Stop Revive Survive

You guys this is the second last day of June, which means 2 more (including this one) June Blog Challenge posts, and then it's back to less often. But! I'm thinking of aiming to blog at least twice a week during July, or something? What are your thoughts? Is it worth trying some sort of "rule" like this? I just sort of feel that without it, I forget to blog for like a year, often. And ideas which would become blog posts are milled down into facebook-status and tweet sized chips, rather than being delivered as a lump like this.

It's 3am at the moment, because despite having had all afternoon and the better part of the evening(in the sense of "large amount" not in the sense of "S opposed to the worse part") in which to blog, I still mysteriously left it until I got home. I did bring my laptop with me, though, in case I should have to pull over for a roadside nap and be implausibly struck with the urge to type then. I guess this is a reasonable thing to think, given that my last stop-revive-survive nap finished with a 45 minute wait for the NRMA to come and jump start my flat battery.

Apparently, despite all the warnings and signs and public awarenes campaigns, and despite the fact that by the time I'm 3 quarters of the way down the M4 I really really feel like all I want to do is sleep, it's actually quite rare to do this? People look at me with surprise, sometimes, when I mention it. Plus, the other day, I casually mentioned the NRMA adventure in a conversation which also featured an old friend and a new acquaintance, and the old friend sort of broke into the conversation at this point to say "you know that thing you're supposed to do where you take a nap? She actually does! Weird, huh?" in a sort of indulgent exculpatory way. It was pretty disconcerting, to be honest. I mean, I know sometimes you don't have time, or a 45 minute nap isn't going to cut it, but if you can, why wouldn't you? Especially given how much your slowly-blinking late-night-driving eyes clearly want you to!

I was going to describe the rest of my evening to you, but seriously I am the sleepiest in the land, so I'll boil it down to just what I've already told twitter:

1; I've got some strong opinions about invitations (facebook, email, text, verbal, anything) which give street names but not street numbers. I hate so much having to walk along a whle street just sort of listening carefully for revelry and trying not to get overwhelmed by social anxiety and maybe-I-should-just-go-home-feeling-ness. For this reason, I'm also a big believer in the bunch-of-balloons-on-the-gate tactic or similar. I hate knocking and just hoping it's the right house so much. Similarly, if your house had a kooky name, like The Palais, of the Hipster Haunt, or the Shack, or even just Shangri-La or whatever which you always fondly refer to it as, feel free to put that on the invite, just make sure you ALSO out the whole address. You friends have a lot of friends, and people move: even the people who've been there before will find a proper address comforting, they can't remember which is the right block, the right apartment number, etc, for each friend! Plus, you can't just put "Tom's house" into your satnav or google maps or whatever, unless you obsessively save all addresses. You are not Salvador Dali. A letter will not reach you addressed only with a picture of a mustache and a country listing on the envelope. Neither (literally or figurativeluy) will your guests.

2: Smoke machines add as much ambience to a small party as an extra 25 guests would, but more quietly, less likely to throw up, and more awesome-looking, depending, of course, on who those 25 people you were going to invite were. It was a ridiculously dense fog, in that house, but it was surreal and delightful, and actually pretty great.

Ok, I'm literally falling asleep here guys, sorry. Goodnight, more tomorrow, and then very probably ever again, at some point!

PS. Can't proofread, eyes keep shutting when I try. Sorry for all the inevitable typos!

There's not a lot to be done, I fear (insoluble problems)

Do you ever read about the problems of the world, and worry that they're just not really solveable? Like, there might be solutions but they're a damn sight worse than the problems in the first place, or at least, no better? I keep coming back to this today, somehow.

This asylum seeker debate, for instance. It really seems like a lot of people don't give a tuppenny damn about anyone so foolish as to have been born outside Australia. A lot of the arguments have a real vibe of "you should have thought about THAT before you were PEASANTS" to them.

People often advance the argument that our population can only be sustainable up to a certain ceiling and then BAM: droughts, famines, everyone having to feed their fibro houses to their children to save them from starvation, etc. Which is very possibly true, but hardly solves the problem. Firstly, if this is true, then the people who are already alive (like, say, refugees) surely have more right to the planet's limited resources than people who haven't even been born or conceived yet. If we're really concerned about resources, wherefore all the reproducing being encouraged? Maybe we need a one child policy or something? I mean, that engenders its own problems, doesn't it. (See what I did there? I didn't even mean to. That's what we call priming, my friend. You think "problems with the one child policy, and your subconscious goes "here are some words about gender!". Fascinating).

We don't need to engage with the arguments of the distressingly large number of people who simply do not care if other people are suffering if those people are black, or Muslim, or whatever. Their argument clearly has basically no validity, not even pretending to have a proper basis in meaningful reality. But these people are still a problem, since their attitudes leave migrants to form cliques and ghettos, which is essentially pretty definitely not a good thing. I mean, by all means "there's a large Mediterranean and South East Asian population near Maroubra" (that leads to a high availability of delicious things in the shops, for one thing!) but Harlem and the Bronx (I'm sure there are heaps in Sydney, but hardly so recognisable) and so on don't seem like they're working out super well for anyone involved. No-one learns the language or cultural mores of the new country in these cliques, for one thing, which is the sort of knowledge deficit which leaves you disenfranchised and all too easy to exploit. What do you do to solve the problem of racist people? There's no solution to that sort of thing. Freedom of speech, man. Etc. There might be a solution, but damned if I can see what it would be. You can try education, but that's obviously a slow-burner, and doesn't work as reliably as we'd like.

I think the problem that a lot of people secretly have with refugees is the one which they don't really want to look square in the eye: people who have been so badly mistreated that they need to seek refugee status are probably broken and 'no good to us'. No-one (I trust) wants to think of themselves as someone who would happily send someone back to their rapists, assaulters, would-be killers, etc. But people do complain about "those people" bringing their old cultures and old feuds etc with them, which I think is maybe part of the same concept. I mean, it's obviously pretty distressing to talk to someone who doesn't understand why the doctors won't circumcise their infant daughter, and responds "oh well, I guess we'll just have to do it ourselves at home, the old-fashioned way" when you try and explain, and personally, I would very much like it if there were no more of that ANYWHERE, and especially here where we have some hope of actually stopping it.

But I do sort of worry that the current response to "you are too broken by your toxic culture or dreadful experiences" is "therefore we will send you back to continue the cycle!". I feel like, frankly, given the choice of being shipped back to somewhere like the places some refugees are trying to escape, I would genuinely prefer the short sharp shock of drowning aboard a leaky people-smuggling boat. And sending them home is often not muh better even in simpler criteria since it's not so rare (or surprising) that these people often don't survive long when shipped back.

I feel like Jonathan Swift here, all "Modest Proposal" and what have you, but I feel like I see where these policies of "deterrence" etc are going. Can you see it coming, the logical conclusion of that sort of thinking? One day someone will realise that keeping people in refugee prisons is very expensive, as is sending them home, and that some people who can't go home are expensive for society because they're so traumatised and need a lot of health care etc. One day, some politician will realise that the distillation of these policies is having a rule, a very well-publicised rule, that if you seek refugee status here, you will either be accepted or executed. That way, the prison problem is solved, the 'people who are pretty much too broken by trauma to function anywhere' problem is solved, and the 'sometimes the reason that you can't go home is that you're a psychopath or serial killer or miscellaneous terible person who will cause trouble wherever you are' problem is solved. Not to mention the presumably entirely fictional political-football problem of people going "what have we got to lose? Screw it, let's try our luck!", since if what you've got to lose is everything, you'll only be tempted if you have nothing to lose or if you genuinely think you can make a go of it.

But that, of course, although apparently sound logically, is pretty monstrous.

And this is the thing, the only way to solve this problem we have here is to solve the problem of massive disparity and overwhelmingly dreadful asshattery everywhere, and I'm really not sure it can be done. My charming and well-meaning ex-boyfriend thinks that a revolution will solve many of these problems, but he also seems to genuinely believe that property is theft, and that the Reign of Terror after the French revolution was a necessary evil, or possibly even a necessary meh. I mean, what I'm saying here is that it's all very well to suggest we should overhaul the system, since it's clearly broken, but I pretty much do not want to have the people who want to do that in charge of my life, in general. Plus I'm concerned that despite being in general very delightful, he seemed, if I understood and recall correctly, distressingly ok with the idea that a revolution might entail torturing people for information, which not only doesn't actually work but is also the sort of thing which I personally consider a dealbreaker in a revolution. (And, if I'd been quite sure that that's what he really believed, something of a dealbreaker in a boyfriend too, even if he was very handsome and nice (and now single, ladies!)).

I'm not sure what I'm more worried about:

1)that things might just carry on as they are despite being clearly not really ok, on a worldwide scale, or 2) that the crazy Teaparty type conservatives will have a resurgence and it'll be eugenics and racial purity and barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen all round before you know it, or 3) that the opposite-side extremists will get their resurgence instead, and the whole world will end up like North Korea, and no-one will have to pay rent, but also no-one will be able to own their bedroom, or have pets who aren't productive (and yes, I checked, apparently dogs and cats which are productive of happiness don't count), and society will collapse in an unpleasant way.

I'm not happy with things as they are, worldwide. I don't want genital mutilation or drowning or imprisoned refugees to happen, let alone starvation and child-armies etc. But if the option is choosing between exploding or imploding the world, that's definitely not ideal either.

Dammit.

Movies with Chris Hemsworth in

You guys, I think I'm becoming an old lady. I went, on a whim, with some friends to a movie this evening, which started at 9:10, and by halfway through I was already totally ready to curl up in bed. Looks like even though I've ended up sitting up in bed writing blog posts at midnight the last few days, my secretly-elderly circadian rhythms are not fooled: they know (it knows? I feel like circadian rhythms should be plural, even though I know it's really just that one rhythm, but maybe I'm syncopated dnough to count it as two) that I ought to be at least making tokenistic bedwards motion by 10ish.

I mean, in fairness, I'd seen the movie before (twice) but it was the Avengers, which is pretty watchable. Not vastly surprising on the third viewing in as many months, but definitely still pretty good, still enough that a proper 26 year old wouldn't find themselves distracted by idle dreams of bed.

It's funny, actually, how much the movie lost by watching it in a cinema with only about 10 people in it. When I saw it on the opening weekend, it was in packed cinemas full of geeks who obligingly laughed en masse at every joke, which made the nuances and the little slivers of humour, for which Whedon is so beloved, easier to appreciate, easier to notice. I suppose this is what the people who came up with canned "studio audience" laughter were going for, but could never capture.

Maybe it's the spontaneity? Maybe it sounds audibly nothing like genuine laughter? Maybe it's the fact that there's a big difference between someone telling you a joke, and the person next to you going "That's pretty funny!" versus the person who's doing the telling nudging you and going "Eh? Geddit, geddit? I'm pretty funny, huh?". Maybe it's just that if you know you can simply add manufactured laughter, you don't actually need to try so hard to earn it. Which is maybe why it always seemed to devolve into characters making an entrance and then standing there like idiots waiting for the laugh to finish, as if the very act of entering a room was in itself inherently humourous, and even hilarious, reliably so, no matter how often you did it.

The problem with blogging about movies themselves, of course (yes, that's what we're talking about now, suddenly, try to keep up) is that everyone does so. Not that I'm too much of a unique and beautiful snowflake to do what the 'common people' are doing, you understand, but more that Australia tends to get movies last, it seems, and I never really go on opening nights, generally. So after I watch a movie, assuming I'm in the mood to dissect it (and frankly, I often feel like even trying to decide how to answer "did you like that movie?" is too much overthinking for many movies to sustain, so blogging would definitely dent my ability to rewatch and enjoy mindlessly) then generally most of the things worth saying have been said, more concisely and articulately (not to say accurately) by people whose actual job it is, let alone just the hordes of highly dedicated bloggers with a particular interest in movies. Light entertainment is serious business to a lot of people, and there's not what you'd call a lot of scope for the dilettante.

So, for instance, in Snow White & the Huntsman the other day, I kept wanting to take notes to remind me of what I wanted to write about it (which doesn't speak well for it's being a terribly absorbing movie), and indeed, having left my notebook at home by accident, I scribbled all over the inside of a paper wrapper in my handbag.

Problem is, it turns out that there've already been countless articles about how impressively derivative the movie was (seriously, you could basically do a version by just copy-pasting the scenes they'd stolen from earlier movies into order and uploading it to youtube (in fact do that, I want to watch THAT instead. You'll want bits of the 1930s Disney Snow White, Artax's death in the Neverending Story, the weird sibling vibe from Game of Thrones, and the sudden aging from that movie with Cabbage Patch dolls which I watched as a small child and by which I was TOTALLY TERRIFIED for reasons which now absolutely escape me. (Still don't like cabbage patch dolls, in fact, but this is partly because they're just dreaful.) Also Lord of the Rings, the fireswamp scene from the Princess Bride, and maybe the scenes of childhood from Ever After?)) (Three sets of nested parentheses?! I personal best?). People had also wriiten, with entirely called-for outrage about the casting of non-short-statured people in one of the few roles those poor short-statured actors could actually rely on getting. It was a bit like the scandal after Willy Wonka, except that not only did they hire full-height actors to play dwarves, they also gave them stupid haircuts and 1 dimensional characters (yes I know that was in the Disney version, but so was a lot of stuff, like narrative continuity, and there was no truck with that here)(well, less. Certainly they changed the story enough that they could happily have fixed the dwarves) and generally made them caricatures.

One of the short statured actors I heard quoted compared it to casting white actors doing black-face, and it seriously was pretty much exactly like that. I mean, it's not as if these people have managed to get far enough past discrimination that they can look back on this crap and laugh, just yet. I mean, it hasn't been a full year since the last time a short statured person was badly injured when some idiot decided to pick them up and throw them because dwarf tossing sounds hilarious and "midgets" don't matter. (The fact that they cast a dude who's over 6 foot to play Gimli wasn't great either, but at least that was only one dude. And at least he wasn't wearing a stick stuck in his ear and being creepy but childlike at Kristen Stewart). Plus the director was all "but we wanted well known people!" Which fools no-one, since the dwarves weren't in the ads, and how will short-statured actors ever GET well known if you never cast them, even as the seven bloody dwarves?

So those bits of review are out, which just leaves: I don't know if anyone has already written about the impressively terible haircuts on some of the dudes, but I suspect so, they must've, surely. The Beautiful Wicked Queen carries on about how she's got to be beautiful as a woman, because that's her power, and hangs out with a brother who's creepy and predatory and sort of rapey, and also has bad acne scarring and seriously the worst haircut ever.

Is this some kind of incredibly handfisted message about how beauty is only important in women in our society but less so for men? Because if so, casting 2 beautiful girls who are having a fight about who is "fairest" and also a few dudes who can barely act but are decorative does rather detract from that. I mean, it's all very well to try to credit them with being hamfisted in trying to underline the iniquity of the culture of beauty, but frankly, it's a bunch more believable to read it as a hamfisted attempt to perpetrate just that sort of thing which we might imagine them to be criticising.

Plus: why does he have such a terrible haircut (I wish I could find a picture, I do), when no-one could ever deliberately have that haircut in the first place, let alone if they were hanging out with someone that style conscious all the time. Mum suggested that maybe he's supposed to be stuck with that hair because that's what he had in the flashback to him as a kid, but Charlize Theron changes her hair, and he wouldn't've had the acne scarring as a kid. No, I'm afraid there's no point in overthinking it at all, this was just a choice made by idiots to make Charlize Theron look more glamourous by comparison (as if that were necessary) and him look creepier (as if that were necessary, what with the aforementioned rapiness), or at best to distract all our follicular attention away from the fact that Chris Hemsworth and Kristen Stewart seem to be perpetually damp for no plot-based reason.

In one scene, we see the Huntsman dive into water early in the morning, then we cut to them in the forest saying "we've been running for ages!", apparently like 6 hours later, since it's now late afternoon, and there's still water literally dripping out of his hair and beard. It's like someone read that bit in Bridget Jones where she keeps going on about how great wet-shirt-Darcy is and just really really took that to heart, and therefore doused Thor superfluously between every take. Either that or we're meant to think he has like a really serious sweating problem, I guess? I feel like that sort of thing would make it hard to hunt effectively, though, what with animals having a keen sense of smell. Mind you, no reference is ever made to him in any way hunting anything at any time, perhaps Huntsman is just his name? Like Smith!

The moral of this story, obviously, is that actually I can write a ridiculous amount about even the tiniest detail in an otherwise largely sort of pleasantly meh movie, so maybe it really is for the best that I don't do so very often? I mean, all this from a couple of weird stylist choices. Imagine what'd happen if I watched Schindler's List!

PS Alex was the only person to request a topic of blog, and he requested "unedited stream of consciousness" so this is his fault, and also yours for not suggesting something better yourself, like "Bear vs Tiger vs Shark: who would win?" or "can conflict in the middle east ever be resolved?" or even, like, "blankets" or something.

Inside-dogs

It was pretty cold in Penrith on Sunday night. So cold that when I went to my car at 10 to 8, the windscreen wipers skittered over ice rather than bunching all the frost up at the end of the arc like it normally does on a cold wintry morning. Comes of being a long way inland, apparently. Further from that big blue thermally dense ocean which takes longer to heat up and cool down with the seasons, so that coastal suburbs are warmer in winter and cooler in summer. I suppose that being at the foot of the Blue Mountains, but uphill from the river might have something to do with it too? Pressure zones and precipitation and what have you.

Anyway, I was whingy, because I'm in NICU (neonatal intensive care) this week, and there's nowhere for students to leave coats or scarves, and you aren't allowed to wear anything with sleeves that come past the elbow. When it comes to protecting tiny little sick babies from infection risks, these people do not mess about, so no cuffs are allowed to dip germs onto the tiny under-ripe patients. This wasn't so bad for me, since my bare forearms and I were only out in the cold for maybe 10 minutes in total. Our poor old dogs, however, were not so lucky.

Usually they seem pretty happy in their kennels, which have floors so they're not lying on hard wet ground, and they've finally gotten past the stage of dragging the bedding out of the kennels to play with and destroy during the day, but leaving them less warm and comfy at night. Still, when you're an arthritic old collie with un underactive thyroid (this makes you feel the cold more, for those of you who are as familiar with what the hell thyroids do as I was before I had to start doing things like sit exams on them), it turns out, a kennel on an icy night is about as warm as it looks, fur notwithstanding.

When Mum went to let them off the chain (they're chained (by a pretty long chain each, don't worry) to a tree in our yard, able to get to kennels and food and water and a reasonable radius of playing space, because if there's one thing our dogs agree on, it's that 5 acres of yard to run around in is nothing compared to the thrills of escaping over the cattle grid in the driveway and having adventures like "going to the Kingswood Pub and being patted by delighted dudes drinking Tooheys New" and "playing tag with the neighbour's teens while they try to ride their dirtbikes and not accidentally fall off trying to avoid a cheerful, supportively barking, dog" and "trying to get run over on the nearby Motorway") on Monday morning, one of them actually yelped when he tried to stand up, because the poor thing had practically frozen in position, what with cold and arthritis and what have you. So at the moment, these last couple of nights, we're experimenting with letting them sleep inside.

It's sort of funny actually. Remember when you were a kid, and you went on long drives in the evening, like coming home after a big day at the zoo, or driving back from a holiday? Remember when you used to pretend to be asleep when you got home, pretend that you hadn't woken up in the backseat when the car had pulled in the driveway, so your parents would carry you in to bed? (Don't give me that "no" look, every kid does this, I'm pretty sure. I definitely remember pulling this off up to the point when my mother put me down on the sofa and I figured that if I was really asleep I'd slide off (what? Why, tiny past self? You've slept on that sofa before! I know you're floppy when you're asleep, but you're not Alex Mack, you don't turn into a liquid. Floppy isn't the same as runny) and slithered off the sofa onto the floor, still with my eyes closed, trying to act as asleep as possible, not realising my mother was still watching me until she said "You know, people who are asleep don't actually do that, so how about you go put your pyjamas on and go to bed" and I was all "Curses, foiled! I would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you infuriatingly canny parents!") The dogs are sort of doing that in the evenings, because they don't really believe their good luck. Lying around looking conspicuously Asleep and watching you through one very slightly open eye, just to see if you're buying it, and will let them stay in, unaware that you're already planning to.

I have to say, they've gotten the hang of it awfully well, not running about all night or soiling the hall or eating the furniture. I guess it's silly that this has surprised us, since they often spend chunks of the day, and certainly most evenings, lying around the house, napping in weird positions, and they've been up to that challenge for years. (Like, really quite weird positions, though. There's one of them who always seems to sleep with his head either up on something, or down, but almost never on the same level as his body. You'll find him apparently perfectly comfortably asleep with his head hanging off a step, or propped up 90 degrees on a wall. Either that or having in some way wedged himself somewhere. Unless he's totally exhausted (or his thyroid hormone is under-replaced), in which case he sometimes lies dead straight, on his side, with his legs straight out, like he was innocently standing there and was suddenly petrified into position and then knocked over. A bit like Rowdy in Scrubs.) Anyway, now we sort of feel guilty of suspecting them of not being able to comport themselves with dignity overnight, but rather pleased. My parents keep telling each other how soundly they (the dogs) seem to have slept, and how charming it was that Darcy decided to eschew the towels we put out as bedding, and instead sleep on the scrubs lying by the door to be taken back to the hospital, with a couple of pairs of Crocs by way of underlay.

I realise that maybe choosing to write an entire blog post about your dogs sleeping inside is a bit odd, but it's really a surprisingly large mental gear-shift for us, because our yard is so big that we always think of them as spending a lot of time outside roaming free, even though they don't much, that's just what we hoped they'd be able to do, before we discovered their penchant for adventure and impressive ability to completely ignore a cattle-grid which I personally find it a complete bugger to walk across, even with my flat hominid feet. Plus, I did literally nothing today (so what else could I tell you about?), and there's a dog lying on my bedside rug right now, occasionally sort of snoring to himself, or waking up to look at me as if to say "are you still clicking away on that thing? Don't you know it's late, and that no-one wants to read about the sleeping arrangements of some poor dog who can't get to sleep anyway since the light is still on?". It's pretty cute, you guys.

Bunting is the name for those strings of flags you get at fairs. Like cheerful triangular prayer flags.

I have just now finished sewing the first batch (or perhaps I should say the first 1/5th-length) of the bunting I decided to start sewing in about November last year. At first I was going to make a random number each of flags, in any nice fabric I had a big enough remnant of, and also in about 6 other fabrics which I bought bits of from Spotlight. Then, after sewing a few, I decided to make exactly 5 of each fabric, so that the numbers'd be even, hoping to have the whole thing done by Christmas, then by the start of my elective, then by the end of my elective, then just sort of hopefully at some point before my eventual demise. Somewhere in the middle there I got completely carried away in a large number of fabric shops, ranging from cavernous halogen-lit warehouse-ish Lincrafts in western Sydney to tiny poky little hole-in-the-wall places in Wales and hidden gems with names like "The Quilted Sheep" somewhere near Lake Windermere.

It was quite a lot of fun, actually, hunting about for interesting fabrics as mementos, rather than feeling vaguely like I ought to buy tacky dust-collecting souvenirs like a tiny model Roman holding a sign that says "I bathed in the Bath baths!" or whatever. This way, everything was cheaper and less breakable (and also lighter and more compact) and I got to make my own tacky dust-collector, which was actually quite fun. Plus, it meant that if I had a couple of days to kill in an unfamiliar town, I could get an idea of the lay of the land by trying to hunt down fabric shops in them. This is actually surprisingly effective, like a scavenger hunt; you get a pretty good idea of a town doing this sort of thing.

Anyway, now, there are something like 100 different fabrics, which is to say about 500 flags all told, all hand-sewn and hemmed into neat little triangles, in sets, now, of 4, plus one representative of each unique set sewn onto the preliminary string I've finished this evening. I'm not actually certain exactly how many different fabrics there are, because although I pretty much remember something about each one, and can gleefully tell you which ones used to be old rag-bag dresses or "3 for 10p" remnants, they somehow defy counting, like Galleon's Lap in Winnie the Pooh. I always seem to end up quite certain that I've counted correctly, but varying around 100-odd with a margin of error anywhere from 0 to 12. So I mean, it's somewhere between about 90 and about 110, I guess.

The only problem with all this is that I'm sort of like one of those people who want to show you all their holiday slides or family album photos, agog with how endearing and delightful they are, completely blind to the fact that you often had to be there to really "get" the pictures, and that 5 would be quite sufficent, thank you. I mean, I'm bad enough about actual photos that way, so this urge I have to explain objectively-less-interesting flags to people is likely to end poorly, and fairly inexcusably, since I know, deep down (and quite a lot of the way up to the surface, come to that) that no-one but me could possibly be remotely interested in how thrilling it was to come across the fabric of which my old favourite dress was made in a shop named "My Hung Fabrics". I even know that that shop name isn't actually amusing to those of us who aren't, at some level, a 10 year old still giggling to themselves are going "hehe, you said hung". In fact, since it's run by a lovely chinese family, it may in fact be deeply inappropriate to think of it as a funny name. (Is that even right? Sometimes I worry that I might be accidentally being a racist jerk without meaning to or noticing.)

Still, there you are. Much like the gigantic ball of finger-knitting (it's like french knitting, kind of, only there's only one stitch, which makes it possibly even less useful than french knitting, which Lord knows is already useless enough)(the french seem to have dropped the ball here, actually. 'French' as a prefix usually presages greatness, or at least pretty-good-ness, like in cooking, or kissing or knickers. I guess every nation has their off days. Some have Terra Nullius and hats with corks on them, even though the corks are themselves just as annoying as the flies they're supposed to ward off, and others have the Reign of Terror and French Knitting. I guess all you can do, as usual, is feel sorry for the Germans, who aptly always seem to have this sort of historical schadenfreude competition taped up from the word go) much, as I was saying, like the gigantic (about 25 cm in diameter?) ball of finger knitting I made in year 4, this is one of those acheivements (which I may very probably spend the rest of my life making), of which I am immensely proud, and which absolutely no-one else will ever be impressed by, except perhaps that particular sort of impressed which is expressed through saying things like "yes but what for?" or "I can see it's taken a long time, now what are you going to do with it? Also why did you choose to do it in the least efficient way possible?".

I'm sure that there must be some kind of deep and meaningful Life Lesson to me in there, about 'doing things I like doing for my own satisfaction', not for the dubious attraction of showing other people and impressing them or whatever, and obviously I get that, and am better at seeing it than when I was in year 4 (when I mainly tended to figure that if I explained patiently enough how awesome it was, people would suddenly see, and presumably hail me as the next Disney Princess or something), but frankly I do not feel bad that I have yet to totally master this. I suspect that getting a true and real grip on that sort of thing is the sort of thing which people usually take their whole lives to get the hang of, and sometimes even then they occasionally don't get it. Probably this is what Maslow means by self-actualisation?

Anyway, long story short, I sewed something a bit useless, but am still foolishly proud of it, and that's ok. As long as I don't forget myself and insist on explaining all of them to anyone but my Dad, who had the misfortune to be next to me when I cut the last thread, before I'd taken this whole blog post to nut out that probably he didn't really want to listen but was doing so out of the sort of habit which you can only get by literally decades of being a good and patient parent, and also by perhaps surreptitiously tuning out the voice and imagining what sort of secret passage you'd like in your house or whatever, all the while making interested noises.

I figure that tbis makes me just like Jane Austen writing Emma and saying in the correspondence excerpt which some completely inept marketer had decided to put in the blurb of the copy I read in highchool "I am going to write a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like". Except, you know, with less literary genius and more constant fiddling with bias binding (I was going to say more hours of useless hand-sewing, but that would probably not actually be true, what with the whole 19th century thing and what have you) but with the upsides that highschool girls will never have to try and skim through my bunting and eventually just watch a BBC miniseries after they realise that the Gweneth Paltrow version is bollocks, and also that it gave me something to write today's post about.

I have to say I'm maybe a little ashamed of how much I've written about the damn bunting, given that the evolving main thesis of the post is "stop telling people about your damn bunting", but hey, you don't have to read, so it's what you might call a victimless crime, really.

Deprecation is not the same as depreciation

Today's musings are proudly (but humbly) brought to you be self-deprecation (I wanted to insert a link there to the Stuff White People Like page on Self-Deprecating Humour, but it turns out that it's a chapter in the book but not on the website). I was talking to someone recently who didn't seem to be entirely across the concept, and so I figured it might be rarer than I'd imagined? It always surprises me when this happens, but it's not as rare as I always seem to expect (I'm a slow learner that way).

It turns out, there's a part of the population who just genuinely don't seem to know what to do with self-deprecation, much like many more of us persistently mishandle compliments. Seriously, I am so bad at handling compliments you guys. When someone says "I like your hat" I always go "it's great, isn't it?!" before realising that you're supposed to be self-deprecating about it, even if it legitimately is a great hat, and you didn't make it, so you can hardly be all "nahhh", since then you're actually milliner-deprecating rather than self-deprecating. But if someone is like "you have nice eyes I go "Nonsense, shut up" even though actually I'm super pleased, because the habit of self-deprecation is too strong.

Even more than compliments, though, I don't know what to do with people who don't understand how self-deprecation works, who seem to think that "self-depreciating" (with an extra i) is what it is. Like saying "oh man, I couldn't run 100m to save my life!" actually reduces your value in some way, or like it's a big meaningful difficulty you're worried about. You know the ones, you say to them "Your writing is so neat! My notes always look like they were scratched by a chicken who's recently had a stroke!" and instead of going "pfft, only my good writing is like this!" or "you don't fool me, your writing's not at all bad!" or "heh, it's my superpower! Neatest running-writing in the west!", they offer to give you tips to get better, or explain that yes, their writing is so neat that it once singly handedly saved a child from drowning, and you should see how good their watercolours and use of a pencil is! Their chiaroscuro shading has been known to reduce grown men to tears. In fact, they were the only 4 year old in the state to be awarded a fully legal pen-licence, years ahead of their time! (For the record, I never actually got my pen licence, I've been using biros illegally since the start of year 5, when it was assumed we'd all managed to master basic handwriting in year 4. I hope Mr. Goodlet never finds out).

I know this is in a sense my fault for putting people in a situation where, if they take me entirely at my word, they will look (possibly just to me?) like a socially inept twit, but I do think that in general, this is something with which, critically low caffeine levels notwithstanding, you should be able to cope, unless you actually are a socially inept twit? It's not like it's reasonable for me to totally judge people on this (so I don't, many of my friends and acquaintances have their aspergesque days), but equally, it's not like this sort of thing should be as challenging as it apparently is.

I get particularly annoyed when people drop the ball on this and I know it's my own fault really. Meeting someone for the first time, or talking so someone you've seen around but never really spoken to, and who therefore doesn't know much about you is not, I should know by now, a good time to say things which might be misleading if misinterpreted. But my goodness. It drives me so up the wall when I tell an anecdote about the one time I stuffed up something I consider myself to be generally pretty good at (like the time I accidentally made the world's worst lasagne despite being a pretty fair cook generally, or any one of the numerous times I've totally failed to remember a crucial word despite generally being very chatty, for instance) and the person I'm talking to makes it clear that they now genuinely believe I can't cook a meal to save my life, or string a sentence together in company due to crippling shyness. I want to believe that the reason that this irks me so much is that I know it's really my own fault, so I get annoyed with myself, but I fear that maybe vanity is at work here, and maybe it just bugs me when people try to console me for being bad about something I'm actually smug about. I hope it isn't that, but I guess none of us is perfect, and all of us (me especially, perhaps), are a bit inclined to show off. I'm certainly guiltily aware that I do that more than I ought, which is unfair because I find it so infuriating in others.

This is particularly unfair of me in that sometimes I'm actually trying to mention (but make light of, so that the tone of voice etc is probably identical to the untrained ear) something that I actually am worried about being not very good at. I can see why "ha, I once burned a pudding so thoroughly that we had to have the curtains professionally cleaned after a fortnight of the smoky smell refusing to dissipate" and "gosh, I'm so bad at respiratory histories that I genuinely fear that I'll either fail the Long Case Exam or fluke it and then accidentally kill a patient through incompetence!" might seem like the same sort of thing, to someone who wasn't trained in the finer points of My Personal Conversational Peccadilloes. And that probably means I ought to do something about it (and also revise before my long case exam), but, much like me coming to a completely detailed understanding of the management pulmonary telangiectasia, it's not all that likely to happen.

Also, this makes me very bad at job interviews and presumably internet dating, and any other situation where you need to "sell yourself". I just have no idea how to say "I type pretty well" without feeling like I sound like a dick.

Worst of all (or reassuringly, depending on how you look at it?), I was talking to someone about this sort of thing today, someone who actually does a fair amount of job-interviewing, and he said that he's so used to self-deprecating-ness that when someone says something like "I have exceptional skills..." he's prejudiced against them, and less likely to hire because that does indeed sound like the statement of a complete dick. The problem with this is that I've always been taught that the solution to "I'm not sure how to sell myself" is "Don't think about it, just do it, just say 'I'm amazing' because how else will they know how amazingly right for this job you actually are?" so now I don't know what to think.

I'm totally sure I had another (doubtless excellent) point I was going to make about this, in another paragraph, but it's completely fallen out of my brain, possibly as a self-defence manouvre on the part of my subconscious, which knows I could happily blog for hours, but that I have to get up in less than 6 hours.

Hopefully whatever it was will come to me in the night, and I can tell you tomorrow, although if it does, the odds are good that it will turn out to have been oversold today, and may be an anti-climax (also I might never remember it!) so maybe don't hold your breath for that scintillating missing paragraph too vigourously?

Katoomba Winter Festival

Today has been a long day. It's my littlest sister Alex's birthday, and she had decreed that we were all going up to the Katoomba Winter Festival. About a week ago this decree was modified to "I'm going with my friends and you guys can come too if you like" which is the sort of thing where the person clearly has a preference for whether you go or not, but isn't going to tell you which. It always seems like a minefield, that sort of thing, since then you might be all up in their space when they'd actually rather just go out with their friends, or alternately it might be that if you don't go, it makes it seem like you don't really like them and want to see them etc. I know that sounds mad to you, reading it there, in the comfort of your own space, but I assure you that one of those if invariably the case, when it comes to (my?) sisters (possibly all sisters?). Sometimes, if you're very unlucky, the person who's organising is themselves ambivalent, so you can actually sometimes be wrong in both directions at once, which is something.

Anyway, my folks and I figured that it was best to err on the side of caution, and also thought it might be fun, so we all climbed into the car and wound our way up to Katoomba (which was 2 hours by car from Penrith, and allegedly between 4 and 5 hours by public transport from Coogee), dressed in all the warmest clothes we could layer onto ourselves whilst still retaining the ability to bend our arms and legs. (Also I made cheddar and apple scones for in-car breakfast, which was pretty great, although not an effective way of saving time in the morning. It always feels like somehow eating en route must be faster than breakfasting at home, no matter what, but given that making the scones took a good hour and a half longer than wolfing a bowl of muesli would have, it wasn't what you'd call hyper-efficient).

My sisters usually (and I say usually, because we end up going most years, because Alex is allowed to pick what we do on the weekend closest to her birthday, but since her birthday is just about exactly on the solstice, we seem to end up in Katoomba every year, even though it seems pretty much exactly the same to me every time) dress up in corsetry etc for this event. I did too, the first year, but first of all, all my costumery is still in storage at the moment during the Great Maroubra Renovation, secondly, the predicted maximum temperature in Katoomba today was between 0 & 8 degrees minus windchill, thirdly, I've reached that comfortable point in my life where I'll happily dress up if I feel like it, but I really don't feel any need to do so just to impress a bunch of chilled hippies and miscellaneous strangers etc. (And fourthly, seriously, it's cold up there. This is the same as the second point, but bears repeating. Plus, proper costumery involves high or otherwise interesting footwear, and wearing anything but sneakers or walking boots on a day when you'll be standing and walking about for hours on end is for suckers and people with more patience than me, and usually both at once).

There were lots of strange outfits mingling in among the otherwise fairly normally-Newtownish looking folk. Ladies in dinosaur suits, a dude dressed as Jack Sparrow, a red Power Ranger, and a good few middle aged folk in gowns and wigs looking sort of diffusely pagan god/goddess-y. And a higher than ordinary number of people in capes and cloaks or the long-unwashed-hair-and-long-leather-coat combination which is the infallible mark of a dude who's still bitter about people having been mean to him in highschool, and who genuinely thinks that George Lucas is a great storyteller, and has Opinions about dice.

It's a weird thing, the Winter festival. I'm never quite sure what it's trying to be, and I'm not at all convinced that the festival is, either. It's also very very crowded and jostly in the middle of the day. I don't know why, but it's just about the only event where I get that panicky trapped agoraphobic feeling of being absoltely unable to escape the jostlings of strangers. It's weird, I don't know why it should be so, since I have no problem with most crowded jostly places (although I think that live music venues are often a bit like that, and not as pleasant as they ought to be for how expensive they always seem to be). Maybe it's the fact that the crowd of jostlers on days like today is so much more self-absorbed than jostling crowds usually are? Like I said, there's a lot of that defiant sort of young man who tend to be faintly aggressive in that super defensive way familiar to anyone who's ever had to deal with larger groups of undergraduate geeks, and I think a lot of those folk tend to wear being-a-bit-inconsiderate as a badge of honour and a point of pride, having reacted too hard against that vague feeling of maybe being a bit of a doormat which niggles occasionally at everyone who isn't a complete saint or sociopath?

Anyway, for some reason, the Winter festival crowd always seems more than usually tiring, to me. I suppose this could also be because I often end up trying to navigate it with my family. I love my family dearly, but the only one of the 4 of them who is remotely easy to navigate a crowd with is my Mum. My Dad's progress through a crowd is sort of reminiscent of that scene in Beauty and the Beast where Belle walks through the village absorbed in a book, personally undisturbed, but somehow leaving something of a wake of chaos which makes her impossible to follow. My sisters are not quite so dramatically like this, but I'm confident that by the time they've had as many decades as he's had to perfect their technique, they'll be even more impressively difficult to follow through a crowd than he is.

Anyway, this evening, my uncle and aunt (Dad's brother and sister-in-law) came over for dinner, which was lovely (do I say 'lovely' too much? I feel like possibly I do). They're both really nice. My uncle is funny and fun in a jolly and avuncular way which is a lot like my Dad, and my aunt is quieter (I think maybe she's a bit shy in loud groups like my immediate family?) but also really interesting and nice to talk to. We had one of those evenings where everyone sort of hangs out in the kitchen for the whole preparation-eating-cleaning process and chats and jokes and laughs and holds forth about the state of the country and the global economy, the best route to drive tomorrow, and the difficulty of living in a world where whitegoods which break can never seem to be replaced by new ones which actually fit the space.

Also, for dessert, I made the first strudel I've ever made, and it went pretty well, I'd say, even though I forgot to make sure no-one had decided to freeze the filo pastry, which was nearly a disaster.

Sorry for this journal-style post. I went and saw "Snow White and The Huntsman" yesterday, and I might blog about that tomorrow, since I kept seeing things in it which I wanted to write about (not to say that it's deep and thought-provoking, more to say that there were strange inconsistencies and bits which seemed practically verbatim from other movies) while we watched it.

If there's anything in particular, by the way, you'd really like me to blog about, totally say so in the comments, and maybe I will! I mean I probably will. I'm so close to the bottom of the barrel here that I'm rounding off a post which is essentially "here is exactly what I did today with the enthralling enticement of maybe talking about a movie with Kristen Stewart in it. Obviously I could use help.

The Mystery Box contains a ringing phone: procrastination is calling!

I'm having some difficulty typing this because there is a cockatiel trying to snuggle into my thumbs, which is making is all a bit difficult. Also there are collies trying to lure me into patting them by putting their heads on my knee and looking soulful, which is frankly a bit melodramatic of them. It's pretty cute though. Just a heads up in case this post is full of typos.

I'm beginnning to think that this 'blog post every day' thing is not a very good idea, not because it's a chore to write (it's not: it doesn't take long, and as you can tell, it's not like there's what you'd call a lot of mental strain involved), but because it seems silly to insist on writing for its own sake without anything in particular that needs saying. I know that writers are always advising people to write all the time, write anything, just as... practice I guess? But in practice, it seems sort of self indulgent to suggest that you guys have nothing better to do than to read, every day, crap that I've written without any plan or anything much at all.

Like, you know how sometimes, you're talking to someone, and the phone rings in the middle of the conversation, and somehow it seems really urgent, like you really ought to answer it, even though you're already having a conversation, even though phone calls to say "oh, sorry, I was trying to call Anna and I've accidentally rung Angie! Ha, sorry for bothering you! How are you going, anyway?" happen much more commonly than phone calls to say "you have half an hour to do this urgent thing which is super important"? Even though the importance and quality of the conversation you're having is a known quantity, and the phone call could be anything, it's sort of like that thing in game shows where the host says to some sucker contestant "Do you want to take the $1000 and the car, or do you want to take.... The Mystery Box!?" and the studio audience is always like "Choose the Mystery Box!". This is sort of what I worry these blog posts might in some way imply. That the things I write at random (here represented by a ringing phone or a mysterious box containing either a slightly better car or a stale Scotch Finger biscuit) are in some way worth reading when you are presumably already engaged in leading meaningful lives (here represented by a conversation over coffee or a hatchback and a cheque) in which you do things of known value, like getting your work done, or spending quality time with your hypothetical kids, or reading the entire archive of ASofterWorld comics or whatever.

Does that make sense? Why suddenly saying "I will write every day and I expect you to read it, or at least consider doing so" might seem hugely self-indulgent?

That being said, I totally plan to keep doing it until the end of the month, because I may be a self-absorbed chatterbox, but damned if I'm not a stubborn one.

Grist to the mill

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how wacky it seemed to me to deliberately choose not to learn to cook, (or anything else). A couple of pals sort of scuffed one shoe sheepishly in the metaphorical dirt and admitted that they couldn't cook much, and that they reckoned that they were pretty helpless without their wives. So first up, better clarify: it's cool not to be real good at cooking (or anything else), and the division of labour in your household is totally up to you and your partner and none of anyone else's business. What I'd say was weird is if you've already decided on that division of labour before you've even met your partner or found out if they have any opinions on the matter, and what they do and don't like to do.

Plus, I resent any time someone decides that they shouldn't learn to do any task for themselves because some sucker will do it for them. That's across the line between "co-operative, mutually respectful and grateful" to "disrespectful and parasitic". So similarly, it's cool if you can't drive, but don't be all "Why should I ever learn? You don't need to, nowadays, it's useless! Can I have a lift?". (I don't object to giving people lifts, I object the people asking for a lift and calling me a schmuck for giving them one).

Thrillingly, though, either this wasn't clear to at least one person, or it was but they were still super annoyed by my metaphorically suggesting that they learn to make a sandwich. This poor hungry soul (not the guy who I had the conversation with yesterday, since both of us know where the other stands and are happy for the other to disagree so long as they don't try to make us change. Plus I checked with him before I blogged, and after) was helpful enough to leave a comment, which I haven't deleted or moderated because it's sort of bizarre and thus amusing:

"What a steaming pile of feminist bullshit" - Anonymous

My first response, of course, is a bemused "haha what" and my second is essentially a mildly scornful delight. Like I said on Tuesday, it's hard to come up with things to write about every single day, so this sort of thing is all grist to the mill, my friend.

It's funny, rather than distressing, since it could only be distressing if it were news to me that foolish trolls like this stalk the hallowed halls of the entire internet, complaining and attacking any ladies who dare to be out of the kitchen. It's pretty much like that time that woman screamed at me that I was a "dumb slut" for losing my carpark exit ticket. I know a lot of women cop that sort of crap all the time, and I feel sort of like King George being glad to have been bombed during the second world war; having been attacked for being part of a group (in this instance: females), I feel like I'm more a member of the group. Does that make sense? I live a pretty priveleged existence when it comes to this sort of crap, so it's good to be reminded what I'm missing out on.

For all it's not really surprising, what with the whole Sarkeesian thing and what have you, it's pretty weird that there are still people in the world who think that the word "feminist" is a term of abuse, or has negative connotations. I mean, Wisconsin revoked Equal Pay For Equal Work this year, something horrifying seems to be happening generally, obviously gender equality does not yet exist, so feminism's work isn't done. It seems like saying "you... you scientist you!" or something. How dare you seek to learn more about the world? How dare you hope for there to be equality one day? If it's not a postive term, it's surely just neutral.

I think maybe there are a lot of wildly misinformed wusses who confuse feminism with misandry? Dudes, feminism is not for bringing men down, it's for lifting everyone up to the same level. Obviously there are parts of life where men are discriminated against, and although there definitely are people who think you can't be sexist against men, or that discriminating against men on the basis of their gender either doesn't happen or doesn't matter, I don't happen to agree with that. I would pretty much like it if the contents of your underpants never lead anyone to be less likely to be hired, or more likely to be dismissed in any area of like, or to be not allowed to wear certain clothing, or to feel that the activities which are perceived as gendered are looked down upon as either brutish or twee. I just... I actually don't understand where people are having trouble with that.

Does our Anonymous interlocuter worry that if ladies stop doing all the housework and get jobs, he won't be employed? Or is he genuinely just annoyed that people aren't jumping up and own to bring him a sandwich? Because surely the corollary of "women stay home and cook, men earn money" is "men have to do all the breadwinning, and never get to enjoy household tasks"? I seriously don't see where anyone wins in that scenario, if it's complusory. If that's the compromise your family has worked out, fine, but I'd feel pretty ripped off if there was a social expectation that I'd be the only one doing paid work, just because of which chromosomes I had. I'm glad to live in a priveleged time where I have a lot of choices and can be my own individual, but frankly, when my alarm goes off at 5am, I can see a lot of appeal in staying home for the day and just making the place nice, and not commuting ever again. In seeking to bring about change, I've always assumed that the feminist movement, both male and female, was trying to make life better and fairer for everybody. Even tossers whose main goal in the day is to troll blogs anonymously.

It's a strange thing, this 'anonymity', since it's not necessarily hard to narrow down the list of suspects. Firstly, I can rule out just about everyone who I know in real life, since I know their opinions about these sorts of thing, mostly. Secondly, the comment appeared within a few hours of posting, and frankly my blog doesn't get that much traffic, so the odds are good that it's someone who either has my blog as an RSS or "follows" it. And there's only one guy who I've ever given the address of this blog to before I realised that he was the sort of person who really thought that feminism was a massive conspiracy.

It was years ago, when I had an okcupid profile (don't judge me), in that short window of time between the website introducing pop-up chat and me figuring out how to mute the damn chat widget so I was invisible all the time (I hate online chat with people who I don't know even more than online chat with people who I do know but who come online just as I realise I have to go to bed so I look super rude and shifty when we have a conversation that goes "Hi!" / "Hi! Actually I have to go now, bye!" and spend the next interminable period of time worrying that it looks like I'm just trying to avoid them). Anyway, it was pretty strange, this guy was all "I read your profile, and I thought you might be interested in this sort of think {link}, it's about men's rights." And I was all "oh, hi, random stranger, what gives you that idea?" (Because seriously what gave him that idea? My profile, as I recall, was mainly occupied with me making fun of the question "what 6 things could you not live without?") Only later did I get a chance to click the link (and I wish I could find it to show you, Dear Reader, really I do) and realised it was a particularly wacky conspiracy style forum for dudes complaining about how everyone was mean to them. All I remember specifically was this bit where the main article-writing dude was carrying on about some bit of classical mythology (Phaedra? Antigone? Harpies? Can't remember) and saying how savage and awful they were and said "how like a modern feminist!". It was puerile in all the available senses.

Do you reckon these people have never heard the aphorism that posting your opinion as an aggressive anonymous comment is a great way to show that you know you ought to be ashamed of holding that opinion, that your opinion doesn't matter? That not only is no-one else likely to agree, but that even you don't want to be seen or associated with that viewpoint? It mystifies me that you would even bother, given that the scorn for that sort of silliness is so universal.

Anyway, this is probably enough carry-on from me about one single dimwit comment, but frankly, I just sort of feel like you know you've really made it onto the internet when you can hum this great song to yourself and totally feel justified, because someone really did say something that dumb and pointless to you.

"Why should I learn to cook?"

So, talking to a dude in my class today, it became apparent that he can't cook anything. I mean, I sort of assume that he knows how to pour cereal into a bowl and toast a slice of bread, but frankly I'm not certain of that, since I got the impression that he'd be working from first principles and reverse engineering if he had to make a sandwich. (I mean, he definitely said that his Mum makes his lunch for him, so I'm going to go ahead and assume the worst here).

We all expressed some disbelief that you could consider yourself a functional adult, in your final year of a postgraduate degree, but also be in a position to starve to death of left alone for a fortnight in a kitchen containing only uncooked rice and raw meat, for instance. It turns out that he's not worried because his Mum will continue to look after him until he gets married, then his wife will. He's sure any potential fiancee whose cooking isn't up to scratch will be trained by his Mum, and notes that her cooking is great, since he can tell her what he wants, and she'll make whatever it is.

We were all a bit gobsmacked, because frankly, last time I came across opinions like that being openly expressed was an episode of Mad Men, and even then, surely there's the metatextual implication that that's less than ideal. When we were all like "what if you have kids but then your mum and wife and so on are all killed in a bus-crash or miscellaneous tragedy?" but no worries, because there is apparently no conceivable scenario in which there would not be some sister-in-law or female cousin or aunt on whom to depend for basic sustenance and complete childcare services. History did not relate what these ladies would think about suddenly having to do all the chores and kid-raising for all their surviving male relatives whilst also mourning for all the female relatives, but apparently they're likely to be unfazed? Presumably they'll be too busy making sandwiches and bathing distant cousins to have a moment to worry their pretty little heads about that sort of thing?

I guess making fun of the breathtaking sexism here is so easy and so obvious that it counts as a cheap shot, a cheap shot at a large fish in a small barrel, because, of course, and I say this as a woman and also as any other adult: fuck that noise. I mean, it's just so outrageous that there's really no point trying to argue against it; anyone reading this can either already see what's crazy about this "women's place is in the kitchen, men's place is at the dinner table waiting for his damn sandwich" approach, or else there's something so determinedly blinkered that nothing I'm going to say will change their mind. It's a bit like someone who just genuinely believes that eating green vegetables is wrong. You can show them all the evidence you like, you can offer all the salads you can think of, dude's still going to be like "No. I know what I know and the Lord scorns broccoli, yea and peas also" or whatever. There's none so blind as them that will not see and so on. Unless perhaps it's those who so persistenly refuse to see that in the end some woman, tired of all their shit, stabs them in the eye with a fork. I mean, they'd be even blinder then, but you just know they'd be all "See? Too flightly even to cope with the rigours of my intellectual superiority!" or whatever.

Anyway, I appeased my feelings by explaining that I didn't think that was likely to work out well in the long term, declaring & clarifying that I would never ever marry him (he pretended he was ok with this, or even relieved, but he's not fooling anyone), and proofreading his essay with a red pen and really going to town on his sentence structure. You can be as convinced as you like that a woman's place is in the home, but it's got to be hard to maintain your equanimity in the face of that many altered commas and crossed out instances of suprlus appearances of the word "whereas".

The thing that's left, then, is this: why would you do that to yourself? If we ignore the sexism, how do you get past the creepy Freudian-ness of "it'll be hard for my wife to live up to and compete with my mother"? That's the most Oedipal thing I reckon I've ever heard an actual person say.

Plus: cooking is often quite pleasant, I personally enjoy it a bunch (and not because of the flutterings of my ovaries, I'm pretty sure). I mean, you get to make something, and you can make it as functional or as artistic as you like, playing about with the aesthetic appeal to like a good 4 to 5 of the senses (although I grant you that I rarely pay that much attention to the way a cake sounds, the crunch of salad or crust or creme brulee is definitely a pan-sensory wossname), and then you get to eat it! Or share it with other people who trade you friendship for cookies, if necessary! It makes you happy and it makes them happy! You get to do something enjoyable which makes other people happy, and stops you being hungry! I mean, what's not to enjoy?

It seems to me to be equivalent to, like, deciding that music is redheads' work, and that therefore I would listen to the radio or CDs, but never buy them myself, and never ever sing along or hum or play an instrument of any kind. It just sounds like a weirdly barren way to live (and I mean barren in the desert-with-tumbleweeds sense, not the what-would-Gillard-know-about-families-she's-deliberately-barren-and-also-I'm-an-asshat sense).

Even leaving that aside, since I know that baking teacakes isn't everyone's cup of tea, doesn't it seem weird to you to deliberately avoid gaining an entire genre of life skill? What if something unexpected happens and you have to fend for yourself? (I asked him this, and he said that was what McDonald's was for. I kind of meant a larger scale emergency as well, but it didn't seem worth the effort to clarify). I mean, I have an NRMA membership, but I still made damn sure I know how to change a tyre, and check and change the oil levels, and jump-start a flat-battery and so on. Because who wants to be unable to do things for yourself, forced to rely on the convenience and amenability of other people for everything?

Plus, you never know what life will throw at you! What if there's some kind of apocalypse? You'll need to know how to start a fire, how to shoot a bow and arrow, and how to skin a rabbit! You never know when you'll be transported back in time and a smattering of latin will come in useful. You might unexpectedly need to ride a horse, or play tennis, or ski, or swim, or give first aid, or call for help in Morse code, or ride pillion on a motorcycle, or tell a German that you have a headache and also that that is your hamburger! You might need to hire a car and find that only manual ones are available, or you might ever talk to a person who has a different cultural background to yourself, so you could need to know what red packets are, or the difference between haram and halal, or which seat to sit in on a train in Japan! I'm not claiming to know all the things I want to know, or might ever need to know, but at least I'm sort of slightly prepared for some very specific emergencies, and I like to think that I use my internet procrastination time wisely, because I never know when I might need to unexpectedly infiltrate some kind of cult, and knowing that Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe in blood transfusions and Pentecostal Christians do believe in glossolalia might just save me from discovery.

To be honest, this is one of the things that I'm really doing Medicine for. It's not because I have a burning desire to know which electrolytes are filtered by which kidney tubule, it's so if I'm ever on a plane and someone says "Oh my god she's giving birth! Is there a doctor on board?" I can help, or if I'm at the mall and some kid gets shot, I know what to do. Embarrassingly, this is also one of the main reasons I don't have any tattoos; what if I become a spy, or a fugitive from justice/injustice? I need to be able to disguise any potentially identifying marks!

This may sound stupid, but I assure you, after talking for 45 minutes to someone who's condescending to you about how their future wife will look after them and explaining how doing things is for suckers, the possibility that I might have to go on the run to escape a charge of aggravated assault occasioning grievous bodily harm and/or manslaughter (no jury in the country would call it murder, surely) didn't seem at all implausible.

Last minute

Another day, another 11:30 realisation that I said I would write something this evening and forgotten, even though all I actually did with the evening was edit my essay (which I will totally print and hand in tomorrow, this I solemnly swear) and make Char Siu Pork for the first time. And that was using a pre-made marinade out of a jar, so hardly labour intensive.

I guess the problem is having nothing much of interest to say. You can only get good and outraged (which is of course the easiest way to write or talk fluently, which is why breakfast radio hosts always seem, after a few years, to get some sort of chat-fatigue and only complain any more. Also their job requires them to get up at 4am every day and presumably be in bed by like 8 eery night) so many times in a week before you start to sound like you take everything just a little too seriously. Plus, you run out of scandalous things to go "and another thing!" about before you know it. All you can do is either risk offending people, repeat yourself, or wait for something new to happen.

I promise to do better tomorrow, honest!

Look, I know it sounds incredibly boring, but I was excited, all right?

So, I got almost all of my essay written this evening, on a considerably less inflammatory topic than I'd discussed the other day, as it happens, with the result that I very nearly forgot to write today's token post! This would hardly be a drama, but I'm stubborn that way.

Having managed to get the essay to the point where I'll definitely be able to fix it up tomorrow, and very possibly hand it in too, or at the very latest Wednesday, is pretty great (if only because it means I get to sleep in several hours longer on Friday, when it's due in the morning), but not as exciting as my possibly embarrassing triumph this evening.

You know sometimes someone tells you about a movie or a book and for whatever reason, you decide to look into it, but then you can't find it anywhere? Is this something that even happens to you guys? I mean, I guess it's possible that it's just me who takes sudden fancies like this and then gets all determined. (I'd make a good fictional detective, I reckon. Probably a crap real detective, but deinitely a good early 20th century fictional detective. Another missed calling!)

Anyway, decades ago, my mother mentioned in passing having long ago seen an old black and white movie where a group of people try to convince a girl she's crazy, by doing things like empty out her coffee cup when she's not looking, then claiming, when she said "where's my coffee?" that they'd all watched her drink it, didn't she remember? For some reaon, I decided to figure out what the movie was. I mean, very probably she said "I don't know what the film was" and I came over all smug teenager and was all "pfft, I'll just look it up on Yahoo [it may even have been so long ago that I said AltaVista], you old people are so bad at this newfangled internet, give me like 2 minutes, bam". Anyway, I couldn't find it, despite hunting intermittently for years. Ages later I came across the movie Gasslight and rather dismissively decided that that must've been what she meant, since the concept of trying to convince someone that they're mad is popularly attributed to that film (hence the term 'gaslighting'), although annoyingly there was no cup-emptying scene.

Frankly, I'm a bit OCD, and this always bugged me, but with that undergraduate contempt for one's elders which we've all been guilty of, and all resented in people younger than us, I just assumed that she had for some reason radically misremembered it.

But then, today, out of nowhere (well, technically in response to me saying that since he was obviously asleep I was going to drink his tea and tell him he'd done it himself), my Dad, half-asleep, referred to a scene where people do that to try to convince Jean Simmons she's mad.

Look, I know this sounds super dull, but it was really like one of those scenes in a whodunnit where the detective is all "what did you say Hastings? Of course!" and rushes out to board a train and solve the crime or whatever.

Anyway, long story very slightly shorter, I finally managed to find it. Turns out it's a movie called "So Long At The Fair". Infuriatingly, it's not available to download (perfectly legally or "perfectly legally") nor is available in JB Hi-Fi, who are essentially the only DVD retailers left in the country. But! Not only is in available on Amazon, but also the Amazon store who have it also sell a bunch of other old movies I haven't been able to find anywhere! Most notably Bachelor Mother, which I've been trying to get on DVD (only to be assured by the internet that it's never been released on anything but VHS) for maybe 7 years. It's a pretty great film, but I'll level with you, it's possible that part of this affection I have is based on the fact that the entire film has been playing hard to get this whole time.

Anyway, I also got a bunch of super cheap Margaret Lockwood, Ginger Rogers and early Hitchcock movies, as well as a CD I've been trying to get for my Grandmother for a year and a half. All in all, it's been a disproportionately satisfying sort of evening!

Maybe guns do kill people, but so does almost everything else

I'll be honest, I wrote that whole post yesterday about ethics and birth and what have you, and having just finally managed to upload it now, it does seem a bit pointless to write a whole new post for today, but I promised I'd write something every day this month, no matter how small, so here it is.

Actually, I was thinking earlier today about maybe writing something about the fact that people of both sexes feel done down because of their gender, and there's no denying that everyone's a bit right. Chicks get stiffed with regard to wages and respect and all that sort of stuff, but dudes lack a whole lot of our personal freedoms, which must suck. A girl can like girly things (sewing, baking, pretty things!) and you're not allowed to object, or she can say "I'm a tomboy" and like exclusively things which are seem as blokey (chainsaws, football, beer!) and barely raise an eyebrow, or any combination of the 2, but a guy can like dude stuff and people will call him a bogan dumbarse (fast cars, guns and sports are for yobs) or like girly stuff and have everyone laugh at him and assume he's gay (ever seen a dude just wearing something lovely and interesting and different because he wants to feel pretty, without having to go the whole drag queen hog?). That definitely sucks. I'm not saying it sucks more than womanhood does, but I reckon that it sucks a lot of the time no matter what you've got in your pants, and I really think that's a bit rubbish.

Speaking of which, for the record, I think that whole scandal because some of the Olympic swimming team posed perfectly legally and mildly amusingly with some guns was ridiculous and outrageous. I mean, seriously, what the hell? Shooting is an Olympic sport to suggest that it's simultaneously a font of criminal depravity it clearly hypocritical and stupid.

Seriously, what? I'm not saying guns can't be dagerous or misused, but cars kill more people in an average long weekend than have been killed by guns in the last 5 years, in Australia. Scandal! Ian Thorpe photographed in Holden Dealership! Thank heavens he's not representing our country! Heaven forbid any levity whatsoever should in any way creep into our national consciousness! No-one had better dare make any Zombie-Apocalpse preparedness jokes or pose like Charlie's Angels, those activities are also silly and involved guns at some level, and we can't have that!

Ehhh- ssay

I have an essay to write for uni this week (ideally this weekend) and it’s not difficult, it’s just outrageously fiddly, given that it’s only a pass/fail ethics essay on an Obstetric or Gynaecological thing we’ve seen during our term so far. I keep going “Right, now’s the time! Going to do this thing right now!” and then opening it, reading the guidelines and going “ugh… I seriously can’t be arsed with this”. (I mean, I will, but… ehhh…)

So! We need an “ethical dilemma” which we might plausibly have observed, for which 5 peer-reviewed references can be found. I wanted to write an essay on the ethics of midwives saying “you’re going really well, won’t be long now!” all the time to women who are pushing ineffectively, and in pain. I kind of feel like that’s unethical, inasmuch as if you’re in pain, and asking for help from a healthcare professional, the least they could do is say “I know you’re working really hard, but try doing it slightly differently and it will hurt less and work better.” When I say this, people tend to say “oh, but we want them to be supportive!” but I definitely think you can both help and be supportive. And if someone has a bunch of family members and only one qualified professional in the room, they pretty much have “unhelpful but optimistic” covered, and could really use actually meaningful assistance. A coach not a cheerleader, if you will. Especially since dragging the labour out is not terribly good for the baby, always.

So obviously I could easily write 800 to 1500 words about the ethics of that, no problem, but if you can find 5 scholarly references discussing that sort of thing you’re a better researcher than I.

I did manage to find a midwifery guideline from (I think?) the UK, which said that since one of the goals was to minimise interventions in birth, then we shouldn’t do things which increase the number of interventions. It listed some sensible things to do(you know, like letting women give birth in whatever damn posture and position they like, which we totally do these days), and some things we should avoid, such as checking that the baby is ok by listening to its heart rate or using what’s called a fetal heart rate trace or CTG, which is a sort of ultrasound thing they stick to the mother’s belly during riskier deliveries to make sure that the baby’s heart rate isn’t indicating that it’s in trouble. I just… I feel like I must be missing something. Right? Because to me, “Procedures that increase medical interventions to be avoided where possible e.g. continuous electronic fetal monitoring, epidural anaesthetic” inasmuch as a sentence that poorly constructed can convey anything, says “we are against interventions which are unnecessary [which is good] and therefore we shouldn’t do things which will cause us to intervene [wellll...] like check the baby and allow ourselves to find out that we need to do something[!!!]”. What? No! Fewer interventions is important because it is a step towards better wellbeing of mother & baby! It’s not an end in itself for which we should be sacrificing their wellbeing! Aaargh!

So maybe I can do an essay on whether it is ethical to perform or withhold CTG? I certainly feel like it wouldn’t be hard to find references saying that “if in doubt check” and “if the baby and mother need rescuing to save one or both of their lives then you can jolly well do it, and I don’t give a damn what your departmental target for 'natural' births is”, and obviously it wouldn’t be hard to hold forth about it to the tune of 1000 words. My only real concern is: is that even a dilemma? Like, it seems pretty obvious and clear-cut to me. I’m going to find it hard to present arguments against making sure the baby is ok in a non-invasive way, I’m thinking. Maybe if the birth was very hih risk and you needed to have the CTG on the whole time it would make it harder to have a water birth [which otherwise are totally do-able in the hospital Labour Ward, by the way]? I mean, if so, then there’s that. That would seriously be the first instance I’ve come across where “medicalization” meant that you couldn’t just give birth however you wanted in Hospital, if so. Can even I make a whole essay paragraph out of that? Implying that we should seriously weigh a lady’s right to aromatherapy and bath oils against the chance of her baby not surviving? I guess so?

Heh, maybe I should write an essay on the ethics of deciding you want to be listening to one particular song on really loud while you give birth, bringing that one 3 minute song on a CD, and then making the poor midwives listen to it on repeat for the whole 45 minutes you spend actively giving birth, because TV makes it look quicker? I guess that’s really more OH&S than ethics. The poor midwife spent the rest of the week with that song as an earworm. (I’d love to tell you which song it was, but by Thursday, when I was there, mentioning the name of the song was basically outlawed to prevent it getting stuck in everyone’s heads again).

The other thing of which is an option would be the lactation consultant who lectured us. She pretty much said that anyone who doesn’t breastfeed is a bad mother; that dads shouldn’t get to hug their babies because after conception, they’d done their bit and they should butt out of the sacred mother-child dyad and go, like, hunt or bread-win or something; that mothers should sleep with their babies despite the SIDS risk because if you aren’t going to breastfeed and everything properly then what’s even the point of your having a baby at all, it might as well get accidentally smothered; and that anyone experiencing problems with breastfeeding (low milk supply, baby bites chunk out of nipple [there was a picture of that, oh god], cracked nipples, mastitis etc.) only happen if you don’t breastfeed properly and are a bad mother, etc. Which was particularly awful because the lactation consultant / midwife / nurse (lady’s got herself all the qualifications remotely available, as you see) with whom I’ve worked in the past is eminently sane, and was all “what no” when I sanity-checked our lecture notes with her. So obviously I’m not suggesting that this whole bunch of people is inept, just that it seems like the only ones interested in giving us lectures are the ones with bees in their bonnet and occasionally also a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock, if you will.

I’m not sure that’d be a real essay topic either, though, especially since I have no idea who marks these. Plus; references? Although I bet there are papers weighing the benefits of breastfeeding with the harms of stigmatising bottle-feeding. Hmmm… maybe it’d be safer to fall back on old faithful well-researched things like pregnant women who smoke or take drugs, or indeed people who go up to strangers and abuse them for smoking while pregnant or with pram?

I wish we were allowed to submit ethics blog posts, rather than structured essays in which “Identification of Theme Objectives Addressed” is supposed to be its own subheading. That’s just embarrassing. I should just give them today’s post and say “see? I totally thought about it!”

"Someone with cancer just wants one thing"

You know those statuses people post on facebook, or email or whatever, which say things like "We all wish to have a new car...new phone...to lose weight...a person who has cancer only wants one thing...to fight their cancer...I know that 97% of you guys won't put this on your wall...but 3% of my friends will...Put it on your wall in honor of someone who died from cancer or who's fighting…"? Sure you do, you've seen them, or things like them, and to them I say: Bollocks.

So first of all, and this goes for ALL that sort of emoticionally manipulative stuff; shut up. Don't try to sucker people with a picture of an injured kid and "Like if she's BEAUTIFUL" or "Like if you love people" or "Like if you hate racism" (and I guess presumably that there must somewhere be ones which say "Like if racism seems like a sensible thing to you" or "Like if you think immigrants are ruining Australia and should be sent home in leaky boats" or whatever. I imagine hateful people are probably not any less annoying than the ones who mean well). I mean, it's all clearly stupid, no-one thinks that liking those things makes any difference, surely? They're like a virus (not a computer virus, I mean actual viruses) the only thing they can do is spread themselves, and maybe make people feel a bit manipulated on the way past.

Also, (and I'll get to the real problem eventually, honest); dude. You've got to learn to use some kind of punctuation other than ellipses (...), get some commas! Get a full stop occasionally! This makes me want to shake people.

Next up; what do you mean "post it on your wall in honor of someone who died from cancer or who's fighting" exactly? How is it an honour to be listed on the same page as all the "I've lost my phone, goddamn!" posts and the "LOL I was sooooo hungover this weekend" and the "Carn the blues" posts or whatever? It is seriously like the smallest honour you could possibly accord someone. Maybe if you are remembering someone, you could just remember them? Or write "I miss my Nan, she had cancer and also was great" (actually, mine did, and was, so there). Someone who's "fighting" (and I've written posts before about this thing where people have to be "fighters" if they get cancer, and only the "weak" die or whatever. This is what it means when you say "Kylie has been diagnosed with breast cancer but she'll be ok, she's strong, she's a fighter, she'll beat this") would maybe be more appreciative of a personal message, or a visit, or a cup of coffee, or you not constantly carrying on sanctimoniously about their disease when they're just trying to take their mind off it by looking at facebook?

It actually says "I know that 97% of you guys won't put this on your wall...but 3% of my friends will". Which is obviously made up, as far as the numbers go, but otherwise, what are they saying here? That most poeple are bad people who hate cancerous people, love disease, and refuse to do their bit to fight it by reposting? That most people won't, so that if you do you can feel even more virtuous? Or that they KNOW it's a ridiculous irritating thing that most people don't want to perpetuate? I mean honestly.

Mostly, though, speaking as someone who's pretty likely to have cancer at some point in my life: sod off. If I have cancer, that doesn't suddenly become the only thing in my life. Like, yes, it's big, but it doesn't stop me wanting a car that doesn't leak or a house that's big enough for my family. It might stop me wanting to lose weight, but doubtless only because I'll probably lose weight because of the cancer or the chemo, which will be a lot less pleasant than I'd've been hoping for weight-loss to be. If I have to go on steroids (and a lot of people do) then the side effects may well cause me to gain weight, and yes, in that case, I totally plan to resent it and want to lose weight. This is the sort of thing which people who have cancer actually say. They're annoyed by the fact that it messes with their life, so they might well want to lose weight, want a new car or house(especially if treatment is expensive, so suddenly they can't afford the one they were saving for), or phone, so they can play games and talk to people while they're stuck in hospital for hours and hours.

Cancer sucks, and it can probably take over your life in a big and horrible way, but that doesn't mean that that's suddenly the defining characteristic of you as a person. Just like people tend to assume that when someone is gay, or a member of an ethnic minority, or has a religious affiliation which is not the dominant one in our society, or is disabled in some way, or short-statured or whatever, are defined by that characteristic. You know, "I had lunch with my gay friend Jake" or "Bella, you know, the black girl" or being delighted that Peter Dinklage has finally gotten a good role despite his dwarfism but only ever thinking of him in terms of his height and smallness. It's outrageously small-minded to think that any one characteristic can totally define someone as a person, and dictate their every hope and dream.

And it must be especially bizarre if the thing which is your new entire personhood is cancer, because it's be totally new. If you tell someone you've got cancer, that suddenly becomes, apparently, the most important thing about you, which must be really unspeakably odd if you're used to people only narrowly categorising you because of being a woman, or being overweight, or being blonde, or whatever. This totally sucks. If you've been diagnosed with a nasty and scary disease, the last thing you need is to also have to contend with people being weirdly prejudiced about you all of a sudden, even if they're trying to be prejudiced for you, rather than against you. I bet it's pretty damn difficult to get a job, though, if your potential employers know you have cancer, I bet there's pleny of "against" too. I imagine it scares off the HR middle-management evn faster than announcing plans to get pregnant in the next year or so. Folk who've got cancer really don't need "that's all there is to you" from some dude they haven't seen since highschool, or a well-meaning aunt, or any other facebook friends, if they're also dealing with that sort of thing.

Lastly, this thing where, as a culture, we seem to believe that cancer is a death sentence, one that can be evaded by "strength" and "battling" but which will always become the most defining characteristic of your life is just wrong. Yes, a lot of people get these diseases, and die of it, but not because of being "weak". A lot of people also get cancer and then have a small procedure and are essentially cured. To imply that the only thing they could possibly want in their life is not to die of cancer is insulting to everyone involved.

Sometimes, no-one is in the right

Earlier this week, a man in Texas was arrested. Apparently, he and his wife had had some friends around, and when he went to check on his 4 year old daughter, he found an acquaintance sexually assaulting her. And so he did what any red-blooded American would do: he literally beat the guy to death with his bare hands. And I mean literally in the sense of "literally true" not "figuratively but whoa", as it so often seems to mean. Anyway, so he hasn't been charged, because, as the Sheriff of police said "you have the right to defend your daughter". Which is a right more or less explicitly enshrined in Texas law, if I understand correctly.

Of course, a lot of people, including me (why do I want to type "myself included" there? Why is that a thing we say? When we know that referring to yourself as "myself" like that usually makes us sound ridiculous?) have the first reaction "good thing too!". Like, there's a bad guy here, and it's the dude who's having sex with a four year old kid. There are times when a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and those times include "finding someone assaulting your kid". And there are times when you can actually imagine yourself beating someone to death, and this is pretty much the definition of that sort of time.

On the other hand, I'm sort of nervous about that sort of instinct, to just be all "he got what he deserved!" because first of all, there's thumping a dude and hauling him off your kid, and then there's beating him all the way to death, which is sort of a different thing. Secondly, there's only his word for it. Thirdly, the poor kid, and lastly there's the whole precedent dealio.

So, I guess first things first; I can, as I said, totally understand. I also condone hauling off rapists and defending victims (kids or not), especially as compared the the rather less laudible instincts of the folks in that scandal last year (or early this year? I've forgotten the name of it; I mean the one where a bunch of folks saw that coach raping kids and were all like "huh, I guess I'd better not say anything, but maybe report it to a single superior and not follow up on it in any way!"). I could even understand if, as an American, you happened to be packing heat (as I believe they say) at the time and just straight up shot the guy on impulse. Or hitting him a bunch of times. But barring hit-him-a-couple-of-times-and-then-he-hit-his-head-on-something-and-oh-god-he's-not-breathing-what-have-I-done-? type stuff, surely it takes a fair while to beat someone all the way to death? Like, surely traditionally there's someone pulling back on the beaters elbow and saying "Jack, no! You're killing him! He's not worth it! Let him rot in jail!" I just feel like it's all a bit much to completely wave aside as hard-but-fair. Maybe what you need in a situation like this is a suspended sentence? A guy who can beat someone all the way to death is a guy who might well have some anger management issues and definitely a capacity for pretty full-on violence. Seems to me that what you want is a sentence along the lines of "Ok, no punishment this time because we totally understand, but lay so much as a finger on anyone ever again, and we lock you up and throw away the key, capisce?" Just in case, you know?

Then, we have the thing where if there was no-one going "Jack, no!" or whatever, then presumably the only person who can confirm or deny that he was assaulting the daughter is the 4 year old herself, and they're notoriously unreliable witnesses (we did this whole thing in Developmental Psychology about how people take advantage in courtroom settings of how easily led child witneses are, it's horrifying how easy it is to get the poor little things to say seriously anything, and to really believe it too; their memories are manipulable and they're used to doing what they're told. This is why paedophiles are able to get away with awful stuff like "if you tell anyone, I'll magically know"). It worries me that there's no way to be sure that the guy didn't just beat someone to death for kicks. I mean, depending on what sort of assualt it was, there might be DNA evidence, but it's the sort of evidence that might be smudged in that enthusiastic and vigourous "being beaten to death" process.

I'm also worried about this kid. It's super traumatic to be raped (if indeed that's what the assault was, I mean there's a very wide spectrum of unspeakably awful things a paedophile might decide to do to a kid), but it's also got to be pretty traumatic watching your Dad beat someone to death in front of you (unless he hauled the guy into the hallway first, in which case she'd only have heard it - which would still be nightmareish). Especially since a child that age might not have actually experienced low-level sexual assault stuff as traumatic, because she wouldn't have understood what it was about. If so, if all you're aware of is an over-friendly man giving you hugs and kisses and rubbing himself (or whatever - and also heaven forbid you should think I'm condoning that) and suddenly your Daddy comes in and is really really angry and beats him to death even though he's always been a nice Daddy and so on, then, as a very young child, you're liable to think you've done something wrong, or that you must never hug anyone again, or that your Daddy might hit you over and over too if you do anything bad, or whatever. That's all just speculation, but it's pretty plausible sounding, and it's a total nightmare. No kid needs to have seen anyone die violently.

My biggest concern, though, is precedent. Beating someone to death on the spur of the moment because they're raping your little girl is something I can more or less get behind, but I'm sort of worried that it sets a precedent which ends up (and I know that in general the slippery-slope argument is pretty dodgy, but I get the impression that when it comes to legal precedent, it actually works a bit that way?)... ends up at a point where people can cite this as a reason that they shouldn't get in trouble for spending 3 days torturing someone to death because they got the impression that their intentions toward their 15 year old kid, or their wife, were dishonourable. You know? And I just really really don't ever want to be tortured to death? Or even just tortured to injury! Obviously I don't much fancy being beaten to anything either, but there you go.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter what I think, but I'm certainly apprehensive about this whole thing being dismissed out of hand. Also, though, I definitely do not promise not to beat anyone to death who I catch in the act of raping a child. So heads up on that, would-be paedophiles. I'm not above a couple of good solid kicks to the family jewels in an emergency, and I pack a mean headbutt.