Achievements
blogDespite giving myself a stomach ache after munching on a dodgy crabstick, it didn’t stop me from making my way to Offshore Cafe for another exciting, if low-key, installment of OMG.
One of the problems with OMG is that it is unsustainable. Teenage diaries and poetry are the peak oil of the confessional comedy world, once they’re used up that’s it (unless you’re Wringham whose supply is suspiciously inexhaustible).
This time around I resorted to reading from my high school reports. Every year we were asked to write down a list of what we considered our achievements. Unfortunately, between the ages of 10 to 13 my achievements were rather limited and they wouldn’t let me write things like “Completing Super Mario Kart” or “Touching J_______ S______’s boobs”. Instead, I wrote things like being in the Cubs and raising money (£1.30) for charity week.
For me, it was enough just to take part. As Woody Allen says, 80% of success is turning up. Well, I did a lot of turning up, being a member of countless teams and clubs, including: chess, Spanish, football, rugby, hockey, computer, German, badminton, basketball, athletics, library, and gymnastics. There were few, if any, barriers to entry to any of these, so why did I imagine that it was some kind of achievement?
I would argue that there are two types of achievement: those which are self-contained and those which are stepping stones towards something greater. For instance, writing King Lear or walking on the moon are self-contained achievements, whereas playing sport for the County or having an article published in a magazine is more a step towards a greater goal. The ones in my report were neither. Of course, language is a funny thing, we can also talk about achieving focus or achieving orgasm. These may feel like an achievement at the time, but you wouldn’t put them on your CV.
The laurels for the evening go to Ryan Vance for his surreal fridge poetry, inspired by what must be the worst holiday ever. Briefly, he went to New York to meet up with a girl he’d been courting on the internet for four years only to find that she had just become attached to a new man. He thus spent a week as a gooseberry, being undermined, ignored and rained on. It sounded horrific.