with trends like these

Who needs enemies? Good pun(k). See what I did there? Probably not. A few people I used to know through the Punk Alliance had a band called Bad Day Down that was kind of a socio/political type affair. Having since split and had a member move south and one disappear, they've reformed as two separate groups - Protest! and Damn The Empire. I went to see DTE the other week when they were up from Melbourne to check out what my old friends had been doing with themselves and it was good, really good. Turns out Bram, formerly of Yidcore, is the frontman. Good times.

Anyway, back on track, I picked up their cd afterwards, cleverly titled "With trends like these". Good listen, especially if you're into fast, well-thought out punk rock with intelligent lyrics. Which I am. Or at least, was.

Growing up, I discovered punk at the reasonably impressionable age of 15 and quickly grabbed hold of it. In a small town where not fitting in meant violence and vicious rejection, I clambered at this new thing that told me it was okay to be different. And by god I ran with it. At 17 I started my first shitty pop-punk band, equal parts social motivation and complaining about girls, had my hair dyed bright red, spikes, wallet chains - all the things I understood as being punk rock. It's kind of ironic that a counter-culture that was so heavily defined by not following trends has so many accepted stereotypical dress fashions, but I guess a minority uniform is still the minority.

But I digress. Back then, punk had some pretty simple ideas for me. Trends were bad. It meant you weren't thinking for yourself, following the crowd - and most likely, not following them anywhere good. I lived by those tenets in my social rebellion for many years, later going on to join Run Amok and start the Punk Alliance, which ran for around three years and produced my most successful work in music.

But I came here today to talk about trends and that's what I'm finally about to get to. We'd defined trends as bad. But earlier in the week, I was looking at Google Trends, comparing search histories and traffic for a few different phrases trying to track the migration of people across social networking platforms, and I realised I was trying to use trends to prove something that I perceived as being good. It got me thinking about the nature of evolution, which we generally also perceive as being the improvement of an organism, and realised that all the bands that I've desperately loved over the years that I still love have been the ones that have continued to evolve. The ones that stayed the same and kept producing the exact same style of music fell by the wayside as uninteresting. NOFX and Lagwagon come to mind as examples of the latter, while Muse and Thrice pop up as the former. I anxiously await every new iteration of their work, but the bands I grew up on have long been forgotten.

As humans, we are predisposed to advancement. It's in our nature to constantly try to improve. One thing that Google, Wikipedia and the Internet hath wrought is a collective knowledgebase that spans the globe. As soon as one person discovers something, they can publish it and it becomes instantly available to the entire world. Whereas a discovery a century ago could take nearly a year to reach the other side of the world, today it can happen in as long as it takes someone to hit post. So we have a culture based around the internet of constant advancement, but development in any direction rarely happens in an independent fashion, isolated, because we're so connected and in touch with what everyone else is doing. Anything that has value will gain attention, and the more people become interested in something, the more people will realise its worth and put resources into developing it further.

And this is why trends exist. People recognise something as good, and want to contribute to it, to be a part of it. And as a society, a race, a civilisation, that's been the driving force behind our culture. So my point, after all of this rambling is that trends are not bad. Bad trends are bad. Trending towards anything only means that people recognise it as having value. Whether that's jeans tightening, punk bands becoming rock bands, CDs getting louder, collars getting popped, whatever - a lot of people doing something just means it's getting attention. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.

All of a sudden I have cause to rethink my automatic assumption that the word trendy is pejorative.

rudeness

"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength"- Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer was a writer and philosopher in the US in the 20th century. Born 25th of July 1902, died 21st of May 1983. He theorised heavily about mass movement and the behaviour of large groups, and wrote extensively on turning tragedy into opportunity; something he experienced heavily in his own life.

His comments on fanaticism were profound at the time, being one of the first to note that for many people, the content of what they obsessed about was not nearly as important as the fact that they were obsessed about something. This seems all too relevant in our society with its quest for celebrity gossip and fads. What is popular is not nearly as important to us as that something is popular. But I digress.

Among his many quotable phrases, this one has always been my favourite. As a person who spent a lot of time growing up being insulted, I had always just thought that the people treating me in a less than favourable manner were stronger than I was. Whoever said 'sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me' had obviously never experienced the crushing weight of years of verbal abuse.

I remember being a young lad on the Internet and coming up with new and creative insults and thinking I was arguing with people, but I really wasn't. I was injecting tangental negative discourse into the conversation with really no effect except making the other person mad, and even then that was only working because they were able to be distracted from their real points with it. It wasn't until I grew up that I realised that the true nature of taking power over someone didn't involve insulting them, or being rude to them, or being able to talk down to them - it was about asserting yourself with logic and confidence, in such a way that they couldn't fight back by any reasonable manner.

And it works; especially if you're trying to discuss something with someone unaccustomed to the concept, who can't take control over a situation without having to pump themselves up without pushing someone else down. A weak person masquerading as a strong one will take snipes at someone, thinking that because they're able to be rude to someone else, that they're better than them. I've seen a lot of people rip the hell out of people in service industries, McDonalds workers and cleaners, and seen them take it like a champ. I had so much respect for the way they were unphased by the substandard behaviour of others and didn't take it personally.

Being rude does not mean you are strong. It means you are a jerk.

expectation

A few years back, I had it all. At least, I thought I did. Successful band, long term girlfriend, nice house with good housemates, good job, good friends, working car.

Within a few months, it would all be gone.

Car crashed, girlfriend left, band breaking up, job turning to hell, house turning to worse hell, one of my close friends died. I was devastated. Everything that had made me, me, was gone. I dealt with it less and less successfully as time passed and I withdrew socially. I stopped going to parties, didn't go to shows, stopped going out. And no-one noticed. Facebook wasn't popular yet so we had to keep in touch the old fashioned way, and .. nothing happened.

I was so disappointed. For all my friends, the massive numbers of people who came to parties and shows, and no-one noticed I was missing. It all hadn't meant anything to them. In the years that followed, I met new people, made new friends and became close to people who really matter to me. I was shocked at how amazing life was and have been so grateful for them ever since. But I never got over what happened back in 2007 and I never forgave them for it.

But I realised the other day that I pass people in the street all the time that have no obligations towards me, nor I them. We walk by and go about our lives with nearly no interaction and that's fine. And it hit me that that's what I expect of strangers. It was fine that when I was having trouble with my bike that people keep walking because I have no expectation that they'd stop and help me. After all, I'm not their problem. And that's when I realised that expectation is actually the cause of all disappointment. If that'd been someone I know and cared about, damn straight I would've expected they'd stop and help me.

I thought I had close friends. And sure, we partied a lot and had fun but I had an expectation of them that these people I spent all my time with, were also going to be the ones who'd look after me when I wasn't doing so well. I expected that if I were in trouble, that someone would notice and come and find me. But that didn't happen. And I realised that I'd never communicated that expectation to them. Obviously that's not the sort of thing that comes up in day to day conversation, but I couldn't be any more mad at them for not helping me with my problems than I could be for my ISP not fixing my Internet if I never told them it was broken. I saw them all again last Friday for a friend's birthday party and I remember how things did stay that way so long - life was just fun. We partied and drank and danced and everything was good. I just never noticed that we didn't have anything more until I needed it. All the signs were there that I'd never been part of the core social circle, I just never thought about it.

Now I can enjoy those people for the relationship that I do have with them, because I don't expect more of it. And it's that expectation that gives people the opportunity to disappoint you. I'm not suggesting that we avoid expectation - it's stupidly important to keep people around that you can expect to throw down for you when you need it. But you can't be mad at people for something you expected but never made them aware of. That expectation was under your control - you set the bar. That's something I can take responsibility for. So it's really up to you to make sure that your expectations are reasonable, and more to the point, that the people you have expectations of are aware of them.

subconscious instruction

When I first started working full time, I was really in over my head. Not just technically either; I had come from a scenario where when I was at uni, no-one really ever had any power over anyone else. The lecturers were there to do their job and didn't care if you did yours or not. If you got in an argument with someone, you could let it go or viciously prove you were right. No real rules to speak of, every man for himself. Moving into an environment with a chain of command and people who, in any discussions, could pull out the fact that they were my boss and I'd have to shut up and take whatever they were giving out was difficult. It took some serious adjusting to, but it was fine. After getting used to that, I thought I was sorted - I was my employer's subordinate and that was that.

What I hadn't wrapped my head around was that that wasn't exactly how it worked. I found myself in a situation where I wanted to do things, get paid more, get more responsibility, and I complained that they wouldn't let me. A friend who had been running his own business for several years told me that I needed to stop asking for things and start taking them. I didn't understand, I said they needed to let me. What I hadn't figured out is that I wasn't actually under their control, I was in their employ. They paid me money to perform a task, and I had the choice to accept or not accept the restrictions they placed on it. If I were to not accept it, I could've handled that in a number of ways. Gathering facts to present arguments, doing research or quitting and finding a new job. But I didn't see those options at the time, I just saw people treating me in a way that I perceived as being bad.

And the guts of it really was that we subconsciously tell other people how we want to be treated by the behaviour we accept. On day one, instead of defining my own boundaries of what was acceptable to me, I took it like a bitch because I thought that's what was expected in corporate life, and in doing so I made myself a peon instead of a respected colleague. It took me leaving the company to pursue other goals, and eventually starting my own company to properly gain the respect of the people who'd employed me. I'd been out in the world enough to know how I deserved to be interacted with, and simply expecting that caused it to be delivered.

Almost every week I hear people complain about their friends, partners and coworkers and how they treat them, but all I hear in the midst of that is that they're telling those people it's okay to treat them like that, because they accept it. They do nothing about it and in doing so, mark that behaviour as acceptable. Then when they finally do blow up about it later, the other party has no idea anything was even wrong, because that's how it's always been. In a way, we almost have an obligation to define the boundaries and standards of acceptable behaviour for the people around us, because otherwise they may not even have any idea they're not doing the right thing.

I need to say it again for effect to finish, because it's the entire point of this post: we subconsciously tell other people how we want to be treated by the behaviour we accept. We have absolutely no right to complain about someone elses behaviour if all we've done is accept it.

role-based interaction

Generally, on Monday nights I go to the laundromat to do my washing. There are a number of reasons why I don't just buy my own washing machine and dryer, but the biggest of them is that I love laundromats. There's something earthy and involved about having to share a space like that with people you don't know - literally airing your dirty linen in public.

While my washing is being done, I generally stand out on the street with an acoustic guitar, and play/sing to passers-by. This is pretty normal for me, and is a good way to dual-task time. The thing that's unusual about that is that I'm not busking. There's nowhere to put money, and this is kind of unusual for a street performer. I just really like the idea of taking music away from being commercial in any sense and making it something that one person can share with another.

But the thing is that people know how to interact with buskers. There are social norms to that interaction that dictate how you behave. You walk past, if you have change you drop it in the receptacle. That's how it works. You see these kind of role-based interactions all the time - as a customer of a store, you know that you collect the items you want, and then take them to the counter for payment, then leave. As a passenger of a taxi, you just get in and tell them the destination address, then probably have some awkward conversation, then pay them and get out. These roles allow us to interact with people we don't know because we know our roles.

The best part about playing in the street is that people assume you're a busker, and they know how to interact with a busker. They get money out and walk over without paying too much attention to what they're doing. It's only when they get there that they realise there's nowhere for the money to go - and the role is broken, along with the walls between me and them. In that instant, they're no longer a passer-by giving money to a busker; I'm interacting with them, the real them. Not a role, not a defined set of interactions that tell you how to act. Just the person themselves. In that instant, our interactions are honest and personal. Whatever happens after that happens between me and that person, and it's the most effective way I've ever discovered to find meaning in fleeting interaction with strangers.

indestructible

"Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

- from Looking For Alaska, by John Green (2005).

bring that lesson to the job

“You know, Westmoreland made all of us officers write our own obituaries during Tet, when we thought The Cong were gonna end it all right there. And, once we clued into the fact that life is finite, the thought of losing it didn’t scare us anymore. The end comes no matter what, the only thing that matters is how do you wanna go out, on your feet or on your knees? I bring that lesson to this job. I act, knowing that someday this job will end, no matter what. You should do the same.”

-- FBI Director James Grace to the Attourney General, in The Kingdom (2007).