Standing Up.
I spent most of my time in High School waiting to be tripped, spat on or otherwise abused, which happened a lot. I spent a LOT of time at work waiting to be yelled at, yelled about or corrected for nothing. You could say I know a little bit about bullies.
Someone I used to know is a bully. She thinks nothing of belittling, ridiculing or out and out attacking people who disagree with her. She surrounds herself with “Yes!” people, deleting anything that shows her as maybe not the wonderful person she thinks she is. Feeding on these compliments and applause she stands herself tall and feels she can do no wrong, ever. In the middle of this circle of people who think she’s amazing, she is always right in everything she does. She is quick to accuse others of being bullies.
Everyone can do wrong. Not a single person in this universe is a perfect human being. Everyone, at some point, handles something badly or says a stupid thing to someone or runs over the tie of the CEO. Things happen, it’s being willing to admit we messed up and to learn from those mistakes that lets us grow as people and become, hopefully, better.
A couple of days ago I posted a thing about the Weight Police. I had it in draft for a while, I ummed and ahed and reworked and changed and eventually decided this: This is my little place on the internets. If I want to post 40 pictures a day of my big toe, I can do that. If I want to say Danni Minogue looked better before surgery, I can say that. And if I want to say “I want treatment for my medical condition” I can do that.
I am not in any way a perfect person. I have been a bully. I have been a bitch. I have hurt people, and I have been thoughtless and careless with emotions. I am no better than anyone on this planet, but I am no worse either. I am tired of wondering if what I am going to say is going to upset someone who clearly doesn’t care about anyone but herself, so this bully who has stepped out of my life is not terribly missed. Because I just realised, I’ve been editing my plurks, tweets and blog to make sure I don’t incur her wrath.
And I don’t have to do that anymore.
If you’ll excuse me, I have 40 pictures of my big toe to take – gunna be a big post tomorrow!
We can all be friends
My friends and I don’t always agree on everything. Like, Matt thinks Batman is the most awesome thing ever, which is clearly wrong. Angela thinks sewing is boring, so she’s not right in the head. Julie claims pandas are the cutest things in the world, when it’s clearly frogs. Mark hates horses, so that’s nuts. Hell, Angie, Brian and Crystal are Mac People even. Eeesh. You see what I’m getting at here.
Within my “circle” of people I like to spend time with either online or real world there’s a whole range of political, religious and personal views. And yes, we generally all get along alright, though there’s the occasional shouty match which is soon forgotten. Or in Matt’s case remembered word for word and used against him later when he least expects it. Muahahahaha.
Thing is, we’re all capable of having our own opinions and thoughts and disagreements without it damaging or destroying the friendship. We’re adult enough to say (usually) “Hey, you’re wrong, and here’s why” without turning into a little personal drama.
Just some things happened today that threw into sharp relief the awesomeness of my mates, so to each and every one of you, with all your weird and crazy ideas, I send love and thanks for being able to hold a reasonable debate, discussion or out and out argument without letting our friendships crumble. Yes yes, even you mac people.
Things I’ve Found Today
I’m having yet another clear out, but this one is a LOT more ruthless than usual. Rather than just pulling out bits I can see that I don’t want, I’m actually digging through drawers, shelves and closets to really toss stuff I no longer need or want. I’m packing 56 litre bin bags full of stuff. Stuff stuff stuff, I have too much STUFF.
As a result, I have found some things I had forgotten I have, or had given up as lost a long time ago. Here’s a run down of the more interesting things:
- A bag of canvases in all sizes from when I was going to “paint every day”
- A UV toothbrush sanitiser I got in a mystery box from Zazzle.
- TWO long lost prescriptions I’ve had to go and get reissued. Bah.
- The manual for my sewing machine (HOORAY)
- A notebook I made with scrapbook paper in a hard cover from a dead book.
- Two small prints I bought in Kuranda, one of which I am keeping and the other I passed on to my brother to give his girlfriend.
- 5 framed photos I bought in Darwin.
- Quite a lot of random craft supplies.
I’ve chomped the bullet on my VHS collection. I hung onto them for a long time because they’re mostly obscure Tim Curry movies or British Comedy that were slow to come out on DVD. A quick net search reveals most of them are now out on DVD so I can toss the VHS copies. I’ve packed up some yarn to send to a charity knitters group also, mostly yarn I bought coz it’s pretty, but will never use. Which is actually most of it…
My wardrobe is empty of too small clothes, which was well overdue. It was becoming a pain to pull out a blouse and find it too small, pull out another one, too small…
I’m on a coffee break at the moment, but am about to haul out a bag of rubbish and open a new bag to start fresh. It’s a very nice feeling to drop bags of stuff off at the opshop or whereever. Someone else can use the stuff, and it’s not falling in a heap around me anymore.
Downhill, very fast.
One of my greatest memories of childhood is the great Billy Cart race. For you American people reading this, a billy cart is a soapbox racer. I think. You people don’t speak English proper.
Anyway, the house here is at the top of a hill, with a long driveway. A very hard left turn at the end of the drive takes you down a steep road, unmade, which runs on the downhill for a good kilometer at least. I don’t remember how old I was when this took place, probably around 6. My brother and a few of his friends had built billycarts, and they decided that a race starting at the house and ending at the bottom of the hill in the road was in order.
So basically, 4 or 5 ten year olds pushed off and rattled, rolled and wobbled down this road. They got up to great speeds, one of them came off the road and hit a telegraph pole with such force he was thrown out of the cart and into the fence. Good speed, that was called. The carts mostly consisted of seats from primary school chairs (any aussie knows exactly the plastic seat I mean), a couple of cross beams to stick the wheels to, a rope on the front beam for steering and a beam down the middle holding it all together. I’ve since heard that some people had brakes built in, but for my brother and his mates they braked by dropping their feet to the road and waiting to stop.
I was reminded about this on “Can We Help?” tonight, where a couple of blokes in a shed lamented that kids these days don’t ride carts anymore. It’s true, and it’s a shame. A good, active, creative outdoor activity that has fallen out of favour.
Now, I’m not saying kids should be allowed to ride carts down roads anymore, we knew there would be no traffic at the time is all. But there’s a million soft grassy slopes to ride.
I’d like to see a Billy cart revival – blokes in sheds building carts with their kids and taking them to a park or reserve to race them. Lots of nice outdoor fun! So if you know a kid, make em a cart.
Seventh
I don’t tend to look at the photos I took last year on Black Saturday. They pop up when I scroll picasa, or check my flickr feed. I’m going to share one with you now.
The photo there doesn’t begin to describe the feeling of watching Kinglake burn. The clenched gut knowing that people we love and care about were trapped up there, with no way of knowing if they were alive or dead.
Once the sun went down, the power went off and we sat in the loungroom, myself and my family, and listed to Jon Faine on the ABC – Jon Faine who normally we would hear in the mornings on weekdays was on air on a Saturday night. It was both comforting and scary. I checked and rechecked the CFA incident website on my pager, we went from ember attack warning to no warning to ember attack warning and I don’t know if any of us slept.
I didn’t attend memorials, and nor will I be watching the sugar loaded BS special reports on tonight. One of the strongest memories I have is watching a news team badger a man who’d just lost his entire family. They wanted tears, they got them and to this day I hold most of the media in contempt for their actions.
My love and thoughts are with everyone who is remembering their hell today, be it trying to get out through the fires, or losing loved ones.
Strathewan is being reborn, many places are. Let’s please now look ahead, help the towns recover, help the people recover and move into the future with hard lessons learned, but learned well.
Let it go, guy. Let it go.
At what point does a gentleman wake in the morning and decide that the only course of action with his balding head is to create a combover? Combovers are the great male delusion. The idea that if you plaster four lines of hair over the top of your head, no one can possibly notice that you’re balding. The fact that the back of your head remains hairless, and sometimes the points of the combover don’t quite reach the other side are lost on the gentleman carefully brillcreaming his hair into place.
I had the mixed hilarity and misfortune to be talking to a chap I knew outside on a breezy day. As he discussed his career options, his combover lifted in the wind, dancing like a tamed snake on top of his head before giving in to the product used to hold it in place and falling back. I am proud to say I didn’t laugh until the chap in question was well out of ear shot, but laugh I did. Hard. To this day if I think back on it.
In my 10 years of customer service, I have seen some epic combovers. I’ve also seen combforwards and comb ups (where two sides of longish hair are pulled up to meet at the middle of the head). Interesting thing about these combovers is that they were all spottable as just that. Not a single one looked like a natural head of hair.
I am far more a fan of either clipping the whole lot short, or maintaining what’s left with a neat cut rather than a combover or baldmullet. I know I know, to a man his hair is his youth and vitality, but honestly, guys. Seriously. If the thought of combing it over crosses your mind for even a moment, please have a lie down until reason prevails. You’ll be much more handsome if you’re less funnylookin’.
Completed Star
So remember the circle from yesterday? What do you mean you didn’t read this blog yesterday? Get out. OUT.
Those of you who DID read me yesterday may remember the yellow circle I claimed was a star. Well here’s the finished piece:
It’s considerably less tidy than the one by the original pattern lady, but it’s.. uh. .. homespun charm. Yeah. That’d be it.
Again, if you’d like to make one, you can find the pattern here.
Rainy Deliciousness
Mama and I went to Greensborough Plaza today in order to leap about at the Millers sale, because Millers sales are awesome. Came away with lots of goodness to wear – new with tags! This Savers girl doesn’t know how to feel about that… anywhoo, as we were paying, the lights flickered and thunder rolled. Then thunder rolled. Once we’d left the store, we noticed all the internal lights that weren’t in stores were off, and through the big skylight we saw heavy rain. Heavy, heavy rain. The storm didn’t last particularly long, but it hit with power, dumping vast amounts of wonderous wet stuff.
We stopped off to see Katie at her bauble stand and she said she could feel water hitting her, but figured she was just being paranoid. Apparently not, quite a lot of the plaza had incoming water issues.
Okay sure, there’s been issues. Someone in Eltham came home to find the contents of their garage, including a double deep freeze, floating down the road. Greensborough Plaza had some MAJOR issues themselves:
As well as multiple stores flooding, they had a cave in of the ceiling near the main street doors. Quite a few shops closed up till the waters were out, and the shops near this cave in were closed pretty much till that’s fixed I think.
In Diamond Creek, the supermarket was dealing with a rising tide of water coming in, and recovering from a power failure which left a few registers out of action. Again, more shops closed.
Pretty wild old day for weather. Came home to find my desk covered in water from an old roof leak, but we’ve only had 1 leak in the whole house, which is a record for us.
I still love Grover.
I went to the mall today to pick up some final giftings for people who need their giftings posted. The DVD I wanted for my mother was no where to be seen in JB, but as I poked around in the bargain bin (you must NEVER skip the bargain bin at JB HiFi. I got “To Kill a Mockingbird” for $2 once) I found a DVD we’ve had at work for a while and I pondered buying. Sesame Street Old School.
It’s volume 2, so covers 1974-1979 and oh my god I love it so much I could weep. I parked myself on my bed with my crochet hook and my little DVD player thing and watched the first two discs as I worked on a thing. This was preElmo people, how could it be bad?
I love Grover. Grover brings the sunshine. I just read a review on the DVD that stated it was grey and miserable and depressing. Uh. What? It’s certainly not the frantic rainbow of today, and there’s things that wouldn’t pass muster in the current paranoid climate but it’s far far from miserable. Some of my favourite bits are the bits like this:
I loved those as a kid, and I do now. I don’t know if Sesame Street still includes little snippets like that, but I hope they do. It’s simple but it’s interesting and educational.
Grover is still my favourite, but it’s a close call.
Eh.
Been longer than I intended. The nano stuff has ground to a halt, as has about everything else to be honest. I’m down.
I’ve talked to my doctor like a sane person should, and had my happy pill dose doubled but it’s done not as much as one would hope to help me pull out of this slump. I head home from work with the intention of crafting or writing till my boy wakes up on the other side of the world, and instead I nap, or sit here in front of the PC bouncing around the internet. It’s nice and brainless.
I’m working on getting out of the gloom, but it’s taking some big scary steps which I’d like to hide from for a long time. I am not a brave person actually, despite my big mouth and sometimes bigger personality. I’m a smartarse, but I’m not overly brave. Switching jobs is utterly and indescribably terrifying, but it HAS to be done.
I’m annoyed that my leave has to be reset in a new job too, because with Matt moving over next year I would have liked to had some time off to hang out and introduce him to Aussie things like meat pies and AFL football (not that I give a flying fig about sport, but he seems to enjoy it because he’s weird).
So yeah. I’m not in a happy place at the moment.