Beauty is as beauty does

30 May 2014

I have thought about this deeply and as objectively as possible.

And it’s not tall poppy syndrome.

But I really don’t think I’d warm to Miranda Kerr even if I shared an office with her.

And having read in more places than strictly necessary about her ability to orgasm in public places like planes or backstage both alone and in good company, I’d be wary about sharing an open plan office with her.

I definitely wouldn’t be shaking her hand.

See there’s a double standard that exists here – if Shane Warne talked openly about wanking in public places or at work, we’d all be ‘ewwwww icky’.  And then we’d talk about how men are generally gross.

But when Miranda Kerr does it, we’re all like that’s fine, how risque darlink.  Well most people.  I’m still not shaking her hand until I know she’s been to the washroom.

Just sayin’

I’m also not a fan of people that don’t own up to being genetically blessed.  She keeps banging on about how if I used her products and exercised twenty times a day, I’d look like her.  But that’s bull shit.  I’ve seen her Mum and her Nan, and my genetics don’t have that kind of tall and lithesome any place remotely recently so all the body cream and butt kicks aren’t going to change a thing.

She’s basically that colleague that turns up, sucks up, puts in the hard yards when management are looking, and spends the rest of the time telling you how you could be as good as her if you know, you were born her.

Frankly, she’s annoying.  Especially since she still hasn’t got the office manager’s name right even though she’s worked there for almost three years.

So when I read about that woman having plastic surgery to look like Miranda Kerr I felt completely baffled.  One that you’d do such a thing, but two – with so many beautiful, interesting, kind people in the world, why on earth would….?

Never mind.  I hope you love your new face lady.  And I hope you’ve got plenty of humour, courage and kindness to make that face truly beautiful.

    

I married an introvert

29 May 2014

I did.

lovers.

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My comfort zone does not contain ‘the moment’

28 May 2014

Babies are good at being ‘in the moment’

You know when somebody says ‘be in the moment’?

I rarely am.

There is always a little part of me that is watching me (normally with a sardonic expression on the face and a slight curl to the lip – something I can’t actually achieve in reality).

It’s because I’m incredibly self conscious.  Always have been.  Being in the moment is not my comfort zone.  No sirree.

So while I’m not big on being overly criticised, I’m not big on being overly praised.  I like a nice ‘well done’, ‘lovely’, or even a ‘you are the best’ and we can carry on.  I find any kind of extremism discomfiting but particularly when aimed at me.

So you know how I’m a long distance runner now?  No?  You must be new to the blog (cackles gleefully). I ran 23 kilometres last week to raise some money for cancer and couldn’t sit down unaided for about 48 hours.  And you can imagine how awkward that was as a) I was rehydrating and b) don’t have a penis.

Anyway, decided to use my health insurance and go and get a ‘remedial sports massage’.  First session – legs (pain free peeing – SUCCESS).  Second session – back – oohhhhhhhhh HEAVEN.

New masseuse.  She’s lovely.  And really incredibly good at the massage thing.  And the professional advice thing – you know the stretching, the epsom salts, the restarting the training (ha ha).

She’s also really nice and incredibly new age.  Like more than Bronwyn.  THAT new age.

She kept saying things like –

‘Honour your achievement with all your body’

‘I can feel your strength, focus in on how amazing you are’

‘Be in the moment, let go of the pain, hold onto your courage and commitment’

And so on.

I felt like a fraud.

I loved the massage, but I was seriously blushing.  “I ran for money. I bitched the whole time.  I’m still bitching.  And profaning.”  And she laughed and said something like “I see your spirit is modest”.

Bless.  No.  I’m an arse.

As she kept poking around in my back and I was thinking how amazing it was that somebody can push a muscle in your shoulder and you can feel a muscle relax in your foot, she encouraged me to breathe strongly like the warrior I was and will continue to be.

I accidentally snorted trying not to giggle and had to pretend I just needed a tissue.  Could I be any more infantile?

And you know, I am pleased with my achievement. I really am.  But lovely lady, when you massage that brilliantly, you don’t need to be nice.  I’m coming back anyway.  Though I may make up a story about tripping over an old lady so you think less of me.  Just to save you from being new age and lovely to the undeserving.

What about you?  Is there a type of encouraging speak which makes you twitch like a six year old boy just before bell rings?

    

From the cradle

27 May 2014

Over the last week I was involved in two conversations with people that said that they don’t think it’s fair that children are taken along, or feature in photos or campaigns, that represent their parent’s beliefs.

The two people involved are chalk and cheese and separated by about 30 years of age.  But they were in full agreement – “Those poor children don’t know what they are getting involved in. It’s disgusting.” (Both times in reference to the children featuring in that very funny video by Elena titled ‘These are a few of Tony’s favourite fibs” – a Sound of Music parody – do watch it, it’s very clever)

But I’ve been thinking about it – because our children come with us to things that I know both these people don’t approve of really – and so there is an element of my choices being criticised, however obliquely.  Which does get one to thinking. Which is never a bad thing.

And I’ve concluded that they are right.

No.  The children don’t know.  But eventually they will.  And that’s the point.

Generally, children are being exposed to things that their parents believe in or are passionate about. Right from the cradle.  And that’s what parenting is about – guiding our children down roads we think are right for them.

In our case, our children come with us to march in support of marriage equality, human rights, protest poor government choices, and rally in support of asylum seekers and refugees.  I have used their photos online to support #kidslikemine.  They come to cancer fundraising events, miracle baby events, other events for ’causes’, watched me run, stuck coins in collection buckets, worn rubber bands on their wrists and once, even got to meet Peppa Pig.

Why?  Because my kids are born lucky and I also think it’s important for them to see us actively supporting issues we care about.  Change doesn’t happen through apathy and I don’t want my girls growing up thinking that life is awesome for everybody.  If people don’t care, actively care, nothing changes.

And that is something both their father and I agree on wholeheartedly.  

See.  Told you.

Others take them to the football and indoctrinate them with a fervent and inexplicable passion for (searches brain for suitable reference), Collingwood.  And people spend thousands over a lifetime on jerseys and memberships and scarves and hats and things.  Parents feel physically gutted if their child changes allegiance as they grow older.  Let alone changing codes.  Grown men cry over football.  Completely inexplicably to me – football matters.

I know it’s a touchy one folks, but religion – including atheism.  Generally we get them christened, communed and confirmed, bar mitzvahed, hijabed, pledged, etcetera, all before adulthood. It’s not right, it’s not wrong.  It’s an example of parents demonstrating their beliefs and passions to their children because they believe it is the right thing to do and they believe it will benefit their child in a lot of awesome ways.

Politics.  People line up for hours to have their babies kissed by politicians.  Those babies don’t know any better.  Does being kissed by Tony Abbott preclude you from growing up some kind of bolshie leftie?  Who knows?  But still, while we might think “Ew, poor mite being kissed by Tony”, we’re not thinking “What terrible parents.”  Because they’re not.

Because generally people are doing the things that they believe are best for their children.  Yes it means that some people are brought up being complete arses, who are so proud of being arses they will bring their hating to every conversation on every public forum in the world (looking at you my dear bigoted Mr Heinrich Schmidt and the completely cray cray Conchita of Canberra).

I can do everything I can to bring my children up the way I think is right, but eventually, they’re going to use their bright minds and the influences of the world around them to make their own decisions.

You know something, they might even turn into people that follow football.  And I’ll still love them.  Probably.

    

Inspiration by Goat #Laughlink

25 May 2014

In the dark of the pre-dawn this morning I awoke with a BOOM and thought that is the BEST idea for a funny blog post I have had in a long time.  And I typed into my phone ‘goat’.

And then proceeded to have an extremely bizarre dream about a friend of mine proposing to his girlfriend by tying the ring to a goat.

But I don’t remember what the post was going to be about.  GOAT!  What the f**k could I possibly have felt so inspired about that I wrote the word goat?

“I is goat. Goat I is”

I don’t have a lot of goat stories. I recently went to Goat Island for the first time but a man had a heart attack during our visit so it wasn’t exactly laugh a minute.

A friend of mine used to have a three legged goat in his backyard as a pet but I think that goat was a rescue animal so it’s more awwww sweet, than joke material.  Plus it was in the 80s.

And another friend of mine once got backed into an electric fence by a goat she was trying to inject with antibiotics, which resulted in her accidentally shooting the goat’s antibiotics into the air and then they splashed into her own mouth.

And that was funny, but only because I was watching at the time and it was pure slapstick comedy.

Until we had to ring the poisons hotline and find out what to do if you swallow goat medicine. Actually, I was still giggling then but in a caring look at me I’ve rung the poison hotline kind of way.

I’ve also watched that movie ‘Men who stare at goats’ but I think that was about Iraq and I don’t have any jokes about Iraqi goats in my repertoire.  Well unless I thought of one during the night but that seems a bit of a stretch that even my slightly odd subconscious was sitting on a cracker of a joke about Iraqi goats.

So since I have got nothing funny to write about goats, definitely not a blog post – I’m just going to share these three goat jokes I found by googling ‘goat jokes’.

What do you call an unemployed goat? 

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I’d biddy biddy bum

22 May 2014

What does the dream look like for me?  If I was so fabulously wealthy that money really became no object what would I do?  How would I know I was ‘living the dream’?

Would I build a dinosaur park?  Buy private planes? Drop cash from helicopters? Give a scholarship to the Prime Minister’s daughter?  Splash out on a wardrobe of designer clothes?

I was pondering this in the early hours of the morning today during my regular pre-dawn random insomniac hour where I wake up and spend time uselessly focussed on the most obscure things.

And I know exactly what would define my new life as ‘wealthy’.

I’d have a full time cook or two.  Somebody or bodies (I mean people need a life I don’t mind them job sharing because I’m super wealthy now and can afford to be magnanimous to the little people) to plan the food for this family and do the cooking.

Image credit

I have a theory in life that happy couples consist of somebody with a passion for cooking hooking up with somebody who doesn’t give a rats bottom.  However, neither Nick or I care much for cooking and so we cook what we need to, in as few pans as possible, as quickly as possible so we can get it over and done with and get on with life.

Rest assured we’re happy but imagine how much happier we’d be if we never had to think about what we ate, we just ate!  It would be utopia.

Not for us this hours of time in the kitchen, sampling recipes and lovingly dabbing flour on each other’s noses.  We’re more – what can be done with half a cucumber, some cold sausages, tinned soup and left over Easter egg?

Shows like Masterchef or My Kitchen Rules or Jamie Oliver’s ten minute muffins bore us rigid.  The fact that people subscribe to cookery channels leaves us baffled.  Don’t be fooled here – we enjoy eating good food, well prepared and put together by somebody with half a clue, we just don’t like doing it ourselves.

So that would be living the dream.  Somebody to prepare yummy, nutritious food and just give it to us at the appropriate time.  Sometime that knew how to turn old bananas into banana bread rather than just buying the banana bread pan and putting it unused into the cupboard.  Somebody who loves to scour cookery books and take inspiration from them.  Somebody who would get a kick out of grating zucchini into a wet mess to stick into muffins so the children got their vegetable intake without knowing it.

Somebody that could identify quinoa and understands that caviar is only palatable with a spoonful of Vegemite on the same cracker.  Somebody that understands that we really don’t care what we eat as long as it’s yummy and caters for my ‘please make sure all animals are completely dead before you put them on my plate’ thing.  Somebody that could ensure I never had to touch raw chicken again.

That my friends is the dream.  My own personal chef/s.  I’ll even buy them the hat.

What would be the sign that you officially had too much money?