I can’t be the only person suffering f&#*witphobia?

4 Jun 2013

If you look at the news at the moment you’ll generally see a common theme.  Phobia. And I thought that with all of my banging on about tolerance and acceptance, I should actively practice it.

So, I skimmed through as many news sites as I could to get a feel for the things people are being phobic or hateful about so I could be more tolerant.  I tried to avoid reading the comments on anything because that would be an unfair test of the new tolerant and accepting me.

Turns out there is a lot to be afraid of out there so I tried to summarise the key things that people are scared about so I could focus my zen like approach appropriately.

1. Some people are afeared of the gays – generally because they are fabulous and happy and might make other people fabulous and happy.  And they’d spend lots on weddings and help the economy and be treated like equal citizens. Scary stuff.
2. Some others are scaredybobs of those that are Muslim – because if you can’t see somebody’s hair they are probably a terrorist and it definitely says in the Koran (that none of the phobics have read but they read it on the internet so it is probably true) that they have to kill their neighbours but preferably by just wandering around minding their own business. But don’t trust them because they want to kill you, you can tell because they don’t drink but still dance.  People that do dance without drinking are scary.  Granted.
3. We need to be frightened of people who are not white – which when you consider of the 7 billion people on the planet only about 15% are white, leaves you with a lot of freaking people to be scared of just because they aren’t you.  It also means that you have something in common with Pauline Hanson and the BNP which is even scarier. 
4. We should totally be petrified of those buggers FLOODING the country by boat.  I mean if they were desperate enough to leave their country on a leaky vessel and try and get to Australia for asylum, they’re desperate enough to do anything.  And now that they aren’t allowed to work, they’ll have all that time to sit around thinking up ways to do dastardly deeds.  And we should be scared here – look at the skyrocketing crime and drug offences in football teams.  Proof already.
5. And last but not least – we should be petrified of indigenous Australians.  Cheeky chappies wanting to be in the constitution as the first Australians and wanting to bring their life expectancy in line with the rest of the country.  It’s outrageous that they can’t see all WE’VE done for them giving them the vote and what not.  Next they’ll be, be, be… DOING SOMETHING. Yeah, you know. RUNNING THE COUNTRY OR SOMETHING AND WE ALREADY HAVE REDHEADS AND WOMEN NOT KNOWING THEIR PLACE. CRIKEY!  

Teeth and boy bands

2 Jun 2013

My favourite Facebook post of the week has got to go to a friend we shall call Darren (for that is indeed his name) who wrote the following:

Do I want to be part of a society where chemists stock One Direction singing toothbrushes? 

 It made me laugh a lot.  It was a very true statement.  I liked it’s dramatic nature. The comedic pathos. I liked that it was about toothbrushes, popular culture and the state of the world.  Sometimes, people just nail something in a sentence and it says everything there is to say.  Just like that. Kudos Darren.

I googled ‘one direction oral hygiene’ to get this picture

And then I was going to write a blog post about this but realised it would completely negate my point.  So I’m not.

Tanzing and Edmund did it better. Fact.

29 May 2013

Have you read about this chappy who is about to sit for 60 days on a rock?  Just because.  Just to see if he can do it longer than the guy who did it in 1985?

In the video the rock clearly shows nothing but bird shit.  Lots and lots of bird shit.

You can get this in miniature in any town centre that features a statue to its founding members (or bizarre Romanian produced Michael Jackson statues in a surprising array of cities in Eastern Europe)

Some days you’re the pigeon.  Some days you’re the statue

Mr Hancock claims he’s looking for a challenge after running marathons and climbing mountains.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say ‘get a job dude’.

It’s a rock with bird shit on it.  That’s it.

I get that you have to sit in a plastic bucket, take your food, catch the rain, etc.  I get that you will not have anywhere to plug your smartphone or your camera battery.  I get that it’ll take you a while to get there in your plastic bucket.

But really?  You’re kind of clutching at straws when you choose a rock that nobody has ever heard of to ‘conquer’.  Tenzing and Edmund did Everest. 60 years ago today just by the by. That was an accomplishment.  The moon, another fairly big success.  Columbus and Cook did okay.  Yes, there were people there but in fairness neither of them knew that when they set out from the other side of the world.

Sometimes rocks are just rocks.  Get. A. Job. Please.  Your poor mama must be wondering what she did wrong.

* See how I scheduled this to post at 11.30 am – my little tribute to Tanzing and Edmund. 

Me, Colin and an email address

28 May 2013

Matthew Rhys starring in adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (click here) has led to a flurry of suggestions from concerned friends that I was going to have to change my personal email address.  Um. No.

Mr Colin Firth – King

Some context – a little over ten years ago a relative of mine suggested I was too old to throw in my job and go backpacking.  The view was that I should be settling down, not gallivanting.  I said I was going overseas to marry Colin Firth and they apologised – said they hadn’t realised I had a boyfriend. That afternoon, still chuckling over the conversation, my friend and I (and several wines) decided to seize the day and make sure I was prepared to meet Colin.

And so setting up my personal email address in preparation for life as The Honourable Mrs Colin Firth I headed overseas for a year or four.  The fact that he and I were complete strangers, he was in a long relationship with a stunning Italian and um, I was highly unlikely to meet him living in share houses in London has not stopped the joke, even after I met and married another Brit, brought him back to Australia and had little half English/half Australian babies.

But it is a joke.  I’m not a deluded stalker.  I’ve never written a letter to a celebrity in my life. When I speak to celebrities its because I’ve run into them somewhere and have started speaking to them before realising I don’t actually know them and it always seems rude to just drop to my knees shrieking ‘ARRRRGH, I accidentally spoke to somebody who I have seen on the TV/interweb/BIG SCREEN’. I have never proposed to, or expected a proposal from, a celebrity.

My husband doesn’t feel threatened by my email address, his mother has long accepted I’ve just got a daft sense of humour and was not actually previously married and last but not least, I’ve only had to have one job contract re-written with the correct surname inserted.

I could change the email address but I’ve used it for so long and keeping people up to date with changing physical addresses is hard enough.  Since the job contract fiasco I’ve set myself up a new grown up email address using my real name which I use for grown up reasons but only for grown up reasons.  None of my friends or family, for instance, use my grown up address.

So Mr Rhys can don his leggings and flutter his eyelashes as much as he likes and I’m sure he’ll be absolutely brilliant however, my email address is going to remain true and faithful. But thank you for your concern.

Profound statements from my bra

26 May 2013

Today I had stabbing chest pains.  On several occasions.  I’d stop what I was doing, move around a bit until the discomfort eased and then get on with it.  I’ve seen the adverts, I know that heart attacks can happen to people my age, but I wasn’t worried about that.

I was suffering from ‘rogue underwire’.  This is a condition which only afflicts people that wear bras. I’m not being gender specific on purpose.  I’m new age like that.

This is white underwear

‘Rogue underwire’ happens when for whatever reason the underwire in your bra bursts through the material and attempts to kill you by stabbing you in the chest repeatedly.  Normally in the most public place possible.

The basic premise of ‘rogue underwire’ is that if it can not kill you by puncturing your chest plate in its first unexpected attack, then it should cause you maximum embarrassment by ensuring you have to try and push the underwire back into place while pretending you are not actually juggling your boobs in a public place.  Ultimately the underwire will win.  This is a known truth.  Up there with death, taxes and Hugh Jackman being a genuinely nice man.

The best defence is to actually just rip the underwire out and lob it into the unknown but then you end up with lopsided boobs and you kind of have to weigh up the circumstances and work out whether this kind of approach is going to work for you.  Lopsided boobs are okay in some situations but I actually can’t think of one example so really – it rarely works for anybody.  If you don’t have boobs which require bras – understand this is a bad thing.  A very bad thing.  Lopsided boobs can ruin hundreds of dollars of tailoring in seconds.  Or in my case, $15 of comfy jumper. Even the badly dressed value good underwear.

Some people patch bras to keep their underwire in, but this is futile.  The bra has told you that death is preferable to a life in servitude.  Allow it the dignity of dying the way it chooses to do so.  Patching bras is ultimately useless.  The ‘rogue underwire’ will just break out in another spot.

We should learn from history.  When those in servitude decide to break free – nothing will stop them.

And that is my profound Sunday observation.  Vale ‘that bra’.

I’m a mum in a million said millions of mums

22 May 2013

Becoming a parent is one of the most amazing adventures you can ever embark on.  It’s not quite the same as skinny dipping under the stars off the Turkish coast, or climbing Mayan ruins in Guatemala but its still pretty awesome and friends become just as bored by the sentence that starts ‘Did I tell you about this one time…’ whether it refers to a new child or a recent holiday.  It is what it is.

  

“The goal is to get as many people as possible to visit the www.millionmums.org.au website and click on the “email your MP” link – all people need to know is their postcode and they can send a pre-scripted email to their local member of parliament to ask for their support.”