"A nation of shirkers"

So, since I last blogged, many moons ago, I've half-thought-out about a million (or, like, 7) blog posts to write for you, Dear Reader, but somehow, with one thing and another, I haven't followed through with any of them. I think this is partly due to the structure of classes this year; somehow after a day in hospital I feel less inclined to natter in text form than after a day of enforced silence in lecture theatres. Plus people ask more "pop quiz, hotshot!" type questions in hospital (and they never seem to be looking for the answer “shoot the hostage”, somehow), so I suppose maybe I get tired of having to think on my feet? (Also, immediately subsequently, of consultants looking at me as if to say "How did you get this stupid? Were you dropped on your head a lot as a child? Are you even really a medical student? You're not lost, are you? Are you perhaps in the hospital by accident, or actually a patient? Did you by any chance steal that stethoscope from some hapless registrar whom you've left stunned and semi-conscious in a supply closet somewhere, having lured them in and coshed them like people in old movies dressing up as policemen or prison guards or similar?" I mean, it's all in the eyebrows and the jaded, jaded eyes, but that's definitely the look they give me. And it's very tiring, spending all day resisting the urge to show them where it says my name on my stethoscope and go "See! I belong here! I'll be an ok doctor, if I ever make it, I swear! Even if I’m a crap medical student! Which, by the way, is a subject on which the jury is still out!")

Plus, I've been staying with my grandmother, who is, as I'm sure you are tired of hearing, 99, which is, as I'm sure you've noticed, at least moderately venerable. That's 3 nights a week I spend without reliable internet access, going to bed super early and getting up super early to drive all the way to hospital, and 3 evenings a week having short loops of conversation with someone who has minimal short term memory function at best. Long story short, I haven't been filled with that creative zip and blogging zing which I'm sure you will agree are necessary for me to pen the great work of literature and social commentary that is this blog.

I can't remember, to be strictly honest with you, what many if any of these nascent posts were to have been about, but I was telling someone the other day about how I have a blog, and I realised that I just barely do, at the moment, so I thought I'd sort of check in here and say hi.

One that I do remember, though, at least in part, was this infuriated rant about a Telegraph heading which I kept seeing all over the place one day. The thing about being in hospitals on the ward is that you see the front page of the Daily Telegraph a large number of times (Always the Telegraph somehow, not other papers. Maybe people who read really awful newspaper get sick more? Or possibly they hold forth to people about things like hoe foreigners are taking all our jobs or whatever it is the Telegraph tells them, so other people injure them? It could definitely be that.) This headline was irking me enough that I actually went to their website to read the article before I blogged about it, because I've sort of learnt (learnt? learned? Is it like burnt and burned, do you think? How do I not know this?) my lesson about ranting on here about things without checking that I haven't got the wrong end of the stick completely. Which then (the reading it online thing) was even worse, because then I'd actually boosted their recorded readership by hitting their website, and so on.

Anyway, what this is all building up towards is the actual headline, which read "A NATION OF SHIRKERS" with a subheading explaining that what they were referring to is the fact that there are more Australians on disability pensions now than have been killed at war in the last 2 centuries. In fairness to the Telegraph (what a phrase to have to type), although I read the article, I think my computer crashed (presumably in protest) before I finished it, and I just couldn’t bring myself to look it up again and boost their hit count further, so it’s possible that I’m annoyed by something they weren’t actually trying to say.

Still, though, even if the article itself was in some way radically different in tone and content to the heading and subheading, the fact remains that this “shirkers vs. diggers” dichotomy thing that they’re tapping into there is definitely a philosophy many people seem to ascribe to, so it seems reasonable to engage with that .

First up I would like to say, in response to the sentence “there are more Australians supported by taxpayer-funded disability pensions in the past year than there are/have been Australian soldiers killed at war ever”: good. That is a good thing. What that means is: not that many people from this country, in the grand scheme of things, have died at war. What that means is that we have a pension system that works, that not too many people are slipping through the net and begging on the cold streets or whatever because their illness or disability or whatever it is precludes them from gaining adequate employment, rather than being supported by the public purse, which is what the public purse is for. Plus, of course, people are often supported on these pensions briefly, so that “having been on a disability pension at some point in the last year” is a very different thing to being on one permanently. Then you have the fact that you can draw a long bow (and it’s the Telegraph, so it seems naive to assume that they wouldn’t have) and include carers under the heading of “people who receive some sort of government funding as a result of disability (their own or others’)”.

Secondly, and this should really go without saying, but obviously it bears repeating: having a disability doesn’t make you a “shirker”. They don’t hand out disability pensions like they’re going out of style. It’s not that easy to get one, you pretty much have to have, - and you’ll kick yourself for not seeing this coming, Telegraph, when I tell you – you pretty much have to have a disability of some kind. And since we’ve come some distance, as a society, since beggars used to give themselves fake sores deliberately to get more money on the Elizabethan streets, there are not as many people as you might imagine lining up to get themselves one of them there sweet sweet disabilities. Because, funny thing, most of them suck? Even leaving aside the fact that being unable to do normal things, which is a reasonable working definition of “disability”, which obviously is less than great, there’s more to it. They’re either obvious, in which case you feel self conscious when you go about the place, which isn’t much fun, and in which case you clearly have a disability, or they’re not obvious. These latter include things like mental illnesses, which (a) also suck, and (b) mean that you spend a lot of time with nasty Telegraph-types looking at you suspiciously to check that you aren’t just faking. Because a perfectly healthy person would totally bother to imitate a crippling mental illness of some kind, presumably, and also of course doctors are morons who wouldn’t suspect anything. It’s way fun to pretend to have social phobia or an anxiety disorder! All you have to do is not leave your house or see your friends or do any of the things you used to enjoy, and make sure that even when you have to go out for necessities like food, to be totally self-conscious and stressed-seeming the whole time! I bet perfectly fine lazy people are lining up around the block for that sort of one of a kind opportunity to scam free money, to the value of one (1) pittance, from the government, for the tiny price of giving up basically all the things in life which are fun!

Or perhaps (as Bob Ellis would put it) that’s completely stupid.

Having a disability doesn’t make you a “shirker”, it makes you a person with a disability, who may or may not be on a pension depending on the extent, nature and severity of your disability. And even being a non-disabled person on a pension doesn’t make you a shirker, it just makes you someone whom we, as a society, are helping in some way. That’s why we have pensions in our system. If only bad people applied for or received them, instead of sending you money when you applied for one, Centrelink would send you a stern pro forma letter telling you to ‘man up and pull your goddamn weight, we don’t care if you’re 85 or whatever, son. Make an effort or don’t eat’. Fortunately, we, as a society, have decided that some people being supported by the state either briefly or permanently is valid and acceptable and appropriate.

Next up, of course, there’s the entirely important point that being a soldier sucks. (Be patient, this is relevant, I promise). So, if you’re a soldier in active service, and you don’t die (which, according to the binary logic of the Telegraph, is presumably the ideal outcome) you either come back fine and dandy, or you come back with some sort of disability, either of the PTSD type or the “dude, someone totally shot me” type. Since, as I understand it, modern warfare has been designed since the American Civil War with the aim increasingly of maiming rather than killing (for a bunch of obvious and terrifying-that-people-are-able-to-think-like-that sort of reasons, like it’s easier to avenge a dead friend than one who’s screaming and crying and begging you to take them to the hospital, and the fact that a dead person is, when you get right down to it, cheaper for a society to support than one in an iron lung with catastrophic sepsis, or even just a missing limb), so that it makes sense, fiscally speaking, for an enemy to try to drain your war-funding by simply giving all of your soldiers really big owies. What I’m saying here is that even non-shirky soldiers have a higher-than average chance of ending up on a disability pension. Ultimately, the Telegraph seems to be employing a distressingly with-your-shield-or-on-it sort of approach to soldiering as a profession or pursuit, like the only good soldier is a dead one. Which is interesting, given that they also seem to think, at least at some level, that a dead soldier is also better than anyone else of any profession of aliveness-status (if you’ll excuse the technical language).

This really all seems too easy. Like there’s no point even bothering to argue against the Telegraph categorically, they always take enough rope to hang themselves, pretty obviously. It actually feels sort of cheap, bothering to tell you how wrong I think the Telegraph is. It’s like taking candy from a baby, or like criticising disabled people by telling them that they’re not as good as dead soldiers. Cheap and easy.

In fact, to make it up to you (and because I don’t have any internet connection, so I can’t just stop typing and hit “post”, I just have to save all this as a Word document and copy-paste it later, so that there’s no properly defined end-point and thus no reason to stop typing) this next paragraph will be about disability pensions as a phenomenon, rather than the Telegraph per se. Isn’t that nice?

The problem with a disability pension is that it’s like strong pain relief. When you injure yourself, with luck, you can get by with a couple of panandol and a few days off work, but if it’s bad, you need more support. Maybe you need an opioid prescription painkiller, maybe you need to take a lot of time off work and be supported by the public purse for a while. Which is a great relief when you start, because it suddenly takes away all the pain/hassle. The problem is, it means that for a little while, it also takes away the little background niggling pains/hassles you’re used to putting up with. You know, like the little headaches everyone gets briefly every few days, but which go away when you ignore them, or like the terrible dreariness that is getting up when your alarm goes off early on a cold Tuesday morning to go to work. Which means that it’s then very difficult to bring yourself to give up your pension or your morphine. Because those things which start out as a useful crutch can all too easily become an inescapable crutch (huh, that’s not really a thing, is it? Sorry), or maybe one of those super deep soft feather beds in royal suites in old movies. You know, comfy and soft at first, but so soft that you sink in and can’t get out even as you’re being smothered. It seems like making your whole life a little easier for a little while is a dangerous thing.

I, for instance, pay very low rent, because I live in an apartment which my parents own. I should move out; it’s not a convenient place to live, and I know that I’m being a burden to them, but somehow radically increasing the amount of rent I pay for no really discernible benefit is something it’s very hard to get motivated to organise. Similarly, at the moment I get paid an allowance of sorts to look after my grandmother. This means that I basically have a job at the moment where I hang out with a really lovely old lady in the evenings then lie about and read a book or write obscenely long blog posts, and then sleep. So, if I get paid to have a pleasant evening and sleep, how will I adjust to getting a job which is actually work? It’ll be do-able, and obviously I’ll have to move house and get a real job one day, but I’ve managed to make that an awful lot harder for myself, by making my life too easy in the meanwhile.

Look at that, it’s like some kind of incredibly obvious and clunky metaphor for modern society. Or possibly a microcosm? Anyway, I guess my real point is this: speaking as an actual shirker, I think the Telegraph should pick on people like me, rather than people who have actual problems. Only ideally not me personally, because all this easy living has made me soft, and I would deal poorly with that sort of 45-point-font criticism.

"Why don't you have a boyfriend?"

Hey guys, long time no blog, as has apparently become standard. Sorry! Still, new year, new chance write really long things on the internet, as they say. With this in mind, I'm breaking with my tradition of post titles starting "In Which..." not because of the fact that so few people these days seem to have read the sorts of books which have chapter titles like that, and not because it isn't awesome, but because it was sort of difficult, given that this isn't the sort of blog which is about things actually happening, as such, so it seemed inapt and sort of clunky.
In what seems to me to be a much more intuitive appraoch, I'm going to go ahead and give this post a title which explains what it's actually about. Crazy, I know, but what can I say? I'm just a wacky and spontaneous chick.

So! Last week was Valentine's Day. (Not the entire week, thankfully, although can you imagine how few people would be glad if it were? Thank goodness for time-limited... holidays? Celebrations? Events? What is Valentine's Day even classified as?) Which meant that it was, as you know, the traditional time for relationship dissatisfaction. The single mutter embitteredly to themselves, and anyone else who'll listen, about manufactured holidays and Hallmark conspiracies; the folks in relationships secretly feel gypped because either their loved one didn't get them anything, or got them something inadequate, or something over the top, or expected them to give something, or whatever.

The people who actually enjoy Valentine's Day for what it is (not like I did, which is to say: I had a quite pleasant day, but not because of it being Valentines)must be a tiny tiny minority. Mainly smug highschool girls who get to carry flowers around all day (whose boyfriends must have had to get up really early to get roses to their girlfriends in time to get to school afterward), and some tiny percentage of people who enjoy a romantic evening with their spouse/partner/[gender]-friend and genuinely prefer to do it in crowded pink locations, surrounded by other people doing the same thing.

I guess, ideally, for Valentine's Day, you'd be one of those midcentury teenagers who enjoyed making out in their cars at the local Lovers' Lane, with similarly occupied cars around them? Like in Pleasantville! Anyway, possibly I am some kind of embittered husk of a human being or something, but I really can't see the fun in Valentine's Day. If someone gives you soemthing, then they've done so out of calendar-based duty rather than as some kind of spontaneous outpouring of affection, and if they don't it's just like all the other days when people don't give you anything, only worse.

Anyway, either because of Valentine's Day or for some mysterious other reason, last week about 5 different people independently asked me whether I had a boyfriend or was married. Since none of those people did that endearing pop-culture thing of brightening perceptibly and asking me of I was busy Friday when I said that I was single, it seems reasonable to rule out the most optimistic interpretation of this sort of question. If nothing else, it looks a lot like all of the people who took it upon themselves to enquire were either married or similarly attached. You can tell, because no single person, surely, no single person in the world, would do what they all did next.

What they all did, when I said that I didn't have a boyfriend, was entirely perplexing to me. Without fail, every one of them said "why?".

What is that even about? What are you expecting when you ask someone "why don't you have a boyfriend?"? I seriously cannot think of a single acceptable answer, a single answer someone asking a question like that could possibly want to hear.

I suppose that maybe what they're trying to imply is that you, the hapless single victim of their take-no-prisoners approach to social interaction and small talk, are simply so wonderful, so beautiful, so devastatingly attractive, that you must be constantly beating off suitors with a stick.

"Why not give in to one of them?" they presumably hope to imply, "There are so many wonderful single dudes all vying for your hand, why are you so stubbornly refusing to give any of them even a chance? The odds are very high that most of the myraid gentlemen besotted with you at any given moment are entirely eligible and would make excellent boyfriends! Why not succumb? I assume that you must have a reason, what is it? If that's not too personal a question". (Which, even in that situation, it obviously would be) But what it ususally sounds like is, more succintly "Why, what's wrong with you? How is it that you've repulsed the entirely of mankind? Is it bad? Should, uh, should I be standing further away from you? It's not leprosy, is it?"

Seriously, what answers are even possible? I tried "I'm too young to have to worry about being married yet" but that not only managed to offend the young-marrier in the room but also caused me to be regaled with a "when my mother was your age she had already had five children" story. This is an awkward conversational gambit at the best of times, but worse in a professional situation like this was, because you're not allowed to cheerfully respond "Gosh! I guess I've dodged a bullet there, then!".

I tried "I'm too busy, what with uni 12 hours a day, plus 3 hours of commute daily (minimum) and this foolish self-indulgent thing I have where I like to sleep more than 6 hours per night. All that only leaves 3 hours' leeway in each day, and I already use that time for such fripperies as buying groceries, cooking and consuming dinner/breakfast, dressing myself, and bathing." this was greeted with the even-more-bizarre-than-the-"my-mother-is-totally-beating-you"-approach: "I used to use that excuse," said the young man of my acquaintance, "that's just what it is, an excuse." I mean really, what? Are you trying to say that I insist on bathing every day to avoid meeting young men? Are you perhaps attempting to imply that it is my duty as a right thinking young woman to want to be in a relationship, that excuses will get me nowhere, and that, irksome as the task inevitably is, I really must stop being selfish and start going on dates? Since this was around Valentines, is it possible that they were suggesting that I was too lazy to carry flowers home with me?

I guess it's true that love is always portrayed as a burdensome duty in our culture, something, with it's tiresome "kisses" and, ugh, "affection", which girls are always trying to avoid. Oh wait, my mistake, that's complete bollocks. Firstly, as if I'd make up excuses to avoid having to date (in general. I'm totally not above making up excuses to avoid dating specific people, but that's an entirely different question), and secondly; even if I were, that's totally valid. Who wants to go out with someone who's only there because they couldn't come up with a proper excuse and knew that "I can't come that night I'll be washing my hair" is fooling nobody? Not me, and not anybody I'd want to date.

What else might you say to a question like "why don't you have a boyfriend"? People generally suggest "I'm a lesbian" if you ask them what would be a goood response, but that only loops back to "Why don't you have a girlfriend, then?". Plus, in giving an actual excuse, you're giving credence to the validity of an entirely unjustifiable question.

Other options include "all the boys I know are married, gay or miscellaneously unsuitable", "I'm afraid I'm simply too repellently unattractive for anyone to ever love", and "I'm currently conducting a torrid affair with your Mum, and she's too jealous to let me see other people". And somehow, none of these seem likely to do the trick.

It all just mystifies me. Do people contract some kind of amnesia, upon entering a relationship, where they forget that there was ever a time when they were single, either by (valid) choice or bad luck? What answer could you possibly be expecting?
I really do feel like someone is missing something. It could be me, but I'm pretty sure it's them.