After finishing the 342 project with Jon and Leigh, I had two and a half hours to kill before MUCSA EOYD, so I went to the city. I was feeling a bit hungry, so I decided to call Steve and ask if he wanted to have dinner, but he didn’t pick up. I got to Melbourne Central, and saw that Good Luck Chuck was showing, a movie that I wanted to see – and still want to see (yes, I’ve read the reviews and heard it’s lame, but it has Jessica Alba!). Despite being both hungry, and wanting to see a movie, I did neither. Why? For the simple reason that I didn’t want to do it alone.
As someone who always wanted to be a hermit (inspired by Ben Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope), I was surprised how reluctant I was to eat dinner in a restaurant alone. In fact, my first thought about the high school to uni transition was that I would spend my lunch hour sitting alone at a table with a book open in front of me studying while eating lunch – how wrong I was! Even when I have something due, I’d rather sit around with friends and work on it alone while talking to them than sit alone and try to finish it. Graham thinks this is anti-social though. T_T
I noticed Amanda doesn’t like to read alone. Whenever she’s reading a book, she will only do it when someone else is in the room, if nobody is in the room with her, she’ll move into another occupied room. There’s also the whole girls go to the toilet in a pack thing. I guess maybe there’s a safety in numbers rationalisation going on in the background. Well, maybe not quite safety, maybe utility. If I’m studying alone, and I don’t know something, then I have to go and find it myself, but if I’m with someone, then I can ask them. The more people I have to ask, the higher the chance that somebody will know the answer. Going to the toilet as a girl apparantly involves touching up make-up, gossip and fashion exchanges. Again, the more people there are there, the higher the chance of you getting what you wanted to know (maybe you ran out of lipstick, or you wanted to know who X’s new girlfriend is, or you wanted to know where Y got that dress, etc). I think maybe as the youngest of four children, Amanda dosen’t really know what it’s like to be alone, so when she is put in that situation, it feels alien to her, and she moves to another room to make that feeling go away.
I don’t think being alone is a bad thing, if I didn’t have time to myself, I’d never be able to play Tetris, Freecell, etc, as I wouldn’t want whoever is with me to become bored from watching me play. I find that I’m more efficient when I’m alone. If I code with other people, I don’t get the same focus as when I code alone. By the way, if you’ve never tried paired programming, you should try it sometime. It’s when one person is at the computer coding, and the other person just watches them and points out mistakes, or whatever. Just make sure you do it with someone whose friendship you don’t value all that much. =/ I think it’s frustrating for both parties, as the person who is programming gets annoyed at the other person pointing out all of their typos and stuff, and the person who is correcting gets annoyed because they think they could be programming this so much better than the other person.
In case you were wondering, I didn’t starve due to not having anyone to eat dinner with, Sharon was in the city after her presentation, so we went and got dinner together.
:| 
While Jessica Alba is quite attractive, if her acting is still like it was in Dark Angel, i think i may or may not have to have a gun stuck to my head in order to be taken to see that movie. If i ever hear her go "You go girl" in that crappy accent again, i may kill. Something cute. That people like. That people would miss.
I like her because I really liked the Flipper TV show. >_>
good luck chuck is $8 @ greater union this week if u have a cinebuzz (greater union movie club) card.
Doing stuff with people is often much more fun than doing things alone. But that is not to say you shouldn\’t do things just because you\’d be doing them alone. There is some sort of social stigma attached to it that I\’ve never really understood. I remember going to see a movie alone one day as a spur of the moment kinda thing, and on my way out I ran into a friend, and when I told him what I\’d been up to he was like "dude, never go to a movie alone". I never understood that.
For some reason there is this stigma attached to doing things alone. Sitting in a coffee shop, going out to eat, going to the movies, and many other activities are all things that, for some reason, we feel should not be done unless in the company of others. The only people who seem capable of doing these tasks uninhibited are those who have been forced to, and have thus aclimatised themselves to it. Yet why is it such a big thing for the rest of society?
I think it may have some connection to the errors of attribution. We see somebody sitting alone and we think "ahh, someone alone", not "what a sad joke of a person". Yet I think that is what people fear, what others will think if they see you sitting alone *gasp*.
Don\’t get me wrong, company is a good thing. Given the option of going to a movie alone and going with people then I\’ll choose to go with people, but if nobody else wanted to go to the movie and I did then I\’d still go.
…I\’m not entierly sure what my point is, but I think it has to do with the fact that percieved social backlash from a buch of people you\’ll never meet or see again is somehow affecting our patters of behaviour, and I think thats just rather wierd and stupid.
…maybe… I\’m not sure, it\’s 3am and I haven\’t caught up on sleep after that drunken Halloween party last night…
I\’ve always really liked going to movies on my own; same with going out to a restaurant or coffee shop. Sometimes I even prefer seeing a movie alone, since that way I get to think about it afterwards, instead of having my thoughts interrupted by the need to respond to other people\’s conversation. I guess I think of a movie/dinner/coffee alone as being a way to treat myself to some nice relaxing time all by myself, without the need to talk to anyone else. Doing the same thing with people can be more fun, but it\’s not as relaxing. So it depends on whether I want to relax or socialise at the time.
That was Lena by the way.