The Time It Takes To Fall (Explanations)

The is the story behind the entry behind the song which you can listen to below.

_____

When I was in college, one million, billion years ago, I used to take the train into the city each day and I'd spend my time writing about the people I'd see around me, making up stories about them, trying to work out who they were.

Everyday, there was this beautiful girl who took the train at the same time as me and, often, we'd end up in the same carriage. I never spoke to her and, because of my shyness, all we ever had was that train ride in the morning.

I had to be ok with that.

And I remember, as will they, spending one last night together with someone, knowing they would be gone when the sun came up.

And I had to be ok with that too.

So this is about being ok with the time we're blessed with, with each other and appreciating it for all that it is, not worrying about tomorrow because by tomorrow, it could be gone.



Here's what Dan's doing with the song because he's awesome like that.

"I work with high school students... going into their schools and talking about the value of respect. I use this song and intro it saying that "in life we are given moments... moments to choose. We come to a fork in the road and we sometimes have to choose a path. This song is about that moment... about making that right choice... about living each day to it's full potential and really just choosing to be YOURSELF."

If you could only hear and see the response that this song is getting from hundreds of students EVERY DAY... it's an honor to have been able to use your words, turn them into song, and share them with the world. Thank you."

- Dan Rodriguez

I'd like to thank Erica Mayer, Ben Patrick Johnson, Jon Ellis (always) and especially Dan Rodriguez for putting this together.

I am -constantly- amazed.

My Daily Struggle To Not Be An Asshole

What no one tells you about experiencing any level of success or fame (no matter how small) is that it can, quite easily, turn you into a complete and utter asshole.

I know because I have to stop and check myself every now and again to make sure I am still the person I say I am. There's usually a huge discrepancy between these two things: The person you say you are and the person you are. I don't like it.

I have, quite literally, hundreds of people a day who tell me that I'm brilliant, or a genius, or that they love me, complete strangers and every single time it happens, this warm feeling washes over me and I feel appreciated and loved and that's great.

The problem with it is that it can take away the fear you need to be alive. You need a certain amount of fear and doubt in your life in order to motivate you to do better. If I do let it get to me, if I start to believe I am the person everyone tells me I am, I start to act without questioning my motives or intentions.

I start to believe that everything I do is right and just and perfect because, hey, hundreds of people tell me I am so that makes sense, right?

Wrong.

The reason people started to like me is because I started telling the truth. Or at least started trying to write down what the truth was. And the truth is fear and doubt. The truth is uncomfortable and real. It's missing someone, it's hope and happiness, it's finding love and being afraid of it, it's wishing you were less afraid and the entire spectrum of emotions that come with being human.

Acting, without question, without grounding myself first before I do, is not human. It's alien.

So I have this daily struggle between my ego and my heart. My ego wants me to write the first thing that comes into my head because obviously, it's perfect. My heart wants me to strip away the bullshit until there's nothing left but pure, unadulterated, truth. It wants me to shock myself with my honesty.

And I know on a daily basis which one wins depending on how people respond to the things I write because I know when I've written the truth, it resonates with people on an emotional level and they respond to it in a way that says

"I am human and so are you."

I am only good at what I do when I'm humble, when I experience a sense of humility and when I put other people before myself. Strangely enough, this is also when I'm happiest. I forget about my own, tiny, insignificant problems and my life is violently hurled into perspective, against a vast backdrop of other people's problems.

Dwelling inside yourself isn't healthy. Better to go outside into the air. And not be an asshole.

Smashing Crayons

Here follows my opinion on advertising because people have asked for it for some God knows what reason.

Advertising is a blight on the human race and I hate it, most days with every fiber of my being.

This may seem strange considering I work in advertising. My excuse is that I try in my own work to try and make it what it should be instead of what it is. Which is shit.

The advertising industry is abusive. It’s abusive to the people who work in it, the people who pay for it and the people who watch it.

The industry as it currently stands, is broken.

I’m sure it was all well and good one billion years ago when J. Walter Thompson or David Ogilvy or Bernbach or whomever we’re hailing as the founding father of advertising this week sat down and wrote

“Lemon”






















or something like that on a page but that was then and this is now.

You can’t expect things to stay the same considering the environment we now live in. Things are different from 10 years ago, let alone 100.

But this business hangs on tooth and nail to making its little movies, winning its awards and abusing the hell out of the people around it.

On the subject of little movies, the vast majority of people who get into advertising are frustrated directors, comedians, artists and writers, myself included, too afraid to actually try and make it in the career path their heart’s desire, so instead they settle for second best.

Advertising.

It’s safe and easy, relatively speaking of course because getting into advertising is like trying to get up your own asshole, hard, embarrassing, awkward, humiliating and often impossible.

But compared to actually making something of yourself, as an artist or whatever it is you really want, it’s a walk in the park.

That’s hard work. That’s starving. That’s suffering for your dreams.

I often wonder how all the kids trying to get in would react if they knew how many people were trying to get out by writing a book/shooting a movie/learning exotic dancing/getting into acting/finally settling down and getting that accounting job they’ve always had their eye on.

Advertising as a career is sold to people on the basis that they will a) get rich (not unless you open your own ad agency or slither along the scum to the top of someone else’s) and b) attain ‘ad fame’.

Ad fame?

Fucking ad fame?

“One day, people will speak of you in the same revered tones as creative geniuses like Nevil Brody, Stefan Sagmeister and Luke Sulivan.”

Here’s a pro-tip:

YOU ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHO THOSE PEOPLE ARE.

There’s your ad fame. Congratulations. I’m sure the interns from the local ad college will love every second of licking your expensive sneakers, while your neighbours at home try and work out just what it is that you actually do for a living besides smoke pot and look cool.

But of course, there are awards, which are dished out like stale pasta salad at a Sunday picnic. I sincerely doubt (please prove me wrong) that there’s a single industry with more award shows than this one.

And then you win some. Congratulations! You’re amazing! Just like the other 10 000 people we gave an award to in the last 24 hours. And of course, there’s always next year and when you don’t win anything or you don’t win as many or they’re not the in colour you wanted, you become a sad, bitter fuck, like me.

I won a shitload of awards in my first few years and ever since then I’ve kind of been coasting along, winning a few here and there and it hurts each time I don't win every single one because that's what I've been lead to believe I'm supposed to do.

Never mind that advertising or creativity is the most subjective aspect of human talent to judge, so you might not win (or win) because of how one of the judges feels about the colour blue.

That's it.

The people judging aren't scientists, they're more often than not, drunk. It's a lottery, everyone with half-a-brain admits it in private and everyone knows the best way to win is to enter as much as possible, in as many different categories as possible as long as you can afford to and keep the awards (party) circuit going.

Of course, you might get so tempted to win an award, you'll create an ad for company that doesn't exist or didn't even ask for it. Essentially, you are creating "air" and stealing mine with your very existence.

It’s a construct designed to make you feel special when you win and shitty when you don’t so creative directors can dangle something in front of your face in order for you to spend another 72 hours awake seeing if there maybe isn’t something just a little bit better right around the corner.

Wrong fucko.

There isn’t.

The second idea I came up with, 5 minutes after I was briefed was the best idea and now you’re just getting off on some kind of power trip and everyone else in the industry works the whole night before a pitch, so we should probably do that too.

For an industry that prides itself on zigging when everyone else zags, it’s a failboat heading down fail river to load up on some fail.

Here’s one of my pet peeves and it’s a language peeve, obviously.

“Consumers”

We call “people”, “consumers”.

Would you like to be called a “consumer”?

Have you ever noticed that there’s this distance people have when they use that word?

Like, there’s this magical bunch of people sitting on couches watching TV at night buying shit over the phone. Those people are your family and friends. They’re not distant.

They’re sitting next to you right now.

Consumers are chickens stuck in battery lines, consumers are plankton sucking up the sun, consumers are lifeless things stuck to a hose.

These are fucking people.

So I call them people. My eyes magically replace the word “consumer” on every brief I get with the word “people”. Just so I remember who the hell it is I’m actually talking to.

And there’s the “The Client”

You know what “Client” makes me think of? Someone who’s always right. You know what I call someone who’s always right? A fucking asshole.

So, much like my previous magic eye trick, I learn the first name of the person putting the roof over my head and replace the word “client” with that.

“Bob wants some changes to the layout.”

Hey, that’s fine, Bob’s a nice guy, pays my salary and he’s actually quite funny once he’s had a few.

“The client wants some changes to the layout.”

Fuck you.

No, don’t go because I'm about to save you a ton of money on how to write the perfect copy, no fancy drunken two day seminar, no book to sell, here's the secret: talk to people like they're people. Talk to fucking people. Ask yourself, hey if I was chatting to my friend and I wanted to let him know what was going on, what would I say? Would you hold up a giant sign with “99c” written on it? Would you end every sentence with an exclamation mark?

How we as an industry ever got this stupid and this distant boggles my mind.

And it's not social fucking media (use that word around me and I’ll have to suppress the urge to throat punch you), it's talking to your friends.

Have you ever asked a 14 year old what they thought of social media?

Social media is a term used by people who don’t understand it but want to sell it.

Here’s how the industry should work.

You’re a company. You’re doing quite well for yourself and decide you’d like to get the word out. So, you speak to your brand manager, who isn’t your sister’s-friend’s-friend who you gave the job to just because you figure that was where they could do the least damage (and they have excellent taste in curtains!)

Your brand manager is smart. They keep in touch. They are a veritable encyclopedia of cool and awesome. They find an artist, a writer, some guy on youtube who’s done something amazing, and crazily enough, it resonates with the values your company embraces (notice how I didn’t say ‘Brand’ because that makes me think of torturing a domestic farm animal with a hot iron pole).

He phones them up.

“Hey, listen, I saw your video on youtube. It’s amazing; you’re obviously very talented. Instead of just stealing it outright or recreating it, like we usually do, I was wondering if you’d like to sell it to us or do a version of it with us in mind? You wouldn’t mind? Excellent, I’m about to send you a big fat fucking paycheck, buy yourself some fancy sneakers.”

There are hundreds of thousands of creative people out there and we’re only discovering them now because this is the first time in history they’ve all had their own publishing companies perched on their desks.

That’s not going to happen anytime soon, or at least however long it takes for a bunch of people in the upper echelons to retire or die. So in the meanwhile, finally, here are the only reasons you should get into advertising and the reasons I’m still here:

• You love coming up with ideas.
• You love creating.
• You love communication.
• You understand people.
• You empathise with them (this precludes you if you’re a pretentious asshat).
• You enjoy having your ego stroked but still manage to keep it under control.
• You love coming to work each day to work with people who are, often, quite literally out of their minds.
• You happen to work with/under one of the 20 or so decent people (if you’re reading this, I mean you) in this business who give a fuck about you, this country and the companies you work for.
• Money isn’t the soul purpose of your existence.
• You don’t care if more people know you than you know people.
• You have been clinically diagnosed with ADD and can’t concentrate on one project for more than 5 minutes at a time, like me.

No other.

“I am never teaching my children to draw.”

- Friend and designer, 3:45am

The Drawing Season (Interlude)

People who know me who introduce me to other people, at some point in the night, always try to get me to tell a certain story. I’ll tell that story here and hopefully I can tell people to google it from now on as I’ve been telling it for 15 years.

We were very lucky one Christmas when my brother was 5 and I was 3 (1983), he got a new computer and by new I mean one of the first commercially made, an Acorn Electron. I got a Knight Rider car that if you pulled back and let go, it would zoom across the floor and the red light on the front would glow.

To this day, he’s very good with computers and I love Knight Rider.

He always had this fascination with technology that I shared by proxy.

When this first modems came out, we got one to surf Bulletin Boards and download stuff, like pictures of Kurt Cobain after he died (1994) and at some point, mp3s. Which were new and exciting.

To give you an idea, for fun, we (and by we I mean my brother, his friends and me hanging around in the background) would bounce phone calls from Sydney, to Paris, to Hong Kong, to New York and then back to the second phone line in the house, just to hear what our voices sounded like (due to the delay of the call being bounced around the world).

A caretaker kicked us out of the local highschool for skating there over the weekend. So we went back at night and connected a handset up to the phone lines, phoned the talking clock in Tokyo, and twisted the wires so the call would carry on till Monday.

We had a million different internet accounts, none of them legal. We’d get them by going through the trash of the first internet service providers that sprung up, late at night (“Iain, hold the flashlight higher”), looking for documents that were supposed to have been shredded, but weren’t.

We ordered several thousand luminous condoms using a fake credit card number generator and had them delivered to our headmaster at the school.

So those are some of the things we used to do. It’s worth noting at this point that the ability to talk to complete strangers online, so alien and new at the time and a small part of what we were doing, and the trust we would place in each other, without knowing each other, had a profound affect on me from an early age.

One day my brother was on bulletin board in Belgium. Before the internet as we know it existed, you’d have to phone in to the bulletin board (like an early webpage), wherever it was in the world, which would often mean you’d get charged for an international phone call. And my brother started chatting and someone asked him where he was from.

“Port Elizabeth, South Africa.” My brother replied.

He’d worked out how to emulate the tones sent down the phone lines that the telcom companies used to indicate a terminated phone call. So we’d dial a number, send the tone, and not be charged for the call.

The person he was chatting to ran a porn line, a phone service essentially that allowed you to dial in and listen to a woman having an orgasm, charging you per a minute.

They came to an arrangement. We’d phone the line in Belgium, leave the phone off the hook, he’d take his records to the phone company over there, they’d pay him out, he’d pay out a share to us.

So for several weeks, every time you picked up the second phone line in the house, there was the sound of a woman having an orgasm.

One day, during my summer holidays, there was a knock at the door.

Two men stood there, both dressed in suits (at this point I hadn’t noticed the bulletproof vests or the guns they carried, strapped just inside their jackets) and I let them in because they seemed official and I didn’t know any better.

“Good morning. We’re from Interpol. Do you have any computer software or hardware on the premise?” said the South African one, the other one was from Belgium.

I’m quite lucky in that the more nervous I get, the funnier I get and I have these sudden surges of adrenalin that help me deal with everything from car crashes to awkward moments without missing a beat.

My mother hates technology, she hates the microwave, she hates the halogen tubes in the kitchen (cancer) and she uses a mouse with two hands (one to move it, one to click).

So, naturally, I said

“Mom! It’s for you!”

And my mom came through and tried to work out what the hell it was these two guys wanted, she had no idea what we were doing and so I figured it’d take them a while to explain, which would give me time to run to the cottage we had at the back, covered in black tarp and Nine Inch Nails posters, comic books, Telkom manuals, energy drinks, ashtrays and forgotten bowls of noodles as well as all our all computers, and format everything.

We’d often discussed installing some kind of emergency formatting routine, maybe some giant electric magnet above the drives that we could flick on with a switch, of course that was one of the few things we never put into action.

As I turned and started walking at speed down the passage towards the back of the house, one of them spotted me, drew his gun and ran after me, I didn’t move much after the gun came out, he grabbed me and they took me with them to the cottage.

“Haha, bust you.” were the first words my brother and his friend, Rory, heard that gave them some inkling of what was happening.

They hit redial on one of the phones, an operator answered and said

“Hello, Belgium Direct, how may I place your call?”

Rory went to the bathroom and ate a sheet of paper with names and phone numbers on it.
I stood there, in my boxer shorts (like I said, I was on holiday) and watched.

They confiscated the computers. They invented new laws to charge my brother because it was the first time anyone in South Africa had done anything like this. The computers came back with evidence numbers scrawled in thick black marker pen across them. Interpol offered him a job (he declined). He was a minor and it was white-collar crime, so they gave him community service. The files mysteriously vanished (although I believe this was due to incompetence).

The adventure, at least in terms of messing around with phone lines, stopped.

Being raided by Interpol does wonders to deter you from these things.

And that’s the story people who know me ask me to tell people they introduce me to.

The Drawing Season (Part 2)

I originally planned on joining the army after I finished school because I’d been told my entire life that I lacked discipline and if enough people tell you something stupid, then it starts to make sense on some level.

Although these days if more than one person tells me my shoelaces are untied, I tell them that I like them that way.

I don’t think I was a particularly naughty child; I just got distracted easily and didn’t want to do the things I was supposed to do. Like go to school.

I remember my mother asking me when I was five what I was thinking about and I told her I was thinking about a homeless man walking down the road outside needing money.

He didn’t exist, I just happened to be thinking about a homeless man walking down a road needing money.

She ran outside to make sure some homeless guy hadn’t been hassling her son.

Which is when I learned that when people ask you what you’re thinking, they want you to either say “nothing” or make sense, neither of which happens with any great regularity when I’m left to my thoughts.

So I went to ad school in Cape Town and for the first time in my life I was popular because I was weird (not so popular in small conservative towns) and art colleges and places like that are havens for freaks, hippies and weirdoes, all of whom I love.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

- Jack Kerouac

I originally studied multimedia design and technologies but by the end of my first year, my visual diary was filled with nothing but words and maybe two pictures, so it seemed obvious what I should do next.

I studied copywriting and the ideals of always having an idea in everything you do (never do anything for pretty’s sake) and simplifying everything you do until only the idea remains were hammered and beaten me.

Ideas essentially work the same way jokes do, they always have a punch line, there’s a payoff, they take you on a journey from A to B to C and when you get to C, they force you to look at A in an entirely different way.

“I just flew in from LA and boy are my arms tired.”


I was/am quite good at it and have several pieces of metal that apparently prove this in the eyes of the we-wear-too-expensive-sneakers crowd.

I was afraid of heights and there was this rickety tower in the courtyard of the ad school, rusted railings (falling off) and crumbling cement steps that I’d climb till I got to the top, then I’d force myself to sit with my legs dangling over the edge until I came up with an idea for whatever I was working on.

I stopped being afraid of heights after a while.

Standing in the rain also works on a similar level.

I hated my first job, it started at 7:30am every morning, which went against everything I’d been told about the ad industry and it was the middle of a recession (2001/2) so it was the only job I could get.

I got told to write headlines like “Our prices are melting!”

So I did because it paid the bills. I’m not proud of it.

That first job nearly drove me insane and I started writing stream of conscious poetry to distract myself, 15 page long things that I’d write in 30 minutes, never stopping for anything (I type incredibly fast), simply pouring my brain directly onto the page in front of me.

I doubt any of it was any good but it was a distraction from “Our prices are melting!”

In winter, it was “We’re freezing our prices!”

And that’s enough for today.

The Drawing Season (Part 1)

I was watching a James O’Barr (creator of The Crow) interview the other day and later I listened to an audio book I have called Stephen King On Writing. One thing both of them did was discuss the events that shaped them as people and as writers. So I’m going to copy them.

My dad has had Multiple Sclerosis (MS) since I was born and I can just barely remember him walking without crutches and then later, a wheelchair.

I didn’t think anything of it until the Father-Son-Three-Legged-Race we had at school (I was probably about 7), when my mother joined me on the field instead of him and that was the first time I think I felt different.

He’s a truly great man (the strongest I know) and if I have anything good in me, I owe it to him.

My mother raised me on an illustrated book of Bible stories that she'd read to me each night before I slept. I can still see John the Baptist's head on a plate, brilliantly done in water colours.

I was sent to a bunch of different places because my parents were convinced that I had a learning disability because I was easily distracted. I didn’t think anything about this at the time and assumed these... sessions were something that every kid did.

One of the exercises, for God knows what reason, entailed drawing on a mirror with shaving cream as homework. I think they meant the foam that comes in a can but all we had was the stuff in the tube you had to whisk in water before it’d turn to foam. I wasn’t very good at that so I started drawing on mirrors with this goopy, green foam.

I loved it and demanded more suitable drawing implements, like wax crayons. This was the start of what I called, then, The Drawing Season.

I believed everything had a season. There was a cricket season and a rugby season and a hockey season and I felt this tremendous urge to draw but I was sure, like everything else that has a season, the urge would burn brightly and then pass. This was the drawing season and it would end.

I was wrong.

That urge to create has never, ever left me.

When I was 13, my art teacher entered a painting I did, elaborately titled “Me Eating My Supper” into the World Of The Child Art Awards, in Taiwan, and I got a silver. So at that point I was convinced that I could do something special, as apposed to merely suspecting.

When I was about 5, a friend of mine and I were messing about in our spare room, jumping up and down on a bed that was shoved up against a cupboard, which also happened to be where my dad kept his razor blades.

My foot slipped between the bed and the cupboard, one of the razors was sticking out and neatly and deeply sliced my foot from my big toe to my ankle.

I remember thinking that there was a lot of blood and while I’d seen blood before, this seemed redder than usual and poured out of me in pulses. I didn’t mind it; it was warm against my skin and just something that had happened.

Paul, my friend, said we should probably go and tell our moms, who were having tea in the lounge.

I merrily walked through to the lounge with Paul, pushed open the door and managed to get out “Mom, look…” before the nine circles of hell opened up.

My mom started screaming. As did my aunt (not really my aunt but we called any close female friend of the family that).

And that was when I started crying.

The experience has stuck with me because it was the point at which I learned to cry and why. These are things we are taught. Crying is something we learn.

The 18 stitches down my right foot were excruciatingly painful but I soon got used to the process. From then to probably around the age of 18, I had around 178 (at last count) stitches, all from different incidents.

I fell out of a tree and a branch went through my arm on the way down.

I practiced doing headstands in front of a glass door and failed.

I nearly blew myself up (this happened a lot, it was a small town with little to do).

I fell off the roof of a car.

I jumped into bed. And missed.

I dove through a window (too much TV).

My brother threw a dart into my leg (not intentionally).

These always happened on a Sunday because Sunday was family day and we weren’t allowed to leave the house or have friends over, so my brother and I would think of things to do to keep ourselves entertained, often involving jumping off roofs with garbage bags as parachutes, skating in the cement driveway, or sometimes with a friend, I’d sneak down to the valley near our house and we’d throw the bird traps we’d find in the forest into the river, convinced that we were doing a good thing. I still think it was a good thing.

My father often joked that we needed to get me a season ticket to the Emergency Room but this, thankfully, didn’t continue too long and that season has ended.

I learned to read on comic books, Classics Illustrated a collection of which my mother gave me, things like A Tale Of Two Cities, The Three Musketeers, 2000 Leagues Under The Sea, The House Of The Seven Gables, Hamlet, King Solomon’s Mines, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and so on. I learned to read because I could kind of figure out what was happening in the stories just by the pictures but I wanted to know more.

I keep those comic books on a shelf at home and I still look through them every now and again.

I started writing when I was about 14 or so. Your standard depressed teenager stuff. I really started writing when I was 16 and I had my first steady girlfriend. I didn’t talk much when I was young so writing was an escape.

And when you’re 16, love is forever and real and untouchable.

And when you realise it’s not, it is a fresh, new kind of pain.

Both of those things are what we call ‘inspiring’.

This is enough of a giant wall of text for one day.

To be continued.

The Sounds Inside Words

Someone said to me the other night

“You’re quite…funny about language, aren’t you?”

“Obsessed.”

“Yes, that’s the word.”

It’s true. A big part of I Wrote This For You is me trying to play with it and see what else it can do. I love words. If you spend enough time around them, you start to notice little things about them. The way they smell, the way they taste. It’s like perfume or whiskey for me. Beautiful words bring me to my knees. Not complex, not fancy, just simple, beautiful words.

I had the words “more sadness than soil” floating in my head for a week before I used it in an entry.

Soil is where we put dead things. It’s where the past sleeps. Histories live there. What could have more sadness than soil?

Language is our GUI (Graphical User Interface) with the universe. Like windows or OSX, it’s the pretty bit on top that allows us to interact with the world around us. I can describe something to you and you can picture it just because of the sounds I’m making with my mouth, the little symbols I’ve arranged into groups (words) in front of you.

It’s as close to magic and telepathy as you can get without sacrificing some sort of animal on an altar and dancing around it naked in the moonlight.

We think in words. We have this constant internal monologue with ourselves, where we discuss our lives (It’s usually our Ego yelling at our ID, trying desperately to work what it - what we, are going to do next) and our thoughts and our plans.

The more eloquent you are, the better this conversation goes. The more you understand that conversation, the better you can direct it in the direction you want it to go.

Our thoughts are words. And we are our thoughts.

I also love phonosemantics, the sound symbolism within a word. I tend to say the things I’ve written out aloud to myself, or whisper them under my breath if I’m in a public space and I’m not actually meant to be bursting into impromptu spoken word.

This helps me understand what the sound of a word means.

Sound symbolism exists beyond native languages. If I yell or scream, you don’t need to speak English to understand how I feel.

For example, “R” sounding words tend to be quite passionate.

“Rush, ravishing, ravage, revenge, red, rampage, randy” and so on.

And there are words that exist in completely alien (to each other) languages that mean the same thing.

So I like to listen to the sounds inside words.

Language also dictates our behaviour.

If someone calls us “Sir” or “Madam” we know whatever follows is probably going to be of a formal nature (unless your friends are messing with you) and we change our mindset to match it.

On the other hand, if someone says to you “Don’t run” out of the shadows, in a dark alley, as happened me once, chances are, you’ll run.

The words we use, the ‘case’ (most of you should remember that word from high school I’m hoping), influence our behaviour, how willing we are to accept things, what we expect from other people talking to us and most importantly, how we act.

There’s a dead give-away about ourselves in the last word of that sentence, “act”. How we act. We’re always acting on some level. We have different scripts for different situations.

You don’t speak to your friends on facebook the same way you do to the president.

Now, that I’ve introduced all the necessary elements for my final move, what I find most interesting of all is this difference I’ve just mentioned, between how you speak to your friends on facebook and how you speak to the president (if he were ever to take time out of his busy day to ask your opinion on national affairs).

In a comparitivly short, in the greater scheme of things, time, we’re going to have a president that grew up with facebook. Think about that.

Think about the things you say, the way you act, the jokes you tell there. Preserved for all eternity, for any journalist with enough know-how to dig up. Remember, unlike marriage, the internet is forever. Every email you’ve ever sent, ever poke you’ve ever poked. You tattoo your behaviour on a virtual self.

Of course, that same journalist digging up stuff on our theoretical future president has a past of his own stretching back decades, also there for everyone to see.

What does this mean?

It means we’re going to live in a more casual environment in the future. It means the president will find lolcats funny and won’t mind mentioning them when he addresses the press. It means the press will laugh when he does. It means, we as a society, will be more honest, we’ll hide behind our words less because we’ll all eventually be speaking in the same tone, in the same case, at the same time.

Formalities are lies told to make us feel inferior to a process.

Hopefully, not for much longer.

So yes, I’m obsessed with language.