My dream for “them gay friends of mine”

4 Nov 2014

Dear “Them Gay Friends of Mine”

As a result of a video brought to my attention by Facebook and their algorithms which assess my interests, our sexuality and the wider world’s incessant obsession with dog memes, and then deliver highly targeted content to my feed, I found myself watching yet another obviously educated, well mannered child of same sex parents deliver an articulate, well reasoned argument for equal rights for their beloved (in this case) mamas.

And I realised this is my dream for you.

I dream of a world where when you mention you have a child people don’t feel they need to ask how you conceived it.  Because it’s icky and none of their business.

I dream of a world where nobody assumes that the parent that didn’t bear the child loves them a little less.  My man did none of the heavy lifting during our pregnancies (and still hears about it) and nobody ever asks him this particularly stupid question.

I dream of a world where gay parents can raise badly dressed children and people aren’t surprised.

I dream of a world where your children can be gay and people don’t assume it’s because you’re gay.

I dream of a world where children play mum and mum and baby and nobody says “you can’t have two mums” (or dads – whatevs)

I dream of a world where you can raise stupid children, even really stupid children, and it’s not a reflection on who you choose to love.

I dream of a world where your 15 year old can grunt their way through adolescence without ever feeling obligated to tell the world that you are decent parents. Or even notice that they have parents.

I dream of a world where your children can grow up to be right wing fascist arseholes and everybody will just assume you parented badly rather than parented gayly.

Basically, I dream of a world where nobody gives a flying football whether or not you are gay, and judge with the same three criteria they judge straight parents:

Did you ever allow your child to drink from anything that was not a breast?
Yes?
SHITTY PARENT

Did you allow your children to eat chocolate before graduating university?
Yes?
BAD BAD PARENT

Did you spell your child’s phonetically rather than properly?
Yes?
Well you deserve EVERYTHING they say about you.  Have some standards people!

That my friends is the dream.  I’m practically Luther King I know.

All my love
The lady with ‘them gay friends’
xoxo

    

Tasmania – Dudes. Really?

28 Oct 2014

I have a couple of friends who have recently moved to Tasmania and have since started a fairly insistent campaign that we all abandon life in Sydney and follow them to the wee town of Hobart.

Parts of it sound lovely.  The cost of rent, the sparkling bays, the lack of peak hour traffic.

But dudes.  Jacqui Lambie.

When she announced to the world she was looking for a guy with a lot of money and *ahem* a decent package – I was fine with it.  Sure it was inappropriate but we’ve all said dumb things occasionally.

But she just doesn’t bloody stop.

She stood up yesterday and tried to ban the burqa and when she was challenged on the grounds that she was introducing a draft law that discriminated on the basis of religion she said no she wasn’t, the burqa was just worn to show that they were Muslims and nothing to do with religion.

I couldn’t make it up.

The thing I fail to understand is how Tasmania can produce Bob Brown and then follow it up with Jacqui Lambie?  I know there are other politicians in Tasmania but I am assuming you hear nothing from them because they are trying to work out how to sever the mooring ropes between Tasmania and the mainland while Jacqui is visiting Parliament.

I know I KNOW it shouldn’t get personal and that we should refute reasoned political suggestions with articulate and well formulated rebuttals that demonstrate why you have an opposing view but she says things so gob smackingly incorrect (and in no way reasoned or reasonable) that all I can think of to say is “You can’t be fucking serious?”

But she is.

Which makes me weep for Tasmania and all represented by her.
 

    

Ten tips to be as awesome as us!

27 Oct 2014

You know something people – I just had a huge weekend that followed an epic couple of weeks.  

Because parenting is so fucking glamorous.

But as family units go – our little team of four is tracking okay.  In fact, no. We’re more than okay – we’re awesome.  And this morning I’m owning that because being awesome takes effort – you’ve got to be committed people. Awesome doesn’t happen accidentally.  You’ve got to practice and practice some more. 

1. We like each other and we don’t care who knows it. 
2. We have legitimately got to the point where we don’t give a shit if the way we do family isn’t to the liking of others.  
3. We do things.  We even do things we don’t think we’ll enjoy sometimes just to be sure.
4. We like other people. Like genuinely.  
5. We don’t have secrets. Well apart from gifts and the like.  Because everybody loves unwrapping presents.
6. We do mad.  But we don’t do grudges.  
7. We talk.  About everything.  
8. We can say sorry.  And we do. 
9. We are proactively positive. Sometimes we’re are even proactively positively awful. 
10. We surround ourselves with positive people who are all kinds of fabulous.  No space for h8ers. None.

And I’ll give you an 11 for free.  We fuck up occasionally and we own it.  Awesome doesn’t come from cracking some special code.  It comes from living as authentically as you can and being prepared to change direction if it’s not working out for people. 

So there is our version of awesome.  What about you?  What does awesome look like in your little bit of the universe?

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Don’t forget to follow Talking Frankly on the social medias

    

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WP .COM

Wanted: Lesbian Step-Mum Support Group

19 Oct 2014

If you’re living life in the mainstream, there are support groups for pretty much anything.  Like anything.

Live in Hobart and have children?  There’s a group!
Single Mum in Cambodia that only speaks Dutch? There’s a group!
Monster truck fanatics in Malaysia? There’s a group!
Depressed? What type? There’s a group!
Did a thermomix ruin your marriage? There’s a group! (No really – there’s a group)

But try and live slightly outside the box and you’re screwed! You’re doing it on your own.

Where is the support group for Lesbian Step-Mums in semi-rural Western Sydney? Not a one that I can find?

What about the group for people that don’t play golf but want to get a promotion in a big multi-national?  Nothing. It’s play golf or quit!

What about stay at home dads with a passion for lip-synching 80s music? Nothing.  It’s lonely out there.

And don’t scoff.  There are mainstream organisations that are heading towards support group status. Attendance at church is dropping.  You might be going to mass weekly at the moment but it’s a short trip from there to meeting in former churches as a founding member of The People Who Still Believe In God Group.

Members of Hillsong will join The Former X-Factor Voters Group and with all the Football players swapping codes we will shortly be in need of a People Who Don’t Know Which Code They Follow Group.  There will be support available for People Who Thought Climate Change Was A Joke in a group and a huge influx of membership for People Who Read Miranda Devine’s Columns On Purpose And Feel Dirty Groups right across the nation.

And what about a group for People Who Have Listened To Trance While Not High And Are Now In Mourning? People That Took Kale Too Seriously? People That Just Don’t Know What To With Themselves?  There are niche groups for everything.

I personally need a support group for People Who Learned To Touch Type On A Typewriter Back In The 80s And Are Now Finding It Hard To Let Go Of Two Spaces After A Full Stop.  I tell you – it’s killing me finding out that I’m showing my age because I learnt to type back when sentences had a structure.  I KNOW RIGHT?  Feel for me.

It’s nice to find your community – a little group of people that understand you and your experience – no matter how unfamiliar it may be to some.  Tribe matters.  No matter how awesome our touch typing speed is or how we came to be parenting small people.

So if you do know of a nice group of Lesbian Step-Mums – do let me know.  I know a lovely Lesbian Step-Mum who started this particular musing by yelling down the phone to me “AM I ASKING TOO MUCH WHEN I SAY I JUST WANT A SUPPORT GROUP FOR LESBIAN STEP-MUMS? AM I?

No my dear girl. You’re not.  Got your back here.

    

An open letter to Russell Brand

17 Oct 2014

Dear Russell Brand

I am a fan.  Particularly of your vocabulary.  And I envy your ability to articulate ideas and concepts using words that flesh out the meaning of each sentence, so that you can literally roll the idea around in your mouth and taste it’s flavour.

I love that you challenge ideas and constructs that seem immovable and inevitable.  I like that you own your own humanity while campaigning for wider acceptance of the human condition in all its chaos.  I’m pleased that you only have one outfit in the world apparently and yet you still remember to clean your teeth.

But Johnny Rotten is right.  The right to vote should not be ignored or done from a position of ignorance.  Now, more than ever, every single individual has access to information, ideologies and discussions that can help us form our own opinions and view points.

If you take your rights for granted, they become eroded and lose meaning.  They will be taken away and you won’t even know you have lost them.  If you take no active part in the governing of your country, the policies of the country you call home, or use the channels available to you to protest what is ignored or mishandled – then you are culpable.

Revolution is not just the shouting and looting and metaphorical beheading of those that represent the system.  Revolution has to be a commitment to reform, to active citizenship, to responsibility.  It means voting and working and taxes and allowing people to be complete numpties.  But not voting them in hopefully.

Revolution is about recognising that our best interests are not served by decimation of the environment, cuts to welfare for the elderly, a lack of investment in education or a flouting of our obligations to people’s human rights.  Revolution is actually about citizen power.  Revolution is about our citizens demanding that our governments speak on our behalf and not on the behalf of corporations that already make profit that would wipe out debt in third world countries.

Revolution is not no ties and more cake for all.  Revolution is the righteous actions of people that have allowed themselves to be the fall guy for bad decisions.  “We have a public mandate” generally means “nobody gives a shit so we’ll do what we want.”  There are over seven billion people in the world.  We need a system.

Voting. Taxes. Jobs.  All those boring things are essential for the revolution because even the first world economies with their ‘rights’ have had them less than a century.  Less than half a century depending on gender and skin tone.  Still haven’t got them depending on sexuality.  Too many of the third world countries have never ever had ‘rights’.  Yet like those that have never experienced a world without vaccinations and so don’t vaccinate because they’re idiots, we discard our responsibilities and obligations as citizens when we don’t vote and/or claim “they are all the same”.

If “they” are all the same – “we” did it. Apathy, the discarding of our responsibilities because there are other people that can do it, causes decay.  Governments don’t go from awesome to crapola overnight – it’s an insidious decline made possible by the people that vote them in and then don’t challenge them, don’t use their hard won rights, to be proactive in the formation of their own future.  “They” are the problem.

Revolution comes with responsibility Mr Brand.  Perhaps add that to the soundbites being frantically retweeted by those that who don’t yet know what they don’t know.  You have no rights if you don’t use the ones that have been hard fought and won for you by those long dead.

Agreed?  PS: Who is paying for the cake?

Much love
Fangirl Al xx

    

Vaguebookers Verboten

12 Oct 2014

“FML”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Worst day ever”

“And there ends another chapter. Will I ever learn?”

“OMG – the best. So spoilt. So loved.”

If any of these statements make you want to reach into the computer and punch it in the throat you’re not alone.  Vaguebooking – which is basically the act of posting something random so people interact with you on Facebook – is the kind of passive aggressive bullshit which probably lost you friends in the first place.

These status updates generally say the following to me:

“You have a cold”

“You’re watching the Bachelor and thought Lisa was going to win”

“Your sports team lost”

“You just dumped a perfectly decent woman who stayed with you way too long to put up with your neurotic bollocks and want me to sympathise with you being a complete numpty”

“You finally got a boyfriend and he paid for your entire Big Mac meal the big charmer”

If it’s not those things – you might need to write more.  Because regular Vaguebookers are a personality type identifiable in every social situation in the world and anybody with any social awareness can pick them a mile off and just refuse to engage.

Accidental Vaguebooking is allowed.  Normally done by good people who got distracted by a butterfly, Katter on Q&A or wine.  Accidental Vaguebooking is generally followed up thus in about ten seconds or following the first comment calling them out on their vagueness:

Status update 1: “Worst day ever”
Status update 2: “Ha sorry people – Worst day ever should have had a second sentence! Can’t believe the doggies lost.  I blame the beer”

If you need attention – just ask.  Most of your friends probably like you enough to come to the party. Try –

“I’m feeling particularly needy because it’s Saturday night, I’m home alone again while my stupid ex is off in Fiji with their new squeeze who is my sister – send love to me or wine. Either way, I want attention and I want it now”

And at the other end of the internet we can all think ‘Poor lass” and search for hitmen, funny memes and useful things to fill up your Facebook feed to distract you.  Because we get the need for attention – WE GET IT LADY.  We just don’t like being manipulated.

So it’s your civic duty people to call people on Vaguebooking.  Just comment “Vaguebooker!” and leave it there.  They have Google too, if by some remote chance they are unaware of their tendency to online manipulation, that one word should sort it nicely.  In the kind of passive aggressive way they are so bloody fond of already.

What violations of

online etiquette drive you bonkers?