1st Impressions

So here it is; my Led Zeppelin II, my Axis: Bold As Love, my 21 and my 7 to the great S Club. If I haven't lost you already then you'll know I'm talking about the follow up albums and in this case follow up blog. I've gotta say its taken longer to decide what to write than it did for my first post. Whereas my first blog the process from thought to typed took all of 1 hour this one has taken all week to settle on something to write about but I finally got there and here we are.

My first post got me thinking about first impressions and how important they are. As Willis and Todorov's research article (Willis, J., Todorov, A. (2006) First Impressions

Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face, Psychological Review, 7(17), pp 592-598) shows a first impression on just your looks alone can be made in 1/10th of a second and that your behaviour afterwards does very little to change this. Now I can agree with the impressions taking less than a second to form however I find it hard to believe that anything you do afterwards changes that. Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not always the best at making first impressions. I seem to have a knack of saying the most inappropriate things, lets take for example my first night at university. 

It's my first night there and pre-drinks had just begun, I had got to university a few days after the rest of my block and so had yet to meet anyone bar my flatmates whereas most of the others in the block had already formed initial friendships over the previous two days that I wasn't there. Pre-drinks was in my flat that night and so the whole block and uor reps had gathered there, about 40 people all crammed in. Now like I said I have an almost superhuman ability of saying the most completely inappropriate things at the wrong time and this night was no exception.

When I usually meet someone for the first time I try and break the ice by making a joke or two and me being the great comedian that I am thought I had the perfect ice-breaker lined up. Now to this day I'm not sure what made me say what I did that night, I don't know if it was nerves, my cock sureness that I really was a funny guy or my desperation for the rest of the block to like. Looking back I'm pretty sure it was a lethal mix of the three. So the room is full and I am yet to introduce my self, everyone else introduces themselves to me and it's now my turn. And here are my exact words "Hi my names Ash and I hate white people," yes I really said that and instead of the raptures of  laughing people in stitches over how good joke was I instead had 40 silent, shocked and predominantly white faces staring back at me. That's right folk I told my future block mates who I was gonna spend the next year with that I pretty much hated them all. 

Of course I didnt hate any of them and especially not for being white, it would have been a bit awkward if I had as my girlfriend at the time was a White Irish Catholic girl and I come from Norfolk which is about as white as it gets, so race was never an issue.
Understandably I wasn't a very popular figure at the time and having spoken to some of my housemates recently I was told that they didn't plan on me surviving the week let alone my first year of university.

Thank fully though race relations improved considerably over the week I must say and somehow I've managed to survive it this far without causing a race war and it's been from that moment that I realised that first impressions aren't really as important as I used to think they were. Sure you can get a basic idea of what a person is like from one instance but it's not until you spend time with someone that you really get to know them.

The old saying rings true "never judge a book by its cover", especially in my case as I don't think I'd be standing here if I wasn't given a second chance.

Until next time,

Ash out.