DAY FIVE. ASSOCIATION.

The word of the day is association

I don’t feel like going to Google for what it means, kindly open a new tab and check for yourself and for some of you this is the golden chance you have been waiting for to call that teacher of English after hours, you little perverts. I am not in the brightest of moods, bet you can already tell. Why can you tell? Because every time somebody spoke like this they were in a snarky mood. With the exception of those called little perverts on the regular.

GO AWAY.

Come back!!

You read both sentences in shouting voices with different tones didn’t you?

As much as things get lost in translation, we have to admit that a lot more is understood because of the beauty of association. Association gives a path for our perception to follow. I don’t eat coleslaw or beans at parties; the one time I did resulted in lava like diarrhoea. Of course not all coleslaw causes diarrhoea but the one that did, ruined it for them all. And because I have said diarrhoea three times in this paragraph, you have probably said ‘eeww’ and imagined it all because of association.

Association is how we learn, how we bond, how we remember and how we fine tune our instinct to know what to avoid. Associations can be passed down or acquired through repetitive experiences. Like how most of people hate black cats in fear of bad luck. And how I love impwa because it reminds me of my mother, it is bitter but to me it tastes like home.

Association is simply a mental connection of things. Because it is mental it can be good or bad, accurate or absolute bollocks. I know a person who is used to people using them and walking out on them, so the person is needy, highly suspicious of others and it is honestly taxing to keep convincing someone that you’re not going anywhere and in the end people get tired and they leave because they are tired of her antics. In the end she says people are always walking away. See her associations predicted the outcome and enforced the situation and she didn’t even notice it. Is it possible to press reset from associations?

Associations reinforce stereotypes and complexes, people feel better than others simply because the way they are is associated with good things. White people are associated with money and the darker you get on the skin colour graph, the poorer people expect you to be. Indigenous languages are associated with primitivism and the more local you speak, the more uncouth people expect you to be; result is false accents and people abandoning their own culture. Even what people find attractive has been wired into us? A guy went to twitter to talk about how he doesn’t really care about curvy women, he agrees that they are beautiful but he isn’t really an ass kinda guy. You should have seen people bash him and emasculate him.

Association hasn’t been all bad in my life though. Because people perceive me a certain way they know what to expect from me, so my reputation has served me even when I have been absent. Association allows me to imagine the good in life even when it isn’t manifest. Association is why I love certain smells and I love custard; there is nothing like a childhood taste and the smell of a loved one on bad days. Resetting the mind back to positive after experiencing so much negative is hard. Maybe the secret is in associating ourselves with positive thoughts to get positive things.