the realist speaks.

A heading on the news just caught my eye.
"Rotten egg smell causes chaos in Queensland."

Chaos? I'm fascinated. What sort of chaos are we talking here? What exactly does the smell of rotten eggs make me people do?

I'm picturing cars grinding to a halt in city streets; sirens blaring, elephants smashing through shop windows. Smoke, people running, people collapsing in doorways.

It seems I have an over-active imagination. Because, apparently, 'chaos' means a few people got sick.

Hmm. Perspective is a valuable thing.

I had to remind myself of this last week. Last week, the most bleak week of the year. The week everything was grey, everything was lost, everything weighed heavy on my heart.

So it seemed.

Nobody had died. I wasn't ill. I hadn't lost anything.

Without boring anyone with the details (and to save face) it came down to the fact that something that I was hoping for didn't happen.

Pretty big deal. At the time.

I quickly found that being depressed takes a lot of energy. I was buggered. I couldn't - and didn't - do anything. I didn't want to see anyone. All I wanted to do was sit and mope and eat chocolate. And mope.

Fortunately, the novelty of being a depressed wreck wore off. The week ended, other things came up. I got over it.

If anything useful came out of the experience, it is the knowledge that even the most crap days finish at 12 midnight.

And sometimes, it is the measure of our own perspective as to how much we really suffer.

The Aussies who passed out because of a strange pong in the air were suffering. My feeling inadequate was suffering. And when we're broke, or angry at someone, or we miss out on the last muffin in the lunchroom, we're suffering.

But it's amazing what a dose of perspective can do for that suffering.

Because, on the same day, someone lost a family member to cancer. Someone else lost their job. And someone else died in a car accident.

It's okay to feel bleak over little stuff, I've realised. For a little while. But at some point, you've got to pull finger. Open your eyes. Be grateful that it's only little stuff.

And get on with living.

figuring it out

We've all been there. Some of us breeze through it; some of us get stuck; some of us take a kind of boomerang approach and return to it again and again.

But all of us, at some point, will wonder, "what should I do with my life?"

It concerns some more than others. Some people, I think, spend frustrated years searching for the 'right' answer to that question, as if our lives have no meaning otherwise. They zoom down one career path and up the next, hoping to end up in the place that they are 'meant to be'.
And perhaps getting more disoriented and confused along the way.
Others seem quite content to not think about it at all. I know a woman who has a masters degree in English and started her career as a teacher in her twenties. After her OE, she got a job at a fish factory. She is now in her mid-fifties and has been there ever since. Never married, no children; she lives at home with her mum.

Perhaps that's an extreme case, but an interesting one. Where did her ambition go? Did she ever have any?

And really, does it matter?

As kids, the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question seems to fit in alongside learning our ABCs - mainly for the amusement of adults. If only we knew that our response would be saved up and dug out during a speech at our 21st birthday party... "When our Johnny was five, I recall he wanted to be a space monster..."

I don't think there's any particular age that this question can or should be answered. I know people nearing forty who still haven't figured it out.

At 25, I've had my fair share of I-will-never-go-there-again jobs. I've answered phones, cleaned urinals, poured Guinness, packed strawberries/asparagus/corn and assembled boxes of frozen cordon bleu and chicken nuggets. It's difficult to say which of those came out on top in the Worse Job Ever stakes.

Oddly, I did all those jobs with a (very expensive) degree under my belt.

While my future career options are now a little more palatable, I'm still nowhere near making a decision. Perhaps it will come to me in another six years, when I'm still in my current job; or perhaps when I'm backpacking around India, or blogging about my travels in Africa. Or buying frozen peas at the supermarket.

In all honesty, I don't think people care what anyone else does with their life; they're too preoccupied with their own.

So who are we answering to - ourselves, or the rest of the world?

click-a-friend

Once upon a time, friendships were formed over games of Tiggy or swapping muesli bars for yoghurt or joint homework assignments on Saving the Dolphins. It began with involved eye contact. A smile. Spoken words. A laugh or two.

Watch a bunch of five-year-olds in a room together and you'll recognise the old way of making friends.

Kids of that age have no preconceptions when it comes to making friends. Usually, they decide who they like best - be it because they were nice to them at lunchtime, or because they brought a really cool toy to Show and Tell - they strike up a friendship, and that's that. Simple.

These days, all one needs to do is click 'Add As Friend' on Facebook and - voila -

you are now friends with Joe Bloggs.

I was watching over my sister's shoulder the other day as she logged into her Facebook page. A Friend Request had come up.

Interestingly, the request came from a person who had been my best friend at Intermediate. I think she and my sister had spoken, oh maybe twice... and that was 12 years ago.

Nevertheless, she and my sister are now 'friends'.

Looking through the profiles on my own Facebook account, I note that several people have 400+ friends. Four hundred people? I can barely name four hundred people I am acquainted with, let alone am friends with. Perhaps that says more about me than them, but I'm still willing to bet that fewer than 30 of those four hundred people will stop in the street for a chat should they pass each other by.

Now, making friends is as easy as online shopping.

Perhaps it's that the concept of 'friend' has changed. Nowadays, a friend isn't necessarily someone you'd have a coffee with or call on the phone if you're having a bad day. A friend can be someone you met once at a party, or who sold you a book on the internet, or perhaps just someone who knows someone you know who sold THEM a book on the internet.

Once we head into the big wide world, we suddenly find ourselves without the means of easy social interaction of the school playground or classroom. We still crave that interaction; almost as much as we want people to know we are still popular and still liked by other human beings.

Hence, click-a-friend.

So what happens when the thread holding us - and all our four hundred-plus Facebook friends and Trademe friends and Oldfriends and Bebo friends - breaks? When the internet collapses beneath the weight of too many Farmville requests and Join This Group suggestions and godknowswhat applications?


If it weren't for the internet, how many friends do any of us really have? When Telecom fails, will Joe Bloggs call you on the phone instead?