29 feb
Scottish legend from roughly 700 years ago says it was legal for women to propose to men during Leap Years. Men who refused proposals were fined, with penalties ranging from a pair of silk gloves to a new dress.
These traditions evolved into today’s marketing hoopla to fill the consumer spending gap between Valentine’s Day and Easter. I’m a traditional kind of girl when it suits, so I’m going to ask every man who crosses my path to marry me and see how quickly the new dresses and gloves pile up. My winter wardrobe will be stocked by lunchtime, I reckon.
The list of modern-day wedding etiquette that shits me is pretty long (note to self: whine about dinky poems requesting money instead of toasters one day, and woe behold anyone who asks guests to pay for their own meals) but these days women can propose and be accepted or rejected with the big boys. The concept of equality was a little different in the late 1800s and early 1900s according to these postcards.
Would you choose the chick in the blue dress with a dog bone at the collar and truckie’s arms? Then again, the lady in red seems to have a strange neck/bust/waist alignment condition. Quite rightly, the man is keeping his mitts off both of them but, with the women attached to him with four points of contact, his chances of escaping alive aren’t good.
I don’t understand why the Daddy-O is staring so lasciviously at her groin area. The cigar is a nice Freudian penis in case we missed the stare bear thing. The beau in question is praying to either spontaneously combust or that dad wants to cut his lunch with the tiny-hoofed, giant-befeathered woman.
Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer. The most attractive figure in the middle has the smallest pile of booty, yet the woman in red who couldn’t be bothered changing out of her nightie thinks cold, hard cash will win the day. The wicked witch from the west on the right hasn’t a hope in hell. Will he choose looks or money? Neither, of course. This soldier is going straight back to the war zone where life’s a lot safer.
The female throwing money at a prospect continues. She’s better dressed than the figures in the other postcards, although the duckling tied around her neck is a distraction.
Happy Leap Day.
Crank-o-meter: give me gloves
27 feb
The longer I live, the less I know
I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!
~ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Warning: self-indulgent discourse ahead
The simplicity of daily life during the Christmas break is long forgotten (along with choosing to forget the feelings of guilt for not doing everything on summer’s to-do list). In its place is the time-weary sense of obligation to provide time and effort to earn a salary and honour fiscal commitments.
Is this all there is? In life? For now, yes.
The feeling of being special and unique in this world is lost because everyone eventually questions their purpose in life and role in society. The feelings of aloneness and isolation are so universal that milestone periods of angst are labelled as growing pains, a mid-life crisis and so on.
This one is a longer and more serious malaise that has rolled in like a dense fog over the mind.
The urge to break out and do something different, risky, dangerous is a constant presence, gaining size and authority as its spreads through the brain’s thoughts. It wants and has no safe outlet so it attacks from all angles: quit the job and drift for a while; have sex with … everyone; buy a ticket to somewhere and disappear from the world. It’s not a fresh look at the world’s wonders but an undisciplined call to flee from the once-satisfying routines of life. Giving in to childish urges leads to internal chaos and a deeper state of dissatisfaction but the yearnings are strong.
Spending too much time overlooking the precipice dividing youth and middle age. Guilt because middle age and old age means we’re still alive when others aren’t that fortunate but it’s not enough. Shallow fears that skin will crease and options for the future will expire, like our breaths one day and it is beyond control. Exacerbated by realising that life has been built on living day-to-day and the foundations aren’t real, aren’t solid, aren’t pointing to a direction.
Questioning one’s moral self and past conduct. Casualties left by the wayside, friendships neglected, rejecting and being the rejected, sometimes living neither honestly nor openly, the impact of ill-thought decisions on others. Is this understanding what it’s like to be human or being self-critical again?
The conflictive emotions tie knots in our chest that obstinately refuse to be unravelled. In vain we try to fight them or reduce them to silence. We’ve only just gotten out from under them, we imagine, when they erupt again with renewed vigour. Such emotional distress is notably resistant to soothing, and every attempt to be rid of it seems doomed to failure. During such conflicts, our world shatters into a multitude of contradictions, that generate adversity, oppression and anguish. What went wrong?
Thoughts can be our best friends and our worst enemies. When they make us feel that the entire world is against us, every perception, every encounter, and the world’s very existence become sources of torment. It is our thoughts themselves that rise up as enemies. They stampede through our mind in droves, each one creating its own little drama of ever-increasing confusion. Nothing is right outside because nothing is right inside.
~ Matthieu Ricard, Happiness
Time to repair the holes in the fabric of life and create a way of being rather than lulling the bored mind with a series of distractions. There’s a lot of work to do. Mend a small hole, take a small step, any direction will lead somewhere.
It’s time to walk the dogs – shiny brown button eyes and wagging tails go someway towards soothing a tired heart.
Crank-o-meter: drowning
25 feb
Join the police force – but remember to leave your breasts at the door
Senior Victoria Police officers have been airing their dirty linen in public for some time about everything from plots to overturn the current chief commissioner to pleading innocence at pending court. Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon has the unenviable job of pushing positive messages about her force’s good work while trying to manage the never-ending bickering from the vocal and powerful anti-Nixon faction. She must regularly think I really can’t be f@$ked going to work today.
It’s been a little quiet on the Nixon-bashing front, so what better than a former top staffer to pooh-pooh her policy to increase the number of policewomen. What was former assistant commissioner Noel Ashby thinking? I’m not employed there any more, I’m potentially facing perjury and misconduct charges, but hey, I’m going to ring my media mates and get stuck into my old boss’s recruiting policies. Righto.
Ashby questioned Victoria Police’s policy of seeking older recruits and increasing the percentage of women in the force. It’s hard to tell if his comments were skewed or his thoughts on equality are based somewhere in the Jurassic period but, either way, he’s coming across as a right dickhead. In an interview with The Age, he said, “That is also an issue for young mums because they don’t want to be away from their kids. We’re already seeing those stresses come into the organisation where we’re unable to attract women to some areas.”
Also, “It’s difficult to attract women to some of the specialist traffic areas, such as booze buses because seven shifts out of nine are late, after 6pm, for obvious reasons. It’s also very difficult to attract women to specialist taskforces because of the periods of time they have to be away.”
He also suggested that allowing a gender balance of 60 per cent male/40 per cent female was “more realistic.”
Oh, OK, let’s recruit more men (often married with families) instead of looking at workforce policies and culture to make coming to work a bit easier for women.
He might have a point somewhere about effective workforce planning but I can’t find any quotes where Nixon wanted a half-and-half gender mix in the force. Victoria Police’s web site says that, “We are committed to recruiting more women and people from culturally diverse backgrounds. Our particular focus is to increase the representation of women in Victoria Police to 25 per cent.”
Nixon’s mission has been to bump the current number of female recruits is part of a campaign to also attract candidates with previous work experience and from different cultures to mirror the society in which they work. There’s no secret that policing is a 24-hour a day vocation – applicants know what they are getting into and shift work is part of the deal.
Oh, hang on, maybe a policing career is less desirable for women because a troglodytic culture still exists in some pockets of the force. With Australia’s backwards policies towards maternity and paternity leave, childcare and family-friendly work practices, a large brunt of last-minute childcare needs such as medical emergencies still falls to women. Maybe they want to do shift work and make a difference to the community but it’s too goddamn hard. Has anyone asked female coppers how the job impacts on other aspects of their family lives?
The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for instance, where women weren’t allowed to join the police force until 1973, started all-women’s police stations in 1992 and has all-female police battalions. Some of the women interviewed for the story said they defied their fathers’ wishes to join and they’re one of the best-trained and motivated forces in the world. The police commando course, for example, concludes with a 440-mile (704km), three-day footrace (that’s after they’ve mastered horse riding, wielding an AK-47, bomb detection and unarmed combat). Somewhere, somehow, the kids are being looked after and women are pursuing their career goals.
Last year the Liberian government started a program to increase its female police quotient to 20 per cent but is struggling to reach six per cent because of the force’s image and low educational standards of women. The United Nations is helping with an education program to help women get into the force and a group of Indian policewomen has flown over to assist with a peacekeeping mission. Again, the Indian police force seems to be doing something right so its women can share their skills and develop policing in other countries.
Perhaps the former assistant commissioner can use his media clout to promote progressive ideas like part-time policing, 24-hour childcare and other countries’ flexible work practices to attract and keep the best candidates of both genders. A welcome mat never killed anyone.
Crank-o-meter: over outdated policies
23 Feb
The reasons we watch porn are the same; just the medium differs
Today’s cover story in The Weekend Australian Magazine offered to answer two of the most obvious yet intriguing questions in modern society: who uses porn and why? I know jack shit about a lot of things but ‘nearly everyone’ and ‘to get off’ leapt to mind, however, a cover story indicated there might be more to the article than the blindingly obvious. Oh, and the decidedly non-porny cover shot of a model’s skyscraper legs brought out some primal instinct that I must immediately hate anyone whose ankles are thinner than my wrists.
The article is based on an about-to-be released book, The Porn Report, that discusses the consumption and production of pornography and debunks a few myths along the way. The body of the magazine extract is a nod to the past that links to the present with the conclusion that adult material so readily available that everyone is part of the porn debate, like it or not. That’s fair enough as a sociological and cultural essay to place the debate in perspective (especially when thinking about regulation when almost everything is freely available on the internet), but it was the sidebar’s statistics that gave the story true insights on an everyday level.
Most users of porn are normal, everyday people with a range of ages, incomes, political affiliations and religious beliefs. Nearly half of the survey respondents were in relationships and 75 per cent spent either nothing or less than $50 a month on material.
Another finding was that women are increasingly accessing and consuming porn (yet the magazine article is scattered with erotic images of women from over the centuries. Not a buff — or moustached — male figure in sight to balance the scales). Maybe it means the viewpoint that women are objectified in porn is being challenged, more titles are available that women find appealing or we’re just coming out of the closet regarding our desires. Perhaps this is addressed in the book.
The findings at the ends of the porn-accessing bell curve raised even more questions. Two per cent of survey respondents described themselves as celibate. How do they reconcile their abstinence from real-life sexual encounters with accessing pornography (or were they part of the respondents who said they didn’t use porn?)
What kinds of porn turns people on? The article addressed the situations where porn is used but not what turns people on. The book promises a list of the 50 best-selling porn videos and DVDs but I’m curious about the content outside commercial sales. What percentage of straight men are into gay male porn? How many lesbians watch hetero skin flicks? Who buys the trampling videos of the kind made by a man I know? Do women tend to buy ‘softer’ porn or where do their tastes really stand?
Six per cent of those surveyed watched porn with a crowd of friends (separate from the five per cent who used porn in sexual situations with more than one partner). Most people I know go out to dinner, the pub, or a sporting game with friends rather than watch the latest gang bang escapades on Redtube; just what do they do afterwards? Find separate rooms and masturbate, stay seated until erections subside and wet patches on the couch fade or throw Top Gun into the DVD player because it’s just something to watch while having a few beers?
There are some bigger issues at play such as protecting increasingly computer-literate children from porn and how censorship might work in the future, but I hope the book also opens the door into people’s bedrooms so we can have a peek.
Crank-o-meter: confused now but still think most porn is crap, like commercial TV, really
21 feb
A day just for men? Hurrah!
Today started badly in the cranky stakes with a radio station crossing live to its news reader having a vasectomy. Call me conservative, but if I ever need surgery I don’t want it performed at a clinic where the breakfast show listeners get an earful of genital slicing and dicing. I’ll stick with live-to-air liposuction and gall bladder surgery, thanks.
The afternoon’s news featured a magazine poll that deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is Australia’s second-sexiest woman. I’m more a Natasha Stott Despoja kind of girl myself if I had to choose from the pollie ranks, but taste is an individual thing. Our deputy PM handled the accolade with a stylish brush-off and went about the business of doing stuff with the country while the media went nuts that men might find powerful women attractive. Get used to it and grow up.
Later I caught a rural TV network’s news and nearly had a fit about the headline for a ‘blokes’ day out’. The camera panned across a showground with men doing men’s stuff like talking, eating, walking around and looking at displays. The Gannawarra Shire Council even threw in $1,000 towards hiring a bus to get the blokes home safely if they’d had a few beers. An interviewee said all men were welcome if they didn’t have to go to school or were alive – in a world of pre-recorded and scripted interviews, his guilelessness was pure gold.
What a glorious idea to give country men a day to put aside stresses caused by drought, rising interest rates and mates’ suicides and get out there and do man stuff. And you know what, there wasn’t a bikini-clad promo girl in sight. Thumbs up and have a great day out next year.
Crank-o-meter: cheering somewhat
19 feb
The end of culinary innocence (or, prepare the decks for scurvy, ye pirates)
A few months ago I almost caused an uprising at work because of a proposed office move. I like my office (except the current tenant aka the Bushpig from Hell) and I can be equally unproductive pretty much anywhere. We were going to be shoved to offices above the staff canteen, which spits out unfathomable quantities of fried almost-everything from 6 in the morning. Even the most dedicated mung bean muncher can’t resist the wisps of fatty, salty aroma rising from the deep fryers. People gain kilograms inhaling the smell when innocently dropping off the internal mail.
The only safe zone in the canteen is the salad bar where the curtain is lifted from the display cabinet at exactly 10:00 to reveal the only bright colours among the masses of brown, crispy stuff. It’s like the sun’s rays breaking through clouds on a winter’s morning. My heart smiles when I buy a towering wholemeal sandwich packed with vegetable goodness for the princely sum of $4.50. Wrong, it seems.
I was sitting with workmates the other day while they filled their bellies with fried matter when snippets of another conversation caught my attention … Use the lettuce sparingly because that’s all we’ve got …
Que? Go to the shops and buy another one for less than two dollars. It’s not hard. Then my eye ran to a green bag the size of the pillow my head rests on at night. Filled with shredded lettuce.
I asked a former chef for clarification between his bites of dim sim bathing in soy sauce.
“Yes, Nicole. You can buy almost everything pre-cut. It’s cheaper to bring in fresh food than pay someone to prepare it.”
“Oh. I knew about the chopped potatoes you use at the footy club.”
“That’s only the start. You can buy anything: onions, carrot, whatever you want.”
“How long does it keep in the bag?”
“Up to two weeks.”
“Are you telling me most of the stuff in the salad bar has been brought in? I thought someone with good knife skills got the tomatoes and cucumber beautifully sliced every time.”
“I’d bet all of it’s been delivered in bags.”
“Oh. So the reason the canteen’s out of lettuce is because the truck hasn’t arrived today.”
[insert confused stare that I’ve obviously never worked in a restaurant and perhaps I’m also a little slow with some concepts]
The only non-processed food available on site is also processed and delivered by the foodservice wholesaler. I feel like I fell down in the last shower.
Australians are weighing more and eating less fruit, vegetables, seeds and nuts and now attempts to make healthy food choices are being thwarted by “fresh, portion-controlled, excellent shelf life, no-waste” bagged vegetables. Commonsense says eating preserved produce is better than nothing, but cut and peeled vegetables lose about half their nutrients in one to two weeks. The government’s ‘Go for 2&5’ campaign recommends eating five serves of vegetables a day (one serve is half a cup of cooked vegetables, half a cup of cooked pulses or one cup of salad vegetables). Doubling daily consumption to compensate for ageing veges turns the daily mini-mountain of fresh produce into a Mt Everest of salad.
It’s mind-boggling to think we have ready access to almost everything but it’s getting more difficult to meet daily nutritional needs. Drought and water restrictions have turned many home vegetable gardens into dust bowls and our demand for consistent produce year-round means we’ve forgotten what’s seasonal and what’s been sitting in a coolstore (or cargo plane bulkstore) for weeks.
Pre-chopped salad ingredients might save us from scurvy when we’re sailing the seven seas looking for new land masses, but we’re selling ourselves short by accepting attractive but nutrient-leeched food on a regular basis. Ask questions of the food outlet if the salad ingredients look a little too good.
Crank-o-meter: narky
17 feb
Where did you come from, nerd?
If I were employable somewhere else (and hadn’t failed statistics at university – apparently there’s more to it than mean and median) I’d love to work at the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Spending days, weeks and months taking multitudes of numbers and turning them into reports that can be manipulated to death by others sounds like right fun.
The next best thing is the ABS blog. Every few days the number crunchers post about the ABS’s newest reports “for librarians and other like-minded information professionals.” I gossip, so that puts me smack-bang in the middle of the information professional category.
Combine some fancy stats with history and it’s double the nerdy historical joy. The ABS has been scanning the bureau’s 1901-1908 yearbook and reading about life last century has been more enjoyable than watching The Biggest Loser with a slab of chocolate mud cake with double cream.
The more things change
Population: there were 111 males to every female in 1905 (giving today’s myth of a man drought a proper kick in the pants).
Employment: 60,000 Australians were employed dealing in food, drinks, narcotics and stimulants (can’t put two of those on your tax return these days).
Religion: The most popular religion was Church of England (1.5 million), with 35,000 Mahomedans, Buddhists and Confucians. One pagan was reported in Tasmania.
Death: The most common causes of adult death were tuberculosis, cancer, pneumonia, violence and congenital debility and malformations.
Defence: More than 300,000 horses were exported to Natal and Cape Colony in 1901, dropping drastically to 7,000 in 1904 on the cessation of the South African War.
Marriage: There were 333 divorces in 1906.
The more things stay the same
Aboriginal Australians: “Ethnologically interesting as is this remarkable and rapidly-disappearing race, practically all that has been done to increase our knowledge of them, their laws, habits, customs, and language, has been the result of more or less spasmodic and intermittent effort on the part of enthusiasts either in private life or the public service. Strange to say, an enumeration of them has never been seriously undertaken in connection with any State Census.”
Drought: Livestock numbers fluctuated, mainly due to droughts “which have from time to time left their impress on the pastoral history of Australia.”
Retirement: “The number of persons aged say sixty-five years and upwards will represent about 5 per cent, of the total population, and the provision of the sum required to pay to these a sum which would provide the pensioners with even the barest necessaries of life would be a very considerable burden upon the State Treasury.”
Immigration: “Prohibited Immigrants – Persons comprised in the following classes are prohibited from entering the Commonwealth, viz. :
(a) Any person who fails to pass the dictation test ; that is to say, who fails to write out not less than fifty words of a language prescribed by regulation when dictated to him by an officer.
(b) Any person likely to become a charge upon the public.
(c) Any idiot or insane person.
(d) Any person suffering from an infectious or contagious disease.
(e) Any person who has been convicted of an offence, other than a mere political offence, and has been sentenced to imprisonment for one year or longer and has not served his sentence or received a pardon.
(f) Any person undesirable for moral reasons.”
I’m glad I was born here because I’m guilty of at least three, your honour.
Crank-o-meter: strangely amused
15 feb
All right, I’ll change the goddamn title
Are you ever so tired that words on the screen move like ants following food and even a simple task like taking out the bin seems like jogging across the Sahara Desert in bare feet? It’s one of those days and daylight is yet to emerge.
I found the statistics module on my host’s control panel and found some interesting tidbits, such as a reader from the Russian Federation (hello) and the most-common search term to hit this blog is ‘animal s-e-x blog’ (dashes intentional so searchers for that kind of thing aren’t misdirected here again). I’m tired and old and cranky and, I dunno, do people search for that kind of stuff and expect to find it? Please, please, please be a fantasy and stick to your own species in real life.
There’s a few permutations of the same theme so I guess I’m guilty of deception in the ‘animal s-e-x’ post about vibrators named after furry critters. I’ll change it as soon as I can think of another few words before the Federal Police pay a visit.
Writer’s block hits at the stupidest times.
Crank-o-meter: on
13 Feb
The theft of four paintings from a Zurich museum this week forced a furrowed brow on the cranky face. Where’s the sense in stealing something valuable that can’t be melted, re-badged, laundered or put on eBay?
Reserve $50 million
Guaranteed authentic!
Monet painting, girls picking poppies in a field
Suits most décor
100% authentic!
Stored lovingly in a pet-free, smoke-free home
Will post worldwide
See my other items: a Degas, Cezanne, van Gogh and combine postage!
Source: Interpol
In addition to depriving many of the opportunity to enjoy valuable and important works (well, the pilfered Degas wasn’t his best, but the other three are beauties), the numpties who steal art are messing with some serious karma. Buried deep in a news story was a snippet that the four stolen paintings were from the EG Buehrle Collection. He wasn’t just some rich Euro-trash with money to burn on art bequests. Herr Buehrle was a German-born industrialist who provided arms to the Third Reich during World War II. Perhaps contributing some of the family’s blood money to bring art to the people balances the universe in a wonky kind of way.
However, the scales tip to the side of bad juju as it seems Buehrle started his collection prior to the war, buying paintings at ‘discounted’ prices from Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. Thirteen of his works were later returned, having been located on a list used to repatriate pieces looted by the Nazis.
I doubt the thieves had an overall sense of justice in mind when stealing the paintings, but there’s a certain satisfaction that they’ve been taken from where they may have never belonged. They’ll be impossible to sell on the global market, so if you’re looking for something to replace the three plaster ducks on your living room wall, check the local trash and treasure this weekend. Don’t forget to haggle.
Crank-o-meter: perplexed
11 Feb
I am still the biggest loser, by kilos
Love is a fickle beast. My infatuation with The Biggest Loser is over and I’m contemplating a formal separation (thank goodness, I hear you say, and stop writing about it). Might have just enough time to fall for another TV show before Valentine’s Day but there’s been nothing but shit on television since Veronica Mars ended so I’ll be divorced from the box before I know it.
The only sparkle of hope for our union is in about six weeks when The Biggest Loser’s contestants’ weight loss plateaus. I’ll be arse-down on the couch with a family block of chocolate in one hand, a bucket-sized thickshake in the other and a smile on my lips when I’m not shovelling food through them. Taking joy in others’ distress never felt so good.
The 10 minutes of television stretched tediously into a 60-minute slot is almost tolerable because I cook dinner during the boring bits, however, I cannot stomach the comments after a weigh-in that a 10-kilogram weight loss in a week is a good thing, and a three-kilogram loss is piss-poor. It makes for dramatic television but it’s not realistic or sustainable. Somewhere deep down in my pisstaking, there’s a voice saying, “Some people will believe this illusion because they want it to be true for themselves” and fall off their personal weight-loss wagons out of despair. Apart from the possible health risks and deluding the viewers in couchland, the body’s skin can’t shrink around a smaller frame quickly and might leave big folds of superfluous blubber requiring surgery to remove. Looking like a human Shar-Pei is not good.
Channel 10 can hype up the competition, or ‘game’, as much as it likes, but the laws of nature will always win and not a single bit of creative editing or emotional voiceovers can stop the inevitable. You crash diet, your metabolism turns to survival mode and slows, end of story. A lot of rapid weight loss is water and muscle tissue that helps burn more kilojoules, but that’s not entertaining. The half-kilogram a week plodders in the universe of reality will win the race but won’t get the money or the personal trainer for a year afterwards because they’ll never be picked for the show but they’ll have learnt lessons in determination and look a heck of a lot better naked. And hey, they won’t have to be embarrassed years from now in re-cap or ‘where are they now’ shows.
For the folks at home who believe this foolery: let’s get the contestants to parade in swimsuits at the season finale to see what they look like under the new outfits for a proper dose of reality TV.
Bring on the weight loss plateau. And the sugary sweet doughnut-shaped Os of contestants’ mouths when denial sets in.
On another note, memo to the woman in the blue team who won’t stop whinging: IF YOU HAVE THE ENERGY TO COMPLAIN, YOU HAVE THE ENERGY TO TRAIN. Now shut the hell up and pedal.
Crank-o-meter: sick of the bread advertisements
09 feb
Sisters aren’t doing it for themselves 1
I’m kind of fortunate to be in the dead zone demographic for women’s magazines. Too old for Cleo and Cosmo, too young for Your Life, too scared of the neon-coloured covers of the women’s weeklies, too god-knows-what for the wedding magazine section and too easily bored for the brain sludge that Marie Claire has become. I’m a cheap date at the newsagency.
As much as I try to avoid bagging out easy targets like politicians, AFL players behaving badly and women’s magazines, the current issue of Dolly stood out like a female at a company directors’ meeting. I haven’t read one of those things since Elle MacPherson had an Australian accent and quite possibly since the Liberal Party was in power the time before last. Some headlines change but some stay the same, like preparing for the first time (to have sex, I presume), getting a boy’s attention and wearing clothes. Let’s hope the stories are presented in reverse order to avoid confusion on the big day.
I don’t know how much of the fluff in a teenagers’ magazines is absorbed and how much is forgotten until it’s regurgitated in another issue, but one headline pissed me off big time: Be the girl everyone loves.
No, no, no, no, no. No. Even if the title is an exaggeration to attract the isolated goth girls, geek girls, tough girls, bogan girls and even the secretly insecure popular girls, no one can be liked by everyone. The weight of expectation to please others is excruciatingly heavy and this is the time of a girl’s life to start shedding these burdens and forge her own individuality. The expectation to be universally popular constricts a girl’s ability to think for herself and develop coping skills when her heart’s broken for the first time, let alone later down the track to negotiate a pay rise or run a country.
How about changing the headline to Be your own girl and encourage the women of the future that it’s OK to take risks. Instead of pushing popularity and passivity, start nurturing independence and identity.
The dumb irony in this tale is that Dolly’s editorial staff have bios on the magazine’s website and their universal advice to readers is to be proactive, work hard and set clear goals. Preach what you practice, please.
Crank-o-meter: shitted off
07 feb
I am an idiot. Someone please change the name of this blog from crankypants to idiotfeatures.
The Law of Inverted Karma states the more you try to help someone, the more it’s going to bite you in the arse. Every time I let someone in front of me in traffic, they drive 10km/h under the speed limit. Let someone with one box of Weet Bix duck into the supermarket checkout first, nup, the frigging item needs a price check and there’s no staff available because they’re cleaning baby chunder in aisle five and then it costs only three dollars but the person wants to use a plastic card and the network chooses to fall at that very moment. Yet, I keep being nice.
Yesterday’s stuff-up is going to hurt for the next month. The Law of Retrospective Self-Induced Crankiness says I should not have let the Bushpig from Hell set up camp in my office to do a ‘project.’ It’s only day two but there’s enough motivation here to buy wood and build more office accommodation tonight. The personable woman to whom I said yes has morphed into a human PA system — how does a five-foot-nothing woman pack 120 decibels? — and is obsessed with pontificating about how great the olden days were with other thunderous people in her clan. Yeah yeah, there was no crime 20 years ago, cars didn’t need seatbelts back then, the new generation has no idea about anything, blah blah blah, shut up so I can get on with organising the Dinosaur Olympics and nominate you all.
Who the hell took the chloroform out of my top drawer?
I don’t know why but her pants are two inches too short. I thought people shrank with age but this one has had a growth spurt in her forties. She probably scared her vertebrae into not compressing. It’s not habit to check out people’s pant lengths, but hers are white and the carpet is dark green so there’s a dead zone between shin and ankle kind of like plumber’s crack for office workers. Cannot look away.
It’s too late to retract the offer so I either learn to be tolerant, fake my own disappearance or take action. Tolerance at work is another word for self-denial and I tried to disappear last week, so an action plan it is.
- Install new locking system in office (note to locksmith: base it on the opening sequence of Get Smart)
- Buy bulk pack of duct tape for infidels who manage to worm their way in
- Buy scissors, needle and thread to unhem pants
- Learn to sew
- Get first aid kit in case sewing goes awry
- Fit the cone of silence
- Change all calendars to three weeks from now and maybe she’ll go next week
- Mutilate own eardrums with tube of hand cream
Twenty-eight days to go, or else I may have to comfort eat my way through the wall.
Crank-o-meter: calling the employee assistance program hotline
05 feb
Well, slap my wobbly arse and call me fatty, how much do I love The Biggest Loser? Lots. More than Nutella on bananas when I’m out of chocolate, more than watching tonight’s episode while stuffing a plate of pasta down my throat, possibly even more than inhaling a bowl of raw cake batter. Scratch loving the idiot box more than cake batter, but it’s close.
I blame an erratic social life for getting hooked on the last American season (learning about blame is a defining characteristic of all reality TV shows). The false camaraderie, the force-feeding challenges, the lugging of large objects because it makes good television, the removal of singlets to display bitch tits worthy of a gym full of power lifters. It’s got the lot! Why was I out having a life when this crap could have been choking my cerebral matter?
The Australian host is a skanky moll who’s either been drinking too much Tang between shows or the hair and make-up people hate her guts enough to let her on camera glowing dark orange. Next thing she’ll be elbowing Anna Coren out of the way to get the gig on Today Tonight so her drawn-out vowels can have their own show. And the verbal diarrhoea coming out of her mouth nearly caused me to crack some ribs. Line of the show was to a contestant at last night’s initial weigh-in: “Are you worried about dying before seeing your kids grow up?” I love you, condescending scrag.
The two trainers haven’t featured much yet except to deliver some truisms about, I don’t know, stuff. Working hard, giving a hundred and something per cent, doing the hard yards, whatever. It was hard to tell the show from the commercial for the bread they’re promoting. I love them, too, because they care for the contestants, who need that after getting the orange stare of death from the host at weigh-ins. Even though the trainers wrap some messages in new-age jingoisms (he with the tear-rending puppy dog eyes) and a bit of old-fashioned yelling in your face (she with the killer deltoids that could literally carry the show), their sincerity hasn’t been crushed by the producers.
I love the Commando, too. I love how he’s forgotten the pride, discretion, professionalism and style of those given the honour of serving in the special forces, removed the sandy beret from his pointy head and stamped it into the ground. No commandos I know would sell their souls for a few dollars and hours of air time. Not one. Commando dude, remove those embarrassing cut-off pants and wear proper camo gear for a start. I checked your former employer’s uniform list and schoolboy-length shorts are not on it. Burn them.
And the contestants, I love them all even though I don’t know their names yet. The blonde woman in the losing team who lost yet but won’t shut up about how she deserves the ‘A’ team. I love how I’m going to loathe you and your sense of entitlement and the tears in your eyes when you feel real pain. And the man with the long hair and tears on demand who can work the camera better than Baby John Burgess, you’ll go far my man. And Cosi, dear Cosi, I adore you so much that I remember your name. Anyone who admits to lying on the couch and eating a cupcake wrapper because he was too lazy to get up and dispose of it has my heart forever. May you make me laugh so hard every night that I snort spaghetti out of my nostrils.
Crank-o-meter: it’s hard to be cranky when pissing myself laughing
03 feb
Holding a mirror to Valentine’s Day
Discussing political affiliation has long been a good party trick to polarise a group of people so they leave a party before they trash the joint, but asking, “So, what are you doing for Valentine’s Day?” also elicits all sorts of zany reactions from wink wink, nudge nudging, to proclaiming any ‘Day’ is an overblown marketing exercise with no meaning left whatsoever. Put one believer from each camp in the same room and wait for the dulcet sounds of fingernails tearing flesh.
My feeling towards any day when I’m expected to do something (sing Auld Lang Syne, pretend to like single roses in plastic tubes, not be cheeky to my dad), and bah, I am the New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s, Father’s Day Grinch. Give me a day and I’ll give you a tirade why I don’t subscribe to it.
The hard truth is that our opinion of celebratory days reflects our opinions of ourselves. I’m a deeply insecure and often cynical soul, so poo-pooing a day devoted to public displays of love and spending a fortune on last week’s flowers is a natural defence mechanism in case no one writes a loving verse in the newspaper just for me.
Looking at other people’s reactions to Valentine’s Day is like holding a mirror to their self-esteems as well. People in relationships have a smug glow that says they don’t need Valentine’s Day because their partners do thoughtful things for them every day. That includes holding ice packs to faces slapped scarlet by their fed-up single friends.
Single people get a few pitying columns in the paper with ideas to have a fun Valentine’s Day without a partner. Oh yeah, great, there’s nothing better than running yourself a bath, glugging a bottle of wine, watching a DVD and having to masturbate because Mr Right is having dinner with some other trollop. Such novelty!
The web is bloated with anti-Valentine’s Day sites and forums to discuss the many reasons 14 February should be ripped from the calendar and burned to hell. Some of it’s fabulously bolshie and rebellious while the hearts of others have become bitter, warped little organs with no room to let love in. Of course they’re going to trash the day and demean the lovebirds who still believe in its last remnants of meaning.
I don’t like any day when its significance has been lost. Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter and Valentine’s Day have become assaults on letterboxes stuffed with gift ideas. The spirit of love and togetherness has been replaced with obligation to demonstrate affection with an armful of merchandise. While companies with something to sell can use their clout to encourage us how to behave, the cynics have a good point behind their dissent: no one can take away our strength to chuck the junk mail in the recycling bin and do something from the heart.
It’s a day to feel fortunate for the capacity to love and be loved. If that means a stuffed teddy bear wearing an ‘I love you’ t-shirt or a packet of heart-shaped lollies with messages of love gone sour (I’m still smirking at the ‘Booty 2 Big’ one), go for it. I’ll be quietly blessing the bikini waxers on their busiest day of the year and thanking my lucky stars that muzak Christmas carols have been turned off for a few months.
If you’re stuck for a loving ode to your sweetheart in the newspaper, here’s one.
Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine! ~Thomas Hood
Crank-o-meter: bah humbuggy
01 feb
The credit card with a heart of green?
GE Money has cranked up its green-powered PR machine to bring “the first credit card in Australia with a dedicated program that purchases carbon offsets on behalf of cardholders.”
The premise being plugged is the more you spend, the more pollution you’ll offset. Cheery examples abound, such as a $55 mobile phone bill charged each month for a year will purchase credits to offset a large-screen TV that’s watched six hours as day. Even bigger and better is the suggestion to swipe $600 worth of stuff on the card monthly for a year and it will offset the annual emissions of an average person. It’s that simple! Spend and save the planet!
I watched the television ad and trawled the web site but still have a sinking feeling about the green-heartedness of the offer. Perhaps anything that prompts people’s thoughts towards sustainability is a positive move, but the line between genuine corporate responsibility and feel-good charlatanism is continually being blurred by marketers.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics, in its recently-published Australia’s Environment: Issues and Trends 2007, highlights a largely negative report card for Australians’ consumption and waste generation. Real household final consumption expenditure per capita increased by 2.6 per cent a year for more than a decade while total energy use in Australia rose by 107 per cent over the last 30 years. While waste sent to landfill has decreased, Australians produced 42 per cent more waste than only 10 years ago and green house gas emissions were above 1990 levels.
At the most simple level, credit cards are often used to purchase goods that have consumed resources during manufacture and transport. The drastic increase in domestic electrical products contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, noting that only 132,000 of Australia’s 7.7 million households subscribe to a green power scheme as an offset (ABS March 2005 survey). Are schemes such as the ‘Eco’ MasterCard providing a handy way for Australians to offset emissions or are they a lot of hot air?
I couldn’t tell. Spending $600 a month might purchase enough carbon credits to offset an average consumer’s emissions, but scratching beyond the surface raises more questions. If $600 a month is charged to buy and pay off electrical goods such as a stereo sound system and large-screen television, does the offset include emissions in the manufacture and transport of goods?
Ideally, consumers would use the card to pay for goods that don’t generate greenhouse gases so the rebate’s impact is ‘real’. However, with Australians maintaining a balance owing of more than $41 billion on credit cards, a lot more than essential purchases are being put on the plastic.
Only time will tell if GE Money will spruik the simplistic “our customers are contributing to saving the planet” line when customers start using their new cards or if the company will provide meaningful information about the relationship between spending and carbon offsetting. In the meantime, we as consumers need to take the time to wade between what marketers are telling us is good, and what we feel is right.
Crank-o-meter: a bit cranky