‘A massacre? Ugh.’ … ‘Men fail …’ … «el fuego» 13th of May, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 08:13

“Oh, well, yeah. Fantastic. ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. What a great song. It really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday, doesn’t it? You wake up in the morning, you’ve got to read all the Sunday papers, the kids are running round, you’ve got to mow the lawn, wash the car, and you think “Sunday, bloody Sunday!”.”

Alan Partridge’s TV shows are magnificent comedies of failure. That wasn’t at all clear to me when I saw Knowing Me, Knowing You  at first; I didn’t have exposure to the radio series, and the TV show seemed to involve him succeeding, spreading his mind-bendingly stupid way of thinking across Britain (because making a TV series about someone who’s failing is just asking to get cancelled, right?). And actual life is full enough with that sort of success- despite- incompetence that seeing one episode just depressed me.

But reading up on Graham Linehan I learn a bit more about it, and yes, of course, he fails magnificently and hugely, and taken in its entirety, it’s not a series that focuses on the bright side of being a sycophantic dickhead.

Comment on random blog entry: The crux of treating other people well is understanding their point of view, and then acting to make their life better with that in mind. If you understand anyone’s point of view, you understand your own, and as a result patterns of thought close to your own and reactions to situations close to your own can be related to much better than others.

I cannot imagine myself in any of the described scenarios, I cannot imagine the corresponding point of view for me. If I’m asking someone for money, I am being a ѕhіt, I am exploiting the friendship; having money available is such a priority in my life that “out of cash flow” is wilful neglect, and the prospect of exploiting friends has been thought of already.

Talking about a lousy day just depresses me more, it doesn’t help. If I need to talk to a friend for other personal reasons, ten minutes is either five times more time than is necessary, or a tiny fraction of it.

Unfulfilled sexual desire doesn’t normally disappear like that.

If I think “I want to just sit quietly” and someone comes over, I say in my mind “don’t be autistic, talk to them, remember that time you got all silent on $random_woman and it pissed her off?”

“Backstabbed at work?” I don’t even get the phrase. Someone acted like a ѕhіt? People are ѕhіts, that’s what they do, do what you do in good faith, document it, when they attempt to fuсk you over, you have something to point to when you say it’s them that did the attempting.

Now, I do not mean to say that I would behave as do our blogger’s conversation partners, just that I understand their imagined positions much easier than I do hers. If she’s not ready to accept those imagined positions as reasonable within her cultural sphere, then a heterosexual lifestyle is not suited to her.

Word of the day: оташ is Tajik for ‘fire’.