It is the second time that by accidently pressing a devilish key-combination my diary that I write in “word” is lost, completely except the title that I use to save the document.
Basically, I admire all that electronic stuff and software for working at all, and there are some great features here and there, but in most apps there is also something from time to time making me use four-letter-words. Loud or at least whispered between the teeth.
Ironically “Magix” is the app I use most every day and at the same time the one offering most opportunities for getting aggressive or desperate or tired of everything.
In a ranking, it would be followed by “audacity”, but I know this long enough to handle most handicaps and I don’t forget that it is freeware.
Today, in the video of day 223 (the way to Pingdong) I tried to combine them more intensely than usual and that means to multiply occasions to get mad.
Besides this video from my diary-list, I only could finish another one, but I recorded something new, too:
Now, the messman of the ship, Gihan Mendis is member of the Bürgschaft-team and I cut his video and incooperated his lines in the current version. He was fast and did well. I had made a “transcription” of the German words into English (“dir” now was “deer” or “dear”) and he transcribed that into his Singhalese writing.
It rained all day, so much that I could not use my phone outside for a screenshot of the location, and only during the few seconds that I needed to turn on the GPS tracker, I got wet enough.
At 13:00 we had to change time for the 3rd time, I don’t understand this, because I had been told we had the time of Sydney already, but no I am curious if we change back again.
The announcement for that came by loudspeakers during lunch and besides that I was thinking about cultures and habits and manners. So far, I had the concept that some manners are arbitrary (like curtseys or bows) or have anachronistic reasons (like shacking the right hands because the left hand was used for other things…) and some are polite in the sense of consideration or thoughtfulness, a matter of social compatibility.
But my slurping neighbour who uses his fork only as a kind of supporting tool between the plate and his mouth that is nearly touching the plate, because not everything can be slurped or it has to be pushed from other places of the plate to the slurping position (he doesn’t move his head over the plate during slurping, be it for convenience or convention) made me re-think that.
And now I thought that my reaction to his way of eating is also arbitrary. I can be amused or just interested in the optical presentation but feel disturbed or disgusted by the acoustics. And there are “bad manners” that can even smell and until today I was sure that this is a matter of social compatibility (in a post-medieval society) and that it is not arbitrary or anachronistic to call that “bad manners”.
But where is a good reason to declare offending the nose or disturbing the ear more important than irritating the eye?
Is this just a matter of education in early childhood? Normally I use exposure to things that seem to be “bad manners” in my view just for remembering all those smaller and bigger things I had been told as bad manners myself and then it easy to be more generous. And now I am even grateful for this lesson my neighbour taught me, because otherwise today’s entry in my diary would have been meagre.