If someone is not interested in you then that's fine

All of my life I have had to deal with businesses, people, friendship groups, and sports teams being less interested in me than I have been in them. By the age of 50 I've come to realise that there is a simple solution to it. Forget them and get on with your own shit. In many cases if you're doing things that were your original reason for having those friends then you probably grow past them. Many a time have I just gone off to do my own shit and then the people who weren't interested in me are all of a sudden surprisingly interested in what it is ongoing and want me around them. If I was petty then that would be the time for me to revel in the fact that now I'm the Cool Kid, but mostly I just keep going on about my things. Because those people don't interest me anymore. I say that with all humility.

The power of "comin' through"

It seems to be that people just don't really look where they are walking or want to be getting anywhere when they are walking.

I have a very mild-mannered friend who deals with this problem. When people are not looking where they are going he plays a fun game.

My friend sees a person with the head buried in their phone or gazing off into the distance and walked towards them, gazing off into the distance.

They never walk into him. I tried it and found it to be a great deal of fun.

Similarly if there are three or four people obstructing a doorway then it's them being the rude ones. I found that "excuse me" is a little too nice, and that a cheery "coming through" gives me the chance to communicate what I really think. But I think that often the subtlety is lost.

But at least I had some fun.

Put Labor last

Their cynical game playing has to come to an end.

This election, Labor has gone all out to dovetail their ribbon cutting ceremonies right into the time of Mad March where we then go onto an election and vote them back in.

Well, fuck that.

This time around their projects are running over time and south Aussies are caught in a bunch of misorganised, disorganised traffic jams that I hope will make the chickens come home to roost.

Remember the traffic; put Labor last.

Kick them out, it's time.

Learning to live suboptimally: A computer example

When things that once brought you pleasure and worked to your advantage fail to do that anymore, there is a time to find ways around it. I call that living suboptimally. And I will describe my computer as a case in point.

The last year I was on staff, I had a computer that was two and a half years old. When I became an independent contractor to the same previous employer they did me the favour of allowing me to keep that computer. That was great but after five years as an independent contractor my 7 year old computer is starting to get a bit tired. Suboptimal.

I have found ways to deal with that and it provides a reasonable metaphor for life, perhaps.

I need to prepare for the eventual catastrophic failure. I actually thought I had experienced that early last year and my previous work computer sat dusty in a corner for 6 months. Even then, I was reasonably unphased. I had begun the first stage of living suboptimally. There was no chance of me losing any data because anything important is stored on the cloud. I gave up on the idea of getting anything resembling performance - this was once a laptop that I could take overseas and count on presenting with, and doing major data crunch. Yeh, nah. No longer.

So I just came to terms with the fact that this old computer just wouldn't do the things for me that it once did. In computer world it's just that the hardware is getting old, in the world of personal relationships sometimes people just lose interest. I have software that I like to run on my computers and sometimes that software is a little bit demanding.

Living sub-optimally just means that there are some pieces of software that I don't ask my computer to run. Sure, the computer could run it but if I anthropomorphise a little I'd probably say that the computer has just lost interest. And the amount of extra effort and workarounds required just don't seem to be an efficient use of my time.

There is some software that I simply still have to run on this PC. I can't change the BIOS and it still needs to run a version of windows/office.

If I have a critical activity that I really, really need my old PC to execute then I need to plan for it. That might take hours of putting things in the right places, making sure the PC has had a fresh reboot (perhaps even two) and making sure there aren't too many extraneous demands on it. I shut down all peripheral programs and allow the computer to concentrate on only the one thing that I need it to do. If I manage to caress and cajole the computer adequately I seem to get it to do what I need it to. It's a lot of work, but sometimes there is no other way.

So, living suboptimally is a skill. A great old (now dead) friend of mine once said "I expect nothing of people, and I am rarely disappointed". And the same seems to be true of computers. It's not a path to exhuberant joy, but perhaps "exhuberant joy" - in the long term - is simply a mirage, anyway.

Fat you can see..

We all know that cookies aren't good for us but this was a telling reminder for me. A popular brand of cream cookie was left on a piece of paper a few days ago and I think it's an image worth sharing.

Cascading vices

Cigarette shop is selling greeting cards too top up their revenue and the newsagency is selling lottery tickets and Kino to top up its revenue.

I felt bad about buying a greeting card at the cigarette shop (before I went on to buy some liquor) but then realised that we are all just in the game of cascading vices.

Major page view anomaly last year - I blame the Russians

No, I'm not joking. I just rambled around looking at the pageview stats of this blog and I recall that this time last year I had gone from 1000-2000 views per month up to over 7000. At the time I noted that most of the traffic was from Russia.

That didn't seem too good. But then it stopped. Another of life's mysteries for me.