I’ve been thinking about that poem by Larkin, the one that starts “they f*ck you up your mum and dad.”

Now, I have to confess, when I originally decided to write this post I was going to criticise Larkin for being a misery guts. This is based on the one poem that I have read by him, Toads. It’s a poem about how crappy going to work is (which I think is crap, going to work is great, if you hate it, then there’s something you can do about it, don’t just sit there and hate your life for goodness sake).

The best line out of that poem, by the way, is this:

  Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets — and yet
  No one actually starves.

He’s talking about quitting work and how “travellers” don’t do any work, but … “No one actually starves.” I like the words, ‘unspeakable’ and ‘skinny as whippets’. But no one actually starves. I guess it’s the rudeness I like. Can’t think of a way to end this messy paragraphy, apart from just saying, “lol”. Thank you, internets, for providing me with a way out.

Anyway, I then read some of his poetry and fell in love with it a little bit. But I do think he’s quite negative and unecessarily depressed. Be depressed, by all means, but don’t be depressed for no good reason. I’m all for being depressed if you can’t do anything about it, after all melancholy almost makes misery fun, but if you can do something about your awful life, then don’t waste any time in the doldrums.

But there.

Back to that poem. It occured to me that, yes, your mum and dad do mess you up — but then what relationship doesn’t? Seriously, that’s just people. We’re all idiots, really, and having good relationships is made up partly of the art of being resistant to getting messed up by other people’s character flaws. I guess.

There you go, Larkin. You’re a great poet, and I love your work, but it makes me sad that you were so sad.

Read Toads, An Arundel Tomb or Faith Healing.

We are all familiar with Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb — though it might be more accurate to say that he “finished” inventing the lightbulb: much of the preparatory work had been done by others before him. We quote him every time we say that genius is “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”.

Less well known, however, is his one time employee, Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla was from Croatian Krajina, then part of the Austrian Empire but now part of Croatia. Like Edison, he was a genius inventor, and he worked in the field of electrical engineering. His list of inventions of inventions is impressive, and he is credited with having invented the radio.

Tesla and Edison did not get on, and Tesla left Edison’s employment to form his own company. One of my favourite quotes is from Tesla. While tenacity and determination are vital, these are traits that can so easily become unnecessary stubbornness. I find myself agreeing with Tesla in that cleverness and forethought can save time and energy:

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.

Nikola Tesla

… pithy sayings from the blog of Mark Kenny.

It’s true though. Old people look back with such fondness on the war years. In Russia, old people yearn for the days of Stalin (somewhat incredibly).

We look back on hard times and remember them differently than how we experienced them at the time. It’s good to remember that if you’re unhappy. What, now, will you remember in a year’s time with a smile — and want to go back to?

I read a few blogs now and again, by different people of different nationality and gender. But when I read, the voice in my head that’s reading the words sounds the same, no matter what sex the person is.

I find this quite weird, because obviously when I’m speaking to someone I can hear their voice and it doesn’t sound like my reading voice.

It got me thinking because I’ve noticed that even my own text, when I read it aloud, sounds totally different from how it “should” sound according to what it sounds like in my head. Even if I got the blog authors to read their posts aloud, they wouldn’t sound like how the authors heard them.

(This got me to thinking about how, without telepathy, we’re all really alone, but not really because I wanted to put that in as a joke.)

I find it interesting how we all relate to each other, even though we can’t hear each others thoughts or see through each others’ eyes and think with each others’ brains. Our relationships rely on us all being a little bit the same, which is totally weird because we’re all so different.

One of the most important lessons you can learn while making progress is learning to recognise the progress you’ve already made. Without realising that you’ve made progress, you’ll get discouraged and stop before you reach your goal.

You won’t make progress in the way that you think you will. Progress comes in from the side, and you suddenly realise that you have taken a step forward without knowing it.

It’s very uplifting to realise that you’re better at something than you thought you were. It’s like seeing the first shoots of a new plant — it’s been growing all along, it’s just been under the surface of the soil.

Hey, whenever you find a clever program or website or some piece of technology (sat navs, iPhone, whatever), always remember that the computer is not clever. The computer is a dumb machine. It has the same amount of intelligence as a rock, it’s just a bunch of switches. Literally. That is all a computer is, a bunch of switches.

The computer is not clever: the programmer is. Google is clever because the guys that set it up are clever. Clever at computers (their search engine was revolutionary when it first came out) and clever at business (they didn’t sell out to Microsoft or Yahoo when they came up with their search engine).

Your iPhone is not clever. The developers at Apple are clever. They’re the ones that designed it and pushed it through the polishing process. A piece of technology that’s simple and easy to use takes twice as much ingenuity and innovation (or more than that) to make than a complicated, hard-to-use product.

I was thinking the other day about the childhood game of ‘it’. This is the game where you run around chasing each other. One person is ‘it’ — i.e. they have to chase people and touch them, whereupon the person they touch becomes ‘it’ and must pass find some other unwilling victim to whom to pass the baton.

What a game! Imagine that being entertaining, how funny!

I got to thinking that there are people today, grown adults, who are walking around being ‘it’ and they don’t even know. They probably don’t even remember that last game they played, where they became ‘it’ and were unable to pass it on before the whistle went or the bell rang, to signal the end of play. How many people have moved away from home, or left the country, and took their ‘it’ status with them.

Think about it: you could have been ‘it’ for the last ten years, and you would never even know. And who has passed it on without knowing it? Shaking hands at a school reunion, say.

Now that is some classy mystery thinking right there. This is like trying to think of infinity. Check it out, guys, our childhood lives on, completely of its own accord. Awesome.