Author: ThirdCat

bleeding edge

so, you know I left twitter, and with all the privacy carry-on, I’d leave facebook too, except I like keeping in touch with my cousins and playing wordtwist with my friends, and I don’t post any photos or anything, and plus, I just can’t sever my ties with the interwebs quite that much.

Anyhoo, I found this thing diaspora. I’ve got no real idea what it is, but it looks kind of cool, and I’ve always loved dandelion clocks, so I’m going to give it a try.

Sorry I’ve not had a chance to upload my photographs. It’s the thought of all the cords. It makes my heart race and my head thump. Cords suck. As opposed to the chords eldest lad has been messing with on the keyboard this week. Those chords soothe my head and calm my beating heart.

Deep breath in. Hold. Breathe out. Repeat ad infinitum

Do you know what’s stressful? Deadlines that’s what. Specially when you’re an uptight control freak with compulsive tendencies. All good living in the moment, that which doesn’t kill us practice, but not good for the knots in my back and my neck and my stomach.

On a lighter note, I am very much hoping that tonight I will have energy to upload photos of my weekend so that you can see what I did on Friday. It will leaving you gasping in amazement, wide-mouthed with shock and perhaps even a little in awe of my awesomeness.

You will have to come back to see, because YOU WILL NEVER GUESS.

PS Unless you are my friend on facebook, in which case you already know, but don’t tell anyone, okay…and if you aren’t my friend on facebook, doesn’t that just prove that you are missing out?

Maintain the rage

I don’t remember where I was the day the Governor General was lambasted from the steps of Parliament House. In a tyre swing in the front of our house at Essington Avenue, Clare, I’m guessing. But certainly, the incident shaped my early childhood – I was simultaneously mortified and proud to be driven around a small conservative town in a car covered with stickers proclaiming in red, ‘Don’t blame me, I voted ALP’ and the pretty bloody dreadful ‘Tammy’s got one, Mal is one’.

My attachment to the ALP has been as much emotional as it is political, but like a lot of people, I lost any real sense of belonging at the time of Tampa. I was deeply disappointed in my father then. I could not understand how he continued to support a party which was so clearly disconnected from the values that he had taught me were non-negotiable. My mother would have left, I’m certain of that. We fought about it, my father and I, in a way we had never fought about politics and values before. It was a confusing time, because we had never been separated in such a way before. You fight for change from within the party, my father said. Or you fight it from outside.

I had heard the argument all my life, but this time, I wasn’t convinced.

That was about the time his own, personal fight began, so I guess I’ve forgiven him for letting the ALP battle go.

Maybe all of this has coloured my reaction to Malcolm Fraser’s resignation from the Liberal Party, because do you know what?

I am maintaining the rage.

I thank Malcolm Fraser for his stand against the Howard government and I thank him even more for his stand against the possibility of one led by Abbott. But equally, I hold him responsible for creating a political environment in which a Howard government could exist.

Fraser’s government came to power driven by an unwavering belief in it’s own privileged entitlement to power. Whatever else they did or did not do, this was the foundation on which their power rested. How could the people of such a government escape a ‘born to rule’ mentality, how could they not learn to view the electorate with contempt?

It wasn’t an inevitablity. I’m not saying the Howard government is a natural outcome of the Fraser government. But I don’t think it’s any surprise that the one led to the other.

I have no scientific evidence for my belief, no psychological, sociological or even political insight. It’s just a personal observation. And perhaps it’s not even a very sophisticated way of thinking. Maybe I’m just clinging to my rage, because if I don’t, then that’s just one more piece of Dad that doesn’t exist anymore. An essential piece. Perhaps I’m directing my rage towards a man I don’t even know because it’s easier than asking yet another question of my father and my relationship with him.

Whatever the reason, I thank Malcolm Fraser for his continued commitment to human rights, but I harbour no fondness for the man.

No, really, thank you, but no

‘No, thank you,’ I said.
‘But it’s spend 8,000 dirhams between now and tomorrow, then get ten percent off the second purchase you make between Wednesday and 2 am.’
‘No, thank you,’ I said.

I think I’m the only person who has ever said no to her loyalty card. It’s nothing personal, I want to say. I just do not sign up for loyalty cards. Not the ten percent off every purchase, not the ones that get you invitations to exclusive pre-sale parties. I don’t even like the every tenth coffee free.

I get that some people love a bargain, love the thrill of the chase and so on. But see, I find shopping and buying stuff hard enough as it is. It is completely incomprehensible to me how people can ‘go shopping’ for recreation. I would say that about eighty percent of the time I go shopping, it ends in tears. Mine or someone else’s caused by me.

Loyalty cards just add to the stress. Demanding to be accounted for, to be considered, remembered. For me, loyalty schemes are just another one of those niggles, another piece of brain-noise I can do without. For a person who already over-thinks, this is an issue. If I had to think, every time I stepped into a shop, ‘But I shouldn’t buy it here, I have to buy it at the shop at the other mall, but then I’ll need to get back in the car…’ analysis paralysis, we haz it.

The only exception I make is for frequent flyer points. I am a member of two frequent flyer schemes. Which is why, after spending several hours online last night and the night before trying to book my tickets home for the summer (which will be winter – yay) I am bloody exhausted today.

The search for meaning

I feel the fragility of life more keenly these days than I ever have before. This is my age and the impact my parents’ deaths showing. But it’s being away from home as well. Living here, I am way outside my comfort zone on about a gazillion different levels (I know, you might not have noticed, I’ve been keeping it to myself).

If I were to tell you each of the reasons I feel uneasy here, for many of them you would scoff. No, really, you would. There’s the obvious reasons and one or two of them are big, important things, but mostly, it’s a never-ending succession of small, tiny, itsy-bitsy things that leave me, each day, flabbergasted, trying to understand, but increasingly certain that for me, the place is incomprehensible.

Look at this article for example. In the town where I grew up, lads, young blokes, however you describe them, would have done the same kind of thing. I’ve been in cars that were driven by boys doing dumb things. This is not a culturally-specific event.

Only where I grew up, it wouldn’t have been so…I don’t know, so in your face. And plus, we were a working class community, with not so much money to burn on the roads.

I don’t know what it is that I’m trying to say here, what conclusion I’m trying to draw. The mister drives along that road a couple of times each week, my mother died in a car accident, I have my own two young boys to guide, I like public transport…of course watching this makes my heart race, my breaths shallow, the shoulder muscles tense.

But there’s something more to it than that. Something about my powerlessness that re-awakens or, more precisely, reinforces, my uneasiness. Perhaps it’s just that all over the world, middle-aged women are invisible to young men in cars. And it worries me.

Interestingly, if we try to go directly to the clip on youtube from here, it seems to have been blocked, but we can view it through the newspaper just fine. I don’t understand.

Reality? Check.

I was looking on the updated Skilled Occupation list which is to do with Australian immigration, and who gets extra points on their immigration applications or who gets priority or something like that.

The mister and I have Australian passports, so we don’t actually have to prove our worth to the Australian government when we want to go home. They have to let us in. Nonetheless, I was looking at it, because I thought it would be interesting to see whether or not we hold skills that the Australian government thinks Australia needs.

Much as I would love to be considered ‘brain drain’ material, I am not shocked to find that Australia is not missing my skills. There’s a shitload of jobs there, and I, with a BA, an MA, two finished grad dips, one incomplete grad dip, and a not insubstantial number of jobs, could not even fudge myself as one of them.

The mister, on the other hand, with his CV composed of one degree and two employers, seems to be so highly valued that there’s about five terms there which could describe him, including the top three.

Everyone who said bad things about Malcolm Turnbull, look where it has got us…

Some things I have done instead of working on my short story:

1. put a beer in the freezer;
2. refereed a(nother fucking) pokemon dispute;
3. untwisted the cord connecting the computer to the internet (an aesthetic, not technical, issue);
4 listened to that interview Tony Abbott did on the 7.30 Report the other night;
5. felt father turning in his grave;
6. started worrying (again) about the state of the world and what if – I mean, really, what if the Libs win, because, quite apart from anything else, I will have to stay living here;
7. had sms conversation with friend;
8. got beer out of freezer, opened freezer-cold beer, downed freezer-cold beer;
9. worried some more about the Libs winning the next election
10. given eldest boy his piano lesson (on which situation I will tell you more tomorrow).

Tomorrow morning I am definitely getting up early

Okay, here’s the thing: I’m tired. Not emotionally exhausted or anything like that, just good old-fashioned, can-hardly-stay-awake tired. And I’ve been like it for about a week now. I’m eating well, getting exercise, not particularly stressed about anything, and don’t feel any lurking illnesses. So it’s prolly cos the temperature is hovering around forty degrees every day now, and when I’m not outside in searing degrees, I’m inside in air-conditioned air.

It’s weird though, because last night, I was still awake at 2 am, thinking to myself, just as I had been for the last four hours, ‘I wish I was asleep, why aren’t I asleep, all day long all I’ve wanted to do is sleep, and now I’ve got the chance and all I’m doing is thinking about sleeping.

The upshot of all this tiredness being that the short story which must soon be finished is still in the muddling stage and appears to be nothing more than a collection of words gathered together on one page for no apparent reason (despite that day when I had moment after moment of insight and clarity and couldn’t have been more sure that this short story was deftly-plotted, perfectly-paced, and oh-my-goodness so witty).