The hardest thing about writing for a blog is not writing. Sounds nonsensical, but it’s true; well, for me at least. Blog writing is a habit, and like any habit the first four or five times are bloody hard – after that it gets easier and easier. But when you stop writing, you’re right back where you started. Possibly even further than that because you have to then fight the expectation of being able to produce what you could when you were in the swing of things.
Which is where I’ve been for the past few days. After posting every fortnight or so for a year, I haven’t written anything for two and a half months (if you need excuses I’ve been to Canada, moved house and lost my job in those ten weeks). And every idea that has floated wispily through my head has been swatted aside with a little irritation; nothing really seemed worth writing about.
So I am going to give up, stop trying to find the perfect post and scratch some byte-sized notes on some of the ideas that have been flitting through my mind recently. And endeavour to slip back into the routine that makes this easier. Here’s hoping…
The Interweb is Alive
The ‘net was once just another medium for companies and organisations to peddle their wares and ideas to us with. These days, a fat wedge of the online pie is made up of user-generated content – videos, photos and words in their millions are posted by us everyday. In this sense, the online and offline worlds are starting to converge – the interweb is starting to represent what people do and what they think. But what about how they feel? Each of those scraps of content seeded from a feeling within the person that created it.
And that is where We Feel Fine comes in. It’s a simple, clever and rather beautiful way of representing the emotional state of the online community. It trawls the web for the phrases ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’ and pulls back the surrounding words, categorising them into a bunch of different emotional states. In doing so it’s able to present you with the most – and least – common emotions. The most common? ‘I feel better’. And the second? ‘I feel bad’. Catharsis anyone?
It goes a step further though, by retrieving basic information about the context of the comment found – the age and gender of the person who made it, the date on which it was made, and the city in which they were based (along with the weather that day). Which means you can sample the emotional state of young men in Baghdad, or Australian women the day Heath Ledger died, or…whatever…
It’s worth a look. Maybe even your own emotions have been harvested…
A Short Story about a Short Story
When I was about half the height I am now, I discovered a short story that has stayed with me ever since. I don’t remember my reaction when I first read it, but for some reason I carried it with me throughout the years as my bones grew, voice changed, hair greyed.
Mostly it lay dormant, curling itself up somewhere in my subconscious, but every few years it would stir and my mind would leap to grab at it only to find that, like a myth, the periphery had decayed and time was whittling the story away.
One day it stirred and as I grasped at it, I was shocked at how little of the story remained. I was afraid I would lose it all together, and started – quite frantically – to try and find it again. But it was impossible. I had forgotten the author, the title, and the book I’d found it in. All I had left was its essence, its kernel. I spent hours and hours on the internet and in libraries trying to track it down, but I just didn’t have enough of it left to start from. I gave up, tried again, gave up, so many times.
Often, after a few beers at parties, it’d bubble up again and I’d corner puzzled strangers asking if they’d heard of it. Friends overheard me re-telling the same story over and over and over; a story that no one else seemed to have heard of. But one day, out of the blue, one of those cornered strangers got in touch to say he’d found it. A year after I’d asked him, he’d been working as a relief teacher and had arrived to find a lesson plan based on the story. He even had a link to a copy on the ‘web. I was ecstatic.
I’ll never forget it again. It’s here if you fancy a read…
Legend of the Dancing Goats
I’m a coffee junkie (some might say pusher), but not just for the taste and effect. I love making coffee, and during this recent employment lull I’ve been thinking about why I make it the way I do. My dented old Rancilio Silvia is currently glistening in the Oxford sunshine, but the coffee I make with her draws from others I’ve had in antipodean London cafes and the old haunts of those baristas back in central Auckland and Melbourne.
Those influences also have a history though, back through the Italian immigrants that first brought espresso to Australia, themselves immersed in a European coffee culture that can be traced to the first import of beans to Venice from North Africa in the 16th century.
But that’s only the half-way point in coffee’s history. Its origin reaches right back another five hundred years; way, way back to a hot afternoon on a sunny hillside in Ethiopia.
Legend has it – in fact two legends have it – that the discoverer of coffee, the first to delight in a jittery hit of caffeine, was actually a goat. From there on the legends diverge just a touch – in one the goatherd finds his herd dancing (yep, dancing) around the hillside and notices they’ve been chewing on some red berries he hadn’t seen before. Intrigued, and tired from the long, hot afternoon walking the hills, he tries some himself and the surge of energy prompts his own feverish hillside dance. The village priest, enjoying an evening walk in the hills, comes across the goatherd jumping madly about and delivers a stern talking-to. And confiscates the beans…
Later that night the priest struggles to stay awake during his prayers and, looking at the pile of mysterious beans in the flickering candlelight, wonders if they might help. Chewing on a handful, he finds himself praying until dawn, longer than ever before. From then on he administers the berries to his congregation, in the hope that they too will pray harder and longer than before.
From the dancing goats, to the spread of coffee through the Muslim world, to its delivery to Venice and from there throughout the West, the pattern of the legend – coffee’s demonisation then acceptance – has been repeated time and time again. It’s been criminalised by Muslim leaders because it seemed to go against God’s will, by Western religion because it came from the East, and by political leaders because of the trouble that fermented in coffee houses. There have even been protests by women because of the impotence it brought about in their men.
But it has always survived. Today it is the one truly global drug; one that started with a curious, dancing goat and found its way through a thousand years of history into the cup next to me as I sit in the Oxford sunshine with a keyboard at my fingertips and a cat purring at my feet.