The procrastination post

16 Oct 2013

Well

If you start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start 

– Mary Poppins

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step 

– some wise dude from the olden days

Both Mary and the wise dude are sitting on my shoulder giving me a severe case of the irrits.  Not to mention an earworm thanks Mary.

I’ve got things to do.  Loads of things.  I’ve managed to put a letter back in the post box that was incorrectly delivered, read the news, admire photos of my girls, talk to my neighbour over the back fence about his recent holiday abroad, wave toilet duck at the toilet, eat some rice bubbles and clean a few cobwebs out of the toy room.

None of these things are even remotely things I need to do today.

Sometimes getting started is harder than it looks.

And I hate faffing.  My husband is a professional hardcore procrastinator and it drives me wild. If he was here killing time writing blogs when HE HAD STUFF TO DO I’d be cross and humph a lot because FFS JUST DO IT ALREADY!  So lucky he’s not here.

(And lucky I’m so perfect I have no irritating habits)

I think people that start their to do list with ‘write a list’ so they can immediately cross something off it and feel a sense of accomplishment are essentially cheating.  But right now – I’m totally owning that.

I’ll tell you another way I’ve managed to not start today.  I googled ‘list apps’ just to see if there were any interesting technological innovations in list writing since the last time I googled it.  When there is a pen and notebook beside me on the table.

If that isn’t dedicated not starting I don’t know what is. And yes – I’ve googled ‘list apps’ previously.  What of it? I like lists. I like technology – it stands to reason that googling ‘list apps’ would happen once or twice in my lifetime.

The more time I have to do something, the less I seem to get done.  I was on maternity leave twice and  I never wrote a best selling novel, sorted out my old photos or took up a domestic art.

Calvin never gets it wrong (Source Bill Watterson)

Anyway, this is it, I’m finishing this and I’m going to go and change the world.

Which isn’t on my list either.  Bugger.

Okay… off to write a new list.  Starting with ‘write list’ and followed by ‘change the world’.

And if you hear of any good ‘list apps’, please let me know. 

Day of the Girl Child

11 Oct 2013

I have been fascinated today by the interpretations around International Day of the Girl Child and how some have hijacked it to get all man hating and rah rah rah ‘we does have rights as women right like you know’ without any reference to what the day is actually about.

Which is to highlight the inequity between the rights of boys and the rights of girls world wide.

We’re talking fundamentals here people – not the right to wear short skirts and have sex with whoever you please and what not.  We’re not talking about glass ceilings.  We’re not talking about pay differences.

Those things are all true.  They all matter. They do – but to grown ups (primarily) in the first world. And I’m not saying that I have all the answers.  But as the mother of daughters, I fiercely and passionately want for all small girl people, the same things I want for my own daughters.

Girl Power.

For this is about the girl child.  Child.  In first, second, third and fourth worlds.

We’re talking right at the beginning – to be as pleased with the arrival of a girl baby as a boy baby.  We’re talking about living a life that is not considered lesser, of having access to a proper education, the right to become an adult without being married off or handed over as part of a deal.

We’re talking about living a life that is fearless, where violence isn’t visited upon you, where you can catch a bus to school without being shot in the head or your mother burns you with cigarettes because she doesn’t want you ‘growing up pretty’.

We’re talking about the right to play sport, to run free, to be fed, to be cherished. We’re talking about the right to be loved, irrespective of gender.  To be valued because you exist, not because you’ve ‘earned’ it.

We’re talking about a world where to ‘run like a girl’ or ‘fight like a girl’ is not seen as weakness, where being female isn’t considered a liability or being the third girl doesn’t cause your father to abandon your mother to find a woman who can birth him ‘real children’.

We’re talking about allowing children to be children, whether they are boys or girls.  We’re not talking about the adults they will one day be if the world continues as it is, but rather – what if EVERY child had the opportunity to be loved, to be educated and to forge their own lives, with the same opportunities.

Love. Education. Freedom. Respect.

That’s girl power.

That’s power.  Full stop.

Post Redundancy Panic Number 1

9 Oct 2013

Okay – I am a week into the eight week period of redeployment and having worked out what I don’t want to do, and had some amazingly positive feedback from people in real life, people on the interwebs and even a compliment on my dress from a stranger on the bus this morning – I am hit with the realisation that (drum roll)

Source: Dilbert

The Bad Parent Methodology

8 Oct 2013

I’m a bad parent.

I read all the books. And then some.  I know how to be a good parent but unfortunately, I lack the self discipline to turn the theory into practice.  Our life is not a structured domestic oasis of calm, organic produce and baby yoga.

In fact. I even hate adult yoga. The only downward dog my babies have ever seen is the dog next door during her post pee stretch.

And as a parenting methodology I have to say it is proving a success.

They are growing up independent, imaginative, fierce and a little wild.  They are kind. They are decisive.  They use good manners. They dance naked. They choose their own shoes. They hug. They kiss. They know how to say NO and mean it.

My kids use words like Impossible. Hilarious. Sausages. Boobs. Abuela. Bonjour. Milk. Friend. Best. Love. Gross. They go to strangers. They know the sign language to make a dog sit. They can open the fridge. They laugh with their whole bodies. They go barefoot in public. They hold hands when the cross the road and know that the time limit on a public tantrum is two minutes.

They sing. They play. They fight. They have cross faces. They have happy faces. They aren’t scared of their parents and they assume adults are trustworthy. They aren’t fussed about being left behind because they know we are coming back. They expect joy. They don’t like to tidy but they like to clean. They aren’t bothered by mess but like order.  They sleep anywhere. And better still – they transfer.

Sometimes they misbehave. Sometimes they whinge. Sometimes you can say ‘You know what?’ and they’ll absent mindedly reply “I love you too” and that wasn’t even what I was going to say. They scribble on their faces with coloured pens. They get paint on their clothes. They can’t keep a hair clip in for longer than… nope, already gone.  They like books, big yellow ducks and music.

We’re not great at routines. We hug through crying jags bought on by temper or tiredness. We scold. We feed them what they’ll eat and assume they’ll eventually get bored of corn, sausages and tuna. We don’t allow juice or sodas but there is a place for chocolate frogs. We yell. We have dance-offs with our children. They think we can sing.  We don’t vacuum the house as often as we should because the girls are strangely terrified by the noise of domesticity. We’re secretly proud.

Our house is called ‘Bonkers’ and our car ‘George’. Just ask them. We are trusting that most people don’t graduate from college sleeping in their parents bed as our ‘sleep resolution’ approach. We bitch. We let them watch TV sometimes when we can’t be arsed playing Duplo anymore and when the wind blows we stand outside with them, faces forward and screech “HA HA HA LOOK AT US LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF THE WIND”.

I profane with abandon and my children have never sworn. They are stubborn, focussed and imaginative.  I know that our kids are smarter than us and we hope they understand that to be the best people they can hope to be, they need to trust themselves and not our parenting.

In so many ways, they are proof that nature is stronger than nurture.  And with everything they do, they delight us.  I admire the strength in their opinions, the ferocity of their emotions and the calm in their contentment.  They know how to live in the now and they fight for the right to do it all and they want us to be willing accomplices, unconditional allies and the boring character in all their role plays.

And I delight in the results of my rogue parenting.  I’m comfortable with being a bad parent. I wonder how such perfection could possibly be improved by imprinting my own imperfections on them.

It couldn’t.

So I wont.

Bigotry and social media

7 Oct 2013

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love social media for a lot of reasons.

But there is one thing I hate about it.

It gives a voice to bigots.

I’ve been really pleased to be contacted via Facebook by people I was genuinely fond of in my younger years.  Except the people who I find out within 48 hours are racists or homophobes.  Bigots with a capital B.  Absolute tossers when it comes down to it.

And I am always genuinely saddened by this realisation.  Because if they had come up in conversation, or via a shared connection, I would have been really pleased to hear their news, perhaps reconnect.  And in the course of conversation, our fundamental views on the world would never have come up.  And that is the nature of small talk and shared memories.  You don’t delve deeper – there is no reason to do so.

But with Facebook, or Twitter.  There is no “OMG IT’S BEEN LIKE A BILLION YEARS WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO TELL ME EVERYTHING”, it is more ‘Ah…. Bill…. he was a lovely fellow – I’m definitely accepting his friend request’ and then you log in the next morning and it’s a series of ‘Fuck off Australia is full’ memes, coupled with a tirade against the illegals or that the gays are trying to donate blood so we all become gay and it’s a complete conspiracy and by the way -Obama is totally a Muslim and a Kenyan because my mother’s brother’s best friend’s goat’s cousin’s drug dealer saw the birth certificate.

And then I have to unfriend immediately.  But in addition to that, an earlier memory is ruined by the fact that I never really knew them, or knew myself.

Harder, more ambiguous, are the friends that you have met later in life who have been great and you miss having around now that you are scattered around the world and then one day you open your feed to find a plethora of ill informed jokes about religion, culture and colour.  And want to defriend them immediately, but you give them a few more chances because you really really really want to be wrong about them.

You want them to be having a moment of oops.  Where their interpretation of a joke was slightly off, or nuance means that they saw a different message.  And then they use the word ‘boong’ in a status or rant against the ‘illegals’ and you realise that truly, they aren’t who you thought they were.

And you’d love to pretend it never happened.  But the fact is – to say and do nothing is as powerful as if I sent them the KKK secret emoticon.  Silence is an endorsement.  It’s powerful.  People fill silence with the messages they most want to hear.

We are all learning.  I have no doubt that the younger me was less informed, more close minded, than the person I am now. I probably never questioned the casual jokes, the general stereotypes, the misinformation.  But as an adult, a functioning involved rational adult, I perpetuate everything I don’t challenge.

I’m still learning, I’m still coming to a greater understanding of the world.  But I stand firm in the view that bigotry, in any form, in any context, is still bigotry.  And we must be active about eliminating it, in whatever form it takes.

Including ignorance.

Especially ignorance.

Three first kisses

6 Oct 2013

First kisses are memorable in some instances and not at all.  The first time you kiss somebody you love you think you’ll remember it forever.  The taste, the smells, the moment – seared into your memory to be recalled, remembered and cherished.

Until you fall in love again.

And then THAT is the one that you think you’re going to remember forever.

But in truth, the only first kisses I recall are those that were, for one reason or another, excruciatingly awkward.

Kiss 1: The first time I kissed a boy I had a crush on.

Angelic.  Solid of limb, blue of eye, blonde of hair, uniformed.  The kind of Aryan specimen a mad Austrian revered more than any other.  I liked him because he was funny, and seemed nicer than the average 14 year old male and I thought back then I liked blonde haired boys. He seemed to like my 12 year old, bespectacled, brunette, freckledness enough to snog at a party one exciting evening and went to it with all the finesse of, well, a 14 year old boy.

I’d seen Dirty Dancing, I knew the gist of it, but I’d only ever had chaste, close mouthed kisses and close body hugs at school dances and in the shadows of parties where older teens went about their ‘french kissing’ with the ease and abandon of young drunk people. Which they were. So as he thrust his thick, slobbery tongue into my mouth and swirled it around as if trying get the last of the ice-cream out of a cone, I swallowed my revulsion and ‘did kissing’.

We remained in this tortuous embrace for what seemed like a lifetime before separating and him announcing that ‘I kissed like a fish’ and re-shoving his tongue down my throat.  All hot eyed and embarrassed, I mentally resolved to spend more time practising on my hand and to talk to my bestie about ‘my technique’, before shoving him off and pretending my parents had arrived to collect me.

He went on to snog the 15 year old with the curly hair who could blow smoke rings before I’d even left the room, so I suspect it wasn’t my heavily rehearsed, sparkling wit that led him to kiss me.

Kiss 2: The first time I kissed a girl. 

In my 20s I was doing volunteer work a couple of evenings a week with a hospital up in Brisbane, the kind which enables you to be all cheery to small people living with chronic or terminal illnesses and ensured that there were a number of social activities with the other volunteers to make you feel as supported as possible.

I went on a weekend away to the mountains with this group of people who were huge amounts of fun.  I’d become very friendly with a few of them during my training, and I was looking forward to getting to know them better. They were a mixed bag of genders, ethnicity and sexuality but that bothered me then about as much as it bothers me now.  Not at all.

We’d had a great afternoon pottering about going for walks and building a huge campfire.  We sat around drinking cheap wine, eating overcooked sausages and near melted marshmellows while we talked the crap that can only be talked at campfires and shared the kind of stories some of us only share with near strangers.

Some guy could play the guitar and as we got slowly drunker and subsequently more talented and hilarious, we sang through his entire repertoire of self taught tunes and tried to outdo each other with our sketchy knowledge of constellations and bush based horror stories.

I realised that I was at that point where sleep was my only option and so hauled myself and, at her request, the girl from the cabin next door off the ground and we wandered up the hill to the accommodation walking twice the distance needed due to the wine consumed and having a good giggle about it all.  I opened the door to my cabin and said ‘Night night’ and she leant against me and kissed me.  A very soft, sensual, port flavoured kiss to which I responded not at all as I tried to work out how to say thanks but no thanks while at the same time thinking ‘girls are WAY better kissers than boys’. All of a sudden she broke it off, pulled back, looked at me and said ‘I got it wrong didn’t I?’.

With the awkward meter up to high I said ‘ahh… ummmm…. I think you’re really great, I am really flattered or some such bollocks’ – which is the universal non-sexuality specific code for ‘sorry dude – this particular scenario never occurred to me so I haven’t got the right thing to say ready.’

And she never spoke to me again. Which was a genuine pity because I really liked her and in addition it made the Wednesday night volunteering slightly awkward for a few weeks until I decided to move to Gympie.  But that’s another story altogether.

Kiss 3. The first time I kissed my now husband.

We met in a share house in Deptford in South East London in the second half of the second year of my ‘one year abroad’.  It was a gloriously balmy entirely non-English English summer and the group of house mates and various friends spent lots of long, lazy, smog scented evenings in the backyard pontificating about the world, arguing politics, profaning, philosophising, calling bullshit on each other’s housekeeping claims, drinking wine, laughing at our insane wit and incomparable cleverness, smoking too many Malboro lights and on occasion, Irish dancing in Tescos.

While the other house mates remained completely oblivious, my man and I would hold hands under the table and stay up way later than the others talking the language of love (which is basically to say we fabricated reasons to stay up and watch crap TV* and talk about it so we had an excuse to stay up and keep talking).

And then one night, we kissed.  A soft but insanely intense kiss which I can still taste and which took us both completely both surprise. He then turned around, jumped over the short wall down into the kitchen and bolted upstairs to his room.  And didn’t come out until the morning.

By then I didn’t even kiss like a fish any more. Believe me, in the intervening years I’d practically got written references supporting me in this.  

It was, it remains to this day, my favourite and without a doubt, the most awkward, first kiss of all.

*A really bizarre series on freak weather conditions – predominantly twisters stealing churches from brides and the like over in America.  Obviously ESSENTIAL TV viewing at 1 am on a school night EVERY NIGHT for WEEKS.