I Now know people
So I've recently become dissatisfied with life. I lie, I've been dissatisfied with my life since I lost my hat back in the turn of the decade. Anyways, in the words of a friend of mine you can only refresh facebook so many times until you realise how much of a low life you are. So here I am, putting my typing talents to use. So I had a difficult time thinking of a title for my blog. With all decisions of this nature, I had to rely on a friend beyond the tracks. After some inspirational words I decided to go for a distance but I couldn't decide on what distance to go for. My height, the length of my journey to uni, the size of my endowment... To cut this story short, I ended up going for the vague option hence "a certain distance." Just re-read that last paragraph, didn't make much sense but if you get what I mean it was hard but fun. That's what she said.
Change of plans. As I previously said, this would be a remastered version of my "first" post but I just went out for some jogging and I need to talk about something. Typically Londoners are quite anti-social when it comes to strangers. I'll use a few examples from my own life and perhaps this may aid you in your life.
Situation 1: The homeless poor lady/dude who asks you for money.
There are many ways to respond to this. First of all I must mention compassion fatigue. You know how you've seen like 100 charity adverts and now you don't care about that starving African kid; that's compassion fatigue. This is usually the view I have with these homeless people. Now, through my travels over the years I've realised many of these so called unfortunate(read: lazy/unemployed) people actually are just actors playing their part in the big performance called life. Shakespeare famously wrote "all the world's a stage" and I must say I agree with him. A recent study has shown that 93% of these homeless people in fact are just pretending to be homeless in order to gain money without any actual work. I actually remember this Eastern European woman with a baby claiming she needed money for her baby; she also had a second adolescent child with her. Now, you may have heard of these guys being pickpockets, I can attest to that but what I saw was worse that day. She had a Nokia N95. To put this into perspective she somehow had enough money to get on the tube and also enough money to buy that phone in the spring of '07, quite some time before the iPhone's rise to power. My response was rude yet I continue to use it to this day. "Money please, your baby? I've heard it all before. Whatever. Go claim benefits".
Situation 2: The guy who attempts to sell you his mixtape.
A common occurrence down Oxford St. This dude obviously doesn't realise the state of the music industry. Most artists make their money off live shows nowadays. Buying music is admittedly a waste of time when it's so easy to pirate it. Obviously with an unsigned unpopular artist, buying their music may be the only option but why would someone pay for a random dude they've never heard before when they wouldn't dare pay for their favorite band? Now I must say I do not condone such illegal behaviour and if somebody makes good music, they do deserve some money. After all it's only about 99p per song. Although it's somewhat died out as a social network, MySpace is a good way to share your music and with enough support you could land a record deal one day. Anyways I digress, this dude needs to learn that nobody cares about his music. My usual response and the response of the general Londoner would be to look down at the floor and accelerate as walking past the guy.
Situation 3: The person asking for directions.
Call it arrogance but I never like asking random people for directions. I also hate the fact that people ask for directions. Whenever I'm going to a new weird area I try to check maps online before I go and learn the route. Google Street View makes things even easier. Then you get the guys who have smartphones but only use them for making calls and texts when they have built in GPS. These people personally need to get a Alcatel OT 209, at least then they won't be eating up precious 3G bandwidth. So my response to this situation differs a lot from the others in the regard that I am always polite however depending on my mood I will either tell them the truth or send them wrong direction for jokes.
Now you may wonder why I just wrote all that. I was just trying to prove a point; that me and many other Londoners, including yourself perhaps quite rude when it comes to random strangers. During this entire Nike Grid campaign, all the runners I've met have been pretty cool polite people. These guys don't even know my name but are willing to crack a joke or ask me how I'm feeling. Perhaps not all strangers are weird people after all. However, as always things never conclude on a nice tone. Many of the people in the phone boxes who weren't members of Nike Grid have been quite annoying. I'll make note of one guy, for lack of a better name I'll refer to him as Mr D. Baggerson. Baggerson gets in the phone box after I leave and upon re-arrival about 20 minutes later I find Mr Baggerson still in the phone box but on his mobile phone. After staring at me for 30 seconds or so he gets out and I enter. When I left the phone box, Mr Baggerson re-enters the phone box. I don't think my view on strangers has truly changed. All of us Nike Grid runners know eachother, not by name but by purpose and I guess that means we're not total strangers to each other.
For you cryptic types I've got a hidden message in my blog post. If you work it out, it provides you with my facebook password. Good luck finding it! :D
