Sunday 15 September 2013

Mistakes for all!

I love making mistakes...no, that's a bloody understatement, I really fucking love making mistakes. If mistakes were a person, (Miss Takes? Ho ho ho, we do have fun here with the puns and whatnot!...it's not a pun, it's a play on words! you fool!) I would obsessively stalk that person....it would not end well for either of us....but the point of this is, the takeaway from this is that I really do enjoy making mistakes. I hear you asking "But Terence, how do you tell the difference between store bought cola and brand cola when they're unlabelled?" and the answer is simple, I believe you learn better from your mistakes. It's like....remember when you were a child and you burnt your hand on the cooker? (If you don't, just imagine you do...basically all that memory is anyway) From then on you know to keep away from it. But it's basically guaranteed that your parent or carer or supernatural watcher told you first "don't put your hand on the cooker, it's hot!" and that's, well...great...but what is hot? How do you know what hot is if you've never experienced it? You pay attention to what they have told you, of course you do, they're your mum, your baby-sitter, your ephemeral ghost friend who is unable to move into the light and must forever remain on this planet warning little children such as yourself to not touch the hot things or else you'll end up dead and haunting the place like him...but you don't really take it in. So, you totter off to the cooker and as the little bad-ass punk that you think you are you put your hand on the stove, pfft, it ain't no big deal right? Could leave your hand there all d-Jesus Christ! that hurts! Then you wail and cry and run off to an adult and tell them all about how you didn't pay attention to their wise words....and they roll their eyes and do whatever it is that parents do to comfort a child (in my house, they believed wholeheartedly that laughter is the best medicine.....so they laughed at my injury....I'm just messing! I hope...I really can't remember....) and we learn and we never do it again....until the next time...

So why the subject of mistakes....well, basically....I made a mistake coming here, to the student halls....that's not to say there's anything wrong with either my flat, flatmates or the area, because there isn't. They're good buildings/people/locations, just...not entirely for me....I knew it was a mistake from the first moment I decided I was going to move into a shared flat, a halls of residence, but again, as I said at the start I love making mistakes. I had to do it, you know...oh Lord, that's basically a sign of masochism isn't it? Doing something you know will harm you regardless of that knowledge....But yeah, I had to do it because I knew I'd hate myself if I didn't go for it...My brain would be calling me a chicken and bawking all the damn time about it, and no! Just no! Bad brain! You don't get to dictate my life! (I don't get out of this phase until I go back to the future and see myself get fired for not backing down to a challenge after being called chicken like in that movie, though the lesson doesn't really settle in until I go back to the wild west and learn about my namesake who was very similar to me and died because of his inability to back down, basically my life is Back to the Future....I wish...)

It's not that I don't enjoy doing things right, because I do...it's just...I like being wrong sometimes, you know, there's a thrill in genuinely not knowing something, or being told not to do something and then doing it anyway, and just fucking up....I hate the bad reputation failure gets, people looking down on it and crap, there's a snide remark I often hear about Edison's (and I am loathe to credit Edison positively, but alas, these are strange times and here we are) quote of "I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." that basically runs along the lines of "Well, I'd rather just do it right first time."....bravo to those people, they miss the point. If you got everything exactly right first time, then what? If you just sailed through life, getting everything right first time, never making any mistakes at all, excelling perfectly at any and everything you try, how boring would you be as a person? No, not even boring, just condescendingly inhuman. You couldn't debate with people, because you know, you'd just beat them, even if the subject was philosophy, because hey, you're always right. Always. Whatever the topic, whatever the subject....notice how no good ice-breaker starts with "So, guys, I am awesome in every way and have never done anything wrong ever", well, bully for you! There's no empathy to be had with that statement. We as a species relate to each other by our mistakes, by what has gone wrong (or what we perceive of having gone wrong), if everything always goes exactly the right way, if there's no set backs, we degrade as humans, we become less than what we should be because there is no challenge there, no need to adapt and overcome. Anyway, I've talked enough here, I'm going to go adapt and overcome a plate of curry (....that sounded way less gross in my head....I'm going to leave it in there though, because mistakes, yay!) or something...later days y'all! 

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