9 May 2014
This week I have had the opportunity to get my head around the cost of sperm, trafficking of human tissue, the legal differences between jacking off in jars and donating body fluid, how a helicopter parent copes with the sensitive subject of toddlers double dipping, slapped cheek syndrome, the contrariness of the weather, heart attack vs indigestion, how you can tell whether or not you are dating somebody or in denial on the subject and last, but by no means least, where there ever goats on Goat Island?
How can you EVER run out of conversation? There are things to be talked about that you didn’t even know existed.
Lumbar punctures, friends that haven’t really quit smoking, Eurovision, the Packers, missing Irishmen, tall ships, ballet slippers, new staff members, MBTI, depression, managing behaviour, aspirational parenting, cancer research, parties, jigsaw puzzles, carbohydrates, missing Birkenstocks, broken toes, why submarines are scary, where is Cubby hiding, why do we have to wear underpants?
All these vastly interesting and varied topics to be discussed and I didn’t even have to ask questions sometimes, just listen. And the best bit is, when you ask questions – you learn new stuff.
This is why I am perplexed by people that don’t like meeting new people, or trying new things. Why would you choose to have the same conversation ad nauseum when you can say ‘Hey, lovely to meet you, so explain to me why you didn’t just say that kale is cabbage?
Because if people knew that – they wouldn’t eat it. The only people that ever liked cabbage were the Russians and that was only after they mixed it with beetroot and cream. Mmmmmm…. borscht.
I digress.
I met somebody for the second time last week and they said one of the nicest things to me that anybody has said this year. And they weren’t even trying to be nice. We had a great, well rounded conversation, but one casual sentence put me on cloud nine and we weren’t even talking about me when it happened. Conversation.
Words. Ideas. Beauty, Power.
Conversations.
They shape our world, change our world, make our world. I heart them.
Start one today. And revel in what you don’t know you don’t know. And don’t be ashamed to ask. Because sperm costs less than you’d think. Before import fees. And then Ouch!
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Because I can. And you should. There are some amazing writers out there.
7 May 2014
So just to recap – two blokes have a fight over a girl. Front page news instantly. Murdoch paid $200,000 for the photos. Yes. That much. The NT news yes, had the funniest headline. It often does.
Over 200 girls go missing in Nigeria and it took weeks for anybody to say anything in the mainstream media. It’s still not front page news. 234 brazenly kidnapped and now the gun toting dicks that took them are threatening to sell them. Because God said so.
Just because God said so is fast becoming one of the stupidest reasons anybody does anything. And I mean no disrepect to any religion there. It’s just that all religions agree the big guy gave everybody free will as well, which means you’ve got to come up with a better reason for being a class A dick than blaming somebody that not everybody agrees on.
Especially when it means that we dismissed the abduction of those girls as ‘not our problem’, ‘its them Muslims being daft again’, ‘oh well, you know – it’s Africa’. And I’m genuinely paraphrasing idiots who have put those sentiments onto comments pages.
Do I need to give you my ‘lucky sperm’ rant again? We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars helping look for a plane with the same amount of people on it. Who decides which people we will look for? Is it as simple as we’ve got no time for girls, blacks and muslims? Is it? I don’t know? Because if we have the resources to commit to looking for weapons of mass destruction we knew weren’t there, why can’t we wander along and look for some girls we know were?
And the people that took them aren’t warriors, or militants, or anything else but thugs with guns. I know we can’t just ride on in to third world countries and go shooting people (Oh, except, how embarrassing – now that America suggests it, seems like a great idea), but we could have at least been joining the growing chorus of voices, of those of us with small names, those with big names that said, “OI, Nigeria – that totally sucks, HOW CAN WE HELP?”
Because if people don’t do anything, people think they can get away with everything. And in the meantime, there are over 200 families with broken hearts, absolutely terrified not only of not seeing their daughters again, but worrying about what is happening to them right now. When they’re not dead.
It might not be much, but you can send your support to those families and those girls by making sure they get as much coverage on your facebook page and twitter streams as do the pictures of cats or that irritating smug video saying ‘Look up’. Fine. ‘Look up’, but first, demonstrate your support by sharing the story, signing the petitions and using the # button. A lot.
No, we can’t fix it. We can’t. But we can care and when each individual takes the time to demand action, we are demonstrating that they are not alone. And that Nigeria, we do care what happens to your girls. And we do want you to do something. We do want you to ask for help if you need it.
And we can use the glorious, reckless power of our social media streams to demonstrate that stories like this are more fascinating, more important to us, than two idiots brawling in the street.
#bringbackourgirls
6 May 2014
I’m grateful for a lot of things.
I really, truly am.
I could list them. But that would use up several posts worth of material and no blogger ever wants to do that.
But I’m not grateful all the time.
I’m willing to bet money I’ve never been grateful 100 days in a row. Oh don’t scoff. Bet you haven’t either despite all your best efforts.
Sometimes, it’s true, that despite trying to live mindfully, we live mindlessly.
An (obviously rare right sweetheart?) example is I get cross at my husband because he leaves lights on all over the house like we are some kind of all year round Christmas display, rather than being grateful that he’s just tidied the house that our children just trashed.
And I don’t feel grateful that he doesn’t mention it, I just get crosser that he’s being such a smug bastard and all holier than thou, like I never do anything around the house. I mean I run our lives, make the world turn and make sense of the universe every single minute of every single day, why is he just sitting there huffing at me like I’m the unreasonable one?
Then I get on Facebook and somebody has posted, ‘Here is an autumn leaf #100daysgrateful for the seasons.’ And I’m all – a leaf? I know you girlfriend and the only time you’ve ever noticed nature was when you accidentally stepped in dog shit. A leaf! You’re making up gratitude you turkey. What about being grateful for the trillion dollar boots your sugar daddy bought you but now you never wear because you once stepped in dog shit!!!!!! A leaf? Bah!
(And no, as I recall I wasn’t even grateful that mind reading has not been invented though my beautiful man was probably VERY grateful that something had distracted me from being cross at him – it’s okay people.)
And this inability to be grateful all the time, contrary to popular belief, does not make you a bad person. Nobody is grateful all the time. Life happens and we just get on with the business of living and sometimes that means that we are unreasonably cross or even just out of sorts for a short while.
This doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful, or lack perception, or permanently an arse. It means you’ve had a bad day, perhaps not got a lot of sleep or maybe just maybe, you’ve got other stuff going on which you can’t talk about, so you’re not feeling like appreciating whatever is actually the splendiferous part of your life. Or autumn leaves.
And own that people. If we were grateful all the time, we’d be smug and dimensionless and we would have no friends. No friends at all. Because everybody secretly hates good people. They make us feel bad. Which is why I don’t like most of my friends actually. Because I dislike good people and beautiful people and yet all my friends are one or both. Hmmm. And occasionally they uncharacteristically post autumn leaves. Conundrum.
Anway, like a lot of people, sometimes all I want is to be left alone to be shitty and unreasonable. Or more truthfully, sometimes I want an audience for shitty and unreasonable and unfortunately for my husband sometimes he’s the only audience I can locate at the precise time of meltdown. And I’m not the only person. Lots of people forget to be mindfully grateful every minute of every day. And lots of us have chosen life partners with a stupid amount of patience.
Gratitude is awesome. It is. We should be. Much more than we are probably. And it’s good to try. And it is really quite sweet at some levels that people look so hard for something in their first world lives to be grateful for for such a concerted amount of time. But for the rest of us, it’s absolutely perfectly okay to take part in #100daysofbeinggratefuleverysecondorthirdday.
People that know you love you any way and the others can kiss their autumn leaves.
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Grateful to Essentially Jess for the opportunity to link up today with
#IBOT
5 May 2014
Stop right there.
Thank you very much.
If you have ever blamed your lack of sleep on the snoring of your partner/child/housemate/dog raise your hand.
Ooooh. Lots of hands.
The guttural vibrations of the respiratory system are not the reason you can’t sleep – it’s because you’re crap at sleeping. People that sleep properly are fully immersed in dreamland, hearing nothing but the terrified shrieks in their never ending nightmares involving elephants in pyjamas or the soft lilting of Taylor Swift in their happy ever after dream of Ryan Gosling.
 |
| Ahhhh… the sound of LIFE |
Proper sleepers aren’t bitching about the life affirming grunts and snorts coming from the other side of the bed, or through the wall, or from the other end of the campsite. Proper sleepers are sleeping.
And we all know that the only people who are bad at sleeping are those with guilty consciences. Whether it’s Catholic guilt, High Anglican stoicism or Atheist panic, it chisels away at night time serenity, leaving the poor at sleeping cranky and unable to accept responsibility for their inability to master this most basic of functions.
They lie there gritting their teeth, knowing that they would be younger, fitter, smarter, thinner, wealthier and generally happier if the snorer just stopped. Those that haven’t abandoned all hope of getting better at sleep will poke the person or shove them over until they lie on their sides, dulling the rhythmic roar to an irregular snuffle and taking that opportunity to enter the appropriate REM cycles.
Because everybody snores sometimes. Colds, booze, a funny sleeping position, a pea stuck up the nose that you haven’t yet discovered – anything can make somebody snore. But proper sleepers rejoice at these very real demonstrations of your life and vitality and close their eyes and wander off into the land of nod.
People that sleep, perchance to snore, really don’t give a rat’s bottom that you have been kept awake by their snoring. They pity your petty complaints and generally ignore your gnashing of teeth and renting of cloth because it’s not their fault you haven’t learned to sleep. They know that you are jealous of their well honed ability to sleep and then enjoy the next day, fully refreshed by the tantalising thread of a dream where they defeated the pyjama clad elephants while riding Ryan Gosling, or riding pyjama clad elephants with Ryan Gosling. They’re not quite sure, but it’s left them happy enough.
 |
Who knew that if you googled Ryan Gosling Elephant you
would find a picture of Ryan Gosling Rhino |
So bottle up your bitching poor sleepers. Go practice the art. Close your eyes, close your ears and if the sound of your partner reaches levels which allows the neighbours to put in a formal noise complaint, you won’t care.
Because you’ll be asleep.
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1 May 2014
I really miss reading. Before I had my beautiful girls, I’d read 11-13 books a fortnight. Good books, bad books, long books, short books, brilliant books. I love to read. Always have. I read quickly. Always have. Buy them. Borrow them. Beg them. Whatever I had to do to have a book on the go was done.
I was a torch under the bed covers kind of kid. I was a read until I fell asleep kind of young adult. I read on public transport. I read on holidays. I read on planes. In cars. In cafes. On beaches. On walls. In parks.
I read when I was happy. I read when I was sad. I read to occupy myself if I went to dinner alone. Or with a glass of wine on a Sunday afternoon in a chair in the sun. Sometimes I would be so enamoured of a book, I would read it at lunchtimes claiming I was having ‘lunch’ with somebody. Well I was kind of.
When I went overseas in 2002, I put around 52 boxes of books in storage. I culled ruthlessly about18 months ago by donating them to a charity because we were about to move again and my book habit and our CD habit was fighting for wall space, but I kept the nucleus of each reading stage. The biographies, the crime, the chick-lit, the study, the travel, the children’s books, the satire, the funny, the dramatic, the history, the personal, the educational, the eye-opening, the inspirational, the photo-essays, all of them. So many different genres representing different fascinations at different stages of my life.
I sit here in my office and I’m surrounded by book shelves. My daughters rooms have bookshelves stacked high too. It fills me with a heart thumping joy that they too love reading. I hope they don’t lose that.
I have a kindle. It’s practical especially now when minimising the amount of crap I haul around in my handbag is important. But I still buy paper versions of the books I loved best. Books make me feel good. I like to be surrounded by the knowledge, by all those words put together in so many different ways to tell so many brilliant stories.
I like the emotions stories evoke. I like the way even an innocuous light hearted story can make you think. Start a thought process which will spiral onwards, impacting you in a genuine way. I like to revisit favourites. I’m hopeless at remembering titles, but brilliant at what the book looks like. Better at authors generally than titles too strangely. I love the way a well written book nudges the imagination, allowing you to colour the characters, the scenery, the times in a way that works for you. I love the space that reading gives you to visualise people and times that you don’t experience yourself.
But now, I don’t read as much as I did. It feels selfish right now, smacks of stolen time when I could be, should be, doing more important things. I read sometimes, furtively, quickly. And I look forward to when reading doesn’t look like an invitation for somebody to say “what are you doing?” or “Mama, can I have a biscuit please?” or that little voice in my head insisting “not time for dilly dallying – there’s STUFF to do”.
Books will wait for me, I know. And in the meantime, I write my lists of books to read and fit it in when I can. I fill in my obsession with words with newspapers, magazines in doctor’s surgeries, blogs, favourite websites. I scrawl the names of books I need to come back to in diaries, on business cards, on old receipts. I wonder what the title might have been that I saved in notes before autocorrect kicked in. Curse myself for the haste.
And sometimes, I just get a book and read. Because I want to read.
Is reading one of your favourite things to do?
Or are you the kind of person that prefers your stimulation visual?
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Liking up with the incredibly beautiful and bighearted
With Some Grace for #FYBF
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30 Apr 2014
Whether you’ve been responsible for a child, a dog or a fish, you know that naming it is basically the biggest challenge you are ever going to have in your life.
Get it wrong and your child will hate you and the internet will mock you mercilessly for a thousand years.
Get it right, the pressure is on for the next one.
Obviously people have very different ideas about what is right or wrong when it comes to naming children. I suspect that Katie Price (she of the breasts and persona named Jordan) and I are probably not on the same page when it comes to this discussion.
Since the last few years have seen Prime Ministers and Presidents with names like Kevin and Obama, I think the old ‘is it suitable for office’ argument is long dead.
And if you’ve got a surname which draws attention to itself all on it’s own you have a separate set of challenges to ensure that any therapy the child needs in later life is not because of what you named them.
Throw in making sure it doesn’t rhyme with any word associated with ‘faeces’ for their primary school years, any adaptations which sound like or rhyme with sexually transmitted diseases for their high school years – and you’re half way there.
If there are cultural elements at play, that’s another challenge and then consider the biases of your parents, your partner’s parents, grandparents, friends, strangers and “name nazis” such as myself. It’s fraught. It’s dangerous. It’s without a doubt much harder than the following 18 years of child raising. But a little less painful than childbirth.
Once you’ve named them, hopefully without mangling the perfectly acceptable John into an inferno of tangled vowels and consonants so he has a unique name, you spend the next gazillion years repeating it so people understand it.
Even John.
My name is John. Joe? No, John? Lovely to meet you Sean.
I’ve recently been introducing my daughters’ a lot to new friends and parents at their new child care so there is a lot of this…..
Her name is Tully. Tahlia? No, Tully. Tilly? No, Tully. Sally?
Her name is Cassidy. Cassandra? No, Cassidy. Lassie?. No, Cassidy. Tracey?
Be thankful I don’t mention their middle names as part of routine introduction. (What is what that emerging trend by the way? – I have enough time remembering my daughters’ friends’ first names without trying to remember their second ones)
Like everybody in the world, we went through thousands of billions of names before settling on the final ones. Even with Nick being English and me being Australian there were cultural prejudices and concerns to navigate. And I didn’t want a name in the top 1000 (I may have had to get less dictatorial as time went on…. blush) or with a horrid meaning. Did you know Cameron for instance means ‘broken nose’ and Kennedy means ‘ugly head’. Those Scots eh?
So many names sound gorgeous when articulated, but mean things like “mother’s lament”, “sorrow of the father”, “destroyer of families”. And personally, whenever I tried pronouncing anything Japanese – they have some amazingly beautiful and great meaning names – I sounded like I was saying ‘cake’ but with some kind of speech impediment.
But we managed it. Two little girls with unisex Gaelic first names and female Gaelic second names. We can say it’s a nod to my Irish heritage but basically Gaelic or German works best for the naturally guttural like myself and Nick was prepared to agree to anything just so we never had to have another discussion about it again.
So we ended up with Tully Niamh (rhymes with Steve) and Cassidy Maeve (rhymes with Dave).
Tully means ‘of a peaceful and powerful nature’, Niamh means ‘bright and beautiful’, Cassidy means ‘clever’ and Maeve means ‘she who intoxicates or brings great joy’.
Basically, we nailed it.
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