Patience, and being done with it.

Hello everyone.

It has been a while.

I’d like to begin by thanking everyone for their impatience with my reticence to publish, and express that I fully understand if anyone’s patience has run out. I must say, mine has too. Allow me to explain.

Patience is the ability to wait. I’m actually really good at waiting. That’s how I was able to endure waiting for myself to write.

To sum it up in a sentence, that’s ‘Yianni is waiting for Yianni to write.’

👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻 is crazy.

The funny thing is that I’ve actually written a lot: Pieces, content, systems. I just haven’t published any of it.

👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻 is lunacy.

I suppose I owe you an explanation as to what and why I’ve been holding out on you.

There are two reasons: a good one, and a shit one. Don’t be too hard on the shit one though. Without the shit one, there wouldn’t be the good one. Okay? Let’s proceed.

Let’s start with the shit one, eat your greens first and all that. I’ve been busy. Very busy. As many of you may not know, last year I renewed my legal practicing certificate and started my own legal practice, Stand Up Legal.

Now anyone who knows me well knows that this is something I have spent my entire adult life swearing blind that I would never, ever, do. To quite a pathological extent. But why.

I think this stems from the fact that my father was a lawyer and, growing up, whenever he came home at night he never seemed very happy about that fact.

Dad always seemed put upon by his clients. They were always idiots, who didn’t know what they were talking about and now it was his problem to fix their problems. One day, I would come to understand that what my father was describing was performing a well paid job in a professional service industry, but that day had sadly not arrived yet.

And yet, I studied commerce/law at university. Now why did I do that?

My memory of much of my life, is not great. It’s coming back to me piecemeal, but it’s not great. But I know what I wasn’t.

And I wasn’t passionate about law. I wasn’t moved to do law. I hadn’t always loved or been intrigued by the law.

But you needed a 99.15 TER to do Commerce/Law at Melbourne, and I definitely couldn’t wing 99.60 medicine on a whim, so absent an internal drive or frame of reference, Commerce/Law was what I shot for.

You need high marks to get in, surely this means that it’s ‘a good course’. It’s certainly something a lot of people want to do, People seem to know what they want even if I don’t. If we aggregate everyone’s wants, and work downwards, I figure that’ll probably land me in a good enough place. I did that for a year, and then I became a comedian.

I wasn’t disinterested in these topics, in fact I find them fascinating. But then, I FIND MOST THINGS FASCINATING. Looking back, here’s a list of courses I could just as happily have done:

• Electrical Engineering

• Physics

• Philosophy

• History

• Computer Programming

• Systems Design

• Mathematics (Pure or Applied)

• Horticulture

• Stand Up Comedy (it wasn’t a course back then, but I digress)

Looking back, I lacked so much self-(WE INTERRUPT THIS PIECE FOR A BOOKMARK. 

[BOOKMARK]

THIS MAY NOT MAKE SENSE NOW, BUT YOU MUST TRUST THAT IT WILL PAY OFF IN THE LONG RUN. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program)awareness that I honestly just wandered into that course, rating its exclusivity very highly, absent a more personal metric of worth.

And yet…perhaps that naive ingenue with the rugged good looks of a young Tony Danza possessed more wisdom than he seemed. Because recently, he and his mark fetishisation have paid off. Thank you yesterYianni!

For the past year, I have been busy helping people, two things I hold great affection for. Finding out that law was about helping people actually surprised me! How could I possibly have missed that? But that’s what it is. It’s helping people. I suppose most work is.

Helping people write a will and plan for their future, sometimes entirely in Greek. I’ve done that. Helping people buy and sell properties. I’ve done that. Helping people stop sociopaths from shaking them down and robbing them of six years of hard work because “baby want company now.”

I have done all of these things in the past year. If you’ve got a will, a house or a sociopath you need help with, remember Stand Up Legal. Your problem isn’t a laughing matter, but a sense of humour does help.

So that’s the shit reason for not writing. I’ve been very busy, beginning a lot of things.

But this very page was a beginning once. That’s kind of what we were talking about here, wasn’t it?

And that brings us to the good reason. Which brings us back to the bookmark. Remember the bookmark, back up there?

Now what was I bookmarking, and why did I have to interrupt the flow to do it? I put the bookmark in where I did, because that was the exact place I had the thought “This is too long. People won’t be interested.” And I thought that was noteworthy, and should be remembered.

I got told “It’s too long, are people actually going to read this?” once too. By someone whose opinion I valued, or at least craved. Actually, more than once. Actually, if we’re talking about the spirit of ‘Too long/people no care about your thoughts” then I actually hold a masters in this.

I must believe it too, because only someone who is struggling against the thought “Too long. People not interested” flips between not writing at all, and writing far, far too much.

We who ping between action and interia must make hay while the sun shines. That’s probably why when I do write, I’ve been a chronic overwriter. I tell myself “Look Yianni, it’s only a matter of time before you clam up again. You must say everything, everywhere, all at once. You know, like that movie. Cloud Atlas.

We need not dwell on the reasons for this now. I’ll write a short piece about them soon, it’s interesting. But that’s often how I feel.

The other reason I feel compelled to say absolutely everything, omitting nothing, is a deep need to avoid being misunderstood. Jesus Yianni, why so sensitive? Maybe I’ll write about that too. It’s interesting too.

Back to the shit reason. In the being busy helping as the thing I promised myself I would never be (many reasons, will write short piece), I have come to witness the power and potency, of brevity (may write long piece on this, to be contrarian).

I was recently attacked and diminished (verbally) by someone in a legal setting. It actually took me quite by surprise, threw me a bit and I wasn’t ready with a heckle putdown. Stand-up comedy Yianni was furious at me. “Look what we’ve become.”

But what I’ve come to realise is that it was my doing. And it was fine.

It was my doing. The simple reason they attacked me is because they were in the wrong, and I was saying so, LOUDLY.

I used to avoid doing this lest I lose the bogus approval of bullies (people must know what they’re talking about, right? Commerce/Law, that’s a good course) until I realised that the only surefire way to avoid being attacked for what you say, is to never say anything.

And I’ve come to realise that if everyone does that, the world goes to shit very, very quickly plus it ends up being run by juvenile, aggressive arseholes. So yeah, I understand why you’re upset with me, but I’m fine with it. If you didn’t want to be held to account and fall well short, maybe you shouldn’t have done all that terrible shit?

Our lives are full of bookmarks. Things we flag up, to remember. Memories. Sometimes these bookmarks get corrupted, and misplaced. If this unfortunate event occurs we must keep an eye out for things that remind us of them. When we note one of these things, we should re-bookmark it, with a suitable text reminder.

THIS MAY NOT MAKE SENSE NOW, BUT YOU MUST TRUST THAT IT WILL PAY OFF IN THE LONG RUN.

I have many thoughts. And then I have thoughts about those thoughts.

I think material reality isn’t fundamental, everyone is an aspect of one eternal totality, and that death is an illusion. I think about how you might test this scientifically. That’s interesting, surely?

“Oh, you guru now? What point of big thoughts, from such little man?

Oh, in April and May I started working on an alternative system of AFL statistics called “That’s not an effective disposal”. I got data from the 2021 Grand Final and programmed it into Python for analysis and review. There’s a visualisation of the data below. Check out the little dudes on the bench!

“Oh first you comedian, now you lawyer, and now this?” Pick lane, loser.”

Then I stopped for some strange reason.

Did you know that our backyard is, in local bird parlance, ‘the hip spot’? Every day I sit watching male pigeons doing their head-bowing mating dance, four screechingly loud adolescent rainbow lorikeets shimmying upside down to eat the seeds we leave out. There’s a male pee-wee who’s smart enough to steal Dixie’s cat food but still dumb enough to attack his reflection. And last month, two king parrots we’ve named Reginald and Evelyn turned up one day and literally started eating out of Mrs JUT’s hands!

“Birds? Birds boring! If birds exciting, why birds no have Insta channel? Ten birds? Too many birds. Too long. Less birds. Maybe two birds. Actually, if only two birds, why bother?”

Did you know that I cried, like really cried twice in the last few weeks and incredibly, since I did I feel about ten kilos lighter from catharsis. I mean I wrote this didn’t I? THAT is interesting!

Crying? Big downer. No-one like crying. Plus you happy. Happy Yianni, no reason cry because nothing bad ever happen EVER. Okay, maybe SOME bad things happen. Two bad things. Actually, if only two, why bother?

I mean, I think all these things are interesting. Aren’t they? Maybe my problem is the original problem. Patience. Needing everything, everywhere, all at once.

What if I just started writing my thoughts down and then didn’t stop? What if I just kept going.

THIS MAY NOT MAKE SENSE NOW, BUT YOU MUST TRUST THAT IT WILL PAY OFF IN THE LONG RUN.

THIS MAY NOT MAKE SENSE NOW, BUT YOU MUST TRUST THAT IT WILL PAY OFF IN THE LONG RUN.

THIS MAY NOT MAKE SENSE NOW, BUT YOU MUST TRUST THAT IT WILL PAY OFF IN THE LONG RUN.

THIS MAY NOT MAKE SENSE NOW, BUT YOU MUST TRUST THAT IT WILL PAY OFF IN THE LONG RUN.

Once again, I appreciate your impatience. A person has to have impatience. Not too much, but not too little. Because otherwise, how would we know when enough was enough.

So let’s try this again, shall we? I’ll just write about my life.

Because my life is dope and I do dope shit.

More to come…