Soulmates

Each Saturday in the Guardian Guide there is a section of personal ads. This section also features two 'Soulmates of the week'. These are excerpts from the profiles of people on the Guardian's online-dating site. Here's a selection of them from the last few weeks (click on the images to enlarge them; Blogspot seems to have its own ideas about how big I want images to be).




Read them? Good. Did you notice anything, something that they had in common? Exactly! "They all seem like cunts." Couldn't have put it better myself.

Someone is choosing these people each week. It might be that this person is performing a practical joke and the hilarious resolution is yet to be delivered. More simply, they might be making a statement to regular readers – Online Dating: sail the boundless ocean of banality, electronically meet a thousand 'outgoing' people who are also 'a bit introvert' and like nothing better than to have 'a few beers and a few laughs with friends in the pub'. Wit and charm will be but a distant memory as you discover shared passions such as 'going to restaurants or the cinema sometimes'.

To join the ranks of a group of insecure, romantically unsuccessful, boring people would be scary. I imagine that they would hide behind the arcane language of early twenty-first century, codified, courtship practice. Knowing references to phenomena such as 'the third date' would abound. I seem to remember that on Friends the third date was known as 'the fuck date'. This strikes me as a singularly terrifying prospect. First of all, you will need to choose a set of clothes that are every bit as clean and appropriate as the clothes that you wore on the first two dates but, crucially, are not the same clothes. It may be that you have to resort to buying entirely new clothes. In many ways this evening's meeting will be the culmination of several hours work in various date-venues over the past few weeks displaying the most socially-acceptable aspects of your tightly-corseted personality. Devil may care post-nightclub sex is not on the cards; this is the test drive for, the ominous-sounding, LTR. Candidates will be assessed on: the size and shape of their bodies; the arrangement and relative size of their facial features; their choice of shirt; the number of buttons that have been done up on that shirt; the tenor of their voice; method of eating asparagus; the co-ordination manifest in their choice of shirt, socks and shoes; annual income; judgement of whether or not I am the sort of girl who thinks that you should pay; competence of tipping/giving-orgasms.

And yet there is still hope. In January, the Guardian published a selection of personal ads from the London Review of Books. Many of them are very funny (again, click to enlarge).

People Are Twats

My previous post dealt largely with explaining that young people are rubbish. This time I want to do some broadening out of this theory. I was unduly fair on what I termed 'older people'; I said that they were "of worth to society" and "had something to say". I want now to show that these claims are demonstrably untrue. All people are, in fact, twats.

I doubt that it is would be easy to find an empirical argument for this so, to begin with, I want to deal with what conclusions we can come to inductively. The first - and perhaps most obvious reason - for thinking that people are twats is that they never tell you who to make cheques payable to without prompting. In the history of humanity no one has ever composed an initial letter, email or advertisement soliciting money that included information about who to make cheques payable to. This means that other people have to spend innumerable non-life-affirming hours trawling through company websites, phoning 'any queries' numbers with no one at the end of them, or sending emails that weeks later receive replies saying, "sorry, we've already sold out of tickets/ cheap printer ink cartridges/ vibrating eggs."

It's self-evident that children are twats: they still like toys and spend their time going to weddings and classical music concerts so they can wail during the quiet bits. And I explained why young people are twats last time. So it is now incumbent on me to give an account of why people older than young people are twats. In the previous post I, to an extent, suggested that experience breeds insight and wisdom and therefore "things to say". It is a sad fact that this is seldom the case: 43% of people aged 45 and over can only think of concepts in terms of where their children or their aquaintances' children go to university. A smaller, but sizable, proportion can only think of concepts in terms of Agas. There is also a trend for the complacently unfunny among these people to go on programmes like Grumpy Old Men and talk about how bloody hilarious becoming middle aged is. Eight in ten of their jokes follow this format: 'these days I groan when I get out of a chair.'

A response to this argument might be to say, "What about Gandhi, Mother Teresa or national treasure, Stephen Fry? Surely these people are not twats?" My answer is: I have not met them. My experience with other people tells me that they most probably are/were twats. I know this in the same way that I know the sun will rise again tomorrow, if I don't eat I will become hungry and if I go to Manchester's Opus nightclub I will not enjoy myself.

If you need further convincing, I suggest you watch the first episode of Armando Iannucci's 'The Armando Iannucci Shows', which covers this ground in far greater depth than I have here.

*1/3/09 — the misuse of the word empirical in this post is a source of undying embarrassment for me; I am a philosophy student for chrissake's! I am not going to change it though; let it stand as a monument to my stupidity.

Young People Are Pointless

A few weeks back I was at a party of a school friend in the town where he goes to university. The party lasted into the small hours and towards the end my friend - having decided the oppurtunity for romantic conquest had passed - sat me down to have a talk. After a brief preamble about how the booze seemed to have dried up, he returned to one of his favourite subjects: the importance of enjoying yourself while you're young given the Unrelenting Drabness of Working Life. He said this pointedly because it is his opinion that I spend too much time cooking food and reading newspaper weekend supplements; activities that it would be better to save for middle age or later. I would like to take issue with the assumption that being young is any good. In fact, it is my contention that there are plenty of reasons for thinking that being young is completely awful.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would disagree with me on this and you can see why. Consider, for example: staying up until sunrise at a beach party vs. getting up before its light for work; a thrilling sense of vitality and possiblility vs. a growing awareness of your own mortality; going out six nights in a row vs. six visits to the toilet in one night; a spur of the moment road trip to Morocco vs. having unexpectedly to drive out to Stenhousemuir at 9.30 on a Thursday evening; living in a flat full of hilarious mates vs. dying in a care home. The case appears to be open and shut. But I don't think so. All of the things commonly taken to make life fulfilling are generally absent from youngs lives. Fewer of us are in meaningful and loving relationships, fewer of us are raising children and almost none of us having the satisfaction of knowing we are doing useful work and that we are part of a community. Instead, we lead empty, pointless lives. For those of us without religion or a significant other we face the universe from a position of existential purity; just a person, pissing into the unforgiving void.

Another problem is that as a young person you have to hang around with other young people who are, with few exceptions, vapid idiots. Young people have not done as many things as older people so they do not have as much to say; they resort, instead, to saying things like, "I want to watch Neighbours," and, "when does the new Artic Monkeys album come out?" The intellectual zenith of most young people's lives is having said "belated birthday". Young people don't know anything: I'm young and I certainly don't. I met a young person the other day who didn't know what a brillo pad was. In comparison, older people know how to do things like building bridges, conducting public spending reviews and putting up shelves. Nor are young people funny. The comedian, Russell Howard, of BBC2's superfluous, scripted, improvisation show Mock the Week is known for being very young and he is one of the least funny men in living memory.

In short, young people spend there time wondering if its already too late to get involved in the man cardigan craze and their more mature counterparts are of worth to society. Young people are insipid twats and there is, at least, a chance that an older person might have something to say. Shakespeare may have agreed with me: in "A Winter's Tale" an old shepherd says,

"I would there were no age between ten and three and
twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is
nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging
the ancientry, stealing, fighting-"

So there you go. Sorry about the pretentious ending...