NaNoWriMo

Incidentally, I am trying hard to complete my first NaNoWriMo.

Not because I am “a writer” or “a blogger” or any of those things. I think to get a label like that you have to do things properly. It would be like someone calling themselves “Doctor” when they like to put bandaids on your skin. I just have a problem with labels. Think of a jar of vegemite or iSnack 2.0 or whatever. They put the label on it so someone doesn’t have to list all the ingredients every time they want a salty Australian spread made from beer to put on their toasted bread with butter.

Labels make things easy for you. Easier to say I’m a writer but I wouldn’t be able to defend the fact that I don’t know the ingredients of a good story. I don’t even know the past principle tense of participate properly or how to spell aliteration. Furthermore, I don’t really want to know because the rules are meant to confine in order that others can understand.

I am pretty sure I’d be misunderstood if I said I liked being misunderstood but my point is that, being understood is not relevant. I write this stuff because it is fun, it clears my head and there is a lot of junk in my head. Vinnies won’t even accept it. NaNoWriMo will!

All I have to do is commit to 50,000 words for the month of November and upload it..and it will float off into the digital realm never to be seen again. What a weight lifted.. I can’t wait.

But I am struggling to stay on target, star wars style. So am taking a quck 5 minute breather to write some stuff in the park. Rest time is over.

 

The Best Childhood Your Child Can Have.

I really don’t care what magazines, tv or the Internet says about motherhood. There is so much advice and so much information I don’t believe it can all be right and I don’t believe it is right to try and follow it all either. Everyone has a different story and our parents and grandparents had stories that were no less about parenting than the ones we are creating today. What was different was that if their child was feeling sick, they didn’t spend minutes googling what it could possibly be. More quality time and all that jazz.

But you know something, when I was a little kid I don’t remember playing a lot of games with my mum and dad but I do remember being involved in whatever they were doing. If Mum was cooking, I was allowed to be in the kitchen and get things out of the fridge for her and eat things off the chopping board. If Dad was doing some work in the backyard, he would happily chat away to me while he worked. I didn’t go to preschool, early-learning classes, ballet, tennis, gymnastics, advanced drumming for toddlers. I was not entertained by parents who were working and yet trying to play the clown at the same time to amuse me. They loved my company, loved talking to me and loved me talking to them. For me it was the dream childhood. I have grown up complete and secure in the relationship I have with them.

Now I have my own children I am reluctant to “Give your child the best childhood they can have. Send them to Little Perky Performers today only $19 a class”. My reluctance has nothing to do with money, wanky advertising or a preference for swimming lessons over craft-building lessons over um Perky lessons. It has to do with the idea that the best childhood could be spent away from those who love a child the most. Will it make them a more rounded grownup or will it make them feel more distant from me? I am sure the Internet can answer that question but it shouldn’t because this is our story and it isn’t written yet.

If I’m lucky

Because I am lucky, I decided I must write something about that.

If I am lucky, I will get time to write this in the next week.

But I am lucky, because you will all understand and forgive and let live and move on.

I am lucky, like that but in so many other ways too.

 

The Tooth Fairy

Last week I had my first run in with the tooth fairy and I should kick her glitter butt from here to never-never-again-land.

Wait, back up.

A few weeks ago I reported to all my facebook friends that Kat was losing her first baby tooth. *sob sob* another milestone *sob* what’s a friggin milestone and why can’t we change it to a kilometresign? *sob*

Lot’s of nice suggestions on how to get the wiggle tooth all the way out but the problem was no amount of wiggling was making a difference. Even watching The Wiggles while wiggling the tooth didn’t wiggle it out. In twitter terms that’s a #wigglefail.

All the while a massive white pointer that was literally white and pointy, was poking up from the fluidy pink recess behind Kat’s bottom teeth. Soon it was too large to be ignored. My daughter was growing in her adult teeth behind her baby teeth. She would have two rows of teeth and they would call her “shark girl”.

Deciding on a dentist is hard work too. I’m not a big fan of dentists, they tend to come at you while you’re wide awake with metal instruments and try and stick them in your mouth. It is barbaric. I don’t care how shiny those metal tools are.

A dentist was finally chosen with a website that smacked of unnecessary luxuries like the possibility of a cappuccino while you waited on red velvet lounges and could be entertained by a multimedia collection of your choosing while being massaged by Arabian monks.

Unfortunately cross referencing Saint Smiley Dentist with my insurance company revealed no joy. Kat would be booked into the local dentist/medical centre that boasted a 6inch plasma on the wall and free water.

Walking into that clinic for the first time was like walking into a familiar nightmare. I think parents have to be so brave for the sake of their children and it sux. There I said it.

“This is going to be fun Kat, you wait til you see all the um, fun stuff that the dentist will show you.”

Fortunately for both of us the dentist we lucked in with was lovely as was her assistant. They gave Kat some funky pink and purple sunglasses so she couldn’t really see the shiny steely metal implements of doom coming towards her mouth. These were not mentioned on the features list for this dentist and clearly should’ve been as Kat thought they were great.

So as her pleasure at her new look continued unabated I was told by the dentist in no uncertain terms that Kat’s teeth were coming in too early and would need to be pulled out one by one if her jaw growth didn’t catch up. Lovely dentist lady was quickly turning into Madam Dentist of Doom.

“So my daughter eats meat off the bone and chews leather boots for breakfast – of course she needs her adult teeth now and not 2 years from now. Can’t you accommodate that without pulling her teeth out???”

Apparently not. So my sweet girl had her first needle in the gum and plier pull. To her credit and my absolute amazement she didn’t cry/flinch or even declare that she hated me forever and would never go back to a dentist. In fact, she happily chatted through the whole procedure. Oblivious to the cruel manipulations going on in her tiny mouth.

“Here you go darling. I’ll put this in a little bag for you to take home to give to the toothfairy” – Dentist Doom says. Great now I have to contend with a fairy on top of nearly passing out when I saw you go in for the pull.

The excitement complemented with a kids magazine and a milkshake and a balloon or two, by bedtime the high fell quickly into a dead sleep. This also allowed that naughty fairy to come and take Kat’s tooth. Three x $1 coins all shiny and gold (to overset those shiny silver dentist tools) were left in a special tooth fairy pillow. And a very over excited and milestone marking fairy sprinkled her golden glitter all over the pillow too. Magic happens right?

Oh the heady magic of midnight activities.

So my first run in with the tooth fairy ended in the cool white light of morning reflecting off every piece of glitter that had “magically” spread from the tooth pillow into Kat’s hair, onto her sheets, all over the floor, right through the house, up into our bed and into my hair and David’s too.

Of course the bouncing giggling toothless grin of our four year old,
holding her bounty and the glitter coated tooth pillow was probably worth it all… but never never again.

Un Social Media

I’ve been motivated by a particularly snotty nose (not snooty, snotty) to write about unsocial media. This is a thoroughly unresearched, unscientific, long and deeply undebated piece of rubbish.

Basically there is a theory that says everything moves in cycles. The example that comes to mind is my flippant understanding of “The Gothic Mode” a pseudo-intelligent and yet farcical exploration of literature in high school English. See in that module we studied three novels Turn of the Screw, Northanger Abbey and The Castle of Otranto. The latter is deemed the first gothic novel ever written and it is filled with princes, haunted castles and flying codpieces(?). Austen’s Abbey was said to be a parody of the gothic novels, poking fun at all of their conventions and making young readers desire more reality in what they read. Jame’s Turn of the Screw was a return to something more of a spook genre, tempting readers with something halfway between unlikely and likely. This in between state was also thought to be the scariest evolution.

So I don’t remember the details but what stuck with me is that when it comes to what the masses favour in terms of entertainment, it will certainly move like a swing between extremes. Does it evenutally evolve into something else, yes but that is potentially the scariest option of the two prior positions taken.

ImaMacImaPC.

Now it is “social media” and the argument is that it is here to stay because humans are social and we want to socialise and build networks and blah blah blah. Yes, it all sounds good from one point of view. But is it really social? We have more people online than ever before chatting to people all over the world and building happy little groups of special interest and forming cliquey little clubs about this and that. But you know what I see? I see more people on buses buried in their laptops, in their ipods, in their iphones, in their online networks, in their great “i”. I see the tops of more heads coming towards me than faces. Less smiles, more pokes?

I have a feeling the great UN social is coming. I think that unless we can drive online right off the road and off the line and into someone’s backyard for a bbq.. then the swing is going to be all out of sync and perhaps land us in a much scarier place than we dreamed at the heights of social media fancy.

And it is a bit like reality tv. From the time Big Brother assaulted me, I was addicted to reality tv right through until whatever iteration of Australian Idol we are up to now. Now, I want fantasy. I want Merlin and Lost and creatures of myth and amazement. I don’t care if someone gets a wizard designer makeover.. I want some un-real-life wizards please.

The problem is that once you have a form of entertainment whether it is “reality tv”, “gothic fiction” or “social media”, you may use it, you may parody it, but you can never really abolish it. So it makes me wonder what the un of social media will be. Given NRMA’s insurance campaign, I might just go ask them, so I can un-worry.

Drugs or otherwise known as…

I can’t talk about particular companies and certainly can’t name names because everything I hear is hearsay and everything I say is nay-saying. But I have been scared by a culture of drug use that slips by un-scandalised in the corporate sector. Is this because the media sits in partnership with this sector? I wonder about that quite a lot. Because for some reason it is ok to be a drug user under your white collar.

I am not talking about rock and roll or celebrity or sports. I am not talking about the junkies in the street. I am talking about those with the position and means to treat drug use as something for the privileged. Perhaps it is their little bit of “bad” in the world of good they think they do. Or perhaps it is their little bit of  “naughty” to all those nice fake smiles they need to produce. A bit of “illegal” to all the legal bars they need to jump. I am sure their justification is way more justified than anyone else’s right?

I know that I have only caught a glimmer of it. Like spotting the flick and shine of slippery fish. Perhaps I’ve only half seen half a dozen, perhaps there is a whole school out there. I think it is wrong but maybe I am just a fish out of water.

And who am I to point at drug users when I am lining up for cocktail Friday? That is a conflict. Maybe I am just as bad as those that I shake my thoughts at. All I know is that if you’re in marketing then you know how to call a spade a vase.

The weekend

For my birthday the kids and David got me a toy car. It was a cool car. A cooler person, would know exactly what make and model it was, but I just watch Top Gear for the writing. So the toy car was a bit odd until I realised its full metal body housed a gift voucher from Red Balloon Days (yes I’m a huge fan). The voucher was to drive a V8 super car around Eastern Creek raceway in Sydney and be driven around the track by a racecar driver. The latter was exciting, the former absolutely terrifying.  So my reaction at first was not what David had hoped. I mean, what husband really wants his wife to be intimidated by a gift?

But raceday was still 2 months away.. 2 months of silently stressing over how I would get through it. Being on show, being judged, being clumsy, being mistake after mistake. Being not good enough or not fast enough or not careful enough. All bizarre thoughts to have but the overwhelming one was a fear of not being. Not being really there.

Wow what a weight! And a wait.

So this weekend was the big day and you know I dreamt I had already done it. I dreamed I was actually 80 and I was having a big party. Someone stood up in front of everyone, my kids, my grandkids, my friends and all of their offspring too and said nice things but not real things. So I stood up (walking frame assisted), and I yelled, “hey, you don’t know the stuff I’ve done all you are is all the stuff I haven’t”. It made sense in my dream but somehow reads weirdly in the cold click of day.

Anyway I woke up and started to think about all the things I have done.

I’ve been to Disneyland and gone on Space Mountain mulitple times even though I was only 5. Why? Because I wanted to and my Dad was no wuss.

I’ve been whitewater rafting on the Nymbodia River near Coffs and the Trusili River in Nepal.

I’ve looked across the valley to Mt Everest having walked there from Lukla on these fat strong legs.

I’ve ridden on the back of a Harley.

I’ve sung in Eisteddfords, published poetry and entered creative competitions that I never had a hope of winning.

I’ve jumped out of a perfectly good plane with a man and a parachute attached to my back.

I’ve taken my friends out on a catamaran on Sydney Harbour for fun, for the hell of it, to show myself that I am still alive.

I’ve gone gliding – gift from Optus coworkers.

I’ve stripped off and had a hot stone massage behind a waterfall on a tropical island.

I’ve travelled to London, Paris, Rome, Prague, Copenhagen, Almhult, Shanghai, Geneva, Fiji and other places too.

I’ve swum with dolphins and seen dugongs from the bow of another catamaran in Monkey Mia

So all this stuff I’ve done, none of it was or is perfect. And it wasn’t some better version of myself that did these things. It was just this uneven skin and blubbered form, the addled brain and disproportionate disposition. It was the selfish, confused, introverted, extroverted, optimistic me. How can I reconcile any of this? I don’t know how.

But I can add to the list, that I have now driven a V8 super car at about 190kph with the windows down – because that’s how I wanted it. And for the record – it was awesome :)

Race Day

On a trip because journeys are so reality tv

I really do hate the term “journey” now. It has been subverted. That’s my thought this week.. all the good normal words that have been overthrown and replaced with new meanings. Like when someone says that someone is “special” putting those verbal inverted commas around the word. It isn’t fair. If I say you are special – it is because I think you are someone beautiful; in spirit, mind or body.  I don’t call you special to highlight some detrimental difference, to pull you down. Bastard word subversions!

So I am disowning the “journey” of the realitytv world where contestant A experiences personal growth between episode 1 and episode 10. Instead I will “trip” like they did in the 60s, unknowingly falling into a new place. Starting at point X and landing at point 3. But I will steal back from the 60s the idea that such trips had to be substance enhanced. My trip starts every morning at the push of a button – the alarmOFF button at 5.10am.

Out of bed like I did when I delivered morning papers aged 12. Stumble through exposed brickwork of the unfinished door to the office. Clothes. iPod. Mobile phone. I have no pockets. Why don’t they make running clothes with pockets for all our digital aids? New shoes – earned from 2 weeks of consistent runs.  Another word perverted but I don’t mean that. Out the back door and it is always warm and windy. Start running.

Stop running. Breath is definitely snagging in my throat. Not sure why. But here is a man with a jar in his hands and he is eating something from it.

“Good morning, what is that?” I ask. pant.pant.pant.

Effort from running or from breaking my preferred silence in favour of connection with a complete stranger?

“It *was* muesli. But it is *now* mush. I put it in this jar and shake it with my milk and it goes mushy. Perfect breakfast grub” he says.

Grub – another perverted word but Ican live with it because I didn’t wake up cranky. More running. Open grass filled with bunny rabbits eating their morning grub. The Curl Curl sharp shooter doesn’t come over the hill into Dee Why. So they are safe and yet they flee from me because I am big and foreign.

And there it is, my heart, my home; the deep suck and sigh of the pacific ocean rolling out to a dappled distant sky.

The sun hasn’t struck me with her glamour yet. There is still time to be normal, average and unseen. Then two screams and splashes strike me instead. I watch as two teenage friends trade warmth for the still wintery waters of Dee Why pool. Splash splash scream scream talk talk talk talk talk. When do they breathe? When?

They are out now and I am trying hard to focus on one thing. The fisherman maybe with that incredible beach rod that he has carted out onto the rocks. Or maybe that surfer that paddles his long board with a paddle while he stands on top. Every morning, that must be hard work. Focus, be consistent, have a point.

Talk. talk. talk. drip.drip.drip.shiver.talk.talk.talk.

“You guys are so brave – was it as cold as it sounded?” forcing a natural non psychopath expression.

“It was soooooo cold. We came down yesterday in the middle of the day and it was alright so we thought we’d come down this morning but yeah like that was such a bad idea and think we’ll be um waiting a while before we try again. But there were these other people swimming hey. They are still there, we are just complete wusses cos those guys are still in swimming so you must get used to it or something”.

“If it makes you feel any better those guys only started this week too – and they usually start much earlier. And you are braver than me, I don’ t think I’ll be in til December.”

Feeling paralysed by the volume these girls would talk. Aren’t teenagers supposed to grunt at adults? I can cope with grunts. Better say bye before I am hooked into further conversation and start drowning. These girls are much better swimmers than I had assumed. As they walk off drip drip drip talk talk talk I realise I have now spoken with 3 complete strangers.

Walking now. Thoughts weighing down my feet. Even in new shoes they simply won’t budge when I am thinking too much. Maybe this is why those people in the 60s tripped with substances – so they wouldn’t weigh down their own feet by what they saw, what they learnt and what they felt. Barely can walk up the stairs away from the pool. Texting. Not watching. A more considerate person steps off the path to avoid me.

“Ouch – bloody stones!” he curses quietly.

“Oh man, I’m sorry!”pant. pant. hyperventilating.

“Like its your fault? Did you put the stones there? Don’t think so! She’s right.”

And here I am in shock that a. this person didn’t ignore me like everyone in the city always will. b.has the most beautifully decorated long board. All tattooish and awesome.

“Cool board. Can I take your picture?”

“What you must be a tourist?”

“No I live up the road – just I take photos of stuff. It is dumb. Sorry.”

“No good for you for being a local. I used to live up in Ian St. Do you know it? On the cliff? Had a big house and everything. Now I have a big board and a campervan. Ultimate downsizing but it is good right. This is what it is about.”

“What’s a house if you have everything to make you happy right here? Have a good one”

and I didn’t say thanks for the photo or ask him about the board. Which is why I’ll never be a journo. Plus I have no clue about deadlines – it is 6.10am and my real world is waking up.

Tweet:

“today I have talked to 3 complete strangers. It is just like twitter except you use your voice”

I think I’m funny but on the trip back home what I realise is that I am much more like those bunny rabbits. Frightened by anything bigger and foreign. Yet at the same time completely unaware that just over the next hill will be someone happy to shoot me down.

So I get home not having progressed on a “journey” but regressed while tripping over myself through my awkward attempts at social interaction. If only I could interact without analysis. If only I could be gay. Damn word subversions!!!

Social Responsibility

This week I read a news article about two Australian girls who updated their Facebook status to say they were lost in the storm water drains and needed help.

The fact that the girls had signal and could’ve called 000 for help slides underneath the overarching question of what would have happened if a friend had not taken action after seeing their message on Facebook.

And suppose that friend had asked the wrong questions too many times and too many posts later those girls had ended up in a worse situation?

I couldn’t help but recall the atrocious 000 emergency case in 2006 where a boy died who had mobile signal but could not get through the processes of the 000 line to find his rescue. Would his death had been averted if he’d sms’d a friend?

My concern is not the right or wrong of contacting 000 in an emergency, but what are our responsibilities as good online citizens to ACT upon information we read in people’s profiles?

If someone declares that they have young children and are suffering severe depression – who do we contact? How do we find the right kind of help for that person who is clearly reaching out without finding ourselves responsible for a worse situation.

We are all very good at passing messages on. I can retweet and via til I fulfill all the social rules of online copycatting. However when does my responsibility to act on information kick in and how  much shoudl I rely on what I read?

I’d like to think that the same rules apply online as they do off, however my social network is just that much bigger now, that I include all the online conversations I have each day.

I know quite a few people who would update Twitter that they were in trouble before contacting 000.

Actually, I am probably one of them.

Just gimme 10 minutes

Really keen to write more than 140 characters. I am. Just need 10 minutes.