The Wisdom in Comedy

A wise internet page (it was most likely this one,) once gave me the sage advice that the most important thing in life was laughter. It is wisdom that I have recently taken to heart. The happy go lucky laugh along confident approach to life is enviable but not something that most of us can attain. We live life with different perspectives, different attitudes and different emotional reactions. This is part of the vibrance that keeps the human species dynamic and it doesn't need to be sacrificed to this principle.

The pragmatic application that was counselled was more simple: Find the things that make you laugh. Then keep them with you. Keep them somewhere accessible, so that when life gets you at its harshest darkest moment; where you really can see no light in the distance; this treasure of laughter will be available to you. I share with you my personal application.

I have two big flaws that effect my emotional reaction to things. I tend to overthink, my brain stuck in top gear endless permutations scrambling past the projector in my mind and to think verbally too much. My comedic cure to these symptoms is the irrelevant humour of Scrubs and QI. Scrubs is irrelevance personified and this whacky casual view of the world is conveyed to me, basking in the glow of its characters. It feels strange but a TV show is usually as good a way as there is for me to inhabit an alternate world. Books are for serious things. QI which I imagine my non-UK reader will never have heard of is a quiz show that while being informative is more a portal into irrelevance; the understanding that just because the paddle pool of ignorance is connected to the ocean of knowledge I do not have to run straight into the sea. Sometimes the paddle pool has its own wonders. It is an attempt to revive the fun of words and the pleasure of language, language at the beach and the amusement park instead of the office.

These two items in my treasury both serve to remind me through comedy of the things that my brain needs for its own good. Sometimes it needs to be off; sometimes it has to be left in neutral if it is to run at full speed at other times. It serves two other important purposes. It banishes the darkness; laughter instrinsicly is the emotion of the alive and the happy and this treasury can put you in touch with this at a time when you can't recall them. A life line that is truly priceless. Also it gives you detachment - for a few minutes you forget the here and now; you inhabit the world which the material inhabits and can get yourself recentered by reminding yourself of the full range of human experiences; not only of human experiences but also your experiences.

I have had need a few times to put this advice to the test, and I can confidently say that while not a problem solver it has the magic quality of making problems more bearable, to make solutions more possible and the spirit more willing. And so many of our problems can be solved by these simple changes that I could say that they were problem solvers when the problem was me rather then the outside world.

Conversational History

This weekend I had to reformat my laptop after some sort of critical software screw up essentially made it impossible for it to boot up successfully the whole way. Invariably on every start something would go wrong and I would get the once ubiquitous, now thankfully less, Blue Screen of Death; whereby Windows told you in a rather incomprehensible way why a component had failed you at a critical point. With no way to get into recover my files I had no choice but to go for a rough and ready format and accept the loss of my files.

In the few days after, as things have been slotted back into place and I reinstall all the software that made my computer work in the way that I wanted it to I've found myself missing some files that I really didn't put much thought into at the time. Google has backed up my emails, and my blog posts are all still alive on the net somewhere, so while the loss of my copies is regrettable it's not like I've lost access to that content for eternity.The files that I miss are the conversation history files from MSN. I had conversation histories from the ICQ days which is like 1999 onwards and Trillian logs from 2001 onwards when I made the switch.

Now as a personal perversion I'm a big fan of keeping archives of my conversations and emails so the loss of these was something that I found quite sad. I still have some of my conversations that I had with Craig and Mubaraka in 2000 and thereafter, and as a record of my history I don't have a better source. Our conversations on MSN were sometimes rather epic and even when they were more benign they recorded what we did with our days, what we talked about and what we planned to do with our remaining hours. They reminded me what I had done in those times. With no other method of preserving my daily actions for posterity then these archives functioned as my diary, my record and my portal to memories that I would not otherwise remember. They're the only contemporary record of times that were some of the best that I had with the best people it has ever been my fortune to have stumbled across.

Recently there have been a few conversations that have exceptionally worth retaining and rereading for their general tenor and audacity. While I took that opportunity only once, I would have loved to give them a second reading to extract as much information as I could from conversations that were operating at more levels then I was able to extract at the time.They have a special quality that made them enjoyable and also that made them worth retaining. In many ways it's the modern successor to those conversations with Craig and Mubaraka that were so delightful and I feel equally they might be definitional of an interesting time in life again. The period of now is always interesting in that sense, especially when you get a chance to review them later.

I suppose the end result is a salutary lecture in the virtues of backing up, and keeping alternate copies of those things that are important. But the time for lessons learned is a little distant. While I know that it lives inside me and that friendships are current as well as historic, sometimes the history can be as beautiful and worth fighting for as the past - and that I feel the loss of now.

The Wish to Work

It seems strangely odd to say it, but it is a sentiment that I have been repeating to many others when I mention my slightly busy time in the run up to exams, with the revision that needs to be done and the writing that needs to be done for my two other assessments, but it really is nice to have some work to do again.

My time so far at HKU has been less then satisfactory, and I've made that rather amply clear to those who have talked to me and in my prior post about the prestigious institution here as well. My problem with it at the core is that I don't feel like I'm being pushed at all, that my potential is being enhanced by the mental calisthenics that I would expect that post graduate education would demand of me. At undergrad, every year I could take stock of where I was at that point and compare it to the point that preceded it and I could actively chart my improvement.

In first year I was abysmal, couldn't do a decent amount of work and lacked the focus, discipline and the mental fortitude to knuckle down and expand my exposure to the legal world. In second year the methods learned painfully over the first year with all its mistakes was harnessed to develop stronger and better methods. Second year was an absolute nightmare as we took all of the big three together (tort, trusts and property) the acknowledged hardest subjects on the course (and compulsory I might add) but it resulted in better thinking, writing and planning as well as time management being an absolute necessity. Third year was a bit easier, the topics weren't as hard cause they were the optional modules and Public International Law was something that I knew perhaps better then my teacher in some aspects and the course was definitely taught below the level of the reading. Yet there was still Company Law, with the formidable Eva Lomnicka that served as an excellent template on how to learn complex and demanding law which made no sense at all, and Trade marks which gave me an excellent guide to structuring legal knowledge, which to be fair I don't think she knew she was doing, but I still use that method to teach myself topics and prepare for exams and so far it's doing good.

At HKU on the other hand, the reading is trivial, always well above the level of the lecture and my own personal reading done on the side for some of the topics is putting me well beyond the level of the material taught. Now I accept that is tangentially my own fault for getting through the material too fast and demanding too much of myself and my course. But that sense of being engaged in an intellectual pursuit that demands me too put my A-game in has gone and it is rather disappointing to end up in that situation. I would have hoped that an institution of the pedigree of HKU would keep me stretched.

The effect of a demanding undergrad time has been the net result that I've been bent out of shape in a rather fundamental manner that does not permit me to be lazy for too long and without engaging myself in work that feels substantial. In my second year I recall that I vegged out for one week watching Star Trek episodes by the dozen, but the moment that finished I had to find something more substantial for me to do to pass the time as well as doing the social stuff. A day spent idly is something that has only really beginning to happen at the moment, and I can't help but think it is because the deformity that King's imposed on my character to make me an aficionado of hard work is fading away. The desire to be productive has only been slightly filled in the exam period by having me work hard. Let's hope that we can find a way for the rest of the year to be conducive to that kind of work and develop a way to push myself a little harder.

Formula 1 Concentration

I have started becoming more of a committed Formula 1 fan in recent months. I was never one before I went to the UK, it only featured on my map of the sporting world because it was Sumer's sport, the sport that he was the most interested in and talked about an awful lot. And as one of those de facto things that litter life, if your friends talk about something a lot, you learn a lot about it yourself, and begin to develop a little interest of your own to complement them. But that was initially the extent of my interest; more the interest of my friends then my own.

It changed with university, as did so many other things. ITV in the UK broadcasts F1 free to air, with a top notch presentation crew and commentary that is both accessible and informative and served as a bench mark into the sport. Also the times were suddenly much more reasonable with races being in the afternoon on weekends, times when I had more time on my hand without having to go to madressa or being constrained by the thought of work due in on Monday. I begin to appreciate the excellent fusion that the sport provided between machinery operating at its maximum, the tremendous performance at the top end of any game, and the tremendous focus, precision and concentration that they drivers demonstrated, bringing a car around at 300km/h stopping with infinite precision in a breaking zone all while tussulling with one another for the smallest advantage that they could open out into an opportunity to get ahead or get away from their fellow competitors.

Recently, I've managed to 'acquire' a copy of EA Sport's F1 Challenge which is perhaps the bench mark of realistic racing on the PC, a genre so niche that no one even competes with a game that was last really updated in 2003 and only is current today by the endeavours of a committed set of modders that add updates and strive to improve the game as much as they can, which they are able to do by the excellent open ended design of the game to allow modding and amendments that have enabled the success of these dedicated maintainers of the F1 PC gaming legacy.

A few weeks of playing this modest game, has impressed upon me how much I underestimated the top notch professionalism of an F1 driver. The difficulty is not in mechanics and car control, that is a huge potential problem though, and one not to be lightly discarded. A vehicle going at 200km/h going out of control and into a tyre wall is a sobering thought that would keep most sane people firmly glued to their unmoving seats in the audience stand, not rushing out to the raceway. What is more daunting, and perhaps even tougher is the exacting concentration that is required in every moment and at every turn of a race. You cannot switch off for a single moment without dire consequences. You cannot miss a breaking point, you cannot get caught up in the competition, the proximity of another car on the race track, you have to race your own race while all the time being aware of the ever fluid changing circumstances.

It has shown me how weak actually my concentration is. I find it impossible to focus on anything like race distance. In fact in any given lap, there are probably two moments where I'm on the thin line between everything breaking and the car just staying on the road, and I'm not even consistently able to correct when I think that I might be close to overstepping the line without knowing what to do. That kind of focus, that kind of concentration on anything is something that I lack at any level in my life and I really admire the ability for anyone to do it. There's a hope that the weaknesses in my racing game can finally function to allow me to get more out of life.