Quest for eccentricity

Part 1: Declaration of Intent

I've been called “insanely eccentric”. Just the other day, I opened an email from an old friend and there it was: “You are insanely eccentric”. I took it as a compliment as, it seems, it was intended.

I have long aspired to eccentricity. Not madness, I couldn't stomach all the catfood. Not weirdness, I don't fancy developing that kind of relationship with urine. Specifically, it's eccentricity I crave. It's such a gentle word. Despised cousins can be mad, the kind whose every movement you track from the corners of your eyes if ever you suffer their presence in your home. Work colleagues can be weird. In fact, it has been proven, not by scientists, that all work colleagues are weird. On the other hand, “eccentric” is a description you could happily bestow upon a beloved uncle, the one who arrives for Christmas dinner with easter eggs for everyone, then bursts into Auld Lang Syne over pudding.

Even as a child (small, precocious), I sought to be different. That desire hung over me like a black cloud in my teen years. I followed the dream into adulthood when ...I...became...a ... commercial lawyer. Just like my father. Hmmmm. Nice idea, went ever so slightly awry in execution. In recent times, I have become used to the idea of myself as grindingly normal. I resisted at first but the evidence was there – the lawyering, the lawyerly acquaintances, the lawyerising girlfriend. Then, out of the blue, my friend's email arrived. It seems I may have become eccentric, and insanely so, without even knowing it (which is, I'm sure, the only dignified way to become eccentric).

That leaves me with only one small concern: I fear her comment might just be utter bollocks, that I may remain as ordinary as a paper bag and far less useful for picking up dogshit. Paper bags serve a function and, by and large, they don't offend anyone, but, you wouldn't want to be stuck next to one at a dinner party.

Happily, there's still time. I'm only youngish and having led such an ordinary life, am unlikely to die early of an exotic ailment (that said, the workings of my bowels have never been quite right since a trip to East Africa). I'm likely to live to a ripe old age, growing ever more wrinkly and smelly, like an orange that keeps its head down and somehow manages to survive every purge of the fruit bowl. There's plenty of time left to develop eccentricity.

The question is: how?

Part 2: A plan

Right, I need a plan. Eccentricity isn't just going to develop itself y'know. I'll have to put my back into it. But... how does one go about becoming eccentric? Why aren't there self-help books for aspiring eccentrics? Surely, there's a dummies guide in this.

Should I just wait for the deleterious effects of old age? No, I want it now.

Let's see what I have to work with. Those who read part 1, thought it was fab and have come back for more – mum, seriously, get a life – will recall that my quest for eccentricity was sparked by an email from a friend. A female friend no less in which she bestowed upon me the title of insanely eccentric. I would wear that crown with pride but fear it may be ill-deserved. Perhaps, though, there was some substance to it. Let's see. What was it that caused my friend's declaration?

She was responding to an email I sent describing my day off. I reported that I was in a fine mood because I'd just had a chat with a friend (another female) during which I was very funny and spontaneously so. That always makes me happy. My report continued by saying I was emailing from the public library so I was in disturbingly close proximity to the GP (general public) and that was making me less happy.

Nothing strange there.

The report continued at pace. It was heady stuff. I told my friend... Wait, this is getting confusing. I'm obviously very popular with the ladies, having so many female friends, but it's posing certain administrative challenges. Ok, when I refer to Female Friend A, I will mean the friendette to whom I was writing, the one who replied to declare me insanely eccentric.

So, next, I told Female Friend A that I'd had a great morning. I'd drunk a coffee (fair trade, of course, because I'm so incredibly right on), eaten some left over easter eggs (fair trade, of course, because etc etc) and now, as it was a cold, dreary day in Melbourne, I was thinking of heading home for a bath. Normal, normal, normal. Almost tediously so.

Unless... could it be the reference to day-time bathing? It doesn't seem so very odd to me but then if I am truly eccentric, it wouldn't, now would it? Let's look at it objectively. You know, that could be it. I have an idea that bathing at odd hours is typical odd person behaviour. Lady Macbeth springs to mind. Yes, now that I think about it, I have a distinct feeling that day-time bathing might be it.

So, lesson one on my quest for eccentricity: take more baths.

Part 3: The snag

Have hit first snag. I decided that frequent bathing would be step one in my journey towards endearing eccentricity. Then, I remembered we're in the middle of a drought and I pride myself on how unusually right-on and water-wise I am. When it's yellow, I let it be so mellow, it turns stagnant. Some days, I come home from a hard day's panicking because the boss might discover all the work I haven't done and the smell of stale piss hits me as soon as I open the front door. That's pretty damn water-wise. And that's not all.

A while ago, I started cutting down on showers. I grew up in a one shower a day kind of family. In my teens, they blew out to around 40 minutes in length each. This infuriated my dad which, at the time, I didn't understand. Ahhh, teenagers, if only we could still send them down the mines. In more recent times, my approach has changed.

It all started with Hannah. I was having a moan about how every second Sunday was taken up by ironing 10 shirts for work. I worked then in the kind of office where wearing a t-shirt and jeans was considered the hallmark of the pinko. I was and am a bloody slow ironer so 10 shirts was a good couple of hours' labour. I did then and do now get utterly outraged by having to work on my weekends. Ironing, doing the washing up, that should all be done on work time. It certainly ain't leisure. Hannah told me that her boyfriend only washed and ironed his shirts once every 2nd or 3rd wear. But, surely then he stinks, said I. Not a bit of it, replied Hannah. He, like you, works in an air-conditioned office where he spends the vast bulk of each day rooted to his chair. A day of that kind of wear just isn't enough time to make a shirt dirty.

She was dead right. When your total exercise for the day is umpteen trips to the tea room and back, how sweaty can you get? It changed everything. I began washing and ironing my 10 shirts once a month. Then, every second month. I became a harder and harder taskmaster. A shirt had to be pretty damn smelly before I'd allow it a trip to the washing machine.

Then I began to apply the same logic to myself. If I don't actually smell, why bother washing? It saves time and I can be even more high and mighty about how incredibly right-on and water-wise I am. So, now I wash twice a week on average, less if I get caught in a really substantial downpour.

Am I willing to sacrifice all those benefits for eccentricity? It's a question every would-be eccentric must ask himself: what am I willing to give up? Could I give up my water-wise lifestyle?

Then, inspiration struck.

Hello, I said to myself. Why don't I just have very shallow baths? Brilliant, hey?!

Well, yes and no. They only problem is that really shallow baths aren't all that much fun. After 20 minutes sitting in rapidly cooling water that only came half-way up my arse, I was having a pretty miserable time. To make matters worse (or so I thought), my girlfriend chose that moment to come home. She barged in and asked what I was doing. Having a bath. Where's all the water? This is it. I'm trying to save water. So... you're having a bath with almost no water in it. It would seem so, yes (she's very quick). So, really you're just sitting naked in the bath tub in a puddle. Essentially, yes.

She smiled and kissed me on the head. Whatever makes you happy, she said, but it seems a bit odd to me.

Hey, she was right! You're right! I called out.

That cheered me up. I was on my way.

Lesson two: the path of the eccentric may not always seem obvious but there can be method to its madness (only, it's not madness, it's eccentricity. Quite a different thing.)

Black socks and memory

I'm 32 and I'm astonished at how much I've already forgotten.

Dates past, dates future – lost without some electronic reminder. The rules of long division; gone. My university degree exists only as a certificate with my name on it. The names of B-list friends in high school. Addresses of my student houses. My grandfather's birthday. Entire cities I visited 15 years ago. The plots of so so many books - once I even read three chapters of a book and only as the plot grew turgid and the sense of de ja vu became impossible to dismiss, did it dawn on me that I had previously tried to read the damn thing and lost interest, around Chapter three. I had sold it to a second-hand bookshop. I had bought the next iteration at a second-hand bookshop. So, I had read three very ordinary chapters twice and was left with the disconcerting feeling I may have bought my own book back.

Even remembering last weekend takes prodding.

I have a theory though, that saves me from self-diagnosis of early Alzheimers and the race to write my salacious memoirs before the deterioration of my brain into soup. I've decided human memory, like digital memory, has technical obsolescence. Take your first computer, and think of all the old assignments and self-obsessed adolescent poetry you stored on floppies in Word 4, or Word 5.1 (teeheehee). At the time, those little pieces of you were saved because they were precious and needed to be kept, for posterity, for proof, for comfort. Then after the next upgrade they were stored safely on the shelf above your desk and you knew you'd get around, some day, to saving them on Word 6.0 (oh the nostalgia!). And then CD's evolved and could store even more and the disks were put in the box in the shed and occasionally you remember that once you'd had a go at writing a love sonnet and had written a particularly elegant essay on the Italian Renaissance, or had once studied French and it was around somewhere... on your old laptop maybe, or in the pile of CDs with the photos from two holidays ago that you haven't gone through yet...

We archive our memories and then we forget where we've stored them in our brain. By the time we think about what we've forgotten, things have changed and we're left with a brief wash of sorrow and the sense that we used to know, to be, more than this.

Or perhaps all our lost memories go to the same place those bravest of black socks head for when they strike out on their own. Maybe somewhere there is a land full of homeless memories with warm but mismatched little black feet.

I miss them.

I hope they're safe, because there's some shit out there I don't want to have to go through again.

Rethink launches ... to no fanfare or applause

Welcome to a new blog called ReThink, an attempt at an online magazine by four people vastly unqualified to create one. Watch in horror as we commit literary rape and pillage on the world and simply add to the dross we must wade through each day, rather than offer a path through it.