The temperature here is ‘mucho calor’ at around 36 degrees C and the August ‘silly season’, when people become too hot and bothered for their own good, is fast approaching. Or perhaps it has struck early, causing calamitous thought processes in the unwary expat, who is smugly sipping their agua and thinking “I’m alright Jack” while remaining unaware that they are losing their marbles (and their patience) slowly but surely. As readers may have noticed, the words “fear and loathing” appear in the title of this blog but, thus far, we’ve not had much fear and loathing on here. Now is the time for fear and loathing. It has hardly been the most auspicious fortnight – what with the prolonged family stomach bug rearing its ugly toxins, trapping us in the house for extended periods, and some other assorted ‘unpleasantries’ I won’t mention here - and now it turns out (thanks, Wikipedia) that yours truly has been ‘awfulising’ events. The heat must be to blame, of course. Ahem. According to rational-emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) developer, Albert Ellis: “Awfulising is partly mental magnification of the importance of an unwanted situation to a catastrophe or horror, elevating the rating of something from bad to worse than it should be, to beyond totally bad, worse than bad to the intolerable and to a ‘holocaust’...” Well, I’m not so sure about “holocaust” (although the level of nappy-related bio-hazards in the environment had started to feel like one by Monday) but Albert’s description reminds me of something we called “spectacularising” back in my student days – although this was clearly a misuse of the term: what we meant was “exaggerating (the importance of)”. Although creating a spectacle - possibly unwanted - has always been just a step away. I remember an old Leeds mate, Karl, suggesting I read a book called ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ by Guy Dubord, which I didn’t manage to digest: it lives on a shelf in East Sussex somewhere. This book would have shown the errors with “spectacularising”. Anyway, I digress... perhaps what we really meant was “being a drama queen”, which is hardly a desirable tendency outside the realms of the more flamboyant ends of the club scene (of which we were well serviced at the time, thanks to Vague in Leeds – those were the days!). There’s a (rather more recent) dance track by DJ Rhythm presents Soul Theory called ‘I Don’t Want the Drama’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZnMhKFZGwo) which says it all: “Don't want it (Drama, Drama) Don't need it (Drama, Drama) Don't want it (Drama, Drama) Don't need it (Drama, Drama) Don't want it...” Yes, I think we’ve got the point now! So why create a drama? Will yours truly ever learn that by ‘awfulising’ relatively small events that would otherwise be resolved, they actually do become big, nasty scenarios that bite one firmly and repeatedly on the ankle and throttle all the fun out of the day/week/month/year (delete as appropriate)? Watch this space: we’ll find out shortly...
