19 Nov 2014
Did you know that today is World Toilet Day?
A whole day dedicated to where we do our poopies. And a glorious chance for me to bang on about my favourite topic.
Giving a shit.
And I can say my daughters’ word of the moment with gleeful abandon.
POO POO.
But it’s a serious business. This is actually a UN initiative. Not a Geldof and Bono profile raising one. Because of the 7 billion people in the world, 2.5 million do not have access to improved sanitation. 1 billion still poop in the open. Women and girls are regularly raped and abused while seeking privacy to answer nature’s call. Toilet deprivation impacts education. Health. The staying alive thing.
In fact, sanitation is recognised as a global development priority. That’s right.
So giving a shit about people giving a shit is will literally transform lives. If babies aren’t busy dying of diarrhoea, kids aren’t missing school because of illnesses caused by poor sanitation, if communities aren’t living alongside rivers polluted with effluent – well you get the idea. Toilets aren’t just for fun.
We’re long time and slightly evangelical supporters of Who Gives A Crap – www.whogivesacrap.org – you go online, order a box of bog roll and they deliver it to you. 50% of all profits go to WaterAid to build toilets which means people don’t die, get educated and all those other things we DO give a shit about. And they even have a code red so you know when it’s time to reorder.
And for every dollar you invest in modern sanitation you save five on healthcare so it’s like that shit’s a bargain. Singapore – pretty much universally acknowledged as one of the cleanest places in the world – was a cess pool only fifty years ago. Literally.
And there is a cute little video to show you that where you go matters. Like shitloads.
So happy World Toilet Day. Don’t forget to give your own toilets some love today and be hugely appreciative of your access to that white shiny porcelain thing that makes you happy, clever and generally shit hot.
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17 Nov 2014
I’m putting a huge part of the writing world out of a job here but things are pretty simple. If you want to be something, you generally have to do something.
If you want to be a triathlete. Do a triathlon.
If you want to be a runner. Run.
If you want to be a swimmer. Swim.
If you want to be an ironman. Buy an iron. Just joking, do an iron man thingy.
If you want to be a gardener. Garden.
If you want to be a writer. Write.
If you want to be a teacher. Teach.
If you want to be a superhero. Buy a cape and give yourself a cool name.
It’s that simple.
Unless you want to be Kim Kardashian. In which case my friend – photo shop.
If you’re doing it, you can call yourself that thing.
And don’t beat yourself up about whether or not you’re doing it well or the best. Just doing it is enough to qualify for the label.
The benchmark for success for pretty much everything is fairly subjective. Rules are generally made up and if enough people follow them, that’s they way things are done. But if you don’t like them you can do something else. That’s just the way the world works.
Unless you’re a scientist in which the rules exist and you’ve just got to work them the fuck out.
This has been a non-sponsored public service announcement as part of my #CTFD initiative.
You’re welcome.
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11 Nov 2014
I agree with Clive Palmer. I know. Who would have thunked it?
Remembrance Day is not a day for politicking.
There should be no turning our backs on politicians or any such bollocks.
Remembrance Day is bigger than that.
At the heart of it – War is two groups of people disagreeing and then sending other people to sort it out. War is ongoing. We are not a country free of war and its fallout. Remembrance Day is not just about the second world war, or the first, or ‘Nam or any of the hundreds of conflicts that Australian soldiers have been involved in.
It’s about remembering that the sacrifice of war is not just in the men and women we offer up as canon fodder, it’s not just about the people injured physically or mentally that live with the damage until the day they die, it is also about the families and communities that are permanently impacted.
War is not noble or glorious. It is gut wrenching, painful and calls for courage from those who had no part in the making of it.
War is a collective effort and that the consequences are far reaching. We need to make sure that our acts of remembrance grow with us and that we recognise that war is not just a jolly adventure for young white lads looking for a bit of a lark.
It’s about recognising that war is not an abstract thing. It is fierce, painful and entirely with consequence. Families live with the effect of war long beyond the formal declarations of ceasefire. Those that serve – whether they bear arms or support those that do- are changed in ways that we who have never gone to war will never understand.
Remembering is a fine thing. But so is not forgetting that we are not yet done with war. Let us remember without glorifying, without sanitising, without white washing.
Let us take heed to the words of Wilfred Owen – soldier and poet:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mor.
Lest we forget. For we sure as heck don’t learn.
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10 Nov 2014
IThe papers are full of information at the moment about how other people are having sex or not having sex and where they are doing it and how they are doing it and what colour is the best colour to do the sex in and with how many people and to avoid what cancers.
I had a good solid Catholic 80s education. I know that sex happens to people that are married and that we whisper the words to our body parts and that masturbation is only something naughty boys do. You’re talking about a girl whose early years book obsession resulted in a vocabulary far more extensive than her experience. In fact, she only knew to use the word ejaculate to indicate an expression of surprise in her creative writing pieces. Hell, I still occasionally use the word ‘gay’ just to refer to a state of happiness.
My parents were not arty liberal American types letting me examine me or my sisters’ genitals in the lounge room. I am one of six and my parents had a television so I knew it wasn’t that which was growing our family but I didn’t care. In fact, apart from the torture of trying to determine what would make a good kisser (technique vs tongue – it was the great debate of 1985), I have not spent much time thinking about the sex lives of people I know.
99% of judgeypants behaviour comes from people thinking about, and having an opinion on, other people doing the sex. Think of how much nicer the world would be if we didn’t think about other people having the sex – no homophobia, no slut shaming, no racial slurs, no shunning babies born out of wedlock, and so on.
And the articles encouraging me to open up discussions with my friends about their sex lives. No. If Jane goes into raptures about Bob’s ability to bring her to orgasm with a feather, the colour blue and a single finger I will never be able to sleep at their house without wondering if it was THIS pillow that he took the feather from. And I don’t need to know that. It’s not that it’s not an interesting tale because as far as I have been able to tell Bob is as dull as dishwater but I don’t NEED to know. I really don’t.
Nobody is having as much sex as they are supposed to be having. When they have young children even less than that. If they’ve had a good night’s sleep, caught up on their reading and brushed their teeth – maybe you can up the stats for the wedding anniversary. But basically who cares? If you have sex four times a day for the rest of your life – kudos for not having to take up running to improve your cardiovascular fitness but why are you telling me? Do you think I am only friends with you because you shag a lot? Do you really thinks that is the most interesting thing about you?
It’s not prudishness my friends – I am happy to have a full and frank conversation about bodies, good sex, bad sex, whatever – it’s just that I’m not judging you, or me, on how and when you get your shagging on and I do fundamentally object to the barrage of media telling me that this is another area which I am supposed to be competitive about.
I don’t care how many people you have slept with (if any), whether your orgasm is digital or clitoral or whether your collection of sex toys is more extensive than your library. For some of you I can guess and thats okay. I love you despite your lack of book learning.
So can we please just leave off the judgeypants behaviour around sexual activity. The mass hysteria about who slept with whom and where they put what bits. It makes me question what is lacking that so many people are so obsessed with other peoples sex lives. It’s a bit icky and a little bit weird.
Enjoy the sex. Use every position in the kama sutra, shag indoors, bang out doors, scream, whisper, tie yourselves up, use toys, do whatever you want. I get that the ride of your life didn’t happen at Movieworld.
I just don’t need the postcard. Thanks anyway.
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7 Nov 2014
Did you get a picture she asks cheekily?
It was a home invasion my friend, not a fucking date.
It sounds bad and my friends it was worse. I work from home and here I was sitting at my computer tippetty tappettying on my keyboard because I’m good like that, when I have to duck as a bird flew over my head and smack back into the window.
Having shat down the window there, it shot off entirely by chance into the bathroom where it flailed against the fly screen desperate to get out. Unable to get out, bouncing of screen and windows and mirrors and walls, it shat all over the room and then bounced down the walls to the main bedroom where it flew at full force into the window and temporarily stunned itself.
Shitting itself as it went down.
I race into the bathroom where gagging on the putrid stench of the results of vegetarian and worm diet I managed to wrestle the screen off the bathroom window, practically dislocating my wrist in the process, and desperately hoping the bird didn’t return for another go before I had a chance to move out of its way.
Because I can tell you people that birds shitting on you is not lucky. It’s bullshit made up to make you feel better about being the only unlucky bastard in a 100 kilometre radius to have a bird choose you to take a dump on.
Some days the saying goes, you are the pigeon and the others, the statue.
I sidle down the corridor to see what the bird is doing. It’s grown in size by this stage and is roughly the size and weight of an elephant but yet somehow still seems to manage to be lurking under our bed strutting the strut of the truly desperate.
It lurches up again, flies straight at me and then boomerangs straight back into the window.
I brace myself for an attack and jump onto my bed and launch myself onto the window sill where, balanced between bed and oblivion, I tear the screen out of the window frame caring not at all how I will reassemble it later, all before the bird rolls back on to its feet, shits and goes back under the bed.
I back over the bed, straight out to the door where I resolve to ignore the problem before it goes away. I’ve dismantled the house, dislocated limbs and I don’t want to play anymore. Occasionally the little bugger wanders up the corridor to have a look but keeps returning to the safety zone underneath my bed.
All goes quiet for a while and I assume I’ve won and that it flew out the open window without me noticing and so I email Nick to say the bird has gone. Just as I hit send, it launches up from under the bed up onto the air conditioning unit, onto the clothes horse and in one fluid movement, heads out the open, now screen less window, where it flies across the yard, perches on the frangi pangi tree and shouts abuse at me.
Which is fair because I have flung profanities at him as if he was Morrison himself.
I close the window of the bedroom, survey the floor and bed and curse Mother Nature and all her stupid birds. Donning hazmat levels of rubber gloves I go and throw out anything in the bathroom the bird shat on, spray bleach around with absolutely no regard for the environment and scrub down the bath, floor, windows and walls.
Then on my hands and knees I work my way up the corridor, scrubbing the carpet furiously and repeatedly. The bed is stripped and moved, a couple of missing toys located, carpet poured with the kind of liberal abandon I normally reserve for my wine and now I am sitting at my computer listening to a genius playlist based on the song “Birdhouse in my soul”.
This kind of shit NEVER happened when I worked for the man. Never.
Now, where was I?
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6 Nov 2014
If I didn’t have full confidence in the extremely good nature of my four year old Tully, I’d be pretty convinced at the moment my daughters are trying to get me publicly named and shamed as “Meanest Mum Ever”.
Imagine that you’re doing the patient but firm piece on your 2.5 year old at the shopping centre. For the purposes of this post, we’ll call this small person, Cassidy. She’s a cheeky, feisty little thing, far more articulate than many of the same age and with an attitude that Lilly Allen would envy. She is fierce about her independence but does absolutely prefer to be carried about rather than walk.
So here I am. I am telling her she has to walk. That she is big enough to hold my hand and use those two very adorable legs to propel herself in a forward motion. She disagrees. She’s throwing herself across my feet with the same determination Emily Davison stepped in front of the Kings Horse at Epsom Derby in 1913.
I get down low, look her in the eye and say to her “Cassidy. No. You are walking”.
Then I get up and take a few steps forward congratulating myself on having made myself clear as she is no longer crying. I turn to be encouraging and there is Tully, staggering along carrying her little sister in her arms, saying things soothingly such as “There, there little one, I’ll carry you, it’s okay, don’t be sad”.
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| It’s okay Mum. Sigh |
And where there was nobody, there is now a large assortment of ladies who probably went to school with Emily Davison herself gathered about watching Tully lurching along with Cassidy clinging to her as if her life depended on it, and yelling out “It’s okay Mum, I’ll carry her for you”.
I make some kind of comment that sounds lame even as I utter it, make Tully put Cassidy down and move away with two wailing children. One that wants to be carried and one that wants to be helpful.
Go to another day, Tully is sitting in the trolley waiting patiently while I crouch down next to Cassidy who is demonstrating her capacity to be sad. Very very sad apparently. Which is actually a fully blown tantrum because I have given her two options – walk or trolley – and she wants to be carried.
Down at her level I acknowledge verbally that I know she wants to be carried but that I have said ‘No’ and I definitely can’t change my mind now that she’s throwing a tantrum and so on and so forth and blah blah. I feel the look, glance up and am surrounded by a posse of cane toting venerably aged women asking in that deceptively calm way “All okay dear?”
Cassidy’s wails move up a notch to “Oh an audience, how delightful.”
Before I have a chance to say anything Tully breaks of the soothing sounds she’s making to her sister and pipes up with “Mummy’s making Cassidy sad again but it’s okay, she’s okay, aren’t you little one?”
Cheeses Tully. Really? Could you have made me sound ANY more in need of reporting to DOCS?
I explain what’s going on and we all smile and they move off, but not before one of them stars so hard at me she’ll be able to describe me to the police without a single error including, as I discover when I get home, that I was only wearing eyeliner on one eye.
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| Butter wouldn’t melt would it? |
So now I am nervously awaiting the third strike and avoiding groups of aged citizens. I can’t help but feel they are following me about waiting for yet another example of how I make small people cry and force other small people to act as pack horses in public places for my own deviant purposes whereas they will trip me with their canes and pin me to the floor until the police arrive.
What about you? Has the bond between your offspring portrayed you in a less than flattering light recently?
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