Two things you should be slow to criticise

"Two things you should be slow to criticise, a man's choice in woman, and a man's choice in work" as Paddy McAloon says on Jordan: The Comeback.

Never did i quite understand that line as i do right now. The complexity that some situations achieve can be so overwhelming that it's impossible to make a decision. Either choice can be justified at a particular level, so how does one know which is the correct one?

How we baulk at the office workers from the desks of our school classrooms! How simple it was back then, to think that destinies are something we have complete control over. Little did we know of the myriad compromises that make up an adult's daily life, watering down those pure and noble thoughts we once had as teenagers.

Most days i alight from the bus in the City, mortified that i have to be surrounded by such ugly buildings and dreary people. How supremely original i think of myself compared with these career driven fools. And yet, how do i not know, that behind one of these pink-shirt-blue-tied brutes, stirs a kindred spirit? There could be any number of truly creative souls out there, bludgeoned by the machinery of a financial centre, and their only aim, to use it, as i use it, to sustain and propel the flames of imagination, albeit in an altogether abstract way.

Again, in the youthful enthusiasm of a lad bred on Dawson's Creek, there lied a misunderstanding of what interconnected realities lay before him. Love, i am told, heightens the senses, yet lowers one's perceptions. Is it wise to fall disastrously in love, to plough all available resources into such beauty as one so defines, only to be rebuffed by common sense, and the cold light of day? Jerome K. Jerome, believes that affection is all one can hope for, a flat-lined flow of sensuality, rather than a swooping sine wave. Can one settle for affection only, and find passion and purpose elsewhere? Should it matter if one can be satisfied in all areas of one's life through many different means, rather than just one?

Such a Western impression. To believe, to even consider that a partner could provide everything one desires! Is it perhaps that we've debunked religion as the answer to everything, and now we scrabble around for a new idol worthy of our adoration? I had once thought that an ideal partner would be someone i could communicate with in such subtle ways, and would understand my articulated nonsense that would be taken as feelings. Now i am torn between that which a society has nurtured me to believing, and something that same society would think utterly base and devoid of humanity.

To see a couple, and to react to their choice in partner, is something i now abhor. It is no-one's business how they connect, or do not connect, as the case may be. Just as it is of no-one's concern how one makes a little money to get by.

Teenage ideals should be kept in the Mongolian wilderness, where life is truly simple.