry even faster to get to work on time.

On the tram I wrestled with my demons, tears in my own eyes. I called my husband, who really didn’t appreciate me trying to off-load some of the emotional guilt in his direction: his take on the situation was along the lines of ‘life’s not all good, he’s got to learn to take the rough with the smooth’, and even better, ‘he must have been picking up negative vibes from you.’ No consolation there then.

So what to do? I felt as if I had to take action somehow. I finally realised that my reflex was to try to use that verbo-emotional sticking plaster of the digital age: the text message. I wanted to text my son, to say everything would be okay, chin up, mummy was thinking about him, mummy would come to get him as soon as she possibly could. As I sometimes do with my husband, sending him little “courage, I love you” messages full of xxs if I know he a tough day ahead, or just to briefly alleviate the boredom of commuting. A little good deed done, or a bad one undone, and so easily. A little text would alleviate my guilt and make everything okay.

I realise that even once my son is old enough to read, and old enough to have a phone of his own (heaven forbid), such messages would be of dubious benefit. Emotional sound-bites from a stressed-out mummy would not, I suspect, do much more than add guilt and anxiety to his side of the equation. Then, as now, would it really help him if I try to explain that mummy simply has to work, and that my holidays are a week shorter than his? Would it help if I tried to explain that we made choices? That we decided we needed a house that was big enough for him and his sister to have their own bedrooms, with a little bit of garden for him to expend his copious amounts of energy, to run and shout without disturbing the neighbours, far enough away from the city to allow him fresh air and garden fruit, and necessitate use of at least one car on a daily basis? Would it be possible to explain that, even if we did live in a tiny 2-bed suburban flat, and avoid absolutely all unnecessary expenses, both mummy and daddy would probably still have to work to make ends meet, including some of the school holidays?

It is not a problem with “collectivity”, as the holiday club director will no doubt try to tell me next time she sees me. My son is not nervous or anti-social, he is always asking to invite friends around or self-invite himself to theirs, and it is extremely rare that he objects to going to school. At present I count myself lucky that I am not one of those parents having to leave their children screaming and protesting at school 5 days a week, 30-plus weeks a year. Perhaps these parents are also feeling guilty because they have no choice, or guilty because they do have a choice as school is not in fact compulsory until the age of 6. But would we be doing our kids any favours if we kept them in the protected, parent-focused home environment for as long as absolutely possible?

My mother didn’t work, from my birth until I was at university. She stayed at home to raise the kids, a luxury afforded by the nature of my father’s employment (in a scientific domain), and by a carefully managed family budget (I remember going years without a holiday, for example). We were lucky, I know. This maternal presence meant I could read before I went to school, there were never logistical problems with childcare, and I always felt extremely well-supported at every step of my education. However, as an adult, I sometimes wonder if the results were exclusively positive. I rather doubt that I can be defined as more well-adjusted and ready to face the world than any of my peers whose mothers worked. Are maternal sacrifice and parental pressure more formative paradigms than maternal multi-tasking and somewhat blended childcare arrangements? And can me taking time out of both work and childcare to blog about this issue possibly gain anything other than the creation of yet another contradiction…?

Motherhood Facebooking...or Facebook mothering

I’ve got so many terribly important things I should be doing right now it’s completely unreal, so instead I’ve decided to whip up another blog entry. Returning yet again to my Facebook ranting, I going to take the easy way out by sharing my own recent attempt at a “micro-mini-series” of quasi-comical status updates, just to illustrate how it seems to me that Facebook comes to shape experience and not just report it. As I’ve said countless times, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but as motherhood ends up being the subject of a large proportion of my Facebook status updates, needs must…

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no.1: building a meccano motorbike whilst breast-feeding.

This was a genuine occurrence, and the one that set the whole series off. The question is, how many of the examples that follow were shaped by the fact I was now looking for humourous combinations of activities to report on Facebook?

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 2: cooking dinner whilst playing tennis - thankfully with an imaginary ball...

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 3: doing the household accounts whilst simultaneously entertaining a baby with a rattle and "wind the bobbin".

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 4: winding baby mid-feed whilst dealing with a felt-tip-pen-on-sofa-cushion crisis.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 5: putting clothes away whilst helping my son and his imaginary friends fight an imaginary wolf and throw it down the stairs. Then rescuing said wolf because it is in fact a nice wolf.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 6: talking to phone technical help/the electricity board/my boss etc. on the phone while pretending to the baby in the bouncy chair that she is getting full attention.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 7: manoeuvring around trying to set up computer and internet connection without waking the sleeping baby in arms. Above all take care not to let the dummy fall...

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 8: making work phone-calls from the day-care centre car park with baby sleeping in the car. Because when you said you'd be in the office the week maternity leave ended you forgot it was also the school holidays.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no.9: discovering work bag doesn't fit in pushchair. Well, it does, but not with the baby...

This last one was not even true. I could in fact fit the bag in, as long as I put it in first and placed the clip-on car seat afterwards.

What is striking to me, now I have compiled this list, is that none of these reports (with the possible exception of the first one) seem half as funny as they seemed to seem to me at the time. Which should really be a lesson to me. I guess real humour, like real literary art, stands the test of time because it has been carefully constructed: planned and drafted and re-read and edited and sculpted and perfected. The problem with the internet is that it makes it just too easy to put out any old tripe far too quickly. In my last entry I talked about the useful and necessary process of re-reading and editing made obligatory by the practice of blogging. Maybe it would be useful if the same applied to status updates and the like. If it were more necessary to take time, to “think before you tweet” for example, then a fair few of recent history’s media-mashup conflicts could have been avoided, and the internet would be not quite so chock-full of such utter rubbish. And like the paradox that ended my Blogging versus Motherhood entry, by writing about the problem I am adding to it.

A metablog - blogging about blogging

One aspect of blogging that I have really come to appreciate is the obligation to repeatedly re-read my own writing. I’m not really a spur-of-the-moment blogger: each entry usually undergoes an extended notebook-to-electronic document transferral process (or once a back-of-till-receipt-to-notebook-to-electronic document process, as described in First Entry) that entails much re-reading and editing. Furthermore, before starting (or re-starting), I have usually let a few entries accumulate before actually posting anything online, to be sure that it was really worth (re)starting anything, enforcing even more re-reading before publication.

Even once posts have made it online, I have been known to re-read them. Sounds crazy, when I think of how time to read anything - be it for professional or personal development, intellectual pleasure or pure entertainment – is at such a premium, and that there are so many more useful, interesting and well-written things I could be spending my almost non-existent reading time reading. And yet, usually during tram journeys, when I am simply too tired, after a rough night or a working day, to contemplate exploiting my commuting time in any vaguely productive fashion, and when the possibilities of Facebook and its hyperlinked off-shoots have been exhausted, I have occasionally been known to waste precious subscription 3G megabytes on reading my own blog via my tiny, eye-strain-inducing Smartphone screen. This can even lead to further post-publication tweaking and adjustments. It could seem rather narcissistic and egotistical to spend such time reading my own writing, but to look at it another way, if I can’t be bothered to read my blog, how can I expect anyone else to do so?

My point is, I have learned a lot about my writing style this way. I see that I overuse hyphens and colons, and regularly have problems with awkward, over-long sentences. My comma technique could definitely be improved. Blogging cannot really be used to rehearse and refine the formal, academic style that is necessary in my professional life, but writing in such a different context has served to raise my awareness of such style issues.

I occasionally also return to some of my much earlier writings. I couldn’t say when the “need to write” explained in my first blog entry kicked in. As a child I was a committed diary keeper – although for these I have not yet braved a re-read, in fact I’d probably struggle even to find them. I don’t remember at precisely what age I started keeping separate note-books for fragments of ideas for poems, song lyrics, essays, even some loftily-named “philosophies”, but most of it dates from the most intellectually-stimulated, emotionally-charged and narcissistically self-absorbed period of my life – namely late teenage-hood and early university days, before the tyranny of the everyday really began to take over. Very little of my material has been read by anyone except me, not even my nearest and dearest, although I did allow (persuade? coerce?) two female housemates, on two separate occasions, to read some printouts. I remember that one declared my writing to be ‘rather moving’; the other declared me to be completely bonkers. Any aspirations I could have possibly had of becoming a published writer were effectively felled at the first submission I ever attempted: two of my poems were rejected by an amateur poetry magazine which, I distinctly recall, had a stated editorial policy of publishing everything.

Some of this stuff is lost to me forever due to my appalling handwriting. Other examples are now frozen in time capsules of un-updatable software programmes. But some of it has survived the ravages of time and technology, follows me around via my paranoid data-backing-up process, and very, very occasionally still sees the light of day. None of it is any good. I will try to resist the temptation to post any of my archaeological finds here, although I suspect I will give in, because they make pretty much pre-written blog entries, and some of it is not entirely irrelevant to the extremely vague thematic of this blog. Then as now, I was fearful and muddled: then, as now, I wondered, worried and generally wasted words.

Facebook funny stuff

Another lengthy pause since my last entry… but I’m not going to go on about that again, just accept that my blogging happens when it happens.

Instead, I will resume my ranting about Facebook. A friend of mine has brought to my attention a very interesting article by Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books[1], about the recently-revealed scandal that Facebook deliberately tried to control people’s feelings - ‘to make users miserable’, as headlines have claimed - as part of a mass psychological experiment, by manipulating the quantity of either positive or negative content in their newsfeeds. This issue opens up a whole new can of worms concerning social networking phenomena which goes far beyond the scope of my previous Facebook-themed griping (see Facebook Face-off and Status Update): the only reason I mention it here is because I find that Mr Jones rants about Facebook so much more eloquently than me. He opens thus:

Heaven knows there are reasons enough for anyone to feel miserable about Facebook: the mediation and commodification of ordinary human relationships, the mediation and commodification of every aspect of everyday life, the invasions of privacy, the ‘targeted’ adverts, the crappy photos, the asinine jokes, the pressure to like and be liked, the bullying, the sexism, the racism, the ersatz activism, the ersatz everything.

This sums the phenomenon up pretty well, in my opinion, and all of the issues he lists could perhaps become the subject of future blog entries. However, as I have also previously mentioned, much as I really want to detest it for so many reasons, not all my experience with Facebook is negative. Despite its compulsive, addictive properties, and the fact that it is mostly crammed full of utter rubbish, there are some aspects of Facebook that I cannot deny I have come to value. It has provided the means to communicate, albeit in a “mediated” and “commodified” way, with past acquaintances that I surely would have otherwise lost entirely from my life. I also appreciate the opportunity to – very occasionally, I hope – vent my frustrations concerning my personal or professional life, and to receive sympathy and well-intentioned advice that can sometimes even be useful. Most of all, I think, I appreciate Facebook as a means for diffusion of humour. I really like to laugh, and whilst I am not amused by all posts of supposedly comical intention, I have to say that Facebook has supplied me with countless cartoons, anecdotes and images that I have found delightfully witty, comical and mood-lightening. Furthermore, the nature of Facebook makes it so much easier to share and propagate such things (and cannot really be more annoying than the mass emails that were required to do so previously).

As I tried to express in Status Update, Facebook makes wannabe comedians of us all, as we strive to artfully combine wit and brevity in our status updates. There are regular stories in the press about how innocent Facebook posts or Twitter tweets have ‘gone viral’, being re-posted and re-tweeted far beyond the original intended audience of author Joe/Josephine Public, providing their 15 minutes of fame (or notoriety) and maybe even changing their lives forever (for example, this Business Insider article about the now famous “Hi Becky… spin the bottle…now wants to play Farmville” joke by ‘regular guy’ Chris Scott makes some interesting points about plagiarism, intellectual (or humouristic) property rights and the free-for-all “borrowing” of text that has become an internet norm).

Within my own, limited online social network (firmly set to “private, friends only”, for what it’s worth)  I would like to think that, if I broadcast elements of my personal life on Facebook, it is done mostly in the aim of delighting, amusing or otherwise speaking meaningfully to my tailor-made mini-audience. For examples, recent personal status updates have included:

My son is currently air-guitaring and singing his little heart out to "The Final Countdown". He doesn't know the words, but this does not deter him.

My son singing one of his improvised songs, in full voice as usual, comes out with....'move you arrr........ms....' Had us worried there for a mo... and he couldn't work out why we couldn't stop laughing.

Although my daughter can't speak yet, I know which of my children I can understand more easily at the moment. She cries when she's hungry, tired or has tummy ache. My son has just had a meltdown because I can't immediately produce a life-sized tractor for him to play with.

My son just walked into the kitchen asking "excuse me Madam, is this the restaurant?" Playing along, I said "yes sir, would you like a table for two adults and a child?" "No silly, for 3 adults and a wizard." As you do.

My son asks to sit on Daddy's motorbike, then asks 'where do we put the coin?'

[What this brief exercise has shown me, rather worryingly, is a) how my life revolves rather a lot around my children, and b) that they are really not going to be impressed should they ever somehow be able to read my back-dated Facebook profile in years to come.]

I guess I know my audience. I imagine these anecdotes will speak to those who know my children (some of my Facebook “friends” are family members, or parents of children in my son’s class at school), and to those whose links with me are more distant in time and geography, but are of my generation and so have children of similar age. For others, maybe they find such anecdotes funny, maybe not: that is up to them. If they get to bored or annoyed with my recurring parenthood references they can always block my posts or ‘un-friend’ (de-friend?) me.

Extending the comic intention further, there are those that attempt create a running theme in their status updates, like a kind of micro-mini-series – working on the assumption, I suppose, that their readers are paying enough attention to keep up with the thread and therefore appreciate the ongoing joke. One of my Facebook friends is a particular genius in this regard: he has recently been posting regular statuses that superbly parody the current trend for irritating “Which Disney/Harry Potter/Game of Thrones/Lord of the Rings etc. character are you?”-type quizzes. These are churned out in their hundreds by sites such as BuzzFeed.com and PlayBuzz.com, it seems, serving up trite quasi-character analysis (in the name of entertainment – I hope for all our sakes that no one is media-muddled enough to take them seriously) via sets of inane multiple choice questions, the “results” of which then choke our newsfeeds. I read somewhere that apparently we should really not be clicking these links, and certainly not sharing them, as they are part of yet more data-harvesting crookery (although I did succumb to the “What Country in the World Best Fits YourPersonality?” quiz and was astounded that it came up with the country I actually live in, and not my country of birth, despite the fact that for the first question I definitely answered ‘tea’ and not ‘a glass of wine’ or ‘whiskey’).

My friend’s series of “quiz” parodies are (like many of his other posts) skilful, amusing and sometimes admirably anti-establishment (usually an effective humoristic device as far as I am concerned). I have his permission to quote a few:

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Famous Actress Are You" and got: "Childhood Shirley Temple singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop"!

XXXX XXXXXXX took the quiz "Which Bible Character Are You" and got: "Fish and Loaves."

XXXX XXXXXX  just took the quiz "Which Component of America's Failing Infrastructure Are You" and got "Moral/Ethical Fiber."

XXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz" "Which of Sagrada Familia's Spires Are You" and got "The ones that aren't finished yet."

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Albert Ayler Song Are You" and got "Witches and Devils."

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Tell-Tale Stain on Monica Lewinski's Blue Dress Are You" and got "Mayonaise."

Now these, for me, exemplify effective Facebook status update humour. If more people managed to recognise Facebook for what it is, and succeeded in turning the tool against itself, I think the future of our mass-media-mangled society would be just a little less bleak.

[1] Thomas Jones (2014), “Short Cuts”, London Review of Books, 17 July, p 6. 

 

Blogging versus Motherhood

As I said in the entry It’s been even longer, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but it is about contradictions, so here is one. In the same entry I questioned my return to blogging when I have so many other pressures on my time: in particular, why am I blogging when I should be being a mother. By which I mean, a better mother.

Such is the nature of our lives, and of my children, that I can’t really deprive them of my actual presence and attention by blogging. As hinted at in previous entries, most of my writing is done when they are asleep and I should be (although right now, I am being extra self-indulgent by writing this during daylight hours, between forkfuls of my late, microwave-reheated lunch, while my son is at school and my baby daughter finishes her nap in the bouncy chair next to me. The lunch aspect being the reason why I am not obliging myself to immediately dive into awaiting housework (washing up, laundry) or my thankfully-sometimes-doable-at-home work (current focus: exam corrections).

What I mean is, I sometimes feel guilty about the time I spend writing when I could/should be, for example, making flashcards to teach my son to read, baking cakes for his play dates, or absorbing parenting books to help me better master one of the most challenging jobs in the world (and practically the only one in which no one checks qualifications and suitability before engagement). What’s more, sometimes, writing about anything other than the sheer beauty of my daughter’s smiles and gurgles, or the glorious ecstasy of watching my two children gazing lovingly at each other, lying in our bed on a Sunday morning, seems somehow just plain ungrateful.  What? She writes/thinks about inane concepts like the downfall of humanity? Doesn’t she realise how lucky she is to have two such beautiful, healthy children, a good job, a nice house, etc. etc…

And of course, by devoting blogging time and space to such a subject, I have added a further layer of paradox to the theme of this blog that does nothing whatsoever to assuage my guilt.

Status Update

My rant about social networking became rather long, so I decided to leave until another blog entry my reflections upon one of Facebook’s main elements: the “status update”. This is the principal means by which a member “communicates” (for want of a better word) with others; users can respond to Facebook’s caring question“what’s on your mind?”, attach and comment an image, video or link, or just type whatever the hell they like, and these ‘updates’ are diffused to “friends” and followers in the Facebook world.

I seem to remember that Facebook status updates used to be restricted in length - a little like mobile phone text messages - to 160 characters, although this no longer appears to be the case (just as ‘unlimited text’ phone subscriptions and multiple-message Smartphone functions have made the SMS character limit obsolete). This restriction required people to exercise their verbal faculties a little, to condense their comments, anecdotes, jokes and observations into one sentence or so. But I think the role these statuses (stati?) play has gone beyond this; thoughts and experiences are no longer reported on Facebook, but evaluated, maybe even shaped by their suitability for a Facebook post.  My Other Half is even more wary and cynical about online media than me, and although finally persuaded (by me) to join Facebook, would probably like to think that he uses it ‘ironically’: however, even he regularly declares something funny enough ‘to go on Facebook’, and has been known to log on straight away to make it so.

While I'm on the subject of social networking and mini-messages, I might as well make it known that I simply don’t get Twitter, the so-called ‘micro-blogging network’. I mean, isn’t it just the equivalent of a list of Facebook status updates, without the other “applications”? And what on earth is a hashtag anyway? Twitter was just getting big around the time I finally joined Facebook: I did even sign up once, but I simply didn’t see the point and stopped checking my account. Rather ironically, I do still sometimes receive emails telling me about what is being “tweeted”.

Of course, the comfort in brevity, of immediate transferral of messages in short sound-bites that do not tax the concentration, is not entirely new to this social networking age; I’m thinking of newspaper headlines, or the popularity of inspirational/motivational quotations. So much easier than having to read a whole book in order to find improvement, enlightenment or solace! The difference is that headlines no longer head anything and quotations are no longer extracted; the mini-message is the sum total, and has become the norm of communication, both private and public.

 Many years ago I was lucky enough to discover the work of writer and artist, Ashleigh Brilliant, probably most famous for his vast series of ‘Pot-shots’ or ‘Brilliant Thoughts in 17 words or less’. He has made a career – and an art - of creating and illustrating humorous, philosophical and often beautifully sarcastic epigrams, following a strict set of self-imposed rules. Amongst my favourite examples that I recall are:

“A world at peace is worth not fighting for.”

“I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.”

“Please don't tell me to relax - it's only my tension that's holding me together.” (this one describes me very well)

 “Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.”

“I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.”

[All the above quotations obviously © Ashleigh Brilliant. I rather doubt this unpaid, unread blog post will have the power to lead any as-yet uninitiated to his work,  but just in case you are reading this, let me say that you’d do much better spending your time checking out his website www.ashleighbrilliant.com. ]

My sister and I discovered some of his ‘Pot-shot’ postcards in a gift shop, bought a pile and then ordered a catalogue by post (those were the days). We would spend hours pouring over it, showing it to friends and choosing which ones to buy to decorate our bedroom walls. Years later I was moved to look him up again, and am now on his mailing list and own a CD-ROM version of the complete illustrated catalogue of 10,000 Pot-shots, which I have been known to use for teaching purposes (it has a very handy search function).

As tweets and Facebook posts became ever more dominant, I was often moved to wonder what the great man must feel, now that it seems that so many people are constantly trying to be word-limited poets, micro-philosophers and punch line comedians. Does it denigrate his art, bring it to new prominence, or mean nothing at all? I contemplated asking him, and even started writing him an email – I found it years later in my Outlook drafts folder – but never ultimately found the time or courage to phrase the question before the passage of time made it seem obsolete.

Maybe the Facebook/Twitter phenomenon is a good thing. Maybe it pushes people to try to make their public statements that much more humorous, more thought-provoking, more broadly relevant and appealing. But I somehow doubt it. Instead, lives are being shaped and deformed by the tyranny of social networking – experienced in bite-sized, digitized fragments, as a mere mirror of an online profile.