The Purple Dragon Blog

Could you write the story of your life in just six words? That’s what participants in SMITH magazine’s six-word memoirs project did. The result is a book filled with six-word stories by famous and obscure writers. Some of my particular favorites are:

I like girls. Girls like boys.  (Andrea Dela Cruz)

 

My life’s a bunch of almosts.  (Shari Bonnin)

 

Just in: boyfriend’s gay. Merry Christmas.  (Seshie Hargett)

 

Born bald. Grew hair. Bald again.  (A.J. Jacobs)

 

Surname rhymes with profanity. Childhood torture.  (Noah Smit)

 

But all of them are funny or poignant and some so succinct that you can see a life’s worth of events and emotions behind them. Did I contribute? Of course. And I invite everyone who reads this to have a go!

Sorted life, met world, completely lost.  (Purple Dragon)

Wow… look how long it’s been since I last updated!  8O 

Sorry. Life has been hectic, and I keep getting sick.  I was actually sick on my birthday. I’m nineteen now, but I don’t feel it, because I mostly slept through my birthday, and the parts I didn’t I had a fever and was convinced I was a wizard. (Turns out there was a downside to reading Harry Potter only a day or so before I got sick.) I got an mp3 player though, which I adore, as well as other neat stuff.

The thing I’m most excited about at the moment is the return of Doctor Who to television. (God, I’m such a nerd.) I am very much enjoying season three. I watched an episode last night, with my sister and Dad who have slowly been sucked into watching it along with me every week.

Dad noted that it was odd that no one in the episode wondered why the Doctor was able to instantly identify what the machine did just by watching it, despite it being an experiment in an obscure area of science.

“It’s like the TARDIS,” I pointed out. “In one episode in the first series someone asks the Doctor, won’t anyone notice the TARDIS in the middle of the street? The Doctor goes, ‘listen, someone parks a mysterious blue box in the middle of the street. What do you do? Walk right past it.’ ” I grew thoughtful. “You know, it often astonishes me how people fail to notice the most amazing things, just because they’re too busy going about their life.” I shook my head. “People are always walking past the TARDISes of life.”

My Dad got a most peculiar look on his face.

“That is not an expression,” he said slowly, “that I have ever heard before, nor one that I believe I will ever hear again.”

“You know what I mean,” I chided.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I’m scared that I do.”

I suppose that in a loose, vague sort of way I consider myself to be a feminist. I’m a strong supporter of women’s rights to do things, and launch into those who think we can’t.  So why is it that I have such a tendency to abhor the views of feminists?

Feminism, as many pioneers of women’s rights will tell you, has lost its way. Most feminists that I have heard from spend half their time telling women what they ought to do and want, how to live their lives. Women shouldn’t want to get married, want to be housewives and mothers. Women should be independent career-oriented people. If you’re married, or want to be married, want to have kids and stay at home to look after them, then somehow you’re a kind of disgrace to women as a whole.

How did we get to here? Somewhere along the line these women hijacked the feminism movement and turned it into a medium by which to impose their own life choices on others. To me, feminism ought to be, and once was, the ability to choose: the right to have an equal chance at having a fantabulous career or  be a housewife. Whichever you wanted. Feminism did not mean you had to work your way up the corporate ladder in order to be an independent, self-assured woman. 

And has anyone noticed that men use feminism as an excuse not to do things? Women are supposed to be only doing half the work in relationships, but in reality these days it’s more likely that not only do they have to do all the housework and manage the kids, but look after their careers on top of that. How often do you see a dad arranging dinner or doing a bit of washing or vacuuming to balance everything out?

 What concerns me most, though, is my generation. A generation or two ago women fought for the right to have sex without condemnation; now the situation is almost reversed. “Women can have sex whenever and with whomever they want, can’t they? So why aren’t you doing it? You must be a deviant or frigid or something, right?” is basically the response teenage girls get these days. Fending off amorous boyfriends these days is much harder when everybody’s doing it. “Don’t you love me?” they ask. Too many girls now agree to have sex not because they feel ready, but because they feel that they ought to. Since when did sex become an obligation again? And I’m not even going to get started on the whole “condoms are uncomfortable, if you loved me you wouldn’t make me wear one” argument. The only thing more pathetic than that is the number of girls who cave in to it. I know girls who have done so.  And making boyfriends stick to boundaries is even harder when you’re inexperienced in such matters. What is reasonable? What should you allow? What’s ‘normal’ for a teenage relationship? Everyone has a different answer in a post-sexual-revolution age when the fact that sex is acceptable makes it seem odd when you don’t want it. There aren’t guidelines anymore. The sexual revolution fed into a new philosophy, that you are required to have sex, and feminism isn’t helping here. Feminists aren’t in touch with the young women of today, don’t sympathise with their values or accept them. Is it really a surprise, when you take into account the fact that feminists oppose many of the goals and values of the current generation, that the word ‘feminist’ has become an insult in some circles?

Feminism desperately needs a revamp and some more tolerant, broad-mind people who aren’t just regurgitating 70s feminist propaganda, but represent the needs and values of today’s young women. The world has changed, people. Feminism needs to do so also.

Some sheep in Soviet Russia want to leave the country.
“Why?” ask the officials. “What makes you want to leave?”
“The Secret Police,” explains one sheep. “They’ve had orders to bring in all elephants.”
The officials are puzzled.
“So what? You’re sheep, not elephants.”
“Try telling that to the Secret Police!”

It’s easier to be a success if you can be content with what does not make you happy, but never stop aiming for what will.

Taking risks might  make your life more fun, but it also makes it much harder to fix when things go wrong.

You have two choices in life; you can try to please others, or you can try to please yourself. It is a rare person who is capable of both.

It’s amazing how many big things people will help you with if you help them with the little ones.

A little charm goes a long way.

They say that you can catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. Me, I think that I can do without the flies.

Those who charm, usually want something.

Often the most interesting people to know are the ones that everyone else overlooks or shys away from.

There is little that is more useful than knowledge combined with understanding and a certain amount of ruthlessness. With those, you can eventually get just about anything.

One of the best-kept secrets to looking good is believing that you look good. Walk with confidence, refrain from fiddling with your clothing or hair after you’ve gone out into the public, and always wear a smile and keep your head up high.

Using logic might not change a person’s mind, but at least it’ll annoy the hell out of them.

This post has been written for notbean’s Philosophy Blog War.

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All men are created equal.

This statement (ignoring, for the moment, the somewhat male-predisposed nature of its phrasing) is the basis on which our society is built. As a democracy - literally, ‘government of the people’ - we hold that everyone should have equal opportunities, equal rights, and be free from the effects of prejudice, bigotry, and racism.

Unfortunately, by the time we reach adulthood, many prejudices have wormed their way into our behaviour and thought processes. Sometimes they are so slight as to be undetectable, but they are there all the same. I include myself here. I am a fairly tolerant person. I don’t care about religion, as long as it’s not used as an excuse to hurt others. I don’t particularly care about race. Conflict based on skin color has always seemed singularly pointless to me. Being socially deficient in some aspects, I am often more tolerant of eccentrics than some. Differences do not bother me so much. One of my first friends, back when I was five, was a Chinese girl who didn’t speak a word of English. But all the same I, like everyone else, have my own set of prejudices.

The thing about discrimination is that it is vital to our survival. Our survival, throughout evolution, has depended on our ability to look at something and instantly make an appraisal of it. Is something a possible danger? Is there something wrong or off about it? In some ways this instant judgement is even more important when it comes to other people. Look at their appearance. Is it too different? Maybe they’re an outsider who will challenge the tribe or endanger it. Are they sick or disabled? They might be a burden that the tribe cannot afford, or have an illness that can be passed on to other members of the tribe. For thousands of years at least, and likely longer, our minds have been fine-tuned to pick up on the tiniest of hints and use them to form often-unconscious judgements. In primitive days, logical assessment of something was a liability; by the time you finished coming to a conclusion, whatever you were considering could already have taken your life.

Mind you, things are quite different these days, but all the same our brains continue to make judgements. Some of this is instinctive, or at least instinct-based, but a great deal of it is societal conditioning as well. Find yourself in New York, and if you’re a middle-class white person you’ll probably avoid groups of black teenagers, particularly if their clothing is scruffy or rocker. It is a public belief that black people are more likely to come from underprivileged backgrounds, and are more likely to commit a crime. Is this suspicion fair on the teenagers, who you know nothing about and who for all you know may be model students and an example to the community? Not at all. But is it understandable behaviour, taking into account the facts at your disposal and the possibilities? Of course.

That’s the problem. Discrimination – as opposed to outright bigotry and racism, which is discrimination gone overboard – is an important survival mechanism, but at the same time it is unfair to those who are the target. So what to do? Well, in my opinion a reasonable balance is the answer. Putting aside all discrimination is foolish, and dangerous. It can save you from injury and even death. But when a situation does not have the potential for danger, put all discrimination aside. Don’t pick on people because they are eccentric or behave oddly. Believe me, that hurts. Don’t assume that the teenager browsing your store is a thief. Lots of them might be, but just as many if not more are law-abiding citizens. Don’t assume that disabled people are unintelligent. You’d be surprised how many people act patronisingly enough towards the impaired that you want to beat the s*** out of them. Similarly, the innocent or socially-awkward are often very bright. As a socially-awkward but somewhat gifted child myself, I can assure you that it annoyed the hell out of me that people talked to me like I was five years old because of my difficulties with people.

In short, use reason. Apply discrimination sparingly, and only when you are at risk. And if you feel that discrimination is course of a cautious person, try to be polite to the subject of your wariness. In an ideal world, we could do away with discrimination altogether, but since people continue to get beaten up, murdered, and hurt, we must be satisfied with using it sparingly.