Look out! He's got a knife!

Weirdnesses of perspective

Morgue's nice little piece on the disconnect got me into a thought tangent. He said:

"Something you know about or care about has turned up in the newspaper or on TV, and you've watched/read the coverage and been taken aback by it. Maybe it angered you; more likely it just made you realise how far their portrayal was from your experience."

It made me think about the Bowie concert. I came away from it thinking, "That was really great how we all got together in crap weather and had a great time. I loved how Bowie rose to the occassion and seemed to have fun with it. Sure I had to stand in the rain for several hours, but it was a great time!"

Some other people I've heard from came away from it with thoughts that seem odd and - frankly - stupid. Like, "He didn't play enough of his old songs!" Or "Brooke Fraser was shite" as a recent comment on this very blog had it. Or "The seats were tied together," or "People stood up so I couldn't see while I was sitting down" - because as everyone knows rock & roll is all about sitting on your arse.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with one of me mates about a mutual friend of ours. He said, "Why is it that this person always focuses on the negative to the exclusion of the positive?" and related a story about a great social gathering that he and this mutual friend had been at, where Mutual Friend spent the whole evening bitching and moaning about how a particular person she'd really wanted to see had been too busy to come.

Forget about the insult to the people who were there in the inference that this one person's presence was the difference between a good night and a bad one. Mutual Friend was robbing herself of a good time by focusing on what was wrong, rather than simply enjoying what was right.

And it goes on around me all the time. I'm guilty of it sometimes. I think i'm finally understanding the true meaning of "If you haven't anything positive to say, don't say anything at all." It doesn't just mean "Be polite or shut up," it also means "If you change your focus, you'll have a better time."

That's not to say that we should all put blinkers on and ignore the bad stuff. I'd never say "What I don't know can't hurt me," because that tends to lead to "I never even saw what hit me."

(My faithful manservant just asked me, "Will you be needing all the cliches this evening, Mr Pearce?")

As Morgue says in his timely piece, it's all about missing the point. If all you've got to say about Bowie is "Brooke Fraser was shite," you're missing the point of going to see David Bowie. If all you've got to say about a party is "but the one person I wanted to talk to wasn't there," you're missing the point of going to a party. Likewise, if you're the only survivor of a four-car pile-up and you lose both your legs and all you've got to say is "Wow that was exciting..."

So it's not really all bad that WebMarshall has banned access to this blog and its affiliates from my work for "offensive content," and that I can no longer read it or post to it from there, and will therefore be posting much more infrequently from here on in. Hell, I had to give up reading all the Stonesoups weeks ago, the Livejournals months before that; can't read Norightturn or NZPundit or any of my other favourites (though badpolitics still seems okay). Because now I have more time to... er well to work. There's a bright side in there somewhere...

Posted by pearce at February 23, 2004 9:29 PM