23 Jan 2014
Just behind Kerri Sackville’s VERY good article on being a pottymouth parent* – there I am. Published.
Page 22. February edition of Practical Parenting. Which is mainstream media. Australia’s number one magazine for parents.
And best of all, it’s an opinion piece.
The irony after the last blog post eh?
Anyway, I’ve put a photo of it below but you should go and buy the magazine so you can
a) read the ‘No’ viewpoint,
b) read the whole magazine
c) tear the page with my article out of it
d) frame it
e) get me to autograph it.
For when I become Beiberesque in my celebrity and you want to sell that autograph to fund your retirement.
Don’t think it’s worth the $6 to buy the magazine?
All I have to say people is remember the parable of the Bitcoins. The doubters still work for the man, the investors own big yachts and throw their underpants away rather than wash them.
You’re welcome.
* Self confessed pottymouth parent with children that don’t. Nature vs Nuture? Thank you Nature.
21 Jan 2014
I am a woman of strong opinions.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, this isn’t probably a surprise. If you’ve known me for more than a minute in real life, this probably isn’t a surprise either.
.
It’s true.
And yes my dear pedants, by it’s very definition, an opinion doesn’t always have to be factual and will contain an element of bias. Which is why we sometimes define things as a professional opinion, or a personal opinion depending on who we are trying to persuade.
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| These are not my feet |
But everything in life contains an element of bias. All of us have an opinion on everything from what is the best cereal for breakfast, what is the best genre of movie, is bacon basically god?
We do nothing on a daily basis that is not coloured in some way by our opinion. Our own experiences, our education, our lifestyle, our beliefs, our ethics, our families, our friends, our absolutely everything, colour our opinion.
Opinions can change.
My favourite Jesus Christ Superstar line is “We all have truths, are yours the same as mine?”. Pontius Pilate was basically saying that even facts, when viewed through different eyes, take on different meaning. Basically we can have different opinions, even though we use the same facts. I’m not interpreting the bible here people, just the musical – so please don’t start quoting Leviticus at me.
Why all this pondering on ‘opinion’? Quite simply, somebody referred to my writing as opinionated the other day and its thrown a big black cloth over my brain and I can’t find any words to write without second guessing my own blog. The thing is, this person wasn’t being mean, because I asked her if she thought it too opinionated and she said no, she was a regular reader and enjoyed it.
My blog is all about ‘having a say on everything from house work to human rights – commentary, observation and opinion’. I write what I know, what I see, what I feel and what I wonder. I do have strong opinions.
I have always had strong opinions. But not at the expense of learning, of developing, of growing.
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| Bill Watterson nails it again |
I am truly grateful for the freedom to have an opinion, something I know that many women and men don’t have. I am not preaching hate, I am not preaching ignorance, and I like a feisty discussion around ideas, concepts, politics, ethics, people, music, books, movies. Anything really. And I love to be around people of strong opinions. A quick audit of friends and family demonstrates that ‘strong opinions’ applies to most of them.
So I come back to the word ‘opinionated’. If I was quieter, less adamant in my expression I would perhaps be seen as perceptive. Which is also an interpretation of truth. A perception and an opinion are not distant cousins by any means.
I am perceptive. I have self awareness. I do know what I’m talking about. And I have 20 years of team days backing up these statements. I also lack the ability to lick arse. 20 years of team days backs this statement too. I always keep team feedback – it’s nice to look back through it and see how some things have grown and shaped, and others, like the old report card saying ‘Alison would benefit from talking less in class” never change.
The other one that came up regularly was ‘never afraid to share her opinion’.
Why would I be? Why should I be? Why is my opinion any less valid than another? Your opinion is equally valid too. That’s the beauty of opinions. We can learn so much, share so much, yell ‘YOU ARE WRONG’, bang the table and yell ‘MORE WINE! We are not going home until you see that I AM RIGHT’. That’s how I met my husband actually. He was probably wrong though (right beautiful man?).
So opinionated is what I am. I am not intransigent. And that’s good. If I was opinionated and intransigent I’d just be a wanker. And nobody wants to be that.
And now I am going to find a picture or two to illustrate this blog and get back to using my opinions about food to decided what to have for lunch.
Yes. Yes I am.
19 Jan 2014
Okay, I get that there are things that make up our conscious mind and things that make up our subconscious mind and all of this works together in some mysterious way.
And I get that quite often our subconscious mind works overtime when we are at rest and seemingly influences our dreams. Which is why our dreams are supposed to be significant if we remember them when we awake.
So work with me here.
Last night I had a dream that I had taken the girls to a “Fun House”. There was a gift shop and admissions area downstairs and you caught a lift upstairs (unless you were afraid of lifts in which you had to pay extra to use the escalator)
Once upstairs, instead of rooms, there was a huge beach complete blue skies, light breeze etc. With a counter running the entire one side of the beach where you could purchase refreshments, books, newspapers, and souvenirs. On the other side of the beach, the water stretched away into the horizon. It was a proper beach, an Australian one with white sand, shells and lots of people sweating suncream and lazing about on towels under umbrellas.
I settled in under an umbrella that was emblazoned with my new business’ logo, and the girls went off to play while I chilled out, reading ‘The Railway Man’ and watching the girls. They were part of a performing jet-skiing team – doing formations and amazing stunts, bouncing over the waves like total experts. In the dream they are exactly as they are now – the younger aged 21 months and the older almost 3.5 years old. They wore helmets and their favourite swimmers. I was very proud of them and took lots of pictures which of course I posted on Instagram.
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This is not really them
because it was a dream
so don’t look for it on instagram |
Oddly, I wasn’t at the beach with Nick, but his absence wasn’t sinister or anything – just like he was at work. But I was accompanied by a beardless, floppy haired Russell Crowe. Aha! Fantasy I hear you say! But here’s the thing. He’s not (sorry Russ) and he was attired in pirate finery, and he had two ‘peg legs’. Not one. Two. And he wore a watch made of feathers and he was there to watch his kids in the ‘dolphin chariot race’. And it didn’t seem odd that he was a pirate or that there was such a thing as dolphin chariot races.
PLUS 
Apparently Russell’s kids are the current world champions.
Russell and I were taking turns like any event you go to with a fellow parent, one would go to the toilet or to get lemonades or whatever and the other would watch the children. It was a lovely, non-eventful day.
Then all of a sudden, a storm blew in and it started raining, turning the beach into a giant marshmellow. A huge emergency siren went off and people were desperately trying to get into the lifts to leave. Security guards were not letting people without the right tickets use the escalators and people were getting really frantic as one lift had gone out and people were having to wait for just one lift but yet the escalators were running with nobody on them.
In the midst of this, I was trying to find the girls who were not where they were supposed to be and somebody tried to steal my purse. Russell got all Karate Kid on the thief, even saying ‘wax on, wax off’ as he knocked him out. Then I saw the girls by the lift, holding onto the hands of the security guard looking for me.
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| Remember this? |
So I bounced over to them on the marshmellow and managed to squeeze into a lift by being completely rude to the people already queuing and only feeling a little bit guilty, because I was just relieved I had my girls safe. I said bye to Russell and his kid as they had escalator tickets. The lift opened at the bottom and we headed out into the Big W at Top Ryde shopping centre, just by the book section and….
THAT WAS THE END.
Nothing. I don’t know if I woke up or the dream ended just there.
Now, dear people – explain THAT dream to me. Because all I’m thinking is that my subconscious needs to lay off the cheese and bikkies on the weekend.
Any clues? Or do you regularly have obscure dreams?
16 Jan 2014
This quote on a friend’s feed on the faceybook.
“With no understanding, there can be no acceptance.”
It’s obviously spoken to her. It did not speak to me.
I’ve googled it and I and the closest I can come to putting the quote into context is JK Rowling’s “Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and acceptance is the first step towards recovery”. From Harry Potter’s Goblet of Fire apparently.
Otherwise, I don’t know where it came from.
Even so, I still cry “Bullshit”
Let me start by saying that understanding things is indeed brilliant. But you don’t have to understand everything to accept it.
I don’t understand how my car works, but I still drive it.
I don’t understand how flying works, but I still get in aeroplanes.
I don’t understand how electricity works, but I still use lights.
I don’t understand how anyone voted for Tony Abbott and his cronies, but I accept that is how democracy works.
I don’t understand what goes on in my husband’s head about 85% of the time, but I still love him.
I don’t understand how my body created such two awesome human beings but I’m still claiming all the credit for the most amazing, interesting and beautiful girls ever to be born.
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| Bet the Wright Brothers didn’t understand their wives |
Sure you can read about these things, learn lots of stuff and connect the dots and say ‘AHA, now I get it’, but there is an awful lot of things out there in the universe and if you had to understand everything fully before you accepted it, used it, embraced it, tried it, sang it, loved it, sold it, bought it, shared it, walked it, read it, lived it…. you’d be….. ummm… busy. And really really freaking boring.
I bet you don’t understand how the internet works in all it’s entirety but yet you are reading this because of it.
Cool huh? (And thanks… I appreciate you coming by!)
And people – understanding them first before you accept them? You’d have no friends. If we had to waste all that time understanding our friends before we accepted them, we’d be lonelier than a very lonely thing.
And it would take all the fun out of it. Sometimes to not fully understand is what keeps it interesting.
There are definitely things in the world that we do not understand and we do not accept. There are things we should try and change. Mullet haircuts. The Kardashians. Cross-fit.
But otherwise, move on. Embrace the mystery. Enjoy the journey.
Go on. I dare you.
14 Jan 2014
So there is this guy Trevor Young who is known as the PR Warrior. I first met him at the ProBlogger conference I went to last year where I was massively inspired by the confidence and kindness of so many successful bloggers and entrepreneurs. I wrote a post called ‘Big Love and Blogging‘ if you missed it.
Anyway, back to Trevor Young who I didn’t actually write about (sorry Trevor). I read his post detailing his year in review and the three words he was going to use as his guides and inspirations for 2014. And I trawled through posts from the people he found inspirational, and the people in the Twitterverse discussing it and I thought – I like this. I really do.
Three words to give focus to a year that will be either “Awesome” or “Um, er, unsure what happened there”
And you know why? Because it is so easy just to do today as you did yesterday. Which means tomorrow will look like today, which looked like yesterday. And I live in constant fear of waking up one day and finding out I went nowhere and did nothing.
So here goes. My three words are:
Believe
… in myself, in others, in success, in happiness, in life, in a world where empathy and compassion are proactively practiced. To ignore the dissenters and rise above my internal voices. To believe I can make a success of my new business, my blog and this infernal half marathon. To believe I can make a difference to the Australia and the world I live in. To believe that change can and will happen. To believe I’m going in the right direction, even when I forget to take the map.
And that rhinos are unicorns in disguise.
Dare
… to do the things I’ve never done, to try things that I haven’t tried, to say things I’ve never said, to be silent where I was never silent and to act in ways I’ve never had the courage to act. I am going to dare to speak up when it is right, to always challenge apathy, ignorance and bigotry. I am going to dare to live as the kind of woman I want my daughters to aspire to be.
And maybe even do that skydiving thing.
Roar
… because I am woman, for my children, for my husband, for myself, for all those that can not roar for themselves. I am roaring to rev myself up, to find the my ‘Serena’ grunt, to cover the sound of my own terrified heartbeat. I am roaring in voice, online, on paper, in action, in attitude. I am roaring for those that can not roar, that will not roar and that have not known the freedom to roar.
And because sometimes I just like to be loud.
So what do you think? Three little words for me to live by in 2014.
What are yours?
13 Jan 2014
When I was in Year 6, we all had to write a letter to ourselves to open when we were 21. I don’t remember the exact things we were to include but it was about what we thought our future selves would be like and what we were like right then in 1985.
I sealed that letter up, took it home and gave it to my parents. They put it in the study under the green vinyl divan in the storage box which was the great repository for all important documents we didn’t want to lose.
Guess what? It got lost.
Somewhere between 1985 when I wrote it and December 1995 when I turned 21, that letter went astray. Probably tossed out as not important, a small letter in a small envelope, addressed to “Alison”, insignificant among the sea of documentation that lived under the divan and which would have had to be sorted when the divan went to divan heaven.
I often wonder what I wrote in that letter. Judging by a couple of my short stories that have survived from primary school it is entirely possibly illustrated beautifully like this:
or this
Or perhaps it had a confusing ‘summary’ like this book jacket where I seem to have written a book that advocates incest and babies as the route to happiness:
Or maybe it’s as thrilling as this little play:
I won’t ever know where my ten year old self was heading or what I thought I might have achieved. I suspect that it was best I didn’t know how turbulent the next ten years were going to be and how confusing and terrifying growing up was rather than a raffish adventure like Nancy Drew would have had. I wouldn’t have known about the friends I was going to make that I still have, or the mistakes that I would make that still impact. I did not know how much I did not know.
1985 was the year I read Watership Down and wasn’t part of the special group invited to watch Genelle and Daniel ‘pash’ at lunchtime on the obstacle course. I had one older brother and four younger siblings and didn’t feel I fitted in anywhere. I read a lot, wrote a lot, dreamed a lot. I got my first pair of jeans, a love affair started by a cousin named Sue, that has lasted a life time.
Mrs Hinton set a homework assignment that required us to answer ten questions about ‘A Country Practice’ and Dad thought I’d made that up as an excuse to watch a forbidden TV show, so I failed my homework and was publicly outed as the only kid in Year 6 not allowed to watch that particular show. Arthur lost his temper and threw his chair out the window and I was hugely impressed by his daring. I had a crush on a tall, gentle guy called Michael, and Mr P, the coolest teacher I ever had, called my parents in to discuss why I used the word ‘ejaculated’ in my fiction writing. My naive, book obsessed ten year old self, used it quite innocently in the context of “saying something quickly and suddenly” not in relation to semen.
In hindsight, that was probably a very discomfiting discussion for my parents to be having. I suspect they weren’t congratulating themselves on having a child with such an extensive vocabulary.
It snowed on my December birthday that year quite randomly and I was excited about going to high school the following year. I liked riding my bike and going on adventures. When I look at the handful of things I remember from that year, I can’t even begin to imagine what I wrote to my older self but I’m prepared to bet it used big, beautiful and possibly age inappropriate words.
I hope it dreamed big. Really big. I really do.
Did you ever write to your future self? What did you say?
