I’ve not seen that many of them, but I am quite fond of silent films. Nosferatu is a film I really enjoy and it has several scenes which remain quite creepy to this day. Metropolis gives us us a weird view of the future from the perspective of the 1920s and it’s one of the most bizarre films I’ve ever watched. There’s a certain mystique to silent films that I really appreciate.

Of course, as good as silent movies can be, those with sound are much, much better. Simply hearing a person’s voice does so much more to humanise them and to help us to feel their emotions. I’m sure that in, say, the 1960s people would have said that silent films don’t have a future. How and why would they ever come back after becoming what is essentially an obsolete art form?

Well, it’s funny because silent films are back – although they’ve taken a very different form. We all know that Facebook automatically starts playing videos silently when you scroll through your newsfeed and as much as some of them may implore people to turn the volume on, most people won’t. What this means is that it’s the videos which can be enjoyed silently which are the most popular and they’ll often have little bits of text on screen – much like how a silent film would have the odd bit of text. It’s an interesting parallel I think, as content creators of today may well begin following the same conventions of silent film makers of 100 years ago.

I really like the song “Let’s Just Be Friends” by Alex Lewis. If you’ve not heard it before, you can listen to it here and if you’re not in the mood to listen to it, essentially it’s about a man who ends up in several intimate situations with women (e.g. cuddling in bed) which he incorrectly reads as sexual, when really they’re just being especially friendly. He gets annoyed with them saying “Let’s just be friends” to him and then ultimately ends up saying it himself to a woman he finds unattractive after a drunken one night stand.

Either the song is very clever or enormously hypocritical. When I read the comments of people who enjoy listening to it, I think they obliviously have a hypocritical view on it. The fact that he ends up saying “let’s just be friends” himself makes it seem like it’s quite a clever commentary on people who complain about that phrase, but it’s hard to be sure. I try not to worry too much about the authorial intent and just enjoy the fact that it’s a nice sounding song.

What I find quite amusing is that I have been in several of the same situations as the person singing the song, but I have never thought that I was in a romantic or sexual situation. People should be less afraid to be particularly affectionate with their friends. My original plan for this blog post, in fact, was to write a parody of the song, but it actually turned out so bad that I didn’t want that to be published – hence this analysis.

Ultimately, the character in the song is somebody who does not appreciate their friendships. “I’m going to staple a sign to my head that says, ‘I have no interest in being your friend!'” and that’s a shame because friendships are actually very valuable and a source of great emotional contentment. In fact, I think the phrase “Let’s just be friend” alone reflects a lack of appreciation for friendship, because saying you are “just” friends with someone implies that it is somehow lesser, when in fact friendship is a fantastic end in itself.

At any given time, we’re the sum of all our experiences which lead up to this moment. I look back at the time when I was dangling over the edge of a cliff in the Welsh countryside, then later to the time when I persuaded a woman at an amusement arcade to give my friends a prize despite not having enough tickets because they worked so hard, to being told I owe my whole school year an apology for my behaviour, to hiding under the school sofas because I was ill, to an emotional leaving presentation in my sixth form, starting this blog, making new friends, creating missing cow posters, visiting Nando’s for the first time, feeling new feelings, starting a webcomic,  helping avert brownie fires, saying goodbye to very many people, arguing with corrupt business owners, meeting cast members of The Waltons, getting punched by too many people, becoming depressed at a call centre…

It’s all actually one string of events, despite these seeming so disconnected. A deterministic view says that it could never have happened any other way. Every experience, every hello, every goodbye, every tear, every smile, every Trusty Water Bottle and every friend all leading up to this moment – the culmination of my life; the culmination of so many emotions and experiences that I could never adequately capture them all in writing, even if I had a life time. And what is this moment? Oh, I’m just eating a bag of doritos. I’ve got a nice dip too. But that’s every moment. This moment will always be the sum of your life.

The idea of starting your career off with a terrible job might not sound very appealing, but actually I think it has some benefits. Let me be clear, though, that I am not talking about a job that’s low on the career ladder – I don’t mean ‘terrible’ like, working in a shop or a call centre. Those are respectable and honest jobs that somebody needs to do. When I say a terrible job, I mean any job which is badly managed and which has a negative working environment.

But why would you want a terrible job? Something which causes you stress and frustration? Well, I think that some negativity in the workplace is completely unavoidable and it’s good to be prepared. If you have such a bad experience early on, then nothing that comes afterwards will seem that bad.

This is certainly the case for me. While not my first ‘real’ job, fairly early in my career I had a job with a particularly nasty manager with many unpleasant personality traits. I put up with so many terrible things there, that nothing in any other job since has really seemed that bad – even when other employees have complained that things are really bad. I feel like it’s helped me to become quite resilient to corporate irritations and that’s something I am very pleased with. Handling problematic authority figures is something you can only learn to do through experience and that’s why it’s good to start your career with a terrible job.