I can’t make everything right. I can’t magically fix the world. But every now and then I have the opportunity to stop the world being a little bit stupid by pointing out what is painfully obvious to almost everybody else but which some people just don’t get.
This is one of those times.
The following expressions, and many like it, mean you are a racist. Maybe only a little bit racist (thanks AvenueQ for the earworm) but still – racist.
“Them Chinese are shoddy.”
“Well he WAS an Indian taxi driver.”
“Couldn’t find a real Australian at the fete for all the Asians.”
“Are there any of your kind at the school you attend or is it all, you know?”
“Oh no, not a local black, a foreign black, you can trust them.”
“You can’t be Kanye without a black face.”
“Why did a pretty blonde like you marry an Oriental?”
“Aboriginals are all addicts at heart.”
I get that you might not recognise you are racist – because you certainly don’t get that you’re unkind and making a prize twat of yourself whenever you open your mouth, but it’s not okay people.
It’s not okay to say it to somebody you are serving in a bank.
It’s not okay to assume a blonde women is the nanny if her children have Asian heritage.
It’s not okay to make negative generalisations about an entire race based on your disdain for anybody that doesn’t speak English as a first language.
It’s not okay to dispossess a native people and then buy the bloody Daily Telegraph and absorb it’s hate as gospel.
It’s not okay to badmouth people at the next table to yours because you don’t think they can hear you.
It is not okay to refer to people of colour when you are artificially orange. #drumpf
I could go on. But let’s stick with it’s not okay to make any kind of negative judgement based on any kind of visible difference ever.
It’s definitely not okay to assume that because I have the fair skin of my Celtic ancestors and English as my native tongue that I’m a racist arse like you and want to participate in conversations perpetuating hate.
It’s just not okay. It is especially not okay to say it to me, in front of my children, around my friends, about my friends or about the guy over that I really don’t like because he’s a knobstick.
I don’t want to have to tell my daughters that you’re talking bullshit. That you are spewing hate and that you are clearly an idiot because you think somebody’s skin colour or racial heritage means that you are better than they are.
I don’t want my daughters’ friends exposed to casual racism, deliberate racism or any other kind of racism because they have a more melanin in their skin. I don’t want my girls to notice the colour of their friends skin for any other reason than they love to get these things just right when they do their colouring in. They know that some of their friends look different to them but they don’t care because they choose friends on the basis of shared interests and, BECAUSE THEY LIKE THEM, not because they have a matching skin colour.
Kids might be weird but they are a whole lot smarter than us in this regard. We’re the ones that fuck it up for them with our petty prejudices and skin related arrogance.
So. Just. Stop. Stop with the racism.
You’re embarrassing yourself.
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An apiarist if you would like to use the correct term.
They have a farm up near Emerald. They sell their honey to Capilano which is great because that’s my favourite honey and it’s always nice to contribute to a conversation with a stranger with something positive even if completely pointless.
She was one of fourteen children, had nine of her own over a quarter of century. The youngest is now a quarter of a century old. They live all over but not far from home.
Except for one daughter. One daughter she hadn’t seen in almost ten years. Married to a lovely fellow, two gorgeous kids, works for a televison company. Very clever she is. About to turn 40.
In fact, she was flying in as a surprise to celebrate the 40th. Her son-in-law and some of her other daughters had planned it.
This was her first time flying. She was in her 70s and she’d never been on a plane in her life until yesterday.
She was in parts terrified, excited and overwhelmed.
But most of all so touchingly thrilled to be seeing her daughter.
We chatted on the plane, through the airport and out to where she was meeting her son-in-law. She’d never seen so many people or so much commotion in one place in her life.
When she saw the son-in-law he gave her a big hug, then she gave me a big hug to say thank you and got in his car and away they drove.
I cried. I was so ridiculously happy for her.
I don’t even know her name. But I will be thinking of her for a long time.
I hadn’t seen my babies for 36 hours and I had missed them so much. To let your children fly free and live their own lives, even if it means you don’t see them for 87, 600 hours… well that’s a whole lot of love.
A whole lot of love indeed.
Be the beekeeper people. Be the beekeeper. Love freely.
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Once upon a time in a made up town in a sheep paddock, there lived a little girl.
That little girl lived the life she lived. And she did alright at the living bit because one day she become a woman.
This wasn’t because she was blessed with the monthly bleeding that signals possible fertility, or because she lost her maidenhead to a fair prince who took a chance, or any of the other myriad reasons that people mythologise as part of their ongoing depictions of women, but because she turned 18 and legally became an adult so people stopped referring to her as a girl.
To be honest, she didn’t feel very different from when she was a girl. Life made no more sense than it ever had and quite often she felt like an imposter. She wondered at the confidence with which other people lived their lives and marvelled at the intelligence of the people around her.
She lived her life in the shadow of insecurity but talked enough to cover it. She did lots of amazing things and lots of mundane things and lots of things of which she was very proud and lots of things of which she was not proud and lots of things that were kind and lots of things that were probably not kind and sometimes she got it very very right and sometimes she got it very very wrong.
Life took her from one place to another and never involved magic or fairy godmothers or lucky beans. But the thing that she did start to discover as the years went by in a way that had not been clear or obvious to her when she was younger was the power of ‘other women’.
Some ‘other women’ where villainous and cruel and generally not very nice and for a while she thought that this was because of her. Oh dear readers, how arrogant was this little girl to believe that people’s ugliness or otherwise was directly attributable to her. Alas and Alack, she is not alone in believing this and it is a stronger and more durable spell than any that has been conjured in a Disney movie.
But then, like all stories without any kind of decent plot and with not even a halfway decent segue, she discovers the power of ‘the other kind of other women’. These women were like the trail of glitter that comes out of a gassy unicorn – dusting everything they landed on with a bit of sparkle.
They revelled in the successes of other women. Supported them in ways that were loving and kind. They laughed. They cried. They profaned. They advised and sometimes they agreed that life was a bitch and then on those days, the days we all have sometimes, they said nothing at all, they were just there.
And there was so much to learn from these other women. It was a relief to the little girl to finally just be the very best and very worst of who she was knowing that there was a lot of ‘the other kind of other women’ out there. In fact they were in the majority. And like all women, they had been little girls and weren’t really sure sometimes exactly where they were going to end up, or even what the fuck they were doing, but that didn’t mean they had to tear other women down to get there.
It wasn’t that they liked everybody. And it wasn’t that they were perfect in any way. It was just that the magic happened in focussing on the positives, and not the negatives when it came to their very femaleness, and it was just generally a much nicer way for women to live. Especially because pay gaps, inequality, sexism, misogyny and all that.
Nobody wants to fight that shit on their own.
So to all the amazing women out there who started off as little girls without a clue and who have grown into resilient, battered, powerful and glitter coated women (quite possibly still without a clue) – Happy International Women’s Day. May there be no need of it or any other fairytales some time soon.
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Oh I know I know, it’s seven or so weeks in to the new year and it’s all about you! You’ve spent the last month and a half getting thinner, fitter, nicer, calmer, more chilled, less stressed and generally transforming into the perfect human being?
You can’t. None of us are perfect.
So thankfully we can get that out of the way and ask just what kind of cerebral explosions are happening in free thinking minds across the country?
We have a national emergency when it comes to domestic violence and we have had Rosie Batty as our Australian of the Year for a whole year and yet, somebody somewhere in an office says ‘hey let’s give Mark Latham a spot on our radio station and lots of money to trash talk her.’
Because that’s HILARIOUS when vicious hateful men are on the radio picking on decent individuals who have been generous enough to take their own personal tragedy and have it picked over in the interests of making the world a better place.
And we have men like Jeff Allan, the guy who teaches men how to pick up women by treating them violently, who got a visa to come to Australia until people went ‘um no’ and over 60,000 signed a petition telling Dutton to do something.
So he did.
Yet, we have millions and millions of signatures on petitions calling for Dutton and his team of merry men to allow refugees into the country and he’s all like “Nope”.
It’s gotten to the point where State leaders are speaking out against our national policies which might at one level be tokenistic like the cynics say but sure as f**k raises the question “Why don’t we have that level of gumption in our federal government?.
We have doctors risking jail to protect the children, churches offering sanctuary and one of only the six refugees we managed to resettle for the 20 zillion dollars we gave to Transfield is homeless and has been taken in by a Seven Day Adventist who is doing it for f**king free.
Then over the ditch New Zealand says “Hey, we’ll have them” NOT ONCE BUT TWICE and the government is all like “NO WAY – those desperately ill treated people fleeing persecution and war in their own countries who have committed no crime must remain in indefinite detention at billions of dollars expense to the Australian people because….. well, we don’t actually have a reason but MUSLIMS. TERRORISM. PROTECT OUR BORDERS”
Well at least the international community has called us on it and said that we are generally arseholes.Don’t read the comments on those articles or you might believe that there really is no hope for humanity. Except they probably wrote ‘their iz know hop 4 hughmaniteeeeeee’ because all that hate spilling out stops people being able to spell.
Holly Brockwell who is a tech journalist wrote an article about an app called ‘Stolen’ which lets people steal your personal information off Twitter and do weird stuff with it. Her general stance was ‘Nope – dumb app’. And in response, a bunch of men wrote really angry things asking her to do things to her nether regions with very sharp objects and then one guy jacked off on her photo and sent her a picture of it.
Just because he didn’t like what she wrote. But yet thankfully there is no sexism in Australia. No sir-ree – that’s just all those Feminazis not getting laid often enough. I mean men are ejaculating all over photos of Harry Tucker when they disagree with him on a point of technology? No? Then nothing to see here. Sorry about that.
We have an indigenous population with a higher rates of suicide, a lower life expectancy, still not being recognised in the constitution and generally treated like second class citizens despite them being here first and somebody (yet again in an office far removed from the real world) okayed a game which encourages people to hunt them down and kill them.For amusement.
Which obviously would be HILARIOUS if we completely disregarded the last 228 years of cyclical abuse, persecution and genocide. But hey, that’s just those effin’ do-gooders being all upset about nothing. It’s political correctness gone mad.
Don’t you know English is the official language of this country? What? Isn’t it? Nope. If you didn’t get that message from Dan from Optus you’ve wasted your 2016 so far. That man was a ray of sunshine in a the pea fog of our news feed.
And over in the Vatican Cardinal Pell is refusing to come home on a first class flight because it might kill him. Oh, poor man. Well let me tell you something Google taught me Cardinal Pell, and that I feel you probably know inside out, – John 15:13 says that “Great love hath no man that lies down his life for his friends.” And since he in whom you believe also said something along the lines of #dontbeadick REPEATEDLY throughout both the old and new testaments you would think that he would be prepared to put his life on the line to testify. Not only that, due to crowdfunding and the genius that is Tim Minchin the money has been raised to bring him home and keep him alive during the process. We can’t play fairer than that.
Honestly, what the f**kedity f**k f**k f**k is wrong with people? When the first month closes out with some rooster pretending to screw a dog on Australia Day, you have got to wonder why the fuck we worry about the refugees when we are breeding our own numpties right here.
It might be a cliché, but seriously people “do as you would have done unto you”. AKA #dontbeadick
And definitely stay out of the comments section.Please. You’re embarrassing yourself.
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Last week we became ‘school parents’. As a super special sign of my love and devotion, on the night of Nick’s birthday, I arranged a babysitter and we went to the first P&C (Parents and Citizens) committee meeting for 2016.
Hey – they were serving BEER and WINE. It was practically a date.
Sure I might have teared up a bit watching my biggest little one walk into her classroom for the first time but the 55 hours between my induction and her delivery by emergency c-section are still so fresh in my mind that it seems impossible she is wearing a uniform and singing ‘Happy Fartday’ to her dad and thinking it the most hilarious thing EVAH!
People are very kind when your child starts school, checking how you are feeling and generally being lovely about the 4,156 photos you insist on showing them from their first day. Because obviously no child has ever looked as adorable in their school uniform as yours. EVAH!
And it’s all gone quite smoothly except for me discovering I had to hand write a note to the teacher. HAND WRITE. Blimey, it was like I was back at school or something.
But we’ve done it. We’ve begun the process of letting our child go. She’s going to make new friends, learn stuff that we’ve forgotten and start negotiating the Darwinian environment of every school playground in the history of the world. She’s going to be a great friend sometimes, a bad friend sometimes and the kid that did the silent but stinky fart sometimes. She’ll learn the National Anthem and cheeky rhymes with swear words in them.
Day six and dancing to her own tune.
She’ll love some days and hate others. She’ll be exposed to different ideas, different opinions, different approaches. We will love some of them and others will be vehemently rejected over wine at dinner parties with friends. She will learn to read and the early signs are good she’ll be better at maths by tomorrow than I ever was in 12 years of schooling.
She’s going to have stories and memories that aren’t emailed to me at the end of the day and that I will try to extract from her by asking questions at the end of the day that are generally answered with “I dunno”.
There is even a terrifying chance that somebody might convince her to like team sports and we’ll find ourselves on the side of a field on several chilly winters morning pretending we’re excited to be there. (If you see us there – we’re totally faking it. We’re keen for both our daughters to be musically inclined, start bands and need chaperoning to perform gigs in pubs at nights rather than taking turns cutting up oranges at sparrow’s fart on a Saturday morning.)
And while she’s doing all this, I’m going to see if the school hasn’t heard of email.
I mean handwritten notes. Honestly. Next they’ll be asking for a landline number.
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It’s been going for just over two years now and it started small and it’s gotten bigger and it’s doing quite well these days. I even have a wonderful team now. And an accountant. My beautiful man owns it with me but it’s mine. My time, my passion, my experience, my partnerships, my knowledge, my stress, my learnings and my achievements that underpins whether or not it succeeds or fails.
It’s been a steep learning curve. And a humbling one. I’m good at what I do but I knew nothing about running my own business. And I stumbled. I tripped. I fell. I swore. I crawled. I toddled. Then I asked for help and well…. I should have done that sooner.
I’ve definitely got some pace on now.
But it doesn’t take away the fear. And so, you’re switched into the business 24/7. Pitching, worrying, strategising, selling, wondering, writing, training, delivering, revisiting, laughing, crying, swearing, swearing some more. And then on top of that you have a relationship, children, friendships, family, volunteer commitments, business commitments, networks, study and the intense desire to sleep uninterrupted for 8 hours.
And then your pysch talks to you about self care. And I give my impassioned speech about integration not balance. Which she actually agrees with so I’m kind of singing to the choir on that one. I don’t have a lifestyle where I can balance things. They all have to work together. I work doing something I’m quite passionate about so it’s not a case of this is my life and this is my work. It’s all a jumble of complex priorities and a lot of self doubt.
Now that I think on it, we talk about this self care bit often. When I say ‘we’ – she keeps bringing it up so I suspect she thinks it’s something I should be focussing on. I’ve put it on my list of things to do this year. She can’t say I’m not listening.
Look – somedays I’m a freaking machine baby – NAILING THAT SLIPPERY LITTLE SUCKER CALLED SUCCESS LIKE MY SURNAME IS KERBER. (No, don’t be silly, of course I didn’t watch it, my Facebook feed told me you all did and that in the end she beat the Williams lass)
And then other days I’m more Steven Bradbury. If I’m winning it’s because other people have tripped over their proverbial skates allowing me that brief thrill of victory and a temporary respite.
Like all people I have to let some things slide sometimes, and pick them up other times. I worry about letting people down, I worry about fucking it all up and I worry about things I can assure you don’t even cross the mind of some people. I’ve got such a huge amount of practice in worrying, that I can worry about the amount of time I spend worrying.
Success for me is not just building a business that I am proud of. I’m already proud of what I’ve achieved and I’m pumped to achieve a lot more this year. It’s also about getting this integration thing right – working out how to keep it all ticking along and work in that elusive self care element seamlessly.
But it’s not a case of set and forget. No life is. The struggle is real, it’s constant and it’s ever shifting.
I don’t even think this blog post has a point. But getting that all out of my head into a post has stopped me worrying about the fact that I worry so much and WHAT IS IT ALL FOR AND WHAT IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING which was kind of getting in the way today of me actually doing anything useful.
So back to it. Happy Sunday lovelies.
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