I can’t drink enough to make you interesting…

I’ve been musing recently on rationality and more interesting to me… irrationality…

And whilst sometimes they are very good reasons to ramble off down the road of irrationality… maybe for creative purposes or in situations which defy all rationality and thereby irrationality is the only means available to try and make sense of things… There are without doubt, times when irrationality bites you firmly on the ass…

You know those situations where you find yourself thinking – well there’s 2 hours of my life I’ll never get back… You know… those times when you force yourself to finish that trashy novel you started even though you hate it because surely at some point it has to get better? Surely it will? No? After all… everybody is raving about it? Or maybe sitting through some god awful film because you paid for a ticket… Yet, seriously folks… isn’t your time more valuable than those few quids you squandered on entry price?

Why do we put ourselves through these things? And while these things may be fairly small and somewhat trivial, what about staying in that job you hate, or relationship that you know has passed its sell by date, just because you’ve been there for 10 years or so?

So I had a word with the Queen of Swords…

She asked me a few questions:

• What situations do you find yourself in, where you know in your gut that it’s just not for you?
• Do you overrate the results of a choice, based on how much time, money and effort you have put in?
• Do you know when to cut your losses and move on?
• How do you determine the current value of a situation, to you, right here and now, without factoring in all that’s gone before?
• Do you ever find yourself in a distasteful situation and try to find ways to justify it to yourself and attempt to minimise how unpleasant you find it?

I said – Blimey!! I didn’t expect you to machine gun me… I thought your weapon of choice was the sword…

She said – OK Karen… Think a minute and tell me about a time when you recognised you were in a situation where you felt your life slipping away and your soul quietly losing the will to live… Tell me when you’ve had that happen and decided to walk away…

Oh… OK… I can think of this one time when I was out on a very boring date and decided I’d be better off cutting it short and heading off to join some friends elsewhere…

Karen… Am I correct in thinking that that was the time that man asked you what you were thinking, and you replied – I can’t drink enough to make you interesting…?

Yes…. yes it was…

Well Karen, that’s not a bad example… though really, you could have spared yourself another couple of hours of boredom?

Really? How’s that?

You know when you arrived at the bar and he asked you what you wanted to drink… You asked for a pint of snakebite and he came back with a half a cider… Because it’s unlady like to drink pints… You should have walked then…

Yeah! Queeny, good point! CHEERS! 😀