I’d say it’s what separates us, not from the beasts, but the bestial. Creating the future, renewing a learned past - these are reasons to strive. Writing for and with love, taking and framing an image, stretching new melodic skins onto old skeletons of song… it’s how we manage to fly. It’s how we stay you and me, not us and them.
Unlike Osk, who seemed to establish his own tactical task force wherever we lived, scooping up neighbourhood feline troublemakers as sidekicks (including the memorable ginger behemoth Watson, with whom he used to scope the street from the safety of the shed roof), Jelly has the intelligence gathering skills of a sponge cake.
Anyway, somewhere in between my 'and then you should've done this' and 'why didn't you say x and y, rather than z', and 'for the love of monkeys and the general public's eyesight, you didn't honestly wear that heinous shirt did you', something he was saying about the dating extravaganza we were picking to pieces finally penetrated my cloud of self-congratulatory cumulo-waffle.
"Most people don't talk about how dates are progressing as a tender process, do they?" he asked.
"What?"
"She said I was 'part way through the tender process' and that she was judging me on my submission. I'd like to think there was irony involved, and I think at the time I may have given an admittedly weak "haha, yesssss, quite". Looking back, I'd have to conclude, computer says no on the presence of Fabulon or other aids to achieving crisply pressed linen."
Anyway, somewhere in between my 'and then you should've done this' and 'why didn't you say x and y, rather than z', and 'for the love of monkeys and the general public's eyesight, you didn't honestly wear that heinous shirt did you', something he was saying about the dating extravaganza we were picking to pieces finally penetrated my cloud of self-congratulatory cumulo-waffle.
"Most people don't talk about how dates are progressing as a tender process, do they?" he asked.
"What?"
"She said I was 'part way through the tender process' and that she was judging me on my submission. I'd like to think there was irony involved, and I think at the time I may have given an admittedly weak "haha, yesssss, quite". Looking back, I'd have to conclude, computer says no on the presence of Fabulon or other aids to achieving crisply pressed linen."
...admitting intellect is part and parcel of finding someone attractive seems to be akin to saying you love someone because they secretly wish Stalin or Kruschev was still running the USSR, and had Red Dawn-ed the world into submission.
If you find someone attractive for their butt or their boobs, why is it so wrong to find them attractive for their grey matter?
Think about the person you're with presently (if you are with someone - if not, think about the person you feel you'd like to be with). Now imagine the future. You're seventy or eighty years old. Believe me, it's on its way - admittedly for some of us it's closer than for others. It's after dinner on a Saturday night. You're sitting on the sofa with them, vino in hand (hey, eighty doesn't have to be boring!)
And suddenly, somewhere in between Matplats and Badrums, your relationship is resembling that moment where Katniss and Peeta are about to eat the berries... and not in a dying for true love kinda way.
However.
There is hope. You can pass this test. Really really.
““The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.” ”
— Lev Grossman, The Magicians
I was listening to The Great
Gatsby soundtrack yesterday and in particular the Lana del Ray song
'Young and Beautiful' - well, it would be fair to say, a bit
incessantly. It's a great song, and it fits the mood of Gatsby so well -
the reckless hedonistic abandon of the 20s and maybe/maybe not doomed love.
It also
raises a question which we all think about in one form or another,
whether we are single, coupled up or somewhere in between:
"Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?"
It's
something we all have to face. Time stops for no man, and it seems
doubly so that it stops for no woman for some extremely unfair reason
(case in point; grey hair looks better on men. I'm sorry, but it does).
Growing older we soon learn who is willing to love us for us and not for
pure physical appeal.
Even more importantly we learn whom we want to love ourselves.
I
was talking about this with the still very very youthful and extremely
beautiful Miss K the other day. We were discussing relationships (as one does)
and she said 'yep, they have to pass The Scrabble Test'. And this is so
very true when it comes to longevity in love.
What's The Scrabble Test? It's simple.
Think
about the person you're with presently (if you are with someone - if not, think about the person you feel you'd like to be with). Now imagine the future. You're
seventy or eighty years old. Believe me, it's on its way - admittedly for some of us it's closer than for others. It's after dinner on a Saturday night. You're sitting
on the sofa with them, vino in hand (hey, eighty doesn't have to be
boring!)
Now.
It's time to...
Whip out the Scrabble. And whip their butts.
And laugh while you do it.
Firstly
I suppose, can you see yourself with said person at eighty? And if so,
can you see yourself happily playing board games and reading together
and snorting and pretty much being as much of an idiot
as you are at twenty-five, or thirty-five, or forty-one?
That's The Scrabble Test.
You
can call it the Trivial Pursuit Test, or the Backgammon Test, or whatever
the hell you want, but my point is this; love is the sum of a whole lot
of parts. And one of the biggest parts is like - and laughter.
And
stupidy stupid. To quote Baldrick the Great. So make sure you bestow
your affections on someone you still want to beat up over board games in
years to come.
““I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.” ”
— Stanley Kubrick
I don't know about you, but I dream about flying all the time. I love it. And I can tell when I am close to waking up because my 'flights' turn into a strange kind of bunny hopping where I don't achieve much height and can only get off the ground for about ten seconds at a time; and the more I drift towards consciousness the shallower the jumps become.
Dammnit.
But when I am truly sleeps - then I am soaring over power lines, zipping around the sky, having a total blast. It's the ultimate freedom. Possibly, much like birds, I should be looking out for passing A380s, but in dreams they tend not to be a feature - it's all swooping and soaring and not so much being sucked into jet engines.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened with old Daedalus and the luckless Icarus if the latter hadn't got a bit too big for his feathers. Would the course of aviation history have moved up a good two millennium or so? Or did they even really exist - and if they were real people, did their wings do anything other than look like big flappy things which would have been ace Mardi Gras accoutrements?
I may be naive, or simply a believer in the improbable, but I like to think that young Icarus was (obviously before he went splat) on the right track. You know why? A couple of reasons. One, he was willing to try something radical; and two, he was massively grateful that the the only person his father wanted involved in this project was him. So many parents would say 'don't - you'll always be here. This is my project, not yours, so naff off and leave me to it.'
Hubris may have gotten the better of I&D Industrial Aerospace, but if you are lucky enough to have awesome parents - or family members - who you engage with on a personal and professional level, don't ever, ever underestimate the value of their brains and their passion for what they do. If they let you in, be in.
And if they make you a set of fairy wings?
Wow. Never, ever stop being grateful.
And don't fly too close to the outdoor gas heaters.
