Working from home. I hate it. If I had a family or a social life and a self-disciplined gym regimen, Iβd be fine. But I dont. And I work for yanks, so my hours are all shifted to suit them.
I miss having a daily commute I could work a daily exercise into, colleagues I could passively chat to, social events happening around me.
But I dont. There are no other jobs, just yank work. I just wake late, sleep late, consume fast food, and work.
Iβve got two:
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The Cat-Call
Not quite the same level as yours, but: once I saw my cousinβs cat meow at its kittens to call them for milk.
On a spur of the moment random impulse, I meowed the same way, inadvertently replicating the mother catβs meow down to some exact degree of mimicry such that all the cats turned to look at me; the kittens stopping mid-stride to look at me for a source of milk, their confusion expressed in a footfall hesitations of whether to come to me or not.
The mother cat meowed again, and the kittens resume their journey to her, and she threw me an irritated look.
I have not once been able to replicate this. It was just one of those once a million moments where all the odds of the universe stacked up in favor of me, and paid out in the most realistic cat sound known to either man or cat.
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Call to Prayer
This one has more hidden steps: once, when I was a kid, I was bored watching endless TV coverage about the Royal family
It was a show about the latest gossip on Princess Dianna, and there was literally nothing else to watch on another channel. So I did what any well-adjusted kid did, and that night I got down on one knee and prayed for her die. Prayed. Iβm not religious nor was I raised religious in any sense.
Anyway, one week later, she popped off. The guilt stayed with me for a while, until I decided that if Godβs taking messed up requests, then thatβs on him and not me.
Okay, imagine youβre down at the pub, and that actor from GoT comes in surrounded by a horde of screaming girls. He clearly just wants a drink and to be left alone, but canβt shake off the fans. The bar stool next to you is free, and you have an expression of utter repulsion on your face to ward off anyone. Heβs eyeing the seat and your face with desperation. Do you let him sit with you, or do you tell him to piss off to another pub?
Fine, imagine this: youβre at the local Nandoβs getting their veggie supreme for your girl Suze, when a man in a tracksuit comes at you saying that itβs his order and that heβll brap you up if you say different. You notice that his hand is down the front of his trousers, and if heβs hiding anything there itβs either small or non-lethal. Suze is looking at you. What do you do?
Okay, what about youβre at the local chicken shop, and a wean comes in asking if youβll buy him some chips and a coke. You originally say no, but then three of his schoolmates come in too and one of them looks like heβs holding a sharpened ruler. How many chips do you buy assuming you want to leave the shop?
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- 8M
- β’
- β’
- 1Y
- β’
- β’
- 2Y
- β’
Youβre always playing catchup when in a conversation with others; theyβre racing ahead on the topic, already knowing both sides of the discussion and throwing their own spin on it, and youβre just sitting there staring at them mouth-agape as you try to process what is being said in realtime, but canβt quite grasp even the base concepts nor the terminology of what theyβre talking about because their shop talk is so far removed from the baseline that itβs practically a whole subject in itself.
The smart thing to do is to just interject quickly with simple questions to highlight your supposed ignorance, and get some quick definitions to keep you at least somewhat up-to-date in the conversation.
But you donβtβ¦ either too ashamed of your own ignorance to draw attention to it, or rejecting it outright instead of facing the humiliation and telling yourself that youβre not that interested in the topic anyway.
Thatβs how it feels to me, anyhow