Observations about observations

I’ve been re-visiting my David Sedaris Masterclass lessons over the past week or so.  David teaches ‘Writing with Humour’, and as he’s one of my favourite humour-writers, he’s a suitable person to learn from.

One of the things David teaches is to be “tuned in to the world”, which means observing its bizarre everyday happenings.  It also means recording those bizarre everyday happenings into the notebook you carry around with you at all times, so you can mine them for writing ideas.  I already do this, but I still rely on my memory far more often than I should.  This makes a lot of my observations patchy and unreliable, even to me.

So… I’ve set myself a challenge to record at least one observation every day this month.  The caveat is that they must be external observations – something someone else did or said – rather than something that simply occurs to me.  It’s been an utterly exhausting exercise so far, which seeing as we’re not even half way through March, is a tad worrying.

I have observed, though, that being told to observe does make you more observant.  You notice more of what’s around the edges.  Like my observation from 3^rd March, when I went for a walk along the seafront.  It was a sunny day.  Sunnier than usual for March, though not a patch on June, but still, there were several men walking along the promenade without their tops on.

Already?  I thought, and then I noticed something else.  There was no in-between with these topless men; they were either in very good shape or very bad shape.  When it came to taking their tops off (a decision I’m curious about generally: at what point on a pleasant but not blazingly hot day does a man decide to forgo any kind of top?) the prevailing attitude seemed to be, “I’ve worked hard for these abs and I’m showing them off!” or “I don’t care about how I look and I want everyone to know it!”

You see?  That’s an external observation, right there.  It’s the type of thing I’ve been recording into my little “observation notebook”, which reads more madly with every day that passes.

I’ve also noticed that men have much better opportunities to observe life than women do.  This might be why it’s David Sedaris who teaches that class, and not his female equivalent (whoever that may be.  I can’t think of an example, which is sort-of my point).  Men can walk around on their own at night.  For the most part, they can go wherever they like, on their own, and not be concerned about potential consequences.

This “I can go anywhere I like” impunity gives men a huge advantage in the observation stakes, for which I’m envious.  As if to rub salt in the wound, my observation for today is an “overheard in M&S” conversational snippet between two women buying birthday cakes.  It couldn’t have been a more “female” observation if it tried, but does that make it any less interesting?

It’s a poser.