Last Saturday night, a good friend of mine half-jokingly accused me of analysing everything to the nth degree. This is probably true. I seem to have an overdeveloped sense of self-awareness, carefully cultivated throughout my hideously shy/gawky teens. In fact, I used to think of my mind/body as two seperate-but-linked phenomena - I would watch myself moving through life as if from above, a birds-eye view. Anyway, now that my teens have been consigned to the embarassment bin, I have found this level of self-awareness quite useful, as it has let me know myself intimately, my flaws and strengths and idiosyncrasies. The downside is that continually watching and policing myself has made me somewhat scared of putting myself out there, of trying new things, because of the way in which I analyse myself doing these things. In that sense it can be a little disabling. Still, I think on balance it's positive.

More recently, I've found that I find I can use the same analytic technique on other people, in order to understand them. Most people have a level of self-awareness, but some have almost none. I volunteer at a soup van fortnightly, and there is a woman there I find fascinating because she can't step outside her immediate greed, even for a second. Background: We turn up to the housing commission flats (commonly known as the suicide flats) with baskets of sandwiches, soup, cordial, coffee and sweets. We have heaps of meat and cheese sandwiches, but limited tuna sandwiches, which are in heavy demand as a result. This woman heavily prefers tuna, and always comes out to the van to nab some before the others can get into them. Once the baskets are on the outside table, people dive into them, clawing for the tuna sandwiches. Somehow, this woman always manages to get more than her fair share. This would be bearable, except that while she ravages the baskets, she continually points out how many sandwiches other people have and how few she has and how greedy other people are. She gets angry when we try to restrict the number of tuna sandwiches she gets so as to let other people have some, continually pointing out the size of other people's bags, while neglecting to mention her own, sagging under its own weight. Her greed is so absolute that she is blind to others needs, like the quiet woman who waits for the greedy to have their fill, so that she can quietly ask for the scraps. It's incredible, absolutely incredible. The worst thing is that she accuses others of her own sins, in a remarkable feat of self-blindness.