Ahem ... well, that was a longer pause than anticipated ...

Right. OK then. Back.

Well, sort of back. God I’m tired. This is not the Festival post. Nor is it the Canterbury Faire part III post. This is the grumpy post. But I'll update before another five weeks pass, so don't fret.

I seem to have spent most of the last year having things go boom around me because people do not listen to other people. Recently this has seriously upset a bunch of people that I really care about, and even led to me being yelled at (in itself a fair cop) because a third party couldn’t be arsed actually paying attention to what was said in a conversation (not fair!). This has all made me think that we have a problem.

I understand that we live in a time of deep self-involvement. I understand that we are all busy and all Very Important. But I think that the only two ethical options for people in this time of Busy and Important Lives is to either pay serious attention to the words and opinions of everyone around you, or opt out of other people entirely.

What seems to be happening a lot, though, is one of two things: either the conversations are “I am listening to you talking about me and now I’ve stopped listening, I’ve decided that this is the point I plan to be outraged about” or else “I have had this conversation entirely in my head and now I plan to tell you the results without involving you in any way.”

Now, if this just meant that I got a wake-up call to break out the kid gloves with more people than I thought possible, I would not be having this grump, because god knows that it’s a universal truth that I could be nicer. But this sort of crap is seriously hurting people who are already nice.

At Festival I lost count of the number of times that people were being told off for not meeting someone else’s standards. Now I’m all for having standards, but there’s a right way and a wrong way for raising them in others. On the upside, I saw two good examples of the right way.

Baron Hrothgar leaned across to us during Fighter Auction and asked for a bag or a goblet to hide Berengar’s Coke in. He borrowed one of my bags and B drank it from the concealed can (Hey ... I never got that bag back ... hang on ...;-) This was done with gentle ease and Berengar took it with the grace it was offered. Nice.

In a bigger case in point, Duke Cornelius had made several comments on the Lochac List about wanting to raise the standard for merchants at Festival. He and Count Stephen were merchanting and they had constructed a period stall which was accoutred very properly, alas I failed to take photos. They didn’t nag, bitch or moan, they just set an example of what to do. Very nice.

Contrast this with the several people who went out of their way to go up to filk-singing folks and tell them they were Very Wrong to sing filks. OK, if you have a perfectly period campsite and someone wanders into your camp and sings songs about goblins, you would have a right to say: “Shut up you lupin!” And yet Rowan never did in all those years because she has class. But these people were being accosted in private camps surrounded by nylon tents or up in areas away from most of the site. What possesses someone to trek over to someone else and say: “You’re doing it all wrong!” (unless what they are doing is actually something vital such as CPR or hitching a trailer to a car, in which case, fair enough but that’s different!)

And what possesses people to pursue filk singers, the gentlest and most easily wounded of all our non-period elements, yet walk straight past Coke cans, nylon tents, trainers, bad T-tunics, Laurels suggesting braid for said bad T-tunics (oh the humanity!), eyeglasses, sunglasses, discussions on Vista, whiteboards of doom, sixteenth century jewellery with fifteenth century frocks and plastic containers to pack it all back into?

Not that I’m saying all those things point to Satan’s minions. In fact, they all point to the SCA, because we do allow for lowest common denominator. And that’s not a bad thing, because the lowest common denominator in year one is often a costume laurel in year 10 (seriously, I have photos of many of us, it wasn’t pretty.) If you give help, or set a good example, you raise the bar properly.

But what these people were doing was instead walking up, venting, and then feeling better that they’d had their say regardless of how it left the people they said it to feeling.

Here’s a tip, we English like to call it Repressing. I know that the Americans are against the very concept and do whatever they can to root it out, however they also voted for Bush and Cheney twice, so I am invalidating their status as grown-ups until they have a new government and some gun control laws.

Repression is an essential part of being a grown-up, it’s what stops J saying “Why yes, darling, you are a fat bastard these days.” It’s what stops me smothering him in his sleep when he doesn’t do the dishes. And it’s not causing us mental anguish, it’s distinguishing us from our five-year-old selves.

There ARE times for you to have hard words with your friends, that’s not what I’m talking about. Those times are the occasions that make you see the depth of your friends’ characters and their love for you and they are ultimately good things.

But there AREN’T times when it’s a good idea to go up to people to whom you are not close and essentially tell them off for not doing what you want. Because the answer to that will always involve short phrases starting with F and ending with uck you.

It’s not just in the SCA that this is happening, either, but since this is an SCA blog, we’ll stick to SCAdian examples.

The only thing worse that this is the type of conversation where once person doesn’t even involve the other in the conversation, just makes their announcements and that’s it. Two year olds do this. Then they grow out of it by the time they’re five.

I’d far rather people just BE sociopaths, because that way you don’t waste loads of time treating them as normal.

Feel free to gripe about things in game that annoy you. But do it with a skerrick of consideration for the people you plan to gripe to. If you are just going to have a yell so that you feel better at the end of it, then that’s not good enough. We’re not Americans here, we don’t need to “Get it all off our chests”. Suck it up and hold it in, you won’t explode and any therapist that tells you that you will is only after large hourly fees.

Crap, it’s midnight again, no wonder I’m tired. Tomorrow is buy gold fabric for embroidery, clean house, find hemp ‘string’ for Deense’s corset and finish Festival washing day. I may catch up on my blogging ...