Just Something I Do

And then there are the days one might as well have stayed in bed

2008-09-24T17:33:00.002+09:30

I use a product every morning that come in individual wrappers, and for some inexplicable reason these wrappers are printed with random factoids. You know, like Cleopatra sometimes wore a beard, or bats always exit caves to the left*.

Anyway, this morning's fact was 'if you sneeze too hard you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze you can burst a blood vessel in your neck or head and die'.

Well, okay then.

In other news, did you know that even if you have put on a nice, new, professional looking dark brown wrap dress, found a hair clasp that matches, managed to paint your nails a complementary golden brown and unearthed the one pair of nude stockings that still fit, the 'most polished you have looked in weeks' effect is somewhat diminished when you discover at 10.30am that the dress is on inside out?

I mean, I wouldn't have minded, but do you know how much effort it takes for me to look even slightly appropriate for work these days?

Matters did not improve when I (having taken the dress off and put it on the right way) went out to lunch and dropped puttanesca sauce on my belly. It used to be my cleavage I dropped food onto, but now my belly sticks out even further. I'm not convinced that this is an improvement.

Is anyone still out there?

*Okay, I actually learnt that from watching Ricky Gervais on The Daily Show the other night. When I tried to Google it just now (accuracy of reporting being ever my watchword) I hit this explanation, which I am reproducing here for the line "This is the most moronic answer that I have ever encountered". And then I regoogled and got this, which I feel beats even the former answer. Wikianswers is now my new favourite site.

I know, I know, I'm just as shocked as you are

2008-06-06T11:11:00.001+09:30

What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03)
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Hedonism

Your life is guided by the principles of Hedonism: You believe that pleasure is a great, or the greatest, good; and you try to enjoy life’s pleasures as much as you can.

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”

More info at Arocoun's Wikipedia User Page...

Hedonism

100%

Existentialism

85%

Utilitarianism

80%

Justice (Fairness)

55%

Strong Egoism

50%

Kantianism

40%

Apathy

25%

Nihilism

25%

Divine Command

Oops

2008-05-28T11:36:00.002+09:30

I'll be late in tomorrow, we're going to go meet Reginald. Well, look at a picture of it. To check it has all its bits*.

Reginald?

Yeah, we didn't want to be all cutesy and "oh the jumping bean is hungry" so we sort of fell into the habit of calling it random things, and Reginald just stuck. I mean obviously we aren't going to really call it Reginald. I mean, you know. Reginald.

My father's name is Reginald.

...Oh.

*It does. At least so far. Although, are they supposed to look like four-limbed beetles?

Week Eleven

2008-05-19T15:53:00.003+09:30

The way we are apparently supposed to approach things:

'Baby is now called a fetus in "medical terms". You, however, may have chosen the name "peanut," "angel," "jumping bean" or simply "miracle." '

Actual conversation in our house last night:

Aww, look, you've got a little pot now.

That 'pot', as you call it, is your child, mister.

Sorry. Aww, look, you've got a little Reginald.

That's better.

Things that seem true but probably aren't

2008-04-23T10:47:00.003+09:30

Half of Adelaide has taken up smoking in the past eight weeks. Perhaps there was some sort of World Take Up Smoking Day Event and I missed it. Probably fortunate that I did, really.

Working days are awfully long affairs, aren't they?

Despite there being several hundred foot outlets in town, every single one of them sells sushi, soft cheeses, cold meats, pre-made salads, alcohol and/or coffee. And nothing else.

Every single one of my workmates is so irritating, obtuse and dull that really in the scheme of things my bad mood is entirely justified because honestly can I be expected to keep quiet when M makes sexist jokes or G tries to tell me how to do my job or K asks me whether I've finished that thing yet when obviously I haven't finished that thing because I am TIRED and BUSY and my God do you people realise how much effort it takes for me to get out of BED in the mornings recently and furthermore and additionally SHUT UP.

Alternatively, all of my friendships are based on the shared consumption of alcohol. I don't know which explanation gives me greater pause.

Bed, despite wafting its lusciously soft pillows through my consciousness at inconvenient moments (much in the same way that the touch of a man's knuckle brushing against one's cheek or the sensation of gently biting into a warmly salt-slicked shoulder comes back into one's mind during an important client meeting and makes one blush, or at least it used to, you know, back in the days when one had a libido) and flaunting its wanton comfiness as soon as I arrive home, is not actually very comfortable. In fact, I swear that all of my pillows have morphed into strangle triangular beings designed to give me a neck crick. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that, no matter how tired I am when I go to bed, I never sleep particularly well.

No, really, the working day. Let's talk about it. Does it seem reasonable to you that one is expected to work for up to ten hours a day? Does it? Does it really? Because it seems to me that we'd all be far happier with a thirty hour week. I'm just saying, look at the French! With their...chic, and their cafes, and their haute cuisine and okay okay their racial tensions and high unemployment rates and may I refer you to point number 4 wherein I invited you to SHUT UP?

Reading books together is an excellent way for a couple to bond before the great day

2008-04-21T08:49:00.003+09:30

Okay, so it says here that you may be worried that I will get fat and flabby and stay that way forever and ever, and that this is a completely legitimate concern.

Right.

And if you do worry, you should never ever tell me or even hint at it, even if that means lying through your teeth.

Does the book say that?

No, that's me telling you.

Okay then.

...

Just out of interest, what does the book say?

Oh. It says "It is difficult enough to stick to a rigid diet for two weeks. To help her stick to it for nine months you will need to provide encouragement and support." But you have to prod my conscience, not be my conscience. Apparently this involves 'quietly reminding' me when eating out with friends in a restaurant rather than making a public announcement.

So I should whisper that you have to order the salad rather than shouting You're Not Having The Alfredo AND The Garlic Bread Are You? No Wonder You've Turned Into Such A Porker?

Yes.

Got it.

Or, and it's just a thought I'm throwing out there, you could always just remember that I'm a grown adult capable of choosing my own meals, and mind your own damn business.

That was pretty much my plan.

Glad to hear it. What's for dinner?

Hey, remember how I was going to stop blogging unless something really interesting happened?

2008-04-14T15:52:00.007+09:30

When we moved into this building, one of its much touted features was the glass-walled offices. Each office is walled entirely in glass, meaning that anyone walking past can see you and what you are doing at any given point. Comparisons with the Panopticon come to mind.

In the past, this has meant that shopping online for lingerie, spending half an hour rearranging my shelf ornaments (...shut up) or snacking on anything less decorous than a pre-cut-up apple* have been fraught with danger. How the Partners manage to conduct their tawdry affairs with their little blonde secretaries** is beyond me. I guess one finds ways and means, just as I've learned not to be bothered by people looking askance at the feminist blog up on the screen or the fact that I have seven pairs of shoes in one corner.

These days, it mostly just bothers me because I can't take a 3 pm nap under my desk.

* The pre-cut apple has long been my visual symbol for What Is Wrong With The World Today. Not the home-cut apple, you understand, nor even the little baggies one can buy at sandwich bars. But did you know that you can buy pre-sliced apple, vacuum packed in a little plastic bag, from the supermarket? As in, the fresh food aisle? As in, next to the actual apples? The ones which are about a quarter of the price? Those apples? Well, you can. And that is What Is Wrong With The World Today.

** This is a joke. To the best of my knowledge, all the Partners are fine upstanding*** members**** of society. Who do not have affairs with their secretaries, blonde or otherwise.

***Heeee

****Okay, okay, I'm stopping now

What may or may not be a final post

2008-03-27T08:11:00.003+10:30

There've been a few people recently asking me whether or not I am, in fact, dead. A reasonable enough question, in the circumstances.

The reality is that I just don't have time to post any more. But I've been putting off the decision, because every time I think that's it, I don't have time to post any more, I've got to pull this blog down, something happens that I want to write about.

Like the recent morning when I levered myself out of bed, showered on auto-pilot, clambered out, dried my hair with a big fluffy towel, wandered into the bedroom to dress, lifted my hands to my hair to lift it on my neck and pull it back into a plait ... and felt something behind my ear. And even in my sleep-befuddled state, the tiniest sense of unease crept into my consciousness. I couldn't tell what it was that I was feeling. I just knew I shouldn't be feeling anything.

So I lifted my hand again to explore further, and the thing behind my ear moved and my fingertips registered something sort of furry and OH MY CHRIST ITS A SPIDER THERE IS A SPIDER BEHIND MY EAR.

After brushing it off and disinfecting my neck in the vain hope that it would get rid of the nasty scratching sensation behind my ear and screaming slightly and hopping around because now the spider was under the bed and disinfecting my neck again - after all that, I thought:

Well, that'll make a good story for the blog.

But one post every few months does not a blog make. And these days I run triage between keeping the house less-than-filthy, getting to the gym or eating a real dinner, not having the time and energy for all three. So I think this is it, folks, the final curtain.

Probably.

Unless something really interesting happens.

I'll think about it.

Still not dead, still swamped

2007-10-18T08:14:00.000+09:30

So in lieu of giving you something to read, I've updated the blogroll so you have - well, something to read.

It's a jumble of categories now. Too many of the political/feminist blogs were also funny. I gave up. Pot luck it is, I'm afraid.

I'm not dead

2007-10-10T08:37:00.000+09:30

I'm just swamped. Real post aaaaany day now. Honest. Would I lie to you?

Although I suppose it'd have been worse if my shirt WAS unbuttoned

2007-09-18T11:54:00.000+09:30

So I'm walking down a city street to work this morning, and I notice that men walking in the other direction, towards me, are all giving me appreciative glances. Now, it's not as if the odd appreciative glance is completely unheard of in my world, but this was well beyond normal. There was staring, there were smiles, there was at least one leer so blatant that I wondered if my shirt had come unbuttoned or something.

Perhaps I'm emitting a vibe that I'm unaware of, I thought. It's a nice sunny day, maybe they're all just filled with joie de vivre. Perhaps the half-asleep no-makeup look is more appealing to men than I'd thought?

And then the footsteps that had been behind me for quite some time sped up, and a tall, slim young woman with waist length blonde hair, a short skirt and knee high spiked heels overtook me and turned down a side street. After which, the glances stopped.

Not the best start to a day I've ever had.

Study in a Shade of Fatigue

2007-09-13T08:52:00.000+09:30

6am

Oh, God, is it seriously morning already?

Uh huh.

I don't want to get up. Being in bed is nice. Being asleep was nice. I would like to stay here, please.

Mmmm. We can't. We have to go to work.

Do you think that if we dressed the cats up in teeny little suits, and sent them off to our works instead of us, anyone would notice?

Yes…

Damn.

...They're a lot shorter than us. And lazier. They'd just sleep on the keyboards.

10pm

Oh, crap, I forgot we need to change the bed. I was hoping I could just crawl in and go to sleep.

Mmm me too.

Well, come on, don't just stand there.

What do you want me to do? Do a little dance?

Well I was thinking 'give me a hand with the quilt cover', but a little dance would be entertaining.

Doo dee doo, la la la la…what? Why are you laughing?

That's…you're…

What? You're making no sense, I can't understand you, you're laughing too much.

That's...that's singing.

…Oh.

…

…

We're just really tired, aren't we?

The post I'm posting prior to posting a post

2007-09-11T13:38:00.000+09:30

I've been reading fitness and lifestyle magazines online, recently, because – well, it's practically like actually exercising, surely? Anyway, I'm browsing Self and I come across an article entitled '31 days to great sex (try one easy tip a day)'. Okay then…

Tip 1: Sleep in the buff.

…

Okay, now, not to judge, but…

Is it at all possible that a woman who is looking for ways to entice her partner into more frequent sex hasn't already tried taking her clothes off? I mean, at all possible?

The other top four, for the record, are:

"Work out", which – well, it's a fitness magazine, isn't it? I mean yes okay, but it's hardly news.

"Initiate a quickie". I don't have a position on this one, but I am somewhat perplexed by the accompanying picture, which appears to suggest that you should climb atop your husband whilst he lies back and reads the newspaper.

"Turn in early". You mean I'm more likely to want sex if I'm not exhausted? Who knew?

"Stop eating two hours before you go to bed". Apparently 'feeling full can diminish desire', according to some expert who has never met a Taurean. She doesn't explain why except to say that 'heavy meals may cause a woman to feel less sexy' which rather suggests that this is more societal than anything else (and god forbid the solution should be 'learn to love your body' instead). I wouldn't be so offended, but the suggested solution is to keep a stash of frozen meals around so that you can 'nuke your nosh'.

So giving up a shared, lingering dinner of salmon and asparagus with a glass of sauvignon blanc, followed by some cheese and strawberries and port and meaningful looks over a candle-lit table, instead going for a frozen piece of tasteless chicken and pre-boiled peas, is going to improve my libido.

She really hasn't met a Taurean before, has she?

The whole thing baffles me, perhaps even more than the average Cosmopolitan 'sex tip' articles. It's not that I expect every woman to have the skills and repetoire of a high class escort (and in fact it annoys me that we do in fact seem to be expected to these days), but I would think that the sort of woman who is buying womens' magazines in the first place, a genre aimed at 'improving' oneself for the delectation of one's mensfolk...already know that getting naked and initiating sex is a good way to, you know, get laid.

And that's not even what I was going to blog about today. I was going to blog about the inability of various people to accept that women do not delay or eschew having children in favour of a career, financial security or personal satisfaction out of ignorance, but rather out of choice.

But what would I know?

Zoo: Grubbing in the dirt and picking lice off one another as always

2007-09-05T13:20:00.000+09:30

Dear Mr Merrill,

Hi. I'm one of those feminists. You know, the ones you want to see naked. And whilst we're on that topic – yeah, good luck with that plan.

Anyway, you seem a little confused about a few things. That's okay. I realise that it can get confusing, this radical concept that women are people too. I understand that it's easier to assume that feminists don't like sex than to acknowledge that we just don't like sex with you. And plus, I hear that all that thinking is emasculating, or something, and we wouldn't want that.

So I've tried to make this simple for you.

We* don't disapprove of sexy women. We disapprove of anyone who think their girlfriend's cleavage is for public consumption. We disapprove of anyone who makes money from exploiting the insecurities of others. We disapprove of those who think that it's okay to encourage their girlfriends to mutilate their bodies and insert potentially lethal foreign bodies into their breasts. Wait, did I say disapprove? Because I meant despise.

That is a despicable thing to do, and I feel nauseated at the thought that it was a popular competition. There are that many men out there who think it's alright to try and get their girlfriends to deform their bodies so that they look more pornalicious? There are that many women out there who would accept this?

And we don't hate men. We do, however, hate you, you vile, revolting excuse for a human being.
Hope that clears things up.

Tanya

*I am handily defining 'we' as encompassing 'the group of people who share my opinions on this topic', here. Don't be fooled by the disclaimer, though. There are a lot of us.

And a young man's fancy turns to...

2007-09-04T09:50:00.000+09:30

Blondie: Is it really still winter? It feels like summer out here this evening.

Tanya: I know, like, did I miss a memo or something? To: The Southern Hemisphere (except tanya), From, from…whoever is in charge of these things, Subject line: Bollocks to this winter lark, summer's the go.

B: It's good, though.

T: Oh, I know. Men in shirt sleeves.

B: I know! So good! And it's nice to be able to wear a skirt with bare legs again.

T: Yeah, the men in shirt sleeves are pretty happy about it. Everyone's checking everyone else out all the damn time.

B: Tell me about it. People just wandering down the street looking at each other all mmm hmm.

T: Good times.

B: Good times.

There's definitely something in the air recently. I have had some serious game going on and believe me when I say it's not like I'm trying, because, hello, married. Suddenly even the stuffiest of my colleagues are tossing me compliments like the compliments are fish and I'm a seal and it's feeding time at the zoo and oh my God could I have invented a worse simile? Even my horoscope, which is usually all Russian doom and gloom, likes me for a change. Well, except for the whole 'keep your mouth shut' aspect, but you take what you can get from an ill-translated Russian horoscope, in my opinion.

And it's not just me. Yesterday I watched a young man go walking up the street, spot a girl in an above-the-knee skirt and strappy sandals, and almost step in front of a car. He'd have died with a smile, at any rate.

The only problem with the unseasonable warmth, from my point of view, is that I suddenly need to shave again. After months of thinking eh, tomorrow will do, it's now firmly de rigeur. At least, unless I want to solidify my reputation as The Feminist One around here, and whilst I have no problem with that in the abstract, I don't think I want to push my luck in a professional-image-assisting-in-the-pursuit-of-promotions sort of way. So I suck it up and shave my legs.

And why is that a big deal? Well, remember how I am both a Delicate Flower and have no fine motor skills? And you know how shaving involves a sharp blade being dragged up and down the skin? Unfortunately, when I am tired and rushing through my morning shower, my lack of motor skills make a mockery of the concept 'safety razor'. Which means I end up sporting a trickle of red to decorate the blue-white of my ankles.

Not a great look. I never was very patriotic.

So I've been trying to think of alternatives. Let's see:

Electrolysis/Laser hair Removal

"Electrolysis works by inserting a fine needle into the hair follicle and applying an electric current to destroy the hair root. The loosened hair is then removed with tweezers.
It’s a slow process as each hair must be treated individually, and only 30 to 40 follicles can be treated in a 15-minute session. Some people find electrolysis painful, but not many find it hurts enough to need pain relief. It costs around $25 for a 15-minute session."

This is...this is something people actually do? Zap their hair follicles with electricity one by one? Um. No.

Waxing

I've tried this. Note the past tense. It is safe to say that I do not understand the point of waxing. It's messy, it's painful and it's tedious. In my case it makes my skin blotchy and pink for the first day after the treatment. I could potentially deal with all of these things, except for one thing. It only works if the hair is long enough to pull out. Which means that one can't redo it until the hair has grown back. Which means that, on my calculations, I would have to sport leg hair for the majority of the time. So. No.

Depilatory Cream

As a foolish and overeager 12 year old, I bought some of this stuff to use on my newly sprouted armpit hair and locked myself away in the bathroom for this, my first foray into the tedious business of being an adult woman.

Long story short, if something starts to itch, and then burn, you should probably wash it off as soon as possible rather than gritting your teeth for ten minutes. Unless you enjoy having red, swollen, tender armpits for three months afterwards.

Also, funny thing, turns out depilatory cream should never be used on armpits.

Not Shaving Your Legs

Already dealt with above, but I find it interesting that this is not raised as an option when one googles 'alternatives to shaving'. I'm just saying. Not is 'wear trousers'.

(Yes, I did google alternatives to shaving. Do you want new blog posts, or not? Then hush.)

Of Bruises and Buses

2007-08-23T12:01:00.000+09:30

K reminds me that I have been somewhat postless in recent times, a charge to which I plead guiltier than I feel.

I have, thus, been racking my brains to come up with witty but insightful posts to entertain my legions of reader.

Should I wax lyrical on my ability to injure myself without – as far as I can tell, unless I am a sleepwalker of Olympic standard – actually making contact with anything potentially injurious?

This generally manifests as mysterious bruises on random parts of my body and the occasional deep gash across the hand. Generally I am oblivious to whatever current wound I'm sporting until the husband catches sight of me undressing for bed and exclaims in horror. And then I say something like, you are not supposed to exclaim in horror upon sighting your unclothed wife, you know. And he says yes yes, but what on earth is that bruise, and I shrug in confusion, and we move on.

I put this (the bruises, not the conversations) down to a combination of a) the fact that I am a Delicate Flower and bruise if you look at me too hard but b) have a high pain threshold and also c) bad motor skills. Just in case you were wondering.

Last night, however, I woke up somewhere in the wee hours with the vague awareness that one of my fingers was hurting. Slightly more awake, I established that it was hurting because I couldn't bend it properly, and that I couldn't bend it properly because – somehow, somewhere – I have sprained it.

How do you sprain a finger without noticing or being able to retrospectively identify the incident? I have no idea, so I've just switched my rings to the right hand and carried on.

But it's not really a topic with much meat to it, so I continued thinking. Would anyone be interested in hearing about our recent car accident? On consequence of a combination of fog, speed and a tailgating van, our poor little car is now in a crash repairs undergoing major surgery. On last inquiring, I was told that it was 'fully stripped', leaving me with a vague impression of a naked and shivering Astra and no clearer an idea of when it'll return.

Apart from the obvious fallout: paperwork, a stiff neck, the barely concealed glee of lawyer friends who can smell a CTP claim in the air and the fact that we are now hauling around quite the grubbiest loan car I have ever had the experience of sitting in, it's safe to say it could have been much worse. On the other hand, it's also reintroduced me to the pleasures of public transport.

Ah, public transport, how I have missed thee. I should specify here: I am well acquainted with the late evening bus on which I have sat lo these many years, somewhat the worse for wine and pretending to read a book. I am not unfamiliar with the early evening buses which I catch on those days when I end up working 12 hours and the husband elects to drive home without me. And I have a passing acquaintance with the Sunday bus, which takes me to the local library and back on those weeks when an hour in a hardware store ('it's on the way!') seems too high a price to pay for a lift.

What I had forgotten about were those early morning bus rides. Ah, early morning bus rides.

I'm not sure what my favourite part is. There's the way that the bus either comes early, requiring me to arrive at the stop panting and winded, or late, by which time my toes are numb. Or there's the need to negotiate schoolbags left in the aisle by teenagers too intent on discussing at unbelievable length just how much they detest Art History and Viticultural Studies and Taxation Mathematics and when the hell did they start teaching these sorts of things in high school anyway? In my day we did English and Science and Mathematics, and if you wanted to get fancy you took French or Art. God.

And then there's the one-sided mobile phone calls. This morning the man in front of me spent twenty five minutes on the phone to FedEx in America explaining why they needed to reimburse him for a package that had been sent to Sydney and then privately couriered to Adelaide because, no, let him explain please, FedEx doesn't deliver to Adelaide, which is a city that isn't Sydney, no, not a suburb of Sydney, a whole different city in a different State, and part of the deal with the cost was that it would cover the courier if it came within 21 days and it didn't arrive for…yes, he realises that Australia is a long way from the States but if he could just finish, and was their manager available because – oh, look, okay, he'll explain the saga one more time but that's it, he lives in Adelaide and FedEx only delivers to Sydney…

Twenty five minutes. I kid you not.

But none of that is too much of an issue these days. It's why the iPod was invented, after all. Well, it might not have been, but it should have been as far as I'm concerned. Gorgeous little things that they are, providing sweet oblivion from the company of others.

Unfortunately, I'm yet to come across any technology that saves me from dealing with my very favourite part about the early bus. Sleeping Commuter Guy. The one who – inevitably – sits next to me in the first place, gets comfortable and relaxes. And by relax, I mean snoozes. And by get comfortable, I mean uses my shoulder as a pillow. And by 'reacting with icy politeness' (which I realise I haven't said yet, but it seemed like the time to bring in the phrase) I mean 'jerking my shoulder sharply so as to dislodge his face'. You'd think that would make a difference, but man, Sleeping Commuter Guy was persistent. Three times, I had to do it, and we were only saved from a fourth by the fact that my stop was reached.

Next time, I'm taking knitting needles.

Just quickly

2007-08-09T10:20:00.001+09:30

Real post coming soon, I promise.

In the meantime, this is the most awesome thing I have seen in a long time. Go play. No, really, go play.

In Which Our Heroine Contemplates Growing Up

2007-07-30T14:18:00.000+09:30

Okay, first, I wasn't kidding about the chest infection, nor the resulting abdominal strength. So it's all good. What's three days off work, a nose so sore and red that one of my nostrils cracked and started bleeding and a total inability to hold a conversation for two weeks, compared to marginally flatter abs?

I got over it a couple of weeks ago, in the end. The illness, not the sarcasm. So where have I been? In the office, mostly, covering for those colleagues whom I infected and subsequently took to their own beds. It's been quite the fortnight.

Basically, I've been neglecting the blog for so long that I seriously considered just giving it up. I mean, come on, I missed my own one-year anniversary. And if I don't have the time to self-aggrandise, what's the point?

But fear not, my incessant need to talk endlessly irrespective of any audience has overcome once more. There will be blogging – oh yes, there will be blogging.

Ah, people, people. I can't be funny today. I am tired, and stressed, and my life seems to have skewed so far in one direction that I can barely remember what 'work-life balance' is anymore. And I know that the answer to that is to force myself to spend time on good healthy things and not on – just to pluck a totally random and practically hypothetical example from the air – drinking too much wine and watching three episodes of Boston Legal back-to-back.

(I jest, I jest. I don't have time to watch anything longer than The Daily Show most weeks, let alone three hour-long episodes of James Spader goodness).

So I'm facing hard truths, I guess. If I want to have the energy to keep living like this, I need more exercise, better food and less alcohol. And the only way I can fit in the exercise without abandoning the husband to long nights on his own is to get up at 5.30 and get to the gym before work.

Either I'll fail, in which case – well, nothing new there. Or I'll succeed, and I'll be one of those people who gets up at 5.30 am to get to the gym before work, eats apples as 'a treat' and doesn't drink. Because hey, everyone wants to hang out with that person, right?

I'm not sure which sounds worse. Let's find out.

And now a message from our sponsor

2007-07-08T10:01:00.000+09:30

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**And your schedule***.
***And don't even get me started on what it does to one's sex life. Jesus.

I'm too busy to blog properly

2007-06-18T12:36:00.000+09:30

So this is a placeholder to remind me to tell you about the personal religion I invented when I was sixteen and called Tanyaism for lack of a better term.

And then it will probably make more sense why I find the following so funny:

How will I be defined in the dictionary? Thus:

tanya --

[noun]:

An immortal

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

I'm dreaming...of an alcoholic weekend

2007-06-08T16:15:00.000+09:30

Just like the ones I used to knooooow.

The alternative title for this post was: spot the obvious flaw in the personality assessment.

You Are Chardonnay

Fresh, spirited, and classic - you have many facets to your personality.You can be sweet and light. Or deep and complex.You have a little bit of something to offer everyone... no wonder you're so popular.Approachable and never smug, you are easy to get to know (and love!).
Deep down you are: Dependable and modest
Your partying style: Understated and polite
Your company is enjoyed best with: Cold or wild meat

What Kind of Wine Are You?

...'modest'?

A Tale Of Two Kitties

2007-06-08T10:22:00.000+09:30

My mother, a charming fifty-something academic, currently lives alone in exactly the sort of quaint inner-east cottage one would expect a charming fifty-something academic to inhabit. It is decorated as one would expect; gourmet olive oil and foreign postcards in the kitchen, papers and files and folders littering the desk around the laptop in the study, an old love seat under a towering bookshelf in the lounge.

Obviously, though, there is one thing every charming fifty-something academic single woman needs in her charming cottage, and that is a cat. Since the familial familiar passed away peacefully some time shortly before the cottage was bought, a new cat was called for. So, about a year ago, my mother started looking about herself for a suitable feline.

She ended up with Amelie. Amelie was a Scottish fold-ear, a tiny little thing with quite the most ridiculous face I've ever seen. She was also extremely active, extremely inquisitive, and mind bogglingly stupid. And wanted to be friends with everybody and everything. My mother spent thousands of dollars on secure fencing. To no avail. Amelie just squeezed through the smallest of cracks, leapt the highest of walls, and wandered off to see what belly-rubbing opportunities were out there.

Many was the time, I am told, that my mother looked out of her window to see a gang of youths gathered in a tight and somewhat menacing circle, only to realise that said youths were in fact taking turns to pat and awwww over her cat. Many was the time that she answered a knock at her door to find a stranger carefully holding her cat and saying 'I found this kitten, is it yours?'. Once, she received a phone call from the local primary school asking her to come and collect Amelie. Most cats would shy away from a horde of 6 year olds. Most cats, indeed, would fail to fit through the security bars that surround primary schools these days. Not Amelie. Twenty small children patting her at once was her idea of fun.

The primary school, with its duty of care to ensure that its charges didn't have allergic attacks, was less amused.

Unfortunately, Amelie's lack of smarts extended to traffic. She liked to lie on the sunbaked road. It's a narrow street, and so most cars tend to drive slow enough that they managed to drive around her. But it was never going to last.

And so one day, poor little Amelie, the stupidest cat that ever was, was no more.

Fast forward to last week, and I receive the following email from my mother:

"After nearly a year of mourning and a lot of inner debate I decided I was ready. So yesterday I went to the animal welfare league, the place where you can go and stroke kittens and play with them and so on. Basically you get to test drive a whole bunch and see which ones you like.

Well the idea of a kitten with all those puddles and pointy sharp edges didn't appeal so even though they were very pretty I demurred. Then I found myself in the cage of a lion - and he adopted me. He is 2 years old, very plain to look at and huge. Even worse, since the description on his cage said ''Big super-affectionate boy", by the time we had discussed him for half an hour he had acquired the moniker ''BigBoy''. It really is too embarrassing."

I find this email charming in so many ways I can't begin to tell you. For a start I am tickled by the fact that she needed to describe what the animal welfare league was, and that her chosen description is 'you get to test drive a whole bunch of kittens'. The image of kittens with pointy edges brought back memories of the summer that the husband and I looked after a friend's kitten. At the time we lived in a very open plan house with a loft bedroom. So there was no way of denying the kitten access. And it was a very pouncy kitten. And it was a hot summer. And we had no air conditioning, so we slept naked with a sheet over us. Which meant that every time one of us moved, the kitten would pounce. Which meant…well, I think we're all familiar with my stories of pouncing kittens, yes?

Anyway, the husband and I went over to the cottage for dinner a few days ago to meet the Cat of Unusual Size. I had rather expected its name to have been changed by then. Apparently not.

It's a lovely cat, as it happens, and the antithesis of Amelie. It sleeps, it purrs, it shows no desire to run away and it hops up onto one's lap without protest. The perfect companion for a charming fifty-something academic.

But I tell you, you haven't lived until you've watched your mother lounge on a sofa with a glass of wine, calling out "Come here, Big Boy...come here."

Hmmmph

2007-05-22T11:13:00.000+09:30

I just related Dream 3 to one of my workmates over the coffee bar, and she said "Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you, your mother did ring and ask us that. We told her she was right."

I'm going home.

Mr Sandman: Not As Benign As You Think

2007-05-22T09:35:00.000+09:30

Today you, probably, would be presented with necessity to look at a situation in other way. Most likely, it wouldn't be pleasant for you.

Yeah, that's about right.

After a series of anxiety dreams Sunday night, most of which involved Variations on a Theme of Getting Fired, I was hoping for a more psychologically peaceful sleep last night.

No such luck.

The night kicked off with a dream involving public nudity and humiliation (both mine), from which I was awakened by one of my cats, who required that I get out of my nice warm bed and pad downstairs in near-zero temperatures to let it out.

After drifting back off to sleep, I was told by my boss in no uncertain terms that the upcoming Team Bonding Day would cost $500 per person, and was compulsory. 'We've kept the cost down so that no-one had an excuse not to go', he explained.

Moving on, I chatted to my mother for a while about needing a formal dress for the mid-year ball, and remarked that she didn't seem very interested in helping me choose one.

'Sorry, darling', she said, 'but I don't think it'll make much difference. I just don't think you're very pretty.' Naturally, I was hurt, and said as much.

'Well, I don't know what your problem is', she said, 'it's not an insult. I mean, you're clean and presentable and everything. You're just not that attractive. I asked some of your friends if they thought so, and they all agreed with me'.

Somehow, it being a dream and all, the character of my mother morphed into my husband, and I spent the last few minutes of the dream stomping around all 'Fine, then, if you don't want to be seen with me, if I'm not pretty enough, I'll just walk over here on my own'. And, people, I woke up absolutely furious with the poor man. Like, not wanting to look him in the eye or speak to him furious.

Naturally, I sobered up (which is what waking up after a hard night's sleep feels like to me, is that a bad sign?) and realised I couldn't possibly hold a grudge against him for something that happened in a dream.

My mother, on the other hand, better stay away from me for a while.

At least I didn't imply that all he needed was a good fisking.

2007-05-17T16:00:00.000+09:30

About ten years ago, I dropped acid with a very close friend, and we went out to our local Goth club for the evening. An evening I still remember as being, possibly, the most amusing acid trip I've ever experienced.

It wasn't particularly visual: I never really got much in the way of exciting visual hallucinations. It was more that every single person there that we talked to seemed to be parodying their own personalities, so exquisitely themselves they seemed. Everything Natasha said was so Natasha, every gesture of Lou's was quintessential Lou, the way that Pat left halfway through a conversation was, well, you know how Pat is.

I imagine that the people we observed that night wouldn't see it that way. And that, in defending themselves - no, you can't see straight through me, I'm more complex than that, stop reducing me to a caricature - we would have merely felt our point was proved. The more they defended themselves against the charge of being themselves, the more perfectly they played their parts.

Like this.

Ace, for those of you who haven't had the dubious pleasure of encountering him, is this guy who…

Well, let's go through the article. I can't think of a simpler way to describe him.

He links to a woman who, at first glance, seems to be trying the classic trick of playing the anti-feminist card - presumably she labours under the belief that by proving her own hatred of women, men will like her despite her being, you know, a woman. Which works for Ace, at least to the extent that he can point to her as a Real Woman and contrast her with the Straw Feminist, who is wearing the mask of his current obsession, Amanda Marcotte.

Unlike Ms. Marcotte, this woman has actual, empirical, real-world experience in the bedroom. She speaks about more than airy, untested theory.

Ace knows this, of course, because since he himself wouldn't bed* the terrifying Ms Marcotte, it must follow that neither would any other man, and that therefore she must be unbedded. Ms Forksplit, by comparison, a charming name if ever I read one, seems to be saying what Ace wants to hear, and therefore she must be, like, getting laid all the time.

She does allow that she likes to know a man has some feminist training, though, so she knows that when he's calling her a dirty filthy whore who needs to be punished he's really doing a dirty-talk fantasy thing, not really, you know, expressing his genuine belief that she's a dirty filth whore who needs to be punished.

But apart from Mysterious Drifters usually played by Don Johnson or Mickey Rourke who come into a small town during the swelter of the summer in order to rob banks, shake up the quiet rhythms of small-town life, and (ambiguously) rape women, how many real dudes actually think of women this way?

Well, none, obviously. I mean, the very idea of it. Men, thinking that women need to be punished via ("ambiguous") rape? Heavens forfend!

Except the AutoAdmit boys, who consider that rape threats (including posting identifying information including home addresses) against high ranking female law students are protected speech, and/or just a joke. Except the assholes who sent Kathy Sierra into hiding by posting rape threats. And the assholes who caused Melissa McEwan to quit her job with John Edwards by coming to her house at night and threatening her. And the men who stoned a teenage girl ** to death in front of a crowd betraying sexual excitement. And the men who think it's okay to threaten rape against politically unpopular right-wing women in order to punish them for their policies.

All of those cases, all of them, are examples of women stepping outside the boundaries set for them by men. And how do men choose to punish them?

And don't think it's escaped my attention that the men he chooses as examples of this oh-so-evil attitude are the 'Mysterious Drifters' idolised by teenage boys everywhere. The hell?

Masterfully ignoring what Ms Forksplit is actually saying, which is that dirty talk is hotter from a guy who is half reluctant to do it, from whose tongue the words are transgressive rather than a statement of his real beliefs, who gets the same illicit thrill from whispering filth as his partner, Ace goes on to miss the point some more.

Can any guys (or lesbians) conjure anything more depressing that having sex with a wholesale subscriber to strong-form feminist theory like Amanda Marcotte? Is anyone else's idea of dirty-talk Baby, I am going to empower you all night long... ?

I could half forgive Ace for his puerile misogyny if he was actually funny. But come on. For a start, this paragraph smells more like sour grapes then a pub at chucking out time. Secondly, he missed a classic chance to make a 'hot, sticky, white Holy Spirit' joke.

And thirdly, Ace himself has provided the answer.

What's more miserable than sleeping with a feminist man? Sleeping with a guy who considers female genitalia to be the equivalent of bacon and playdoh.

And then there's his closing line. His punchline, the joke to which the entire post has been building up:

Really, politics has no place in light conversation and/or light bondage and discipline.

Dude, if that's the best your tongue and your hands can come up with, no wonder you don't get laid. Seriously.

*Although I strongly suspect that his bedroom walls are covered in photos of her, such is the breath and depth of his little obsession.

**The link is to a post at which the YouTube video is linked. I'm not linking to the video itself, because it makes me cry.

Neglecting One's Blog: Thankfully Still Only Sin #548

2007-05-15T16:18:00.000+09:30

I would make a terrible nun. On a quick reckoning-up, I think I commit all seven deadly sins on a daily, or near-daily basis. Every now and then I get a wave of latent guilt (although, having been brought up about as atheist as they come, I've got nothin' on the lapsed-Catholic husband in this respect) and vow to myself that I'll do something about it. Donate money to the homeless instead of Jigsaw, eschew avocadoes (only a green vegetable in the most technical sense) in favour of celery, pretend to care more about a man's politics than his pectorals. You know the drill.

The thing about that, though, is that I have pretty much zero willpower. I mean, it's fortunate for everyone that I prefer reading books and gardening to snorting cocaine and molesting small children, because if it were the other way round I'd be hanging round playgrounds with a pocket full of hard candy and a face full of nose candy. What can I tell you, I'm just not good at self-deprivation.

And this, of course, is why every now and then I say something like 'I'm going on a diet' and then it's never referenced again. Basically what that translates to is 'I'm going on a diet, just as long as there aren't any avocados in the house, or slabs of gooey Brie, or very large glasses of Chardonnay…oh, fuck it, what are the odds of that, pass the bottle'.

So yesterday I confronted a problem. I have a formal ball to go to in just over a month, one at which the majority of female attendees will be younger, slimmer and better dressed than I. Not to mention richer, but don't get me started on that. This, after all, is a work environment in which if one's shoes (and by shoes, I mean heels, because we are young sexy lawyers, you know) do not tone with one's designer shirt, one is letting the side down.

And then there's me, who considers the jacket with only one button missing as "the good jacket", who has been known to wear a pair of trousers with the ankle hem down for two days before getting it fixed, and who considers one haircut every four months as "frequent grooming". I ain't gonna to be the belle of the ball, is what I'm saying here.

However, resigning myself to a lack of lustful eyes is one thing. Standing out as the frump of the evening is quite another. And so, yet again, I am announcing my intentions to go on a diet.

Obviously, you're about to point out, this hasn't worked so well in the past. And this is true. But this time, I have come up with a plan so cunning that one might be justified in naming it A Cunning Plan.

Overcome Gluttony by using the other Sins to my advantage.

So I've already made a start. I've enlisted the help of a friend at work to compare eating and exercising notes with, since such an arrangement is likely to enable my random competitive streak (Pride). I'm perusing glossy magazines full of sylphs in expensive gowns (Envy, obviously). I'm promising myself rewards in the form of clothes if I succeed (Greed, which I always think is interestingly differentiated from Gluttony). As for Lust, well, sex is exercise, right?

I still have to overcome Sloth, of course, and I'm not entirely sure how Wrath plays into it. But I'll keep you posted.

But I marched against the war already, isn't that enough?

2007-04-18T10:03:00.000+09:30

"…a situation that the United Nations called “desperate" two years ago has become more grim. There are millions without adequate food and water, and millions more who were forced to flee the violence, and who now depend entirely on relief organizations for survival. But the relief organizations have stretched their resources to the breaking point."

No.

A haphazard post for a haphazard weekend.

2007-04-17T15:05:00.000+09:30

When I asked the husband how he was doing this morning, as I am wont to do, he told me he was hung over. "I have a splitting headache and I feel nauseous*", he groaned. "But we didn't drink anything at all yesterday." "No. But I think all the alcohol from the rest of the weekend finally left my system".

That, my friends, is the sort of weekend we had. Red wine, white wine and whisky, all culminating in the most abysmal attempt to play poker ever.
"So, hang on, I've put in four of these chip things, does that mean I can knock on the table or do I have to put more in?"
"Who's left of dealer? Is it me?" "You're the dealer" "Oh, right. How many cards in the flop again?"
"Ha! I have a straight!" "It's not your turn. But I fold." "So do I" "And me" "Dammit".

Much of Sunday was spent trying to set up our shiny new wireless modem connection, which works fine on the desktop but sends my laptop into a confused tizzy. I'm not even going to go into it, except to say Who The Hell Told Me Laptops Were Fun This Isn't Fun.

And then in my hopes that this post would have a point, it somehow became Tuesday. I hate it when that happens.

*Yes, I know it's 'nauseated'. But I am not an asshole who corrects my husband on tiny pernickety grammatical errors first thing on a Monday morning. I make this qualifying comment only because some scientist-types like to get all pedantic in my comments section, as if it mattered whether a frog and a fish are in fact the same thing.

Idle post-weekend blogging

2007-04-02T16:47:00.000+09:30

Despite me being the worst friend ever, my dear mate Matthew and his gorgeous partner Michelle* are coming back to my city for a visit, and staying with us for part thereof. So Matt and I are going out this Wednesday to our favourite Cheap Dive to drink too much wine and gossip. This makes me very happy. This will in due course make me very hung-over, because the dive in question boasts a wine selection apparently geared to the group of dead-eyed gamblers glued to the pinball machines in the corner, but for the sake of old times, I'll deal with that.

You know, now that I put it like that, I'm not entirely sure it's a good idea. Would it be cheating to have one drink at The Dive, toast to old times and then go somewhere where the wine is made from real grapes?

Or is that sort of soft-hearted liberal entitlement why the terrorists are winning?

In unrelated-but-for-being-a-good-thing news, we bought some new fish to replace the ones that died. We figured that they were killing each other because there were too many males and not enough females in the tank* so we tried to pick female fish. Obviously you can't just pick a fish up and flip it over to insert its nether regions, so this involved us standing by the fish tank in the shop and saying things like That One Looks Like It Has Hips and Not That One, It Looks Too Strong/Determined/Fast**. Obviously I have no problems with gendered behavioural stereotypes when they apply to amphibians.

They seem happy enough so far. Insomuch as they have not yet torn each other's fins off in a fit of rage. I'm not entirely sure how they even do this - having not caught them in the act I imagine some sort of coordinated attack involving specially sharpened gravel - but I swear they do. Behind those shiny fins and innocent flicks of the tail lie the hearts and minds of evil little killers.

And apart from an enjoyable afternoon strolling around galleries filled with antiques and artworks for sale and pretending I was rich enough to buy them, that was my weekend. And you wondered why I don't blog as often any more.

*First mentioned in the days before I started in with the cute nicknames. Possibly luckily for them.
**Disproving the old homily that fish have died and worms have eaten them, but not for caviar.
***In the speed sense, not in the sexual sense. A fast female fish, in the latter sense, is exactly what we want. The more baby fish the better, if you ask me.

This is what happens when I try too hard to be friendly

2007-03-30T15:19:00.000+09:30

Me (finding my beloved super sour boiled sweets tucked away on a high shelf in the only shop that stocks them): Ah, I was beginning to think you'd stopped stocking these. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had stopped stocking these.
Lady at the counter: Oh.
Me (jovial): Yeah. I mean, because they're so intense.
Lady at the counter (looking past me for other customers, any other customers): Oh. I haven't tried them.
Me (fixed, rictus-like grin): Oh. Well. They're very intense. Very sour. When a friend asks for one and I share, they always try it and then look at me like I just killed their kitten.
Lady at counter (increasingly alarmed): Have a nice day.

Killed their kitten?

Leaping Mildly Funny Quips in a Single Keystroke

2007-03-30T08:21:00.000+09:30

How To Create Unnecessary Pressure On Oneself To Blog, or, A Conversation I Had The Other Night.

tanya: Hey, how are you, haven't seen you in ages
friend: I know! Have you updated the blog? I forgot the url.
tanya: justsomethingido.blogspot.com - how about you, been writing much?
friend: Not for fun, only work writing
tanya: Well, there is the url, come say hi some time
friend: Sure! Hey, did I mention I just won an award for best humour column?
tanya: Did I say justsomethingido? I meant, errr, actually, you know what, I haven't been blogging at all.

Anyway.

Knowing my natural tendency towards self-aggrandization and exaggeration, I have in recent weeks tried to adopt a more humble approach to analysis of my favourite subject: myself.

Naturally, this creates a tension with my belief in truth, justice and the expatriate way. It's a fine line I walk, the pressure of honesty keeping me up at night and the desire to overcome arrogance keeping me half-asleep during the day.

But in this one regard, I can no longer hide the truth. A conviction has stolen over me, one that has grown ever stronger until I can no longer ignore its truth.

I have superpowers.

I know, I know, but it's true. I have, in fact, the superpower much desired by children everywhere. The power of invisibility.

At first, I thought it was just a couple of rude commuters. Even a week ago, when I was partway through crossing a road and had to leap back not the curb to avoid being splattered by a car, I wrote it off to peak hour traffic.

But when, three times in a five minute walk to work, I am forced to stop moving and glue my back to the nearest wall because someone - with plenty of room on their other side, mind you - will otherwise walk straight into me, I have to consider other options.

Likewise, when I stand waiting at a shop counter for ten minutes whilst other people walk blithely in, order their coffee and walk blithely out again, and not a flicker of eye contact is made, I have to consider other options.

After all, it can't be that everyone is just incredibly rude, can it?

So henceforth, I will no longer rail at the blindness of others. It is a weighty role that has been foisted upon me - with power comes responsibility, and with superpower comes super responsibility. This is my vow to you: I will use my powers for good, instead of evil.

…

That, or stealing bottles of Laphraoig from the office of the managing partner.

Also, what the fuck is up with the file picture in the newspaper article?

2007-03-23T14:59:00.000+10:30

Isobel Redmond is normally one of the few Liberals I like. Not today.

A South Australian court last week decided that if you consent to one sex act, it is not rape if you then don't consent to a subsequent act and the perpetrator continues despite your lack of consent. Because, you know, it's not like it's your body or anything.

Well, that's not quite right. The court in fact decided that in a particular case, it was inconsistent to find that one sex act (fellatio) was consensual and the other (vaginal intercourse) was non-consensual, given the context and the evidence. I'm not sure how that can be the case, personally: it is in fact possible that she (reluctantly) consented to fellatio but then protested when he attempted intercourse. The judges appear to have said "but there was a series of events that took place over a maximum of five minutes" which…you can't change your mind in five minutes?

So it's a horrible, horrible decision. Not that it's much comfort for the victim, but least it's getting horrible publicity, and for once the State government's habit of criticising every legal decision that happens in this place works out: they're tabling new laws that specify that if consent is withdrawn after sex has begun, it becomes rape.

Which raises a fairly obvious question. If you are having sex with someone, and they tell you to stop, that they don't want to be having sex with you, and you ignore that and carry on anyway…what else could that possibly be except, you know, rape?

But wait, what am I thinking? After all, if they start legislating to prevent sexual assault, who knows what might happen. Why, if that happens, 'even married couples will have to sign a contract before they have sex'.

That's Isobel Redmond saying that, right there.

Apparently, making a law that recognises that if you change your mind about an intimate encounter, express that you do not want something physical to happen and some asshole goes ahead and forces it on you anyway IS RAPE is the same thing as requiring every married couple to sign a document before having loving and consensual sex.

Here's a tip, Ms Redmond, and I'm going to speak in small words so that you understand it. Ready?

If my husband rolls over in bed and throws a less-than-platonic arm around me, and I wriggle around and start kissing him, and an hour later the bedclothes are on the floor and we both have big grins, no-one is going to find themselves in a court of law a year later. If you yourself aren't convinced that you (or your partner) can recognise consent without formal documentation thereof, that is your issue. But you know perfectly well that people do not end up in court defending themselves from rape charges unless they've been accused of rape by their victim. And you also know that the number of false accusations is minuscule. And you also know that when you look at the statistics, only around 2% of reported rapes in this State end in conviction. Reported rapes. Which on a conservative estimate, number perhaps 10% of actual rapes.

So you also know that the risk in this area of law is not that perfectly well-meaning gentlemen who pursued consensual sexual relations without a signature on the dotted line will find themselves in gaol. It's that women like the one in the above case, who found herself on an empty stretch of road with a much bigger man who forced her head onto his penis and then turned her over forcibly and raped her, telling her all the time (by his own admission) that she was enjoying it really, who are found by a friend curled into a foetal position on her couch some hours later, and who have gone through a trial and an appeal, are told that their withdrawal of consent is unrealistic and illogical.

The idea, Ms Redmond, that without written documentation or express formalistic verbal consent (the Antioch strawman) perfectly innocent people can find themselves accused of rape is a deliberate obfuscation, a deliberate misdirection, a deliberate fucking LIE. And you're a smart, educated, well-informed woman. So you know that.

Which makes you a fucking asshole.

Well, now this is just getting ridiculous.

2007-03-22T11:34:00.000+10:30

So yesterday afternoon, a friend calls to tell me that there's a bushfire burning an uncomfortably short distance from my house. The husband calls the hotline and we're told not to go home as they need the roads clear for fire fighting vehicles. We spend the evening at a friend's place listening to local radio and drinking wine until we are allowed home (after 8.30pm).

The house was fine, as was the cat who'd been happily snoozing upstairs all day. Nigel the fish wasn't: after perking up for a day or two he had relapsed and was pretty clearly about to die. So I put him in the freezer (mmm, goldfish popsicles) and he is No Longer.

I'm deliberately not giving out details of the bushfire only because I'm not keen on having my geographical location pinpointed. But if you know me and where I live, and was wondering: we're fine.

And, universe? STOP IT.

The Ides of March and other woes

2007-03-20T10:46:00.000+10:30

The tales of woe continue chez tanya. The Future-proofer blames the Ides of March, but that's been and gone, and still no respite. Even the fish are suffering. Arthur the fantail got stuck under the oxygen pump the other day, and by the time we realised and rescued the poor thing (fish being quiet creatures, even whilst their fins are being pulled off by the force of the suction) it was too late and we had to consign him to the Great White Telephone. Nigel the black moor seems to have lost half a dorsal fin and some of his tail to some event, we know not what, and has been consigned to Fish Hospital whilst we try and feed him up. Fish Hospital is a plastic fishbowl, around which he is swimming somewhat disconsolately and making an attempt to heal.

The husband is doing little better, although he is not consigned to a plastic bowl. After threatening to call into work Incompetent after a weekend of curry-spilling (on trousers, at music festival), coffee-spilling (on shirt, just before leaving for work), glasses-breaking (no idea how) and watch-losing, he is treading warily around the world lest it bite him.

And out there in the world'o'blogs, some assholes are trying their damndest to hurt the careers of some awesome women. So here's my tiny bit of help:

This is a crosspost to effect a Googlebomb, correcting an injustice against a fellow feminist blogger.

Jill Filipovic, who blogs at Feministe and Ms. JD, is a NYU law student who has been the subject of cyber-obsession on a discussion board allegedly populated by law students. The discussions regarding Jill Filipovic (and many other female law students) are sexist and sexual in nature, rating the women’s physical attractiveness and fantasising about sexual contact, both consensual and non-consensual. Neither Jill Filipovic or any other of these women contributed, or gave their permission to be discussed, to the discussion board in question.

Jill Filopovic’s name and class routines etc have been regularly posted to this board, and at least one of the pseudonymous board-members claims to be Jill Filipovic’s classmate. Photos that Jill Filipovic posted (with full rights reserved) to an interent photo-storing and sharing site have also been posted to the sleazy discussion board without her permission. This is a horrendous invasion of Jill Filipovic’s privacy, a violation of copyright law, and calls the ethics and character of the alleged law-students participating in these discussions on the discussion board into question.

A major side-effect of an already nasty situation is that the sexist, objectifying cyber-obsession threads come up on the first page of internet search results on Jill Filipovic’s name. To an inexperienced user of the internet, it may even look as if Jill Filipovic and other female law students chose to compete in these Hot or Not rating competitions, instead of having their pictures posted without permission.

This post is an attempt to balance those internet results to point to the significant writings of Jill Filipovic instead, using the Googlebomb tactic and also linking this post to social networking sites (eg. del.ici.ous, Stumbleupon). Please feel free to copy any or all of what I’ve written here to your own blog in order to help change the top-ranked search engine results for Jill Filipovic. If you don’t have your own blog then please at least link to one of Jill’s post[s] listed below at your preferred social networking site and give it the tag “Filipovic” (as well as any others you think appropriate).

I have linked to these sites in this post:
Jill Filipovic’s bio page at Feministe
Jill Filipovic’s blog posts at the Ms. JD blog
Jill Filipovic’s article about these scummy lawschool sleazebags at Feministe
Jill Filipovic’s article at Ms. JD: When Law Students Attack

If any of the other female law students stalked by the same sleazy site wish to copy this text with names altered, you hereby have my full permission to do so. All other rights reserved. (C) 2007 tigtog

Of course, in the time it took to write a post justifying my lack of a post...

2007-03-01T16:24:00.000+10:30

If you're looking at this page through Internet Explorer, I apologise for the wonky formatting that the last post caused. Also, why on earth are you looking at this page through IE?

Anyway, I've been thinking for a few days I should post just to try and improve matters. And I have a post I'm working on about this story. But I don't have the brain power for it right now, for a variety of reasons.

Reason One: The Laptop of Multiple Crashings

Remember my laptop? My shiny, shiny laptop? I had never had a laptop before. I wanted one really really badly. And after a year of hard work* I got a nice fat tax return, with which I excitedly went out and bought the laptop.

Which waited 8 days, thus putting itself 1 day outside the Automatic Replacement window, and started crashing. Over and over. So I took it back to the shop, and they diagnosed a faulty hard drive and…other things, and I waited for them to order in new parts, and duly the laptop was returned to me.

Without an operating system installed.

"Oh, you should be able to run that from your recovery disks"
"What recovery disks?"
"That you burnt."
"I had the thing for eight days, during most of which the computer didn't work, when were you thinking I'd have done this?"
(deep sigh)"Send it back, we'll order some in".

So I did, and they did, and the laptop was returned to me once more. And there was much rejoicing, and the pitter patter of tiny keyboard strokes brought joy to the household once more.

For about a week.

So I'll go back to the shop, and I'll have to go all lawyer on their asses which I really, really don't want to do, and I'll…well, hopefully end up with a working laptop, because it's been four months now, and the thing's depreciating by the second, and it's all a horrible use of time and energy. Which could be used writing intelligent insightful posts about pornography, feminism and free speech. Or drinking.

Reason Two: The Work Function Of Much Alcohol and No Food

I don't mind work functions, normally. Free wine, free food, decent conversation, what's not to like? Unfortunately in this case, although the wine was indeed free, and free-flowing to boot, the food was entirely animal-based and the conversation…less than riveting. Time after time, the wine waiter topped up my glass. Time after time, the servers came round with exquisite nibbles of food; asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, elegant little chicken sandwiches, sausage rolls in flaky sesame bespattered pastry, bruschetta with pieces of rare steak and caramelised onion perched atop them, honeyed meatballs in dipping sauce…one by one they wafted past me, and one by one I waved them away.

Three hours in, I decided I was just too hungry to stay, and departed. When I got out onto the street I realised I was a lot drunker than I thought I was. By the time I got home - later than I'd intended - I felt horrible. Just horrible. I called hello to the husband, watching TV in a room out of sight, and went upstairs to strip off and take a shower before facing him. Except that then I realised I couldn't get my necklace off because the motor skills required were entirely beyond me. Getting dressed again in order to go downstairs and ask for help? Equally so. So I decided that lying on the bed for a few moments would help, much as the best way to open a tricky lock or achieve an elusive orgasm is to not over-think it but just relax and let it happen.

(So you would have used a different analogy. Sue me)

Needless to say, an hour later the husband came upstairs a little confused and woke me up. And then took my necklace off for me, ran me a shower and made me a bowl of soup. I'm such a catch.

All of which meant that I was inappropriately hung over yesterday and couldn't write intelligent insightful etc.

Reason Three: The Unfeasibly Labyrinthine Work Journey.

It's currently taking almost twice as long to get to and from work as usual, thanks to a car racing event that has blocked off half the city streets and several arterials whilst welcoming a huge influx of young men in wife-beater t-shirts and loud cars. Yesterday the husband tried to drive into the city to pick me up, and after twenty minutes stuck in traffic gave up and parked wherever he could, leaving me to walk almost a mile to the car. Which I wouldn't have minded, but I got stuck behind a horde of said obnoxious young men and had to listen to their commentary about a girl sporting a skirt of the I Can't Believe It's Not A Belt variety for three blocks.

This had nothing to do with my lack of serious posting. It was just annoying, and I was on a roll.

Reason Four: The Internet of Time-Wasting Opportunities.

This isn't a reason either. It's just an excuse to post the fact that if you think you've found enough reasons to procrastinate, and you haven't yet tried nailing jelly to a wall, you're not procrastinating hard enough.

*Mostly standing around in bottle shops pouring people glasses of wine but if it adds to the pathos to claim that I was a coalminer, I'll come to that party.

I wanted to be Oscar Wilde like all the cool kids

2007-02-21T12:45:00.000+10:30

You are Cleopatra

Beautiful and Charming. You are able to persuade anyone to do anything you would like, because of your hotness and charisma. You are an expert in gaining power over anyone you choose.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

I am so befuddled by this that I went back and changed the answers on which I was undecided, and it came out exactly the same.

Gentlemen, the queue forms to my left. No jostling.

Saag Mollee, with detours

2007-02-18T19:49:00.000+10:30

Each marriage has stories about itself. Stories about its beginnings, sure, but also stories about its existence. Short plays, epic tales, extremely detailed cast lists.

One of our stories is that the husband is the experimental chef of the family, in contrast to my safe and dependable cooking. He's the one who'll look at a potato and an eggplant and decide to finely cube the potato and deep fry it to make potato croutons, which he uses to stuff the eggplant along with roasted wattleseed and the sauteed contents of the eggplant itself. I'm the one who never cooks without a cookbook propped up against the spice rack.

But then I promised to write a recipe down for someone the other week, and realised how many footnotes it took me to do so. I don't so much follow a recipe as I use it as a launching pad. My transcribed recipes say things like 'simmer for half hour or until masoor dhal is tender (which you'll find takes at least an hour and a half, and if you want that caramelly effect I recommend you simmer for three hours, then cool down overnight and simmer for another hour the next day), then add peeled and deseeded tomatoes (except, who can be bothered peeling and deseeding tomatoes? Just chuck 'em in chopped finely and simmer down)...etc'.

And this evening I was cooking a fish and spinach curry, using a recipe book. The husband wandered in and asked what I was cooking. It's a mash-up of a saag paneer and a matter paneer recipe, I answered, except that I'm using fish instead of paneer, and Greek yoghurt which I know sounds odd but makes the sauce thicker, and some lemon juice. So it's not, in fact, a recipe that resembles anything in that book, he asked. Well, no, not really.

So on the grounds that it therefore needs writing down somewhere, I give you saag mollee a la tanya. You'll see what I mean about the footnotes.

Saag Mollee

About a bunch of English spinach. My good friend the Future Proofer tells me that not all bunches of spinach are created equal, so basically you need enough that when you've chopped off all the nasty stemmy bits and picked out all the bits that have gone off in the few days between 'Ooh, I should buy some spinach' and 'What the hell am I going to use this spinach for' and then rinsed the leaves thoroughly under several changes of water, it still fills a colander.
1/2 kg white fish, chopped into chunks. Ling or basa or hake or anything will do.
1 tbsp ghee
A medium onion, chopped finely
Two cloves garlic, chopped finely.
2 tsp fresh grated ginger, or dug out of a jar of ginger like normal people do.
1 teaspoon panch phora. Panch phora? It's a mix: 2 tbsp black mustard seeds, 2 tbsp kalongji (nigella) seeds, 1 tbsp fenugreek seeds, 1 tbsp fennel seeds. Make it once, you can use it for ages. Hey, go crazy, increase the quantities.
1 tbsp ground coriander
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chili powder
one 400g can diced/crushed tomatoes
1 cup Greek yoghurt. European will do, but Greek is better for a thick sauce.
Some lemon juice
Some salt
1 tbsp Garam Masala
Some fresh coriander, torn up into little pieces

Rinse spinach leaves thoroughly. Steam in large pan using only the water that clings to the leaves for about 15 minutes. Stir occasionally, because if you get distracted and don't stir it occasionally, the bits on the bottom burn, and burnt spinach is a really odd smell. Just saying.
Drain spinach and leave to cool.
Use the same pan for the curry. Melt ghee in pan and add panch phora. Stir over highish heat until seeds start to pop. This is not a good time to be standing really close to the stove and peering at the pan. Without goggles, anyway.
Add onion and garlic and ginger, stir over heat until onions golden. Add ground spices except Garam Masala, stir to coat, cook2 minutes.
Add can of tomatoes, stir for five minutes or so. Sauce should be pretty thick.
Chop now-cooled spinach into...smaller bits. Add to sauce, stir through to heat.
Add yoghurt, fold through. Add a squirt or two of lemon juice. I don't know...a tbsp? And salt to taste.
Add white fish, simmer for ten minutes.
Add garam masala and coriander, stir through, take off heat.
Eat with rice or naan.
Write fan mail to Tanya. Preferably enclosing cheques.

Nutrition Information: Christ, I don't know. It's got spinach in it. What more do you want from me?

I prided myself on my stoicism, too

2007-02-14T16:40:00.000+10:30

Hey, you know what's worse than getting up after a night of sporadic insomnia, climbing into the shower still half-asleep and bleary-eyed, looking up at the shower head and seeing a huntsman spider the size of a kitten hanging on the showerhead and registering what you're looking at just in time to see the kitten-sized arachnid leap towards your face in an attempt to get out of the water stream, causing you to shriek, stumble backwards, bang your shin against the side of the bathtub and scramble out of the bathroom still dripping with water but with unwashed hair and unshaved armpits?

No, neither do I.

Sweet dreams are made of these

2007-02-05T10:02:00.000+10:30

Eight years ago and change, I was at a party hosted by my housemate when my eyes fell upon a slim young man with dark curls and exotic eyes. Never being one to shrink from my desires, I introduced myself and proceeded to monopolise his time for the rest of the night. A week later, he dropped in to our house to retrieve some CDs he'd 'forgotten' to take with him. A few nights in loud clubs with copious quantities of kiss-enabling-beer, the subsequent ritual combining of furniture and cooking implements, and the rest is history.

Some three and a half years later, realising that we seemed compatible in such important matters as interior decorating tastes, holiday preferences and the keeping of pets, we formalised the arrangement in the time-honoured fashion (cake, expensive clothes, a senile celebrant, you know the drill).

So this weekend, our connubial bliss intact, we thought it was probably finally time to bite the bullet, take the plunge, and mix our metaphors. We needed to find out if we were compatible in bed.

Obviously, this was a big step for us. After all, having tied ourselves together in the bonds of matrimony (a phrase which sounds rather kinkier than I think it was originally intended to be), the ramifications would be serious if we weren't. This was nothing to be taken lightly.

So we did our research: was latex the best option, or a natural fibre? We read the manuals: most people preferred it to be hard, they said, but there were a lot of advantages to a softer, gentler approach. And we decided to use an expert to explain to us how it was done.

First, this gently-spoken young woman instructed me to lie on a bed and relax. Take deep breaths, she said. Then she repeated the process with the husband. In between the deep breaths, she peppered us with questions about our bedroom routines. Were we hot together, she asked, or cool? Did we move around a lot, did we have a favourite position or mix things up, did we make noise? We answered to the best of our abilities, blushing a little, and she nodded seriously and fed the results into a computer.

A few clicks and whirs later, and a print-out emerged. We waited with bated breath for the verdict. Were we doomed to spend our lives together, incompatible in the area that mattered the most? Was there something we could do about it, some sort of middle ground?

She beamed. What do you know, she said. You're perfectly compatible, that's really rare, congratulations!

And we are. But we're also down a couple of thousand dollars for the new mattress.

If only we could choose not to have parents

2007-01-22T15:13:00.000+10:30

Well, that's the weekend over. Yes, it was about as bad as I thought it was going to be. No, I'm not going to talk about it. Not here, anyway. But for the very reasonable price of...oh, I don't know, a small beer...a large number of tedious anecdotes can be yours. But wait, there's more! Ring now and get a free impression of the way my father-in-law hocks mucus from his nasal passages into the back of his throat, landing with a wet splat against his tonsils!

Heh. That should ensure that none of my phones ever ring again.

It's Blog For Choice day today, it being the anniversary of Roe v Wade and all (and yes, I do realise I am not American, thank you very much, but there wasn't an equivalent decision in Australia; the law is state based, varies a bit, but allows for abortion on request in every State and Territory subject to various time-based restrictions). So, anyway, the topic is Why Am I Pro-Choice, and I can't think of anything at all to say. Not because I'm not, but because I can't imagine being anything else. It's rather like explaining why I'm pro-oxygen.

So I'm going to wimp out, and let these people do the talking for me:
Bluey The Body Rights Thingamabob explains the concept of inalienable bodily rights.
Bitch Ph.D on choice, and why "the fact that abortion is even a debate in this country demonstrates that we do not trust women".
And The Onion, just for the hell of it.

Updated 23/1/07: now that the US feminist bloggers have all got to this, I wanted to add:
Jill at Feministe who provides the best round-up of facts and resources I've seen so far.

The universe is not on my side this week

2007-01-19T17:02:00.000+10:30

Yesterday I witnessed one of the most awesome ways to create discomfort ever.

Stand in a bus queue at peak hour. Get there early for your bus, so that all the people in front of you get on a different bus whilst you're still waiting. This leaves you at the head of the queue. But, and this is the genius bit, don't move up when they leave.

This would also work in a queue for a toilet. Or any number of things, really.

There's no reason to move up, right? The bus won't come any faster if you're standing next to the kerb instead of a metre back. The toilet won't vacate more speedily. And yet there you are, behind the head of the queue. And there before you, just the other side of this one person, is a vast empty space. But you can't walk in front of them in order to fill the space. You can't ask them to move up.

Tumbleweeds blow o'er the untouched terrain. The wind whistles through, unimpeded by people. And yet they don't move up.

It's been a long time since I saw so many people silently discomforted so effectively. Genius.

Onto other things.

The in-laws are over this weekend. My father-in-law and I have a relationship akin to that of North Korea and the United States, where we mostly keep things just on the polite side of hostile for safety's sake. We'll see how things develop. If you see a mushroom cloud over my way, my grand plan of Distracting Everybody With Alcohol will have failed. Tell my mother I loved her.

Break out the champagne. Or the aspirin.

2007-01-17T16:45:00.000+10:30

I went out with girlfriends last night. Several bottles of red wine and a generous helping of angst later, I weaved my way home. To find that the husband had locked the front door on his way to bed, despite me not having taken my keys.

(The key thing happens all the time. Three days into my Christmas break I discovered that I had no idea where my keys were, and on reflection realised that I hadn't had occasion to use them for the past ten days, and thus they could have been anywhere. I turned the house upside down, even cleaning out rooms that hadn't been cleaned in months, to no avail. I didn't find them again until I got back to work on 2 January. I'd left my keys in a suit jacket, which I'd then packed in a box to be moved over to the new office buildings. I'm a genius.)

So it took me ten minutes of alternately ringing the doorbell, the home phone and the mobile phone before I managed to wake the poor man, who ambled downstairs, let me in, yawned 'oops' and wandered back up to bed. And today - singing along with me if you know the words - I'm tired and hung-over.

Hey, anyone remember that New Year's resolution I made? Nope, me neither.

So for a start, there went any chance of getting to the gym. Basically, if I can't get thin and fit on one visit a week, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't even want to think about the money.

Secondly, I had an appointment with my HR manager, subject line We Have Two Days Left To Decide To Fire You. To which I turned up with hair scraped into a messy ponytail and in dire need of cutting, a shirt of dubious age chosen because it doesn't require ironing, and definitely not enough make-up to hide the bags under my eyes. Add to that my inability to make eye contact (her office was very bright) and my over-reliance on the word 'um' to fill pauses, and I'm sure I came across like the brightest young lawyer on the block. After all, nothing says success like Hi, I'm Hungover On A Wednesday.

Despite which, apparently they're not going to fire me. Probation is over as of Friday.

With more coffee, this post might have been coherent

2007-01-16T13:24:00.000+10:30

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and the city is filled with handsome men looking distractingly sexy in their pinstriped suits and crisp white shirts. I'm not sure where they've all suddenly come from. Perhaps there's a convention on. So far I have resisted tugging any of them to me by the tie (as far as I'm concerned this is the primary purpose of ties; come-grab-me clothing if ever I saw some) and snogging them, but I can't make any promises for the future.

By the way, if it is a convention, and you organised it, and you happen to be reading this, please accept my heartfelt gratitude. However, if you wanted to ensure my lifelong heartfelt gratitude, which is obviously a better thing to have, then I would be happy to accept any invitation to the opening ceremony that you care to extend. Because there must be an opening ceremony of some sort, right? For the convention of delicious men? Maybe a parade of some sort, with streamers and topless men dancing and…you know, I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this, and there went my last chance of getting anything done today.

I think there should be champagne, too, at this opening ceremony. Just, you know, in case you were taking notes.

The husband had to get up before dawn this morning, which in the middle of an Australian summer equates to Too Damn Early. Being a supportive and loving wife, I elected to ride into town with him rather than catch a later bus, and went to the gym before work.

There are people out there who think nothing of getting up at 5.15 in the morning, going for a refreshing five-mile jog before drinking a delicious freshly-squeezed jug of spinach-and-celery juice, nibbling a wholegrain cracker and bounding off for a fulfilling twelve hour day educating orphans. I know this because back in law school I was friends with one of them, a total freak of a girl who did all of the above (not the orphan bit), won about a trillion academic prizes and then ruined the few shreds of schadenfreude-esque* comfort I had left by gaining a good-looking, exotic, talented artist boyfriend. Last I heard they were in Paris together.

Anyway. Moving on. Totally not bitter and envious over here.

The problem is that I'm not the sort of person who gets up at 5.15 am. Under the persistent delusion that I am, in fact, a trust fund baby with a lucrative book deal, I insist on acting like the sort of person who rolls out of bed at about noon, removes the sunglasses at about 6 pm, and then spends the evening hosting a salon whilst intellectual men admire my wit. I think we all understand how far this is from the truth.

So this morning, when the alarm went off in the dark, I was still recovering from the sparkling red wine and…other things…** of the night before. I dragged myself out of bed. I dragged myself to the gym. I even spurred myself into a shambling jog. There were hardly any people there, and for some reason the gym hadn't turned any music on. Because I'm still confused about how to attach my IPod, all I could hear was the rhythmic squeak of the treadmill, and the purr of the motor when I ramped up the speed. I think it lulled me into a half-dozing state.

You know how when you're half-asleep, asinine ideas seem like strokes of genius? There I was, jogging, half-dozing, and through my muddled state I thought hey, I'm onto something here. If I can manage to stay half-asleep, I won't notice how much physical work I'm doing, and I'll be able to work harder. So I hopped off the treadmill and went to try this on some weight machines.

The problem was not that it didn't work. The problem was that it almost did. I woke up on the leg press, unable to work out how many repetitions I'd done. And I really hope that was sweat on the vinyl seatback, and not drool.

Don't worry. I wiped it off.

* There's something about sticking a French suffix on a German word that amuses the hell out of me. Look at it, it's like a teeny linguistic border dispute. So cute!
** Tips for young bloggers: do not give one's blog address out to one's husband's workmates.

If anyone needs me, I'll be hiding under the bed with a bottle of Scotch

2007-01-12T10:58:00.000+10:30

Laugh? Cry? Run far, far away?

"There are a lot of things I have concluded to be wrong, without studying them in-depth. Evolution is one of them. The fact that I don't know that much about it does not bother me in the least."

"Every female, beginning at the age of thirteen, completed at age eighteen, should receive training on how to be supportive, submissive wives to their future husbands. This would effectively rid society of feminism, which is nothing but psychological terrorism. Every female should be taught their equal status with men, while recognizing there are differences in roles between the sexes."

"The United States is based on having freedom of religion, speech, etc., which means you can believe in God any way you want (Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, etc.), but you must believe."

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it. [emphasis added]"

"Men should stick to blue and women should stick to pink. We dress babies in the right colors so why can't we do the same as adults? It is a sin to wear clothes that belongs to the opposite sex and women are particularly bad at violating this rule. Men don't wear dresses (apart from a few sickos) so why should females wear pants? It's a sin! Most women today are transvestites and abominations."

I...don't think I can find anything to say about this.
(via)

Breaking News: Women may or may not care about correct peeing posture

2007-01-10T13:22:00.000+10:30

So, my attention was drawn to this claim that "Young women in Sweden, Germany and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating".

Quite apart from the fact that the source for this assertion is nebulous at best (believe me, I tried to find information on the 'internet survey of Australian women' and came up with nothing) I'm mystified both that anyone cares one way or the other whether someone else does or does not stand to pee unless the someone in question is tasked with the cleaning-up of random spraylets, and the vehemence of the reactions to the news.

This guy jumps to the conclusion that "this is the latest attempt by liberal feminists to emasculate men. It would take a liberal feminist to be victimized by men urinating while standing."

Well, obviously. After all, asserting a right to restrict the private and personal actions of other people when those actions do not affect me, the asserter of said right, in any way at all is the textbook definition of the word 'liberal'. You can tell, because us liberals are the ones who discourage women from freely choosing how to spend their Saturday nights, agitate to stop women making decisions about their own health and bodily autonomy, prevent GBLT folk from deciding to legally formalise their own personal relationships or serve their country openly, prevent householders from decorating their own front doors and, for pete's sake, encourage people to stop eating soy. Damn interfering liberals.

(As an aside, I love how that rant ends: "You can remove the urinals from the men's room if that makes you feel better about yourself, but we're still standing.". Either he means that he's going to stand up to pee whilst in a private cubicle and no-one can stop him, dammit, just you try, or he means that he's going to walk into a urinal-less men's room and just, what, pee in a corner? And this is…a demonstration of his unstoppable masculinity?)

In my attempts to verify any of the sources named, I did find a Norwegian article from September last year in which the head of the Democrats Party splutters with outrage that a school requires small boys to sit down to pee in an attempt to ensure clean bathrooms. "It is a human right not to have to sit down like a girl," Kleppe said.

Does anyone need me to spell it out more clearly than that? Humans = non-girls. Girls = non-humans. The fact that it's almost solely women who clean the urine-bespattered bathrooms in question = totally irrelevant.

I mean, Jesus. There aren't real problems in the world to worry about?

Three Conversations

2007-01-10T09:04:00.000+10:30

On the drive home last night:
Me: I need to find a way to attach my IPod to myself when I'm at the gym. Any ideas?
Husband: You could tuck it into your waistband?
Me: That won't work.
Him: Or you could...tuck it into your underwear. [starts to laugh] That'd be funny, seeing someone wearing headphones, and the cord disappears down into their underwear. And you'd be all, er, what on earth are they listening to?
Me: The Vagina Monologues?

In conversation with a co-worker, discussing the pregnancy of an acquaintance's wife:
Me: Apparently she's due any day now
Her: Really? Is she having a caesarian?
Me: I don't think so, no. Why do you ask?
Her: Well, she's only got one leg.
Me: ...
Her: Well, it would make it hard to push.
Me: ...
Her: Because, you know, you wouldn't get traction.
Me: I can honestly say that never occurred to me before.

In my office, discussing how to co-ordinate diaries so that my boss can accompany me to various appointments.
Me: I don't know that we need a formal meeting, I'll just come and see you in your office, and we can make sure you can come down on me.
Him: ...
Me: ...
Him: You didn't mean to say that, did you?

Is it a bad sign that the first task of my New Year was burying a decomposed possum?

2007-01-04T09:37:00.000+10:30

My company moved offices over Christmas. We moved into an already-existent building, but one to which we commissioned major internal work. For the past month or two we've been hearing increasingly hysterical updates on how it's going to look: 'You'll all love it! It's open plan, and very modern, everything's glass, you'll love it" seguing almost seamlessly into "You'll all love it! It's not quite…we've had to cancel the scheduled walk-through, but they assure me it'll be ready by January, and it's very open plan…and…glass…look, let me show you an artist's impression. See? Shiny".

Now it's January (and, oh yeah, sorry about the long absence. The laptop is still at the shop, the desktop got partially fried in an electrical storm and I wrote my car off in an altercation with a be-bull-barred four wheel drive. The last thing isn't strictly relevant to the fact that I haven't blogged, but I throw it in here in case there's some sympathy to be had) and we're installed in the new premises. I'm sure it'll come as as much of a shock to you as it did to me that the offices aren't entirely finished.

So here I am, in an office which boasts dusty drinking water, no toilet paper in the bathrooms (that's not entirely true; they've now hung rolls of paper from the hooks on the inside of the cubicle doors. No dispensers, as yet) and workmen standing on our desks and patching the defective glass doors ("it's so modern, and…glass…"). Fun times.

The oddest thing about the situation, to me, is that the workmen are trained to give way to us. That's the wording that was used, trained. I imagine they used some sort of ringing bell/food reward technique. In effect, it means that if I walk down the corridor to grab a coffee (not that I can do that, because the coffee machine isn't yet working, but let's not dwell) the workmen all stop what they're doing for a minute and move aside. I mean, they're not bowing their heads in obeisance, or anything, but it's still sort of creepy.

Personally, I'd have preferred it if they were trained not to leer at all us young women, but that's just the sort of radical humourless feminist type I am.

Anyway, my dears, you'll be glad - or completely disinterested, but hey, it's my blog - to know that one of my resolutions is to blog more often again. I suspect the nature of it might change a little, but we'll see.

My other resolutions? I don't normally do this (make resolutions, much less share them), but on the grounds that it might actually help stick to them, are about as clichéd as one can get: eat less, drink less, exercise more.

In the service of which, I need advice. Does anyone know of a good non-alcoholic substitute for white wine? Especially in summer, I find that the cool lemony acid bite of a glass of wine is what I crave with dinner, and nothing else is the same. It's not about the alcohol, but non-alcoholic wine is terrible. Any suggestions gratefully welcomed.

Happy New Year. I missed you.

The Luck of the Draw

2006-11-29T21:13:00.000+10:30

I was in computer training all day today with three workmates, which wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded. Usually the idea of an entire day being taught to use Office programs fills me with dread, but not only was the trainer funny as hell, but she pitched it at the right level so that I actually learnt a fair bit. She gave the four of us – I’m not kidding – little signs to hold up that said ‘OOoooOOOooo’ on one side and ‘Wow’ on the other, in order to gauge our interest. Suffice it to say that I held it up unironically on several occasions.

In order to keep her audience interested and ensure that we interacted with her, she told us that every time we said something useful or asked a good question, she’d hand us a playing card. The more the better at the end of the day, because whoever had the best poker hand (choosing their best five cards) won a prize.

I want you all to understand the implications of this. The deal was that the more we interacted, the better our chances of winning a prize.

Well.

Let me give you an example of how I read such a challenge, just so that those of you who haven't caught up can understand why this is a bad idea.

The last thing we learnt on the day was how to use PowerPoint in a BigLawFirm approved format. In order to demonstrate this, we were all instructed to put together a simple three-slide presentation about ourselves. The other three were called things like ‘All about Blondie*’ and ‘Queenie**’s presentation’. Mine was called ‘Tanya: why we love her and buy her alcohol’ complete with clipart of wine glasses and a little graph depicting the ratio of adoration to inebriation.

Believe it or not, I got extra playing cards for this tactic, and won the prize.

I was expecting the prize to be a cheap bottle of wine, or perhaps a pack of playing cards. Nope. It’s a poker kit complete with chips, dealer chips, cards and a booklet. So I’m feeling pretty lucky, and I suggest to Blondie and Queenie that we go to a bar and celebrate Blondie’s house purchase. We go somewhere nice. It’s hot, and the balcony of the bar is crowded with expensively dressed yuppies. We blend in.

I’m feeling lucky up until the point where I knock my relatively expensive glass of wine over. It flies in the direction of the floor, though, missing me and everyone else, so I’m just down a glass of wine. So I’m still feeling lucky when I ask the waiter to bring me a second glass. He acquiesces, and brings my Sauvignon Blanc out on a tray which also holds a glass of red. He puts my wine down carefully, and as he reaches for the second glass his hand jerks up and he throws the contents of the glass all over me.

The wine flies upwards and out of the glass in a graceful arc towards me, the sunlight glinting through it as it moves. The balcony hushes. Forty yuppies turn towards me. I stand there, my shirt and skirt dripping with red wine.

And all I can do is laugh.

In the end they comped me two more glasses of wine and promised to pay the dry cleaning bill, so I’m feeling pretty lucky still. Now I just need to work out how to play poker.

*Blondie is the girl from a previous post who told me I had a wicked personality. She’s actually very nice.

**Queenie is the other girl with whom I started. The three of us share an office. I feel guilty giving her such a corny nickname; it’s no reflection on her.

To err is human, to blog is...well, also human. If you're an attention seeker.

2006-11-20T20:33:00.000+10:30

So, this whole write-a-novel-in-a-month thing? Yeah, not so much. The laptop is pretty much cactus, and I've taken it back to the shop. Normally I'd just do the usual trade with a computer-geek friend (I cook, he makes the computer go) but this was very clearly a hardware issue, and the thing's under warranty, so you know. Reformat from scratch, I said. Hell, give me a new one, I said. Just don't charge me. I was bolshy, the lawyer knowing her rights. And then I walked out of the shop and looked up at the husband, lip quivering for added effect, and said in a plaintive tone that was the shiniest thing I'd ever owned, and now it's gone.

So, self-imposed pathos aside, I am still writing, but I'm not going to get to fifty thousand words in a month. I'm at nineteen thousand at the moment, so I'm shooting for a novel in two months. [Inter]national novel writing month[s], one might say. I feel what it lacks in pithiness it makes up for in accuracy.

Why not in one month? Well, apart from the job and the lack of laptop and the interstate visitors, I've also joined a new gym in the hopes that spending half my wage on indulgent yuppie faux-exercise rather than, you know, going for a damn walk, will inspire me to work hard and lose weight.

So far it's been a week of cancelling appointments because I have work commitments, and then an 8am 'orientation and assessment' in which they explained how to use the treadmill (Now, you press the big button that says Start, and then you adjust the speed with the big button that says Faster...) and asked me what time I started work (Me: "Well, normally 8, but I had an appointment with you so I came in at 7.15. Her: What, a.m.?|). No matter: I am enthused, energised, and almost completely sure that I won't be writing a post in two weeks that begins "So, this whole get fit and healthy thing?"

Sometimes you should just go home early

2006-11-19T17:47:00.000+10:30

Friday night I had a work do, a professional mixer thrown by a big client, at which I intended to drink one glass of wine and then leave early.

For some reason, I always seem to think that this plan will work. By now, you'd think I'd know what was actually going to happen, and which did. We turn up, a phalanx of black-suited lawyers, and head to the bar. Now, I say bar. This is a low-key sort of arrangement, so the bar is just a trestle table manned by volunteers. It's less than half an hour into the party, but the girl before me gets the last of the plastic wine glasses. So my champagne? Comes in a tumbler.

After two of those, the speeches start. My boss uses his (lack of) stature to sidle unnoticed through the crowd and obtain us a beer each whilst everyone's listening. Some time after that, there's a glass of red wine in my hand.

They finally kick us out, almost an hour after the official finish time. It's still early, 7pm, and a lawyer friend and I decide to go on to a bar. She's meeting a girlfriend who isn't due for an hour, so I ring the husband - shouting over the other people in the lift - and tell him I'll be late.

I don't eat at parties. It's just too awkward, trying to establish whether the little quiche things have meat in them, trying to balance a drink and a plate of vegetables, being introduced to potentially important clients with a mouthful of food. So by the time we get to the bar, I'm sort of drunk.

And the girlfriend turns up, and she's beautiful. Really, genuinely, heartbreakingly beautiful. My lawyer friend is also very striking, blonde and tall and thin. So when a couple of men come in and come over, I'm invisible. I mean, they don't even look in my direction, sort of invisible. It's not like I expect male attention as some sort of birthright, but it's a little galling not to even have them bother to introduce themselves to me.

Lawyer friend tells me it's always like this with the Beautiful One, men just materialise. She's quick to add that she herself commands enough attention, I should understand, as well. And I nod, and say something like yes, I can imagine that neither of you have any trouble, you're both very attractive.

And do you know what she says to me? In a tone of genuine warmth and good humour, she looks at me and she says "Oh, but don't worry. You've got the most wicked personality."

Miss Congeniality 2006, ladies and gentleman.

The Abyssinian Restaurant, with detours

2006-11-11T18:03:00.000+10:30

Has anyone here ever read an article linking the existence of the internet to the dearth of decent modern literature? Or at the very least linking the existence of the internet to the demise of the long, detail-stuffed novel?

Because I am 8,000 words behind schedule on the novel now, and whilst there is a valid argument to be made for blaming this on the fact that I’m a) a lawyer, b) at a really big firm where they, for reasons that escape me, seem to expect that I will work diligently and without pausing for breath for ten or eleven hours a day, c) and I sit with my back to the door of my office so that everyone, most pertinently my boss, can see what I’m doing at any given time d) not to mention that I probably have no writing talent whatsoever anyway…I choose, instead, to blame the internet.

Damn internet, with its beguiling distractions and wanton ways.

Anyway, moving on. I went out to dinner with the husband last night after work, which was very nice. And I promised a friend that I’d give him a rundown of what the restaurant was like (I’m trying to lure him and his wife to Adelaide with the promise of good food, you see. I briefly flirted with the idea of claiming that my city was known for handing out free mojitos on street corners, but my mother always told me not to lie to men who know how to handle a gun*) and thus paid more attention then normal to the food.

Given that I’ve been neglecting this blog, and one of my secret Dream Jobs is to be a food critic anyway, I figured I might as well share my review with you lot.

So.

(Holy crap, that was a long lead in. No wonder I’m so behind on the damn novel).

The Abyssinian – Ethiopian Cuisine

There’s nothing glamorous about the Abyssinian. It’s a kilometre or two out of the city, and the neon sign is past its use-by date. Inside, the tables are covered in floral yellow cloths with a stack of paper napkins on each. Even on a warm Friday night, it was almost empty.

It does, however, feel genuine. Ethiopian artefacts and paintings are everywhere, and cones of incense burning on a little table at the back of the room. Impossibly tall women with amazing hair keep coming in to say hello to the owners. The wine list is practically non-existent, and what is on there is poor quality and over-priced; they are also BYO. They do offer a range of Ethiopian beers, which we didn’t try but are probably far more appropriate as an accompaniment to the food. The food, at least to my ignorant palate, is very very good.

The husband chooses the house speciality, the Doro-wot, chicken legs simmered in a sauce of berbere (red chile pepper), minced shallot and egg. The Doro-wot sauce is a dark paprika-red, and apparently with quite a kick to it; ‘like a cross between a Hungarian goulash and a Vindaloo’, I am instructed. It, like mine, is served with injera, a flat bread made from rice flour. Everything is eaten with the hands, of course, which leads us into a discussion about whether this place would be a good idea for a first date or not. We decide that it would be; he because it would allow him to weed out anyone too squeamish to give themselves over to the experience, I because of the finger licking. But I digress.

I go for the Beyianetoo, the mixed vegetarian platter, which at $15.00 is the most expensive thing on the menu. From the top: the kik-alicha (split peas in turmeric sauce) is mild, the turmeric and basil bringing out the nuttiness of the peas. The gomen, spinach and onions sautéed with tomatos and garlic, is beautifully fresh, a nice counterpart to the spicier dishes. The fousselia (beans and carrots) is quite bland, and the dinich wot (potatoes and carrots) could have used some lemon to bring out the turmeric and spices. The star, for me, is the messer-wot; red lentils in berbere sauce with garlic, red onions and spices. The lentils have been simmered for hours so they are tender, and their flavour blends with the sauce to produce something rich and luxurious. I could have been content just eating this dish, and perhaps the gomen as a counterpart. Still, the huge variety on the platter is appreciated, and even with the husband helping we don’t manage to finish it.

It’s amazing value, and one of the best meals we’ve had in a while. It probably won’t appeal to anyone who prefers style to substance, but if you like food, you can’t help but enjoy this.

*We have some odd conversations, my mother and I, what can I tell you?

Where Am I (II)

2006-11-06T21:44:00.000+10:30

Why, I'm glad you asked. I'm settled down in my lounge room. There's a cat snuggled up on the sofa to my right. A husband on the couch to my left, watching television. The heater's on.

It's pretty comfy, all told. I just thought I'd share.

Where Am I?

2006-11-02T22:00:00.000+10:30

It's National Novel Writing Month and despite the fact that I still don't have a laptop, I do have a job requiring ten and eleven hour days, and I'm booked solid every weekend from now until January., I decided to do it. You know how it is, right?

To make matters worse, my sister in law and her husband are coming to visit tomorrow for a few days, which meant that we had to go grocery shopping and then clean the house this evening. It's 9.45pm, I've just finished mopping the floors, and I'm logged on in order to write.

As of right now, I'm on 3000 words. Which is behind schedule, but not by much.

Guys, seriously: I love this blog. I love knowing that there's an audience for what I say, even if it is only because you're all bored stupid at work. I haven't been great at keeping up with blogging recently, and it's going to get worse over November. But if you can bear with me just a little longer, I'm pretty confident I can get back into it in December. After all, if I can write a novel in a month, what's a little blogging?

I thought they were supposed to relieve tension

2006-10-29T12:10:00.000+10:30

I know, I know. It’s been over a week since I blogged. Where have I been?

I have been sick, is the answer. Sick, yea, even nigh unto death. Well, not really, but definitely sick enough for it to constitute an unusual event. Sick enough to wander the house misquoting Macbeth (‘Out, out, damn snot!’ or ‘Who’d have thought the old man had so much phlegm in him?’ being favourites). Sick enough that I am officially Over being sick.

This having been the week that I started the Terrifying New Job, you can see that my continued ill health was a little inconvenient. Luckily, I’ve spent most of the week in training, so only the other two rookies and whoever was unfortunate enough to be in charge of us that day have been subjected to my coughing and spluttering. Still, it’s hardly ideal.

The other problem has been…well. I’m sure that if I were actually dying, rather than just turning to the husband and croaking melodramatically: "If I die, will you promise to be nice to the cats?" (Him: "you’re not dying". Me: “I…*coughs*…might be…". Him: "You’re not dying. Take some Panadol and have a cup of tea" Me: "I was going to, but I couldn’t…quite…make it to the kitchen". Him: "Okay, okay, I’ll be nice to the cats. Take some medication."), then I would be too sick to think about sex. As it is, I’m just too sick to do much about it, because, well, not to over-share, but I hold the firm belief that if you can't breathe through your nose, it's probably not going to be much fun for either of you. And I am totally blushing right about now, for the record, which isn't going to stop me continuing this train of thought.

The point is, now that I’m on a Shakespeare-paraphrasing roll, that for the past week or so, the spirit has been willing but the flesh has been weak. By Friday, I was climbing the fucking walls. If a delightful young page of borderline legal age had wandered my way, well, I can’t guarantee I’d still be in a job.

I spent a large part of Friday in the Hilton, attending a professional seminar. Uncharacteristically for professional seminars, the speakers were interesting. However, there was at least one speech I didn’t hear a word of, because there was this guy. Or, more precisely, there were this guy’s hands.

You lot know how it works, right? You turn up for a seminar, you get a folder containing a variety of papers and programs and the like? Well, this one included a stress ball, one of those squishy things one uses to relieve tension. Or not.

So, I’m sitting there after lunch (seared Barramundi and a dry Clare riesling, but I went into the law to fight for social justice, I swear), and I find myself mesmerised by this guy who is sitting in the row in front of me and a few seats to my left. I can’t see his face, and it doesn’t occur to me to care, because, well…

He’s holding the stress ball. And when I say holding…

(excuse the ellipses, I’m just having to take little breaks, here)

More specifically, his left hand is wrapped, fingers splayed, around the stress ball, and is gently, rhythmically, kneading it. Meanwhile, the thumb of his right hand is slowly, slowly, flicking back and forth over the surface of the ball.

Holy fucking Christ, people. I was mesmerised. There were a good ten minutes there where as far as I was concerned, nothing else existed. I think I may actually have whimpered a little. Luckily I then had a coughing fit and pulled myself back into the real world.

Jesus.

I'm smarter than I am pretty, and thus I judge

2006-10-20T13:56:00.000+09:30

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Hot Or Not. . Extreme Makeover. The Biggest Loser. All of them, more or less, take an overweight frump and render them vaguely shaggable, whether by improving their dress sense, whittling down their figure or cutting off their nose and making them a new one (I’m not the only person who finds Extreme Makeover about as wrong as wrong can be, right?).

Because of this, people complain about their vapidity and superficiality. They contribute to the cult of celebrity, with its focus on one’s appearance. They should be stopped.

Well, I agree with the first two points, but I think that banning such shows would be missing a major opportunity.

You want the media to extol the virtues of a good personality, a rapier-like wit, an ability to charm? Then what we need, ladies and gentlemen, is a new breed of game show. The personality makeover genre.

Funny Or Not was the concept that started this blog. The original show doesn’t air in Australia, so for those of you who haven’t heard of it, basically a woman walks out onto a stage wearing a bikini and a panel of men tell her whether she’s hot enough (“your thighs touch at the top. Not hot. Next!”). In my version, contestants walk out and have three minutes to demonstrate their sense of humour. Anyone who disclaims their attempt with ‘I have a strange sense of humour’ or quotes from pop culture is automatically Not Funny.

Quick Wit for the Dimwit would involve a team of sharp-tongued friends accompanying some hapless soul to every work function, party and date s/he goes on for a few weeks and giving them helpful tips on how to socialise better. It would perpetuate my favourite Urban Dictionary term ever: Third Joke.

Extreme Personality Makeover would take people who actually had socially crippling disabilities, like undiagnosed depression, and feed them medication until they acted like everyone else. They might be bland and plastic, but hey, at least they’re normal. I mentioned I hate Extreme Makeover, right?

As for The Biggest Loser, I don’t think we need to change the name. Any guy still using chat-up lines in an un-ironic sense, or girl who talks about how much she wants babies on the first date* gets voted out.

I think there's a new era coming, my friends. I can smell it on the air.

*Talks about it on the first date. Although wanting babies on the first date would admittedly be worse. And difficult to organise.

What it lacks in content it makes up for in length

2006-10-19T15:41:00.000+09:30

I’m on holiday, I thought. I’ll have loads of free time, I thought. But the husband’s on leave with me this week, and we’re both conscious that my free time will be severely curtailed next week, and so we’ve been approaching the holiday like I’m going off to war. The result is that between the day trips, the evenings out and the incessant bonking, I’ve not had a lot of time to blog. Today, however, I’ve been felled by a cold and so I’m back in my old familiar spot in front of the computer.

I feel like I should blog about Melbourne. I had a blast, but I don’t really have much to say. Everyone smokes, the women are all incredibly hot (there was a heatwave, so there seemed to be smooth slim legs everywhere), and if you know where to look you can happily spend an evening drinking wasabi caprioskas. It was a good time.

Onto other things.

As I said, I’m battling a cold. Well, that sounds rather more dramatic than it is. More accurately, a cold gave me a threatening look and I immediately handed over my wallet and jewellery and tried not to cry.

Anyway, I can’t breathe through my nose properly, which must have made sleeping next to me terribly pleasant last night. This morning I took a very long, very hot shower in an attempt to clear the airways (I don’t know how this works, but I’m told it does) and found myself singing an embarrassing little song to the tune of The Addams Family. You don’t need me to inflict the lyrics on you, but suffice it to say that it began with “I’m sniffly and I’m snuffly”…yeah, I'm going to leave it at that. Believe it or not, sometimes I can pass for sophisticated.

Anyway, I then started to think about this habit I have of making up ridiculous little rhyming songs, and I realised that my mother always did the same thing when we were young. I was always impressed that she could make up rhymes on the spur of the moment. That’s the nice thing about kids; they’re easily impressed. I’m sure that if I’d caught her singing when I was fourteen, I’d have sniffed about the lack of iambic pentameter and then wandered down to the rocky shore to stare soulfully at the waves. And yes, I really did have a rocky shore to wander down to at fourteen. All teenagers should, if you ask me.

What the hell was I talking about? Oh, right. Singing little songs. Both the husband and I do this, so I was idly thinking how whimsical and charming we would be as parents, how other people would say to us, oh, you two, you were just born to be parents, how we’d be the envy of our children’s classmates…

And then a telemarketer rang and broke into my reverie. After I’d politely got rid of him and went to dress, I heard the husband – who’d had to abandon an intricate art piece he was working on in order to grab the phone - singing a little song to himself. Ah, how whimsical, I thought. And then I realised that, to the tune of the Banana Boat Song*, he was singing: Fuck off, fuck off…

Maybe we shouldn’t have kids just yet.

*I had to look up the title of this song. I think of it as the Day-o song. You know the one, right?

And are you sure the full-fat version is a good idea, Ma'am?

2006-10-11T15:16:00.000+09:30

My way of passing the time when standing in the ‘express aisle’ – a misnomer if ever I heard one - of a supermarket is to judge the lives of other customers based on the contents of their shopping.

This isn’t difficult, most of the time. The be-suited woman holding six Lean Cuisines and a pint of skim milk obviously lives alone, works long hours, spends a lot of time in the gym and never drinks. The young man holding a packet of mince, one onion and a packet of spaghetti is trying to impress a new girlfriend, and has forgotten the pasta sauce.

Hey, it keeps me amused.

I confessed this to a friend (whom, I suspect, will soon need a pseudonym. Polly hasn’t forgiven me yet, though, so I’m treading with caution) who told me that he did the same thing, only possibly more judgmentally. That, of course, made me wonder how many other people do this. And I got a bit paranoid.

So yesterday, finding myself needing a few things from the store, I employed a cunning trick.See if you can make a judgmental call about me based on the following:

One packet of Nurofen
One packet of Panadol
One bar of chocolate*
One glossy magazine
One carton of dishwashing powder.

You can’t, can you See what I did there? With the clever red herring grocery item?

I know. I'm an idiot. I wouldn't mind, but we didn't need dishwashing powder.

I’m off to Melbourne to render us destitute this evening, by the way, and I am still laptopless, so no blogging till Monday.

Have a good weekend.

*I haven’t bought chocolate in months. Jesus. You take your eye off the shelves for a second and the world goes crazy. You know you can get cookie dough Kit Kats now? The hell?

Conversations with lawyers

2006-10-09T16:52:00.000+09:30

So Friday night, I’m sitting around after work with some workmates, and we’re discussing the week. Debbi, a young family lawyer, was telling a story about a couple of new clients who described themselves as swingers. When, earlier, she'd handed their file over to me, I’d said to her that they sounded more like polyamorists than swingers. And now here we are, over a bottle of wine, talking about this, and the cloned blond secretaries naturally ask what the difference between the two things is. I find myself explaining. Remember I don’t know these people very well, but what the hell, it’s my last day on the job anyway, and so I persist.

And halfway through this, I become aware that Francis, a senior partner, has come in and is listening. Now, Francis is a nice guy. He’s also incredibly intimidating. He carries the sort of English accent that discreetly hints at the existence of some very old money. His manner of speech, of dress, of deportment, all make me feel as if I’m a common, gum-chewing, slangy young thing. And now this incredibly proper Englishman, who must be close to sixty, is listening to me explaining the difference between non-mainstream sexualities.

After a couple of minutes, he says, thoughtfully and slowly; “No, there’s a problem with that, you see.”
“A problem with polyamory?”
“Yes. Yes, I think so.”
Oh, great. Now I can either defend the morality of a lifestyle which I don’t practice but have nothing against in principle – which my instinct is to do – or I can nod and smile and leave feeling like a coward. Either way, this is not how I was hoping my last evening was going to go. This is not the conversation by which I want to be remembered.
“What do you see as the problem?” I never have been good at knowing when to shut up, after all.
“Well, ‘poly’, you see, is from the Greek, whereas ‘amore’ has a Latin root. As a neologism, it just doesn’t work.”
“Er. Yes. Good point. I’ll pass that on.”

Thank Christ for that.

Like manna from heaven

2006-10-06T15:07:00.000+09:30

So, turns out someone else bought cake anyway, so I’m just going to drink the free alcohol this evening with a clear conscience. Hell, it’s not like they’ve been paying me to work here for the past six weeks, the least they can do is cough up for the alcohol.

(Sentences like that are the reason I don’t tell my workmates about the blog. Well, one of the reasons.)

Yes, the last six weeks have been unpaid. Which is no end of fun, because I have issues about money, and spending it on myself, and not pulling my financial weight. This upcoming interstate trip is a case in point; I’m saying to the husband, I can get somewhere without too many cockroaches for $X, and he’s saying, yeah, or you could spend a bit more and stay somewhere nice, you fool. I did, and at a very good price, but the fact remains that I have major anxiety about this trip.

Technically it’s a cheap way to have a holiday before starting a new job. It’s undeniably true that I need clothes for work, so that’s hardly a frivolous purchase. But still. I shall spend too much. We shall be unable to pay the mortgage and find ourselves out on the street. The husband will forever resent me for my abysmal money management skills, and will turn to bourbon and blondes to appease his anguish. I’ll have to sell the cats for scientific experiments, always assuming I can find a scientist who wants to run a How Many Hours A Day Can That Thing Possibly Sleep, Anyway? Are You Sure It’s Not Just Dead? Experiment. We will be doomed, doomed.

So you can imagine how I reacted, reading this: You, certainly, cannot buy everything, but you are able to buy a lot. You can permit yourself to luxuriate, if, certainly, you know when to stop.

I can permit myself to luxuriate? Me? Luxuriate? Oh, ‘tis to laugh. I mean, seriously, I haven’t been paid in six weeks, in fact, I should check the bank account to see if I can afford to go out this weekend…

And, holy shit. My tax return has finally come in, and I under-calculated it by a hundred and odd dollars. Meaning that I have a laptop-sized amount of money sitting in there.

I just…I don’t even know what to say any more.

At least I'm not as clueless about appropriate office behaviour as Foley

2006-10-06T10:05:00.000+09:30

For commentary about serious political issues, I usually turn to Shakespeare's Sister; and, indeed, her latest post is worth reading. This time, though, the political news story of the week is so sleazy that I can’t do better than to point you at Jason Mulgrew to get the full import of what’s involved here. Seriously, go and read his commentary, it’s both hilarious and shudderingly nasty.

Onto other things. For someone who hates leaving workplaces, I seem to be doing a lot of it recently. Today’s my last day at this current job, after which I have two weeks holiday and then officially begin my career as an Evil Corporate Lawyer, complete with menacing laugh. No capes, sadly.

So I agonised this morning about whether I should bring something into work, a cake or something, and if so do I announce it or just leave it in the lunchroom, and does that presumably mean I have to go to/initiate a morning tea, and why the hell am I the only person in the entire world who doesn’t understand the etiquette involved here? Was there a class in school I missed?

Anyway, the bakery I walk past in the morning wasn’t yet open, so I am cakeless, which probably makes me the Most Ungrateful Intern Ever. Maybe I’ll buy flowers at lunchtime and leave them instead. Probably won’t, though, to be honest.

Two weeks off. I’m dizzy at the prospect.

Besides, no-one needs to hear me try and sing soprano

2006-10-03T17:25:00.000+09:30

The profession of law has the second highest incidence of alcoholism of any profession, apparently. I suppose that after four and a half years working to gain admission to the bar, they’re determined to make the most of it.

And yes, I did decide on this topic so just I could use that joke. Oh, like it comes natural to you.

Anyway, this particular statistic came up in conversation the other day at work; fittingly, over Friday night drinks. One fellow in his mid-thirties opined, somewhat smugly if you ask me, that ‘as a single man’ he makes sure never to drink alone, and that he will therefore never succumb. Purely out of scientific curiosity, I asked him if he thought it acceptable to drink alone if one were not single, but happened to find oneself alone for the evening. Oh, definitely not, he said,, no, never. Two of the young blonde secretaries (I think there’s a cloning lab somewhere that caters exclusively to law firms) nodded in agreement, evidently feeling that one would only be alone for the evening if one hadn’t enough friends and admirers to take one out.

Well. Not wishing to gain a reputation for argumentativeness, much less dipsomania, I held my peace. But really, let’s face it. He’s wrong.

Let me count the ways.

Firstly, I’m not single, friendless or unemployed. Which means that I rarely have the opportunity to spend an evening alone in the first place. If anything lubricates my path to lushdom, it’ll be drinking in company, since it happens about a hundred times more often.

Secondly, because a night alone is a rare pleasure (and its rarity is part of the pleasure, I hasten to add), I’m damned if I’m going to spend it sipping herbal tea and…and…dusting or something. And neither would you. You’d take advantage of the fact that you have unfettered access to the television and you would watch Bridget Jones’ Diary for the fifteenth time, and you would do so whilst drinking white wine. Well, you probably wouldn’t, because I think most of you are male. But I feel my point stands.

And finally, it’s well known that one says tactless, ill-thought out or at the very least excruciatingly dull things whilst in one’s cups. Why on earth would I want to inflict that on another?

Sense and sensibility...well, not so much that last bit.

2006-10-02T13:24:00.000+09:30

People, I don’t know what to tell you about this weekend except that it’s been non-stop hedonistic indulgence.

There have been very few moments in the past three days where I haven’t been either drunk or hung-over. And I hope to God Jason’s right about not having to diet on weekends, because whichever hand hasn’t been holding a glass of alcohol has been shovelling Brie, chocolate or sashimi into my mouth. Orgiastic is not the word.

Which ties in nicely to my question of the day:

If you had to lose one of your senses permanently, which one would it be?

I’m incredibly short-sighted, and not to sound over-dramatic but I already live with the possibility of losing sight, and it would be devastating. Somehow I doubt that there are enough books in Braille or in audio form to keep me satisfied, for a start, and trust me, you don't want to be around me if I'm out of reading material.

The loss of taste would be useful from a weight loss point of view, but I don't want to live in a world without the subtlety of a ripe avocado, the zinginess of lemon-grilled haloumi, the hot rush of wasabi. And not to be able to touch is a heartbreaking idea; do I even need to go into what one would miss?

So it comes down to smell and hearing for me. But I’m having trouble deciding between them.

Think of all those smoky bars, those encounters with odiferous commuters, those polluted days in the city that one would be spared without smell...but then, imagine tasting a wine without the bouquet, or being unable to smell the skin of one's lover, fresh from a shower.

Without hearing, life would be peaceful. No power drills on the street, no honking buses, no screaming advertisements by blokes with first names like "Crazy". But then, imagine not being able to hear Nimrod, or someone's laughter, or the way a forest sounds after a heavy rainfall has eased and water is dripping onto sodden leaves.

So I don't know. What do you think?

Low blood sugar + blogging = a random collection of petty complaints

2006-09-28T12:25:00.000+09:30

Every occupation has its physical hazards. I’m convinced that if I die in the course of a workday, it’ll be in a taxi. I just got back to the office from a six-block ride in which we got honked at twice, narrowly avoided being side-swiped by an articulated bus and at least three illegal manoeuvres were performed (the best of which was an illegal u-turn in front of a moving tram). Jesus.

In other news, this diet that I swore I wouldn’t talk about? It’s pissing me off. I’m eating two relatively healthy meals a day, few-to-no snacks and the occasional fruit salad, and I’ve lost – stop the presses – a pound. Something tells me I’m not getting a book deal any time soon over this particular strategy.

Someone did try and convince me that wine contains calories, but I’m dismissing that as medical quackery. There must be another reason I’m not losing weight.

And my tax return still hasn’t come through, meaning I still don’t have a laptop. If I don’t have one by the beginning of November I don’t see how I can possibly attempt Nanowrimo, which would be disappointing.

So, to sum up: I spend my days riding around in taxis, I drink too much wine to be catwalk-thin, and I don’t have a laptop. Cry me a river, huh?

My subconscious is taunting me

2006-09-27T12:09:00.000+09:30

So this morning, in the wee hours, I was visited with a rather delicious dream of an adult nature. And then, just as it was getting to the really good bit, my husband rolled over in his sleep, threw an arm over me, and woke me up. Such are the disadvantages of being a light sleeper.

So I lay there for a minute, grumbling to myself about the loss of my dream, because isn’t it always the way? And then I thought, hey, who needs dreams when there’s a husband right here? So I made moves of an amorous nature towards him, waking him up, and he seemed receptive to said moves, and things were just getting to the really good bit…

And then my alarm went off, jolting me out of sleep, and I had to get up or risk being late for work.

I mean, goddamn.

I predict my male readers will only get two sentences through this one

2006-09-25T15:24:00.000+09:30

So, now that I have a shiny new job to go to, I have to turn my attention to various boring adult things. Like the fact that I only own two suits, one of which isn’t so much a ‘suit’ as ‘a jacket and a skirt made of vaguely the same fabric, the former of which has a ripped lining’. This, I suspect, will not cut it. So, woe is me, I have to go shopping.

Since I haven’t had leave since before the invention of the iPod, I have decided that said shopping should take place in a city other than this one. A nice little yuppie holiday to go along with my nice little yuppie job.

(Oh, my poor mother. She spent our childhood pioneering Community Farms, and protesting at Greenham, and force-feeding us macrobiotic lentils. I bet she never intended us to turn out like this. Actually, that’s not true. I think it was all a cunning plan on her behalf. Step One, indoctrinate children in Alternative Hippy Lifestyle Choices. Step Two, ensure that AHLCs in question are just uncomfortable enough* to send them screaming over to the Dark Side of Comfort and Affluence. Step Three, be taken care of in own morally superior old age. Well played, mother; well played indeed.)

Indulgent as such a holiday sounds, it’s something of a challenge for me. I’m not good at spending money on myself, and I resent the cost of good clothes. What tends to happen, therefore, is that I get caught between the beautiful but expensive option and the ill-fitting but (to me) reasonably priced option, sulk about how much of a chore this whole shopping thing is, get annoyed with myself for wasting so much time and end up buying something which is halfway between the two options. I then wear it twice, realise it’s completely unsuitable for its original purpose and start again. I’m not even going to tell you how many black skirts I own, all bought in a quest for a straight, classy skirt that finishes an inch or two above the knee, and all of which are either calf-length, too short, too large across the waist and/or too small across the hips, or, in one particular stroke of genius, not actually black but a sort of dark browney-purple that goes with absolutely nothing else in my wardrobe.

Eight skirts, since you’re so persistent. And I still don’t own one that fits the original bill.

I need a new strategy. I thought perhaps I should try going shopping whilst intoxicated, but that might just mean that I think I look foxy in everything, rather than alleviating concern about price tags. The same problem applies to shopping in a self-imposed panic; any strategy that stops me worrying about cost will also stop me being able to exercise judgment.

So I’ve come up with a plan. The only times in my life I have been able to shop with an eagle eye for a flattering cut and not be bothered about cost have been when I’m dressing for a crush. A devastating pair of jeans? Wicked little heels? And Crush will be seeing me in these clothes, you say? Hell yeah, here’s the credit card, pretty me up.

Now all I have to do is develop a crush on someone, preferably someone whom I see regularly and who has a predeliction for business suits. How hard could that be?

*I’m sure it’s possible to grow up on brown rice, lentils and pulses, and be comfortable. When your only parent works long hours and loathes cooking, however, it’s rather the opposite. When I was ten I was forced to develop a mysterious and non-specific food allergy until she buckled and reverted to Birds’ Eye fish fingers and baked beans, otherwise I would have starved to death.

To be fair, you wouldn't have known the last one either

2006-09-24T15:27:00.000+09:30

Three discoveries I have made in the past three days:

1. Just because someone is friendly doesn’t mean that they share your sense of humour. This is especially true if they work in a service industry and being friendly is part of their job. Just to pluck a random hypothetical example out of the air, going into the pet shop and asking for six goldfish “because the cats looked hungry this morning” is generally not a good idea.

2. Drinking an extremely nice bottle of red wine, the sort one puts away for celebrations, and following that up with some dessert wine and chocolate, and then in a combination of guilt and over-excitability deciding to go to the gym the next morning and beat your personal best running record…well, it doesn’t end comfortably, that’s all. Unless you are much fitter than I am.

3. Morris Dancing, whilst universally mocked as a hobby, can be an excellent career move. This works best if one of your fellow Morris Dancers moves to the biggest law firm in the country and is tasked with finding a bright young graduate to fill an upcoming position.

In breaking news: life fucking rocks.

You could hide under the bed, but the monsters might get you

2006-09-21T11:26:00.000+09:30

Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond was critically injured on Wednesday after crashing in a jet-powered car while filming for the program, the BBC announced…Top Gear…were filming him trying to break the British land speed record.

Now look. Consider this a public service announcement.

If you have a job which involves doing risky and possibly fatal things: just stay home for a while, okay? Work in nuclear fission? Call in sick. Run a skydiving business? Take a sabbatical. If you’re an academic, stay out of the stacks, and writers should be on the look out for poison pen letters. In fact, unless your job is to sit around in a sealed house and talk endless drivel about yourself, a holiday would probably be in order.

Although actually, if Abu Bakar Bashir is right, even the Big Brother participants aren’t safe. So I guess there’s an upside to everything.

Warning: this post contains sexual references, adult themes and 5th century Christian doctrine.

2006-09-20T22:36:00.000+09:30

My head seems to be full of random thoughts recently, which I want to blog about but which don’t quite develop into whole stories.

Such as; why did Christians promote the missionary position for sex? What did they have to gain? I understand that organised religions of various types have vested interests in prescribing religious edicts that banned contraception (more believers), paying tithes (more money) or whatever, but what interest did they have in dictating a sexual position?

And obviously, the answer is because they wanted to channel sexual energy into religious fervor. If you go back to the teachings of Augustine and his peers* they loathed and detested the idea of sex. It was alright – grudgingly – for men to enjoy it, since you rather need male orgasm in order to make little Christians, but women? If you’ll pardon the pun, God forbid they took pleasure in the act.

Basically Augustine talks about the danger of concupiscence; lustful and forbidden thoughts. If men and women lose themselves in carnal pleasures of the carnal, their minds are on their pleasure, the union of their flesh, and not on God. So sex shouldn’t be enjoyed, for to do so is to temporarily forsake God.

Okay.So that leads me to another question. Does that mean that the missionary position was prescribed, in preference to anything else, because it was the least pleasurable position?

I’ll let you ponder that for a second. And when you’re done:

Whether they were right or wrong…how did they decide on that? Did they take a poll? Compare notes about their own experiences? Run controlled experiments?

The more I think about this, the stranger it gets. And then I realise I’m thinking about ancient Christians thinking about sex. Do these sorts of things happen to anyone else?

*What? I happened to have a book lying around**.
**I'll work on embedded hyperlinks in my own sweet time, thank you.

Missing in action

2006-09-20T17:22:00.000+09:30

I haven't died. I'm just busy. I have a few things brewing right now, some of which I'm hoping will lend themselves to bloggy goodness.

Until then, do feel free to keep yourselves amused in any way you see fit. I'd recommend the links to the right, but far be it from me to prescribe your pleasures. Later, guys.

I might die alone, but I'll die happy

2006-09-17T21:55:00.000+09:30

I was standing in line in the video* store today and this guy, who was…what the hell is the correct term these days? Cognitively challenged? Anyway, I don’t think it was Downs’ Syndrome or autism, and that’s the limit of my diagnostic skills, so let’s just go with ‘challenged’. Anyway, he came up to me and said What Are The DVDs That You Are Borrowing? I showed him, and he said Oh, and then he asked the woman standing behind me What Are The DVDs That You Are Borrowing? And she showed him, and he said to her Are You Going To Watch Those DVDs With Her? pointing at me, and she said No, and he came back to me and said That Lady Won’t Watch DVDs With You You Will Have To Watch DVDs Alone.

Which obviously injected some cheer into my day.

Strangers informing me of my social pariah status aside, I’m having a wonderful weekend. Friday night I had a stressful afternoon, of the type that leads to brooding and second-guessing, so I employed the completely healthy and not at all substance-abusing method of arriving home, putting on West Wing and pouring myself a large glass of wine.

Since I’m dieting** at the moment, and therefore hadn’t eaten much, this meant that by the time the husband came home two hours later I was into the third glass and extremely tipsy. I babbled at him for an hour, dozed off on his shoulder and then put myself to bed by 9.30pm. I’m totally rock-n-roll, me.

Saturday we were coming home from grocery shopping and decided to stop in at a local winery to see if they were selling unlabelled cases. They were, but they were also selling cheese platters***, and we hadn’t had lunch, and one thing led to another and we found ourselves eating camembert and sliced pink lady apples whilst gazing over rolling hills planted with sauvignon and pinot gris. Sometimes I really loathe my life, I mean, I don’t know how I carry on.

And then today I dropped the husband off at a fun run, drove down to the finish line and watched people run past whilst drinking coffee and reading my novel. It was just like exercising, only without the sweat and sunburn. Well, and the cardiovascular benefits, but let’s not split hairs.

It’s been a good weekend.

*Why are they still called video stores? Mine doesn’t even carry videos any more. It scoffs at such outdated technology. And yet it is a video store. It passeth understanding.
**Sort of. And don’t worry, I won’t get all boring with the diet thing. Why would you care about my physical self? I’m just words on a screen, here.
***Yeah, see, I’m already regretting mentioning the diet. I’m not good at self-deprivation, what can I tell you?

To move or not to move

2006-09-14T14:20:00.000+09:30

The husband* was a little depressed last night, so I took him out for a beer. It quickly became obvious that my normal technique of regaling him with hilarious stories from the front (“so she’s spent twelve years teaching this guy to read and write, helping him through a heroin addiction, looking after the kids and working to pay off his debts, they split up with no money and she goes on a single parent pension, then he wins $5 million on OzLotto and I’m not kidding, the first thing he does is arranges his affairs so that he doesn’t have to pay child support. I mean, jesus, right?”**) wasn’t going to distract him, so I pulled out the big guns.

Thai food, a bottle of wine, and everyone’s favourite Topic of Marital Contention: moving interstate. Nothing like a heated debate to take one’s mind off things.

I want to move to Melbourne or Sydney, you see. He doesn’t. I’ll lay out the arguments briefly for you, and I think you’ll agree that I’m clearly in the right here.

Him:
Both cities are much more expensive than here. We could only enjoy the same standard of living if we took on a much bigger debt burden, and that makes us both unhappy.
And actually, I’m not at all sure we could enjoy the same standard of living anyway, because where else can we live twenty minutes from the CBD and be surrounded by wineries and orchards?
Not to mention, we’ve finally started to get the garden looking nice, and we’ve barely finished repainting the house, and starting again would be a major hassle.
Given the debt burden thing, we’d both need to work fulltime for years and years, and where does that leave the plan to have children?
Also, we’d be moving away from your family, to whom you are very close and who would miss us dreadfully.
Plus, don’t you realise that if we moved to Melbourne we’d be living in the same city as my family, and we’d get hassled to go to family dinners every week and to attend every single family event forever or be made to feel like horrible children? Church may be involved. Don’t underestimate the power of grandmotherly guilt.
We have lots of friends here, and it’s a better city for someone in my profession generally, and there’s going to be huge amounts of money flowing into this state over the next few years, and it’s an exciting time to be living here.

Me:
But I’m bored and restless and I want to move.

Honestly, I don’t know why he’s even contesting this one.

Anyway, near the end of the conversation we revisited an old theory of mine, that in an era of cheap air fares, one can live and work in a cheaper state, and use the saved money to visit more expensive states often enough that one gets the benefit of both. It only works if you argue that the higher wages in bigger cities don’t balance out with the higher cost of living.

I don’t have time to do the research right now. But I’m sure I’m right that if you take the difference in mortgage payments between, say, a two bedroom house in a leafy Adelaide suburb and the equivalent in Melbourne, and then look at the difference in salary for a professional five years out of university (since I think salary differences in various cities start to kick in a few years out), you are probably better off living in Adelaide and flying into Melbourne or Sydney or wherever every second weekend. That way you can maintain close friendships in both/all of those places, since how often do you see your friends anyway, as well as getting the benefits of the shopping and art and concerts and things.

It's a plan with no drawbacks (now that the cheap airlines allocate seating and the airport's been redone). So why does no-one do this? Am I missing something?
*I’m getting uncomfortable with this appellation. It’s too close to the nails-on-blackboard “hubby” construction so beloved by women’s magazines. Note to self: find better nickname.

**True story, on the public record, not one of our clients. I’m in the clear.

On links, limps and life in general

2006-09-13T13:57:00.000+09:30

Guys, I don’t ask much of you. An occasional cursory click through the site to see if I’ve updated (which I almost always have, because despite having a stressful job and a home to run I make the effort to come up with new material every day, no, no, that’s okay, I do it for the love, not the recognition), maybe even a grudging smile or nod once in a while, that sort of thing. I don’t expect plaudits.

But would it have killed one of you to tell me that I’ve had a broken link up there for the past three months?

I mean, alright, I possibly should have checked it myself. And yes, possibly the fact that I constantly berate you all for not loving me enough isn’t in fact working in my favour here. But still. How embarrassing.

Also, one of my links seems to have disappeared altogether, which I find terribly mysterious. I’m at work, so I can’t fix either problem until I get home, and I really shouldn't have mentioned it because none of you would have noticed anyway. But it’s preying on my mind somewhat and I'm in a stream-of-consciousness sort of mood.

The job’s still fascinating, for the record. I’ve been horribly uncreative since beginning it, though; not because I’m tired or overworked but because the stuff I encounter every day is so damn interesting, and often (unintentionally) hilarious that it eclipses anything I could possibly relate.

So what can I tell you about? The fact that I arrange my morning commute so that I walk half a mile to and from the office, and that most of the time this is a really nice little moment of my day, walking briskly along in the fresh air, feeling professional in my neat little suit, heels clicking on the pavement, but that yesterday I stepped out of the office and one of my shoe straps immediately broke, giving me no option but to limp another next seven blocks to the bus stop? The pitying looks of commuters as they passed me, dragging one foot behind myself like I had a congenital defect? The bus ride itself, where no sooner had I settled down with my book and my Diet Coke then the guy three seats behind me sprayed deodorant around his seat, creating a fug that crept through the bus and gave me a headache? The guy immediately behind me, who contributed to said headache by whistling loudly along to his Ipod? My gratitude when I got home and my husband, who’s on leave this week, made me a Cosmo? My frustration when, a few sips later, I knocked the almost-full cocktail over and onto a pile of study material?

None of that conveys how much I like my life at the moment. It doesn’t make for high comedy, I know, but I feel like I’m bubbling over with it, so I have to say it. The weather is nice, work is interesting, my friends are extraordinary and I live with the greatest man in the universe.

And I’d say that even if he hadn’t made me a replacement Cosmopolitan.

I'm Getting Old; or, Weekend Recap

2006-09-10T21:43:00.000+09:30

When I was eleven or twelve I was sent to the supermarket for a few groceries, including dishwashing detergent. It’s stayed in my memory because I came back with a mint-scented detergent, which I thought was both novel and sounded refreshing. My mother disagreed with my choice at some length, but we didn’t have the money to buy any more, so we were stuck with it. It was certainly novel, but I quickly discovered that mint isn’t a scent one wants clinging to one’s crockery.

I’ve held to that belief, but I’m discovering that I may be behind the times.

Remember when surface spray came in two varieties; hospital and hospital-with-lemon? Yeah, me too. And yet this weekend, in my small provincial city, I find myself choosing between green apple and pink grapefruit. And the detergents. Cinnamon! Mandarin! Spearmint! And my personal favourite, ladies and gentleman: Tropical Splice. That’s mango and pineapple, if it wasn’t immediately clear. This is something you use to clean your dishes. As if Crème caramel Kit-Kats weren’t ridiculous enough.

I must be getting old.

Friday night I helped celebrate a close friend’s liberation from a stultifying job, with the help of white wine and dolmades. Saturday the husband and I decided to throw an extremely elite cocktail party comprising us. He mixed Cosmopolitans, I made guacamole and we shared the olives. It was great: I got to choose the music, I wasn’t at risk of getting stuck in a conversation with anyone dull and the house wasn’t trashed in the morning. My idea of a good party.

Shit, I really am getting old.

And today was beautiful. Sunny and crisply cool, and all mine. I spent the morning planting broccoli and irises, went to the library at lunchtime and frittered away half of the afternoon napping in a patch of warmth on the old sofa upstairs.

You know, I thought I was kidding about getting old.

I’ve got to go find a rave to attend. Are recreational drugs still called recreational drugs?

A Post About Nothing - No, Really

2006-09-07T23:29:00.000+09:30

I did nothing at all in my last job.

I realise people say that, but I mean it literally; I’d get in at 8.30am, and all day I’d email friends, browse the internet, blog and occasionally try and write something more substantial (but still strictly personal).

I’d leave at 5.30pm or so, go home, complete a few basic domestic chores and then drape myself over a sofa for the evening and read a book. I always felt exhausted.

And now I have a job (temporarily, at least) which is fun and demanding. It keeps me thinking for nine hours a day, and I’m always ‘on’. I think maybe it’s what I needed.

This morning I managed to unload the dishwasher, make plunger coffee, iron shirt, sew hem of trouser leg back up, edit and post to blog and walk out the door made-up (seriously, guys, don’t tell me how much ties suck, try having to smear paint all over your face every morning) and be-suited all within 45 minutes. As in, by 6.50am.

This afternoon was about the same. And then at 9.30pm I thought, I’ve been pretty efficient today, what have I forgotten?

The answer is: to think of something to blog about. I no longer have time to read the papers and garner inspiration (although I did hear some guy died…I don’t know, he had something to do with lizards or something? Anyway, I hear people are sad. I’m sorry for your loss, all you sad people)

So I’m afraid this is it. No substantive post Friday. Wasn't really worth even clicking through, really, was it? Blame work.= >Blame the government. But don’t blame me.

The Start of Something Beautiful

2006-09-07T07:04:00.000+09:30

Dear Diary,

You'll never guess! I think I'm in love!!!!

I know I said that before, but that was just a stupid crush. This is the real thing, Diary!

His name is Coffee, and he is just soooo gorgeous. He's strong, and mellow, and, like, totally hot. And oh my God he smells soo good. I just want to inhale him or something. This must be what Ms Jacobs meant in Biology class about pheromones!

He's so much nicer than that stupid Tea I was dating. God he was such a pain, I mean, totally. I thought he was alright at first, you know, kind of sweet and a bit sophisticated, but man was I wrong. The relationship went, like, completely stale. I don't want a guy who's too weak, you know what I mean? And he got so fussy, with all those stupid accessories of his. It just got to be too much of a strain.

I told him I didn't want to go out any more. He went this totally ugly shade of grey - ugh. I wanted to put it off, but I knew if I left it too long the whole thing would just get too bitter. Really he should be grateful that I was honest with him - some of the girls in my school are like really fake and saccharine, so he should find me refreshing. I said that, but he just got steamed.

Anyway, I know I shouldn't plunge into anything with Coffee just yet, cause, like, the magazines say you should be single for a while before the next relationship. But oh my God, Diary, I am like sooo gone on him. I couldn't even sleep last night thinking about him, that's how much I like him, and this morning even, Mum was like slow down, why are you talking so fast, you're not normally this full of beans at this time of the day, and I was like Mum, you so wouldn't understand, and she just looked at me but I had to go and walk to school because the bus takes too long.

That's how I know this is Love, Diary. I've never felt this way before. It's like the whole world is brighter, and I have so much more energy and stuff.

I just know this is going to be the start of something beautiful.

I love Coffee!!!!!!!

To anyone who wonders why I'm never online any more

2006-09-05T22:06:00.000+09:30

This is how my evening is going so far:
8.30pm: dial up. Open messenger client to see if friends are there. Get no response. Open web browser. Computer freezes.
8.40pm: Repeat
8.50pm: Repeat. Instead of rebooting computer, decide to see how long it takes to unfreeze. Go take shower. Come back just as computer unfreezing. Try to switch windows. Computer freezes. Consider throwing computer out of window.
9.15pm: Dialup.Do not open messenger. Open browser. Browse for three minutes. Open messenger. Computer freezes. Consider throwing self out of window.
9.35pm: Dial up. Feel thankful for free local call arrangement. Grind teeth. Vow not to open browser. Vow that if don’t manage to post soon, shall give up and go to bed. Realise have nothing to post about. Resort to posting book reviews.

I am so sick of this I can’t even be funny. Nothing I’ve tried has solved the fact that this relatively new computer doesn’t let me do anything useful. And now there’s a chance my laptop fund will be swallowed up by something that isn’t a laptop, so it’s not going to change any time soon. I realise this is a quintessential First World problem, and all, but still.

At least I have a good party to go to tomorrow night. With any luck something hilarious will happen to me.

Wednesday Book Review: Bumper Edition

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Froer

>I'm tempted to werite "fucking brilliant" and leave it at that for this one. It is, in fact, fucking brilliant.

Oskar is a precocious, charming nine year old who lost his much-loved Dad in the 9/11 attacks in New York. A year later, still grieving heavily, Oskar finds a key tucked away in a vase in his father's closet, and decides to discover what it opens. He begins a year-long expedition which takes him all over the city, making friends with a diverse group of strangers as he goes.

Oskar is one of the most charming characters I've met in a long time. Safran Froer's portrayal is sheer genius. I really did laugh, and cry, and ignore the world around me while I finished it. I can't recommend this highly enough.

Josie and Jack - Kelly Braffet

Very polished for a debut novel, and without any of the gimmicks that sell first books. Josie and Jack are sister and brother, living in a ramshackle house with an abusive father and left to their own devices most of the time. They drink and get stoned and pursue their twisted interpersonal power games, and it's mesmerising to watch. From the blurb, I was expecting more melodrama than I got, and I appreciated the balance the author struck. Not bad at all.

State of the Union - Douglas Kennedy

I'm a big fan of Douglas Kennedy and have been ever since The Big Picture. This is his latest, a book about a woman who makes one huge mistake in a careful and well-behaved life back in the sixties, a mistake which isn't discovered until George W Bush's second term. I use that timeline because Kennedy uses the reaction of the public to the revelation to vent his anger at the sanctimonious, hypocritical Christianity that currently permeates American media. Kennedy wrote a very powerful book a few years back called The Pursuit of Happiness, which is set in the era of McCarthyism, and the parallels are clear without Kennedy spelling them out.

State of the Union just isn't as good as that one, sadly, but it's not a bad read if you want to feel some righteous anger at the world we find ourselves in.

The Photograph – Penelope Lively

Sometimes I find that my reading follows a theme over a week without it meaning to. I read this just after the above, and they’re both about old secrets – specifically, old infidelities – coming to light. The widowed husband of a sparkling young woman discovers a photograph ten years after her death that suggests he didn’t know her at all. Through his search, and through the eyes of the others who were close to her, we get a portrait of the woman herself.

I’m always admiring of people who can create a protagonist who isn’t actually present in the book. Lively is a skilful writer; the sort of whom one says “she commands her craft”. It didn’t rip me raw, but it was a good day when I read it.

Reunion - Alan Lightman

A small elegant book filled with small elegant prose. A story of a middle-aged man looking back on his college-aged self with some pathos and a lot of joy. I can’t get too enthusiastic about it, but I can’t fault it stylistically.

Stop Me if You've Heard This One (II): Holidaying with the In-laws

2006-09-05T10:14:00.000+09:30

So, there we all are, crammed into a modest unit over a sweltering Christmas, and I experience what has to be the most awkward morning of my life.

You're going to need some background. Let's see.

For a start, you have to understand that the husband and I usually spend Christmas with my family, so this trip was a rarity.

My family consists of myself, my younger brother and my mother, and even before we emigrated to Australia Christmas tended to be a sedate sort of affair. We open our presents in considerate order, play board games throughout the afternoon and chat; turning the television on is considered the height of rudeness. All terribly English, really, albeit without the Queen's Speech.

By contrast, the husband's family is large, chaotic, warm, friendly and sprawling. They comprise a gorgeously illogical mix of cultures and nationalities, which makes for a hilarious array of 'traditional' Christmas dishes. It's survival of the loudest around their celebratory tables, and the women tend to win.

We've therefore worked on the principle that his family probably won't miss us, whereas if we didn't spend Christmas with my side it would be a drab sort of affair. The other reason is simpler; we live near my family, and his is scattered throughout every state but ours.

However, my sister in law (let's call her Christiana, because it amuses me) scheduled her wedding for 30 December, and so a mass family gathering was called. We drove over to spend a week there.

With me so far?

All of this serves as background to explain why we found ourselves sharing a unit with four other adults. It having been so long since we visited, none of our usual methods of staying with friends or in a hotel were going to work this time; what's considered a polite distance in my family is often interpreted as aloofness in his*.

So there we all are, crammed into a modest unit over a sweltering Christmas. By "we" I mean myself and the husband (who have the guest bedroom), his parents (who have the main bedroom), his youngest sister, who is fourteen and shy, who is ensconced on a camper bed in the sewing room, and his maternal grandmother, who is in her late seventies and frail, on the foldout sofa bed in the lounge room. It's her unit, but she's chosen that bed so that she can get up early without disturbing anyone else.

Two relevant plot points:
1) My husband's parents are still happily married, but because of work commitments his father currently lives overseas and only manages to get a couple of weeks leave per year. Previous to Christmas, he hasn't seen any of his family since July.
2) The guest bedroom and main bedroom share a wall. This is a modestly sized unit that was never designed to host this many people.

Okay, I'm sorry this is taking me so long, but hopefully you now have the set-up. Let's cut to 28 December. We've been there a few days. There's a heatwave. It's crowded.

And at 6.30am or so I wake up. It's early, and so it takes me a moment to work out what's woken me. And then I realise I'm hearing noises.

Sort of…rhythmic…whimpering noises.

…Yeah.

They're not loud, just these regular little whimpers; 'ah…ah…oh…'. As if that's not bad enough, every now and then they speed up a little, and I can almost hear a suggestion of 'oh…ohhh…ow…' in amongst the 'ah…ah…' which is a little more information than I needed, but I'm trying very very hard not to think about the details so I decide I'm imagining it.

The first thing I think is, I hope the husband's not awake. It's bad enough that I'm listening to this, but these are his parents. And man, the noises are just not stopping.

Of course then he does wake up, and I launch into a stream of morning prattle in an attempt to mask the disturbing sounds leaking under our door (and you don't know how much I wish I hadn't just typed the word "leaking" in this context). I put up a good effort, if I do say so myself, but there's only so long even I can talk for, and eventually there's a pause in the conversation.

"What's that noise?" he asks.
"Well. Ummm…"
"Ohhh"
"Yeah"

The thing is that it's still early, and if his gran is still in bed then the entire living area is in use, and there's no way we can get up without intruding on her sleep, and there's no room to sit and have a coffee anyway. So we stay in our room. And try not to listen. For approximately seventeen years.

It seems to me that the whimpers are getting louder, and the little soft cries that sound almost like pain are closer together, and through the swirling horror that I am even thinking about this I am holding onto the hope that maybe soon they'll stop and we can escape…

And then the door to the main bedroom opens and his father walks out.

And the noises don't stop.

It wasn't his parents at all, and it certainly wasn't sexual. The noises I'd been listening to for the past forty minutes were in fact whimpers of pain.

Some time early that morning, around two or three am, his gran had got up to visit the bathroom, tripped over a trailing blanket, landed and fractured the tip of her shoulder joint so that she couldn't move that arm. And not wanting to disturb anyone, she'd manoeuvred herself into an armchair and sat there all night, waiting for someone to get up. As it had got later, she'd allowed herself to make slightly louder noises, which is of course what I was hearing.

She was in a soft sling for the next month, but she was essentially fine. What I keep thinking, though, is this:

Did his parents assume they were hearing us, just as we assumed we were hearing them? Did they stay in their room in mortification just as we felt trapped in ours, and the poor gran sat in her cold armchair wondering why we were all sleeping in?

I don't know.

But I do know that next time we're staying in a hotel.

*In case I sound critical, I should say that this need to demonstrate warmth is extremely good for me, since I tend to withdraw otherwise. I never really learned 'family' and the welcome it implies, and I love his to bits.

Let the timestamp serve as my excuse

2006-09-04T06:33:00.000+09:30

So, I was mowing the…

What?

Hey, look, I told you last week I might not manage to blog every day. What do you want from me? I have a real job now.

So, I was mow…

Well, yeah, I do. And he does, normally, although I should point out here that even asking that question makes me wonder about your gender politics. But yes, yes, normally it’s his job, you’re right. But he hurt his back last week, so I volunteered, because I’m nice like that.

Happy now? I can continue? Good. So, I was mowing…

You know, I can't be bothered finishing that; it just wasn’t ever going to be an interesting anecdote. I mowed the lawn today, it was a pain in the ass, I should never have suggested buying a house on a steep hill. The End.

My mother rang me last night, using Skype. She’s never used it before, and she was extremely excited about the whole thing. Apparently she’d rung two people in Spain already the same evening. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know anyone who lives in Spain, which concerns me a little.

It (Skype) didn’t improve the quality of the connection, either, which would be far more useful from my perspective. The phone line to my house is so bad that despite the fact that it’s a large house, there’s no way of having a private voice conversation because one has to shout to be heard. I also can’t get broadband, for the same reason, but don’t get me started on the inadequate lip service paid to areas which are relatively affluent and not particularly far from the CBD and therefore don’t qualify for regional assistance nor constitute part of the standard metropolitan area and therefore seem to exist, or not, as a sort of shadow on the radar screen of the major service providers.

Now, see, what did I say about getting me started? Hmmm?

Anyway, I’ve given a lot of thought to all of the input and comments received on the subject of laptops. Luckily there were none, because you lot are either apathetic in general or don’t care about me, so that wasn’t an onerous task. The original plan was to get one so that I could obtain a wireless connection. Turns out that even a wireless connection, in this area, would be both expensive and slow. I still want a laptop, though, so in the absence of knowing anything technical at all, my plan is to wait for my tax return to come in and then go and spend as much of it as possible on one. Does that sound like a good idea?

Nope, still not interesting. Okay.

Triple chocolate Mars Bars. Now, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. I’m more likely to gorge on grilled haloumi than Rocky Road, and yes, I’m also a total food snob, but that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but when I’m hormonal and craving chocolate, it’s the Mars Bar that wins out every time. And you know what? Not once, ever, and this includes the years of my youth when my desire for chocolate may have been influenced by rather less than entirely legal drugs, have I thought you know, this Mars Bar, it’s pretty good, but what it needs is more chocolate.

...

I think we all know I’ve got nothing, here. I’m feeling the after-effects of standard Sunday night insomnia, I have an ulcer inside my bottom lip and there are two cats downstairs wanting to know why I’m blogging* instead of feeding them.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you guys the story of my Christmas with the in-laws. Right now I’ve got to start mainlining caffeine.

*Well, obviously they’re not asking why blogging, specifically. They’re more enquiring about why I’m Not Feeding them rather than Feeding them, that being the dualism that interests them.

Great questions of our time: Sex, sleep, or food?

2006-08-29T21:47:00.000+09:30

Let me make this crystal clear: I want you to argue with me on this one.

So Jason Mulgrew brought up this question the other day: what’s best, food, sex or sleep?

Obviously one can survive without sex, whereas the other two are necessary. So, given the choice between bad sex and none at all, I’d choose none at all. In contrast, I’d chose bad food or sleep over none.

But that’s almost meaningless, since the body needs both sleep and food, no matter how bad, and the idea of choosing whether I prefer bad food or bad sleep is just too depressing.

Let’s consider the good.

Sleep

Those nights after a long day and a hard workout, when every limb feels heavy. And you manage to muster the physical energy to stand under a hot shower so that your skin is tingling through the weariness. And the bed is made with fresh sheets, and you slide in between them and drift into blissful deep sleep.

(That probably came across like a virgin trying to write erotica. I admit I was using my imagination. I haven't had a good night's sleep since 1991.)

Food

I have maintained for years that those people who use food merely as fuel don’t know how to cook. Because no-one can eat grilled haloumi with a glass of dry Rose, or asparagus and sundried tomato risotto with parmesan with a Marlborough Sauv Blanc and tell me that this is mere bodily fuel.

Sex

Don’t worry. I’m not going to describe good sex in lurid detail. You all know what good sex is. The sort that renders you oblivious to the world around you at the time, sees you grinning stupidly afterwards and makes your toes curl in pleased embarrassment on a bus full of commuters in the morning. You all know.

Sex, sleep, or food?

The thing about good sleep is that by definition, you’re not consciously experiencing it. Good sleep is experienced in the future and the past, but never in the present. So I’m ruling it out.

Good sex has more beneficial side effects than good food. It elevates the heartbeat, gets the endorphins flowing, promotes a sense of well-being. So assuming that there’s no possible repercussions (ie, it’s your own partner you’re with), sex has to win on the virtuous side of things...fundamentalist attitudes aside.

But then again, sex requires a certain amount of effort. You can have decent sex on your own, of course, but I’m not sure that competes with good food. And sex with someone else, well, it involves someone else. And therefore there’s a certain amount of pressure to make sure they’re enjoying themselves, they know you’re enjoying yourself, they know you know they’re enjoying…anyway, you know what I’m saying here.

Food, not so much. You can share a banquet of dhal, matter panir, alu ghobi and tomato kachumber with friends, or you can hunker down with an avocado, some olive tapenade and some good beer on your own. It can last a few exquisite minutes or be savoured over hours.And you never ever run out of flavour combinations.

I hate to come to this conclusion. But food is the best thing ever invented.

Why do they call it cold turkey, anyway?

2006-08-28T21:19:00.000+09:30

Turns out I don’t even have a computer in my office for the next week, so the chances of me managing to post every day are looking increasingly Nicole Ritchie. And I am wrecked tonight. I enjoyed a peaceful hour’s sleep last night between eleven pm and midnight, and a luxuriously long stretch between three and five thirty this morning. My new office has a policy of not allowing its employees to drink coffee at their desks, so I hope you can feel my pain here.

It’s strangely peaceful, working without a computer. Once the withdrawal pains abated and my hands stopped shaking, I found myself able, for the first time in months, to concentrate on the same thing for more than five minutes. I don’t know about you, but even when I’m reading the world’s most entertaining thing on the internet; one of my favourite blogs, or a snarky recap, or an email from a close friend, I can rarely get through a page without flicking to another screen and reading the two in tandem.

And yet today, I was able to sit down, open a file, and an hour later find myself able to recite all the relevant details from four years of litigation. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. And I will take it as a favour if any jaded young litigators out there refrain from telling me that it’ll turn out to be more of an ill-conceived infatuation than true love. Let me have my illusions, at least for today.

Still, nice as it is to work computer-free, coming home to the world’s slowest dial-up connection bites. Even buying a laptop and paying for remote wireless won’t improve matters much. I may have to move back into the city.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (I): The Great Emasculator

2006-08-27T21:49:00.000+09:30

It’s Sunday night, and I don’t think I’m going to have time to blog tomorrow. Obviously I would hate to contribute to a sudden surge in work productivity, so I’m blogging on a Sunday evening so you have something to read. No, no; you’re welcome.

When I was eighteen, I moved out of home into a share house, and got a kitten. The kitten, whom I named Disraeli, was a grey tabby with ears so disproportionately large that my friends used to call him Dumbo the Cat. What no-one told me at the time was that ears are like feet in this regard; they are an indicator of the eventual size of the animal. These days Raeli is an enormous sleepy old creature with very little harm in him. In those days, he was something of a terror.

One day, when Raeli was about five months old, and as playful as one would expect from a kitten who was growing up in a sociable share house, my boyfriend and I found ourselves alone in the house for an afternoon. It was February, and hot as hell, and we were young and libidinous. So we found ourselves upstairs in my bedroom, naked and intimately involved.

Neither of us spared a thought for the kitten, alone in the house with no-one to play with. Neither of us thought to close my bedroom door. And the thing about sex is, especially if one is engaging in the position that spreads the gospel, certain parts of the male anatomy tend to swing and dangle. And the thing about young kittens is, especially if they are bored…well, I can tell that my male readership is wincing, so I’ll skip over the details. Claws were bared, contact with delicate parts of the male anatomy was made, yelping ensued. And from then on we closed the bedroom door.

Six months later, I moved in with another female friend, Polly*. Raeli was an adolescent cat by now, and whilst he liked the gentle patting that my housemate and I would bestow upon him, lying there and purring like the pampered soul he was. He also appreciated the rough-and-tumble games that her boyfriend would play.

Until one day when he came out of our shower and walked into the corridor, a scanty towel wrapped around his waist. And the cat came bounding up to him eagerly. And he said hi, cat, let’s rough-and-tumble, and he squatted down to pat the cat.

And the thing about being male, and only wearing a towel, is… And the thing about young cats is…

Yeah. Exactly.

Now, whilst this second incident was playing itself out, I was in my own bedroom with my new boyfriend English**. We heard the cry of shock and pain, and I went to check. No lasting damage was done, and I went back to my room, reporting to English what had happened.

Cue two months later. English and I are getting amorous on my bed. The cat pushes the door open (they didn’t click shut in this house, and thus the cat could effect entry whenever and wherever he chose) and padded inside. I heard him come in, but didn’t see any reason to let his presence stop what we were doing until English sat upright, and with wild eyes yelled

“Argh!”

“What?”

“The cat’s going to eat my knob!”

Raeli. The great emasculator.

*Not her real name, but the one I’m going to use for her from now on. Polly is still a dear friend of mine, but abandoned me to study fungi in California.

**Now one of my closest and dearest friends, who abandoned me to work in London. They all swear it’s not me, it’s them…

Toddler Circus: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

2006-08-25T15:27:00.000+09:30

For those of you keeping count at home:

Number of people who have said goodbye and good luck = 1
Number of people who have said have a good weekend, see you Monday = 6
Number of people I have corrected on the above assumption = 0.

I am such a coward.

But that's not why I'm posting. I have a query.

My best friend is extremely attractive, and her boyfriend is very hot. Therefore, they would have adorable children. Opinions divide on whether I’m more ‘pretty’ or ‘funny-looking’, but luckily my husband is impossibly gorgeous, so I think we can safely assume that our children would be pretty damn cute as well.

Given this information, don’t you guys think that my friend and I would be being selfish if we didn’t share the beauty of our children with the world?

See, we’re having a disagreement. She thinks that having children at the same time so they’d be the same age, then teaching them tricks and sending them out to perform and therefore fund our early retirement is wrong. Exploitative, even. I think that the world needs our Toddler Circus for its own good, and if we make a little money on the side that’s just icing on the cake.

So, what do you think? Should we have children and turn them into an International Travelling* Toddler Circus?

Come on. Tiny acrobats! Wee little trapeze artists! Very short clowns! That doesn't do it for you?

*I should point out that her children will be Finnish citizens, for reasons that I’m sure are perfectly logical and well-thought out. Thus the International Travelling bit.

Sleeplessness, awkward departures and advice needed

2006-08-25T10:26:00.000+09:30

To whoever came here looking for Ukranian nudists: yeah, sorry about that.

To everyone else: Hey, you know what’s a really good idea, if you’re a caffeine-sensitive insomniac? Drinking an enormous mug of black tea and then trying to sleep next to someone with a bad cough. I tell you, some nights even la petite mort doesn’t result in le peu sommeil.

Was that too much information?

Next week I’m starting a six-week work placement elsewhere, and I expect to be a lot busier than I am now. Well, it would hardly be possible to be less busy than I am now, so what I mean is: I expect to be busy. I’m going to try and continue to post every (week)day, but I give you all fair warning that the entries are likely to be a lot shorter. So don’t come bitching to me later.

I’m doing my best to sneak out of this office today without saying a round of goodbyes. Ostensibly this is because I’m only officially on a six-week secondment but in reality it’s because I have a weird shyness about saying goodbye to people. I’m not a shy person, as anyone who’s met me can attest, but every now and then I have an attack of the cowardlies. Last week a guy who works on my floor left; he’s not part of my department, but we’ve chatted in the kitchen a few times, and he’s a friendly, sociable sort of bloke. What did I do when I heard he was leaving? Sneak past the goodbye drinks gathering rather than make awkward goodbye conversations. I doubt he noticed, but still, what kind of misanthropic coward am I?

So I’m ridding myself of the piles of paperwork gradually in the (possibly vain) hope that no-one will notice that my desk is completely bare. And I’m sneaking out when everyone else is at their regular Friday afternoon meeting. I’m ridiculous. Especially because I already know what will happen: I’ll pick up my bag to go, someone will then finally notice and say goodbye, and then I’ll end up having to do an even more awkward round of goodbyes, now holding all my stuff. The firm I’m going to will then decline to hire me on an ongoing basis, I’ll slink back here and have to face another round of questioning whilst I explain where I was.

Fun times, I tell you, fun times.

On a different subject entirely: I’m thinking of buying a laptop. I have about $AU1500 to spend. It needs to have wifi, but apart from that I don’t have any particular requirements; basically I use my computer for chatting to people and writing stories. I’ve never owned a laptop, so if any of you have recommendations either regarding specific brands or general laptop buying principles, I’d be keen to hear them. Email at right or comment below. Thanks.

Picking up a slipper. Or a hairbrush. Or anything with a hard flat surface, really.

2006-08-24T12:06:00.000+09:30

"You're a bad, bad, bad little girl but I feel sorry for you, so I will rub something soothing and cool on you after I spank you with my slipper!"

I tried, but I just can't leave you on that note. The above quote is from today's Cary Tennis column and it's the funniest thing I've read all day. Go see for yourself. You might have to watch a brief advert first, but it's worth it.

Picking up women, picking up a book and picking your battles

2006-08-24T11:47:00.000+09:30

My brother read this page for the first time the other week, and his only comment was “you are hungover at work a lot”. I indignantly denied it, but honesty compels me to admit that today, well, I do have a wee headache. Wednesday night Scrabble seems to lead me into excess. Nothing says fun like playing complicated word games under the influence of alcohol.

The friend who was hosting Scrabble lives behind a pub. I was running early, so I sat down at one of their outside tables and began reading a book. A minute later, an American in the back seat of a passing sedan called to me “Are you looking for me? Are you looking for someone?” I looked up, said “Nope” and went back to reading. “Oh”, he said, sounding a little disappointed. “Have a nice night”.

For future reference, men of the world, if I were looking for someone, I probably wouldn’t have my nose buried in a book. And whilst we’re on the subject, if I’m out with a friend with whom I am engrossed in conversation, we’re probably not looking to meet men. If you try anyway, and one of us responds to your opening gambit with a non-committal “mmm” and then immediately goes back to our conversation, we’re definitely not looking to meet men. If you persist, and we finally tell you that we’re having a private conversation, that does not make us bitches.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with trying to approach a woman in a bar. The American guy wasn’t out of line (plus he had a cute accent). But take a moment to read the body language, for your own sake as well as ours. If you persist in trying to chat us up after we’ve made it clear we’re not interested, it makes you look like you don’t believe woman can have fun on their own, that we all need a man, that you have the right to ruin our evening to prove something to yourself. It makes you look like an obnoxious asshole.

Oh, and on the subject of obnoxious assholes, it’s been weeks since I made fun of Bush, so I hope you’ll forgive me for doing so again. I know, I know, it’s lazy journalism on my part since it’s not exactly difficult to do, but now he’s pushing my personal buttons and claiming to be a man of letters with a slavering media even posting a complete book list. Now, even on its face this is a puerile attempt at restoring public confidence in a man who can’t get enough of fart jokes. The Carpetbagger Report looks at the word count and decides that there is no way Bush could have read that many books. Frankly, I’d be concerned if he had: should a President in this much trouble be spending several hours a day reading novels?

(Via Shakespeare’s Sister)

I don’t know how to finish this post, and re-reading it I realise I sound angry rather than funny. I’m sorry about that. As I write this, a good friend of mine is battling against an injustice that threatens his future happiness, and I’m worried about him and angry at my own impotency.

I have several friends going through serious life events at the moment, and it brings home to me how sheltered my own life is by comparison, how trivial my concerns. I’m in awe of all of you; your strength and grace in the face of tumult, your ability to confront painful life decisions and work through them, the fact that you all keep giving and living and loving. I’m honoured to know you, and I hope the universe gives you a break soon.

If I added sex to this post, it would be titled My Three Favourite Things

2006-08-23T15:28:00.000+09:30

"In tribal societies in which gift giving is economically important, there may be exchange of gift giving of identical (or useless) gifts which serve to maintain the relationship between donors. In Australia, the ritual of the round, known virtually to all adult members of society has some parallel functions. It symbolise entry to a group (and, for that matter, makes pointed an exclusion). It binds a group together." National Times January 1978

Buying a round of drinks is safe here, for now, but Scotland is trying to ban the tradition..

I don’t tend to take part in round buying, but that’s mostly because I spend my time with other wine-drinkers, so it’s easier to just buy a bottle and plonk it down between us (and by us, I of course mean a group of people larger than two, and when I say a bottle, I mean a bottle, and not several bottles, because that would be irresponsible behaviour on my part. Moving on now) and the other people present will get the next one, whether then or the next time we catch up. But the tradition of the round is not something to be messed with. As the quote indicates, it’s about something deeper than a desire to get as drunk as possible as fast as possible. It’s a symbol of hospitality, of inclusion, of egalitarianism.

I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t understand the problem of excess alcohol consumption. But could the Scottish…people who are in charge of these sorts of things…have chosen a worse way to go about this? Don’t attack the problem, attack a time-honoured tradition that appeals to a sense of national identity and is, at best, adjacent to the problem. Not smart.

Wednesday Book Review

Talking of traditions, I’m going to stick with this one (not least because it means that I have a post ready to go on a slow news day). Today, though, I’m boring myself writing these reviews, which means you’re too bored to read them, so I’m keeping it brief. Please imply deep literary insights as liberally as you wish.

Running With Scissors: a Memoir – Augusten Burroughs

Augusten’s mother, a bipolar wannabe poet, gives him into the care of her shrink when he is twelve. Augusten, who is obsessed with neatness and order, grows up in a household where nothing is ever cleaned, the Christmas tree stays up until May and the psychiatrist examines his turds for divine messages. None of the adults condemn 13-year-old Augusten’s ‘affair’ with a 33-year-old man, let alone his smoking, drinking and total failure to attend school.

Burroughs writes with an astounding lack of self-pity, leaving room for the reader to be outraged at his dreadful childhood. It’s funny. It’s smart. Read it.

Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow (List book 207)

Henderson is a clownish multi-millionaire with an unhappy second marriage, a drinking problem and a total lack of social graces. In an attempt to find himself he heads to Africa. The book details, in seriocomic fashion, his often farcical and self-parodying attempts at heroism and self-knowledge, eagerly embracing what he sees as the mystical wisdom of the tribes he encounters.
I’m told this is Bellow’s most popular book. Personally, I was bored stupid by the long conversations and internal monologues that lead Henderson to his enlightenment. Blah.

A Far Cry from Kensington – Muriel Spark

The tale of a young war widow in the nineteen-fifties and the Kensington boarding house she lived in. Spark has a sparse, wry style which I enjoy, and the narrator’s liberally-dispensed advice on how to live one’s life makes her a memorable character. A pleasant read, although it’s not on my list of books to buy*.

*I read far too much to be able to buy all the books I want to read. I also reread my favourite books over and over. The theory is that I borrow everything from the library and then buy copies of those that I want to re-read. In reality, I tend to borrow from the library, think to myself that I should really buy that book, go to the bookstore and get tempted by something entirely different which my library doesn’t stock. I can’t help it. I love new books. I love the way they smell, and the way they feel, and the hours of bliss that they promise. And much as I adore and am grateful for my library, borrowed books are not the same**.

**I was forcibly reminded of this today, reading Kensington over lunch. An unknown member at my library likes to make grammatical corrections in self-satisfied capitals. A line that reads “she continued to speak, think and act as if I was motherly” will have ‘was’ crossed out and WERE written in the margin in blue ink. I’m something of a grammar pedant myself, and I grumbled just last night because a headline on the prime-time news read “Rate rise effects*** housing prices” – but the idea of defacing literature, second-guessing the choice of words by people who use words to make art, blows me away.

***I don’t know what it is about this one specifically. I have at least two regular correspondents who misuse this word. In most cases, I leave them alone about it because it’s not like it’s harming my world. In the case of the prime-time news, however, I think I’m justified in getting cross. Do you know how many people would love to work in television journalism? Do you know how many of them are literate? Come on, people.

Different ways to pass the time

2006-08-22T12:21:00.000+09:30

Okay, I confess: I’m too much of a wimp to post about polyamory. So you guys go ahead and screw whoever you want, I’ll just be over here talking about performance art.

You know how sometimes, something is so quintessentially itself that you have to wonder whether it’s a satire?

It’s not a satire . It’s “a slow crushing dance with a pig for one person at a time." According to the artist: "The work left me with an undercurrent of pigginess, unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses began to flicker into my consciousness."

What I particularly love about this piece is that viewers of the art are only allowed in one at a time, for up to ten minutes. This is ostensibly in order to create a sense of intimacy and rapport between the performer and artist. Now I'm not an art critic, but it seems to me that the only thing created by standing in silence for ten minutes and watching a woman cuddle a dead pig would be a bad case of the church giggles.

An undercurrent of pigginess. I mean, Jesus.

In other news, men from different countries have different perceptions of themselves as lovers. That’s not what the article says, of course, but it’s the only thing that I can glean from it. 60% of Italian men make their partners climax every time? Okay then, I’m sure that’s absolutely true, because after all it’s not at all an accepted fact that most women fake sometimes and most men can’t tell*. British men spend the longest time on foreplay, and Filipinos, in a beautiful turn of phrase, are “world-beaters” at masturbation.

Australian men are ‘amongst the most faithful’ in case you’re wondering why they reported this in an Australian newspaper.

See, to me these sorts of surveys raise more questions than they answer. For example, what counts as foreplay? Does the clock start ticking at the moment you roll over in bed, plonk a hand on her breast and say How About It, or at the point where, dressing for dinner, you choose the aftershave that renders her unable to form multisyllabic words? Where does it end; is foreplay any act but penetrative sex? That presupposes a certain…linearity to a sexual encounter, if you see what I mean.

It’s as if sex is a formal dance, with a defined set of steps and figures. Partners make indirect eye contact from across the room before approaching one another. They move through the steps considerately, careful not to rush through one figure to the next. And at the end they thank each other politely and retire.

But what if the dance starts from that first lidded glance across the room and continues through the night? And what if it shifts from Viennese Waltz to Foxtrot to Lambada until the steps merge into something new, something without a name? What if the dancers were so lost in the moves that they couldn’t begin to guess how long they’d been dancing?

I suppose then we’d have no way of comparing ourselves to others. And where’s the fun in that?

*Incidentally, guys, the female orgasm, like the male orgasm, has some fairly distinct physiological characteristics which can’t be faked. If you can’t tell, you’re not paying attention, which might be why she’s faking in the first place. I’m just saying.

Age differences

2006-08-18T16:22:00.000+09:30

Abacus’ comment on my previous post raised a question I’ve been meaning to ask, actually. Is moderation putting you guys off commenting?

(Of course, if it is, I’ll never know, so this may be a moot point)

Because you've all stopped talking to me, and I have to wonder why. I don't want to discount the possibility that it's just because I've been terribly dull recently, but just in case it's the moderation, for the record: I will only edit or refuse a comment that reveals personal information about me and my loved ones, or which is clearly spam. In general, I love comments and I don’t want to discourage them. Disagreement and debate are heartily encouraged. I also like emails. And single malt whisky, should you have any of that lying around.

Okay, let’s talk about age gaps in dating. I’m having one of those days in which my reading and my emailing is throwing up the same themes over and over again, and this is one of them.

An old post of Aunt B.’s mentioned this formula:

If you take your age, divide it in half and add seven, that’s the youngest* age you can date without looking sleazy.

This would mean that I could date anyone 21 or over, and men 42 or younger can date me. Obviously the formula allows the age gap to widen as we grow older, which I think is part of its charm. It’s generally accepted that as we get older, age differences matter less. And hell, that seems like a good enough age range for me to work within, should I be looking to date.

When I was seventeen I dated a 24-year-old, which obviously falls outside the formula. I don’t know that he was someone I’d call sleazy, but he would arguably have had trouble impressing women his own age; he was unemployed, lived in a share house and dedicated most of his energies to obtaining and partaking of the best-quality marijuana he could find. Which pretty much sums up my life at seventeen, except that I wasn’t quite as dedicated to the quest for the perfect bud.

And that's the trouble, I think. If there's a significant age gap, shouldn't there also be a discrepancy in lifestyle and world view? And if there isn't, what does that say?

I don’t know that it’s sleazy, exactly, to date outside the formula. It does make me wonder about the personal power of the people involved. Age, especially for men, confers a certain status; youth is characterised by naivety. So if a man dates someone significantly younger than him, is it because that’s the only form of superior status available to him? If a woman chooses a younger man, is that because she seeks a level of unquestioning devotion that is unavailable to her from a man her own age?

Or is it simpler; choosing the nubile beauty of youth over the wisdom and wit of greater years?

I don’t know, and I realise I’m sounding terribly judgmental here. There are exceptions to every rule and nothing about human relationships can be boiled down to a formula. But I like this one for its simplicity. How about you?

*Not oldest. That would make no sense. Thanks for spotting that, Michelle.

Sex seminars

2006-08-18T10:16:00.000+09:30

I had a dream last night that I came up with the perfect topic for today’s post. In the dream I even knew exactly what I would write, and it was pithy and funny and insightful. I felt an enormous sense of relief that I had something so good to write about, and an eagerness to get to work and share it with you.

Of course I have no idea what it was, now. But how sad it is that I’m dreaming about coming up with posts?

This article makes me a little angry. It’s about the growing number of ‘sex seminars’ in North America, which teach sexual techniques to women; how to give amazing fellatio seems to be number one on the agenda. Coupled with the growing interest in pole dancing classes for non-strippers, which are available even in my small city (I’m at work so I’m not going to google a link for you), at-home ‘fitness’ videos by Carmen Electra and the growing norm of Brazilian waxes, it’s pretty clear that women who are not in the sex industry nonetheless want to improve their sexual performance and desirability.

I don’t have a problem with this, in and of itself. Frank talk about sexuality is a healthy thing, and I like to believe that it’s more and more acceptable for women to be openly interested in sex. Hopefully, amongst all of this talk about stripping techniques and role-play there’s room for discussion about sexual health and egalitarian relationships.

And yet, and yet.

Where are the classes for men on how to give skilled cunnilingus? What man goes to a sex toy party and discusses how to use various equipment for his and his partner’s pleasure? For that matter, why do these classes for women focus on providing skilled services for their man, and not on how to increase their own enjoyment of sex? Nowhere in these articles is there a suggestion that ‘sex seminars’ teach women what positions or what angles increase their own chances at an orgasm. The focus is on being as skilled as a professional sex worker in order to pleasure your man.

Being good at what you do, and knowing that you bring pleasure to the person you love (or at least lust for) can create a sense of pride which a lot of women tag as sexual empowerment. But I can’t escape the feeling that in the race to be everything a man wants in bed, women are losing sight of what they want. We define how sexy we are by the cultural norms around us, and they are increasingly mandated by the porn industry. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent shift in our expectations of men. Women are allowed to want sex now, as long as we want the right sort of sex; porn sex.

Being desired is a powerful aphrodisiac. But it doesn’t beat making love with a man who knows how to please his woman and enjoys using that knowledge. That's the kind of sex we want.

Sartorial splendour

2006-08-17T16:20:00.000+09:30

Hey, look what my friend made me! No, up there. Above you. No, not on the ceiling, that would be ridiculous, how do I know what’s on your ceiling? At the top of the…you know what? Never mind.

I’m posting later and later in the day recently. And whilst trying to come up with content, I’m reading other blogs, and every time I think I’ve found the best I discover more, and then I get discouraged because really, how many things can there be to say, and what are the chances that they haven’t already been said by someone funnier and smarter than me?

And then I sit down and tell you about my day anyway.

You know it’s going to be a good day when a workmate takes you aside to discreetly whisper that you appear to have ‘cobwebs or something’ on the hem of your skirt, and you duck to the bathroom to investigate and it turns out to be a fairly extensive foundation stain that won’t shift no matter how long you spend scrubbing it with paper towels and hand soap.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. A few months ago it took me until lunchtime to realise that I’d managed to put my trousers on, I kid you not, inside out. How does that even happen? Did I not notice that the zipper was difficult to do up? Another day I teamed new dark brown slim-cut pants with a rather sharp Cue jacket. The pants were slightly looser than normal, and I spent all day feeling slim and pretty until I realised at around 3pm that in my dimly-lit bedroom that morning I had in fact donned an old, shabby, stretched pair of black trousers that I no longer deem suitable to wear out of the house let alone the office. Classy.

This time, though, the problem was far too obvious to tough the situation out, and I had to go skirt shopping. I am not a big fan of clothes shopping in the first place, and the prospect of browsing dress shops looking like I’d been defecated on by an agile pigeon did not fill me with joy. That was problem one.

Problem two was that I didn’t have either of my usual style consultants with me.

Why do I need the help? I’m an average sort of height and an average sort of weight. My dress size is so common that I rarely find things in the sales. I think I’m unusually proportioned, but what woman doesn’t? And after all, I’m only looking for a plain black knee-length work skirt.

But as any woman will tell you, it’s not that simple. Skirts of a certain cut make me look like a six-months-pregnant stripper in denial. The wrong length makes my legs look elephantine. Belts on anything make me look like a sausage, and don’t ask because I don’t understand either. Intellectually, I know that the problem is the clothes, not me. Emotionally it’s a different matter.

So I spent an excruciating hour struggling in and out of various skirts, twisting to see myself from all angles whilst preventing myself from seeing the full true horror that is my flabby white self. The saleswomen, spotting a vulnerable customer if ever there was one, spent the time urging me to try on more and more clothes, attempting to cajole me into entire suits “for that pulled-together look” whilst still reassuring me that my current black jacket matches all of their black skirts perfectly “because it’s easy with black”. (Which is piffle, by the way. Not all blacks are created equal. I’m an ex-goth: I know that of what I speak). In the end I escaped by throwing far too much money at them in exchange for a basic A-line, and bolting to the nearest public bathroom to change before limping, blistered, back to the office.

Someone tell me why women are supposed to like clothes shopping so much?

Wednesday Book Review (now with 100% more music)

2006-08-16T15:38:00.000+09:30

Only two books this week; I’ve been strangely disinclined to read as much as usual for some reason, and I chose not to sub a previously-read book in.

Also, remember how I said more books, less exposition? Yeah. That second part didn't work out so well.

Albert Camus – The Outsider (List book 206)
(Note: the French title of this book is L’Etranger, and thus English translations are sometimes titled The Stranger rather than The Outsider. Just in case you might have been confused by this. No, no, don’t thank me – it’s a public service)

I grabbed this from my Unread pile this morning largely at random, thinking only that it was slim enough that I could read it at lunch. And thus began a series of coincidences.

Firstly, today’s media has been all over the fact that George W Bush has been reading this book whilst on holiday. Apparently the fact that Dubya can read is in and of itself a newsworthy topic. (Incidentally, the Cure song Killing an Arab is based on The Outsider, and don’t think the irony of this has been lost on liberal bloggers).

Secondly. We bought the latest Interpol album (Antics – which is fucking brilliant, by the way) on the weekend, and have been listening to it on repeat in the car for the past five days. The husband tells me that at least one commentator considers this a concept album in which the songs comprise a continuous narrative. I’m unconvinced, but my interest was piqued by the claim that ‘Evil’, my favourite track on the album, is loosely based on the Camus book I was holding.

Whilst there are similarities (the lyrics in Evil seem to make reference to a murder on a beach, the subsequent solitary confinement of the perpetrator and an upcoming trial), I don’t think it’s necessarily deliberate. Interpol sing about lost love, frustrated passion and desperate longing. The Outsider, by stark contrast, is the tale of a man committed to truth and simplicity but divorced from the complex passion and depth of feeling of those around him.

Told in first person, the protagonist Meursault details a series of events that through different eyes would be emotional and dramatic; his mother’s funeral, his befriending and abetting of a local pimp who badly beats up a mistress, the beginning of a sexual relationship with a woman he has fancied for a long time, his murder of an Arab stranger and his own subsequent trial and execution. Heady stuff, and yet through Meursault’s eyes they are all just events, things that happen to him without meaning or reflection.

Camus said about The Outsider that 'In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death’. Meursault is no Josef K: he has clearly and without provocation committed an act of murder. However, it is the focus on his lack of remorse that Camus is interested on, and it is on this basis that Meursault is executed rather than given a lighter sentence.

Meursault’s lack of self-reflection, his alienation from the social world, make him unknowable and unlikable. However, his refusal to play the game, to do anything except state the truth, however unpalatable, wrings from the reader a certain admiration. As with The Catcher in the Rye, I can imagine that any adolescent would identify with the protagonist’s nihilism.

It’s a great book. I recommend it. Also, buy (burn, download, steal from your blind and helpless neighbour) Interpol’s Antics. Fucking brilliant.

Margaret Drabble – The Seven Sisters

Also written in first person, The Seven Sisters is the diary of Candida, a middle-aged divorcee alienated from her three grown daughters, making a new and much-circumscribed life for herself in London. After a period of grimy poverty, she comes into some money and travels through Tunisia and Naples with a group of female friends. How these women in the ‘third age’ of their lives interact with one another and themselves is the focus of the work.

I had difficulty engaging with this book, although I’ve enjoyed the author’s work before. In Candida, Drabble has created an uptight, self-conscious character who is given to deconstructing herself and her own need to impress and connect with others. The trouble is that she’s done it extremely well, and so the book reads like, well, a self-conscious personal diary written by an amateur. She plays with narrative style and perspective as a form of self-analysis, which makes one question Candida’s candidness; but rather than piquing my interest, this just made me more irritated with the character.

It’s a tricky skill, writing a flawed character in a way that doesn’t lose the reader’s sympathy. Drabble skilfully charts the growing optimism and personal strength of a woman thrown on her own resources, who is able to lose the ‘bleating, whining tone’ of her earliest entries in favour of a more positive voice…but personally, by the end of the book, I no longer cared.

Keeping one's head above water

2006-08-15T14:46:00.000+09:30

I woke up last Monday to brilliant sunshine. The light striped my bedroom floor, promising warmth and welcome outside. Contemplating what to wear, I found myself excited at the prospect of lace camisoles instead of heavy shirts, of bare legs in strappy heels instead of wool trousers and boots, of vitamin D seeping into bare skin.

This is what spring means, and I rejoiced in its coming.

And then I realised what else spring means: no more camouflage. A winter of carbs and sloth have taken their toll, and action must be taken. So I dug out my swimming costume from the bottom of the drawer and set forth.

This has been going quite well, so far. I’ve made it to the pool a few times, remembered how much I like to swim, and started to build a routine. In the water, my total lack of hand-eye coordination doesn’t seem to matter, which is a major plus. I swim for half an hour or so, and walk back to work feeling peaceful and refreshed.

Until today. Today was neither peaceful nor refreshing. But the doctors tell me my eyesight will be restored just as soon as the PTSD improves.

The pool I go to has four lanes, labelled Slow, Medium, Fast, [Very] Fast. When I get there at around 11.30am, there are two people in each of the middle lanes (Medium and Fast), one bloke in Slow and no-one in Very Fast. Now, I’m coming back to swimming after a year or so away, and so I’m not fast by anyone’s estimation. But once you get more than two people in any lane it becomes too crowded for comfort, so Medium is out. The guy in the Slow lane is walking up and down the pool, stopping halfway to do stretching exercises, and occasionally just floating on his back. He's also obese, and therefore taking up a lot of space. So Slow is out as well.

I hop into the Very Fast lane. This affords me about five minutes of total freedom in which I manage a few respectable laps. But I’m out of shape, and already I’m slowing down a little. This, of course, is when another girl joins my lane.

And she is fast. Like, turbo-powered. I manage to speed up for one or two laps in order to avoid shaming myself completely, but the effort takes far too much out of me. I start swimming one lap as fast as I can manage, stopping at the end to let her catch up and overtake me, and then swim another.

Even with the rests I'm slowing badly. This is getting embarrassing, but I don’t want to leave the pool, so I’m keeping an eye on the other lanes in the hopes that a slower one empties.

Finally! Slow Guy heaves himself out of the pool and walks towards his towel, behind my lane. I wait a minute to check that he’s leaving and not just grabbing equipment before moving; I don’t want to find myself in the Slow lane with a guy in floaties. In my peripheral vision it looks like he’s just winding a towel around his waist, but it’s taking a surprisingly long time. When, a few minutes later, he has neither headed back into the pool or out to the locker rooms, I turn around to check the situation.

This is a mistake.

For some reason he’s decided to change under his towel instead of head to the relative privacy of the locker room. It’s a large towel, and he’s evidently done this before, so anyone looking into the room from the street would see nothing untoward.

I am not on the street. I am in the pool. Below him. From where I stand, in the shallow end, I am therefore looking up and under his towel. And I’ve caught him in that delicate moment between dropping his swim shorts and pulling on underwear.

OH MY GOD I’M LOOKING AT A STRANGER’S COCK.

I look away immediately, blushing. Fast Girl is still pounding up and down the lane, giving me increasingly annoyed looks as she comes past, because I haven’t been swimming for a while now. I figure that at least Slow Guy’s definitely clearing out, and therefore I can steal his lane.

Except that to lever myself out of this lane I have to turn around again. And I don’t want to do that.

I really, really don’t want to do that.

So I take a deep breath and plunge into a new lap. It’s surprising what emotional scarring can do for one’s speed.

Not so fast, Doctor

2006-08-14T15:30:00.000+09:30

I don’t know where to start with this story that claims women stop wanting sex when in a secure relationship.

Actually, that’s not true.

How about I start by saying: this is one of the most ridiculous reports I’ve read in a long time. It misreports and exaggerates the findings to give it journalistic bite, fails to take causal factors into account and arrives at a hypothesis which is not borne out by the data. Plus it irritated the shit out of me.

Sound Byte Journalism
“The female sex drive starts sputtering to a halt as soon as a woman has got her man”. Sounds drastic, huh? It continues:
“Women's libido plummets so rapidly when they believe they are in a secure relationship that after just four years the proportion of 30-year-old women wanting regular sex falls below 50 per cent.”
Wow. Ignoring the hideous syntax for a second: Below 50% in only four years? That is indeed a rapid plummet. Except if you read on.
“While 60 per cent of 30-year-old women reported wanting sex "often" at the start of a relationship, the figure fell to below 50 per cent within four years.” So actually, within four years of a steady relationship, only 10 per cent of female respondents reported a decrease in sex drive.

Ignoring Causal Factors
These are 30 year olds, by the way. Do you want to guess what the average age of woman experiencing her first pregnancy is these days? Google is frustratingly silent on the subject of German rates, but in Australia it’s, what do you know, age 30. Not that that could have anything to do with it.

Also, 90% of the respondent women, irrespective of how often they wanted sex, reported wanting tenderness. Male desire for tenderness fell off rapidly (and you can’t fake tenderness, so if they’re not wanting it, they’re probably not creating it). Which is causing the other?

So [only] ten per cent of women experience a decline in sex drive in the first four years of a committed relationship – the same years, incidentally, in which they are the most likely to bear and rear young children, and in which their mates show a decline in tenderness.

Clearly, social science has no part to play in this!

Interpreting Data to Fit Hypothesis
“Dr Klusmann [...] has compared his findings to the sexual habits of prairie voles and offers an evolutionary explanation.

He believes that women, having found a man with whom to procreate, keep "resources" scarce to keep the man interested. Men, on the other hand, maintain a higher sex drive in the hope of keeping their mate faithful and other men at bay.”

Prairie voles?

I looked up prairie voles. They are 'famously monogamous’ and form pair-bonds for life. Like humans, the prairie vole releases a chemical called vaspressin when it mates, creating an addictive reward cycle such that it is drawn to mate again and again with the same vole.

And…that’s it. That’s the basis of comparison. Clearly the two species are practically one.

Let’s revisit the good doctor’s theory.

Women, having found a man with whom to procreate, keep ‘resources’ scarce to keep him interested. Men maintain a higher sex drive in order to keep their mate faithful and keep other men at bay.

I am reluctant to speak to the second half of this claim (but please, men, comment!) so I’ll concentrate on the first sentence.

If it’s true that a man’s desire to have sex with his life partner doesn’t decrease throughout the relationship, a premise which is at the heart of this article, what possible reason or motivation would women have to do this? From this particular evolutionary perspective, wouldn’t women be more likely to want to continue to have sex with their men, thus ensuring that they stay around and help rear the children rather than go off and form new pair-bonds?

There's no suggestion that this 'withholding of resources' contributes to the fact that male libido stays steady through a relationship. This, therefore, makes no sense at all.

In addition, there are much-vaunted reproductive advantages for women in having one regular sexual partner. The risk of pre-eclampsia (a dangerous condition in pregnancy) goes down where the woman has had one regular sexual partner for a longer period of time. There is evidence that female fertility is improved if having intercourse with one partner.

In both of these cases it is not the security or emotional wellbeing that makes the difference; it is the sex, or more specifically, the semen. Having regular unprotected intercourse with one man makes the female body more receptive to that DNA. Infrequent intercourse would work against a woman who is trying to optimise her reproductive abilities.

Also, if the above were a compelling reason to withhold sex, wouldn’t more than 10 per cent of women employ the strategy?

Shoddy journalism and shoddy science. That’s all this is. And you just know it's going to be all over the popular media.

AOL

2006-08-14T11:57:00.000+09:30

I mean to post this the other day and forgot. If anyone reading this is an AOL customer and doesn’t yet know about last week’s monumental screw-up , stop reading this immediately and go to that link.

For more information, check out memepool; they have several links up analysing the fallout.

Slow news day

2006-08-14T10:05:00.000+09:30

The today will be like a competition in running with barriers. The barriers will be small, but there will be a lot of them.

And a very good morning to you, too.

Seasons should change gently, gracefully. Naked winter should flush pink like a girl rising from a bath, slipping into crisp white cotton springtime. This year winter seems to have lurched into spring like a man caught bonking his neighbour’s wife, hopping around frantically tugging up his trousers with one shoe on and crashing into a chest of drawers. One day it’s all Hallmark frost, the next it’s t-shirts and sandals. Very confusing, and the worst of it (for me, and it’s all about me) is that changes in atmospheric pressure stop me sleeping. I woke up at 3 o’clock this morning.

The problem with insomnia is that one never knows when to give in and get up for the morning. I considered it briefly at 4, but still held out hope of sleep. By 5 the lying-still-and-hoping technique was palling, but I couldn’t quite muster the resolve to move. By 5.30, half an hour before the alarm was due to go off, I was drifting in and out of uneasy sleep.

The upshot, of course, is that I’ve had four hours sleep and a series of unsettled and unpleasant dreams. I mean, damn. The upshot of the upshot is that until I shake the rancid scraps of dream from my mind I don’t have a lot to talk about.

Apparently I’m not the only one reaching for content today, though: you’re telling me they only just noticed that these mountains – which, one assumes, have been around for millions of years - look like breasts? (link safe for work).

Yep. It’s a slow news day.

Hey, remember that poll?

2006-08-11T10:10:00.000+09:30

So, were you thinking of maybe hijacking a plane from London, flying to America and blowing up a city? Want to practise first? Be my guest!

Okay, that was tasteless. Moving on.

Look, it’s becoming increasingly clear that I will never be able to post the results of the great Ten Inch Penis survey. The original problem was that two separate polls were running; one asked people to rank the five criteria whereas the other, due to technological limitations, merely asked people to specify the most and least important. So that didn’t help. No matter: I had this complicated algorithm worked out to collate the findings into one coherent set of results, the fruits of which I was going to share with you.

The second or more enduring problem is that I don’t have access to the complete second set of results, and they’ve proved impossible to obtain. So there goes my complicated algorithm.

However, I do have most of the results, so rather than posting some funky graph (ha! Like I know how to do that anyway) I’ll just give you the gist. All in all I got about sixty responses, the majority of which were women in their twenties and thirties but from a range of professions and even countries. Oh, and some men posted, too. That was nice.

The vast majority (about 90%) of women picked Good Sense of Humour and Intelligence as their top two characteristics. Responses were evenly divided when it came to ranking them first and second; that is, about half said that Intelligence was more important, the other half ranked it second below Humour.

An even bigger majority – maybe 95% - ranked Ten Inch Penis and Earning Capacity as the lowest two. About three quarters put Earning Capacity second last, the other quarter considering it the least important. Looks sat squarely in the middle.

Standard deviations: where age was known, older women tended to prioritise earning capacity over looks, younger women going for the physical appearance first. Men, who were asked to guess what women wanted, agreed that Intelligence and humour were more important than a large penis. However, as I suspected, they tended to guess that Earning Capacity was more important than the female answers actually suggested.

I did hope to be able to post some of the comments that came out of the poll, but I can’t do that just yet. Conversations around the poll have been intriguing, though. Would it be better to date someone a bit dim who made you laugh, or someone intriguingly smart who never saw the funny side? Can a lot of money make up for a lack of good looks? How many of us have ever encountered a ten-incher in real life, anyway?

I haven’t anything funny to post about this, really. But the gist is this: guys, if you’re funny and smart you’re probably doing okay in the pick-up stakes. And if you’re not, you’re obviously not hanging out with the right people – i.e, my friends and colleagues.

If you’re rich, well-endowed and boring as batshit (and batshit’s pretty boring, let me tell you), you’re out of luck. Sorry.

You know, that doesn’t look quite as convincing in type as it sounded in my head. I wonder if I phrased the survey wrong?

30%. Seriously.

2006-08-10T16:51:00.000+09:30

Is it unreasonable of me to post about US politics? I never know whether that’s unfair or not, since I have a feeling I’d get bristly if people from other countries bitched about Australia, but I do think that what’s happening there is often reflected here, so that’s my justification. Plus, I’m not really commenting about Bush voters. I’m just linking.

Okay, read this link. At least the first paragraph. 30%, people. 30. Per. Cent.

Now read this one. It averages out to 39.7%.

When you look at the age spread of the first group, the chances of them forming a substantial part of the second group grows. Not that I’m making any comment about Bush voters. I’m just linking.

Pollyanna

2006-08-10T14:01:00.000+09:30

Turns out I have less than no css skills (well, I did know that already. More to the point, it turns out that I cannot in fact teach myself code in one afternoon), so I must give all credit for the fixed template to my friend Angela. There’s some changes left to be made, but at least it looks vaguely put together again. So I can get back to what I do best: writing.

Well, technically what I do best is waste time. And hang out with people in bars. And read too much. And…well, anyway, I can get back to one of the things I do less incompetently than web page design: writing.

And I wanted very much to write to you all today. Sometimes, I know, I can be a little, well, negative. A little sarcastic and judgmental. But today the milk of human kindness flows through my veins and I am full of joie de vivre. I am having a spectacular day.

Take this morning, for example. The sun was shining gently through the windows, urging me to spring up and begin my day. Which I duly did. Such a nice way to start the day.

Much better than having the alarm clock go off at a startlingly loud volume, having mysteriously retuned itself in the night to a popular music station complete with Intensely Irritating DJs. And realising it was zero degrees outside and the fire was long out. And that the cat was meowing outside the door so that hitting snooze would have been futile. That would have sucked. Luckily that didn’t happen. I don’t know why I mentioned it, really.

And then the drive to work was peaceful and serene, all the cars observing the road rules and definitely not swerving in and out of lanes at 120kph, blaring their horns and acting like five year olds with anger issues.

They’ve finally turned on the heating at work, too, so that instead of sitting here in our coats and gloves (no, really), we’re all enjoying working in sub-tropical temperatures. It’s like being on holiday! Somewhere really hot! But without any of that annoying sand, water or remotely heat-appropriate clothing, and with a total absence of those awful cocktails! Can life get any better?

All of this, though, would count as just a standard good day. What really inspired me to call today a spectacular day (a word I do not use lightly) is the wonderful lunchbreak I just had. I love working in the city. It’s so colourful and cosmopolitan, with things happening all the time. This is great, because when I’m walking along I have a tendency to try and enjoy my own company, sink into my own private thoughts, that sort of thing. I know! Unsociable and unfriendly, right? Thankfully, this crazy city is here to stop me indulging this dangerous, misanthropic tendency.

In the space of 45 minutes, I got two separate exhortations to “smile!”. I love being reminded to smile. Obviously, it’s my duty to present a cheery and smiling face to total strangers all the time and I’m grateful to those civic-minded citizens who willingly do their bit to help me be the very best Barbie - I mean, smiling girl – I can be. Thanks, Greasy Dude and Maniacal Business Man!

Also, apparently it’s good for the circulation to be a little bit cold sometimes, so I’m ecstatic that the drycleaners hadn’t received my coat back yet despite swearing that it would be ready today. Mmmm. Nothing like a brisk walk in insufficient clothing to get the blood flowing. Also, if I’d been wearing the coat, how would I have got my regular dose of validation from letting men stare openly at my breasts? All in all, things couldn’t have worked out better.

At least the woman at the dry cleaners let me know about the non-delivery of the coat quickly, rather than ignoring me for twelve minutes whilst she examined every single photo in an customer’s wedding album and discussed what type of cake they had and who made the dress. Because that would have been ridiculous, what with it being a customer service job and all. Especially since there were three of us waiting, all clearly on our lunch breaks. Can you imagine?

Walking back to the office, I got a rare excuse to demonstrate my agility and lightning-quick reflexes when a car decided to whip round a left-hand corner whilst I was entering the pedestrian crossing, forcing me to leap backwards out of the way. I was just bemoaning the fact that office culture doesn’t allow me to fit in enough exercise, so this was great.

Now I’m off to make coffee. I hope the kitchen’s jam-packed full of people who want to comment at length on the weather, the football and what that other guy’s got in his sandwich. I can’t think of anything more fun.

More Books

2006-08-09T09:00:00.000+09:30

No substantive post until I get the template sorted out, I’m afraid. For now:

Wednesday Book Review

Winter Breaks – Joseph Connelly

Connelly writes English social farce, much like Tom Sharpe but (to my mind) significantly funnier. He has an ear for internal monologues, and much of the narrative happens inside his character’s heads. Winter Breaks is the sequel to Summer Things, which was possibly a little funnier. In the sequel, the characters are even more dysfunctional, and it’s harder to feel enough sympathy for them to stay interested in their stories. Nevertheless, a funny light read. Good for holidays.

Paullina Simons – Red Leaves

Some authors write one or two brilliant books and then lose their way. Others only become mistresses of their craft in later works. Simons is one of the latter.

Red Leaves is an early work, and it’s got some technical faults. It seems unsure of whether it’s a murder mystery or a social drama, and the result is a clumsily paced narrative. The switch between the first half of the book, which chronicles the last week of the main character’s life, and the second half in which a detective tries to discover her murderer, is jarring; the first half is too long for a book revolving around the mystery, and too short for the reader who has become intrigued by the character herself. The revelations of the latter half are oddly paced, and the dénouement unsatisfying. Simons excels at human drama and the conflicts of people trying to balance love and morality. Luckily, that’s what she has concentrated on since Red Leaves. Read Tully or The Bronze Horseman instead.

Anne Tyler – Ladder of Years

I love Anne Tyler to bits, and none of her books have disappointed me yet. So when I say that Ladder of Years may well be my favourite, I don’t say it lightly. There’s something strangely compelling in the theme of a person who walks away from their life and trappings to start again (Douglas Coupland’s Miss Wyoming and Douglas Kennedy’s The Big Picture are both great examples), and that’s what Tyler concentrates on here. She writes in a style so realistic it could be accused of dwelling on minutiae, but she is so intelligent and incisive that every detail is valuable.

If Tyler has one fault, it’s that her couples are all variations on the same theme; a talkative, scattered, slightly childish wife contrasted against a dour husband. That said, she has sympathy for how these types create and reinforce a symbiotic relationship, and Ladder of Years examines how one’s self-identity is connected to the role we play in the eyes of others. It’s a beautiful book. I loved it.