nektros - Cynicism in a Hot Dish

As an Asian born within the majestic borders of Australia, and raised with nary a friend who shared my ancestry, nor a lesson from my parents in how to manoeuvre the landscape of their native tongue, I have for a large part of my life been aware of my unique inhabitant status – that of perceived foreigner and actual, palpable native – which nevertheless has ne’er shone a shred of remarkableness on any facet of my life.

For a reason attributable only to the endlessly fascinating power of the human spirit to meander towards the mediocre, headphones have experienced something of a popularity lasting a sum total of infinite negative hyper-mach years.

Why don’t people wear headphones in public?

Above all, she promises to keep the requisite yet bypassed-without-fail introductory paragraph to a minimum, while arranging the list in descending order of renown so as not to suggest she’s a twat who believes that no-one in the general vicinity of this article has ever heard of these apps, though the liberal comma and third person perspective usage may have already nixed the mission statement by this point.

A few weekends back, milling around a ferry terminal as the preordained quota of swear words beggared by all forms of public transport reached its daily limit, I recognised a girl disembarking from the most recently docked hell boat.

She had belonged to a high-visibility group in high school, while I had remained comfortable in a no-visibility one. She hadn’t come across my radar in four years, much less spoken to me during the six preceding ones.

Ask anyone – of whom you know for sure you already have a good gauge of – what their self-perceived level of maturity is, and their answer won’t sound so unfamiliar.

“I’ve felt old for a long time.”

In the initial stages of my Textpattern thrall, a sole source of peevishness was the at once beautiful simplicity and frustrating complexity of its discretionary markup language, Textile.

P1: One day I want to be psychic.

P2: What’s so important about this future date that you’ve got to bypass all the clairvoyant fun today?

P1: Whenever, then. Reading people’s minds! No-one would screw with me again.

P2: That was almost mature for your age demographic.