11 Jul 2013
Today’s post is by the completely bonkers Slapdash Mama (also known as Sarah). She does talking frankly in a way I’ll never crack and I always love reading her blog – her energy leaps from the screen and I admire both the energetic and the articulate. I am really pleased that she agreed to do a guest post here and once you’ve read it and become a fan you can follow her HERE!
So without further ado – I present SLAPDASH MAMA!
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It’s my very great pleasure to be guest posting today for Alison on her clever and amusing blog “Talking Frankly”. I feel weird calling her Alison because in my mind I always refer to her as “Frank”. SO anyway thank you very much for asking me, Frank, I am stoked.
Frank has asked me to elucidate on a topic she has chosen for me. The topic I’ve been given is;
Of all the things already invented, what do you wish you had invented?
I am a bit of a weirdo because I really like getting thrown random topics to write about. JUST LIKE AN EXAM! I used to love exams. I am actually not kidding.
So let’s plough ahead shall we?
Well, the short answer to that question is (probably not unlike many of us out there) I wish I had invented Google.
I know we all say how much we HATE Google because TAKING OVER THE WORLD AND INFORMATION, but frankly if I woke up tomorrow and I was suddenly the millionaire billionaire brains behind that interweb sensation I would be freaking smug. And rich. Did I mention rich?
I suppose I probably should have said “I wish I had invented the polio vaccine because SAVING LIVES”, or “I wish I invented crop rotation because HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE”, but my naturally acquisitive instincts led me to my greedy choice. Altruism? WHAT GOOD DID THAT EVER DO ANYONE ANYWAY HEY?
It might seem quite a stretch, for anyone who might actually know me in actual real life, to imagine me actually inventing something like Google, what with my actual lo-tech luddite-esque tendancies.
O YE OF LITTLE FAITH!!!
I totally could have invented Google if I had WANTED to.
I mean, I did IPT in Year 11 AND Year 12!
OK, so maybe I only did it because my Dad basically forced me to. And like, it is POSSIBLE that I wasn’t actually any GOOD at it or anything. And it MIGHT be the case that I did spend a CONSIDERABLE amount of time weeping over my Visual Basic coding and swearing at my Expert Systems assignment. And maybe because it was 1997 and the internet hadn’t really taken off, just maybe it is possible THAT WE DIDN’T EVEN LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT WEBSITES OR THE INTERNET OR ANYTHING THAT MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN USEFUL IN THE 21st CENTURY!!!!!
OH GOD IT’S TRUE I WAS DISASTROUS AT IPT! DISASTROUS!
My friend L and I were the only two girls in the class of computer nerd boys. So I guess it was a bit like a real life version of this…
Or it would have been except that I looked like more like this at the time…
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| WHAT A GLAMOROUS TEENAGER! NOT AWKWARD AT ALL! |
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, IPT. Inventing Google.
So my time in the classroom studying IPT with a gaggle of computer nerds was sort of like – look, I’m not going to pull any punches here – it was like being on the planet Mars. Didn’t help that the computer nerds were all better at everything than our flustered teacher. They occasionally tried to help me but their communication skills were sometimes, ah, lacking.
Look I’ve got absolutely NOTHING against nerds. In fact, I AM a nerd. A total nerd. And let’s face it computer nerds are TOTALLY FASHIONABLE and LAUGHING AT US ALL because RICH! It’s just that I have never been the right type of nerd.
My type of nerdishness – reading a lot, wishing I was in a Jane Austen novel, enjoying Gardening Australia, listening to Irish Folk Music and Tori Amos from an early age – did not lead me to power or riches. Or popularity at high school. If only I had spent my lunch hours playing networked Doom in the computer rooms, I would be laughing all the way to the bank now I am sure.
I suppose these days my penchant for granny hobbies would fit right in with the HIPSTER CHIC OEUVRE. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I’m pretty sure that train has sailed for me now. My interests are not ironically cool, because I am not thin enough or young enough or tattooed enough, and I don’t have a ZZ Top beard.
OK maybe I do have a bit of a beard. And I AM a vegan*.
Anyway back to IPT. Yes. And inventing Google.
My friend L and I spent most of our time doing group assignments at my house, printing out reams of coding and crying hysterically. One time, on the due date of an assignment, my PC died. My hysterics reached new heights.
My Dad, a teacher at my school and possibly feeling somewhat responsible for the whole thing (AS WELL HE SHOULD ARE YOU READING THIS DAD I BLAME YOU) did what any parent would do when their child phones them screaming “I CAN’T GET THE ASSIGNMENT TO SAVE THE COMPUTER HAS DIED I AM GOING TO FAIL AND NEVER GET TO UNI AND END UP ON THE STREETS!”.
He loaded my entire computer and hard drive into his blue volvo, drove to school and parked up on the grass outside my teacher’s staff room, unloaded the entire computer and plugged it in at her desk and got her to work it out.
Not embarrassing at all. Nope. Not a bit.
So that leads me right back to Google (OK I KNOW IT DOESN’T REALLY BUT WORK WITH ME HERE PEEPS). I think we all accept that computer nerds now rule the world. Bill Gates, Julian Assange, and Dr Sheldon Cooper are the puppet masters and we; we are their puppets.
Now excuse me while I go and Google “How to get rid of chin hair” and “How do you spell Oeuvre?” and “ZZ Top beards”.
Good day to you all.
*HAHAHAHA! As if.
9 Jul 2013
This exercise malarky has found me ill-equipped in more ways than just fitness.
1. My running is ugly
I’m not joking. I jog like a wounded beast, lumbering along on the inside of my feet for a hundred metres or so before lapsing back into the wheezing reality of the overweight walker. I keep up my pace, thankful for large sunglasses and slower, fatter people until I build up a little reserve and lurch forward once again. One thing is for certain – nobody is ever going to be mistaking me for a tampon advert.
2. I have boobs
The men and women that bounce along the pavement in naught but a lick of lycra do not need to battle their breasts into submission by strapping them to their bodies first in scientifically designed, AIS approved, militarily tested bras and then reinforced with constrictive clothing. I have to ensure my emerging jogging style is not impeded by boob induced whiplash or I won’t be running anywhere as I’ll be in traction.
3. Where the f**k do people put their musical devices?
Those arm straps are uncomfortable. My phone insurance doesn’t cover sweat damage if I shove it down my bra. I am morally and ethically opposed to bum bags. When I carry it in my hand I rip my earphones out of my ears when I swing my arms. I haven’t yet worked out the solution but I suspect it might involve duct tape and my neck.
4. I don’t look good in baseball caps
I see my capped reflection and realise that I look like I should be wearing a lumber jacket and shooting deer, not going for a sedate walk/run around the bay. I have a big head and hats and me have a tortured relationship. The whole jogger look is pulled together by the correct head wear which helps you look professional and run better. I think the head wear issue might be my biggest impediment to successful running.
5. I haven’t got the right playlist
I have playlists of music to put children to sleep. For driving. For writing. For reading. For the bus. Favourites. Old music. New music. But I don’t have an exercise playlist yet. It’s going to need Pink, Beth Ditto, Pulp, Queen, Franz Ferdinand, Vampire Weekend but how do I work out what tunes I’m missing? My genius playlist threw up ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ which didn’t really do much for my vibe. But I know that I’m going to run like Usain once I get it sorted. I just know it!
All suggestions to get myself match fit for the start of my ‘official training’ next week gratefully received.
4 Jul 2013
On a morning TV show this week they were asking if people should settle when it came to choosing a life partner once they reached 30. Recently, a friend was freaking out because he was about to turn 30 and hadn’t decided what he wanted to be. Another girlfriend was lamenting that her husband kept wanting to hang out with his friends and drink and he was 30 and should accept that he’s too old to be a lad any more.
30 years old.
For context, we’re talking 52 years before you’re going to die if you’re Australian (53 if you’re Japanese, 51 if you’re a Kiwi, 50 if you’re British). Add a few more years if you’re female. Sure it’s averages, but speaking in averages, it is still 47 before you get dementia and 45 before you hit compulsory retirement if you’re a Catholic priest.
So unless you’re Jesus or a rock star – 30 is nothing.
If you think about the fact that you spent the first 18 years of your life basically learning stuff that you HAD to learn, you’re only 12 years into learning stuff you want to learn. And if you eliminate most of your 20s which are generally not pretty, you’re only about two years into having a clue.
Going on the stats from the ABS in 2012 – you’ve only been married about a year, you’re ten years away from being divorced and you’ve only just had your first baby. And that’s your first marriage. A few of us have one or two more marriages to go. And when it comes to careers (careers – not jobs) – you’ve got between 7 and 11 to get through according to a series of recent studies – the goal is no longer early retirement and a gold watch.
And sure – ‘settle down’ if you’ve met the person that makes you happy but no age is the right age to just plain old ‘settle’. To settle is to give up. To settle is to live the rest of your life thinking I could have done better. It doesn’t just apply to your partner, but to your job, your interests, your education, your friends. Why would you choose to live your life wondering?
I get biological clocks, I get job security, I get mortgages. But seriously, when I was 17 – I thought my life would be sorted by 25. Mainly because 25 seemed so grown up. I’m 38 now and I still don’t believe that I have it sorted. And I think 25 is so far from grown up. I feel the same about 38 and have a sneaking suspicion I’ll be feeling the same way in a decade or two. There is so much to do and I’m thankful that on the law of averages, I’ve still got just under 50 years to ‘fit it in’.
I can think of no greater tragedy than to settle. As Barry Hastings said in Strictly Ballroom (and to be fair probably somebody before him because loads of people have this tattoo in Spanish) “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.”
My great-aunt M was 80 when she tried sky-diving. Fauja Singh was 89 when he took up marathon running and 101 when he retired. Bryce Courtney wrote his first novel at 56. Imagine if they thought 30 was the age that they needed to have made the decision about the kind of person they were going to be 50 years later.
30 is an early stop. It’s a first chapter. It’s an opening verse. It’s before half-time.
Why stress about having it all done by a certain age? What a burden to live under? Averages say you’ve got bucket loads of time to do anything you want to do.
Unless you are Jesus. In which case, get a move on.
Baz summed it up best really
2 Jul 2013
I’ve been at home today, lying under the blankets feeling sorry for myself as I battle a cold. When I was younger my parents used to say “you’re not martyr material” like it was a bad thing (for those unfamiliar with martyrs they generally end up dead). Now that I’m older I understand that I just have a male approach to illness and I say that with the greatest of respect. Soldiering on should only be for Codral adverts.
Anyway, I digress. To entertain myself I’ve been glued to twitter which was entertaining at first as I caught up with the world of film and music and TV and people’s meals, and then the flood of abuse towards Ed Husic for being sworn in on a Koran rather than a Bible began and I wished I hadn’t been on Twitter and could somehow have remained unaware of how vocal the bigots can be.
“We are a Christian country”. “It’s Un-Australian”. “It’s the book of terrorists”.
To all of you that wrote the above or versions of it. Please shut up. You’re all idiots. And ignorant. And idiocy and ignorance should be more ‘unAustralian’ then they currently are.
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Australian enough for you?
(source) |
Firstly – if anything we’re an Aboriginal country, not a Christian one (remember – boat people are so 1788). And anything that says religion should have a part in the running of the country is just wrong. Law and religion should always be separate because since we clearly can’t agree on religion, the law should be impartial.
Secondly – on this same point. Ed Husic making an oath on the Bible would be meaningless. No more should he swear on the Bible than Julia Gillard, who as an Atheist should probably stick to ‘my word is my bond’ or similar rather than using any book. Why swear on something he doesn’t believe in? How would that be an oath? Go back to your Famous Five novels to understand why getting an oath right is so important.
Thirdly – if a Sydney born Bosniak from Blacktown is not Australian the rest of us are truly screwed.
Fourthly – so called Christians shouldn’t be throwing aspersions on anybody else’s book until they have better explanations for the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the homes for unwed mothers and a host of other historical and more recent examples of ‘being Christian does not a good man make’.
Lastly – why are bigots so VOCAL? Why do you put your names and faces to such abuse? Would you scream these things into the face of Ed Husic and his family? If not – why are you putting them in capitals on your Twitter feed and Facebook page?
I say kudos to Ed Husic for being so magnanimous about the abuse and calling it democracy. I would have stamped my feet, yelled “No Fair” and gone home.
His mother did bring him up good she did. And her a Muslim. Who’d have thunked it eh? **
**for those that missed it – tongue firmly in cheek for this line.
30 Jun 2013
When my Great Aunt Cis was born in 1922, she was not yet an Aunt and not yet great. She was but a tiny scrap of humanity, arrived early. The world hadn’t got around to inventing humidicribs and the like to maximise the chances of premature babies so the neighbours rallied around providing hot water bottles to keep her mother’s bed at a constant temperature. She lived. And then she lived.
Late last week her husband of 65 years, seven children, 17 grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, almost 20 nieces and nephews, various great-nieces and great-nephews and around 300 people gathered in a church in Brisbane to farewell Cis and mark the passing of a generation.
If nothing else it was easy to recognise that people really liked Aunty Cis. A lot.
It’s a truth when I say that at the time of my passing, if my daughters say even 1/20th of the nice things her children said about her in her eulogy I could consider my stint as a mother a success. But it is when you put her success as a mother in context – as one part of her incredible, complex and long life that you realise being committed to a life lived positively – it is not just a new age concept.
I did not know Aunty Cis as well as many others do. I do know that I learnt things about her as I listened to her eulogy. I understood her part in my own family a little more by getting a glimpse of her love for her siblings which included my grandpa, a man I never knew for myself. I know that there are conversations and time I had with her that are irrelevant to her life story but interesting to me. I travelled the best part of 1000 kilometres to say farewell and there were others that travelled more than twice that distance to be there. People don’t do that for the ‘not nice’.
And it with the passing of Aunty Cis that a generation ends. The last of five brothers and two sisters. She will not be forgotten. She has left a considerable legacy as did her siblings. But there is nobody else that lived that family’s story. With her passing that story is officially history.
Vale Aunty Cis. Go well.
25 Jun 2013
We carry a lot of baggage with us these days. And I’m not talking the ex-boyfriends, the family relationships, the work weirdo, the rude sandwich maker, the unmade apology, the parenting mistakes and missed opportunities dating back to infancy. I’m talking ‘stuff’.
It’s practically impossible to get up and head off into the day without weighing yourself down with ‘necessities’. A first world problem I concur but one that affects most of us.
Even people with pockets will have wallet, phone, car keys, headphones, spare change, handkerchief and random bottle top from the beer they had last night. And only tall skinny people with no hips can get away with pockets. The rest of us need bags.
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My every day bag
photo by me |
Handbags. Man bags. Bum bags. School bags. Satchels. Backpacks. Suitcases. Briefcases. Swags. Totes. Sports bags. Duffel bags. Kit. Lots of different names for bags to hold ‘stuff’.
Somebody even recently paid $85,000 for a bag.
A Birkin one And it’s ugly.
Basically, most days we head out of the house like some urban version of Bear Grylls, equipped for every eventuality. Notebooks, purses, wallets, phone for life, phone for work, band-aids, water bottle, pens, earphones, mandarin, lunch, diary, hand cream, computer, chargers, camera, umbrella, sun cream, head ache tablets, vitamins, bills to pay, letters to post, magazines, books, kindles, Ipads, tissues, random nappy from yesterday’s day trip with small person, mouth mints, spare jumper, running shoes, flip flops, sunglasses, old receipts, newspapers, business cards, muesli bars, loose change.
And that’s just the guy that sits next to me at work. Jokes. He doesn’t have a purse. And the nappy was in my handbag. I shifted it for emphasis.
Folklore tells us is this is just women’s handbags. It’s not. Men have man bags these days. And have you seen the size of the school bags on the backs of preschoolers? It starts early this compulsive need to carry our lives around in a bag. Just in case.
And only really really old people or be-suited business types are allowed to pull around their bags on wheels. It’s way too uncool for the rest of us to do it – even though we are carrying about a quarter of our body weight in ‘essentials’.
I wonder what it is like to live a life with just pockets. I have hips so I’ll never know. But to live without the weight of my world on my left shoulder has recently become a recurring thought. What does it mean? Is this more profound thinking from the modern Confucius?
Nope, it just means I need to clean out my handbag and stop procrastinating by writing this blog. True story.
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