One usually reserved the phrase ’sickening angle’ for limbs. Perhaps that makes this not entirely inappropriate. Even without removing the earphones from my pocket, I can tell that something has gone horribly wrong. My mind flashes back to when, 10 minutes earlier in the car, I had removed the phone from my back pocket. Something about the position of the earphones had felt wrong. I realise now what it was.

I remove the earphones from the pocket and my fear is confirmed. The jack does not jut straight out from its white surrounds, instead it is bent in a way that doesn’t look natural. Immediately I work at forcing it back into shape. I hope this hasn’t damaged the insides.

It has. Later, in a coffee shop, I plug the earphones back into the phone. They fit all right but when I put the buds into my ears no sound comes out. I strain to listen over the background noise. I can barely make out something coming from the left hand side.

The intelligent thing to do would be to buy a cheap set. You can get pairs for ¥1,000 in any convenience store. But I want the proper ones, the ones that match. The ones with the clicker and the microphone. Their sound quality is not supposed to be good. I can’t tell the difference. Or I don’t care enough to learn. If I didn’t care about what they looked like, I probably wouldn’t have bought the phone.

I am surprised at how uneasy I feel. I can’t listen to my music. It has been one hour and I have been sitting here unable to listen to my music. I have heard these songs all before. It is not so much the music as the knowledge that I could listen to the music that I want. That I don’t have. I need to go and get another pair. It is worth ¥2,800. I need that knowledge.

In my house, there were two types of snacks: fruit (predominantly apples) and plain biscuits. The biscuits were rarely chocolate-coated and were always, always of the home brand variety. For my birthday, I would be able to get a box of Arnott’s barbeque shapes.

I don’t mean to imply that we were poor. We were certainly not. My father was the principal at a high school and my mother was a teacher. We lived in a small, rural town in New South Wales where things were pretty inexpensive. My parents made a decision not to purchase those kind of foods for, what I assume, were health reasons. My mother did (and still does) delight in eating chocolate but it was clear that the chocolate in the house was hers, not ours (there was a sort of unspoken protocol that we could eat some of her chocolate but only if we basically took so little that she would barely notice).

I say all of this because I wonder if it is this that engendered in me a deep love of junk food. Was it the fact that I couldn’t have it that made me obsess about it? That had me spend my hard-earned money in high school buying a packet of crisps each lunchtime? That makes me crave eating it still?

Although this explanation is tempting, it is not supported by all the evidence. I have a younger sister and a younger brother, all within 3 years of me. While my sister definitely has a sweet tooth my brother does not seem to be possessed of the same desires (indeed, he has always been something of a cook and seems to delight in well prepared meals). If it were as simple an explanation as upbringing, we should all be so afflicted.

Whatever the reason, the simple fact is that I adore junk food. I consider myself a connoisseur of it in the way others might consider themselves connoisseurs of fine wines. I recently went to Singapore and was particularly disappointed when I discovered that there was no McDonald’s at the airport. I generally try to sample the McDonald’s in each country I visit and had skipped an earlier opportunity to eat at a restaurant because I assumed there would be one at the departure lounge.

However, I have, of late, become concerned about my eating habits. When I started eating more junk food as a teenager, I was aware that it was not good for me but I remember telling myself that there would come a time when I would put away such childish things. But I am now 29 and I realise that time is not coming. If anything, I am getting worse. The increase in my disposable income has allowed me to consume more junk food than ever before. I am not proud to admit it but there have been occasions where I’ve eaten pizza three times in a week or where I’ve gone to McDonald’s more times in a month than I’ve had breakfast.

I’m not obese. I’m blessed at the moment with a metabolism that has allowed me to eat junk food like this and avoid a ballooning waistline. But surely that cannot last. More to the point, while the consequences of eating like this may not be visible from the outside, it surely cannot be good for me on the inside. I must be increasing my risk of a heart attack, cancer, etc. These are not things I want to be doing.

The central problem for me is that I just have very, very little interest in food preparation. I cannot stand the tedium of cooking (the fact that I even consider cooking tedium probably says more than anything about my attitude toward it). And so I will steadfastly avoid cooking as best as I can. And junk food is convenient. Not only is there no preparation but there is no cleaning up to do either (another thing I am always happy to avoid).

And so I find myself struggling to eat well. I know eating well is a good thing to do. I know that not eating well is a bad thing to do. I know the things I need to do in order to eat well. I know the foods I need to avoid. And yet I struggle heartily to cook meals for myself for more than two nights in a row. If I go more than a day or so without some sugar or salt rush, I find excuses to go down to the shops.

I sit at my desk wondering how everyone else does it. Are they really all going home to cook? Are they just living at home with their parents and letting them do the heavy lifting? Are they eating as unhealthily as I am?

All of this feels like the very definition of a First World problem. Here I am complaining about my inability to eat properly. Not because I lack the financial resources (or even the food), but simply because I cannot be bothered and because I have enough money to pay something else to cook food for me.

I am not sure what the way out of this mess is. I am not sure how to eat well. I mean, I know what I have to do. I’m just not sure how to make myself do it. Enforce some kind of regimen on myself? Grow up? Just put up with the heart failure? I don’t know.

Update: Subsequent to writing this, I posted on AVCon’s Facebook page that their donation drive was inappropriate and that they should reconsider their decision. Without any correspondence, they deleted the comment. I guess they’re not interested in people that don’t agree with them and they don’t think it’s in bad taste to start asking for donations at this time.

Disclaimer: I am no longer an organiser of SMASH! Sydney Manga and Anime Show. The views here are my own and do not represent the views of SMASH Inc.

Today the pre-eminent anime and video games convention in Adelaide, Australia, AVCon, announced on its Facebook page that it was soliciting donations from the general public to assist in bringing a special guest to this year’s event. The guest is not named and there is no discussion of what happens if the guest does not eventuate.

I wanted to write about this for two reasons. First, I now live in Japan. The relevance of this will become obvious in a paragraph. The second is that I worked on SMASH! 2009 and 2010. In 2010, we brought five international guests to Australia as part of our event, namely Yuko Miyamura (the voice actress for, among other things, Asuka Langley Soryu), Tiffany Grant (Ms Miyamura’s counterpart for the American dub), Matt Greenfield (founded of American production company AD Vision), Shaun Healey (better known as Endling) and Mikiko Ponczeck (better known as zombiesmile).

Clearly, AVCon’s timing is atrocious. It seems the height of insensitivity for an event dedicated to celebrating Japanese popular culture to be soliciting donations for an anime convention at the same time as the worst natural disaster to strike Japan in recorded history is going on. Even if it were true that soliciting for donations was unavoidable, did it really have to commence today? Could we wait until we at least know the death toll?

As bad as the above is, I also find this offensive in the way that it seems to represent a growing trend among event management in Australia. What trend is that? Well, it’s the view that, if you didn’t bother to organise your event properly, there’s no shame in just hitting up the fans for however much you’re short.

Let’s be clear: AVCon is a giant event. It runs over 3 days at the Adelaide Convention Centre. According to Wikipedia, attendance for the 2009 event was in excess of 4,000 people while attendance for 2010 was more than 5,000. This is professional convention territory. Now AVCon sells a range of tickets for its event so there’s no way to know exactly how much it brings in in terms of revenue but it seems safe to assume that, with a single-day price of $30 in 2010, and discounting some of those 5,000 people as being children under 10, volunteers, sponsors and vendors, you’re looking at an event that brought in excess of $130,000. To put that amount into perspective, last year SMASH! had attendance of approximately 2,500 people. My understanding is that revenues were less than $70,000.

So here we have one event, which is at least twice the size of the other, asking its fans for donations to bring a guest. The other, which has ticket prices less than those of the big event, does no such thing.

What’s the rationalisation for this? From the AVCon page:

Why are we doing this? Well, bottom line is we didn’t want to raise ticket prices, because we’re sure you guys wouldn’t be too pleased with that.

The bottom line isn’t that you didn’t want to raise ticket prices. The bottom line is that you didn’t plan your event properly. If you can’t organise things and keep your event affordable, then you don’t do something this year. That’s the difficult decision a professional event management team makes. They don’t run off to their erstwhile fans asking for another $20 to $500.

I can tell you for a fact that SMASH! would have preferred to be at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre last year but that they couldn’t afford it. So instead they worked hard to be there this year. And they made it. Not because of luck, not because they had to beg their fans for money. They made it because they planned it.

That’s what you do when you care about your fans.

Today I tried to recharge my Vodafone prepaid account using the website. I received an error message asking me to try again after restarting my browser. I did this and still got the error. A telephone number is given to call so I tried that. I stayed in the queue for 5 minutes before being booted off. No explanation, no mesage, nothing. Just suddenly the line went dead.

I tried again a few hours later. First, the website. Still not working. Restarted the browser. No dice. Then I tried the phone. This time I got through to the automated service. Went through the rigmarole, got to the point at which I recharged and then get told that I can’t recharge by phone either. Line goes dead.

So I call back, mash buttons until I get put through to a human being. He explains that there is a problem with the system and that credit can’t be added at the moment. I ask what I’m supposed to do to make calls and how long this is likely to take. He puts me on hold, then comes back and takes down my details. I think we’re making progress until he informs me that he’ll put those details in a queue of people who have requested recharges and that I can expect to have a recharged phone in 24 or 48 hours.

I explode.

24-48 hours? I’m just not supposed to use the phone for that time? He says he understands that it’s problematic not to be able to call my loved ones, friends or business contacts but this is a problem affecting a range of people and the system is being bombarded with people having the same problem. I tell him to proceed with the recharge but that this is totally unacceptable, that the company has failed its customers and that, as soon as this charge is complete, I’ll be switching companies. I tell him to pass on the message that they’ve lost a customer.

I left Japan in April 2009 to return to Australia to complete the work experience component of my Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice. This is a necessary step to qualifying as a solicitor and, given that I had already completed the coursework component of the Diploma, had to be completed by November 2009 (lest my coursework component ‘lapse’ and I be required to do the whole thing over again).

After completing it, I stayed, continuing to work at the firm that had employed me. I didn’t really have much of a plan on when to return to Japan. I was hoping it would be soon (given that my wife was still there) but the Global Financial Crisis was still ongoing at that point and when there’s a Global Financial Crisis ongoing you don’t worry too much about things other than ‘Don’t fire me.’

While the firm at which I work is only medium in size, I’ve been lucky to… can’t find another word that means ‘work’ — work with a cool bunch of people. My boss is excellent and is in fact the reason I’m still working for them. When I told him that I needed to go back to Japan he not only was totally cool with that, he suggested that I try to work remotely.

I’ve been doing it for four weeks now and, while there are difficulties, it’s proceeding pretty well all things considered. I have my Australian number forwarding to Skype and am logging in remotely using Remote Desktop. The latency between here and the office makes things a little frustrating at times but it’s sort of hard to complain when you realise I’m sitting on almost the other side of the planet (the latency is actually about as bad back in Australia, so I think it has more to do with work’s connection than mine but let’s not whinge too much). Skype works great and I’m not even sure everyone I call even realises I’m not in Australia.

Other than that, Rui and I will move from our rented apartment into a rented house at the end of the month. I’m really looking forward to finally being able to turn my speakers up (the walls are paper thin here) and have some space to actually put books on shelves (most of our books have been sitting in boxes for the last 3 years). I’ll have to put up some photos on Flickr or Facebook or something. I meant to take some last weekend but forgot. Will try better next time.

First, the background.

I was a founding member of the Sydney University Anime Society and one of the original organisers of Animania. I stopped working on Animania after 2003 and in 2006 I left Australia and went on the JET Programme. While I was in Japan, I heard about Katie Huang’s attempts to create a new anime convention and offered to help out as best I could. At the time, the working title for the event was ComiketWorld Sydney — a name that communicated the focus on art that was a motivating factor for the original organisers.

Although Comiket had strong ‘brand recognition’, I didn’t think it was right. I suggested SMASH! as an alternative. I’d come up with the name a few years earlier but, although I’d thought about organising an event of my own, I’d never had the time or the resources to put one on. I thought the name was pretty neat and it seemed a shame for it to go to waste when someone else could be using it. As I recall, I actually wanted it to be called The SMASH! (or for the domain name to at least be thesmash.com.au¹) but the others weren’t so keen. Looking back, I’m glad I was overruled.

While I was in Japan, there was a limited amount that I could do. I provided advice and suggestions but, when you’re on the other side of the world, it’s not as if you can actually help much on the day. That changed when I returned to Sydney in 2009. I helped assist with the Vendors Department, coordinating our contact with exhibitors, clubs and sponsors. That was the first year that SMASH! was a two-day convention and, while it went well, I’ll be honest: I had hoped for more people to attend. I was excited by the prospect that, with enough people, SMASH! could make the leap no other Sydney-based pop culture convention since OzCon² has made.

Second, this year.

So this year I was elected to a position on the Board of SMASH Inc. As an incorporated association, SMASH Inc is overseen by a bunch of elected representatives. In 2010 we tried a new system of appointing a management committee below us. Many of the members of the Board are on that management committee but not all. I’m one of the two who are not and this gives me a somewhat different perspective on the organisation. Whereas the managers had departments that they are responsible for, I roved, helping out where required. Primarily that was in promotion and marketing — an area that has never been my responsibility, either at the anime club, Animania or SMASH!, but one that I’ve always been interested in.

A lot of work goes into organising a convention. This sounds obvious when you say it but it’s easy to forget when you just rock up on the day. It’s tempting to think that it really shouldn’t be that hard. How difficult is it to hire a building, invite a bunch of exhibitors and put up some posters? Surprisingly difficult, is the answer. Either that or maybe we’re just not really good at it.

Organisation for SMASH! 2010 began in earnest in January. That meant deciding the location, picking staff for departments, setting up the website and basically beginning the long preparation process. Organising a convention possibly wouldn’t be that hard if it was just you. You’d make all the decision, bear or the risk and do all the work. There’d be a lot to do but you’d be the one doing it and there’s an efficiency to that. We’re a big group though, and you generally discuss ideas, come up with proposals and decide what to keep in and what to keep out. Although this can be frustrating at times, I think the event is better as a result. I probably would never have organised the maid café, for instance. That would have been mistake.

We got some early breaks. At the beginning of February, we found that Tiffany Grant, Matt Greenfield and Yūko Miyamura were able to come. This felt huge. SMASH! had brought the first Japanese seiyū to an Australian anime convention in 2008³ but now we had 2 coming at the same time. We also found out that Shaun Healey⁴, who had unfortunately had to cancel as a guest in 2009, was able to come along with his fiancée, Mikiko Ponczeck.

In mid-February we announced the guests and the venue. A lot of people suspected we were going to move (there’s only so long one can stay at the Roundhouse) but judging from the response online, most people weren’t expecting the guests. Their excitement built on our excitement and at that point you almost wished it was August so you could just put the whole thing on right there and then.

Of course, then you’d remember how much work was left to do and you’d be grateful for the months of time that was left. Time to plan our events, organise our AV equipment, plot out our promotion and marketing, design all our signs, badges and paraphernalia and send a lot of Twitter messages.

Third, almost there.

With about a month to go, the nights started to get very long. Things go wrong when you’re organising any event and, when it’s something like an anime convention, it’s a big event. For example, with a few weeks left to go we realised that a room was going to open without any of the equipment in it that was necessary for the events in that room to run. The venue fee was increased because our quote had been provided on the basis of a schedule of fees for the 2010 financial year. And YouTube kept rejecting entries for our AMV competition making it somewhat difficult for us to run our People’s Choice Award.

Still, conventions wait for no man and, no matter the problem, the days ground on and the event drew near. I had created a countdown clock and the numbers would just tick down with a cold sense of inevitability. I had not put any words on the clock so it was just this long string of digits. No ‘days’ or ‘months’ or anything like that. It made it easy to forget what it was before suddenly you’d be jolted out of your stupor upon the realisation that you were into the last 30 days.

I worked closely with fellow Board members, Tom, Nadia and Rob, putting out fires and trying to prevent anything from catching alight. We didn’t always succeed but there was always someone to help. SMASH! is fortunate to have so many people working on it that you’re almost always assured that if you can’t do something, someone else can.

Fourth, my black box.

SMASH! has a curse. No matter what happens, something always goes wrong with our Treasurer. Last year, one of our staff, Dollis Lee, sat in a bathroom both days counting and dispensing money. For that, we made her the Treasurer. Unfortunately, there’s a curse and, with bare days left before the event, Dollis had to pull out at the last second. Not having a replacement Treasurer handy we needed someone who didn’t have a job on the day. I didn’t have a job on the day.

I’m happy to say that in 2010 we didn’t decide to keep the treasury in a toilet. I was in a room, close to the back stage area. I sat in that room for pretty much the entire day. I saw a small amount of the pack up at the beginning and helped with the pack up at the end. The rest of the time was spent in my black box.

It was an odd experience. After having spent so long organising things, I sat out most of the problems that occurred on the day. We have about a dozen radios that are used by key personnel to communicate with each other. Everyone operates on one channel except for treasury. It sits on its own channel which, for most of the day, was silent. Occasionally, ticketing would request some money or notify me that a drop was about to take place. The rest of the time I made comments on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter or just sort of soaked up the atmosphere. Or at least as much of the atmosphere as one can soak up in a windowless room⁵.

I’m going back to Japan to live in October of this year and I don’t expect to return in Australia for a long time. I won’t work on SMASH! again and, on one level, that’s a real shame. This year the event had to stop selling tickets because we reached the capacity of the building. As a result, the event will move to the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre next year. It took four years. Did anyone ever expect that?

The people who work on Australia’s anime conventions — Ai-con, Animania, AVCon, Manifest, Wai-Con and us at SMASH! — all work really hard.

Let’s just accept that as a given. If you didn’t want to do any work, you wouldn’t put your hand up to help on these kind of things. You’d just sit and recline on one of those inflatable couches people float around in hotel pools on.

On top of that, we’re volunteers. You certainly don’t get into the convention organising business to make money. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll make just enough money to be able to run your convention again the next year. And that’s assuming you can find enough idiots to volunteer to organise it all again.

So us convention organisers are hard workers and we’re volunteers. This is true. But this doesn’t mean that we’re infallible. And it doesn’t mean we’re not lazy. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes we don’t make mistakes. We are human beings and we screw up just like everyone else. The fact we’re volunteers doesn’t somehow magically stop this from happening.

So when I see people defending convention organisers by excusing any mistakes on the basis that ‘Well, we’re all volunteers’ or ‘Well, it’s really hard to organise a convention’ I get upset.

I get upset because it’s not an excuse. The person affected by the mistake is no less affected because you are a volunteer. They might understand that you didn’t pronounce their name properly — hello me as cosplay host in 2009 — because you’re a volunteer and you had a day job and that meant you didn’t have time to practice pronounciation as many times as you’d like but you still made a mistake.

Just say you’re sorry and you made a mistake. The world will not end if you do this. In fact, the world will not care. Because you’re running an anime convention and no one is going to die if you forget something.

I want to be really clear that this does not mean convention organisers should have to put up with unreasonable demands. Someone complaining that the convention should have cost $2 rather than $20 is a moron. What I’m talking about is a person who legitimately has been affected by the convention’s mistake. And they’re, usually, asking, Hey, what happened? That is a fair question and we should answer it. And by ‘we’ I mean the person who knows the answer. If someone doesn’t know why I was tired on stage on Saturday, they shouldn’t answer it. They should go and find me and tell me to answer it.

There would be no anime conventions were it not for the tireless work of the organisers that put them on. So let’s give them a hand. But not a pass. If we screw up, we should admit it and explain our reasons. We should do that because it’s polite and we should do it because it means we’re better able to avoid repeating the mistake next time.

And that’ll make us all winners.

Today I saw the film 夕凪の町、桜の国 (Yūnagi City, Sakura Country). The film follows the life of a family and the way in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima affects their lives, from the 1950s until the present. I enjoyed the movie a great deal.

Still, it was hard to watch the film without thinking that it was yet another movie exploring the effects of the atomic bombings of 1945 (albeit one that pays attention to the discrimination against those who survived the attack). It’s easy, particularly for an outsider, to feel as if the Japanese are obsessed with the events of August 6 and August 9. Without a doubt the bombings were horrific. I consider the attack on Nagasaki, especially, to constitute an indefensible war crime.

And yet it was hardly the only war crime. The atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army are well-documented, even if not to the same extent of their fellow Axis powers in Europe. Unfortunately, this is not a topic that gets the same attention in Japanese cinema as the devastation of defeat. If Japanese movies were you only guide, it’d be easy to think World War II was some sort of event where Japan didn’t do much until out of nowhere an American plane dropped an A-bomb.

It’s also easy to start getting defensive as a foreigner. Why don’t the Japanese own up to their responsibility? Why isn’t there the same amount of time spent discussing Nanjing as there is discussing Nagasaki? Or the Burmese Railway? The truth is that even in spite of my connection to Japan I find it hard not to get annoyed.

Sometimes when you’re annoyed, you tend to get wrapped up in your own victimhood. Occasionally you stop and think: Westerners sure spend a lot of time talking about September 11. Why don’t we own up to our responsibility? Why isn’t there the same amount of time spent discussing Nablus as New York? Or our support for corrupt regimes that suit our interests?

I guess because that’s hard.

So what am I actually keep up with? Surprisingly brushing my teeth. I had thought that was one I might have more difficulty with but I’ve found the secret is to have a toothbrush at work. Brushing my teeth is something I always put off when I’m at home but when I’m at the office it’s more like a smoko break.

And I have actually been doing a lot better on the Japanese front since coming back to Australia (as I suspected might be the case). I’ve started going to classes and have made sure to set aside at least three hours a week to do preparation for that. It’s only been going for about a month which is why I didn’t count it, although if I was being generous I suppose I could say I’m at one and a half.

We’ll see how things are going in July!

It seems wrong to say this but I think I’m a funny guy¹. For me the interesting thing about this isn’t the ability to make a joke but that I can clearly recall a time when I couldn’t. This has always struck me as odd. Humour seems such an integral part of one’s personality how could it not have been there all along? Being funny is like being tall, right? You are or you aren’t and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Now I’ve always been a smart kid². I remember being one of the top students in Miss Sutherland’s kindergarten class and after moving to Dubbo one of the academic superstars of St Lawrence’s Infants and then St Johns Primary (not a typo, it really didn’t have an apostrophe). But I can also remember not being one of the funny students in any of those classes. There was John (I want to say Denver). His last name escapes me but I remember he made people laugh (he also taught us all swear words and was the first person I ever heard use the word ‘cunt’).

There was Adrian, my best friend at the time. Adrian was very, very funny. He was a bright student and was blessed with a gift for comic timing. I recall him bursting into a rendition of Milli Vanilli’s 1989 megahit ‘Blame it on the Rain’ that made our Year 3 teacher, Miss Carberry, laugh. This is the earliest recollection I have of any student making a teacher laugh based on something that they said and at the time I was desperately jealous of Adrian for being able to do it.

I can also remember walking home one day with Matthew Piper (another funny kid) and asking him how he was able to make jokes. Matthew was one of the rounder students in the school (a problem with metabolism he explained to me once) but lightning quick with a comeback. He was the sort of kid that the other kids didn’t dare to tease because chances were he’d end up making you look bad.

Matthew explained to me that he didn’t consciously make jokes. He just opened his mouth and they came out. I puzzled over this for a long time. When I opened my mouth nothing came out. Or if it it did it usually involved me informing the would-be taunter that I was rubber and they were glue and whatever they said was going to bounce off me and stick to them. (Even at the time I recognised this was neither funny nor clever. Not to mention logically incoherent. What did ‘I am rubber’ even mean?)

I don’t think I actively worked at trying to be funny but little by little being able to open my mouth and have jokes come out of it became something I could do with increasing frequency. At first it was just with my family. During one of our frequent family get-togethers for Christmas, Easter or someone’s birthday I remember my grandparents and my mother laughing heartily at some remark I made. Whatever it was is gone now but it was the beginning. It gave me the confidence that I could be funny. I just had to find the right thing to say.

I remember I used to have a rule for myself. It was to never make the same joke twice³. Once a joke was made that was it, it was gone into the ether, never to return again. And if I wanted people to laugh at something I would need to come up with a new joke. At some point the rule lost its divine sanctity and I stopped hewing to it so strictly. I had lots of different friends, after all, and why deprive them of the benefits of a laugh just because someone had laughed at the same joke yesterday? And so, over time, it just became one of those rules that I broke but always felt guilty about breaking (thank you, Catholic upbringing).

The rationale behind why I couldn’t retell a joke is lost to time now. Perhaps it was a conscious decision on my part to ensure I didn’t lose my newfound ability. I might have thought humour was like a muscle and if I didn’t actively exercise it it would atrophy and I’d be back at the rubber/glue stage. Or maybe it was that it felt like plagiarism⁴. This is absurd, of course. One can’t plagiarise oneself and yet that’s the best explanation I can give as to why I feel guilty when I break the rule.

But what does any of this have to do with superfluous? Well, I’ve been thinking about this whole becoming funny thing for some time now and I think the answer has to do with language. I believe that the reason I wasn’t funny as a kid was because my style of humour relies heavily on an understanding and appreciation for words that just isn’t developed enough in a 10-year-old (or at least not in 10-year-old me). It was only as I grew up, became more comfortable with concepts like irony, understatement and black humour, that I was able to deploy it to generate laughs.

I keep rewriting this paragraph so that it’ll end on a joke. It’s not working though and I’m just going to abandon that attempt. To be honest, I don’t really know what I’m writing here. A moment of self-discovery, I guess. My personal blog seemed like the best place for it so I hope you can forgive the self-indulgence. I had nowhere else to go.