OK, so there are several ways that people become rich: firstly, by inheritance or trust fund. Much as I love my family, they have let me down here by not making me a millionaire in advance. Neither was I born into nobility or royalty, so there is no country pile or rooms full of antiques to flog.
Secondly, by inventing something truly incredible that the world didn't even knew they needed until I invented it - eg. Facebook or the car. I did once invent a "roll of teabags" (not unlike kitchen roll, perforated together) designs for which I sent to the makers of PG Tips as a child but it didnt catch on. Thirdly, by working really bastard hard and fighting your way to the top of the career ladder and becoming CEO of succesful company X. I can do hard work, I will fight tooth and nail for the things that I want, but I refuse to devote my every waking hour to work. As the saying goes one should work to live, not live to work.
A very good friend of mine is, as we speak, launching a new company (more in later blogs no doubt). She works 16 hour days and most of the weekend, even working when I went to visit her (which meant I could read Game of Thrones in peace, at least!). Currently, her income from this enormous amount of work is zero. I am so disproportionately proud of her achievements, from an idea she had a couple of years ago this is now becoming a reality and she is working ridiculously hard to make it a success. I truly hope that the business will soon pay her a good salary and she can start to enjoy the fruits of her labour, which will be richly deserved.
But, I'll be honest, I just dont think I have it in me to be that dogged, that determined, and that willing to work myself to exhaustion with no guaranteed return. I have always considered myself hardworking and committed, but I have always worked for someone else, on a wage or salary. Maybe somewhere in the subconcious this tempers my willingness to tip that work/life balance out of equilibrium. Maybe I have just never had a job that really fulfilled me or set the challenges that would encourage me to achieve more than I had previously expected.
Which leaves the only viable option open to me: lottery win. I do at least play the lottery, on Wednesdays and Saturdays by direct debit. I have as much chance as the next man or woman of winning the jackpot, which is precisely one in 13,983,816. So, lets be honest, not great odds. But apparently you just dont get six figure salaries for writing blogs in your bedroom wearing a sarong, so it is currently my best shot.
Although, I heard that the president of a small country had promised his Olympic athletes 700,000 USD for every gold medal they bring back. Thats the best part of 450,000 pounds sterling. So I just need to change nationality and get really really good at some kind of sport...
K x
Tuesday 31 July 2012
Tuesday 24 July 2012
Saturday 21 July 2012
What to Read Next
Today I took possesion of two wonderful items - the next installment of George R R Martin's Game of Thrones series - Book 5 "A Dance With Dragons", so lengthy with description, intrigue and anticipation that it is split into two parts. This book is the last of the series, so far, though the author is anticipating two more installments before the series is completed. I am looking at the two new novels now, shiny and unbreached on the bed beside me, urging me to lift that front page and dive back into the story. But I just cant bring myself to start it.
I have been reading the series steadily since Christmas, when my then boyfriend bought me the first 4 as a boxed set, carefully interspersing Game of Thrones with other reading material, lest I be left with no more of them to read. For those of you who haven't read them (or watched the TV version on Sky) first of all I suggest you do so RIGHT NOW. The characters are wonderful, the plot intricately detailed and utterly gripping. I disappear into Westeros when I read, and have become so seriously involved with the (perilously short) lives of the protagonists that I found myself once texting my friend in the middle of the night to say "W T actual F... things are not well in GoT. I can't speak about it. Its too awful".
Game of Thrones has developed quite a following, and not only with the slightly geeky role playing, comic book types, but with well-rounded socialites such as myself and my good friend Alex, who lead fairly normal daily lives and then descend into this dark book-porn world of an evening. I could happily shut my bedroom door and read for days (as long as someone fed the cat from time to time and let me out to go to the loo). So why can't I bring myself to start to read A Dance With Dragons? Because after I finish it, there is no more. And then what will I do? It is very much like I imagine crack addiction to be: I need to know where my next fix is coming from. All the time the book is here, I know there is more for me to read. After I finished reading Lord of the Rings, at 4am in my first year at university (sure I should probably have been out drinking meths or something, but I never claimed to be exciting), as I finished that final chapter I cried. Real actual tears of loss. I had fought through the chapters of dross at the beginning with Tom Bombadil and his bloody songs, I had travelled with the hobbits, I had triumphed with them at Mount Doom, I had mourned the losses. I read the appendices - every word - to squeeze every last minutae of Middle Earth from those pages. And then I was lost with no more to read, certain that nothing would ever be so wonderful again.
So, here I find myself yet again, on the brink of a very similar situation, desperately trying to stave off that final moment, that ending. And the worst of it is that George R R Martin is still writing, albeit very very slowly. I could be waiting at this precipice of misery for years and years to come. I wonder if he thinks it is fun, keeping all his loyal fans (who buy his books and watch his TV series and spunk money on "House of Stark" hoodies from the HBO website) waiting and waiting for the next installment. Or if he really is just a very slow writer. To which end I would direct him to the hilarious YouTube video made by some fans, a song entitled "Write Like the Wind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7lp3RhzfgI - where they beg the author "please write and write faster". Because, ultimately, the author has some responsibility to the reader to complete the tale, does he not? And as the writers of "Write Like the Wind" pointed out, he's not getting any younger, you know?
K x
I have been reading the series steadily since Christmas, when my then boyfriend bought me the first 4 as a boxed set, carefully interspersing Game of Thrones with other reading material, lest I be left with no more of them to read. For those of you who haven't read them (or watched the TV version on Sky) first of all I suggest you do so RIGHT NOW. The characters are wonderful, the plot intricately detailed and utterly gripping. I disappear into Westeros when I read, and have become so seriously involved with the (perilously short) lives of the protagonists that I found myself once texting my friend in the middle of the night to say "W T actual F... things are not well in GoT. I can't speak about it. Its too awful".
Game of Thrones has developed quite a following, and not only with the slightly geeky role playing, comic book types, but with well-rounded socialites such as myself and my good friend Alex, who lead fairly normal daily lives and then descend into this dark book-porn world of an evening. I could happily shut my bedroom door and read for days (as long as someone fed the cat from time to time and let me out to go to the loo). So why can't I bring myself to start to read A Dance With Dragons? Because after I finish it, there is no more. And then what will I do? It is very much like I imagine crack addiction to be: I need to know where my next fix is coming from. All the time the book is here, I know there is more for me to read. After I finished reading Lord of the Rings, at 4am in my first year at university (sure I should probably have been out drinking meths or something, but I never claimed to be exciting), as I finished that final chapter I cried. Real actual tears of loss. I had fought through the chapters of dross at the beginning with Tom Bombadil and his bloody songs, I had travelled with the hobbits, I had triumphed with them at Mount Doom, I had mourned the losses. I read the appendices - every word - to squeeze every last minutae of Middle Earth from those pages. And then I was lost with no more to read, certain that nothing would ever be so wonderful again.
So, here I find myself yet again, on the brink of a very similar situation, desperately trying to stave off that final moment, that ending. And the worst of it is that George R R Martin is still writing, albeit very very slowly. I could be waiting at this precipice of misery for years and years to come. I wonder if he thinks it is fun, keeping all his loyal fans (who buy his books and watch his TV series and spunk money on "House of Stark" hoodies from the HBO website) waiting and waiting for the next installment. Or if he really is just a very slow writer. To which end I would direct him to the hilarious YouTube video made by some fans, a song entitled "Write Like the Wind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7lp3RhzfgI - where they beg the author "please write and write faster". Because, ultimately, the author has some responsibility to the reader to complete the tale, does he not? And as the writers of "Write Like the Wind" pointed out, he's not getting any younger, you know?
K x
Thursday 19 July 2012
Being a Woman
This may seem like an odd topic to be worried about - I would appear to have managed it so far for 29 years without any major difficulties. But it struck me over the past few days just how much pressure us women are constantly under. I read a very interesting article in the New Statesman about young women and their fear of attack - the author had experienced a traumatising episode herself and mentioned others. First of all, I realised that I have been very lucky in my life to have rarely found myself in a situation where I truly felt at risk of being attacked; then I began to consider that perhaps I should be more worried about it than I am. I reflected over past experiences where I had definitely been out of control of the situation, and that perhaps it was more a case of luck than judgement that I had escaped more or less unscathed all these years. Other than the sheer physical difference between the average male and the average female, what is it that makes a woman walking alone more frightened or wary than a man walking alone would do? It boils down, in my mind, to the basic objectification of women and the attitudes of both men and women to this. My example being: When I go to the gym I brush my hair, I wear clean clothes, I check that my top isnt tucked into my tracksuit bottoms or my bra poking out. I don't wear makeup (what a waste!) and I don't set out to "look hot" but I consider my appearance and ensure that I am not looking like an idiot. I walk through the gym safe in the knowledge that anyone who looked at me would have the best possible impression of me at first glance. Although not a conscious thought, I reckon the majority of women in the gym do the same - its rare to see a lady with her shorts tucked in her big pants or wearing a stained t-shirt. But I cannot imagine a man having the same thought processes or the same concerns before starting their workout - they're not there to pick up ladies, they're there to lift weights and sweat. And this isn't an argument for or against vanity or suggesting that women are parading peacocks for the male of the species - simply that we are programmed in some way to know that we are going to be looked at and considered by the opposite sex - positively, negatively or neutrally. And this is surely a pre-cursor to the fear of attack - we walk alone knowing somehow that we will be appraised visually, and objectified. And an object that is wanted can be taken and possessed, can be used for whatever purpose you see fit. Now that gets me onto worrying about domestic violence but thats a whole other subject.
We women, on the whole, spend a significant part of our time waxing, brushing, washing, filing, polishing, buffing and generally preening to meet with, or try to look the way we think we want to look. And I fail to be convinced by anyone who tells me this is truly the way they want to live - I would much rather be enjoying a glass of wine with my friends than having my pubes ripped out, trust me. I want to look nice, and be proud of my appearance, but so much of my expectation or hopes in relation to the way I look are based on the totally unrealistic vision presented to us by the media. And kids are subjected to these pictures of "women" from such a young age, that it becomes normal for teenagers to expect to see a porn-star perfect foo at their first sexual encounter, or that all women should be as thin as Victoria Beckham, or have mahoosive boobs like Katie Price. So the pressure is there from the get-go for girls to live up to an impossible norm, and we make such a good go of it that we perpetuate the fallacy. I know this is nothing new, Im not making ground breaking realisations - I read Caitlin Moran, The Vagenda - this has all been said before. But it worries me, more and more, that I will never be perfect enough, never be thin enough, never be smooth enough to meet this expectation of me that I place on myself. And that the expectation is grounded in the fact that everywhere I go I know I'm being sized up by viewing eyes (not in a Samantha Brick-esque self-congratulatory way, and no doubt more often than not in an entirely neutral and inoffensive manner).
I worry that as now my generation of young women are beginning to notice the total unfairness and lunacy of the body beautiful rituals that are expected of us, whole new generations after us are starting it themselves, and at even younger ages. How can we possibly keep up? If I consider defoliating my bikini area as a chore, will our kids consider getting their vajazzle re-jazzled as "just one of those things you gotta do?". And so we perpetuate the objectification by succumbing to it.
Oh god, and I havent even mentioned career, money, meeting a life partner, childbirth and rearing, periods, menopause, old age, wrinkles and the other million things that worry me about Being a Woman. K x
We women, on the whole, spend a significant part of our time waxing, brushing, washing, filing, polishing, buffing and generally preening to meet with, or try to look the way we think we want to look. And I fail to be convinced by anyone who tells me this is truly the way they want to live - I would much rather be enjoying a glass of wine with my friends than having my pubes ripped out, trust me. I want to look nice, and be proud of my appearance, but so much of my expectation or hopes in relation to the way I look are based on the totally unrealistic vision presented to us by the media. And kids are subjected to these pictures of "women" from such a young age, that it becomes normal for teenagers to expect to see a porn-star perfect foo at their first sexual encounter, or that all women should be as thin as Victoria Beckham, or have mahoosive boobs like Katie Price. So the pressure is there from the get-go for girls to live up to an impossible norm, and we make such a good go of it that we perpetuate the fallacy. I know this is nothing new, Im not making ground breaking realisations - I read Caitlin Moran, The Vagenda - this has all been said before. But it worries me, more and more, that I will never be perfect enough, never be thin enough, never be smooth enough to meet this expectation of me that I place on myself. And that the expectation is grounded in the fact that everywhere I go I know I'm being sized up by viewing eyes (not in a Samantha Brick-esque self-congratulatory way, and no doubt more often than not in an entirely neutral and inoffensive manner).
I worry that as now my generation of young women are beginning to notice the total unfairness and lunacy of the body beautiful rituals that are expected of us, whole new generations after us are starting it themselves, and at even younger ages. How can we possibly keep up? If I consider defoliating my bikini area as a chore, will our kids consider getting their vajazzle re-jazzled as "just one of those things you gotta do?". And so we perpetuate the objectification by succumbing to it.
Oh god, and I havent even mentioned career, money, meeting a life partner, childbirth and rearing, periods, menopause, old age, wrinkles and the other million things that worry me about Being a Woman. K x
Sunday 15 July 2012
What to Call My Blog!
I have been thinking about writing a blog for a very long time. A good friend of mine writes a very succesful blog about diabetes, but I dont have diabetes so I can't write about that. I considered writing a food blog, but there are so many hundreds of those already. Then I thought I could write a film blog (I did do a degree in that subject, after all) but again, the market is somewhat saturated. What could I write about that hadn't already been covered ten times over by better, more well known writers, I asked myself. I could write a blog about coping with RA, but I'm not doing a terribly good job of that at the moment, so I put that idea to one side. The more I thought about it the more worried I became at the whole prospect until I put the idea out of my head once and for all. And then it struck me: the thing that I am really good at and could do regularly and without pressure is worry. I can write copious amounts about things that I am currently worrying about and hopefully manage to make it vaguely entertaining and hopefully instructive and/or informative to some degree. Hooray!
And then I started to worry about what to call The Blog. You can't entitle it "The Blog" after all, and after several weeks of semi-constant worrying about it I fell upon the title that you see before you. This way I can find something new to worry about on a regular basis and share it joyfully with you. Subject of worry is unlimited and non-specific, and any suggestions of useful or interesting topics for me to concern myself with would be very much appreciated! (also, I fear, I may need to widen my vocabulary of words related to or meaning the same as 'worry' as I am now worried that the 'w' of my keyboard may wear out).
For those of you that know me well, you know that my capacity to worry, and through doing so worry about how much I am worrying, is beyond normal. I truly hope to be able through the medium of this blog to turn that into something postive and practical and less mentally damaging (for all of us). K x
And then I started to worry about what to call The Blog. You can't entitle it "The Blog" after all, and after several weeks of semi-constant worrying about it I fell upon the title that you see before you. This way I can find something new to worry about on a regular basis and share it joyfully with you. Subject of worry is unlimited and non-specific, and any suggestions of useful or interesting topics for me to concern myself with would be very much appreciated! (also, I fear, I may need to widen my vocabulary of words related to or meaning the same as 'worry' as I am now worried that the 'w' of my keyboard may wear out).
For those of you that know me well, you know that my capacity to worry, and through doing so worry about how much I am worrying, is beyond normal. I truly hope to be able through the medium of this blog to turn that into something postive and practical and less mentally damaging (for all of us). K x
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