11 Apr 2014
I invented a highly scientific acronym known as GAFF. GAFF ratings range from 1 (being low) to 10 (being high).
The methodology is highly subjective. Highly.
GAFF stands for your ‘Give a f**k factor’. It is variable and completely dependent on topic, sleep patterns, people involved, time of day, hunger levels and so on. It is also transient. And can move from low to high in a matter of moments.
For instance – house a pigsty, needs a tidy – Meh (1). People coming over – Hmmm (4). My highly housework obsessive mother or sister are coming to visit – Arrrrgh – HOUSE CLEAN MUST BE DONE RIGHT NOW (10).
Or – house a pigsty, needs a tidy – Meh (1). Urgent deadline for work – Arrrrrgh – HOUSE CLEAN MUST BE DONE RIGHT NOW (10)
I jest but GAFFs are a highly contentious element of every day interactions. They are the things that lead us to judge ourselves, each other, complete strangers.
Your GAFF can make or break a relationship if it remains non-compatible with your partner’s GAFF. It can cause intense frustration at work. It is responsible for road rage. Queue rage. Indignant rants on Mummamia posts about the mother who fed her baby with a bottle without publicly outing herself as a bad parent. Your GAFF allows you to pour that glass of wine and watch the TV even though you know you probably have something more important to do.
Your GAFF contributes to your empathy levels. Your sympathy levels. Your performance. Your achievements. Your complete inability to ever master the art of cooking. It differentiates the Block fans from the MKR fans from the people that don’t watch either. Some people have incredibly high GAFFs for personal appearance. Fashion. Possessions. Others find their highest GAFFs centre on sports, art, film, changing the world.
The diversity of GAFFs is incredibly important. It is what makes life interesting. But it is equally important to recognise their changeability. Today’s GAFF might be completely different from tomorrow’s. This years GAFFs unrecognisable next. And that is the glory of the GAFF.
So be not afraid people to use it. If somebody is disagreeing with you on a topic – say to them “I recognise you have a GAFF 9 on this, but I’ve only got a GAFF 3, maybe 4, let’s revisit it later or even just agree to disagree”
And because it’s scientific – they can’t argue with it. It magically diffuses the tension and your world remains a place of love and understanding.
Unless they are evangelical creationists or Andrew Bolt, in which case my friends, you’re on your own.
Linking up today people with the delightful Ms Grace
9 Apr 2014
Turns out I am the worst in the world at doing a weekly Run Diary.
We are now six weeks out from the Great Ocean Road Ultra Half Marathon. 23 kilometres of up, up, up, down, up, down, up, down, level.
A few weeks ago I ran 12.5 kilometres and was so chuffed with myself for breaking the mental barrier of ‘half the half’ and yet nobody pointed out to me until I crossed the finish line that my maths was fundamentally flawed and I could have turned around at 11.5 kilometres to achieve that same mental breakthrough.
Cheeky bastards.
And now I’ve run 14 kilometres. And ran all the way. I’m experimenting with gels and honey shots and water loading and breakfast types in a way which makes me feel that I should have tried party drugs when I was younger, because if the rumours are true, a dose of ecstasy would be the best of all things to keep me running for the entire 23 kilometres.
Because nothing is worse than wondering if it’s gas or something more as you shuffle forward like a lecherous old man with an attractive nurse in his sights, miles from any kind of acceptable toileting system. So far, unattractively, it’s only been gas, but I’ve heard the stories about when it’s not. And I only have one pair of running pants – I can’t afford to go down that path.
This weekend just gone I did the Lindfield Fun Run. It wasn’t the easiest run but ultimately, depending on how fast you ran, it was just 30-90 minutes of running up extremely steep hills and swearing a lot. Which doesn’t really equate to the hardships endured by Shackleton and his mob as they plodded towards whichever Pole it was. Though, they probably went faster. Even when they got stuck in the ice.
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The best looking of my running group
(it’s okay nobody reads my blog – they’ll never know I said this) |
Our coach Christie is a professional athlete. This means she gets paid to exercise and people give her pants to wear so if she does ever discover that it’s more than gas, she has a spare pair of pants. The downside is she has to take exercise seriously every day and be mindful and healthy and all that kind of stuff constantly.
She’s been recovering from a ‘career impeding’ injury and just this weekend returned to professional competitions. She aced it of course (bar almost forgetting to actually cross the finish line) but I have noted that none of her thank you essays have included adequate homage to the power of profanity. I consider this a serious flaw in her coaching technique despite my overall admiration for her.
Positive mantras be damned. I run along thinking ‘Fuck cancer’, ‘Fuck cancer’, ‘Fuck cancer’.
Not because I’m noble. Not because I hate that it affects my friends and family. But mainly because if cancer didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have to fucking run.
That’s altruism for you.
So if you’re in Sydney this weekend, and you want to join me for a 16 kilometre run, I’m the chubby one at the back uttering profanities. Hopefully high.
7 Apr 2014
I was fifteen years old when the first of my friends died. We’d been friends since Year 7, were now in Year 11 and Jill had Cystic Fibrosis.When she passed, she’d just got her driver’s license and was terribly chuffed. When we talked about what would happen after college, she said she’d like to make 25, maybe get married and do some University.
The idea of Jill dying was something we were comfortable discussing even if we didn’t truly fathom what it would actually mean. When somebody lives with a terminal illness, there is no point in ignoring the impact is has on their lives – the frequent trips to hospital, the simple activities they can not participate in and the backpack of medications or equipment that needed to come everywhere with us.
The same night she died, a chap in the year below us hung himself. I didn’t know him, but others did. All I felt was internalised red hot rage at his selfishness. All Jill had wanted to do was live and he’d thrown his life away. I was grieving and I was angry. Not dissimilar emotions, but the intensity of my rage had no real outlet because I did not yet understand that it was possible to be sad and mad at the same time. And that I wasn’t only mad at him for dying. I was mad that Jill had died. It didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t. It never is.
Over the next seven years, I lost two friends to Muscular Dystrophy, a best friend’s new born to SIDS, two friends to suicide and a handful of relatives to old age. I’d made my peace with death, it comes to all of us, but I truly struggled to feel compassion for people that passed due to their own actions. Too many people, people who I knew and cared for, were desperate to live and I could not understand how people could be so careless with their own lives. In some way, it seemed disloyal to feel the same grief when death came in such different ways. It did not mean I did not grieve. I did. But I still did not have the words to articulate the conflict between rage and sorrow.
As a society we are not good at grief. We seek to contain it, to measure it, to judge it. We put time limits on how long grief is allowed to be manifested. We have a terrible habit of canonising people so that we gloss over their faults, turning them into smooth edged, dulled, icons who are one dimensional. The ability to create for instance, need not be deified where the artistic temperament (read moody bastard) behind is vilified. It is our dark and our light, our highs and our lows, our kindness and our cruelties that make us who we are. To deny the history of one who is passed, or to pretend the negatives never existed, is to deny the humanity of the person. For when they were alive you loved them in their totality, why would you only love half of them when they pass?
More friends have died in the last 18 years. More relatives. More babies. I had learnt by my mid-twenties that it was possible to be mad and sad at the same time. That I did not need to categorise my grief according to the manner of their passing. I have learnt that it is possible to be so low, so broken that death seems to be the only option and I have learnt to accept that hopelessness is not always visible on the outside. I have learnt that I can not fix the world or make it better just by believing it can happen. I have learnt that contrary to others opinion I did not need to wail in public, beat my chest or be the loudest about loving somebody to be genuinely grieving. People grieve in different ways and we all sorrow for what we have lost, the words unspoken and the future we will not share.
So as the media rabidly pull apart the tragedy that is Peaches Geldof’s premature death, I want all of us to remember that she was part of a family and a friendship circle that knew her. Really knew her. That we, the public, only knew of her. Let her family farewell her, lament her loss and let us not judge her passing, blame her genetics or criticise how they choose to celebrate her life. Let us remember that one day, we too shall pass, and all we can hope for is to have been loved for all that we are, the same way Peaches and all those that go before us were loved for what they were.
The good. The bad. The madness. The hilarity. The slightly illegal. The beautiful. For it is the combination of all those things that truly create the most poignant, the most beloved of our memories.
Go well Peaches. Go well.
*If you, or anybody you know needs help, please do not hesitate to call the fantastically supportive people at Lifeline on 13 11 14.
6 Apr 2014
My youngest gorgeous girl was very sick last Monday – the kind of sick where the doctor sends you to emergency because the fevers are high, the breathing is rapid, the child is non-responsive and the signs are all pointing to ‘not just a cold’. Which I really wanted it to be.
I’m okay in a proper parental panic situation. In fact, I probably err on the side of under-reacting. When the eldest child fell off her trike aged 16 months, striking her head and bleeding out of her mouth, losing teeth – I worried about going to the hospital in case it wasn’t ‘that serious’. It was a freakin’ head injury resulting in a loss of teeth and copious bleeding. But one really doesn’t like to ‘make a fuss’.
So there I am being all properly under-reactive like all super parents. And we got to the emergency room WHICH THEY MOVED WITHOUT PERSONALLY NOTIFYING ME. Honestly, these hospitals.
And as I cuddle my gorgeous girl, I am watching the nurses pad around the emergency room in their blue uniforms individualised with gaudy comfort footwear, coping admirably with the plethora of human kind that has swamped the emergency ward that afternoon and I thought –
I could not, would not, be a nurse.
I have worked out the five main reasons.
1. Patience
I have none at the best of times but when some eejit woman limps up complaining that she’s sprained her ankle and can’t walk properly after slipping on the kerb and she is STILL wearing her stilettos despite the swelling ankle and the nurse takes the time to triage her nicely without just yelling ‘take your stupid shoes off woman’. Wow.
2. Vomiting
There are a lot of people vomiting in hospital. From emergency through to paediatric and all the way in between there are people yakking up into bags and the nurses swan through with nary a dry retch of their own. I can cope with my own vomit and my children’s vomit – but even my husband wouild only get a desultory pat on his back before I retreated into the distance to utter soothing sounds at yelling levels.
3. Latex gloves
On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. Blow one up as a balloon to distract sick child. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. on you get it by now.
4. Smoking
I haven’t had a cigarette since the 1 March 2006. I miss it but this would completely rule me out of the nursing profession. I really don’t want to take it up again and yet it appears that about 85% of nurses in the world are committed nicotine addicts. And I’m a bit of a joiner you know – I wouldn’t have the self control to be part of the minority. I’d want to be out there puffing and gossiping and doing whatever the nurses do in those little huddles of blue.
5. Patients
It seems that you can’t be a nurse without patients. And I really think this would be the deal breaker for me. Looking up people’s rectums, poking their bulging cysts, strapping their manky feet, soothing their fevered brow, taking temperatures, poking aspirators up noses, rocking distressed babies, calming anxious relatives, admiring urine samples, sticking needles into tense arms, assisting with operations, the list is endless.
So to all the nurses out there – I salute you and to the ones I know personally, I love you.
But I really don’t want to be you.
What professions are completely beyond you?
Linking up with the delightful Ms FiveFrogs for the inaugural Laugh Link today.
2 Apr 2014
Recently the Tullinator was playing ‘mums and dads’ with her friend. The friend had chosen to be Mum, various dolls were the children and my little one had opted to be Dad. She was heading off to do the ironing when I said to them (because I’m that kind of pain in the arse parent that does this kind of thing) “You know that some families have two Dads or two Mums instead of one of each don’t you?.
The Tullinator has looked at me quizzically. The friend has ignored me. This is fairly normal.
“Two mums???”
“Yep”
“But who does the ironing?”
Good question, as you were.
Obviously my ironing contribution has not increased in the year since she asked me if I’d asked permission to use “Daddy’s toy” the day I had to iron something myself. It was poor planning, otherwise I’d have asked Nick to do it for sure.
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This is like Genius. I wish I knew who did it.
But thank you. |
But I love that while she has very clear views about what ‘Mums’ and ‘Dads’ do – they’re not entirely stereotypical. Or locked in.
She learned about both Iron Man and The Little Mermaid from a young chap named Robert.
She thinks Mums do cooking.
She thinks Dads do ironing.
She thinks Mums do running.
She thinks Dads do the funniest farting.
She thinks Mums do the best singing (may have been bribed!).
She thinks Dads do the best lego. (thank the gods – how BORING is Lego?)
She thinks that dancing is best done standing up. By anyone.
She thinks lawn mowing is done by the person who can’t think of a good excuse not to do it.
She thinks that her Dad looks ‘very pwetty’ when he shaves.
She wants to be tall enough to drive a cement mixer.
She wants to be a doctor. And a ballet dancer. And a giraffe.
She loves to play with Fire Engines.
And dolls. And pirates. And dress ups. And puzzles. And books.
She does like pink. But she likes brown too. And blue. And oweeeeeenge.
And deep down, I think we’re doing something right. Because she is who she is. She will like what she likes, and she will like what her friends like for a period far longer than her adult self will be able to fathom.
She likes things that make her father and I weep into our wines. Things like Barbie mermaids. And she danced once to One Direction.
But her concerns about a life without men is apolitical. It’s not doubting that two mums is a good thing. It’s not thinking it’s wrong or right.
It’s about the ironing. If there are no men, who does the ironing?
And quite frankly, it’s a jolly good question. If there are no men – who DOES do the ironing?
31 Mar 2014
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| Warning: Wearing Them |
Today’s big topic of conversation is about the danger of posting about your children- either information or pictures – online and how they might hate you when they are older and how there are millions of sick perverts stealing the innocence of your children by liking the pictures and how they might track them down using geolocational technology and kidnap them to make money or for other nefarious purposes.
All that is probably possible. In the same way as being hit by lightning, winning lotto or being killed by a stingray are all possible.
But hugely unlikely.
You’re not that important. Probably. You’re not. I’m not being an arse here. The only people that are likely to be interested in what you post about your children are your friends and family. Unless you’re a blogger or a writer or the such like in which case it’s a wider community. Which is lovely, but the vast majority of the human race is not out to get you or your children. They really are not.
People can be dicks. Even calling them trolls annoys me a little because why create titles for dicks? But mostly, people aren’t perverts looking to manipulate your images of little Johnny running a race. Yes, you have to be careful and if you are that poor chap who posted a photo of his kid in the bath, without checking his security settings – bet you won’t do that again.
Mistakes are made. That does not mean the 1000 people that liked it are out to get the child. They were probably thinking ‘aw cute’. This mob mentality and scaremongering really shits me. If you look at a picture of a child online and think about paedophilia INSTANTLY – I’m more worried about why this topic occupies your mind above all others when they are FAR more likely to be injured in a car accident when you fail to give way adequately.
And if we’re making mass assumptions that everybody is some kind of twisted sicko, why aren’t we banning dog pictures in case everybody is into bestiality? Why not assume that when people see pictures of your face they totes want you in a sexual manner? Why not assume that when somebody likes a picture of an elderly chap on a boat they are working out ways to scam his money?
Why not? Because you’d sound like an idiot.
Technology, social media and the online world are part of both the present and the future. Not using it doesn’t make it go away, only looking at the things that go wrong doesn’t make it go away, your children not being on it is not going to make it go away.
So stop it. Take a chill pill and get some perspective. As a parent you make choices for your children – online and offline – that work for you. Mistakes may happen. Bad things may happen. But not because of anything you did. People that choose to be dicks, choose to be dicks regardless. You have no more control over that than you do over possibly being hit by lightning one day.
Stop sitting around yelling ‘THE SOCIAL MEDIA IS BADS FOR MY KIDLETS’ and actually get out there and demonstrate good online behaviour. Fix your security settings, think about what you post and remember that you’re creating a history for your child that is probably far more accurate than your memory. Which for all of us but Pamela Anderson, is probably not a bad thing. It’s storytelling people, an act as old as time itself.
And if you don’t want to – don’t. But stop with the obsession with perverts.
Concentrate on your world around you. Look after the things that might actually happen. And for the love of Roscoe Arbuckle – start giving way properly. And turn on your bloody lights.
