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.

Cervixes, cranberries & cherries

I've had a day today which would be weird by normal standards, now I come to think about it. It started out with a pathology tutorial in which we were all given preserved specimens to look at; of a cervix, of a testicle, and of a bunch of different uteruses, in different stages of age, disease, and sliced-ness. This wasn't as gory as it might sound; bits of person which have been surgically excised (with consent, don't worry) and then put in formaldehyde for upwards of a year bear about as much resemblance to living bleeding human flesh as devon does to steak.

I spent the rest of the morning sitting in with my Dad as Medical Student of The Day while he saw patients, and did pap smears, and scanned babies in utero, and biopsied cervixes (cervices?) and checked other cervixes to see if ladies had broken their waters and that sort of thing. This was also all very well in a sort of grown up Take Your Kid To Work Day sort of way, and I strongly suspect him of secretly trying to market his specialty to me and get me to follow in his footsteps (which I'm sure he'd strenuously deny, but which wouldn't fool a babe in arms).

The problem with watching someone else work, though, is that no matter how interesting and rewarding it is to do, and to think your way through, and all that, watching someone have pretty similar conversations with a bunch of people over and over again is an awful lot like watching someone else play Mario Kart. You (or anyway, I) are mildly entertained by the scenery, and you'd sort of lke to have a turn, but you know you're not really that good at Mario Kart, so if you tried, you'd spend the entire time trying to turn around after accidentally crashing and ending up facing backwards (ok, so that may be a slightly overdrawn analogy there, but you get the gist). I mean, sure seeing a lot of ladies' bits and pieces (if you will) is an unusual way to spend a morning, but by 11 o'clock it's no more unusual and intriguing than spending a morning looking at the undersides of cars, or anything else you usually don't see many of.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch my Dad at work, and I got to play with a super-great toddler who wanted to take me home with her, which is nice, and I definitely learned a few Important Facts, which is really all you can ask in life. I figure if I learn and retain one single Fact every day at uni, then I'm doing alright, all in all. Especially when you consider that lower case f facts and broader understandings are probably sneaking into my brain on the way past.

Probably the best fact from this last week is that cranberry juice, far from being actually helpful for UTIs like I'd always been told, is a bladder irritant. And not in an "it irritates your bladder into fighting the infection" way, either. Looks like if you make an effort to drink a bunch of water and have enough vitamins on board, you've effectively done yourself as much good as cranberry juice is supposed to, without all that pesky bladder-being-hurt-more on the way past. Frankly, it bugs me that this is the case. Like, what the hell, Blackmores etc? Where do they get off selling us expensive placebos like "Cranberry Forte" tablets if their only functions are (1) to remind us every time we take a tablet that bladder infections can happen to ladies, and thus remind us to be careful and drink lots of water or whatever and (2) to irritate our bladders to make us feel like we must need the tablets? That seriously is messed up.

As a side note, though, I suddenly realised what was going on with the slang of "to pop the cherry" which has always seemed super weird to me. I mean, first up, you pretty much can't "pop" an actual cherry. You can sort of squish it, or crush it, but "pop" is hardly the word. Also, it always annoyed me that it was "cherry" in the first place. I mean, on the one hand, you have the description of a hymen as a thin, incomplete membrane (which actually can be popped, unlike a cherry) and on the other hand you have a small firm spherical fruit which bears no resistance to the putative "cherry". I mean, honestly: what. So, long story short, what with one cervix and another, today I finally realised that the cervix totally looks and feels (no word on "sounds" or miscellaneous senses) a cherry. And I bet popping a hymen feels (and maybe sounds?), like a "pop", so apart from the fact that anyone popping a cervix during sex is doing something terribly wrong (but quite impressive-sounding), that's sort of intellectually satisfying. You know, in an "ohhhh... I get it now" sort of way. Same as when I realised that since old books sometimes call a week a "sennight" (or "se'ennight" or "sevennight" for not-short), and a fortnight is two weeks, then that was probably because it's short for "fourteen nights". I mean, it took an embarrassingly long time, but I got there in the end!

Sorry for all this lady-parts talk today. I was going to write a warning, but since it's hardly what you'd call sexualised talk, I figure it made about as much sense as warning that a post would contain a lot of discussion of spleens. I sort of figure that saying "these perfectly normal body parts might be too much for your delicate minds, look out!" is equivalent to saying "genitals, especially female ones, are objectively gross, that's a valid fact, and not at all a weird socialised thing!" and, you know, there's enough of that already. Besides, "cervix" is definitely the most sternly functional and non-sexual part of that whole area, and that's all I've really talked about, so it's hardly like it ought to be NSFW.

Hopefully. I mean, if you get fired, I'm totally sorry. (But in my defence, I did put "Cervices" right up there in the title. Plus, who wants a job working for someone afraid of a cervix?)

Challenge: Accepted

There's a comedian in the UK named Richard Herring who has this blog called Warming Up (look!, I remembered how to put in links like everyone between the ages of 6 and 46 should surely be able to do by now) which is quite good, and on which he posts every single day. For rather more than 3000 days in a row, now. Which is amazing, and which has briefly inspired me.

The thing is, I feel like you either need to have a fairly interesting and varied life (like, say, that of a touring comedian) or Something To Say to do that well. And I haven't really got any kind of big point to make. I feel like if I could send a message to every person in the world, some kind of deep cosmic message of hope or something, I'd probably end up sending out something like "Honestly everyone, could we all please just take a deep breath and generally try to cut each other a little slack? Everyone has off days, ok, so let's all try to be a bit more understanding of each others' failings and agree not to get too het up about things which are none of our business, ok? And maybe judge things and people rationally on their merits, on the understanding that circumstances, things and people all change, and that race/religion/sex/sexuality/whatever should probably have no major part of that, ok? OK??" Which probably wouldn't work, since the last guy who tried that got nailed to a bunch of stuff and then before you know it, bam, the Spanish Inquisition is torturing folks for being nice to each other in the wrong way, and the Irish are blowing up folks whose folks took differing advice from different dudes in funny hats about how exactly you should go about being understanding, and thousands of potentially hot monks throughout history are swearing vows of eternal chastity and shaving bald patches on themselves in order to get better at judging people on their merits rather than taking wallflowers on dates to get coffee, and a whole bunch of the time nobody wins even though that is clearly not at all the point.

Anyway, since we can dispose of polemic, I think (and who wants to read polemic every day anyway? Good grief) that leaves us with "documenting an interesting life" and miscellaneous. Obviously my first urge is to dismiss the former out of hand, but I guess although my life is not remotely interesting in any meaningful way (it's not very interesting to lead, so it's hardly likely to be interesting to read), it is at least different from day to day. So ok, here's what, a challenge: every day until let's say the end of June, I'll write a blog post. Some probably pretty short, some maybe even good! A lot of the things which are interesting and happen in my vicinity are obviously confidential (either patient stuff or stuff which friends might say in confidence, or thoughts I might have which would probably be actionable if they appeared in print), so this will probably be a bit... fuzzy, but that's all to the good, since I've pretty much only ever blogged by opening a page up and then just thinking as usual but typing as I go. This is a lot of the problem, really.

The next problem, of course, is that this seems silly if no-one but the 10 people who "follow" my blog (at least 6 of whom I suspect to be bots) find out and read any of it. I mean, I imagine no-one but Dave Grey (who seems very bored at work?) will read all of it, really, but you've got to hope. So obviously the thing to do it tweet or facebook links. The problem is (more specifically, this is like the chewy core of the problem I mentioned in the last sentence) that there's a word for that: "promoting". You "promote" your blog on facebook and twitter or whatever. And as soon as you think of it as "promoting" it seems... overweeningly dickish? I think this is the phrase I'm looking for. Overweeningly dickish. Like, a nice, interesting, entertaining person whom you know and like doesn't click "promote" under their facebook statuses. Harvey Norman clicks it.

Plus what's the goal? What am I looking for, in this hypothetical "promoting"? I'm not going to get famous. I know a few people who've managed to parley blogging into actual careers. My best friend from kindergarten writes a travel blog which is slightly mystifyingly called "The Bubble Buster" and she seems to actually get paid endorsements or trips or something out of it. Another friend writes about gaming, apparently for the sheer love of it, and yet another collects memes , which is interesting (and sometimes horrifying) to scroll through, but which I secretly suspect stems from a deep seated OCD-style desire to catalogue the best bits of the internet. He's pretty up-to-the-minute, though, so it means I get to not only keep abreast of the wacky worldwideweb but also feel like a total hipster when he posts things I've seen before. This mainly happens after I've unexpectedly had a bunch of time off which I've spend mindlessly thumbing through tumblr, so I assume it takes him hours and hours of work to collect them all. The only other person I can think of who makes an effort to actively tell people about her blog is Tab who's new style blog is beautiful.

The thing is, these people all have a theme, and I don't. More relevantly, I actually don't really know what they're hoping to acheive with their blogs any more than I know what I'm trying to do with mine.

Also, vitally important clarification, these dear and articulate friends tell people about their blogs, and post about them, and generally try to get the word out, which I guess is what "promoting" a blog is, but I wouldn't for a moment call any of them even slightly dickish, let along overweeningly so. It's the word itself which seems smarmy. In someone who isn't a huge corporation it's fantastic to see people who are confident and proud of their work promoting it. It's Gerry Harvey who needs to stop. And me who would need some kind of zeitgeist, or even, frankly, just some kind of gist, before I could really embrace it. Maybe sometime over this June it'll all crystallise and the whole thing will be excellent.

Tell your friends!

Dreams, Importance, and Drunk History

So, I started writing about this whole weird social disconnect where we're all supposed to have some sort of thing where we'd secretly like to be a star of some kind. You know, if you're "unintellectual" you want to be a singer or an actor or just sort of famous for being famous, I dunno, maybe a model or sport-type dude? And if you're "intellectual" you want to be a comedian or a writer or... I'm not sure what else you're supposed to want to do, actually, it's pretty much just that, isn't it? Maybe win a Nobel prize or something?

Like, "Hi kids! Everyone is special and unique, in either one of two special and unique ways! Do you want to be famous for your body/physical whatsit, or brain/mental whatsit? Pick one!" Which is a bit balls, because we aren't all the best at anything, frankly, and even if we are, no-one is ever going to make me famous for "being the best at constructing a comfy nest out of chairs, cushions, blankets, etc. and reading/messing about on my laptop in that nest while drinking tea and eating Nutella out of a jar". I mean, they might, but it'll be "woman has to be removed from couch with crane" fame, not "wow, you're so wonderful, tell me what brand of shampoo you use, I'll give you $100000 to say Pantene" fame. (Also, no, Pantene people, stop calling me, your shampoo is terrible and I would only accept that sort of endorsement deal from Clairol, and even then, only if they bring back that Herbal Essences flavour they used to have with rosemary in it, the stuff in the green bottles. Why did they bring back all the other "Classics" ranges except the one I love? Presumably the answer is: CONSPIRACY. Possibly they are afraid that that shampoo would make me so lustrous and good-smelling that I'd use my powers for evil rather than good?)

Anyway, then I totally derailed myself into thinking about how, mysteriously, no-one seems to aspire to way more important jobs like sewage treatment or garbage collecting, and I think maybe I'm going to roll with that instead, because, man, this blog has both Been There and Done That, when it comes to "live your dreams" stuff. (I'd put a link here to that post in case you're insterested, but (a) I have no idea how to do that any more, and (b) then I'd have to, like, trawl through the archives myself, and nuts to that).

So the thing is, to some considerable extent, it seems like how important a job is and how important it looks are inverse. Like, singers are totally unnecessary (look, yes they are. I like Florence Welch as much as the next person, but neither she, nor Nicki Minaj nor Skrillex (who I guess doesn't so much sing as just sort of go bzzzzt) nor Justin Bieber or Adele is actually necessary), and that's glamourous and they're applauded, but while the dude who fixes leaks in the big sewage treatment plants stops us backsliding into the 16th century, no-one wants to take heavily shopped photos of them. Do you reckon that this is deliberate in some way? Like, people who have important stuff to do are way too busy to be giving exclusive interviews all the time, so we interview people who genuinely don't have anything better to do? Or maybe there are just too many people doing small but vitally important jobs to laud all of them?

I wonder if this is like that thing where thin is beautiful in societies where food is plentiful, and fat is hot in societies where food is scarce? That's totally an established thing. They even did studies which showed it was true on a ridiculously individual level. So, obviously if, at a a society-wide level, you're starving, curvaceous ladies must be rich or miscellaneously well-fed (which is hot) and if you have heaps of food, slender chicks... aren't too heavy to pick up? Have iron self-control? Won't eat the last biscuit in the packet? I actually don't know what the go is there, but obviously you and I live in a plentiful society, and thin people are attractive people, so even though it doesn't make sense, it's obviously happening at that level. Anyway, it turns out if you make a lone guy feel poor, or hungry, and then ask him which chick is hotter, he'll pick the bigger one, but when he feels rich or full, dude wants him some Bon Iver style Skinny Love. I'm prettttty sure that they checked that the hungry dudes weren't planning to eat the ladies (plus they weren't THAT hungry), so they ruled out the most obvious confounding factor. Which is fascinating.

So I mean there's that. People are just contrary. Maybe if we were stranded on a desert island with a bunch of useless vacuous types (which, in fairness, on a desert island, would probably include you and I, unless your coconut-harvesting and raft-building talents are a well of untapped potential. I mean, I'd probably just be lying around trying not to get sunburned, occasionally going for a swim and complaining that I desperately needed some lip balm and a caffeinated beverage or something), then the useful folk who can build huts out of palm branches and what have you would be the new celebrities. It'd be like The Admirable Crichton, I'm thinking.

Anyway, so the more I waxed lyrical about how useful garbage collectors are and how gratful I am that they save us on a day to day basis from a grisy choleric-or-something death, the more I wondered: what would actually happen? What would we get, hepatitis A maybe? I feel like I should really know what it is that we'd die of if the streets were lined with rotting garbage. Definitely it'd mess up the water supply, and we'd get rats and what have you, so maybe the plague (comfortingly, we totally have antibiotics that'll knock out plague bacteria these days, but I guess we'd get resistant strains and so on soon) and perhaps liver disease from having to drink alcohol rather than water? Also, I like to think that this goes a long way toward explaining a lot of history.

Up until ridiculously recently, right, most people didn't have a reliable source of clean water (and indeed a lot of people still don't, which sucks a lot more than globalisation and "westernization", whatever that's meant to be, do. Like, by all means let us respect ancient cultures and accept that our own is as deeply flawed as any other, but let us perhaps share those aspects of our deplorably decadent over-medicalised whatever which allow us to drink water from the tap without keeling over with acute parasitaemia, surely?). Anyway, until recently, that was EVERYONE. The whole world looking like a World Vision ad kid, looking forlornly at a rusty water pump and wishing that the water to scorpions and miscellaneous deadly things ratio was a bit more favourable.

So what everyone did, of course, was drink alcohol, because fermentation killed a bunch of the stuff before it could kill you. I love this, mainly because if you read history, a lot of the time is spent going "what? Why... why would you do that, historical dude? Maybe you should take a deep breath and then a nap and then revisit your decision-making process, hmm?" and I really feel that if you bear in mind that basically everyone was a bit drunk all the time, suddenly a lot of stuff falls into place. I mean, even as recently as the 19th century, people used the phrase "one over the eight" to mean drunk, and what that means is that someone had drunk one more than the usual eight drinks in the day. (Turns out that if you space them correctly, about eight 19th century style standard drinks is the number your liver can handle in a day before you start waking up drunker each morning than you were yesterday morning and before you know it, bam, you're Amy Winehouse age 27). Eight! That's a lot to be drinking as a standard day! Eight drinks in and I personally lose all sense of personal space and start telling inappropriate jokes at an inappropriate volume (actually, that's probably six. By eight I'm almost certainly past that territory, but let us let bygones be bygones, etc). Anyway, I reckon if I had 8 standard drinks every day, I too would be crossing Rubicons, crucifying dudes who I didn't like the look of, making gladiators fight bears, etc.

Somewhere in there was the briefest glint of something I reckon would make a fascinating basis for a novel, or a really rambly post, but last year an American Friend of mine told me that he really liked this blog (or had done back when I used to post a lot) but could never finish a post, so I'm going to wrap up now, in keeping with my goal of writing things that are short enough that one person could deliberately read the entire thing in one sitting without being trapped under something heavy and thus unable to avoid it.

Other goals include: one day I will figure out how to finish posts super smoothly. One day, my friends.

Into the desert

You are walking through a vast, vast desert. The unmarked and unvaried sand stretches in front of you, featureless as far as the eye can see. Wind whisks occasional clouds of sand across the surface, and its undulating whistle is the only sound you hear. You have been walking this desert for a long time, and you will walk it, whether you like or not, for as long as it takes. Perhaps you have always been trudging across these sands. Perhaps you will always be walking across this desert. The gritty sand burns your feet, and the wind whips sand into your eyes and chafes your face, your legs, whatever skin is exposed. Your legs ache with the necessity of walking, and slip on the sand, but you cannot stop. You can never stop. Perhaps you will always be walking this desert. Your thirst is great, and the heat during the day is as unbearable as the cold of the night, you are constantly lured by the possibility of an oasis, the hope that one day you will reach the other side, and be doomed no more to walk the desert alone.

Sometimes in the distance you think you see an oasis, or opulent palaces with cool shady balconies, deep sparkling pools, laughing company and soft plush carpets into which your feet could sink in blessed relief. But when you reach these places, they are proved to be mirages, and your feet sink only into the gritty sand you know so well.

Once, twice, the past blurs together, but perhaps many times, you have come across a real oasis. Sometimes you could tell from the outset that this was all it was, and sometimes you allowed yourself to hope that you had reached the end of your travels. But always, in the end, your endless walking brings you out the other side of these oases, and you have had perforce to carry on, out into the scorching sun, away from the soft muds and grasses by which your feet had been so fleetingly made glad.

One day, one day otherwise as like any other as every grain of the endless sand is like any other, you see a mirage in the distance. You are always wary, for you have been tempted by mirages before, and as often been betrayed by them into an ever more despairing acceptance that your desert is without mercy and without end. Nonetheless, you approach the mirage, and it does not waver.

A vast oasis reveals itself as you draw closer, and as you step into the balmy shade of the first of many trees, you allow yourself to hope. Perhaps, you think to yourself, in a thought so daring that you hardly acknowledge it, a hope so great that you can harldy bring yourself to hope it, perhaps this is the end of the desert after all. Perhaps I have slipped on my last drift of sand, perhaps I have slithered down my last searing, soaring, steep dune. Perhaps I am safe now.

You walk through this oasis, delighting in the company of the small desert animals who gather around the pools of water, delighting in the water itself, slaking your unending thirst, delighting in the shade at noon, and the warmth at night, and the song of birds. Even your raw and sunburned skin is recovering here, out of the fury of the sun and the cruelty of the wind. Always, of course, you walk onward, praying that every step is taking your further from that desert to which you hope never to return.

Sometimes, there are rocks on the floor of the oasis, and you trip, or graze your feet and hands. Betimes the water seems to attract insects, and you are bitten and find yourself uncomfortable and itchy, but no matter, you are grateful for the shade, grateful not to climb those Sisyphean dunes, grateful for the variation the vegetation provides to an eye wearied by the unending sameness of the desert. By and by you notice that there are patches of sand among the grass, but you do not want to think about this. You begin to notice larger areas of sunlight between the trees, but you must walk on, and perhaps, you think, this is what the landscape is like, out of the desert.

Soon you notice that the song of the birds has ceased, that the clear water has become muddied, and the stretches of sand between patches of grass are wider than the areas of grass themselves, and a great, familiar fear rises in your breast, threatening almost to choke you. You close your eyes to these signs, and walk, heedless on, as you must.

Eventually, inevitably, your fears are realised, and you reach the edge of the oasis. This was not the edge of the desert, this was never going to be the end of your trudging, only your desperate hope allowed you to believe it might be so. You step out of the shade and into the blast of the sun. The wind whips sand against your side, excoriating you not-quite healed skin. Your feet slip on gritty sand, and the only sound is the maudlin sussuration of the wind.

You are walking through a vast, vast desert. The unmarked and unvaried sand stretches in front of you, featureless as far as the eye can see. You have been walking this desert for a long time, and you will walk it, whether you like or not, for as long as it takes. Perhaps you have always been trudging across these sands. Perhaps you will always be walking across this desert.

"A nation of shirkers"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why don't you have a boyfriend?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Which folks are probably not really 'Simple' (except maybe the simple ones)

Today, a friend of mine shared this article on twitter:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/
which I encourage you to read, because seriously, you guys, this stuff is so fascinatingly ridiculous. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's basically an analysis of the dating site OkCupid with regard to what people list as their interests and how people describe themselves, as plotted against their self-identified race. And also, to some extent, their literacy, gender, and religious creed.

A lot of it is pretty fascinating, naturally, but the bit that really caught my attention was the "people describing themselves" trope. Apparently black dudes often use the phrase "I'm cool", whereas the latino dudes want you to know that they're "funny" and asians "simple".

I love the idea of bothering to say any of those things. Is there anything much less funny than someone earnestly telling you that they are a funny guy? I, uh, I'd have thought not. Surely you'd be better off just, oh, I don't know, being funny. Or better still, just writing how you normally talk and letting the reader judge how funny she thinks you are for herself? I suppose this is difficult if your particular brand of funniness is a response-type thing. Like you're quick with conversational banter or whatever? I don't know, I just think "I am funny" as a deadpan descriptor is unconvincing. Everyone knows that everyone wants a "good sense of humour" (but they all have different ideas about what that means, so just suggesting that you'll appeal to everyone is always going to be unconvincing), so it seems like it's on a par with "I am goodlooking" or "sensitive" or "like walks on the beach". "I am an oldfashioned romantic who likes giving flowers and thinks hand-holding is underrated". This sort of thing sounds like you just read an article on "what women want" and copied it out, a bit. (Although I do in fact like handholding and flowers and wordplay, I should mention. Also goodlookingness and sensitiveness, I guess?)

Next up: "I am cool". What. Who says that? (Well, I mean, black dudes apparently) This is like the "funny" thing, but turned up to 11. "I am cool" is only marginally cooler than "my Mum says I'm cool". I'll go further; it's even less cool than that, because "my Mum says I'm cool" has a higher likelihood of being an ironic joke. It's so earnest and foolish sounding, again. Plus, what the hell do you mean by "cool"? Do you mean "hip to the latest trends"; "I have an asymmetrica haircut"? Do you in fact mean "I wear a lot of Ed Hardy clothing"? Do you mean it as equivalent to "chilled" or "calm"? "Unheated"? Or do you mean it like you might say "Oh, Steve, sure, bring him to the party, he's cool"? "He's a cool guy, is Steve". (Note: no Steve I have ever met ever was this sort of cool in my opinion. Sorry if you're reading, anyone named Steve.) Like, he's a nice guy who is pleasant to be with? Doesn't "cool" essentially boil down to three completely distinct meanings?

If you are cool, you either
(a) share many of my interests: and are pleasant ("He seems cool")
(b) are trendy and fashionable ("look at that girl's cool boots")
(c) i: are calm and composed ("it was a bit hectic, but I stayed cool")
ii: are coldly dispassionate and frigid ("relations between North Korea and the US cooled this week...")

I guess we might conceivably add (d) literally cool; "I am an Edward Cullen type, cool to the touch, with icy lips and marble fingers", but that's just so deperately uncool according to all the other definitions that I'm not even going to think about it.

The problem is that the type (a) cool people are, in my case, practically the opposite of the type (b) cool kids. I think things that are a bit dorky are cool. Sometimes I worry that my appreciation of kitschy things is insufficiently ironic.

Anyway, what I'm saying here is: saying that you are cool conveys no meaningful information to me except that you probably aren't.

Lastly, the most complex one to broach: "simple". What does it mean to say that you are simple? I think we can discard the possibility that they mean it in the mental sense, like Forrest Gump is simple. Especially since it's mainly said by a demographic who rate "being a software developer" highly on their list of interests. But what does that mean, then? That they are simply a software designer, and have few or no other interests? That they have old fashioned, "simple" ideas (men should work, women should cook), the values of "simpler times"? Perhaps that you are caveman-like and are operating at a low level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs: "I'm a simple guy, give me food, shelter a lack of immediate danger, and I'm content"? Maybe it's like "crude", like toilet humour is "simple"? Maybe these people just can't handle "complicated" women, relationships, etc? I mean, that's understandable, folks are complicated and that crap can be tiring.

Maybe this is the thing; people describe themselves as "simple" either because they don't like the fact that people (including themselves) are actually complicated, or because they fear that they look boring on paper. (As an aside, I think that the more interesting people probably all look boring on paper. I am suspicious of people with a a super-diverse and super-exciting range of interests and activities. What are they up to? I suspect them of taking up wind-surfing and cliff-diving and merenge and safe-breaking just to look interesting.)

And this brings me to perhaps the most worrying part of this whole thing: what's the go with this contrariness on my part? Why is it that the more emphatically someone insists that they are simple and cool and funny, the more convinced I am that they are just the opposite? It seems a little harsh, really. And fairly unfounded, I mean, people haven't been attempting to obviously and systematically deceive all my life, or anything. My life has not been filled with betrayal or similar. It makes no sense that I should be so distrustful. I mean, yes, there are all the institutionalised deceits that we all deal with, like ads and stuff, but that hardly counts.

Maybe I'm just extrapolating from the people you meet who insist that they are "weird" and usual and "crazy"? I mean, those boring, predictable, ordinary folks are everywhere, and they are just deadset wrong almost all the time, because they've failed to notice that everyone else is all those things too.

Maybe this is the problem with Interesting Looking Girls? Like the love interest in 'Scott Pilgrim vs. the World', such girls are instantly and easily identified as different and interesting (and "cool") but this relies on the fallacy that everyone whose hair is a naturally occurring colour is totally uninteresting, which is clearly untrue.

I saw a poster the other day that said "A little bird told me that if I looked like the other girls, you might come back to me. I don't want you that badly" (or words to that effect) which is great and all and probably includes excellent subtext about body image and self worth and so on, but what is this implication that all the other girls look the same? Speaking as a girl other than the writer of the poster, I'm going to have to go ahead and say "way harsh". I mean, it was appealling, but it was obviously sort of wrong in its assumptions, and you can tell it's wrong precisely because of it's broad appeal. Also it had a cartoon of a dead bird, which seems like maybe an excessively aggressive response. Don't shoot the messenger lady! Especially if it's a talking bird, those things take ages to train!

Hmmm, I've ended up a bit off-track here, and I've run out of break in which to blog, but the important thing is that I've written something again, having been totally at a loss for what to blog about for ages. Sorry if you've been waiting on tenterhooks, obsessively refreshing or similar!

In Which it seems reasonable to conclude that the Apocalypse would probably suck

Have you ever read a book by John Wyndham? Surely you must've done, Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (which they made into the rather melodramatically named movie Village of the Damned). They're usually sort of quasi-post-apocalyptic end-of-the-world stuff, where the heroes have to try to fight off/survive the ravages of terrifying monster plants, alien possessors, and people who've got completely the wrong end of the stick eugenics-wise in post-nuclear worlds of mutations, extra toes and explosions.

The thing is, they're sort of fun, yeah? Same as zombie movies and disaster movies and such. Sort of an 'Oh no! The end of the world as we know it! How awful! So, uh... so what you're saying is that I don't have to go to work on Monday?' kind of thing. Like, secretly, we all believe it would be a little bit awesome. And that's sort of great, really. It would be a brief comfort to us if it ever did, as well as being a pleasant way to pass a rainy afternoon in the meanwhile.

Because the odds of the world ending during our lifetimes are pretty slim, right, so there's not much risk of us having to face the reality of how it would actually be if everything and everyone we liked caught fire or drowned. Or both! At once! (See this is the problem, if you think about it too superficialy, it sounds like a Michael Bay movie, all exciting and explodey, rather than like being terribly uncomfortable and distressing, like a Michael Bay movie that you have to watch more than once, while completely sober.) Conversely, if it does happen, then as long as we don't get distracted by our awareness of our own terrible hubris for long enough for the zombies to get us, then there's really no harm done.

Unless, of course, we somehow get carried away with our enthusiasm and accidentally bring about the end of the world just because it sounds like a laugh, I guess. I think, though, we can probably avert that particular brand of disaster if we all just pinky-swear right now to definitely not, in any way, bring about the end of the world in any way shape of form. This means you especially, Dear Reader. You guys are both smart enough and excitable enough to accidentally-on-purpose set a bunch of velociraptors loose just to see whether your house meets the standards set by International Secure Your Home Against Raptors Day. (For Science!)

But the problem is, right, that last week I went skiing. (Bear with me, this gets relevant, I swear.) At the snow, the place where we stayed had really good central heating (and heaters AND an open fire! From my shivering vantage point here in my chilled flat, this seems like unimaginable luxury, as indeed it was), and it's not that I would miss that sort of thing in the event of an unscheduled return to a pre-civilised world (although I sure as hell would). The thing is, I failed to keep my week's worth of thyroxine (that's my anti-hypothyroid medicine for those of you playing at home) in the fridge while I was away, like I was supposed to. Usually, n my aforementioned chilled flat, this wouldn't be a problem, but in that toasty snowside apartment, the warmth straight-up denatured the whole lot. I didn't actually realise this until this week, when I was back to being all slow and morose unexpectedly, and I realised rather late what had happened. Obviously, this is not a serious long-term problem, because I have the rest of my medicine here at home, and it's been kept in the fridge.

But this really brought it home to me: I'm sort of reliant on modern technology a bit, now. I mean, obviously I always was, I probably couldn't live a week without recourse to things that were invented in the last 150 years. I certainly never have so far. But I reckon that I could probably take a crack at post-apocalyptic living on a good day. I'm pretty good in a crisis, and once I've resigned myself to a life without caffeine (which would take a while, what with the crippling caffeine-withdrawal headaches I'd be having for the first week), I think I could probably scrape together a coping strategy, as long as that's actually in some way possible. (So, obviously I don't expect to beat a world covered with lava, or something. I just think I could give fighting-off-giant-alien-spiders a shot, y'know?) But really, I'd only be at my best for maybe a month or so before I ran out of medicines and just wound down, like one of those battery-powered rabbits that the Energizer Bunny is always owning. And I'd like to see me fighting off man-eating killer plants while running at one-fifth speed and angsting about how now that 98% of the world's population was dead I would probably never get to live out the plot of a chick movie.

(Actually, I kind of would like to see that; until the bit where I inevitably get supped on by the agents of Armageddon, it might make for an amusing 8 second vignette.)

It's a pity, really, because if we discounted the thyroxine bit (and while we're at it, we'd probably better discount all the charming conveniences of modern medicine; I think we're likely to die of something pretty rapidly, otherwise, what with the Death, War, Famine and Pestilence that'd be going about) it could be a tiny bit neat. If nothing else, there'd be fewer delicious Maltesers, and probably a great deal more exercise, so I figure that after a little while we'd all be looking svelte and terrific. It would sort of level the playing field: those of us who usually keep in shape by baking cakes and watching Doctor Who would shrink, and those unsporting types who go to the gym all the time and take supplements and whatever it is such people do would lose at least the more pointless muscles. To keep it fair and reward them for their hard work, they'd be in much better zombie-outrunning condition, but on the other hand, the chubbier amongst us have reserves of energy to allow us to survive post-apocalyptic famine. Like camels, living off their humps! (Sorry, Skinny Nerd Readers, the only consolation for you is that you're brainy enough to outthink the zombies and contain little enough nutrition that they're unlikley to try that hard to eat you.)

Plus, like I said, very little to do by way of paperwork. The entirety of federal and state politics, as well as pop-up ads, telemarketing and The Twilight Saga would be things of the past! We would look back nostalgically and be all "remember public transport? Man, I miss those times".

Still, do not let such considerations tempt you into bringing about the end of the world, please. Remember, we Pinky Swore, and that, my friend, is a sacred vow.

In Which the Reader is deflected rather than actually addressed, per se

You guys, I was going to write this whole thing before I go away for the week, but I've run out of time, and also I've found this video on Youtube. It addresses almost exactly what I was going to blog about, in a more succinct and fantastic manner than I'd've been able to do. Also, almost all of this series are just as good, and just as much things I totally dig/agree with.