Can a woman think about nothing?

Men and women struggle to get on as women think too much about stuff and men don’t think enough

A good friend of mine got in touch recently and she was asking my opinion, as an ex-boyfriend of hers, whether I thought she had a strong personality as she was worried she was alienating a new group of friends by being too opinionated and offending them. It turns out she does not really like them that much and so I asked why she was so bothered and to just be herself.

I then suggested she was doing what so many women do and thinking about things far too much and that she should try and do what men are able to do and think about nothing.

“Think about nothing?” she said, “How do you do that? What does thinking about nothing look like?”

I explained that thinking about nothing is not like looking at a black screen, it is when you can look at something but not really focus or think about anything at all. She said she couldn’t do that, if she was looking at a pencil case, she would be thinking about the pencils and pens inside it or if she could see toothpaste she would be thinking about when it would be running out and having to buy a new one.

She said that she gets annoyed with her husband sometimes as it seems like he is moving in slow motion and that she can see the cogs moving in his head as he figures out how he is going to perform some basic task. She said a woman wouldn’t do that, she would keep moving and not need to stop to think.

I feel that women’s brains are constantly moving, like a CD on high speed, whereas men’s brains are more stop and start type machines. This is not to say that either is better as although women’s brains are constantly active, they are not thinking about anything useful. The great capability of the female brain is cluttered with thoughts of some mad insecurity, shoes, feelings, cushions (women have OCD – obsessive cushion disorder), decorating, dieting, worrying/moaning about friends/colleagues, accessories and the 300 million other things that occupy the female brain.

Men, on the other hand, can only focus on one task at a time and the brain can stay inactive until prompted into action by the restless female brain!

I polled my Facebook friends and the overwhelming response was no, women cannot think about nothing.  Here are some of their comments:

That sounds like bliss. No idea how to do it though?

nope. That’s what men do best

But thinking about nothing is still something to think and stress about!

Hmmmmm? Let me think about it?

Eh what? Why would you say that? What is the underlying meaning of that comment?

It is this difference that causes a divide as men cannot understand why women are so highly strung and get upset by everything in life whereas women cannot understand why men are not upset by everything. Men dread being asked by women ‘What are you thinking?’ as often we are just thinking of nothing in particular but we know we cannot say that as it will be seen as being evasive, so we have to make something up.

So I guess what we need to do to make life more harmonious is to get men thinking more and women thinking less, or is that just a silly logical and rational thought, typical of a man?

Why us Brits should be ashamed of the BRITs

Tonight was the 30^th BRIT Awards ceremony at Earls Court and as a somewhat-proud Brit I was totally ashamed at what I saw. For those unfamiliar, The BRIT Awards is just like the Grammys or MTV Awards with similar production values and glamour, but has been organised by the local parish council.

It is meant to showcase British music talent, but has less professionalism than a recent village barn dance I went to. All the good things about the night were not British (Lady GaGa, Jay-Z, Alicia Keys), with the possible exception of Florence and the Machine, Kasabian (who host Peter Kay described as “Leicester’s answer to Aswad”) and a nostalgic Robbie Williams medley at the end.

The Fantastic Non-British Lady GaGa

Peter Kay, who I love but was not at his best, joked at the beginning of the night that the BRITs was “20mins of entertainment stretched over 2 hours”. He was not wrong.

The award presenters were shockingly unrehearsed and every time a presenter tried to be funny or cool, it was just cringe-worthy. Liam Gallagher showed that not all nobends mellow with age. Sam Fox appeared, but without Mick Fleetwood (her partner in the most catastrophic BRIT Awards ever in 1989) it was not nostalgic or ironic, it was just shit. The less said about Gerri Halliwell and Mel B the better. Even the reliable awards show regular Jonathan Ross wore a misjudged silly outfit that made no one laugh.

Mel B & Gerri Halliwell - Unscripted, unfunny and ungood

For some reason, portable microphones were used which I guess allows presenters and award winners to move around more, but often they were carried off stage and had to be clumsily returned. Jonathan Ross was guilty of this and Lady Gaga was not able to give her acceptance speech until he gave it back and jumped off stage in embarrassment.

The British Award winners were inexcusably pathetic and inarticulate. Dizzee Rascal wittered away like he was a 14 year old who’d been given permission to stay up late and had had one too many sips of his mum’s sherry. In contrast Jay-Z was a consummate professional who was grateful, funny and clearly has stayed up late before.

Liam Gallagher. Nob.

The layout of the awards ceremony is that there is a big audience at the front and the music industry and award winners behind drinking at their tables. This means each winner spends about 2 minutes walking up to the stage. As they got closer to the stage many of them would do that quick shuffle that people do when trying to give the impression of running for a bus but not really putting in much effort. Winners were not ushered off the stage and so many did not know which way to go.

Lily Allen accepted her award like a giggling idiot and claimed she was wearing the preposterous bright orange wig she was wearing so that it would be harder for the TV cameras to spot her in the crowd. I understand that all Mi6 undercover operatives use them.

Lily Allen trying not to draw attention to herself?

The British performances were really quite poor, with Cheryl Cole winning the award for worst miming on the night. However, as she was the only performer not to win an award maybe she didn’t think it was worth making an effort? Every BRIT Award was won by someone performing at the event, it was if they knew?

“Jake, are you trying to say the BRIT Awards are a sham?”

“As if!”

The lovely Cheryl Cole

The funniest thing that happened was when I tweeted, in an erudite outburst, that ‘the BRITS is like proper w@nk’. I spelt wank with an @ to save the impressionable twitter world of my rudeness. However, my good friend Adam pointed out that I had inadvertently used (@nk) Nick Kallen’s name in vain. I don’t know who Nick Kallen is you see, but have a feeling he probably gets a lot of tweets accidentally mentioning him.

So not really that funny then, but was still the funniest thing that happened.

The 30^th anniversary show was not a finely tuned, slick music extravaganza that had absorbed the learning and experience of the 29 events that had preceded it. It was another reminder of all the other rubbish BRIT Awards events that had taken place before.

I really hope that other countries do not ever get to see it.

Jake McMillan