Starring

I remember the first time I saw remorse in my father, when talking about his previous family and him basically leaving them on their own, he said that his ex-wife was justified in hating him, that he had done poorly by her. What I’ve come to discern, in him and in a lot of people is that simply accepting the blame isn’t the same as taking responsibility, it’s not as though it’s very difficult, obviously some situations develop in such a way that revisions to attitude can’t be made, but you can still remember what you did and not do it again. I’ve never really cared for people saying sorry, for the majority of situations so long as they don’t do it again I don’t care whether they’re sorry about it.

As a consequence I’ve never been fond of saying sorry, I find it baffling how much weight people put on the word, I know people who have the sympathetic capacity of barb-wire but if someone says sorry to them they will drop the subject, drop their anger and all is forgiven. People rarely mean it when they say sorry. If I’m dealing with someone snide I’ll sometimes say "I’m sorry you feel that way." Which they often misconstrue as me apologising but really what I’m saying is I’m sorry to have to deal with your nonsense.

That goes into greater application though, people don’t seem to understand what they are saying, as is evidenced by the usage of phrases which mean nothing or which mean the opposite of what the person is trying to express, for example ‘I could care less.’ Is not a glib way of saying I don’t care, it’s actually highlighting that they do care but they could care about the matter less… People forget ‘couldn’t’. I do the same of course, for instance I used to say ‘For all intensive purposes’ when I meant to say ‘For all intents and purposes’, it’s strange how much we just say, without any real consideration behind it.

When I was in year 11 I was doing an English exam and there was a question after a piece of prose which said "How does the author use words to convey meaning?" … … … I sat there for 5 minutes trying to figure out if it was a trick question, I decided it wasn’t so I wrote, in large red letters "Redundant Question." That was the first of many instances in my education where I was asked questions that were either meaningless or nonsensical, but they’re only that way if you really think about the question, otherwise you could just write something, a poorly constructed question on an assignment or worse yet in an exam does my head in. Which in the end is just another contributing factor as to why I’ve never been good at academia, the main one being though is that my memory is shot and I’m lazy, but when I do work hard and find some motivation, when I do actually recall a subject, those sorts of questions are like letting a starving lion loose in the middle of a running race, in a best case scenario it’s merely distracting.