Hee hee.
You're an agitator! Your kids have grown up on the
front lines of rallies and pickets, and chances
are that you boycott at least one company for
its bad business practices. Your kids are
learning what matters to you and how they can
change what matters to them.
What kind of a freaky mother are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Quiz via the blogger on the cast iron balcony.
After watching the PM's performance last night on the 7:30 Report, today's cheery sanctuary prediction is of a Labor landslide. This pre-emptive strike silliness is just about the most ridiculous thing he's said in a long time, and I don't think it's going to play well even with Liberal voters. It's making him sound like a complete foreign policy amateur and everyone knows he's only saying all this crap as an attempt to justify following the Pied Piper into Iraq. This is the man who wants us to believe Australia is in safer hands with him. Get real.
Anyone else getting this "how to become a terrorist" spam lately? On offer from shadowcrew (clickthru at your own risk--I'm not game to visit the site in case it's a virus):
[a] large selection of bombs and different kinds of rockets such as surface-to-air, surface-to-surface and weaponry available at reduced price. With the following types of rockets you will be able to commit terrorist attacks, destroy buildings, electric power stations, bridges, factories and anything else that comes your mind. [sic]
So he made us a bigger terrorist target and now he wants us to congratulate him on increasing funding to improve facilities to deal with local terror attacks. Cheers, thanks a lot, mate. (Yes, that is sarcasm.)
That's the name of the Cold Chisel song that is the source of the phrase "doctors' wives" that we've seen bandied about a fair bit lately, according to this story by Max Suich:
It refers to middle-class women, whom the Liberal Party would normally assume would be big-L Liberals, who have been turned off by the Howard Government's support for the Iraq war and are now contemplating voting Green, Labor or for another anti-Coalition party
"Doctors' wives" evokes mock Tudor perhaps, twin-sets and pearls, golf, and a trace of silver in the hair - and the suburbs of Kew, Camberwell and Malvern. But the fact is the women are to be found across all age groups and in most Liberal electorates."
Um...why does news.com.au have a banner this morning that says "Australia decides 2004. Days to go: 77"? That would make the election some time in early December, wouldn't it? I count about 19 days, but I've never been that good at maths.
Having a baby who is learning to speak is ridiculously sweet. I often hear him "talking" to himself and go to him only to find that, rather than wanting to talk to me, he's deep in conversation with various stuffed friends. It took me a while to twig. Now I just tiptoe away smiling.
Some days I suspect that Howard might still romp it in. That people might just go "better give Latham another three years to learn the ropes and prove himself". I mean, maybe a "Greying Australia" doesn't really mind the idea of having a Greying Prime Minister, instead of some young whippersnapper. Wasn't there a poll last week saying Howard's capturing the Golden Oldies' vote? The Labor focus on "generational change" was probably a mistake. Never mind.
Also, in times of geopolitical uncertainty (we're still a nation at war after all), people might prioritise the economy, because everyone's madly "cocooning" and battening down the hatches (and racking up record household debt; when's that coming home to roost, I wonder).
Anyway, I've decided to stop blogging about politics here for a while in the interests of centralising blogospheric debate (ie. go where the action is). So if I have something to say on the upcoming election I will most likely head to the usual suspects on the blogroll and say it over there.
Just one last thing, have you noticed how those of us in the Anyone-But-Howard camp are constantly being derided as "Howard-haters"? As someone commented somewhere (sorry, I didn't note who), this is a last-ditch attempt by the Coalition to make us look irrational. I don't hate Howard personally at all, I don't even know the guy. We're judging the guy on his record of behavior on the job, not his personality.
Why does the Australian Electoral Commission feel the need to shrinkwrap its 12-page election brochure--printed on what feels like recycled newsprint--in plastic? Was just wondering.
Interested to see the reasons that the terrorists claiming responsibility for the Jakarta bombing gave in their statement. We were bombed because (in order of appearance):
* we're "Christian";
* we "took part in the war against [their] brethren in Iraq and supported the invading forces";
* we're infidels ("enemies of God");
* we need to "leave Indonesia";
* we need to "withdraw from Iraq";
* they want "liberation of the lands of Muslims".
Hearing their justifications spelt out like this makes me wonder if we could ever engage in some kind of dialogue with them. I noticed that Brian Deegan, who lost a son in Bali and is campaigning for Alexander Downer's seat, thinks we should. Australia, as we know, categorically refuses to negotiate.
Well, maybe we don't have to negotiate, but I reckon we do have to at least challenge them through the world's media. We may not be able to rationalise with them, but perhaps we can make them appear deranged to their support base by deconstructing their position.
If we had some kind of open dialogue with terrorists, maybe we could ask them curlies like, "at the end of the day, even if there were no Western interests in Muslim countries anywhere, would you really stop bombing us, or would you just keep bombing us for being infidels and/or Christians?"
I mean, if their ultimate message is really killing all non-Muslims, well then, at least they have put paid to their claims that it's about the liberation of Palestine or Iraq or Indonesia or wherever.
The other day I was surprised to read the words of a commenter around at backpages, Fred, who asked, "if they already have one [reason to attack the West], why does one more [Iraq] matter?" Geez. Luckily Glenn Condell was around when Fred tried that line at surfdom.
Soon after the Christian prayed for us, my six-month-old washing machine broke, I got attacked by magpies, and I set fire to a teatowel and burnt the oven handle.
Being attacked by the magpie was funny. There I was being pursued down a deserted stretch of road where the “For Sale” signs are still only dotted on bush blocks, not houses. I was alone in the bush, but still, blushing madly. You can’t help feeling ridiculous when it happens, because you’re being chased by a bird, for god’s sake. There was that snap of the beak at my earlobe about ten times before I remembered I had an apple and starting throwing chunks of it at the bird, til it got the hint and withdrew. The baby slept through the whole incident. Later, another magpie (I will assume it wasn’t the same one) calmly walked through the cat-sized crack in the backdoor, took a look around my study, shat on my favorite purple cardie, and walked out again.
Then I was baking a cake (Schwaebischer apfelkuchen) and left the teatowel hanging just slightly in the oven door, and it ignited in two seconds. Luckily my mum was with me at the time because it gave me a fright.
The washer breaking down was the most annoying thing, happening just when the baby was sick and there was five times as much laundry to do. The service guy had to come three times because the first time he didn’t have the spare part handy, and the second time the spare part he brought was broken. So then there was about three hundred loads of washing to catch up on. As it happens I enjoy doing laundry; the neverending ritual of folding little colorful bits of fabric into smaller and smaller squares, standing out in the sunshine pegging out clothes in pleasing color combinations…ah yeah, I love all that. Never would've believed how much more laundry you have to do when you have a baby though.
Yesterday I was thinking about how so much of human behavior is so repetitive. Like many writers no doubt, I have a pretty clean house. And having a baby is an opportunity to get even more anal about it. So now every morning after I let the cats out I get on my hands and knees and wash all the slate in the kitchen and living room. It's totally “I wax on, I wax off”. So Zen. I remember The psych lecturers used to be fond of explaining that the more clean and neat someone is, the more likely it is their mind is all messed up. But surely some of us are just excellent procrastinators. And hey, isn’t cleanliness next to godliness?
I also had to babyproof the house last week because he can drag himself around now. He has the run of the house, which, contrary to expectations gives me more time, since he amuses himself exploring.
Oh, and have I told you lately how I love him? I love how we share the same sense of humor. I love his naughty grin. I love how impressed he is with himself when he masters something. I love how he can "come to mama" now. And I was so relieved he only had some kind of 24 hour bug.
But enough schmaltz, eh?
Do I walk around with a sign on my head saying that I need to be saved? I swear I'm not trying to sound like a character in a Flannery O'Connor novel, this religious stuff just keeps happening.
The Christian who dropped around a Bible while Harley was sick last week asked if he could say a prayer for the baby and I thought, what harm can it do? I said Harley was on the mend anyway but sure, go ahead. He said he would have to hold the baby, if that was alright.
Well, I could hardly say no, and besides the man has seven children of his own. He held the baby, rubbed his tummy, and said some kind of prayer which I assume was in Hebrew. Then he declared, "you are now HEALED through the Lord Jesus" and handed the baby back. As he was leaving he reminded me to start reading the Bible at Matthew and promised he would leave it with me, because he wasn’t “that kind of salesman”. Which I figure at least is an admission he’s trying to sell me something.
As if this wasn’t enough I was speaking with an old friend whose father tries on new religions like they’re going out of fashion, and she said now that they’ve made their seachange from Sydney to a small country town that has a large population of followers of new or alternative religions, her father is keen to preach some new religion he’s into, a religion that amounts to "Christ without Church". (Yeah, I know, it’s too Flannery.)
I start telling my friend about the visits from the Christian and she urges me to read the Old Testament first. Apparently her father’s beliefs centre around the Messianic Judao-Christian worldview instead of, she says it sounds like, my neighbor’s Pentecostal Christianity. She never used to be religious, but living with her father again, an artist who has a very powerful personality, has drawn it out of her, I think.
I say it kind of annoys me a bit how people try and convert me. I say I'm quite happy with my world-view; shouldn’t people respect that? My philosophy is pretty simple: be kind to yourself, be kind to others, be kind to the planet. I see no need for a sky-god, and I don’t need to beg forgiveness just for being alive. As for the seven sins, I think some of them are fun, so I’m probably beyond redemption anyway.
Just briefly wanted to comment on the tragedy at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
How can this be read as anything other than a warning? Doesn't matter how much you say "we won't allow terrorists to decide our election!", they are obviously going to try and do it anyway.
Is this election going to be provoked in the worst possible way into being a referendum on Iraq? How does Howard get himself out of this one?
Wait...he's got an out. Remember how he said he'd pull out of Iraq if Iraq asked us to? And isn't his best buddy the President of the United States of America? So can't he get his mate to "encourage" Iraq ask us to have our military involvement in their country reduced to humanitarian involvement under the UN (remember that thing?)? Might just save a few lives.
And while I'm at it, instead of getting goddamn fridge magnets I'd really like some reassurance that the intelligence agencies are up to doing their job, that underlings aren't too scared to pass information up that might conflict with what the Prime Minister's telling the people, that public servants aren't frightened to come out and raise doubts and expose errors just because of what happens to the Wilkies, Keeltys, Scraftons.
That's all. I've got to go worry about something else--Harley's got some kind of gastro; his first, so excuse me if things get quiet around here. See you soon, I'm sure!
ps: I'm sorry about the problems with comments. I have no idea what's going on, it's a bit now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, isn't it.
Oh-oh, here she comes.
update: Ouch. In introducing a guest post by Darryl Rosin, the Australian Greens' Candidate for Griffith in Queensland, Tim at surfdom mentions how the One Nation party got treated worse than how the Greens are being treated now. And here I am guilty of ridiculing Pauline Hanson at the first opportunity. I guess the difference is that One Nation's ideas were far wackier than those of the Greens, in my opinion anyway, and therefore deserved the criticism and the ridicule, if not the vitriol.
Such is the life of a single mum that it takes me til Wednesday to get to read the Saturday papers. Still, this story, called "Dubya delivers, putting PM first among equals", by Greg Sheridan in the Weekend Australian is worth returning to.
Essentially he's saying George Bush did John Howard a favour in praising him at the American presidential convention, but that he didn't really do it out of appreciation of Howard's foreign policy, but rather because it works for him (Bush):
"Bush and his speechwriters have decided that Australia's reputation is so high it helps Bush politically to be associated with it.
...
Australia enjoys a standing in the US among Republicans and Democrats it has never enjoyed before.
This is an enormous national asset.
But right now it has also delivered a real political dividend for Howard.
Moved right along from animals, now the Coalition's getting fruity:
"They are watermelons many of them - green on the outside and very, very, very red on the inside."
John Anderson, Nationals leader, on the Greens.
Senator Brown said the Greens were more like avocados - green on the inside and outside.
Just to change the subject, had to have a laugh at disgraced businessman Rodney Adler's expense at the weekend. He granted Richard Zachariah at the Sunday Tele an "exclusive" (or so it said in the print edition) to air some dirty laundry of his, a little dispute he's having with North Bondi Surf Life Saving Club over $20 or $50 depending on who you believe. Apparently some "derogatory remarks" about him were made.
"He (Mr Wright) asked me if I was having financial difficulties. The bill was $20. Who is he to ask me about financial problems?" Mr Adler said, adding, "I had moved houses a couple of times and never received the bill." The increasingly reclusive businessman told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday: "I have been trying to lead a peaceful life. I have a criminal case coming up in February (related to the collapse of insurer HIH) and I don't need the profile. Your readers would blame me for the collapse of HIH, yet I was one of 10 non-executive directors. The one person they have heard of is me."
God, the more you read about it, the worse it gets. Those poor people.
What I find particularly chilling is how the terrorists built the building itself into the weapon:
Security forces alleged the attack had been meticulously planned days before pupils returned to school on Wednesday after the summer break.
"We found a large amount of explosives and mines and their number says that this attack was planned in advance," the top local security official for the southern Russian region, Valery Andreyev, said.
"The armaments were hidden on the school grounds."
Another official said the militants has posed as builders in July, and snuck in bombs, mines, rocket launchers along with other weapons disguised as construction material.
Only a psychopath could look into a child's terrified eyes and feel nothing. These murderers are obviously psychopaths. It strikes me that where our armies would surely deliberately screen out applicants who score high on measures of psychopathology, terrorist recruiters probably deliberately screen them in. Wouldn't surprise me at all.
by the way In the post below, commenter Parallel asks if I "see this [Ruddock's comments] as "exploiting" the tragedy merely because you don't like the speakers". It's true I've been wondering whether perhaps I could be accused of opportunistically polilticising the situation myself, by referring to it on a blog that's obviously anti-Liberal.
But I reckon I would've said the same thing if a Labor (or other) minister had come out with that. Regular readers know that I disapprove of Howard but that I don't automatically support Labor either. I have criticised Labor on this blog a number of times (for instance just below, in the post about Latham on Sunrise, where I said Labor should bring out their policies already).
Parallel asks, "Should Mark Latham mention Iraqi casualties in the course of criticising Howard's foreign policy, is that "exploiting" them?" the difference is our country's direct involvement in that conflict (ie Howard's foreign policy). Surely that makes it a legitimate topic.
This tragedy wasn't about us or our election. It's not an opportunity for tacking "...and that's why you should vote Liberal" onto it.
Very poor taste, Philip Ruddock. And the PM only compounds the error:
"I think that is a completely unreasonable comment to make on what Mr Ruddock has said," [Howard] said. "He quite rightly asserts that by reference to particular events that we live in a very difficult international environment and that our credentials on fighting terrorism and on national security are stronger and superior to those of the Labor Party."
Mark Latham's performance on Sunrise just now wasn't bad at all. Here were his key phrases (transcript up later):
do it the Australian way
work hard and have a chance in life
advancing a fair and better country
frontline services for the benefit of the people
- to improve health and education
- to keep the economy in surplus through lean and efficient government
-lots of new initiatives
- to use the fact that there would be both Federal and State Labor Governments to work together with the States
- not to increase the GST
- there'd be no change in negative gearing rules
- to reverse the Government's 25% increase in HECS
- to abolish full fee places
- to increase resources to universities
Via counterspin, this:
"I have thrown a grenade but it is only the first week of the campaign. John Howard still has time to show true leadership."
--Russell Galt.
The Australian goes a step further, quoting an unnamed advertising source that suggests the Liberal campaign would turn Latham into "a negative brand proposition. "There will be a (mnemonic) device that they are going to attach to Latham," the source said.
i'm wondering how I'll feel if Howard doesn't lose. Will I still feel like blogging? I might just be rendered speechless.
elsewhere: Rob's doing his best to blog despite technical difficulties so could someone who knows about such things please get over there and give him a hand. All those codes are making my eyes water.
Don't miss the Backpages Election 04 Gaffe Award for all that's going on in the animal world.
"I fell over today," my friend says and I laugh. "Fell on my face. I was walking in Chinatown with my cousin and I tripped over a chair. You know--glasses flying, bruised arms and legs, everything. Yeah, it was pretty embarrassing." We laugh. Then she says,
"And I had a car accident today, too. I was reversing out of the garage and I ran into the fence."
I tell her it’s the second accident I’ve been told about today. This morning, another friend’s wife was knocked off her motorbike. Then I realise it’s actually the third motor accident I’ve been told of today. My neighbor who stopped by this afternoon to invite me to Bible fellowship told me that he’d been in a head-on smash recently and had walked away without a scratch.
"I’m just so tired lately," my friend says. "I’ve been doing all these double shifts." She works in respite, with disabled children. They’ve had a lot of funding cuts and staff cuts, and as a result all the staff are doing these crazy stretches of double shifts.
She says, "And a boy attacked me today, Gianna, and another boy ran away. Yeah. The younger one, the one who ran away, he was missing for about an hour until they found him in the park where luckily a picnicking family had found him. Yeah. He just walked off down the road. We had to call Emergency."
This happened yesterday in Sydney's West. The boy took off while she was cooking the children’s lunch. Apparently he has done it many times before. I become angry at the Department. "I mean, how can you be expected to watch them all as well as cook their lunch, for god’s sake? You can't be in two places at once.”
"Well, that's the thing."
"Were both these boys autistic?"
"Yeah."
"Jesus. And you know, you would’ve been the one who was blamed if something had happened. And what happened with the boy who attacked you?"
"He scratched me right across the chest. Well, he didn’t mean to hurt me. He just got overexcited. Sometimes these kids, they get so agitated, you know? Agitated, but happy. They get so kind of wound up, they can accidentally hurt you. So this boy--he’s about fourteen, really tall, and you know, really strong--was kind of wrestling me, and I was trying to restrain him, this giant...I tell you Gianna, all my karate skills came in handy.”
"And I bet they’d want to keep all this hush-hush," I say, furious at the Government—Tony Abbott in particular--for cutting health funding.
My friend says, "Anyway, it’s a full moon today. Maybe that’s got something to do with it."
"And it’s a blue moon." I say. "They're meant to be good for lovers," I add. While I’m out the back talking to her on the portable phone I suddenly become aware of some kind of electronic melody coming from about a hundred metres away, down the back of the house towards the creek. I’m thinking it’s someone across the valley playing with a synthesiser until I realise it’s frogs doing these harmonies.
"That reminds me," I say to my friend, "I had a visit from the devout Christian up the road this afternoon. He came to tell me about the Lord Jesus." He's a big man, a professional fisherman by trade, and would be handsome except for his one black front tooth. He and his wife, knowing I’m a single mother, are determined to fix me up with a good husband. In the past they've tried to engineer a meeting with a local widower who lost his wife and children in a car accident. Now my neighbor mentioned this man again. "He’s embraced the Lord," he said with satisfaction.
All the while the messenger of the Lord was in my living room, the baby grinned and drooled and jumped up and down with pleasure as I held him, and I was reminded of his reaction to Clara, who also happened to be a devout Christian.
"He likes me," my neighbor said. "Babies can tell." I didn't tell him the baby likes all men; those deep-voiced faces with the silver or white or red hair on their heads and sometimes their chins as well.
I told my neighbor I didn’t really get into religion. I said I had more of a Zen kind of philosophy, where you might say everything is divine, and you don’t have to do anything about it either.
The man snapped his fingers. "Ah, but you can’t be forgiven until you take Jesus as your Lord. Don’t you want to be forgiven?"
I told him I didn't think I needed to be forgiven for anything at the moment actually. I felt like I had disappointed him so I agreed to his request that I read the Bible, because I’ve never actually read it. I said I would be happy to read it as a piece of literature. He said he’d bring me one and that I should start at Matthew.
"Can’t I just start at the beginning," I said. He said that was the beginning. I said then why did he have to tell me to start there.
"It’s the start of the Second Testament," he said. "You know how there’s two Testaments?"-–here he smiled indulgently as if I was a bit of a fool-—"one, written four hundred years before Christ, and then one written after the Lord has died and gone to Heaven." He made a movement with his hand as if someone was swimming towards the ceiling.
Now, listening to the frogs, I tell my friend who got attacked, crashed her car, fell over and lost a boy today, that there's one thing about these people that always fascinates me: how they give off this amazing positive energy, this radiance borne of their absolute certainty.
Anyway, I'm thinking maybe I’ll go along to the fellowship after all, just out of curiosity. Go along and be a spy in the house of certainty. Could be interesting.
Six months. May start to cling. Turns to sounds. Chuckles. Babbles. Watches adults across the room. Watches hands. Objects put into mouth. Starting to find feet and hands interesting. Putting feet and toys in mouth. Plays with toes.
Check...check...check...
Based on the results of internal sanctuary polling--a sample of one, undecided, older voter in a marginal seat (my mum)--I think John Howard's in trouble, but I don't think Mark Latham is necessarily a shoo-in as a result.
By way of background, my mother (who along with me is the only member of our family who has become a citizen and can vote) is basically centrist these days; does not automatically vote a certain way, but makes considered choices based on a government's performance.
She said she thought Howard's dishonest behavior was a schweinerei (German word for absolute disgrace, but involves pigs). She thought he was an opportunist who said whatever he needed to to get his way at the time, without fully considering whether what he was saying was actually true. She said she particularly disapproves of the way he always claims he "didn't know" or "wasn't told" something, saying it is akin to a boss blaming his staff whenever something goes wrong.
But she said wasn't sure about Latham either as he is "too young". On probing she clarified this to be "too inexperienced". However, she said she will reserve judgment til she gets a look at his policies. Still, she reckons she probably won't vote for either of them, and will likely go Green. I said, what about the perception that the Greens are too radical and extreme, and she said, at least as far as the environment goes, "you can't get radical enough".
So my advice to Latham is to avoid talking about generational change as this puts the spotlight on his relative inexperience, instead talk up the experience and credentials of his team. And to get his team to, at every opportunity, express confidence in the team leader and in the other members of the team. And to keep the focus on honesty and integrity. And to bring out his policies post haste!
Oh yeah--I forgot to ask her about Iraq/troops home by Xmas, so will update once I have.
ps: I thought Howard's excitement last night at having "uncovered the first Latham lie" in relation to pay-roll tax sounded desperate and kind of came across like a kid saying "nyer, nyer, I know you are but what am I?" And I thought Latham very convincingly neutralised it. But it remains to be seen what others think.
John Howard gets a flogging in Saturday's online edition of The International Herald Tribune.
Tim Blair today links to a Herald op-ed piece by another right-wing blogger and Liberal Party member, Alan Anderson, which contains this bizarre statement:
While Howard's honesty at a superficial level is under fire, voters still trust that his fundamental convictions are solid.
Ah...that's better. The sun's shining, the baby's sleeping, the coffee's percolating, the Sunday papers are spread out on the deck...but I'm a bit confused by the headline on the Sun-Herald frontpage:
Our best ever. Hockey heroes break hoodoo and gold record
Oh, for god's sake, stop playing these ridiculous games and just tell us when it's going to bloody well happen! What's he waiting for, a written invitation?
update: Sorry...I'm a bit cranky this morning because we had a thunderstorm and a blackout last night and I had no candles and I couldn't heat the baby's milk and he wouldn't have it cold and so we were up all night and I had singularly the worst night I've had since he was born. And I'm just OVER our Prime Minister's gormless dithering about the election and I just want him to BRING IT ON. That's all.
Blogs, that is. Reader Susan is doing an MA on mothers who blog so if you're a blogging mum you might like to help her out by completing her survey.
Tim was wondering the other day about the implications of Australia's latest purchase of weapons of middling destruction. Personally, I agree with surfdom commenter tim g, who said:
It's just common sense, really. If your foreign policy results in swelling the ranks of your existing enemies, and creating whole new enemies, you had better start beefing up your defence.
Watcing John Howard on the TV news last night as he wearily stepped down off his plane, he looked so dejected, so clearly harassed by all the bad publicity, that I almost felt sorry for him. Until I remembered how, in the leadup to the last election, he had blatantly demonised asylum seekers by repeating the claim they threw their kids into the water, a claim we all now know he had been told simply wasn't true. And I remember very distinctly how he said, with a sneer, "I don't want people like that coming into this country". What is even worse than his deceiving the Australian public is that he has not seen fit to apologise to those asylum seekers in the years since. Perhaps that would be the only way he could redeem himself now, if he were to come out and publicly apologise to them. But I know he's just too gutless to do so.
Sorry, John. We don't want people like you running this country.
I've been flicking through some ancient scrapbooks and, in one from about 1988, came across this clipping I had pasted in (but didn't note the source--I think it was probably the Herald) which still makes me smile:
BATON ROUGE (Louisiana), Monday: Jimmy Swaggart, defrocked but defiant, returned to the pulpit yesterday and sought to save his troubled ministry by unleashing the talent that once had made him and his operation the envy of television evangelism.
For more than two hours, the golden-haired preacher in the sharp black suit wept, shouted scripture, sang, danced, embraced cripples, grovelled on his knees, played piano, wept, hugged his weeping wife and told in whispers of dark, prophetic dreams and desperate, late-night conversations with the Lord.
He also asked for money more than once but on this, his triumphal return... [clipping ends]
Men who want to have sex with you do not care about your baby, though they might pretend to. I made this observation yesterday when the man who cleans my roof gutters came around.
He cleaned the leaves off the roof and then, it being an unseasonally hot day, he sat on the deck and drank the glass of cider I offered him. I put the baby in the cot to sleep and came and joined him. We sat chatting. He’d been around once before, when the baby was only weeks old, and I hadn’t taken any notice of him, other than to note that he was a bit of a motormouth. It emerged he had grown up in Sydney near me and that we had certain things in common based on that. We talked about the pubs we used to go to in our youth, the bands that used to play there, the beaches. After a little while, he got a joint out of his shirt pocket.
"Mind if I...?" he said.
"No, but hang on," I said. I got up and shut the sliding door, locking the cat inside. It sat glowering at me, upset because half an hour earlier, I had consfiscated a small marsupial it had brought in—something between a rat and a bandicoot. I'd carefully scooped up the creature in a dustpan and set it down on a rock at the edge of the garden, where it remained, blinking, breathing in great heaving shudders. I wondered if it was mortally wounded. I saw it had a bloodied claw and that its fur was matted into several spikes around what must have been deep puncture wounds. I'd been about to call WIRES when the stomping of the roof cleaner's boots up the drive shook it out of its frightened stupor and it disappeared. Now the cat sat sulking, watching the roof cleaner blow his smoke across the deck.
The sun and the cider conspired to make me feel languid so I didn't care that the roof cleaner somehow managed to steer the conversation around to sex. I looked at his red hair and his muscular, hairy legs and decided I wasn't attracted to him. Which was lucky, because he then told me his wife works up at the local shops. “Oh, you’re married,” I said, unable to disguise the relief in my voice. The roof cleaner made a face. Then told me he had another female acquaintance down in ___ Bay with whom he sometimes had “unusual conversations”, though “nothing ever happened”. It was an erotic friendship, he explained. He asked if I would be shocked if he told me something.
"Nothing shocks me," I announced with some pride.
"Because I want to tell you something, but you might get offended."
"Well, how will I know unless you tell me?" I said.
So he told me, in great detail, what he liked to do to a woman. As he spoke I reddened and laughed and looked around in case anyone was listening. I was glad I'd seen my elderly neighbors drive off earlier. I knew the roof cleaner was telling me this in the hope it would turn me on, but it didn’t have that effect. Instead, I got the giggles.
"I really hope you're not offended by me talking like this," he said.
I said that actually it was interesting, because this situation tested the truth of my claim to be unshockable. I said perhaps I was shockable after all. Or, I mused, perhaps it was not shock but an anticipation of the awkwardness that would exist between us in the future, now that he had spoken so openly about such intimacies. I said we would probably be embarrassed if I saw him in the street now, knowing what he had told me. But, I said, it didn't really bother me, because as I was a writer, I liked to hear people's stories, even the dirty ones. I told him he reminded me of an old friend of mine who never misses an opportunity to tell me all his stories. I said in my opinion, half of it was probably pure fantasy.
I teased him that he was like the pool guy in the movies, who goes around servicing all the bored housewives. He said he wasn't that good looking. I said, “What if it isn't about being the best looking guy, but about charm and personality?” I was just teasing really, though in retrospect, that probably came across as flirting. He looked pleased, and said, "I only do one pool, actually. And the owner's a guy."
"Haha, so you swing both ways," I said, cheeky, and laughed as he protested his innocence. I told him I had to go check on the baby. When I came back he again apologised for talking to me about these things, and again I said I didn't really care. "But," I said, "I do question your motivation in telling me." And when he looked guilty, I added, "That's probably just because I've got a psych degree." He said now he was worried. The words of a lecturer floated into my mind. Exhibitionism and voyeurism are two sides of the same coin. A flasher exposes himself in the hope that you will expose yourself to him in return. However, I had no intention of telling the roof cleaner any of my own stories.
"Tell me some of your fantasies," he said, on cue.
"Oh no, they'd bore you," I said.
"Why?"
"Because they're only ever about one person," I said.
"Oh," he said. "So you're carrying a flame for someone."
"I guess so," I said. We went inside.
“Please don’t ask me to leave just yet, I’m still a bit stoned,” he said. So I made us some coffee to pass the time. As I pottered around the kitchen he asked if I knew I was in my peak right now. I joked, "And what about you? Don’t men peak at fifteen or something? So does that mean you’re past it?"
He said he was forty-six. He said it's different when you get older; better. He said some things do change: for example, men in their forties no longer wake up with an erection. I said I was surprised and disappointed to hear that. I wonder if it’s true. Maybe it’s only true for him.
The baby woke and I got him and placed him on the floor where he played quietly. I excused myself to use the bathroom and when I came back I caught a bored look on the roof cleaner’s face as he watched my baby, but when he saw me he replaced it with a cartoonish grin. Men who want to have sex with you don’t care about your baby, though they may pretend to. It’s not as if the baby was a turn-off, which is what I would’ve thought. It was that the baby was inevitably competition for my attention and so was an obstacle between me and the roof cleaner's obvious hopes of seducing me.
I made myself busy making the baby’s dinner and the roof cleaner hovered, repeatedly apologising for intruding, until presently I agreed that perhaps it was time for him to go. At the door, he turned and said, "Hey, don't tell my wife about this, wilya?"
"I don't even know what she looks like," I assured him. I added, "Anyway, it's not as if we have crossed the line." Though I'm sure his wife would disagree.
He said, "We could," but I said firmly, "Ah, let’s not go there, yeah?"
I edged him towards the door.
"It's something to think about, anyway", he said. "If you know what I mean."
“You’re so the pool guy,” I laughed, shaking my head.
"I'll think about it later, that’s for sure," he grinned as he walked off.
"See you in six months, pool guy," I called. And then he was gone, leaving me to ponder the ethics of our little interlude.
When I let the cat out again this morning he promptly brought me a little corpse--the marsupial rat must have died of its injuries. I laid it in the garbage bin on a bed of leaves that the roof cleaner had placed there. “Sorry, mouse,” I said mournfully. The first creature my cats have killed in ten months of living in the bush, but still, I felt awful. The cat remains under house arrest.
The sad thing is, they don't seem to care. I don't get it.
and what's more: Deputy leader Peter Costello is worried about "national symbols fraying", but curiously enough he doesn't mention the increasingly damaged status of the office of Prime Minister, only that of the Governor-General. Got his priorities straight, huh.
Just been watching John Howard on the Today show. Apart from his whimpering that the Labor Party's ongoing focus on his record of misleading the public is nothing but "cheap personal attacks" and "slagging off" and "playing the man, not the ball", the PM gave a revealing response when anchor Steve Liebmann asked about his views on children in detention (paraphrased):
Howard: And I mean, if the mothers would agree to the community arrangements, the children wouldn't even be in detention!
Liebmann: So you're saying it's their fault.
Howard: No, I'm not saying it's their fault.
Another day, another balls-up for our PM. Ho-hum. My blog is starting to feel like an Australian version of McSweeney's "Daily reason to dispatch Bush".
I love how the PM tries to weasel his way out of facing up to his serial dishonesty by saying "let's just all move on":
"Let Labor fight the last war, in contrast we will talk about the future of our country," Mr Howard said. "Political parties that fight the last war are political parties that have no policies, no plans and no vision about the future of our country."
Mr Howard said when he came to power there were 35 federal electorates in Australia with double-digit unemployment, compared to four now, and real wages had risen by 13 per cent, compared to 2.9 per cent under Labor.
"We all remember the 17, 18, 19 per cent interest rates of the Keating and Hawke years..."
"One of the great triumphs of our foreign policy over the last eight and a half years...
I suppose Blix is lying too:
The United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix says he told the Prime Minister, John Howard, weeks before the Iraq war that he had serious doubts that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Dr Blix's account of a one-on-one meeting in his New York office on February 11 last year undermines Mr Howard's repeated claim, made again yesterday, that "everybody" believed Iraq had such weapons before the military action.
"I am confident that, far from saying to Mr Howard that there were WMDs in Iraq, I conveyed to him that we were not impressed by the 'evidence' presented to this effect," Dr Blix said in an email sent last week. "Regrettably, there were few at that time who cared to examine evidence about Iraq with a critical mind."
Immediately after the meeting, Mr Howard declined to inform reporters travelling with him about what had transpired.
"I don't think it's helpful at this stage for me to be trying to put some particular interpretation on the discussion I had," he said at the time.
Popped over to Tim Blair's spleenville residence yesterday and, curiously finding absolutely nothing regarding the latest developments in Australian politics, left a fairly harmless comment on the top post on the blog asking, "nothing about Howard Overboard, Tim?". See, Tim's in the US travelling and, important Australian journo that he is, he's covering the crucial topic of bars in New Mexico. Anyway, this morning I find that Ms Harris has banned my IP address:
I also banned her IP, because if she's going to be childish, she can do it someplace else.
Just to repeat: if anyone here has some beef with some political figure or point, kindly insert that beef into the PROPER POST'S COMMENT THREAD. You all DO know how to scroll, don't you?
Posted by: Andrea Harris at August 18, 2004 at 01:34 AM
Mr Howard said he was satisfied now that children were not thrown overboard..."But I do know that the belief at the time was that it had happened. We were told that and that is why I made the claim."
[John Howard] said it would not make sense for the election to be held the Saturday before American voters go to the polls.
I’m worried I’m going to end up like this waiting, seething, blooming woman of Dave Eggers'. Still, I love his bite-size short-short stories which he wrote for the Guardian newspaper. “Short-short-stories” just sounds like vignettes to me. But it does seem like a good way to get rid of all those plotless shreds you've written, all those great opening lines, all that junk you keep in a suitcase in the hope it will spontaneously organise itself into the Great Australian Novel by the time you next look....yep, sounds like my kind of form. I always like that quote attributed, I think, to William Faulkner where he says in writing, you have to 'kill your darlings'. Maybe the short-short is your chance to resurrect them?
(Via Meredith.)
I’ve never much been into the genre of true crime but I like Helen Garner and I liked her new book Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The book is journalistic and heavily researched, but from the beginning Garner is very open about her subjectivity. We know Garner is biased towards the Cinque family, we know she’s instinctively revulsed by the killer, Anu Singh. She tells us, and we’re free to judge her feelings against the facts.
I find it fascinating how Garner doesn’t give any oxygen to Singh, who thrived on creating drama. Singh looms malevolently in the background, the protagonist of the whole drama kept forcibly in the wings by Garner, while the victim, Joe Cinque, and his family, take centre stage. Singh’s co-accused Madhavi Rao, who was acquitted of charges, has a bigger role than does Singh in the book, but she too remains an enigma because we can’t get around the fact that she did nothing. Garner observes with horror that in our culture, a bystander is not legally required to intervene to save a person’s life. We are confronted by the fact that sometimes, for all its rational perfection, the law is inadequate. There’s a sense that this extinguishing of Singh’s celebrity (in the book) is Garner’s punishment in lieu of the lengthy prison term she didn’t get. It feels like justice for the Cinques and for society because Singh got off so lightly for the “manslaughter” of Joe Cinque.
Garner isn’t the first person to write the non-fiction novel but it’s a form that’s so suited to our times. Our relentless fascination with other people’s lives, with other people’s truths, is elsewhere expressed as reality TV and perhaps even in a way, by personal blogging (‘Little Brother’, maybe?) The popularity of non-fiction has been frequently written about (see also 'the death of the novel', etc, or look at how Norma Khouri is charged with packaging her fiction as fact in order to sell more copies).
Funny thing is, in the process of writing this book, Garner becomes a character in the story. It reminds me of those physics experiments which show that the presence of an observer can alter the way a particle behaves. Talk about exploding the myth of objectivity. I really like how Garner threads in the little details about her own journey within the story. But even such personal reportage has its own subtle subjectivity. For instance, in some scenes, Garner is very specific about another person’s tone of voice (such as the taxi driver) but doesn’t give any direction about her own, leading to ambiguity (did she say that in perhaps a kind tone, or in an icy, sarcastic one?). Not that it’s important--she’s only a minor character, isn’t she? Ultimately she’s the fly-on-the-wall, the ‘reasonable observer‘ making sense of it for us.
So what comes after the anti-missile missile? The anti-anti-missile missile?
OK, I'm over feeling as if blogging, at least the kind that I do, is just too narcissistic for words. Once more with feeling...
*
We've had a few of those weeks where everything changes, just goes up a notch. Part of it has to do with the fact that I had to wean Harley fairly early, at around five-and-a-half months. Wean him onto the bottle, I mean. There was just suddenly no more milk. I hate the expression 'the milk dried up' because it makes me feel like an old heifer. But that's essentially what happened, I guess. I had a sudden urge to buy formula, he had one last frustrating breastfeed and then we stopped completely.
There's mixed emotions. It's another one of those wistful separations a mother has from her child, because breastfeeding is surely one of the most enjoyable things in life. Now that it's ended, I feel we're both a little lost at mealtimes. The bottle is so inanimate, mechanical, hard.
But on the other hand, there's a few advantages. As my sister moaned the other day, breastfeeding is a prison. Now, or in the future potentially, Harley could be babysat while I had a night out. A date, even (fancy that!).
Harley had lost a bit of weight in my final few weeks of breastfeeding too, so it's nice to see the millilitres going down in a bottle. I also quite like the ritual of preparing bottles, the whole rigmarole that goes with it. I daydream a lot while doing it.
I've encountered a little resistance from my parents, who have their own views on things. The expression 'deadset against' springs to mind. My mother runs little campaigns about things. Phone calls to discuss it further. Emailed transcripts of pertinent radio programs. She acts as though giving formula is like giving junk-food, like Coke in a bottle or something. It's not exactly clear what her idea of an alternative is, though. She's in favour of breastmilk, but as I've got no milk, we're at a bit of an impasse.
Apart from all this, things have been manic as Harley is suddenly so much more aware (and adorable!) than before. He's more and more fun to play with. But the housekeeping part of the job seems a bit extreme all of a sudden. I'm basically moving all day long and by the early evening I can't sit down or I can't get up again. Lately I've caught myself thinking, god, how come nobody told me it was going to be this hard? but of course everyone did and I'm still loving it, so it's OK. Hard, but OK.
What I don't get is how these controversies even get this far these days ("Former governor hits paydirt"). You'd think in this era of spin and image management, that at the first murmur of such a possible payment out of the Premier, Richard Butler would've gallantly (and loudly) declined accepting it. I mean, what do you want, a huge PR kerfuffle where large segments of the population end up hating you for appearing greedy and corrupt, or go out looking halfway decent? OK, it's $650,000, that's a lot of money; but that just makes it even worse, because of whose money it is. It'd be different if he could honestly say he deserved it, though from the sound of things, it's nothing to do with merit anyway:
A $650,000 'golden handshake' extracted by Richard Butler in return for his resignation as Governor of Tasmania sparked outrage yesterday.
Relief at his departure after just 10 months in the job changed to anger when Premier Paul Lennon revealed he had offered the additional payment on top of Mr Butler's $370,000 income.
It was to compensate Mr Butler, who Mr Lennon described as the victim of "gossip and innuendo surrounding alleged breaches of protocol, rudeness and arrogance".
No, I haven't been murdered by a neighbour, thanks for asking. I've just given myself some time off blogging lately because we've been really busy (playgroups and such) and in the downtimes I've been trying to catch up on reading--novels--for a change. Haven't been near a news site or paper all week so wouldn't have a clue what is going down out in Howardland (has he committed to a date???), but as Harley is currently down at the lake with his father and both sets of grandparents, I am going to indulge and read the Saturday papers now...And hopefully get back into blogging soonish.
Sometimes when I blog, I write something that later embarrasses me. Sometimes I delete such posts, other times I just wait for them to become consigned to the scrapheap of archives. But thinking about the idea of truthful blogging lately makes me want to reframe certain things I've said.
One such occasion was when I recently wrote all that junk about preferring motherhood to work etc. Even as I was writing it it embarrassed me but I couldn't help myself posting it, as though some mischievous part of me just needs to be outrageous sometimes. Anyway, it didn't ring true to me because there's one small detail that I overlooked while awash with hormones: oops, I do have a career. I write; it's supposed to feed me and Harley one day. And I haven't given it up at all. The truth is, I'm doing more of it now. But in my eagerness to put some distance between now and the succession of dreary office jobs of recent times, I lost sight of the bigger picture.
I think what I was probably trying to say the other week was just something vague about being happy to be no longer stuck in an office cubicle in a high-rise in the city, combined with the thought that having a kid is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. (Mind you, it's only lately that the enormity of the job of child-rearing has sunk in. I have to show him the world. It's a big deal.)
Of course, all this vagueness and flipflopping on my part will make it quite hard for the Righties to generalise to all liberal feminist women everywhere.
What a great story the whole thing is though. I bet the rights to The Norma Khouri Story have already been auctioned off. Helen Garner could write it. Anyway, I thought the Malcolm Knox and Caroline Overington article at the weekend was quite savage in places:
Her most recent communication with the Herald was a voicemail message on Monday containing incoherent screams and moans of self-hate, calling herself such a loser. Her friends and even her opponents, such as al-Sabbagh, pity her as a disturbed and confused individual who has been breaking under the stress of maintaining her lies in public.
Robert Hill being grilled for draft dodging...John Howard and Alexander Downer being pelted with marshmallows. What can you do but laugh and hope for more of the same?
Except it's not really funny.
BRIAN DEEGAN: My brother was called up for Vietnam when a lot of innocent young Australians went to Vietnam because the Liberal Party decided they should go to Vietnam and fight an unjustified war … where were the sons of the Liberals? Robert Hill said this morning that he didn’t go to Vietnam – he got a deferral from Vietnam. Well, you know, on what basis? And why did he never put his hand up? Why was it that Alexander Downer, who has caused so much grief around this … in international affairs and for this nation … I mean, did he ever go to war? I mean, if people went to war for themselves and had firsthand knowledge of the horrors of war, I think they might be just a little bit more reluctant to cause a war.
I have a few days off to have a social life and as punishment, my computer chucks a wet one and refuses to cooperate properly. So blogging and reading blogs will be a bit random til I get it fixed. Meanwhile, please talk amongst yourselves. Here's something I've been thinking about lately. How do people think e-commerce is going out in the real world? I'm a dedicated online shopper myself. Here's some of the sites I've used that have been good (OK, I admit at some I've only pressed my nose against the glass):
booktopia.com.au gleebooks.com.au pumpkinpatch.com.au remo.com.au woolshack.com isubscribe.com.au epharmacy.com.au peters of kensington.com.au victoria's secret.com and amazon.com (natch)
Any readers want to recommend any others?
Thinking about this also makes me wonder why internet service to RARA (Rural and Regional Australia) is so crap. After all, we're the ones who most benefit from e-commerce, since we can't so easily get to brick'n'mortar shops. I'm particularly cut that that we only get dial-up internet out here. (Apparently the service providers are waiting til they get enough enquiries about it so it's worth registering your disapproval with them.)
If e-commerce really wanted to thrive then it should focus a lot more on supply chain management to remote(r) areas. So far I've mainly had delivery from Aussie Post and it's been fine, but there's room for other delivery channels, like how wishlist.com.au lets you pick stuff up from service stations (in the true sense of the word).
Anyway, more once we get fired up again.
"Scandal: Latham admits smoking pot". From the way this was just reported on the evening news, I wouldn't be surprised to see it getting blown right out of proportion. The Seven reporter said something like, "[Latham] talks about values and reading to kids, but has admitted to taking illicit drugs!" and went on to explain that "his position is different from Clinton's because Latham did the drawback". ("The drawback"? Geez, television sets may be square but do the reporters have to be?)
So Latham once smoked pot and inhaled. Newsflash! The Prime Minister probably enjoys a beer. Meaning he drinks a drug! Shock, horror!!
related:
I agree with John Quiggin.
A strange thing happened the other week.
(warning: long post follows)
There's only one bus a week where I live. It's actually the daily schoolbus--one of those old-fashioned yellow ones with metal seats--but it does one special "shopping trip" every Thursday for those of us poor suckers who don't have a car. It goes around all the beaches and then into the main town half an hour away, then in the afternoon it comes back. We sometimes take it to town, but usually just get it down to my parents place about five minutes away up on the main road, as it's too far to walk.
There's half a dozen regulars: me and the baby, a bunch of old ladies going into town to do their weekly grocery shopping, and a baby-faced man who could be in his twenties or thirties, it's impossible to tell. The bus driver, who is also the schoolbus driver, talks your ear off if you let him, no doubt grateful for an audience over five years old.
It's always the same. The bus picks us up outside our house and I sit somewhere halfway up, behind the old ladies, and eavesdrop. The young bloke gets on at the shops and the driver always says to him, “Where to?” and the boy always says, “There and back.” As he went past me last week curiosity got the better of me and I said, “So, you don’t have a car then either?” and he grimaced and said, “Lost my licence.” He always sits up the back, in jeans and carrying a little backpack, wearing dark glasses, eating an apple.
The bus driver stops outside my parents' gate and they are waiting, standing beside a basket of lemons and a small chicken-shaped jug propping up a sign saying “10c each”. My parents reach into the bus to take my bag and help me down, because I’m wearing the baby in the pouch. Sometimes, if one of us has a cold, my dad greets us wearing a mask, the kind you'd wear if there was a nuclear war. Imagine him: knitted beanie, leather jacket, jeans tucked into gumboots, and a mask. I sense the old ladies peering out curiously. At least it's not summer: in summer he stomps around wearing full beekeeping overalls and the beekeeping hat with a veil; he’s very sensitive to flies. (I happen to think that’s why we fought so much when I stayed there in the summer; because he was all hot and bothered and cranky all the time.)
On the way home last time a very tall, thin old woman gets on at the turnoff to the lake and sits on the edge of the seat across from me. She's wearing a knitted cardigan with a belt over a long skirt and heavy woollen stockings and has a suitcase and small basket at her feet. She enquires about the baby, who is sleeping, and asks where we've been today so I explain about our Thursday ritual. I show her the purple pants I knitted him last year that my mother has helped me finally sew up. The old lady peers into my green plastic grocery bag full of eggs, limes and continental parsley, which my parents have given me. I tell her Harley loves to watch the geese and chickens and the ancient horse around at my parents’ place. She looks thoughtful and after a moment she says, “Do your parents keep bees?” And I say, “Yes, and it's the most beautiful honey you'll ever taste,” and she gives a sly smile and says, "Ah, well I know who you are then."
"Why?" I ask, surprised.
"No, that's all I'm going to say," she says and turns away. The busdriver glances at me in his mirror and grins. I feel my cheeks going pink, for some reason. The boy sitting up the back munches his apple, not listening, not caring, staring out at the fields racing past his window.
When we get to my street she asks where number eighteen is and the driver pulls up there. But she waves him on. "What number are you?" she asks. I tell her. She says she'll get off there, too. The driver and I look at each other and he shrugs. When we get there she gets off and the driver blocks my way and tells me in a stage voice he has to tell me something about the new timetable. He watches her walk off up the hill and says, "She's a bit--you know."
"Oh," I say. Does he think she is dangerous or something?
The next day I walk past number eighteen on the way to the shops. She is gardening. "Hello," she says. I ask her if she's just visiting here. It's strange that she didn't know where number eighteen was, and yet here she is gardening, not exactly something you'd do at a rental.
"Oh," she says. "I'm a volunteer; I do organic gardening." She gets up and comes over to look at the baby, who is sleeping in the stroller. "I'm from Adelaide. They wrote to tell me an elderly lady needed a hand with her garden, so here I am. I'm Clara," she says, offering a trembling hand.
There's someone more elderly than you? I think. I introduce myself. "What did you mean about the honey?" I ask.
She laughs and says, "Oh, I'm a friend of your neighbour Sally. She wrote to me and told me there was a young lady with a baby living nearby who had given her a jar of honey."
Oh, so that’s it. Sally’s husband recently brought around a spare bed they had, for my spare room, for visitors, and I gave her a jar of my mother’s honey as a thankyou.
I promise to drop in next time I'm passing, but I forget. The next day there's a knock at my door. It is Clara.
"I’ve come to take your washing down," she announces. I thank her, but tell her I'll do it later. This time Harley is awake, lying on the floor playing, and when he sees her he becomes very still at first, staring at her, then gets extremely excited, his fists thumping against his belly.
"That’s funny," I say. "He doesn't usually get this excited about strangers. It's like he knows you from somewhere."
“Ah.” She nods. "Babies recognise other babies, and the old." She turns to the baby. "Oh, yes, you've got a lot to tell me, haven’t you?" she smiles. After a while, she goes and after a while Harley calms down again.
The next day she turns up at my door again. She carries her little basket from which I can see knitting needles protruding. I make her a cup of tea and she educates me about organic gardening. When she leaves, she puts her arms around me and the baby for a long time. Normally I have a large self-space, but there's something very peculiar happening, I am finding myself very drawn to this lady; I don't know why.
I decide to go up to visit her the next day. Outside her house there’s a man and woman getting out of a four wheel drive with a couple of toddlers strapped inside.
I walk up. “Hi, I was just wondering if Clara is in today?” I say, assuming this must be the family of the elderly resident. “Who?” the woman says.
“Clara, the lady who’s helping with the gardening?”
“I think you’ve got the wrong house.”
“No: she was staying here, helping your elderly relative out.”
“No,” she shakes her head. “We’re the only ones here. We’ve just been away for the week.”
I point to the flower bed, where the fresh bulbs Clara had planted are poking skywards. “She was putting those in,” I say.
“I planted those last week,” the woman says, and frowns at her husband as though I am possibly dangerous. I am confused; maybe I got the house wrong. I could’ve sworn it was this house. I want to go ask Sally what the story is, but she's away for the school holidays.
When I get home, the lock on the back door comes off in my hands. The real estate agent says they’ll send someone to fix it, but in the meantime I sleep with my phone and a knife next to the bed.
Haven't seen Clara again since, though.
The Prime Minister today:
"Say that we were wrong, say that we were misguided, but don't accuse us of heavying the intelligence agencies," Mr Howard said. "We did not heavy the intelligence agencies, we never did, we respect their intelligence."
Alexander Downer flags second bite at cherry should the Liberals lose in September:
"I think there is a reasonable chance [the election] will be in September and October, that's obviously a possibility," Mr Downer said.
This is good. (Via Wired story We don't need no stinkin login, via Online Journalism Review.)
I feel for the Amish. Not only has George Bush accused them of lying, but scientists have just discovered a gene that is thought to be responsible for causing SIDS, and it's estimated about half the Amish population carries it. Life--not to mention God, and the President--is not fair.
The Australian had a color supplement this weekend celebrating its 40th anniversary. Apart from its "40 people of influence" which necessarily included both John Howard and Mark Latham, it also ran a story titled "Soothsayers" which featured two lengthy articles: one by the PM, and one from...Gough Whitlam? Well, I love Gough as much as the next lefty, but wouldn't it have been fairer to allow the current Opposition leader to counterspin Howard's little campaign piece, rather than printing the Whitlam article, written in 1974 and forecasting the decade to 1984?
Still, interesting to read some of Whitlam's predictions:
I believe that in 10 years we will have fully accepted our responsibilities to the deprived and weaker sections of the community and that the Aboriginal people will enjoy a new dignity and security. These assessments rest on the assumption that the major reforms undertaken by the present [Labor] government will be irreversible and that, even if the conservative parties are returned to government, there will be a continuing popular consensus in favour of progressive policies."
Guilt is something that Howard thinks Australia wallows in way too much. "Guilt about the Aborigines is one example. Now I totally agree that they have been appallingly treated in the past. But I didn't do that. I won't feel guilty about it. But because we feel guilty we have these nonsenses such as treaties. And it is nonsense. I say let's forget the past, start again, and just concentrate on making things better for the Aborigines."
It turns out it was no big deal after all. I guess I was taking it much too seriously. In the end, because of the massive storm that had rolled in from out of nowhere yesterday, we decided that the contact visit should take place at my house, because it's more hospitable than the house my dad almost finished building... So, Harley got to spend some quality time with his father and also met his two half-sisters, who were sweet little girls. My sister took me down to the boatshed cafe for the duration, where we had big cooked breakfasts and read the Sunday papers--in peace for once! now I get it!--and drank those famous "frothy coffees". It was lovely and cosy in this cafe on the water's edge, sitting at wooden bench tables and watching the lone rowboat flipping around out on the gray lake. The storm also blew in a few other recent seachangers who burst through the doors in rainslicked jackets and woollens, and as we all sat around chatting I felt again that strong sense of community that I never felt in Sydney.
The cafe hangs artwork by local artists and my sister embarrassed me by telling the owner that I paint and they harangued me to bring some paintings down. As I've mentioned before I love drawing, and think my nudes are okay, but I'm a terrible painter; every couple of years I buy a canvas and after admiring its blank beauty for a few weeks, ruin it with paint. I did one the other day and hid it in the spare room but my sister really liked it. Still, I may try taking the drawings down. You never know eh? They also had some windcheaters for sale, designed by a local company, but oddly they had no "house" teeshirt, so I thought I might try my hand at designing them one they can sell in the tourist seasons.
Anyway, back to just me and the kid now. And the storm still raging outside.
Harley's father is taking him out for the first time this weekend. At least they're not going far--my folks have kindly agreed to provide 'neutral' ground at their place. And my sister is up visiting for the weekend, which will be good for moral support. I'm dreading the separation anxiety (mine, that is).
Other firsts for Harley: he's now had his first solids--just rice cereal and banana (which he loves) and is beginning to crawl. And I gave him his first haircut the other day. In retrospect I guess that might have been a mistake. But hopefully it will grow back.
Here's a well-designed international blogger survey that I'd encourage other bloggers to go fill out in the interests of advancing blogology (via Kick & Scream).
Some Aussie blogs that have stumbled across me lately and that I reckon I'll enjoy reading too:
southern cross words;
and
from a LAN down under.
To be added to the blogroll when I get around to it one of these days.
I was amazed at the reaction to my idle musings about motherhood over the past few days. Next time I want an extra couple of thousand hits to my site I'll make sure I raise that subject again! I don't know that anything has really been resolved either way--actually I think everyone seems just as confused as me. Anyway, one reader sent a link to a site called save the males. Not sure what that's about. Perhaps they keep beaching themselves?
These Righties and their baldfaced lies:
"She even wishes she was married!"
Oh yeah? Where did I say that? That's right, I didn't say it, because it isn't true.
The other day John Howard bemoaned the fact that our society is getting more "voyeuristic", and yet lately we have been subjected to relentless scrutiny of the breakup of Mark Latham's first marriage and nobody really believes the PM has nothing to do with the dirt diggers, particularly since he has denied knowledge of it. That's an admission if ever there was one. But as Alan Ramsey suggests today, someone could just as easily turn the blowtorch on John Howard. I mean, who in Australia who has connections to either journos or pollies hasn't heard that rumour about which Ramsey hints, about the PM allegedly having a long-time mistress? (Not that it bears thinking about!) If that turns out to be true...well, family values my ass.
I think I was prompted to write the post below because I've been thanking my stars lately that everything went so well with the pregnancy and birth, and that things are generally going so well for us now. I do feel lucky, because a close friend miscarried recently, and some of my other friends in their late 30s are having trouble getting pregnant at all. And that's why I wish I'd had kids earlier--because yeah, I would like more and being 33 already, realistically, it may not happen. On reflection I do kind of regret saying that things I did in my 20s felt like a waste of time, because I think all of it--work, study, travel--makes me the person I am today. And maybe I'll be a better parent for it. Still, you can do all that stuff once the sprogs are at school, but you don't get much of a window for having babies. It's a vexing situation.
I also just want to clarify something: I don't at all regret having had a baby out of wedlock. Sorry to disappoint the Right. What I meant when I said "obviously I'd prefer to be in a relationship with someone I love next time" is not that solo parenting isn't wonderful, because it is. It's a lovely dynamic--just the two of you. Mind you, not everyone thinks so--I've encountered some stigma regarding being a single mum and co-sleeping, for example: The other day I was speaking to someone at Tresillian (government subsidised parenting centres) because I'd been having a few nights where I was getting groped every hour or so and I thought hmm, maybe I do need a bit of help with this 'sleeping through the night' bizzo. Anyway, the woman wanted to guilt me into coming the centre so she started hinting that perhaps we were co-sleeping to satisfy my own needs (oh sure, anything to get a man in my bed) and she said babies who co-sleep end up with separation anxiety. Bollocks. I've never read that in any of the books. Anyway, I did let her book me in for mid-September because I figure by that stage both me and Harley will be well and truly ready for our own space at night. But for now, I stand by my earlier position that this just feels comfortable, feels instinctively right, and I'm sure there's plenty of cultures where everybody does it and nobody ends up with separation anxiety.
Anyway, to get back to my point--obviously life is nicer when you're in love, and obviously it's a nice thing if you have a baby with someone you actually love. It's not rocket science, and it's not a sign of latent conservatism either.
Lastly on this subject, I mentioned to my friend who suffered the miscarriage (but who remains very stoic about the whole thing), that I'd put up a link to a site I came across recently, so here it is: chez miscarriage. Tagline: "who says infertility can't be funny?".
You know you're living in the country when the top item on the regional TV news channel is about a cafe in Yamba which is attracting tourists due to having a Balinese statue of a man with a very big dick out on the sidewalk. Even bumped news of Tony Abbott's cameo in Lismore today.
So we may be forced to endure a six month election campaign. Unbelievable.
I'm sure Anne Summers would hate me for saying so, but quitting work and having a baby was the best decision I've ever made. It's not that I don't want to work ever again; I will, of course. It's just that having a career doesn't seem nearly as important anymore. Some feminist I turned out to be...The funny thing is, I never even knew I wanted a baby until I found out I was pregnant. I never thought I'd be any good at it either, but--if I say so myself--I think I'm doing OK. And it's just such fun. Lately Harley seems to find me very amusing and often just bursts out laughing for no apparent reason. He laughs at the drop of a hat, literally.
I wish I'd done this in my twenties. All that partying, all those nightclubs, all those years at uni, all those years kissing ass working in offices, it seems like such a waste of time now. I mean, of course I had a lot of fun. But nothing compares to the feeling of contentment and fulfilment you get from wiping a baby's bum. God, I used to feel sorry for mothers. And now I dream about making more babies, despite how horrific ghastly um, difficult childbirth is. Though obviously I'd prefer to be in a relationship with someone I love next time! Anyway, who knows what the future holds. In the meantime, this is the life.
update: Just reading that again, it seems almost sacrilegious. I feel very guilty to hear myself say that although I'm supposed to want to have it all, I just don't--I'm happy just to have some of it. I get the urge to qualify and rationalise: it's just that I'm still in the honeymoon phase; I didn't expect to enjoy it this much (ask me again during the 'terrible twos', or whatever); I was never really suited to the corporate environment in the first place; I'd probably feel quite different if I had to leave a job I really loved (when you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose!). Then again, feminism was supposed to validate our choices, whatever they may be, wasn't it. Talk about conflicted eh!
update 2: Apparently I've been outed on a right-wing site as having betrayed my liberalism. But here's the inimitable Rob Schaap's take on it (pilfered from my comments thread):
That 'having it all' bollocks is one of the nastier impositions foisted on women in the last thirty years, I reckon. Another of those American dreams-cum-nightmares we've signed up to. You don't end up with it all at all, and, as you're invited to believe you could have had it all, you're then effectively invited to blame yourself. I remember Kath Hepburn passionately making this point near the end of her time. I submit it's part of the systemic legitimation campaign within which we live. You have total freedom and are therefore totally to blame, sorta thing. 'The market' only makes matters worse, as it has come to depend on inviting you to be unhappy with your habits, appearance, fitness, sexuality, parenthood, credentials, bodily bits, accoutrements and the terrible modesty of your ambitions. Dismal conclusion: our whole mode of political economy is about producing self-conscoiusness-unto-self-loathing and hopeless guilt. Else, how is it one can feel guilty about doing the best job in the world enjoyably and well? How else has it come to pass that one fifth of us are clinically depressed and a host of our young are topping themselves?
Forgive the obsession with our PM's rhetoric lately, but a lot of this stuff is just laughable.
"We've left behind a period of navel-gazing about our national identity. Australia has lifted its head up again."
"Australian society is not something to be constantly moulded and prodded by hyperactive politicians."
"We need a return to faith and the values which have made our country strong," he said. "The editorial writers may not understand it but I want to say to you more lives have been transformed by faith in Christ than by editorial writers."
"A fair and decent society also relies on some common values that bind us together – respect for social rules, a degree of tolerance and openness towards differing beliefs, recognition of personal responsibility."
"While our health system is not perfect, I often say that you are better off falling sick in Brisbane, rather than in Birmingham or the Bronx. We have struck a sensible balance – one that avoids the excessive government control of a system like that in the UK or one that lets too many people fall through the cracks like that in the US."
"Australians tend to be suspicious of politicians who preach too much."
John Howard today:
"We don't just automatically follow something that may be said by either the American or the British Government."
Well, I thought all the ducks were nicely lined up but apparently not. Though backpages does suggest we've just all been through a dummy run which makes a lot of sense. Anyway, good to see the PM admit he's wasting everyone's time:
"The best thing I can simply say is that when I am in a position to advise the governor-general about an election date I will, and I will naturally announce it...But until then everybody is wasting their time asking me. I haven't made up my mind and I don't really think there is much point in going further on the subject."
I think it's on. This talk today about 'acting on instinct' certainly clears the way for John Howard to announce that he's made a snap decision this weekend.
"In the end you go on instinct. I am by nature an instinctive politician on a lot of issues," he told Melbourne radio 3AW...Mr Howard also said he would be in Canberra this Sunday – potentially opening the way for a trip to Government House to call an election for August 7.
