Rethinking Education Part 3: The Innocent Stop Protecting the Guilty

Any time you talk about educational reform you inevitably have to talk about schools and subsequently teachers.

Earlier in the week when I concieved of writing this post I tried to think of the names of all my various teachers over the years so I could try and figure out a ratio of good:bad teachers.

I was alarmed at how many teachers I can't even recall. I must have done 8 subjects a semester through highschool, and sure many teachers teach multiple classes, but I can maybe recall a handful of teachers, and only the good ones.

The rest, not only the teachers are largely forgotten, but the whole subjects they taught, With some effort some come back to me but really it highlights something.

Even those of us who claim to have a good memory, only remember interesting (and perhaps important) stuff, the rest is forgotten.

But we need to mention the elephant in the room: Many teachers are just plain bad. They are bad in multiple ways. They are place holders, 'fillers', unmotivated and uncaring.

They inspire aphorisms like 'those who can't do, teach.'

The earliest blog I ever read Bob C Cock's weekly rant had the memorable phrase 'some of the most boring and uninspiring people I have ever had the displeasure of meeting have been teachers.'

Once out of the education system, your mind probably exercises a similar bias to mine, it simply forgets all those painful hours spent with teachers who taught us nothing at all. Instead when asked about our high-school (those who had no traumatic experiences in the locker rooms) will probably recall instantly our beloved Physics, History or Music teacher outshining the other 60+ members of staff we scratch to even remember the face of.

And I went to a good school.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani said in his book that 'the education system exists to protect the jobs of those who work within it.' and this grim admission is applicable almost everywhere. It shows up in the way education is reformed or revolutionised.

Acceptable ways to reform schools:

Build buildings.

Buy computers.

Fund teacher training programs.

Unacceptable ways to reform schools:

Insist on staff transparency. (starting with management, down to teachers)

Raise prerequisite qualification standards of teachers.

Merit based pay.

I went to a high school where students were mandatorily required to have a laptop. My laptop died in early year 11 and I just stopped using one. From my personal testimony I can say laptops and computers contribute nothing to the quality of education and quite possibly detract from it. (we mostly used our laptops to play computer games in class, I can vividly recall how to beat every level on skyroads and almost none of what was taught me in year 9 science).

Year 12 our fancy technology was next to useless, we couldn't use them in exams and we spent most of our times practicing under exam like conditions, even SACs had to be handwritten.

Our laptops were an expensive piece of flashy sophistication, with little substance to back them and they 4 kg piece of shit antiques we used (top of the range for the day) probably caused back problems.

Putting computers in schools recieves a disproportionate amount of attention in complaints about schools being underfunded and under-resourced. I already know what every teacher is going to say -

'we live in an information age, most business and professions use computers and to be competitive in the job market students need computer literacy.' my mother a literacy coach for teachers alluded that 'the information age' is now even taken into account in text book design, explaining those annoying 'pop up' boxes that punctuated text books.

I suspect part of the bias towards putting computers is an accident of history, adults learn differently to children and subsequently there is an esoteric reverence for 'computer skills' being difficult to learn late in life that is projected onto teenagers.

I suggest that what is widely regarded as 'computer literacy' is a misnomer, it is a far more fundamental transferrable 'soft skill' which I will liberally call 'search skills'. Anytime an office worker purchases and installs a specialist piece of software and gets somebody from the IT department or a colleague whom ALSO has never used it to demonstrate how it works, that colleague is employing search skills.

That is they know how to find information and teach themselves, much of my former job involved looking up excel functions on google and through excel's inbuilt help function to find solutions to all the weird things executives will demand their spreadsheets do.

I have even had to program shit in VB, I am not a programmer nor have ever studied programming, but I know how to find shit out. You can teach students these skills with Mechano sets or lego, or ikea furniture, you don't need huge expenditure on quickly obsolete IT.

But this inevitably is where all the funding goes and any talk of reform must head. Australia builds a Broadband Network to help our rural cousins keep pace with the city folk. To me internet access arguably should become more irrelevant to education, with smart phones and wikipedia we are reaching a stage where everyone can carry around pretty much all the tacit knowledge known to man in their pocket. Having access to information in an information economy will not be the key differential. It will be, as it is and always has been a persons richness in soft skills.

Skills modelled by the secure base, the parental figure and role model that is their teacher.

I read somewhere that many doctors cannot accept as fact (in fact a truism) that half their graduating class were below average. Something that must mathematically be true. It is a relative scale, but in absolute terms we need to admit to ourselves that:

On average, teachers are average...

...At an elite school like I went to. To say Private schools chief advantage is their superior funding is a cop-out. Private schools are businesses, and follow a simple business principle - customers pay for value. Thus their chief advantage is that they can fire bad teachers and reward good ones. They demand results and people pay a premium for them.

Admittedly the results are pretty foolish, ENTER scores that are relevant for about 2 months and then do little to prevent anyone from derailing their life with a general lack of motivation. But nevertheless the private school system attracts dollars largely because the teachers do what they are paid to do, teach students how to score well on exams. Elite schools go a step further and directly intervene in subject selection making sure students learn useful and more importantly generously scaled subjects like 'Latin' and 'Hebrew' and 'Specialist Mathematics' that not only will contribute to a generous ENTER score but prove practical for the rest of their lives when time travelling or dealing with imaginary numbers.

Yes the good schools weed out the 'bad teachers' who inevitebly end up in greater concentration in public schools, their lack of interest in their students education creates a surplus of energy that can then be channeled into internal staff politics and making other teachers lives miserable. Their distaste for their profession may even be so great they set their sites on becoming a vice principal or principal so they largely don't have to deal with them anymore unless of course they are punishing them.

The unmotivated teacher is only one kind of bad teacher, there are also teachers who are just plain stupid and not really qualified to be teaching anybody. My mother was coaching teachers at a school where the principal held up as a role model to all a teacher that had graduated from the school with a study score of 17, but thanks to government intitiatives, loop holes and what not had been able to become a teacher and help shape the next generation of under achievers.

Then you have teachers who are passionately bad at their jobs. They think their authoratarian style harks back to some golden-age of teaching and they think they are doing an excellent job, loading their students up with massive assignments and homework schedules. Keeping them on edge by picking students at random to perform difficult calculations on the board in front of their peers at risk of humiliation and locking students out of class for being late. All serving to increase the brains production of cortisol inhibiting the hippocampus and thus their students ability to learn, a few students cool under pressure shining, the teacher rests on his laurels as having produced such stars, in the same way that exposing thirty lab rats to radiation until only 2 - the strongest, survive albeit much much weaker than they were before the radiation bombardment.

All these teachers are bad, and worse, entrenched in our education system. I forget where I read it, it was either Goleman's 'Social Intelligence' or 'Freakanomics' or some similar science type book, but a good teacher generally in objective terms will impart 1.5 years of course material to their students, whereas a bad teacher will impart just 6 months of course content to their students. (How this stacks up with the Chicago study that said we all retain less than 7% of our high school education, I don't know).

I went to both a public and private secondary school, the public school I went to had a good reputation despite being really large. From my brief experience there I would say the proportion of teachers that are good is roughly the same as private. Private schools seem to be populated by good and average teachers, where public schools have some good, some average and far too many bad teachers.

I feel I need to lay down a chunk of text from Goleman's 'Social Intelligence' before going on:

The power of an emotionally connected teacher does not end in first grade. Sixth-graders who had such a teacher earned better grades not only that year but the next year as well. Good teachers are like good parents. By offering a secure base, a teacher creates an environment that lets students' brains function at their best. That base becomes a safe haven, a zone of strength from which they can venture forth to explore, to master something new, to achieve.

The most critical thing you can do for your education, is get a good teacher in front of you. Good teachers exist, but trying to obtain one for your child in the public system is like playing russian roulette. It is also quite hard to get one in the private system, at least though you probably won't have the teacher who instructs their kids to read from their textbooks queitly for 50 minutes while the ensure silence through threats of detention.

On the one hand, much of our inability to reform anything can be explained away by the political trade cycle. In Australia a government has 3 years to make plans and execute them, they cannot guaruntee they will still be in charge to reap the benefits of completed construction processes. Thus it makes sense that if you need to improve education, you throw money at laptops and buildings - things that I'm sure have been proven to have little impact on students education and success in later life.

If you watch grand designs, complex builds that run over schedule and over budget still only take 2 years or so to become water-tight and habitable. That's not even using commercial building techniques like prefabrication and concrete, concrete! concrete!!, buying a bunch of computers involves negotiating a lease contract or purchase and then rolling them out in such a way as to sew seeds of envy and suspicion amongst staff and students and ensure that they are almost obsolete by the time the last has been delivered.

But yet these are the kind of 'reforms' that can be implemented in 3 years and achieve almost nothing.

Reforming the teachers themselves takes generations, and there is a social responsibility to actually take care of those useless and destructive teachers that have been implicitly endorsed by the education system that exists so they don't drink themselves to death in a caravan somewhere.

Firstly you need to build an environment that is attractive to high perfomers, and high performers are motivated by performance. Thus you need transparency, accountability and a system where good and bad performance are duly rewarded. In fact it is probably more important to any good teachers retention that you get rid of bad teacher colleagues than it is to necessarily reward their good efforts.

Then you need to raise the standards, the requirements to become firstly a principal (so good teachers have the necessary support) and then a teacher. You need to make those peg holes round so the square pegs can't get in in the first place.

Of course, these are not radical suggestions. Governments (including the current one) have tried to implement just such reforms.

What holds these reforms back?

Good teachers.

The most bitter irony of all. The innocent come out in force to protect the guilty. Things like the 'Myschools' website are seen as an attack on their integrity. Passionate teachers call up John Fane and tell stories of the differences they have been making for years whilst being underfunded and underappreciated.

Students exerting the same bias my memory does, call up and talk about their shitty school's one teacher that made a difference in their life and now will be punished by the damning report of 'MySchool' for all to see.

But what I have come to admit, is that if you fired 100% of the teachers we don't remember, and 20% (the bad ones) that we do, we wouldn't miss them when they are gone.

Rethinking Education Part 2: Choice and Responsibility

Today I'm going to flesh out just one aspect of the kind of fundamental lesson that has a large impact on wellbeing. Decision making.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." ~ Yogi Berra

To avoid the sprawling directionlessness of yesterday's post however let me clearly articulate the problem with education as it stands.

Problem: Current education is geared towards an ideal of eliminating risk, or risk aversion. Students are encouraged to expend as much effort as possible to obtain higher marks and subsequently keep as many options as possible. This leaves students averse to making decisions that involve dilemma's and poor at them, worse, many members of society fail to identify where they have made a decision.

For example, I read in a newspaper article around the time 'an inconvenient truth' came out, long before ETS or Carbon Tax discussions were going on, where a Latrobe Valley worker was asked their thoughts on getting rid of the coal fire power plants and he said something to the effect of 'at the end of the day we all have to turn the air conditioner on.' I can't say if this was poorly worded, but air conditioners are a luxury item, nobody is compelled to use them, they are not mandatory yet the notion that they somehow were ostensibly informed the person's attachment to coal fire electricity.

In a more everyday sense I used to come across many people who had bought a house for security reasons, only to discover it had mainly 'secured' their profession for them. That meant they felt unable to leave their job because they were dependant on the income stream to make their mortgage repayments. Many people in this position lack the imagination to create a contingency (whilst also having made an uninformed decision in the first place) - selling the house or defaulting on the mortgage are options, thus you are not actually trapped in your current profession, it just may be unpleasant to leave it. If the consequences of losing the income stream are more unpleasant than continuing to work, you are making a conscious choice.

It has been my experience that few people appreciate choices they make. They feel their life is dictated to them by external circumstance. It is a common trait of depressives, and I feel is something that can be unlearned.

Here is how one might set up the lessons in teaching decision making, with one caveat Economics could be described as the study of decision making and certainly it does provide a theoretical framework however it is materialistic and often abstracted from the lives of those studying it, I would not present 'Decision Making' as a subject in the form of making Economics compulsory:

1. Resources are limited.

Economics does a poor job of teaching what this actually means. Many managers and executives I have come across in my careers, wanderings etc. don't have a full grasp of what limited resources means.

We have to make decisions because resources are limited. If resources weren't limited we could simply DO EVERYTHING. But we can't. Students would learn in the early phases of decision making that we can only spend our time one way or another before considering other resources such as monetary, budgeting etc. The chief purpose is to illustrate that decisions have to be made, with time it will be spent whether you do something or nothing at all.

2. Opportunity Costs.

These are very economic terms, but students then learn to appreciate that a decision to do something is equivalent to deciding not to do anything else. Thus students learn to take conscious ownership of opportunities foregone. The student should appreciate decisions such as 'by deciding to go on exchange for a year, I decided I would not graduate the same year as all my friends.' or 'by deciding to study Accounting I decided I would not spend time studying science anymore.' or 'by committing to the rowing crew, I decided to give up my weekends and mornings to rowing for three months.' or 'by deciding to go on holiday to Europe at the end of the year, I decided to stay with my job until I leave.'

3. Dilemmas

Opportunity cost is all very well, students then graduate onto gaining an appreciation of situations where decisions have to be made where neither outcome is desirable - choosing whether to escape death row by crawling through a tunnel of barbed wire or a tunnel of sand paper. It has practical applications for when life doesn't go to plan and helps people identify what power they do have in undesirable situations. From banal situations like getting dumped 'do I shut this person out of my life and miss their company, or do I expose myself to the emotional pain of our changed relationship?' to medical treatment 'do I undergo the surgery and risk damage to my organs, or do I undergo chemotherapy?' to losing your job 'do I sell the car to save money and ride everywhere, or do we keep it and rent out the guest room to a student?'

4. Identifying options

Few choices are as simple as dilemma's and students can also learn to identify 'bogus dilemmas' that is where you are presented with a 'with us or against us' choice when in fact you don't have to be either. But making decisions well requires some amount of researching what choices are available. Students learn to consider the choices they make rather than leap into them, as well as identifying the time constraints that come with a particular decision. 'The boss offered me a new job, I asked them how long I had to make a decision. They wanted an answer on the spot, but admitted they could wait a few days.'

5. Dealing with uncertainty.

Here economic models would be not entirely wrong but misleading and largely fruitlessly abstract. The temptation is to deal with uncertainty in terms of probability where the odds are known. Rather students learn to identify the possible outcomes of each course of action they may decide to take eg. 'If I take out a loan and buy a house, the house prices may go up making me money or the may go down leaving me in negative equity. If I don't buy a house my money will sit in a bank making 4% interest, interest rates may go up or may go down.' Here students are taught to appreciate the possible consequences of their decision making and thus what possible consequences they decide to avoid, or allow in order to obtain desirable ones. Here students learn about fundamental risks, and making decisions while acknowledging that 'the worst may happen.'

6. Power.

Here is an appreciation of what choices a student actually has, in any situation. Ultimately the students learn that their behaviour for the most part is the only thing they really control, but that this leaves them with choices in almost any situation. 'My partner cheated on me. I decided to react by ceasing the relationship and contact with them.' vs. 'My partner cheated on me, I posted abusive comments about her online and made threatening phone calls to her to make myself feel better.'

7. Responsibility.

Here students learn that the price of being able to choose is to take responsibility for their consequences, even when choices are made under uncertainty. 'We tried a new restaurant and the portions were meagre and the service terrible, but we chose to do something new, we just won't go back there anytime soon.' to 'I'd heard some bad things about heroin, but I decided to try it to try and aleviate my depression. Trying to break my addiction was not worth the high, and it has compounded my problems. I took a risk, I have to live with the consequences.' A big part of successful decision making is being able to live and adapt to the consequences.

Much of today's problems come from an aversion to taking responsibility for the decisions we make. This is I feel viewed as a way to make our lives easier and thus happier. We act like we have no choice about the unpleasant circumstances we find ourselves in, or that problems we create are somebody elses, or that we have some kind of tacit permission from a higher power to act the way we do.

I have observed little to convince me that this actually makes people happier. At the very least their are great benefits in becoming conscious of decisions we make reflexively. People who feel cheated by life and the world make for unpleasant company, their stories of everyone out to get them grows boring very quickly. Bad decision making at least on a social level restricts our future choices and thus our personal empowerment.

I feel 'Choice and Responsibility' are one of those fundamental lessons that once appreciated pay exponential dividends throughout life and also expedite future learning, appreciating where and where we don't have control is fundamental to learning and problem solving, it is a highly transferable skill.

This is but one example of the sorts of stuff I feel 90% of our mandatory education years should be spent on, it is relatively easy to then pick up and learn a very specific expert subject like specialist mathematics, once you have learned how to learn.

Rethinking Education Part 1: Fundamentals

When I think of all the crap I learned in highschool, it's a wonder I can think at all. ~ Simon & Garfunkel, Kodachrome

Most of what we now teach our children is irrelevant to their future success as human beings and they know it. ~ Gordon Livingston, M.D.

Both quotes I took out of Livingston's book 'How To Love' an immensely descriptive and practical title that is sadly, new-age sounding when you don't have the book in your hand.

The posts I plan to do this week are simultaneously rehashed and a long time coming. They may form the draft of a letter I plan to send to my Alma Mata about various issues I have with education.

On one of TED's most watched talks Sir Ken Robinson says that he finds everybody is interested in education, everyone has an opinion on it. Opinions on education are like arseholes, to use Salt N Pepa's analogy.

Here is one more. I plan to do 5, but I have no clear plan on what those 5 will be. Todays initial one was inspired by the overemphasis our society has on expertise, and how it has pervaded the education system, and made it remarkably ineffecient.

The Air Jordan shoes for example is an expensive and professional piece of equipment, for the models released during his playing career Michael Jordan wore them himself, winning 6 NBA chamionships, a Slam Dunk contest, 5 MVP awards and is widely regarded as the greatest of all time.

Of all the people to own and wear Air Jordan's however, only Michael Jordan himself won 6 NBA championships, 5 MVP awards and is widely regarded as the greatest of all time.

Our education system has become like the Air Jordan shoe, we buy the expensive, high quality component and ignore the combination of mental fortitude, physical conditioning, fundamental skills and genetics that contributed 98% of Jordan's achievement and focus on the 2% differentiated product.

Expertise makes sense from a differentiation point of view. In business there are two broad strategies - penetration (price/cost competitiveness) and differentiation (avoiding competition). In developed nations a person who can read and right and add and subtract is not very competitive, but somebody who can design hydrodynamic structures is competitive in the job market. If you need a hydrodynamic builiding designed you are going to have to pay for the necessary expertise.

School broadly speaking is now engineered towards putting people into these differentiated nitches, with the societal objective of trying to maximise compensation for our labour and create a form of material security.

Admittedly, it isn't done efficiently - our education system cannot perfectly match the nitches that demand expertise with the nitches of expertise it produces. Somewhere in Australia somebody is paying for an expert from Scandanavia exorbitant amounts of money to consult them on the use of mobile sustainable waste management systems, while an expert in Flemish Poetry goes working in a retail bookstore.

But this I am not so concerned about, it is more in the spirit of the opening quote from Dr. Livingstone, expertise is fine says I provided we don't just assume away the 90% of fundamentals common to all professions that make for good and bad employees.

Here is my bold proclaimation: EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA HAS ASSUMED AWAY THE FUNDAMENTAL SKILLS WE NEED.

This post was dually inspired by a reflection from Rod, the training manager at my former employer and one of my mentors, apparantly in total quality management circles it has been found that only 10% of problems have what are described as 'special causes' these things have alarm bells and red flags that sound and go up when something goes wrong, that is your warehouse is on fire, a gunman is taking pot shots at people from the building adjacent, the unexpected and rare event.

These account for just 10% of the waste and ineffeciences in any business operation. The other 90% comes from 'ordinary causes' these have no warning bells and that is what makes them so damaging, they are the waste and ineffeciencies that are part of the business operations already.

For example, it used to take a long time to check in for a domestic flight. Whether you had luggage or not to be checked, you had to use the same system. Instead of getting out of your cab, getting a boarding pass from a computer, you had to arrive early and wait in line with everybody else to get allocated a seat. It was a much more resource intensive process and it annoyed customers. That process driven ineffeciency is an 'ordinary cause'.

NOW similarly 90% of what makes an employee a 'good employee' are fundamental skills I have heard referred to as 'transferable skills' many are associated with leadership, but...

BUT!!! but most of these qualities are actually identical to what make somebody a good friend, teacher, colleague, lover, teammate etc. in that way 'transferable' is a highly appropriate name.

These skills are typically evaluated in the first 2-3 seconds of a job interview before anybody has started asking questions because they are quite transparent in how we comport ourselves.

These are some of the skills that I would describe as fundamental to our success not just career wise but in all aspects of life: decision making, risk taking, communicating, skepticism, reasoning, care giving, stress management, emotional management, how to avoid negative people, how to sustain positive relationships, dealing with contingencies, listening, budgeting etc.

It isn't really an exhaustive list, but these skills are transferable to almost any context, anywhere where we are required to interact with people. I have referred to them as 'transferable' but they have also been called 'soft skills' because they can be adapted to any situation, whereas thermal engineering cannot easily be applied to running a bachelor auction the same way communicating can.

The saying is 'soft skills are hard to teach/learn and the hard skills are easy.' As somebody who struggles daily to listen to other people, I can testify that creating an Integrated Marketing Communication plan and finding the equilibrium price of a monopolistically competitive firm operating in two price discriminating markets is EASY to pick up compared to the skill of listening.

Literacy and numeracy are the only soft skills our education system gets right, otherwise we are left to a more darwinian education where we pick up these skills for our own survival... or we don't.

Organisations, communities and families across Australia are populated by people who can't make decisions effectively, don't listen, can't communicate their concerns in a way likely to get them addressed, can't spend within their means, manage their own stress and broader emotions, empathise effectively, sleep and eat right and do their job.

Their is a huge potential for society wide benefits if education refocused on these fundamental skills for day to day living.

Tomorrow I will write about 'choice and responsibility' as one of those fundamental things that could be taught to people in school that would probably eliminate most of the germaine experiences that people struggle with day to day unable to relieve themselves.

But consider the trajectories of two individuals, one we will call 'House' after House M.D. and the other we will call 'Luciana' after my beautiful beautiful BMX. House possesses a high degree of specialised technical expertise, but very little interpersonal or soft skills, Luciana is a beautiful human being with excellent interpersonal skills but nothing technically beyond the core competencies.

It is my experience that in observing the two career trajectories, with both starting at entry level positions in the same organisation that sooner rather than later Luciana will be managing House, as well as others. House may well end up well compensated for his expertise, but Luciana is management material and far more crucial to the operational success of the organization. Largely because organisations consist of people and Luciana can deal with people where House cannot and has deliberately engineered his career to try and avoid having to.

Management consists almost entirely of soft skills, managing a team of doctors at a fundamental level is not much different from managing a team of brickies. There may be trade specific jargon to learn, but these can be picked up much quicker in either direction than the fundamental skills of coordinating and managing people.

Our education system is geared up to produce House's not Luciana's. In reality, because soft skills I find tend to correlate (people who listen good are generally genuinely intellectually curious) that you don't tend to find extremes like House and Luciana. You still get extremes, but I find it to be people who lack both soft and hard skills and people who possess both soft and hard skills. Tragically life is more turds and eagles than porcupines and puppies.

I feel I need to move away from the animal analogies and quickly. Because so much of our success and enjoyment of life stems from our mastery of fundamental and transferable skills I feel as a priority these skills need to be allocated a similar emphasis in curriculum. Admittedly much of what I know of soft skills comes from academic organisations, crammed into the optional elective one off seminars, guest lectures accounting optimistically for around 3% of the time I have spent in class.

Many of these skills are taught (or at least referred to) in leadership seminars, tragically delivered to students whom have already been identified as leaders by their peers, that is they naturally posess many of the soft skills through the darwinian selection. (As an aside, I should admit at my own highschool year to year their were leadership positions allocated to people with no leadership skills, as a reward for parental participation in Parental associations like school boards and committees that may have benefited from these leadership seminars).

But this is nothing like the number of hours allocated to differentiation. Numeracy and mathematics are transferable, there are many occasions where problems we encounter can be modelled mathematically and worked out on paper without the need of trial and error. But differentiation measuring the rate of change is highly specialised and covered in physics where in engineering and other professions where one is likely to use these skills and have studied physics as a prerequisite. Otherwise it is rare to think anybody will need to calculate the area under a graph and change in angle of tangents to a curve.

It is unlikely that the hours I spent on anti-differentiation, imaginary numbers, geometric proofs etc. are likely to have any real impact on my wellbeing over the course of my life apart from the natural satisfaction of studying them compared to the 0 hours I have spent in schools learning how to identify a good romantic partner, something that has caused me more anxiety than any geometric shape I have come across (except perhaps in drawing, but I do everything free hand anyway).

Yet specialist mathematics was held in high esteem by my secondary institution, despite the minimal impact it has on both our wellbeing and careers. Having been to my 10 year reunion I can say that even ENTER scores are a poor predictor of future financial and emotional wellbeing at least over a 10 year period. (in case you are from my high school and reading this, what I mean is from what I can recall of the enter scores I knew of, there is no discernable pattern).

Even university doesn't do it's students many favors. Graduates jump qualification hurdles but even with internship/workplacement initiatives an overemphasis on group assignments etc. few graduate even with a firm grasp of what they are supposed to know and even less prepared to operate in an organisational environment. Group assignments are assigned with very little education or training on how to actually manage a group assignment. They simply must be done, creating the practice whereby one individual completes the assignment and the other four sign their name to it. A good student thus learns not to delegate to people you don't trust, creating at best micromanagers to be the stars of the Australian workforce and then a bunch of people who don't actually know what their qualifications say they do.

Even then, these technical experts can be easily outshined by a salesman with incredble interpersonal instincts and no formal education or qualifications to speak of. It can and does happen and that is a failure of the education system at large.

There is nothing wrong with expertise as such, it is important, but the fundamentals, the general skills are just not being taught. To close this out with more of Dr. Livingstone, here he reflects my attitude to that 3% of time in academic institutions when I have been really engaged in something useful and interesting:

It is not surprising that most parents fall back on a series of restrictions and proscriptions, things one must not do, relating mostly to drugs, sex and driving. It's as if our fears for our children's survival overwhelm our sense of what they need to navigate happily through lives.
I think young people would respond with interest to these subjects. My experiences with teenagers in therapy is that they generally value the chance to have a conversation with a non-judgemental adult about subjects germane to their daily experience.

There is always time to go back to uni, but in Victoria at least a sense of urgency is fostered amongst 16-17 year olds to choose a specialised path of study (despite almost no university courses having a pre-requisite beyond a study score of 25 in english) and plan the rest of their lives around this.
Few graduate or leave highschool possessing an adequate grasp of something as fundamental as how to make a decision, they have made a decision that potentially wastes years of their life without any instruction as to how to make it.

Prior to 16 their are few choices a child can make in determining their own lifestyle. Most of the big fundamental decisions are made by their parents or gaurdians. 90% of the focus of education in the time leading up to this age I feel should be spent equipping them to make these decisions and manage the subsequent results of them. After that you can start specialising, and by no means finish it.

Obnoxiously Drunk

Last night I got obnoxiously drunk. Nowhere near my worst by any means, but near enough for me to regret it. I was a little overexuberant because I got my solo show booked in for Feb 2012, I have a space, now all I need to do is create the artwork.

I don't know why I felt I should personally and privately celebrate this premature victory that could turn into bitter defeat by getting drunk, but I did.

I also have less than 2 months to train for my marathon and my weight is going up, not down. So that is it for drinking. As of last night/early hours of this morning my drinking is done for both alcohol and soda pop. Too many calories.

As of tomorrow, I will start cutting out all the crap I eat. I eat a lot of crap.

What is Anarchy?

We live in interesting times, for one thing Australia has a Prime Minister for which opinion polls have no meaning, sway or context. I think Julia Gillard is a moron and not fit to be called a world leader but due to the balance of power her government may be the exact freakish collision of low probabilities that Climate change needs. Whilst posessing none of the qualities I desire in a leader - intelligence, courage and astringency - she behaves as though she does, why? Because her choice is simple, capitulate to the demands of the greens and the independants or NOT BE PRIME MINISTER.

Don't get me wrong, Tony Abbott is a disaster that our best hope resides in history simply forgetting him, behind these two leaders stand Wayne Swann, Joe Hockey, the cream at the top of a list of people you probably wouldn't want running a milkbar. But it is refreshing, even invigorating to see somebody just selfishly choose to be prime minister and damn the rest to hell... and subsequently wind up doing the right thing. Australia will have a Carbon Tax, it will actually for once in its history be a world leader. In under twelve months time the average 'punter' will recieve $15,000 grand more tax free threshold the carbon tax will come in and - nothing will happen.

Well not nothing, big companies will reduce their tax liabilities by reducing their carbon emissions. They will refrain from causing the mess they didn't previously have to pay for.

That's interesting. Also interesting is this news story that is not a news story, journalism has been readily ignorable for years now. I have lived without reading any news, except on sports for 3 years and I have suffered no penalties for being 'uninformed' largely due to the fact that 'journalism' now days is not informative. But the London riots, they just fucking happened, no catalyst, no moral, no story. Details emerged, but that's fucking it. They are just happening.

For the first time in months I went to The Age's website to try and read an article about what Bishop's assasination or electoral result had triggered the riots in the UK and found nothing. Not only does this confirm there's no real need to read newspapers, but I saw shit described as 'Anarchy'

I am an anarchist and a lot of people expect me to believe that riot's and such, societal breakdown are the anarchist ideal. I would contend that what you see in a riot is usual a bi-product of authoratarianism. The violent and destructive outbursts are a reaction to the rule of law.

On the rule of law, I am not so committed to Anarchy that I don't for example believe in some kind of legal structure - the public perception of how an alleged peadophile should be treated I think indicates that when a mob of mothers think somebody only suspected of a crime should be gelded then murdered, you need some kind of mechanical judicial process to intervene and protect the potentially innocent even YES even at the cost of letting some genuinely guilty people get off easily.

But Anarchy is really, really simple:

Anarchy is the belief that people don't need to be told what to do.

It's pretty much a belief in the communities ability to govern itself. With an uneducated community, I couldn't hold this belief. Yes, my own community is not ready for Anarchy, because it is so uneducated. Each year hundreds, if not thousands of students graduate from high school that are functionally illeterate. I would suspect more go out into the world innumerate. I suspect the vast majority of people graduating high school will fully grasp terms of governance like 'tyranny of the majority' and 'innocent until proven guilty' 'burden of proof' etc.

My work in a call center exposes me to enough examples of people who assume what the law is without any actual knowledge at all. The number of people that lack the imagination to concieve that 'dinner-time' is going to vary household to household, if indeed any household actually follows a fixed schedule at all.

Here is my simple test of a societies 'readiness for Anarchy', that is when the dumbest member of society can still appreciate that a single queue at KFC is the fairest and most efficient way to queue.

Relax

For a while I was worried I was burning out, which was most worrying because I felt I'd been too unproductive to burn out already. Then I realised it was because the heating at work was putting me to sleep at 5 in the afternoon.

But I have decided to follow the path of least resistance with my drawing, to overcome the lack of productivity. I have been procrastinating when I set myself arbitrary deadlines to do the 'important stuff' and thus achieving nothing at all.

Now I'm off to draw.

Q&A

Q&A the ABC's answer to... something, brings out the misanthropist in me. It singularly depresses me where no other program succeeds in doing so. I really, really wish it didn't exist.

I honestly can't handle more than 5-10 minutes of the show at a time. You could criticise channel ten's 7PM project for dealing with serious issues in an off-hand way, but is anybody going to confuse a panel featuring Charlie Pickering and Dave Hughes as a source of legitimate information? No.

But they could with Q&A, the one show on television ever, that I literally can't handle - here is my general experience of the show from the snippets I get before I reflexively change the channel to something that I may actually learn and grow from (last night it 2003's SWAT featuring Samuel Jackson and Colin Farrel on channel GO! a thought provoking movie.):

A young liberal planted in the audience reads a lengthy, loaded and prepared question out directed at the token Labor politician.

A politician bleats out some bleating message that over/under whelms me with its factual dubiosity.

A token comedian says something close to sensible.

Tony Jones redirects the question to a Liberal/Labor party member who proceeds to bleat.

A panalist who's opinion must surely by now be regarded as invalid (eg. John Elliot) voices their opinion.

Some left leaning member of the audience makes a statement-in-the-form-of-a-question.

Those are pretty much all I see coming out of Q&A, which arguably would be better called 'Q' to dispel the misleading notion that any of it's participants may be in possession of Answers.

The show is no Insight, which I also stopped watching, but was in the least insightful. Q&A is not.

Q&A puts punters, pollies and pundits together in the studio to thrash out the hot issues of the week.

It's about democracy in action - on Q&A the audience gets to ask the questions.

It doesn't matter who you are, or where you're from - everyone can have a go and take it up to our politicians and opinion makers.

Energetic and opinionated - Q&A brings Australia's egalitarian and larrikin spirit into the studio.

Q&A is about encouraging people to engage with politics and society.

Q&A is hosted by one of the ABC's most respected journalists - Tony Jones.

Q&A is live to air - it's happening as viewers watch.

Interrestingly, the 'About' page for Q&A doesn't make any claims to impartiality and refers to Australia's 'egalitarian and larrikin spirit' which is quite the opposite of an impartial point of view.

I think people are kind of addicted to argument in some way, but they shouldn't carry misconceptions about how unconstructive the process of argument is.

The intellectual stimulation of creating new ways to defend the stance your ego is invested in can be intoxicating. But argument and 'debate' is an emotional process rather than an intellectual one.

My principal use to make me groan inwardly when he described 'debating as a sport' but nowadays I think he was probably exactly right (if not for the exact wrong reasons). But debating had us defend stances we were arbitrarily assigned for the gratification of winning. I remember shamefully after some debates we lost having sleepless nights thinking about what we should have said and how dumb some of the opponents arguments were.

Similarly what you see on Q&A is people defending and attacking positions that are largely arbitrarily assigned by the ovarian lottery. People tend to defend their moral-geographic-cultural-economic circumstances all of which they had little say in they were just pushed out of a vagina into that life. Few possess any domain of expertise that may make their opinion valid, yet they field questions that demand expertise.

This may go some way to explaining why Q&A (and the media in general) allocates a fuckload of time to issues that are not being resolved by the media on an ongoing basis like the Carbon Tax, Assylum Seekers and the Economy at large.

I feel the audiance comes to Q&A too invested in their opinions to actually be swayed by anything said by anyone on the show, do people watch it with some sadistic bloodlust hoping to see the otherside's champion fall? If so, they must feel some base animal anticipatory gratification watching the show and walk away week after week feeling dissappointed, like pursuing a relationship with a narcissist.

More worrying is anybody who does feel informed or swayed by what they see on Q&A, the logical tactics and strategies employed by the panel members of Q&A are an indictment of either the ABC's audience or the Australian Education system or both. If people with no expertise can convince people to take a stance on such issues one way or another, then perhaps those 'punters' that embody the 'Australian egalatarian and larrikin spirit' should not be engaged and participating in our democracy.

My First Poster.

So this week my first ever gig poster went up in a store window. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. and by that I look at it and see mistakes everywhere, it was certainly a design not in my comfort zone and I have new found respect for that billionaire who drew the Hello Kitty design.

But it's a step forward for me, my name is on it, if you wander through Bar Open it is prominently displayed. It feels good, also I was paid in kind, and got to feel like a big-shot being on the door for a gig finally.

I've made it!

Ballarat or Japan?

Seems like an easy choice, but I'm seriously contemplating detonating my life by moving to either for a year. And then on the other hand, I love what Melbourne has going on culturally and the opportunities it presents, it just seems action packed to the brim of shit you can do. Balifornia is only an hour's train ride away though and when I ran around it on Sunday (almost literally) it had views, hills, Mt Buninyong, a big reflective lake, Gold Rush era architecture. One things for sure, living in Ballarat certainly beats the shit out of living in outer suburbs. To paraphrase my friend: I could be a big fish in a shot-glass in Ballarat.

Conversely I never did actually live in Japan, as much as the country feels like home, as much as I feel my host families are just family to me, I never actually lived there. I remember walking down happiness street in Shizuoka and thinking it was Japan's answer to Sydney road. I could live in Shizuoka, I could live in Nagoya, I could live I think in Osaka for a year at least. When I return there this year I might sus it out. The real catch is whether I would push myself out of the artistic scene and opportunities by relocating to Japan.

I don't want to spend a year not growing.

Flexibility

Hey I made it, managed to crank out 10 posts in some kind of fortnight. The last value on the list of ten is flexibility, an odd one to finish on but I think it highlights some wisdom in choosing friends and partners.

Flexibility is extremely practical character trait to be drawn towards. I had a teacher in high-school that said 'organised is the only way to be.' I disagreed with him then and I disagree with him now.

Flexibility is one's capacity for coping with uncertainty. So it is different from tolerance, the ability to appreciate difference. It is basically how well somebody reacts to you being late, or calling them late at night for a lift. Their ability to find time to see you, or their reaction to a change of plans.

Some organisation is okay, perhaps even desirable. Somebody entirely spontaneous is highly undesirable as Chris Rock said in Never Scared: 'Relationships are boring, the only time relationships are exciting is when you are in a bad one. Bad relationships are unpredictable - you just don't know what he's gonna do next, throw a bottle at your head, sell your engagement ring...' okay Chris Rock never said any of that but I feel I captured the gist.

I never let inflexible people get close enough to me to have any meaningful relationship, but these are the people whom in an attempt to impose order on the chaotic world that surrounds them encroach on your quality of life.

These are people that label stuff in the fridge in a share house, count the change in their dashboard console, plan daily itinaries before embarking on an overseas holiday. They build rigid systems to govern their lives and give them an (ultimately) false sense of security.

Attempts to throw out these systems are tantamount to attacking their person, they get offended and angry. By contrast, flexible people are the ones who can go with the flow, they split the bill in the way that is easiest rather than fairest and save themselves time and conflict.

They give you free reign of their fridge and pantry, you feel inclined to drop in on them. Their houses feel lived in, you feel relaxed and comfortable in their presence. The difference between the flexible and the inflexible is the difference between sitting in a hammock and sitting in an ergonomic chair.

In Japan people can be described as 'Yasashi' which is literally 'easy' but in context means gentle. The use of easy is a reference to this easygoing nature of the flexible.

Do I need to say anymore? Not on flexibility, but I should probably give these 10 attractive qualities a wrap. Starting at the end, flexibility is probably not one of the great virtues that will ever have conceptual statues dedicated to it out the front of temples of the human spirit - but it's just one of those qualities that is desirable because traits in our peers and partners tend to become more annoying with time rather than less.

It may be that we can overlook people's imperfections for a time, have coping mechanisms, but in the long run when you are building something as nourishing and useful as a support network do you want to seek support, nourishment and love from people you have coping mechanisms for?

I am optimistic enough to believe people are capable of making changes, and great changes. In 'Social Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman, the chapter 'Genes are not destiny' finds that science has shown that we are indeed capable of changing ourselves.

This is different though from entertaining rescue fantasies, deciding we love somebody with some crucial piece missing from making them somebody we can live with. Our love does not have transformative powers. We can only change ourselves.

And that is where it begins, with ourselves. I am not a paragon of any of the virtues of the 10 qualities: kindness, optimism, courage, loyalty, tolerance, honesty, humour, intelligence, beauty and flexibility. Most are learned behaviours. But I try, I try, and in trying for the past 6 years or so those paths have become easier and more reflexive to follow.

I foster these qualities because they make life easier, they create their own energy and I hope to be worthy of recieving these qualities from somebody else.

Our love can't magically transform people into these things though, and certainly the easiest and luckiest thing is to find or attract someone who already possesses them.

Otherwise there are no guaruntees, and infact even though people are capable of change, few bother to choosing instead to blame the world. All you can hope to do is provide contrast, to deny such pessimistic views of the world by living in a way that exposes that as a lie. We can influence yes, inspire yes, but not magic peoples problems away. That has to be done by them.

So be kind, be optimistic, show courage, tolerate differences, be honest and true to a fault, be loyal, approach things intelligently, don't lose it when plans go awry and for fuck's sake laugh.

Beauty

Mmmmhmmm, you know I'm going to take the easy way out on this one, say 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder, skin deep, inner beauty' that sort of thing, so why write about it at all?

Physical attractiveness counts for something, there is a deviding line between people we want to be around to drink and talk shit, and people we want to hold, brush their hair back over their ear... all of that. And it is like one tenth of the forces that attract me to people.

There are for example, some peeps that I love right to the bottom of their souls but fundamentally lack the chemistry to make me want to be with them, physically. I see no point denying this.

Having said that, being attractive gets you not far. We have ultra-fast firing spindle cells that connect straight to the Amigdala or whatever, that make decisions about everyone we come across in literally a fraction of a second. Whether we want to fight them or flee or fuck them or quite possibly eat them. BUT we then have like our orbital frontal cortex that processes information and this, our thinking mind is very capable of overriding our hair trigger impressionistic mind. Both are capable of being wrong. One works by rule of thumb, the other by careful introspection.

So the advantage you gain by being physically attractive is a slight boost in the quick and dirty evaluation done by the reactive brain. This is not enough to overcome your personality.

I have no problem with physical beauty, I'm quite a fan of it, but it's a 'nice to have' rather than a necessity. It makes a poor investment, like property people are often naivelly over-invested in their outward appearance. Make-up I will begrudgingly admit can give somebody confidence to go out and face the day, but only because they've been made to feel ugly in the first place. That sort of shit.

Now, let's start sidestepping. Over the weekend I was at my 10 year highschool reunion, due to last minute date changes and short notice and shit, many people sadly missed out. But it was a great night, I had a great fucking time, and everybody looked more beautiful than they did on our 5 year reunion. What the pop-corn?

My former brother in arms at shared earth whom we shall call Captain Kirk made the call to me when I was around 22 or so that 'all of my friends have just gotten hotter when they turned 30.' Which I was skeptical about, but Kirk was sizzlingly hot himself, so I entertained the thought and now at 27 I must concede, he has a very good point.

At the 5 year reunion, myself and my peers were going through an awkward adjustment phase, more awkward than adolescence. It was too soon for us to come to terms with the realities of ageing, that you go bald, your metabolism slows down and your body starts falling apart.

Crucially, people were playing the hands they were dealt - poorly. This is a crucial element of beauty, ownership. I am attracted to people who fucking own their appearance. They express themselves, they are in control, they are not beholden to external standards. They carry their weight with dignity, the abandon their dignity with confidence and deliberation. These are beautiful people.

I have also always maintained, that in my personal case, personality carries an 80% swing factor. Which is probably extreme, and personality is probably a vague and ambiguous term. In part this reflects that 'beauty' is just one quality amongst kindness, intelligence, humour, tolerance, courage, honesty, flexibility, optimism and loyalty.

Another thing I should probably tidy up is that personality is an assumption I make about people based on the behaviour I observe, and behaviour can be seen.

I remember Honda hired some douchebag image consultant that bastardised the 'communication breakdown' of 7% of communication is the words we say, 33% is the tone we employ and 60% is body language. He took 'body language' and changed it to 'how you look.' So let me do the reverse, since behaviour can be seen and evaluated 'how you look' consists of 1. Actions you undertake. 2. Words you say. 3. How you say them.

These are all behaviours, that I and everyone observe and evaluate. I have met some 'good looking' people in my time in the narrower sense, that have invested a lot of time, energy and money into the physique, complexion, hairstyle and attire and just completely fuck up everything else about their appearance which is the vast majority.

Does somebodies body language make you feel welcome, comfortable and confident? Do they make eye-contact? Do they make you feel interesting and beautiful?

I am yet to come across a person who is so physically arousing I can forgive their other defects in personality.

You can become wealthy enough that you can treat people obliged to treat with you like shit, but... why? I don't think you can be attractive enough that people can overlook how you treat people, nobody you'd want to attract anyway.

Which makes me think, in any given room beauty shouldn't be some pie to be divided up by it's occupants. It isn't about taking out the competition, it's about bringing a platter of beauty to share.

Somebody truly beautiful builds confidence, and confidence makes people more beautiful. Few people look better frowning than smiling. People look better yet laughing. Beautiful people make others feel better not worse.

Intelligence

This is the one in my series of ten that I have been most dreading. I have one to come on Beauty that has a similar problem, that is a brand identity problem as an attribute to be attracted to and to cherish. But at least with Beauty the thinking individual can see a vocal body of protesters out there contending the traditional interpretation.

But intelligence? Fewer buck the conventional interpretation of intelligence and many carry around the preconception that if I were to say 'I find intelligence attractive' they would think of being good at maths and debating and school and shit.

Alternatively people would also find this statement the conventional 'lip-service' treatment of intelligence, one of those qualities you miraculously find wherever you happen to want to find it. If the girl is hot, she is suddenly also intelligent, and has a big pair of 'personalities'.

So fuck that, fuck that shit. Under either convention I don't find intelligence attractive (but do find hot girls hot). But rather than say what intelligence isn't let me say what it is with some distinctions and then all these below, what follows I find attractive, if you are capable of putting them in a gift hamper in your mind and calling it intelligence then I guess I would find that attractive.

So firstly, there's the smart kind of dumb and the dumb kind of smart. A lot of people that make me hesitate most when describing intelligence as desirable are the smart kind of dumb. They have extensive vocabularies, are often informed of topical events and capable of useful work. Yet they tend towards having a lot of faith in 'intellectual-constructs' that don't really exist.

The dumb kind of smart for example, take as an article of faith things like 'what's good for business is good for everyone.' and 'these rules were designed to protect us.' and even 'religion does more harm than good.' and 'schools are educational.' that sort of thing. They are often well adapted to their present environment having landed there through near darwinian natural selection, but like a dinosaur, even while being perfectly suited to their current environment have a brain the size of a walnut that is incapable of the ability to imagine an ice age, or adapt to any dramatic changes.

Unattractive, by contrast the smart kind of dumb, the archetype idealised in movies like 'Forrest Gump' don't really need to know anything specific, are not particularly invested in any idea or way of life yet show remarkable wisdom and an ability to surprise that facilitates the much more attractive quality of 'humor'.

One of the most attractive people in the world to me thought that if I left the fan on at night all the oxygen in my room would be eaten and I'd die and that if my fever reached over 100 degrees my sperm would die forever and I'd be unable to have children. The dubious medical knowledge was hilarious and relatively unimportant (neither I nor my future children have died yet) but she is one of the most intelligent people I know, whom I would readily go to for advice on numerous topics.

For one thing, I am attracted to people who posess critical thought and a healthy dose of skepticism, that can entertain the possibility that their knowledge is incomplete, that they are able to be surprised. They need not be obsessively so, like on the point of some mental breakdown wondering how to truly be skepticle about skepticism, it is more the attitude that they operate on assumptions much of the time not real knowledge. They don't get offended when the stark truth of reality crushes some belief of their's underfoot.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. ~ Mark Twain

I have been told that I often comport myself with much epistemic arrogance, or at least don't show enough epistemic humility, I blame it as a hangover from debating which teaches you to speak authoritatively on subjects you know nothing about - but this was told to me by people who show a great degree of epistemic humility, and these are people I would describe as the elusive and rare 'smart kind of smart'. This humility as regards ones own knowledge (epistemic is the shmancy greek word for knowledge) is an attractive quality to possess.

Another trait that is intelligent is simple curiosity if for no other reason than curious people tend to find you interesting. Think of the last party you were at where you were talking to somebody with an occupation completely at odds with your own (or perhaps the appropriate term is 'irrelevant'?) that really grilled you on the nature of your profession, what you enjoy, what the challenges are etc. You liked them didn't you. You were flattered by their fascination. You found it easy to suddenly talk about how fascinating it is to try and find an open source program that can be adapted to ship unique warehouse items without RDI tags.

I'm told I am bad at flirtation, largely because my mindset is 'what's the point' I had an incident with Shonesy at a chinese restaurant where a girl I let out from the table our party was blocking was flirting with me and my witty banter. But I was all like 'alright, goodbye' with my back to her. Thinking that was nice, but you never pick up anyone who is leaving the restaurant you are still eating at. (which in the spirit of epistemic humility probably isn't true) And Shona told me off, I was like 'what's the point? I'm not going to pick her up?' and Shona rightly pointed out that that's not the point. If someone is flirting you flirt back, even when nothings going to happen.

Curiously and inconsistently, I am always interested in other people's work, even if it has nothing in common with mine. I love talking with people about their field of expertise. I don't go 'what's the point? I'll never have to weld boilers.' as a devotee of Heiho (the shmancy Japanese word Musashi uses to describe 'the way') my knowledge is largely generalised and analogous and I'm always looking for new ways to connect ideas and convince myself that the premis of heiho: by truly knowing one thing, you know all things, is true or at least plausible.

So curiosity and skepticism I find attractive, even from illiterate and inarticulate people. But there is a third aspect in the tri-force of what I would call 'intelligence' if it were to be interpreted the same way by everyone else that like Link's courage perhaps overcomes the other two -

Reason, and specifically a persons ability to learn. It is the most attractive aspect of intelligence, it's something ideally you would want not just in everyone you've ever met, but everyone you haven't met as well. Reason is attractive because it allows one to adapt their behaviour, it makes a person capable of change, it is the very opposite of the walnut-brained dinosaur. These people are worth giving a second, third, fourth and fifth chance.

People capable of employing reason, to overcome their emotional brain when it is letting them down, these people can entertain hypothesis, project them into the future and learn from the deviations (mistakes) they make. If past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, people who can give over to their rational mind and overcome their fears, addictions, misconceptions, assumptions etc. are the most capable of surprising us and delighting us.

This, this tri-force of skepticism, curiosity and reason - that's what intellgence should mean in your mind but doesn't. We confuse the details with the picture. Intelligence is an approach rather than a body of knowledge, if they have the bookshelf and the means to stack it, I care little about the poxyness of the current collection.

Humour

Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand. ~ Mark Twain

To me a persons ability to laugh and make me laugh is so obviously attractive it barely needs to be extrapolated upon.

Did you know children are naturally drawn to adults who will tickle them?

Probably the one great force that threatens us most often throughout our lives, threatening to crush us into our graves is boredom. But when you are in the presence of somebody funny, the most dreary godforsaken shit hole can be fun.

I didn't even know I had a 'type' until I was already 18, that was when I dated the first girl that made me laugh. I fell in love with her so quickly, she called me up to ask me out and then I asked where we should go out to. She said 'The Pancake Parlour?' and that was it.

She called the remote control 'the travolta' and acted if it made sense, and her peadophile name was 'Mrs. Bubbles' which may seem disturbing, but we lived in Ballarat and you never know when you'll need one of these things for a job interview.

Then there's people who just appreciate humour. One girl I loved made me truly laugh only a handful of times in the 3 years we dated. One involved her impersonation of a Cornish woman, you would have had to be there. But still it was good to just sit around in the mornings watching cartoons, and homestar runner and we still share a mutual appreciation of the innocent childish humour that populates the better offerings of TV and the internet.

I don't find myself funny as a general rule. It's impossible like tickling yourself but I have picked up older pieces of my writing and glimpsed what other people seem to see in me - 'a magnificent douchebag' maybe. But being able to make somebody else laugh, I mean we are surrounded by sultry come hither looking models on pages of glossy magazines, it is not the look I enjoy evoking most, it is not the look that I find most attractive. Laughter is.

And having said all that could be said on this topic without going into a very, very white analysis, there is nothing so important to me in seeking a potential partner than their effortless ability to make me laugh.

Honesty

Perhaps I should have clarified earlier that I don't hold myself up as a paragon of any of these qualities I've been writing about, I do aspire to have them though. For example my views on religion often bring me into the sphere of intolerence, as with my views on economics and finance, my kindness I feel is nurtured rather than my nature and a relatively recent development of the past 5-6 years. But honesty - this I feel I can say is part of my nature and something that I (often painfully) beholden myself too.

And I find it attractive too. I find dishonesty unattractive, confusing and upsetting. I do talk a lot of shit, for example I often grossly misrepresent Ballarat's character as my home town, being a place where white folk marry their cousins, brush their hair with a fork and 'chaw tabacco. Whereas Ballarat in reality is a beautiful mono-cultured town more akin to an Eastern Suburb of Melbourne than a set of Deliverence.

So hypocritically, I tell tall tales all the time. But honesty for me is about maintaining the essential integrity where it counts.

Genetically I owe my very existence to my ancestors and for better or worse every coupling that preceded the birth of my parents created the opportunity for me to be alive, but as it's told my maternal Grandfather when courting my Grandmother promised her diamonds and pearls and all manner of luxuries he could never deliver to win her hand in marriage. Once one he slapped her on his wedding night and told her he was the boss, and thus my mother grew up in a miserable and disfunctional household thanks to a time and place where to accept somebodies misrepresentation of themselves was an intractable error that severely reduced my Grandmothers quality of life for some half a century.

But the genes at least can recover and I grew up in a happy home. But my Grandfather's attempt to make a lie of himself probably still effects me even though he is a distant stranger of time to me and subsequently the one time I proposed to somebody I made sure I fairly represented that I have nothing, and can't guaruntee I'll have any more. (She said no, but probably not because of that and reasons more cultural/geographic in nature her own father was a house husband - that's the life for me, alas).

Similarly looking outwards I was fortunate to be born with a straightforward sexual preference, and given the tragic intolerence of the world was not presented with probably the most justifiable reason for living a lie across the developed world. I used to feel insulted by closeted homosexuals, bisexuals etc. as far as I felt I could know better their sexuality than they did (which sometimes was possibly true) and it was a long overdue lesson that the feelings of a liberal snob like me are insignificant compared with the consequences of staying in the closet or coming out to a person's relationship with their parents.

My personal values, and if I had a personal choice - the threat of disownment that might serve to keep me in the closet would be pointless, if my family couldn't live with me as I was and expect me to live a convenient lie for them, they were disowning me anyway. Of course their are concerns that are practical as well... but any lie is a problem, it needs to be fed in order to be maintained.

This is equally so for lying about your capabilities or qualifications in your job interview, or about your interest in cars for the sake of a friendship, or about taking a sick day. Honesty simultaneously makes life more effortless and harder.

There is something fundamentally courageous about honesty, being willing to lose a job rather than promise something you can't deliver, or lose your parents rather than restrict your social and sexual preferences, or lose a friendship rather than lie about the nature of it. And it's hard, it exacts a toll financially, physically and emotionally.

But the decision making is easy - tell the truth. I asked one of my bisexual friends whether he'd come out to his parents and how they had reacted, and he illustrated the hardships and benefits of honesty beautifully 'I have, and now that's their problem.'

I guess that is one line you need to draw with telling the truth - you are responsible for what you said. If you tell your boyfriend you don't love them anymore, you are responsible for telling them that. How they (and the world) reacts is their responsibility.

But people who show such integrity when it is hard to tell the truth shall ever be cherished by me. Honest people's words have currency - their compliments mean something, their feedback is instructive and their nature cannot be denied. You can lie about a lier, but somebody honest is hard to not accept.

Furthermore people who are honest with themselves carry the hope that they can actually change, people who lie to themselves don't inspire this optimism in me. I take the view that no matter how rosey somebodies life seems, they will have problems and in some way we are all broken by something. We are social animals and the web too intricate for any tragedy to happen in isolation.

The key difference between the friends I cherish and admire and the friends that remain mere aquantences is whether they have acknowledged themselves as broken and are trying to fix it, or whether they think the world is broken and collapsing on them.

Lastly, you can only really appreciate the value of an honest friend when you do not trust yourself.

Tolerance

Okay an easy and thus potentially boring post. Let's be optimistic shall we and spice things up with an ANECDOTE!!!

So once riding shotgun in the car of a friend and boyfriend of a friend I overheard a semi-passive aggressive conversation/makings of an arguement. I being one of those blessed people whom know that people always want me to volunteer my opinion even when unasked for gave my friend (and friend's boyfriend) some advice on picking battles and giving feedback taken from management advice dispensed by manager-tools podcasts.

I recieved several opinions in return and some feedback on how relationships aren't management. To which their are many merits to this point - management is pretty unromantic, unexciting and rote. I would never advocate a relationship be 'managed' per se. Perhaps my mistake was in revealing my sources.

The manager-tools podcasts could be described by a pie-chart I can't be bothered drawing as consisting of 80% feedback the 'breakfast, lunch, dinner of champions' and given so much airplay I can't help but have the feedback model and 'behavioural' approach to relationships dominate my world view.

Why I offered the feedback model up as unsolicited advice was that it describes behaviour, and not attitudes, intentions etc. Thus it neatly removes 'judgement'.

Can you see yet, why I raise an anecdote about confusing management and relationships yet? Particularly in a post on the attractive quality of tolerance.

Early in my working suit days I had the revelation that the real first hurdle of 'management' was whether you could accept the notion that other people think differently than you do. Many are called managers in this sunburt country, few are. Again there's an importance in not confusing behaviour with titles.

And that's the essence of tolerance, it is being able to recognise that other people have different priorities, circumstances, beliefs etc and that its okay. I don't like going negative but it is easier to make a point of how unattractive intolerant people are by contrast though tolerance is a positive quality to be beheld.

One sure fire way to disenchant yourself to me is in how you treat the help, more so than any other situation that arises, when I witness people abusing a waiter (or if you are an intolerant person you may refer to this as making a 'resonable complaint') over some inconvenience I say 'never again' and have generally stuck to it. I am myself fairly non-confrontational in customer service situations, but people who abuse airline clerks, waiters, fast food employees and the like evoke a super un-sexy sense of entitlement and overinflated sense of self worth.

Intolerant people interpret slights against their honor and violations of their rights where there are none, and work up emotions in themselves that are unwarranted, who wants these people around when there is really bad news.

There is a stupidity to intolerance as well, they are the person who bleats out what we are all thinking, not in a courageous manner, but when we are stuck in line for hours feel the need to make a show of saying 'this is ridiculous'.

Enter the hero of this piece, the tolerant person. This person makes an effort to empathise, to understand and does not judge. They don't impose their internal reality on the external one. When the map doesn't match the ground, the map is wrong. These people you can productively have an argument with, because they are willing to accept that they don't know everything.

In practice tolerant people are incredibly hard to have an argument with, because they don't wrap their ego up in their position. They create a space for interpersonal movement, they remove conflict from your environment, it doesn't mean they are a pushover they just create a means by which you can give and recieve kindness.

Tolerant people are the people to go travelling with, they bend like a reed and don't snap like a twig. They can forgive a place for not meeting their expectations and go with it. They will try new dishes, eat with their hands, and take their shoes off in holy places, even if they are vested in not believing.

A tolerant person is an attractive employee, they are the ones who will notice that some folks are listeners and others are readers (think about whether your friends prefer phone calls generally or whether they prefer texts and emails) they will know that some people care about tasks and some people care about people. They will know some are boisterous and outgoing and some are reserved and observant. And they will accomodate all as much as they can.

I mean a relationship is not about 'settling' or compromise, nor should it be based on some kind of give-and-take power struggle. Like tolerance is not about overlooking the things that make somebody unpleasant to deal with. Tolerance needs it's limits, it is not passivity, it is not 'roll-over-and-tickle-my-belly' it is simply an expression of confidence that you don't need to defend and enforce your world view from a hostile world. It is a refusal to be hostile. A tolerant person generally I have observed won't tolerate intolerance. That is one battle they tend to pick.

Perhaps the best way to surmise the admirable and attractive trait of tolerance is to really look hard at the sentance: they have a sense of priorities.

That is tolerant people can sense others priorities. They will understand when somebody is berieved that that is the focus of their world, just as they won't cut in line because they can sense that everyone else has the same priority to get themselves served. Most importantly their sense of your priorities means they don't take things personally, even when they perhaps should.

Furthermore they have a sense of their own priorities. To the intolerant person I suspect their priorities are hard to rank. All priorities are one, a tolerant person can at least differentiate between their wants and needs. 'I would like the last piece of pizza but I don't really need it.'

Tolerance is subsequently easy to understand as an attractive quality in a manager, friend or partner - would you rather choose to spend time with somebody who knows they want you or with somebody who thinks they need you?

Loyalty

As alluded to in the first post on Kindness, this list of values is not my own, and todays topic - Loyalty is probably one of the more contentious ones yet nevertheless hopefully is therefore ergo vis a vis of some interest to write about.

To me it's contentious because I generally don't advocate loyalty as a life plan - particularly to: organisations, disfunctional families, religious institutions, sporting teams and shitty bands.

My problem with loyalty is that often it is sold as this one way virtue - you should be loyal, a philosophy that permeates Japanese culture, devote yourself to the company/country because that's what good people do and we won't necessarily give you anything in return. It also happens to be this very manifestation of loyalty that is buffetting the countries culture currently with the advent of generational change.

Yet fundamentally loyalty is desirable, security is experience tells me an illusion, yet the optimist in me drives me to seek it somewhat. You want a relationship that is at some fundamental core, reliable and predictable. It's this brand of loyalty that kind of underpins the Classical Economists vs. Keynesian debate.

For example, classical economists being rational morons always expected prices and wages to be flexible, Keynes observed that generally people are reluctant to lower their wages or their prices - that seems a backwards step and they are trying to move forward. The Keynesian promoted reasons as to why prices (& wages) were rigid downwards (that is they can move up easily, but never down) and one of them was the fact that all people need to make some kind of plans for the future.

So rather than renegotiate the terms of our employment day to day, not knowing if we will earn tomorrow what we did today (and thus not being able to form any long term plans) we enter contracts that stipulate our hourly wages, our term of employment how often our wages will be reviewed (implicitly upwards) etc. thus enabling us to take loans, have children and other long term plans that require at least an illusion of security to take those risks.

Sticking with the economics debate analogy for one more paragraph - the Classicists do have a point though, many recessions theoretically would be easier to deal with if prices and wages and everything else were perfectly flexible, that is if we didn't look for loyalty and fairness in our institutions and employers and instead could meekly accept sacrifices for the greater good. Such flexibility is more able to deal with the inevitable change that volatile markets and unpredictable environments bring, the fundamental unpredictability that makes all security an illusion - but to draw the lines for you - just as there will ever be a debate about flexibility and security in how we structure our economy, the debate between being loyal and self-respect (or not being exploited) is an ongoing personal one we all have to answer for ourselves.

But I have to concede there is something magnificent about those who choose to be loyal, security may be an artificial intellectual construct, but we live in another one anyway - society. Both are illusions, but illusions and dreams are where the party is at. Think of people you know that are loyal, there is that lovable stupidity of optimism in loyalty, they assume their loyalty will be rewarded BUT they don't necessarily expect it. And that's courageous, another correlation, the loyal's heart is made for breaking, they trust enough to be dissappointed and exploited.

With a healthy normal level of narcissism, you can't help but love the loyal, and feel guilty at any inability to reciprocate. The people that consistently make an effort to turn up to your crappy parties even though they aren't the person you were really hoping would come. Those that allow your workplace culture to get a foothold and grow into some kind of surrogate family. Those that are simply present.

Loyal people are dear, and precious and rare and should be looked after.

Courage

Ooooooooooooooooooooohh tough one. It's easier to launch into a diatribe of wht doesn't constitute courage, which I mean may be valid because I can think of plenty of contexts where courage is overused - say newspapers, sports broadcasts and the military.

A lot of currency has probably gone out of this word as hero status is bequethed on people who undertake the normal risks to be expected of their job. Some jobs contain more risks than others to be sure, but that is not really a quality of character that makes somebody attractive so much as a fetish for somebody in uniform.

So it's voluntary courage, a demonstrable ability for somebody to step out of their comfort zone and do something with no particular compulsion to do so.

Our society cannot ask the person on the street to run into a burning building on the chance somebody might be trapped inside, it can put this down as an obligation in a job description and that is a chief distinction between real courage and a tough job. An extreme distinction to be sure.

I am attracted to people who are courageous in their principals, who apologise when they are not obliged to. Who stand up for people that are unpopular to defend, who risk social scorn and embarassment to do what is right.

A simple but effective model of learning is to draw two concentric circles one within the other, the small inner circle is the comfort zone. The larger outer one is not, we learn by occupying the non-comfort zone until it becomes comfortable and then both circles expand.

And similar to kindness, courage makes life easier. I like people who stick up for themselves almost as much as I like people who stick up for others. There's no time I loath myself more than when my moral courage fails, there's no time I love a girl more than when she is telling me what I did wrong.

Just as everyone wants some kind of shelter to sleep in, somebody with courage breeds courage in me. Courageous people are good to have around, to set examples.

Furthermore like the optimist (and all these traits tend to correlate) they make things possible. No two people on earth would ever get together if one didn't have the courage to approach the other. In that way it is one of the most fundamental qualities of attraction.

Optimism

I recently wrote about optimism already this month possibly. I don't know. I'm optimistic though I can revisit it again because it's in this series of ten most attractive attributes.

Pessimists are rarely dissappointed and a source of almost constant dissappointment to me. Largely because they pretty much gauruntee failure. My life recently and rapidly progressed from exciting to daunting, and I was going to have micro-meltdown when in a timely and serendipitous matter I had Mark Twain's quote shoved in my ears 'Often I have felt sad at my lack of success, but never have a I felt ashamed of trying.' this is the cold hard beauty of optimism.

Easily dismissed as unrealistic, optimism has as its price dissappointment. The fridge of my soul is stocked to overflowing with the ingredients of dissappointment and heartache, but these are also the same core ingredients of great joy and accomplishment.

It makes sense that our evolutionary history has allowed indivduals to survive that greatly overestimate their odds of success. People who opperate on the assumption that they can and will succeed carry their own kind of exciting energy, momentum that crushes dissappointment under foot.

I used to be obsessed philosophically with 'why?' until one of my more influential mentors pointed out the really exciting concept was 'how?' and my life permanantly shifted for the better in the direction of how. The mentor was Rod the training manager at my former job, and conversations with him were some of the most humbling I ever enjoyed.

That's the audacity of how, the energy that is exciting and enamouring and beautiful to be around. It springs from kindness too, for to suspend your disbelief that something can be done or not and just assume it will is one of the kindest and most reassuring things people can do.

Almost daily I encounter people who hold far more belief in my abilities than I do, and it feeds me. It makes me doubt my doubt, and if you have never had the experience of walking into somebodies office with a seemingly insurmountable problem and just had them launch into a discussion of all the options and possibilities and how to get it done, you have been missing out on the sexiness of optimism.

Then there's the simpler and more pragmatic view of being optimistic about people, it is probably the easiest thing in the world to find fault in others, to do so astutely and expect the worst. It is as such not an admirable skill.

It is more difficult to find reasons to believe in other people, to expect the most and be confident in them. I have friends that reason makes me feel that they will ultimately break my heart. There is no profit though in expecting this, so I hope for the best, I look for the signs that they will in fact turn around. I have one friend I spoke to recently that I could have written off years ago, but those qualities that first drew me to him won out in the long run and now it makes me intensely happy to see what he has done with himself.

Profit = Reward for Risk, and where risks are highest is where the profit lies. The optimist ultimately has a loveable kind of greed, an insatiable appetite for the big profits and thus ignore the collosal risks - except they aren't even.

Optimists don't take the kind of mindless risks that may hurt some body, they are more the people that humbly bet pennies to win dollars. Pessimists fearing the odds of failure tend more to bet their dollars to gain a slow trickle of pennies.

Tomorrow belongs to the dreamers, it always has. Many optimists will enjoy a steady diet of dissappointment, but this is more than counterbalanced by the sheer infectious joy of living in a world of dreams.

Kindness

In an attempt to gather momentum on writing again, I'm going to write a post about 10 of the most attractive qualities people can have. It isn't my own list, but just my reflections on them.

Starting with kindness. There are many and varied views on kindness, altruism and why as social animals it seems important to us and why those who wax nostalgic about the good old days seem to feel it is short supply. I find the pursuit of genuine 'altruism' the purely selfless act a pursuit not worth bothering with. Just be kind, be kind, make an effort to be kind.

There are two broad views on kindness and generosity. Here they are in summation:

"The only true generosity is that rendered on an ingrate" these words I paraphrase from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose book I read recently, not recent enough to remember the exact wording, and I'm too tired to go look it up. But basically this is the view of 'pure' altruism, not giving to recieve. But I have to say when I am kind to an ingrate or in a more long term sense have to dish out tough love, the kind of treatment where you have to refrain from the condescention of 'one day you'll thank me for it' I still get a satisfying sense of bemusement. I think even being nice to somebody rude, reprehensible or worse is not truly a selfless act.

The second type is garden variety altruism, it is where you do a favor to build good will and you can assume, (but not expect as granted) kindness in return.

Overarching this you can take a type of Karmic view that kindness and altruism will be rewarded through a vast web, and not necessarily directly by those aspects where you exerted your good deeds. Thus you be kind to somebody awful who doesn't appreciate it, and be rewarded by somebody else who does, for observing your efforts. Or you can be kind to somebody who does appreciate it, but cannot practically return the favor and be rewarded by somebody else who can.

I probably take the view of all three, just to be safe. But I will refrain from any further talk about being kind, generous, charitable or altruistic for the positive returns it may generate.

Fact is every interaction you have with anybody will leave you feeling either a little better or a little worse. Kindness is the conscious effort to make sure anybody who interacts with you feels better.

Because life is hard, life is fucking hard and brutal and unfair. Life has a way of stressing and burdening people who enjoy abundant material resources, our social dependance and need for interaction means no matter what company we keep we are never in control of all we care about.

But we are in control of ourselves, and we can direct our behaviour to make other people's lives easier. Where and when we find opportunities present themselves.

Take for example a bus ride from a city to a country town. You sit down next to somebody, you can pretend they aren't there, aren't a person, don't exist and absorb yourself in a book, shut out the world with head phones or just gaze out a window at the country side. Or you can acknowledge them. It doesn't require a conversation, nor much energy, nor does it come naturally to all of us. But it can be done. And it is a kindness.

Or I recall Brenton taught me in year 8 or 9, in an enlightening lesson to be kind to employees of a business. I always put my notes and coins down on the counter, the employee of McDonalds or whatever would pick them up, count them out and put them in the register. Brenton one day told me 'pick it up, and hand it to them.' and I have done so ever since. A small kindness.

Shona taught me that people are interesting, and started me on my path to learning how to actually listen (I am still in the steep part of that learning curve), unlike Brenton there was no direct incident. This was the product of years of observing. I could never get why Shona enjoyed socialising so much, always wanted to go to parties. If I suggested we catch up, inevitably it would be seized upon and hijacked into some multiple social engagement rather than one on one, as I intended. Eventually I deduced that while I could stand back and deduce whether I was interested in somebody or not (I don't mean romantically, I mean, interested-period) it was actually far more interesting to ask people what they thought of themselves. There is a disparity between what can be observed and overheard about a person, and who that person thinks they are. And no part alone makes the whole picture. Giving people a chance to speak for themselves and contribute to your impression of them again is a (not so simple) kindness.

Then there are the more obvious forms of kindness: helping somebody move house evidently makes their lives easier, less stressful and more social. Bringing cake to work makes people momentarily happier. Raising money for charity, makes people feel noticed, feel good and helps a charity. Volunteering etc.

But what is the attraction to kindness? 5+ years ago, I thought it was always obvious who I was romantically interested in - they were the only person I was nice to. It was better than being an arsehole to everybody, I guess but insufficient. The attraction to kindness for me, is that it breeds energy, it is easier to interact with somebody kind. Selfishness and other negative traits take energy, defences need to be beaten down. Kind people may be vulnerable to exploitation, but like discovering a really great hole-in-the-wall eatery, inspires in me the kind of energy to protect it from exploitation.

And everything else flows from kindness, the ability to empathise makes argument less frequent but more constructive, it builds friendships that produce diverisity and entertainment to break up the monotony of life, it generates tolerance, and honesty and patience and beauty and humour.

It makes my life easier, the more kindness I recieve. One of my early mentors that I haven't really stayed in touch with made the point 'use your friends because they are your friends. Don't make friends to use them.'

I once said to another mentor after paying for a meal one time, 'You'd be surprised at what a generous act, accepting somebody else's generosity can be.'

So be kind. It's hot.

Who am I trying to impress?

One would rather have the warm tongue of a critic licking his asshole than the tongue of his spouse. It gives him a sense of validity and power. He seems to defy gravity. ~ Mike Patton

"The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are no easy answers, or perhaps there is a whole spectrum of easy answers... in fact for my question there will be an answer certainly that is observable by my behaviour. 'Who should I try to impress?' is perhaps the most valid question, but do you ever hear anybody verbalise that? I don't know.

What? Oh yeah, the first quote by Mike Patton is one of my favorites and most memorable, in his essay 'How we eat our own young' and it's relevant, I assure you. The second one put me in this mindset from the bed of procrustes it is an aphorism I will stretch and cut like the books legendary namesake to suit my purposes.

I have a deviant-art account which has no artwork on it. I have a facebook account which has most of my recent artwork on it, and I have some webcomic pages. Having studied marketing and economics and finance and gone to a school where the year twelve art class students could be counted without taking your shoes off, my social circle consists of few practicing artists. Thus thusly, my facebook page exposes me to an audience of 'lay' people when it comes to art.

I used to think that I could be encouraged by the positive feedback I recieve and then 'graduate' onto DeviantArt an online community of artists once I was producing artwork I was happy to share with other artists. That is my personal question - should I be making art to impress people, people with jobs and money and their own distinct lives? Or shoud I be trying to impress other artists?

As John said to me when discussing our gestating-foetus of an art project "I definitely get that you need to find the balance between masturbating onstage and giving the audience the reacharound now and then." because we are pursuing a holy-grail type challenge.

That's me. I see a lot of live music over the course of a month, and look at hundreds of pieces of art every day. The question of who to impress informs how accessable our work will be. I have been trained in public speaking and presentations, and most processes (at least all the good ones) emphasize that the first step of any presentation is to identify and analyse your audience. The most recent presentation I did was preaching to the choir, and thus almost a complete waste of time. It's objective was to reassure in essence that we were still doing stuff.

But broadly speaking, before performing in any capacity you need to know who the audience is, who matters and who doesn't. Magnanimously you could say 'everybody matters' and yes they do, due to the unpredictability of life in general, but then it also depends what you are trying to achieve.

For me I adopt Seinfields attitude 'I just want to be one of those guys' for me though I'm not so sure if it's about impressing artists and performers as being accepted by them and identified with. That is what I am working towards.

At the same time researching for an exhibition sort of fills me with resentment, that it's almost obligatory that I become part of an 'artistic community' here I am at my most hippocritical. I exert a lot of energy trying to lure collaborators into becoming part of a scene, but my ego prevents me from trying to join an established one. Maybe I just need to lead, and it prevents me from following. I have to reconcile this, but not here.

I see bands though where they are sustained by gimmick, but that seems to judgemental. What they do well is perform. PERFORM. Seeing them play is not like attending a recital, which is a recitation of music, music that was composed by some of the most gifted improvisers in history now forgotten due to the formality which constrains 'classical music' which is the other extreme, still a performance but so formalised that the audience is part of the performance in a way that standing on beer stained carpet in Pony trying not to collide with a skinhead is not.

That is to say, that music aside if I was (and I will kill myself the day this actually seems like a good way to enjoy music) to draw up a scorecard, technical ability, composition, execution etc. would be criteria alongside banter, stage presence, costumes etc. That is I see bands that get some of these things right, some that get none (though this is very rare) and some that get all, and they are usually bands I have to line up at 7am to wait for a ticket vendor to open at 9am and hope my order can get processed in 30 seconds before 50,000 tickets get sold out.

The point being that performance is holistic, and in this context it is easy to distinguish between 'musicians' musicians' and I don't know how to articulate the alternative. But I have seen performances where the performer takes the attitude 'let my music speak for itself' and then literally not spoken to the audience. Sometimes, given some peoples ineptitude at banter this is appropriate, some times it actually destroys the performance. Much like watching somebody eat a snickers bar between courses at an accliamed restaurant would.

I've also been to exhibitions where I spent most of the time reading the explanatory plaques on the wall, because they were sadly more interesting than the artworks. I've also been to exhibitions where there was no explanation whatsoever. I don't know which is better, or which is which but there are elements of holistic performance even in gallary spaces and exhibition layouts.

Everything effects the impression we give, and we should tune these elements to the people we are actually trying to impress.

Who am I trying to impress? I still don't know yet. I would like to say myself, but that would be dishonest. Probably some girl.