...and don't panic! The Know brings you advice during housing
A true friend is always there for you, especially when you're drunk.
Miss Quit regresses to her childhood this week as the prospect of beginning the "University of Life" looms.
Sometimes, the best quits come all of their accord, without any pre-planning from me. Take this week’s, for example. With academic deadlines looming, and almost no preparation to my name, the only option seemed to be sealing myself in my room with the internet unhooked. Needless to say, I was doomed.
See, the moment you retreat from the world, everything kicks off. Its life’s way of preventing you from fulfilling any plans you have the presumption of making.
By lunchtime of the first day, I had already been tempted out from self-confinement by the voices rising from the living room. Without deciphering a word, I knew what was happening from the tone of the noises being emitted alone: a piece of particularly juicy chat.
In order to counterbalance the intense bursts of cerebral activity, and so as to avoid mental breakdown, one needs mindless and idle outlets. At least that's what I told myself, as I ventured downstairs to hear the latest piece of drama that was inevitably being shared. And then, just as I got to the doorway, I stopped myself. For some reason, I just couldn’t step over the threshold into rumour-town. Not this time.
In the catalytic environment that is university, a secret is an impossible concept. To borrow an old Chinese proverb: "What is told in the ear of a man is often heard 100 miles away". Or, more appropriately, "What is written on a student’s Facebook wall is often read by 100 pairs of eyes"… Anyway, you get the point.
Like money, hearsay is a tradable commodity, as easily gained as it is spent. Inevitably, though, sometimes it is at our own expense. It is a kind of unwritten rule that we all know: today you talk, tomorrow you’re talked about.
What made me not want to partake on that occasion was a reluctance to be part of the ritual of gossip. For once you know something, it's impossible to unknow it again. A sense of mystery about a person, situation or event is irrevocably lost. You know it's true, sometimes what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. Harmful gossip actually isn’t gossip at all: it's slander. And that can be very dangerous.
Indeed, gossip and slander are very different animals. Gossip is usually a harmless, grazing creature (I imagine it as a fluffy purple cow, don’t ask me why), whereas slander is more like a poisonous, sneaky beast (a lime-green snake). For every fifty cows there is usually one snake. Please bare with the animal analogy, I promise I’m going somewhere with it.
I tend not to believe the worst of people’s intentions when I hear their words, but do try to take everything I receive from second-hand sources with a handful of salt. Then again, who doesn’t talk about everyone else? It is very rare that one comes across a genuinely vicious spreader of rumours and slander. They are out there, those snake-mongers, lurking in the grass. Mostly, however, one meets many innocuous cow-herders.
Let me elaborate on this. Gossip usually has a herder, that is, one particular person who willingly dispenses it. Everyone has a source, a dealer, a one-man/woman hub of information. Mine is a really lovely girl, who just happens to know a lot about a lot of people, and will habitually share it with me after a few cocktails. It's not as if I actively seek it out or anything…Well, not always.
Much as I dread the stereotype of the gossipy woman, there is an element of truth to every cliché. Then again, at least women are open with their tittle-tattle. Having a large group of male friends, I can confirm that men are just as bad, if not worse, than women when it comes to dishing dirt. They just don’t do it so obviously, or with as much judgement (sorry girls, but we do judge…a lot).
So everyone is guilty of idle talk. Love it or loathe it (and, if we are honest, we all love it really), scandal is a fundamental condition of human existence. As willing participants, then, don’t we expect to sometimes be the protagonist, as well as the spectator? Of course we do. As the ultimate arbiter of social behaviour, Oscar Wilde confined the whole issue within one perfect sentence: "The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about."
Words are just words, after all. Aren’t they?
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