The last 24 hours has brought me profound and helpful learnings which I will share with you, dear readers, in the hope that my insights provoke reflection and action whenever you experience what I term GOCS (Grouchy Old Cunt Syndrome).
I realised that this state was upon me late last night when my hunnee, as is his wont, did his drama queeny bit. Sadly my hunnee does this to me and his latest piece of queenery was the second in less than 24 hours. The GOC creaked into action but lo! I had a learning! And lo the learning was this! He does the queening because I give him an audience and he gets a response. It actually doesn’t really matter what the response is, be it nice or nasty, caring or a kick in the rubber parts, he gets my attention and my interaction. I promptly turned off the mobile and disconnected the PC.
In this age of connectivity, it seems important that we learn the importance of disconnecting. An old student of mine and I have been having lengthy on and offline discussions about the uses of social networking and the ways in which people use media like MySpace, Facebook and so on. Doing some research on the issue, it seems that prospective employers are increasingly surveying these sites to see what their prospective hire REALLY gets up to in his/her downtime. Not that I think it’s any of their business, but be aware, comrades, what you put up is on open access and it is perfectly possible that my musings on GOCS could one day be surveyed by either a gross little fart of a student or a larger faculty fart with the power to shape my future in quite profound ways.
This has left me wondering about the power and beauty of discretion. I love discrete people – not being terribly well endowed with that faculty myself, I do totally respect it in others – and think that this behavioural trait is much overlooked. In a world of constant connection and interaction, maybe we need to reconsider the value of holding back, or at least switching off and disconnecting.
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5 comments:
I think my problem is, putting what people put on myspace, on the actual application form!
Indeed! But then again, they will be under no illusions, wysisyg in action, no?
Ha Ha Ha!
Hmmm...discretion is the better part of valour and all that.
I think that our generation learned discretion (what we have of it) because for better or worse, we had religion of some description drummed into us, there was an all-seeing God watching us at all times, so whatever we did could be scrutinised if not by our parents, then by someone even more omnipotent. Of course it didn't stop us doing things we shouldn't, but we knew we were being watched and judged.
I wonder if this generation, further from that than we were, will be less discreet.
It's an odd one, isn't it? A lot of the truly discrete people I know don't seem to me to have much of a sense of religion, but then again, the truly religious people I have known were absolute monuments of discretion. Whether it's god, politteness, a healthy super-ego or whatever, I think there's something about a willingness to hold back that is simply not encouraged now. Maybe letting it all hang out isn't necessarily the best option.
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