Body Language

Recently I read a couple of body language books. The reason I read two was not that after enjoying the first one, I was desperate to quench my thirst of more body language interpretation, rather that the first one was awful, and I hoped the second one would be better. It wasn’t.

No one can be blamed for being enticed into one of these promising manuals. After all, the claims they make on the covers and blurbs are extraordinary.

“How you can tell someone is lying, just by watching the movement of their elbows”

“How to tell if someone is angry, simply by looking at their face”

and of course the mega-enticement:

“How to tell if a girl is interested in you”

This is the big hook for the introverted and the shy, the promise that you can tell if a girl will like you without having to go through all those horrible but unnecessary stages like going up and talking to her.

The problem is that these books just don’t follow through of their promises, largely down to one basic problem: ambiguity.

The first thing a book like this will tell you is that there is nothing definitely you can get from any piece of body language. Sure, it’s a clue, but it can be a clue to many different, often contradictory things. They’ll always give you example of CIA interrogators or University Professors who would appear to be the real-life incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, but in actual fact their claims of body-reading perfection seem just as fictionalised. They certainly are if the training they’ve had has come from these books.

Here’s an example of the problem of ambiguity, based on the “How to tell if a girl is interested in you” promise. You’ll see the problem.

“If a girl is smiling, it means that she is comfortable with herself and therefore available. In this circumstance it would be appropriate to go up and talk to the girl. However, the girl may be smiling because, rather than being available, she is happy. In this circumstance, it would be inappropriate to approach her, as this will make her sad.

Which brings us on to…

If a girl is sad, it means that she is unhappy that no one has come up and tried to talk to her. This means that she would be available, and it is therefore appropriate to go up and talk to her. However, she may also be sad because she misses her boyfriend. In this case, it would be inappropriate to approach her, as this may make her cry.”

As you can see, no help at all. 

Resolution

I’ve only really kept one New Year’s Resolution in my life: to manage to live all the way through 2007. Every other promise to myself I’ve not kept, whether it be to be less fat, be cleverer or just generally be a nicer person.

This year, like always, I’m making another list of New Year’s Resolutions, because I never learn. There is no doubt that I will fail spectacularly in most if not all of them. But as I’ve been taught in school, it’s better to have high targets and miss them than to have no targets at all. Actually they say it’s better to have high targets and achieve them, but we’re trying to be realistic here. Anyway, here are my resolutions.

1. Stop Swearing.
Completely. Not say a single naughty word for the entire year. This is quite frankly not going to happen, but I’ll give it a go anyway. Actually, I have made this resolution before. It lasted until just before 10 am on 2nd January 2010. Maybe my actual target should just be to beat that. There are a good few words that I’m going to miss, but none more so than Thunderc*nt (the asterisk is just to get me into practice).

2. Blog More.
For some reason I stopped doing this. Probably because I only did it as a way of avoiding revision, and as soon as I had time to blog suddenly it didn’t seem to appealing, there are other ways to procrastinate that aren’t pretending to be work. Actually, the last time I blogged happened to be the last day I was single. Coincidence…..? Yes, yes it is.

3. Don’t Lose My Girlfriend.
This is pretty self-explanatory. And I think I’m safe to assume as just as I don’t want to hear about anyone’s personal lives, no one wants to hear about mine. Unless it involves sadness. I’ll update you when it does.

4. Exercise 4 Times A Week/Join A Gym/Get Fit.
I have made this resolution every year since I was 11, making this the 7th year in a row. I have never achieved this, and I have long since given up hoping to get a physique like an Adonis. If anything, I’ve included this for tradition.

5. Pass Exams/Get A Job/Earn Money/Be Happy.
I could basically sum this up as ‘Don’t fail at life’. Again, it’s up to debate as to whether I have achieved this in the past, but once again I’m giving it a go. Which is pretty much what every New Year’s Resolution is, a desperate attempt to convince ourselves that the coming year is going to be better than the last, despite a complete lack of evidence that it will. Well this has all gone a bit sad all of a sudden. Anyway, I’m off to try and get drunk on Champaign even though it’s disgusting.

Happy New Year!

Gangnam Style

First there was Rebecca Black’s Friday. Then there was Call Me Maybe. Somewhere in the middle of that Joseph Kony killed some children. Viral internet videos become part of the collective social consciousness, not least given to the fact that they spread quicker than an STD in a brothel. “Hey have you seen this?” one friend says to the other, and before you know it, everyone has herpes. I think I’m mixing analogies.

Both Black and Jepsen (or Rae Jepsen, I never worked that out) went viral due to being catchy but ultimately awful. People would watch once to see what all the fuss was about, twice to check if what they’d just seen was as bad as they thought, and a third because they had become addicted to it and were getting withdrawal symptoms. No one was watching them due to their quality, music or video. If anyone could combine the catchiness with an awesome song, surely the internet would explode? Enter, Gangnam Style.

Gangnam Style is a song by flamboyant tune-blazer and Korean mega-star Psy. Presumably this stands for “Psychologically damaged due to a lack of love and attention as a child”, or simply “Psycho”. From what I can deduct from the video, when Psy was a child his father promised to get him a wooden rocking horse for Christmas. His father then went away, fighting and dying heroically in the Korean War in the 70s. This left Psy traumatised, and to this day he still runs around pretending to ride that invisible wooden horse he was promised all those years ago. Watch the video again with this in mind and I promise you this tragic back story will become obvious.

Gangnam Style can be accredited to a genre of music I had previously never heard called K.Pop, which stands for Korean Pop. However, my fleeting research into the career of Psy lead be to discovering that he in fact describes himself as a rapper. We can only assume that its genre placing is due to the fact that they didn’t want anyone saying that his music is “Complete and utter K.rap”. 

Proverbs

Let’s start with a joke, just because I thought this was brilliant.

“I’ve bought heroin four days in a row now, I’m starting to think I’m a shopaholic.”

Good, wanted to get that out of my system. It is slightly relevant though. Some people are addicted to drugs, others binge on alcohol. You do get some rarer addictions like anti-depressants and 50 Shades of Grey. However, I am yet to meet anyone who shares my habit. Second hand books.

Put me in a charity shop or a second hand book store and I will not leave quickly. When I am eventually dragged out, I will be the owner of 10 or 15 new (not new) books, most of which I don’t actually want and none of which I will ever read. A recent clear out of my room unearthed books such as:

• A guide of wildlife in woodlands in the spring time. I think I bought this because it looked old.
• An introduction to psychology. Not in itself unusual. In fact, it went really well with the other two copies of it I had.
• An AS Level biology text book. Actually, I probably should’ve read that at some point.

Last weekend I found myself at another second hand book stall at a fete, and obviously I came away with more books. A compilation of Agatha Christie novels that I probably won’t get round to reading before I retire, the life works of Peter Cook (because I’ve heard of him) and a book of poetry that I will never open, because it had a nice cover. However, I did buy one book that I’m actually interested in, called “A Treasury of Essential Proverbs”. I had to buy it, it was essential.

Proverbs are a strange phenomena. They are short phrases, probably not more than 10 words long, that ideally will lead you to living a better life if you abide by them. Some of them seem obvious (Money isn’t everything), some of them have been translated from Chinese (Good medicines tastes bitter) and some of them make no sense at all (The more it changes, the more it remains the same).

Anyway, he’s a select few:

The pen is mightier than the sword
You can see what the writer is getting at, if you’re prepared to be all metaphorical about it. However, I like to think that he make his maker turning up to a medieval duel with a biro.

You can’t put new wine into old barrels
I don’t really understand this one, because it simply isn’t true. Ironically, the only time you would believe this proverbs is when you’re incredibly drunk.

Live and let live
I don’t want to boast, but I abide by this proverb almost every single day. Almost.

A stumble may prevent a fall
Most proverbs deal with overall morality and how to live a better life every day. This one is purely a useful tip about walking, which in reality is much more practical.

All’s well that ends well
I have nothing to say about this. I just thought it was a good one to finish on.

Haircut

Trusting a stranger is never easy. No businessman would expect to do a deal without building some level of rapport with the client, and why would anyone else be willing to throw their faith at someone they have no previous knowledge of. Apart from…

The hairdresser has a surprising amount of trust placed in them when you sit in the chair and have your cape draped over you, preparing yourself to stare at your ever-changing reflection for the next 40-odd minutes. Once you have committed yourself to this compromising position, this man (let’s go with a man for the sake of brevity) has a frightening amount of influence over your appearance, your image, your happiness over the coming weeks and months. In short, they control what you look like. This in turn controls what people think of you when they see you, which is turn controls how much they like you, and determines your entire future relationship with that person. In short, the hairdresser literally holds your life in his hands. Think I’m exaggerating? Take a moment to think about how closely he holds a pair of scissors to various essential arteries and your general face area. 

You may think it vital to give this man precise instructions in order to get your hair as closely to what you want as you hope, i.e. damage limitation. It’s going to be awful, it’s going to look weird, so best to get it to look as not awful and not weird as you can salvage. Your instructions you give him are vital! What do you want done? In an ideal world, you would want to be able to control the exact length and direction of each individual hair, to avoid the disaster of coming looking like you’ve been wrongly processed by a blind farmer during the sheep-sheering season. How would you like it? It’s an important question. Which only goes to emphasise how careless I am with the same answer I give every time. I’d like it shorter please!

Here’s a question. When the barber shows you the back of your head, has there ever been any thought that crosses a person’s mind that isn’t, “Ooo, so that’s what I look like from the back”?

Instant Links

The brain is a strange concept. It’s where the entire body is piloted from, nothing happens without the consent and direct instruction from the brain (except the beating of the heart, thanks GCSE Biology!). You might think it inherent that we would have worked hard enough in human history to have an understanding of how the brain works, what with it being all important and everything. Despite the plethora of neuroscientific research throughout human history, we still don’t have that much of an idea of how the brain works in all its capacity.

One thing we do know is that our brain can think quickly by making subconscious links. In other words, we learn to expect a certain image or item etc. when the brain is triggered by a word or sound etc. When we hear the word ‘sky’, most of us think of the colour blue, maybe clouds, or possibly the night sky full of stars if that’s what your brain links the word to. Some people, myself included, think of Sky TV and its logo when I hear the word, which shows that I am a complete sucker to their advertisement campaign. The ultimate advertising victory would be for someone to hear the word ‘sky’ and immediately think ‘plus’ and ‘hd’ after it.

I can’t even begin to pretend that I know enough psychology to dig any deeper into the idea, although I would love to someday. I would love to know how the links are made, why those particular links are made and if certain things can be done to influence which links are made. But then I might end up in marketing so

I’ve got to be careful. One thing everyone can do is explore what links we have made in our own heads. All you have to do is take a word and work out what you think of immediately. You have to take the first thing that comes to your head, it doesn’t work if you think about it too much. Here are some of mine.

BenThis works particularly well with names. For example, if you know 5 James’es (I have no idea what the plural for James is), which is the first one you think of? Is it even someone you know. Both my best friends are called James, but I definitely think of one before the other when I hear the word James. I’ll just let them both think it’s them.

Ben is my name, so you’d think when I hear the word Ben, I’d think of me. This isn’t the case. When I hear the word Ben, the link I make in my head is to a man, mid 30’s, with stubble. I think I’ve made this link somewhere between Ben Fogle and Ben Ainslie. Either way, it’s certainly not me. I only just fit one of those descriptions…

ForceThrough many years of Physics lessons, I know that Force=Mass x Acceleration. However, when I first hear the word ‘force’, I make a different connection, given that I grew up as a Star Wars geek. When I hear ‘force’, my brain triggers the sound bite of Ben (back to that again) Kenobi saying ‘The force will be with you, always', before running away and being killed my Darth Vader.

DavidHere’s a strange one. I know 3 Davids, plus many more celebrity Davids, and one of my favourite songs growing up was Who’s David by Busted. The link that my brain has made is actually to the biblical David, who killed Goliath. Having not grown up in a particularly religious setting, I genuinely can’t explain that one.

YellowSome people probably just make the link of something that is yellow. Others might instantly think of the Coldplay song. Many will think follow ‘yellow’ with ‘car’, the infamous colour of car which allows for Actual Bodily Harm on school buses (I’ve never understood that one). My personal link is to a medicine I used to have as a child which was simply called 'Yellow Medicine’, which left such an impression on me that it is now what I think of when I hear the word ‘yellow’. It is so memorable simply because it was so disgusting. Genuinely the second more vile thing I can remember. Second only to the song Yellow by Coldplay.

Yelling into an uninhabited cave

This week, N-Dubz singer Tulisa has had a twitter spat with Lord Sugar about her right to judge talent, specifically the X Factor. As Tulisa pointed out surprisingly articulately, both parties came from (and I’m quoting an N-Dubz song) “Practically nothing to thousands screaming our name”, or in the case of Sugar, people sitting opposite him trying to impress him and his trusty minions elves Nick and Karen.

Both came from relatively modest backgrounds. Sugar was born into a council flat environment, left school at 16 and sold electrical goods out the back of his van by his own volition. Tulisa also came from a tough background, a violent family and no qualifications when she left school.

They each went on to become successful in their own field. Sugar became a success due to his natural business nous, hard work and ruthlessness, and Tulisa because she knew someone with an auto tune machine (citation needed).

But the point is, neither of them matter. I mean really, if it wasn’t for Wednesday and Saturday night television, we probably wouldn’t have heard of either, or at least they wouldn’t be in the public eye. No decision that either one of them makes will actively have an effect of the way we live our lives, and they way we feel most of the time. The only people who are really affected by these two are the media, who are dependent on being able to report which nightclub in Ibiza Lord Sugar is falling out of, or the next shrewd investment Tulisa is venturing into. Or maybe it’s the other way round, I always get these two confused.

They are both classic cases in point of the typical rags to riches story that many of the lower classes in our society are encourage to aspire to, the ultimate proof of social mobility. Other examples include most footballers. Carlton Cole came from a lower class family in Croydon to rise to the ultimate footballing pinnacle, the number 9 shirt of West Ham United. JK Rowling went from being on benefits to being worth around $1 billion. But none of these people matter to us.

Interestingly, JK Rowling was listed as the 48th most powerful celebrity in 2007. At this point, she was releasing the last book in her Harry Potter series, and millions of people wanted to read it. She was encouraging people to give to charity, something that had been close to her heart even when she wasn’t famous. But she wasn’t changing the world, changing the way we live our lives and changing how we feel. Apart from when she killed off Hedwig, I’m not sure I’ve ever fully recovered emotionally.

The key word in the phrase ‘most powerful celebrity’ is ‘celebrity’. Celebrities are designed to give us an interest in the outside world, give us someone to look up to and give us someone to relate to. They are not designed to change or effect our lives, and hence they are not powerful. The people with power in the world are rarely people we can relate to, mostly people we don’t look up to and almost never someone who has come from a humble background. 10 points if you spotted before this point that this was a moan about politics.

Our government is currently primarily made up of the Conservative Party. These are largely people who come from privately educated backgrounds with their path to power paved by their parents’ contacts book.

David Cameron is the most powerful man in Britain politically speaking, and he is exceptionally clever. However, he did follow his father into Eton before going to Oxford. Only the rich can afford to be part of the Bullingdon Club, and Cameron was one of them. This is where he met the man who is now (terrifyingly) the most powerful man in London, Boris Johnson.

No one is saying that Cameron isn’t clever. But maybe’s he’s the smartest who’s rich enough to hang with the rich, the cleverest to have come out of the upper-middle classes. Perhaps the key question is not should he have power, but would he have power if he didn’t come from such a privileged background? And what about those better suited to power, who can’t afford to go to Eton?

The problem won't be solved right here, right now. This is a problem that can only be solved by an overhaul of the entire system. This is just an irritated blog by an irritated blogger. Perhaps being aware of the problem is the most we can do at the moment, so more people can get involved when the issue comes up next. Yes, getting annoyed that the system we live in can feel like yelling into an uninhabited cave, but there’s a chance, just a tiny chance, that someone will here the echo. Because social mobility is an important factor in the fair society that we want to live in. Otherwise, no one would’ve ever heard of Tulisa.