Shop update
Some of our international readers will be happy to hear that you can now purchase New Escapologist using US Dollars, Canadian Dollars and Euros.
We’ve also taken steps to reduce our international shipping charges. To be honest, I’m worried they’re too low, so buy your copies soon if you want to take advantage of a gross miscalculation.
Benefit of the doubt
An expression I’ve been thinking about lately is “benefit of the doubt”.
To fail to give someone the benefit of the doubt reveals more about your character than it does about the person you’re judging. For your default assumption to be that someone acts nefariously is to expose the fact that you would do the same in a given situation.
Furthermore, giving the benefit of the doubt helps to foster a “generosity of mind”. To be skeptical of the actions of a friend or associate is to be intellectually miserly. Miserliness, remember, is something the Escapologist seeks to avoid. By fostering a generosity of mind, you become less guarded toward your fellow man. Let him in! Escapologists have a hard enough time building muscles of resistance against normative living and honing critical faculties (asking ‘why?’ of normal behaviour) without eying peers with suspicion.
This has been today’s lesson in cod psychology.
Drink tea instead of coffee
Man, I love coffee. Left to my own devices, I will drink it all day and all night. I’ve often lived by the dialogue from Jim Jarmusch’s short film, Coffee and Cigarettes: “I drink a lot of coffee before I go to sleep. Then I can dream fast.”
Trouble is, you eventually suffer for this sort of behaviour, as I discovered for the umpteenth time this week.
So very tired.
It’s time to slow down and drink tea instead of coffee. Tea can clear the mind, gently blowing away the synaptic cobwebs and allowing for concentration again. When it comes to perking you up, the leaf is far less aggressive than the bean.
At a British Library exhibition last month, I saw a 1940s advert for tea. Among other things, it said:
If you are cold, tea will warm you.
If you are too heated, it will cool you.
If you are depressed, it will cheer you.
If you are excited, it will calm you.
I know this is an advertising poster and can hardly be trusted for unbiased wisdom, but I think there is an element of truth in this. Tea is good for everything. (I’ve since learned that this is a William Gladstone quote and he was as productive a fellow as you can get).
Part of the attraction of tea is the way in which you brew it. You can enjoy the very act of making of it as much as the drinking of it. The art of making a nice cup of tea is one of those simple pleasures that will put you on the right track to leading an easier, more enjoyable life. My tea tips:
– Use loose-leaf tea over teabags wherever possible: they are better for the environment and make much better tea. It also adds to the ritual of the brewing process.
– Always use a teapot: it allows the leaves to circulate better in the water. If you use teabags, one teabag is too much tea for one cup.
– If possible, filter your water before boiling it. Tea is mostly water, so don’t just take it lead-lined from the tap if you can help it.
– Warm the pot with a little hot water before introducing the tea.
– Allow the to steep properly. Give it at least three minutes in the pot before you pour it.
– Most importantly, make time to drink your tea mindfully rather than ‘on the go’. After a proper teabreak, you’ll be refreshed and ready for anything.
Tried work, didn’t like it.
A friend writes:
“I’ve decided I hate work, I might give it up altogether. I’m 30 now, I can retire now with a clear conscience. Tried work, didn’t like it. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
Indeed it is. How much dedication do these fuckers want? All of it, it seems.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 16.
My girlfriend and I are not religious but we engaged quite fully with the recent Jewish holidays: Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) last week and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) yesterday. Such events are as community-orientated as they are religious and, for me, it’s a good opportunity to get to know my girlfriend’s family better. Besides, Jewish holidays are fun. They involve far more eating and boozing and blowing of animal horns than Christian holidays. No offense, Pope.
Read the rest of this entry »
Four free sample articles
You can now view a sample article (in PDF format) for each of our printed editions via the shop.
Available are:
– An invitation to New Escapology (Issue One)
– The anti-cliché manifesto (Issue Two)
– Plot your escape (Issue Three)
– Editorial: for madmen only (Issue Four)
The aim here is to whet the appetites of those blog readers who have not bought one of our printed editions. Of course, this is not mandatory and you’re extremely welcome to continue reading the blog regardless, but you don’t know what you’re missing. Enjoy!
Also available at the shop are the amazing New Escapologist badges. Finally, your lapels can be as radical as you are.
NE at Czech typography conference
We put a lot of effort into the typography of our printed editions. It is part of how we justify the production of a print magazine in the age of the internet. It was gratifying, then, to be asked to present our approach to a typography conference.
The 4th International ConTeXt meeting was a gathering of TeX users (TeX being the type-setting system we use to make New Escapologist) in Brejlov, Czech Republic.
We couldn’t be at the event in person, but Tim put together a conference poster depicting pages from our printed editions alongside a macro code used in the production of the magazine. Also on display were copies of our first three issues and take-away copies of sample material in pamphlet-form.
The ideas that got away
I came to the end of a notepad this week. Filled mostly with expired to-do lists, there was little worth keeping. Of some interest however (to me, at least), were my original brain-splurges for New Escapologist Issue Three. Interestingly, hardly any of these features made it into the final publication.
Boring website update
The hoary, old WordPress.com version of the New Escapologist website has finally been expunged from the face of the Internet. It had been causing mischief for some time, mysteriously ranking higher in Google than the proper website, despite having inferior metadata and not being updated in almost a year.
The reason I kept it alive for so long was the forty people who continued to subscribe to it via RSS. Despite a few promptings they never moved their subscription over to the new one. I’d made a sticky post at the old site indicating that it was indeed a retired website but nobody seemed to notice this either. Today, my girlfriend’s dad called to say he was having trouble subscribing to the magazine. Of course, he was using the old and decrepit version of the website after searching for it in Google. Embarrassed, I finally deleted it once and for all.
It felt strange to erase an entire website (with 47 posts) even though I knew everything was reproduced and maintained here in the real site.
So anyway, if you’re one of the RSS subscribers to the old website and you’re somehow reading this post, do resubscribe to the proper site today. Rub our words in your eyes and rejoice.
50 ways to demean yourself
The key to surviving on the income of a part-time job is in minimising your overheads and learning to live within your means.
You should also indulge in the luxuries denied to the greying full-timer. Stay in bed until 10am. Have a leisurely breakfast with friends or the radio. Enjoy your hobbies. Spend extra time in the library and the pub.
A list of fifty side businesses in yesterday’s Guardian, however, doesn’t advocate either of these things. Instead, it suggests filling your non-work time with side business. This is a good idea if you want to wean yourself off part-time work and if your side business is likely to lead to full-time self-employment by developing relevant skills. The fifty suggestions in the Guardian, however, are astonishingly unambitious capers that will serve only to encroach on your leisure time for few meager quid:
– Some of them (car-boot sales, eBay campaigns and garage sales) rely on converting existing assets into money. This is not business. At best, it is liquidation. Even if your goal is to declutter rather than make money, selling your stuff is usually more trouble than it’s worth.
– Selling your spare time to do other people’s admin work (by becoming a virtual assistant, selling your time via sliversoftime.com or volunteering for data entry or IT troubleshooting) is so soul-destroying and a submission to white-collar work, you’d be better off sending out CVs for a legitimate admin job.
– Other suggestions woefully underestimate the amount of time, effort and skills go into them. Web design, wedding planning and catering are best left to web designers, wedding planners and caterers. These are not sidelines: they are career changes.
– Others are staggeringly juvenile: babysitting, dog-walking and scrapbook making. Teenagers have enough problems as it is without adults encroaching on their limited employment options.
– Some are amazingly parasitic or demeaning. Buying and selling lost airport luggage? Renting out your possessions? Becoming an ‘ugly model’? Why not just go out and throttle a few pigeons in Leicester Square for meat?
I think the intention of these pocketmoney projects is to help ‘fill the gap’ between a part-time situation and taking up a proper business. There may be desparate situations which call for such measures and they are certainly better solutions than taking a loan from a scumbag at Ocean Finance. Generally though, they are terribly undignified and a waste of time at best. When you’re walking other people’s dogs for a few quid, you could be learning the ropes in a choice industry, building up a body of clients or just having a pleasant time.
