Famous words of my mother: You’re walking a very fine line
with me, Sunshine!
I always liked it when she called me Sunshine, but never in
that context; I’m sure you can imagine why.
Since my adolescence became a part of my selective amnesia, I haven’t
heard these words uttered to me since.
In the office today, I overheard someone use the phrase “It’s a fine
line” in reference to something completely different (An Excel spreadsheet cell
border, just in case you wanted to know!).
When I made a joke, ignoring the context, I was completely ignored, but
it set me thinking: A fine line between
what and what?
I was rereading one of my old undergraduate essays earlier
this week and one of the themes was to do with Differeancé explained by
Derrida. Briefly – I don’t want to kill
you off with boredom – he said that the only way you are able to see separate
entities is on account of the space between them. So when you’re sat looking at a cell border
in excel, you know that that it isn’t a full line due to the spaces between the
dashes.
But when you start talking about the fine line between
things, it almost implies that there isn’t a separation; it’s a sliding
scale. So when a child is cheeky, you
have cheeky at one end and rudeness on the other and they work their way along
the sliding scale. They start “walking a fine line” with you when they edge too
close into the naughty sector.
Is there a fine line on a sliding scale?
Yeah, sure! Look at a
ruler, you can measure in millimetres, centimetres, metres and so on. It’s like walking in a straight line – you
move one notch at a time towards “naughty”.
I wasn’t happy though.
I was still stuck on the fine line between pondering and satisfied. I was sat completing a mundane task at work
and I “pondered” my way to content: most of the time the fine line is drawn
between extremes of the positive and the negative.
Cheeky, in and of itself is not the opposite thing to
naughtiness or rudeness. Its only when
you hold cheek in a positive regard and rudeness in a negative one that you get
a fine line to draw and cross or toe, depending on your rebellious nature...
Thinking I had solved me own little self-inflicted-problem
in thoughts, I picked up my tea cup to make a brew... When I realised... I
wasn’t happy yet. Another thought struck
me: why do some people toe the line and others choose to cross it? Not satisfied with that, my brain conjured up
another one: Who makes the lines and decides where we cross them or not?
I had stopped typing some time ago and due for my tea break
so was running on low batteries. At this
point, I decided to go for brew, fag and piss – not necessarily in that order
mind you! While I was fagging it up
(save it for the Frog and Bucket!) I gave my brain a bit more scope to ponder:
The question of who draws lines and why is simple: Everyone does it to
depending on their personality and boundaries.
You can get on one man’s nerves in two seconds doing the same thing that
another person lasted through two hours of.
It’s completely individual.
So, who crosses the line? We all do. And Why? Considering my
assessment of the moodiness of one man versus another, I think it’s fair to say
that we all do it sometimes totally by accident. There are those sadistic beasts that will
cross lines for their own personal amusement and just to get on the wick of
someone else, but I think, mostly, we do it as a whoopsy. We’re being naughty when we don’t care that
we crossed the line.
Now, here’s another point to leave you to ponder on: Do you
actually care when you cross a line? Does it depend who you cross it with or
what you did to cross it? And with that,
dear reader, I shall leave you to your thoughts.
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