Liberation of the Soul?

Previously on the girl in the song....

I was on a high. I had gathered up enough courage to ask a man out, and while it wasn't a roaring success, I can take some solace in knowing that a coffee, sat across from this slightly unpolished and tumbled man of a man may be on the cards when I return from the far East in 4 weeks time. Wasn't the experience liberating? my friend asked. To be honest, it gave me a sense of achievement, but only nominally in that I could now tick off the "I asked a guy out for real" box on my list of cringe worthy events to come. Clambering over the barrier made the challenge itself seem diminutive in hindsight, especially since the act itself was less of a sweat-soaked, palm-clammy struggle than I had come to expect. I didn't feel the liberation of the soul talked of in legends and memoirs, but a slight anticlimax which raised my threshold for stimulus even higher.

I decided, amongst all things that "two days before my trip" required me to perform, to embed in my narrowing schedule some groundwork, and while I wish I could say for the task of "filling my suitcase", I'm referring yet again to the tenuous courtship I speak of above.

So I set about putting the second wheel of my plan into motion. I figured that four weeks was a long time for one to forget about another, so some sort of fade-proof stamping or etching onto one's memory to was in order. I decided to strike up a further conversation.

"Have you been to Beijing before?", he asked.
"I went a couple of years ago to watch the Olympics"
...
"and I lived there until I was 8 so I speak the language"

Perhaps I've been lucky and sheltered in the contacts with people I have made in life thus far, but never have these comments failed to generate at least a hint of interest or a curious remark. Nothing here but an upturned and sustained smile upon his face, like a moulded expression on a ventriloquist doll.

"I haven't even packed yet and I'm leaving tomorrow!" I continued. "My suitcase is almost full and I haven't taken half of my luggage yet!"

"you're taking a walking wardrobe with you then". He says. I chuckle and agree. A glimmer of hope... followed by a very steadfast silence.

"Are you going anywhere nice this year?", I asked.
"No not this year, I'm saving up for a car".

Finally, something we have in common, well sort of.

"I'm learning how to drive!"

After I make a few more animated comments about running people over with my car, and a reply from him about that being the best method for moving people out of the way, Silence himself, like a patient observer, crept back in to stand over me in mockery .

As my toolbox of wit and charm empties in front of me, I remind myself of one more trick up my sleeve (literally) which has never (since July 2010 when the incident occurred) failed to generate a gasp, a screech or a backward hop of some form or other. The Jelly Fish Sting. And trust me it is nasty. But when life strips you of all your weapons, you have no choice but to surrender with something more basic.

Maybe he's secretly blind and can't see, or maybe he's been caught up in cross-fire before and witnessed someone yank their own foot off in agony to leave a raw ending spewing blood; whatever circumstances his lens of life have presented him, there was barely a flutter in the reaction to the warm pink imprint of a sea creature tenaciously stitched into the skin on my wrist. The only sentence I managed to coax out of him with this elaborate contrivance was "You know what they say you are meant to do with a jellyfish sting...". My reply to that was of course witty and relevant, but with no further avail of establishing a fully fledged conversation.

Someone probably should have gagged me right there and dragged me away against my will, but I just don't like to be defeated, especially when I'd invested so much time and effort. Everyone likes to talk about themselves, and while I still shudder at this act of desperation, I went onto ask:

"What do you guys do behind there then?"
"Nothing much, go on the Internet, watch some football, send an email to Maintenance"
"You could read a book I guess"
"Nah, I don't really like reading books"


WOW. Who cares if you don't read or can't read, but unless this awkwardness isn't making you wanna wrench out your guts, you gotta give something, sometimes. Right?

I say my pleasantries and walk out without turning my head. But alas, it is pouring outside and I don't have an umbrella.

Don't ask a man out if you are leaving the country in 3 days, for 4 weeks

Sometimes when push comes to shove, you just have to roll with it, especially if you've been shoved right into the deep end. You could say that's what happened to me when a colleague decided to ask out the security guy on  reception for me. To be fair, I was the one who started the ball rolling when I gushed about my little crush over an office coffee. The conversation she then went onto have with him apparently went something like this:

"Hi there, what's your name?"
"X"
 "Hi X. Do you know Y(first name)?"
"Y, Z (surname)?"
"Yes"
"Yea I do"
"OK. Well, would you consider taking Y out on a date?"

Security man's face turns red and he swivels in his chair to look at his security colleague who is standing behind him. His colleague gives him an encouraging grin... he turns back to my colleague.

"Ooooh. (pause pause) Do you need an answer straight away?"
"Oh no, I'll leave that for you and Y to sort out"

My colleague trots away up the stairs and messages me. I dismiss it all as a bluff. Four hours later, I am mortified when I realise she is telling the truth as she reveals the above details in a little too much detail for it to be a hoax.

What would you have done in this situation? If the situation is also that you must walk past reception every  day in order to get to and from your office. Least damage?

Apparently not. OK so he seemed nice - I once glimpsed him helping an old lady out of the building - and there was something slightly brooding and tortuous about him which I was drawn to. I thought he was quite handsome, but I've been advised that's partly due to my Disney coloured vision which portrays him as a prince and me in a tower.

After consulting credible friends who told me to smile and walk on by next time I'm in sight -"the ball is in his court" they all said - I paraded onto the court like a tempestuous child and threw many more balls in his direction, as well as a few up in the air.

Perhaps my courage ran a little loose - I was feeling righteously brave while at the same time motioned on by my aspirations to become a freer spirit and fuelled by a song on my ipod called "Tell Him". Above all, I couldn't bare the thought of awkward glances and knowing smiles for the rest of my career in the building. So I decided to resolve this once and for all, and for 4 hours before I did so, I ran up and down the corridors to ease my nerves.

The prelude was that I'd bagged a colleague to walk out of the building with in a casual, breezy way, from which I was going to break off and approach reception like a cool, sophisticated lady. Unfortunately a stumbling block in the form of a post man engaging him in conversation forced me to divert my plans and hold back in a minute space between two sets of doors waiting for another smooth entry opportunity to present itself. Scrunched up in the corner and spying through a slit, I smiled awkwardly while others, justifiably and genuinely trying to make their way out of the building, squeezed past me through the constricted space and wondered why the hell I was there in the first place.

When the coast became clear:

Calm, cool, collected, I walked up to reception

"Hi, how are you?"
"Hi, alright thanks"

I Look down at the reception area to see that the keys I've been looking for all week was lying next to his right hand!

"That's my key!"

A lot of frantic tapping at the glass later and him struggling to see anything but his own hands, he picks up my key ring and puts it in my palm.

"So, Is it true that my colleague came down here and spoke to you?"
"yea she did"
"wow that's embarrassing"
"No... I was just a bit taken aback really"

Random man walks up to reception and waits with a work-related request, I presumed. So I step aside and wait for him to ask his stuff... Moments later

"Well I'm really sorry about that... (pause) All I said was that I thought you might be a nice man, and she kinda just ran with it. (he adopts an awkward grin on his face which is less attractive)

"So...do you wanna get a coffee sometime? No pressure!"

He chuckles, takes a deep breath and says:

"The thing is, I've just come out of a long term relationship, so I'm trying to ease back into it"
"Oh OK that's fine"
"But yea coffee sounds good..."
"OK. Well, I'm going to China for 4 weeks on Thursday, so when are you free?"
"That's the other thing, I work 3-11pm on weekdays... what about Friday?"
"Er, I'm going to China for 4 weeks on Thursday..."

The longest pause in the history of realistic lengths of pauses before they turn into silences. Shall I come in and call it all off? 
"I tell you what, I know your name now, we'll keep in touch"
(easy breezy) "OK cool, sounds good. Well I'll see you later then"

This is where the conversation should have ended. But, I apparently like to stick pins into a barely inflated balloon.

Pop (or just wilt). Shrivel.

Suddenly I see: I'm not a very nice person

Perhaps you think this little project of mine to become the girl in the song has frivolous beginnings and is sourced from a spring of boredom and self-indulgence, with no real emotions attached to it. Well, I definitely was feeling bored and slightly numb (from the cold) while taking my usual district line journey to work as the month of October was clinging on by its last rays of sunshine. These journeys normally involve no more than periodic intervals of you staring at the person opposite you, them staring back at you, and then you looking down at your fingernails. Every now and then a nice looking fella sits within my vicinity and I stop looking anywhere else. Other times, the nice good looking fella stares back and I think the feeling is mutual, only to discover much later that everyone is staring at me because I accidentally drew on my face that morning.

So, as I sat there on this particular day dreaming about dragons and mermaids, I noticed an elderly Chinese man sitting opposite me with his fingers on his temples, his frown lines bundled together high on his forehead and his eyes painfully closed. He seemed to be suffering from a headache. I noticed, but went on dreaming. Periodically, I awoke and shifted my eyes towards the man who on a few more occasions was adopting further expressions of suffering. The funny thing about physical suffering (and I'm well aware there are sufferings of greater significance in this world of which I am not referring to here) is that I often relate it to something personal that just needs to be worked through e.g. when you've fallen over, banged your head against the wall (I walked right into the edge of one 5 days ago and just stood there recovering) or when you've got menstrual cramps (sorry boys), the pain will end but you just have to wait it out. However, when he started to sigh and further tense his face tortuously, I began to think that this may be more than a migraine.

At Mansion House station, I realised that everyone else in the carriage was noticing this man but sat there like dummies. What if something terrible was happening to him and we only realised when it was too late? Maybe there was something I could do to help, my mind imagined all sorts of predicaments that he could be in and how awful they might have been. The right thing for me to do was to ask what was wrong.

Temple station. As the train stopped I decided to get off my seat and go over to him. But I could feel my heart beating out of my chest and my mind toiling with the most ridiculous thoughts imaginable:

• I've got two bags on me, how was I going to neatly do this without having to take both bags over with me and losing my seat (the man was 3 metres from me)
• What if I shock him by going over there
•  What if I fall over when the train starts moving again

Yes, my brain doth think of such ingenious innovations

I have thought of an ingenious way to get myself into the mindset of the girl in the song. One morning not long ago a thought suddenly came to me: I will take "Suddenly I see", and I will replaced all the "she" (s) in the song with "me"(s)...! I can feel your face drop.

"My face is a map of the world is a map of the world, and I'm a beautiful girl I'm a beautiful girl, and everything around me is a silver pool of light...", you get the gist. And before you think I've reached new depths of delusion, don't knock it until you have tried it! Or even if the thought of trying it makes you laugh, and trust me it makes me Laugh Out Loud, that in itself feels good. It's laughable, but I'm still proud I came up with such a simple invention. Create with impact, one should say.

The only flaw in my ingenious plan, if I'm being humble, is how to incorporate "me" into the song without lying at least a little bit. The fact is that the lyrical part that is "dadada... I'm taller than most, looking at me", just doesn't chime with my 5'4 stature, and let's be honest I'm not exactly gona use "I'm shorter than most", or even "I'm the same size as most" (you need to sing these in your head to really feel what I mean). That last one has an extra word or two in it anyway to say the least. So... you win some, you lose some.

One foot in front of the other... just don't fall over

My starting point for this liberation of the soul is honesty and boldness. I've decided in life (that's a phrase you will probably hear again), that some people get away with too much. I don't mean petty crime or the people evading a life sentence for killing a man or two, but the softer imprint of that, the people who irritate and disturb your peace intentionally or out of habit and never really change because they think it's OK or socially acceptable. So think of it as constructive criticism and let me lay out for you what I mean.

A demonstrable case is the unpleasant individuals (mostly men I have to say, and thankfully a few) who sit next to you on the tube and invade your personal space. I think the majority of us have experienced this: the man lying on his seat with his legs splayed out so wide that it's forcing yours to weld together; elbows protruding so far out on the arm rest that you start turning the pages of the newspaper as if your elbow grew out of your ribcage, restricted by the cramped space you have been compelled to manoeuver within. The majority of us, me included in the past, would have tolerated this. But what if we chose not to?

Is our reluctant reticence in public just an expression of our consideration for the feelings of others who we don't know, despite the likelihood that the person beside us is both selfish and insolent? And if so, is the decision to endure it a rational one or simply a cowardly act on our part? While of course we cannot neglect the issue of safety as a consideration, the probability that the person sitting next to us is a tantrum thrower or violent personality is likely to be quite low. Therefore I'm heavily leaning towards the latter proposal - the basis of which may be much more fundamental and start to explain why we find these situations particularly difficult.

There is something very English, reserved and dare I say slightly repressed in what we consider to be proper social etiquette of polite, civilised, and perhaps educated urban dwellers in what is unsuitably a crowded, manic, and mishmash of a city such as London. We go about our daily lives on public transport, in supermarkets, on the road, moving as entities separated by personal experiences, the people in our lives and above all, a blunt unfamiliarity. To put it more simply, we are scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The momentum of modern city life however jostles us towards each other so often that we are forced to engage with strangers, albeit transiently. Even so, instead of embracing this reoccurence, we'd rather mitigate or shorten the encounter, much less go onto confront any potentially uncomfortable or awkward situations. So I propose that while we judge, hiss and suffer discreetly at the rudeness of those who break the codes of social propriety, we are more afraid of provoking a feeling in a stranger, because after all, we don't know them even a little bit and it's more engagement than we had bargained for on that particular day.

Whether there is much more complexity to it, I have come to realise that we don't have to conform to whatever social restraints are on show. I have embraced the new option of following my instinct and letting the perpetrator know in a completely non-malicious and polite way, the issue they are causing me to agonise over. The last two times I found myself in this situation I convinced myself to act on them by thinking 1) I paid £15 for this ticket which is very expensive and 2) Trust your feelings as long as you're not bruising anyone. I then took a deep breath, shouted action in my head and said "could you move your arm please". And as I had rightly suspected, on both occasions my next door sitter unwillingly moves their arm an inch, and adopts a grunting expression which clearly proves to me that they are inconsiderate and aren't willing to repent as you or I would have done -"Oh I'm so sorry" at least. My comments obviously failed to make a deep impact, but if compounded by the same feedback from others in the future, he/she may eventually learn to change. Try it out, but ensure you judge well and don't get injured in the process; and you never know, you may even receive an apology, or just a bit more room to relax and read your book. ;)