Just crapping on

Well miniFP and I visited the family on the weekend. And now we’re sick. That’s what you get.

It’s dusty up there…no it’s not some mining town, it’s the fact that dusting is apparently against their religion and I’ve tried to say nicely a number of times that this makes miniFP (and me) sick but to no avail, either two and two is not making four or the attitude is ’suck it up princess I don’t care for housework’. In stronger times he can go and it’s fine, but this time his lungs shut down almost immediately and he’s still recovering.

As for me, I made the mistake (at the birthday dinner of my youngest sister) of trying to start a conversation with my father, my dysfunctional in almost every conceivable way, my grossly unhealthy, continuously belching father with, to put it politely digestive and dental health issues, my alcoholic father with the halitosis that will one day, mark my words, kill someone; which went like this:

Me (normal voice) – so we went to see Transformers 2 this we…

Him (cutting me off, seedy voice) – the only thing I’M interested in about Transformers Two is Megan Fox.

Me…stunned silence, turns head, refuses to speak anymore, starts almost nuzzling my aunts hair to smell something else.

How DOES he manage to do that…you GIVE him the start of a perfectly harmless conversation in which he could ask your thoughts/engage with his grandson, and no, instead of playing the ball, he lobs in a pervy lecherous old hand grenade. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, even IF you thought people wanted to hear about it when you were younger, there comes a time in every man’s life when he must accept that no one, but no one, wants to hear about your erections – PARTICULARLY NOT YOUR DAUGHTERS.

Anyway, since mini FP is sick, I’ve been trying to work from home and one of my bosses appears to have the shits and seems to be being kind of an arsehole about it. He’s answering me in cold monosyllables, and for the rest is ignoring me with a pissed off air – this from the man who turns up late and does crosswords all day while whinging how much he has on his plate. That’s not easy for me to ignore when I’m already worried at being away from my sick child for any period of time, when the promised ‘conversation’ about me being able to drop back to three days work a week to AVOID having to take days off, and also to stay sane is continuing to be ignored and put off and I’m in fact WORKING on a sick/carer’s day, just working from home when I’d be within rights to just have that time off.

So (tangentially) last night I made a pie. And then there were the scraps of puff pastry. Humouring mini FP I made tiny nutella filled parcels – three each (yes, teaching him the rules of good nutrition is a ceaseless job). So we sat and we munched them with glasses of milk. When he was done he shook his head and said ‘Whoa, even my GRANDKIDS are gonna be hyper!’

I just loved that for some reason. Almost as good as his response to a friend who said ‘I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but what do two rights make?’ to which mini FP promptly responded ‘A  u-turn’.

And that’s me folks. Night. Off to read Harry Potter some more. Stopping at book five so I don’t hate movie 6 (care to take bets on whether I cave? It is after all two weeks til the movie is out and I’ll be finished this book before the weekend).

Oh dear – just caught this tiny snippet of The Simpsons: (Groundskeeper Willy in a snit): That’s the last time you’ll be slapping your Willy around…I QUIT’. Do you think it would go badly if I shouted that randomly at the next person who pissed me off?

What’s going on with everyone else?

P.S/ Is it the sign of a nerd that you desperately want your exam results to come out??

Tennis, discrimination and ‘beauty’ – I’m sure there’s nothing political about it!

Ok. Just go read this. I have no real comment to add except WELCOME TO REALITY SMH – women in sports? Treated badly. About time you noticed.

Also…can I just…let’s consider WHAT passes as beauty. Serena Williams is a resounding *no way* apparently cos her arms are arms built and trained to whack a ball and whack it hard, which surely comes in handy in tennis even for a woman.

I’m sure the shit levelled against this woman has *nothing* to do with her being black, a powerful athlete and unapologetic.

Let’s look at the other picture can we for a moment? The ‘beauty’ contrasted with ‘talent’. She’s what? Young, thin and white and that’s the best that can be said really. Also SHE doesn’t have arms that might be able to rip your precious pee-pee off! Therefore, ticking the boxes of bland, thin, young and white (and no overt markers of a nasty refusal to bow to feminine dictates even where they hold you back like, say strong and muscular arms on a woman) she can be designated as beautiful despite having a face that could only really be described as really, fairly fucking spectacularly BLAND.

I’m sorry, I don’t know the girl, and I don’t care to be drawn into judging women on their appearance and no, I am not saying she’s ugly…she’s fine. She’s just…you know…meh. She’s got a face. How nice for her. That’s about all you can say. I’m not suggesting she ought to have more, that she needs to stun me with her beauty in order to play tennis. But when those people who DO assert that sort of nonsense, also try to assert that “beauty” is an objective thing, I do take exception to WHAT is being called ‘beauty’ and then being set against what is apparently unacceptable to beauty.

Sure, Serena’s pulling an allegedly ‘unladylike’ face of exertion there, contrasted with Kirilenko’s ‘ladidah’ face, however she’s just BELTED a ball far harder than any of us could, so you know, let’s kind of cut some slack there regarding the face pulling. What is pissing me off is that the spitefulness against the Williams sisters seems to be that they DARE to be black, female, powerfully built and sure of their own talent. BURN THEM AT THE STAKE THOSE UGLY MAN-LIKE MOLES!!!

And Kirilenko et al get to be ‘beautiful’ simply by virtue of being young, thin and white. They whack a tennis ball the way a lady should, ie without those unladlylike faces/noises/muscles and without putting the men off their erections. With a demure blond ponytail. But what’s considered ‘beauty’ here isn’t really about looks/faces, it’s about markers that you still know you’re subservient to the dictates of a certain kind of femininity, that you still observe the rules and don’t alarm the menfolk by taking up precisely the amount of space you need to in order to do what men are always allowed to do and turn your body into a high performance sports machine, that you will always play only if you can look ‘pretty’ doing it.

ETA geez I made a hash of spelling back there, hope I caught most of it. What a mess!

Under the heading ‘Posts I wish I had written’

Wildly Parenthetical’s post here on models of understanding disability, on society and shifting the focus onto the ways in which we designate bodies as normal/impaired and the privilege inherent in such a manouvre. Really, very very clear and well thought out.

FP goes all Margaret and David like (with possibly slightly more colourful language)

Spoilers for Transformers/and Sunshine Cleaning ahead(I’ll keep them separate).

I just got home from Transformers two. Is it me or is that movie a bit of a turkey? I mean really – I LOVED the first movie. Ok I know that its politics sucked pretty hard, and I’m not excusing that. It’s just that it was some big time action flick fun. And I laughed some.

I think I laughed once tonight and I cannot remember at what.

Don’t get me wrong. The action is (in parts) still impressive.

I’m kinda ‘meh’ over Bay as a director. I mean leaving aside the politics I still am. Some spectacular scenes, some really compelling OMG SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT stuff in the first Transformers film. And also some ‘Yeah, well it *looked* like something awesome was happening, but you were going so fast I couldn’t catch it and I think you rely on making me seasick in order to cover up the fact that whilst impressive I can’t tell one motherfucking robot from another and I don’t know what the fuck is happening’ stuff.

Possibly it’s going into the last movie with no expectations and going into this movie expecting to really enjoy it, but tonight it just both bored and pissed me off for most of the movie. Why?

Hmm…ludicrously charicatured: hysterical mum, awkward bluffy dad, man-child stoicism, hot chick inexplicably almost humping her bike, writhing in tiny shorts while spray painting a nekkid chick onto it (from a character who has the potential to be TEH AWESOME and never really gets fully utilised), and a cringe-worthy mano e mano ‘layin down the law’ chat between car and owner. All in the first half an hour. And it aint picking up anytime soon.

The college stuff was like a Hefner cliche. I mean what the fuck. That was supposed to be Brown, yes? And bowm chicka WOW WOW amazingly enough the entire campus is chock full of windswept FHM models poutin like they want what you got and they want it REAL BAD. I’m not talking cos the chicks were hot, I’m talking cos it was in danger of veering off into a hot lesbian pillow fight with an invite to join in kind of cliche scene sometime soon.

Now, duh, Michael Bay, what did I expect, right? Except (and maybe I was drunk/delusional) last time it seemed a little, I don’t know…clever…that’s probably putting it too high, but it was kinda fun. There was still boy goggle eyed over girl stuff in the first movie, but it was mildly cute, but this was so generically BORING and spectacularly STUPID. Can I just be clear here? I am not being bitter over beautiful women: I am being fucked off over them not being seen as women, at all, ever, but rather just vapid airheads/dominating sex machines who wanna impregnate you with their devil-machine-spawn at best, background scenery akin to shrubs…hot shrubs with tits but still shrub like in their lack of being people in ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM…at worst. Is that the worst? I don’t know. There was that much bad to choose from, it’s hard to pick the worst.

Then, in case you’d not sufficiently dehumanised women there’s the every five seconds downright ‘AW YEAH, you GOT him’ insult of ‘bitch’/'pussy’/'girl’ – all aimed at the hispanic friend no less.

Fucking homophobia and misogyny run riot within the first half hour. You made it hard for me to even BEGIN to enjoy your movie Michael.Not to mention – dog sex/leg humping – what are you fucking FIVE? It’s just not funny/witty/worthy/anything other than CRAP.

Hmmm…let’s see. Oh of course I forgot, the opening scene -charicatured generic ’savages’, always good for an introductory scene, and a convenient way to illustrate the ‘violence’ of man in ways that don’t point the finger at you (cos a spear, that’s definitely the worst man has come up with!) then obliterate them for some shock value and get onto the real people you’re supposed to care about (straight all-American men and maybe – to a far lesser extent – the women they ‘own’).

The hispanic friend who *comically* speaks Spanish when startled, is oversexed and feminised and ridiculed – he has ‘bitch hair’, that ‘grows like a Chia pet’ apparently, and is continually yelled at for being a ‘pussy’ and a ‘girl’ – this in the presence of Mikaela who when not confined to waxing bikes the FHM way is actually one kick arse woman, every bit as brave and competent as any of those ‘manly men’ not that she’s ever allowed facets or an independant existence or in this movie to be away from Sam’s hand more than a second.

The Egyptian people/landscape/architecture is blown to hell with absolute impugnity.

The Jordanian backups crash into a mountain before they even arive, those crazy foreigners.

I mean it, I WANTED to enjoy this movie, and I went in KNOWING it was Bay and EXPECTING Bay and it still managed to feed me a shit sandwich and ask me to enjoy it while waiting for some robot fighting.

It took me FOREVER to begin to give a shit about what was happening, and FOREVER for them to dial back the ham and get to the fucking action.

They improved a little with the robot on robot fight scenes (you could tell a little more who was who). The overarching plot was so done to death that cliche is a kind word. The baddies are so one dimensional that it’s a yawn fest before it starts. Overall, I say this is a bit of a suckfest. Unfortunately my son wants the dvd.

Damn Shia Le Bouf has potential too and it’s not getting used here, at least for the first half of the movie, you know, for the manly shouting/action scene stuff he goes ok.

Yes, it’s an action flick. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be a bland piece of crap (or am I delusional and that’s exactly what it means?).

Onto Sunshine Cleaning.

LOVED IT!

Sigh. The single mum stuff hit a little close to home (in a this-is-a-good-movie/good performance way) and I found myself willing myself not to cry at a few of her stretched-to-breaking-point moments that weren’t necessarily pitched as ‘cry now’ moments.

The lack of belief in her voice when she told herself she was strong, the going back for more in a pretty depressing situation in order to have a few stolen moments of adult affection, the leaking out sideways of all that stress in unwelcome ways, emotional blurt outs, random strained comments.

I loved the small silly stuff of the lobster man stories and the little boy licking the walls, the portrayal of the school reaction, and her determination, and the grandfather insisting the boy is a genius.

It was just a nice sweet (mostly) understated little movie.

I felt like a couple of times it tried too hard for the emotional manipulation factor, when it already had you and that it could have been even better without that. But overall it was a movie that moved me and that captivated me and dragged me along. I couldn’t shake it last night either.

I was trying to sleep and it was lingering, this feeling of an achy thinky sadness.

To make things worse I’d had a real ‘WTF single mum’ night myself. For the first time I’d let mini FP let himself in in the arvo with careful instructions to order a pizza and that I’d be home by bedtime. I was worried earlier, but was convinced nothing could go wrong. I knew the cleaners had been, but they’d long since left, the house was in order, he had phones, and he’s a sensible kid. I just had to remember to call him to remind him to lock the door, put the keys in the key bowl and order the pizza and all would be well right?

No, at 6-ish, on the wrong side of the city I get a panicked call. ALL the hotplates are apparently on and very hot, and he can’t turn the dials because they’re too hot. Ten to fifteen minutes of trying to talk him down (with a dry mouth and a pounding heart) was not working. I told him to wait while I called someone for help and luckily I managed to get through to a friend who lives close by who could go and help out. I still don’t really know what happened. I guess the stovetop was being cleaned and the dials accidentally got turned the wrong way?

But you know, I get home and accidentally knock the pizza all over the floor, realise my good baking dish has been sitting on top of two hotplates while they burned away, asked mini FP to check the messages to stop the machine beeping to realise it’s a message from his dad, and get told his dad (in Germany) had called again while I was away. How the FUCK does he do that? He calls once every two months and manages to get a time when I’m not home. A time when I’m not home and the fucking HOTPLATES are all on mind. Mini FP realised this while he was on the phone and told him so.

So he’s telling me this as I’m sweeping puff pastry off the carpet and I’m just feeling like the shittiest single mum who ever did shit. So despite the fact that all WAS well and nothing bad HAD happened, the whole ‘Christ, I’m working really hard and it never quite seems to work’ thing from the movie was really resonating, so it’s not a surprise I didn’t sleep and the movie rattled around in my head a while.

And just as I started to drop off to sleep I wondered how on earth did they get that little girl actor to cry *exactly* like she’d just realised her whole world had crumpled?

Anyway, it’s way past my bedtime!

I actually don’t mind this weather

It’s chilly and ceaselessly rainy and it makes some stuff a real pain in the arse. I don’t have a clothes dryer (or I do but it works only when it wants to which is less and less frequently) so I had to haul a large heavy bag of washing to the laundromats…and now can’t pick it up til Monday. That’s not so fun.

But I have finished my exam, and this is the first weekend of not studying, and I read in bed last night, I slept in, I had breakfast, read some more, went back to bed, read some more, moseyed out for a lunch of eggs benedicts and read some more, and now after a quick stint at the grocery store I’m back, to (you guessed it) jump in bed and read some more. Reading in bed while listening to the rain..is there anything better?

I like that in this weather there is nothing for it: I need to shop for food with a little more planning, or swing by Coles on the way home from work. Then I come home, jump in my pjs, cook and settle down to read or watch a dvd. I go to bed earlier and get more sleep. Mini FP is happier to be in bed earlier. I snuggle in pajamas and fuzzy robes, snug in my little shoebox home. At least that’s what I do now I don’t have to STUDY!

It’s ok you can say the word ‘rape’ you know

Trigger warnings.

In this scenario, where two drunk men with political influence cornered a young woman alone in a downstairs laundry, and ‘demanded she have sex with them for money’, then when she refused, one man ‘forced her down into a crouch’ and prevented her from leaving?

When you’re reporting this, it is actually okay to use the word rape. When you force yourself on a woman who is not interested, nay who is not eagerly wanting sex with you, the correct term is rape, when you try it but get stabbed, it’s still attempted rape. They tried to force themselves on her…they tried to rape her, it’s really quite okay to say so and not make it sound like what happened is she got upset that they offered her money for sex and instead of saying ‘No thank you’ and that she would have been able to walk away. So when you write a headline, you might want to think about ‘Fending off rape’ rather than ‘Fending off demands for sex’.

Just in case anyone forgot:

A man’s review of Steel Magnolias the stage play.

Men: Women, their lives, their friendships and dramas? You are meant to find them utterly boring and irrelevant. You can go along to watch just so you have something to complain about later, and insinuate you’re *pussy whipped* and chicks run the world and own your balls, but no way is is possible that women have anything to say that might be worth listening to, nor is there any way in which you should ever attempt to watch a film about women’s lives without approaching it as though it were root canal work.

Women on the other hand should eagerly anticipate the release of the next dull and repetitive Dude-bro film about the wonders of male friendship and the humour to be found in emotional fuck-wit-ism and anything involving car chases and large scale explosions (cos apparently all men at some stage in their lives will be in a Die Hard kind of scenario).

Learn it and learn it early kids: women need to learn to identify with men and male narratives and the male perspective, else they’re locked out of the majority of cultural works, men on the other hand need desperately to ensure they *never* identify with the female perspective else their *man parts* will shrivel up and fall off and they’ll never again have the respect due to them as a MAN. Chicks can be fully expected to watch dick flicks with the menfolk, but menfolk must never ever be expected to watch a chickflick with the womenfolk.

Iran and news coverage

At 4:00 I heard the news about the elections and protests in Iran, the fact that several opposition members are missing and that internet and mobile access has been cut.

At 5:09 after an hour of poking around on Twitter and watching Al Jazeera, I checked the SMH page. Nothing on the main section: Big story about a kid and a meteorite, cops and tazers, cures for baldness and in the “Breaking News” section, not Iran, not Pakistan, but the Wallabies, the Thunderbirds and Yemen. Once you scroll past David Carradine and an allegedly broken hearted Silverchair member, and you know, my sympathies, but get real people, and if you look under the ‘World’ section you get this:

West cautious on Ahmadinejad victory in Iran

10:09am | World powers including Britain and the United States have reacted cautiously to the disputed Iranian presidential election in which incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared winner.

Right-o then, that’s enough about those funny-talking foreigners I guess.

Seriously, I’ve got Al Jazeera running and I’ve learned more about the state of the world (a really fucking broad range of countries and topics) in the last twenty minutes than in I’d think two years of SMH coverage. Just saying is all.

(5:28 and a video popped up while I was watching of the footage that’s been doing the rounds for at least an hour and a half)

I have no title, my brain is mush

I thought I understood it, I thought I had my head around it. I went back to it. No – I missed a lecture, a lecture that has thrown not one, but multiple spanners into the works. It’s close to midnight. I am *not* (even remotely) close to done. I have no annual leave days to take and a sickie is out of the question given they’ll see right through it. I WANT TO BE FINISHED!!!

Update: I finished making comprehensive notes (incorporating the lecture) on easements, the majority of which I think will be relatively useless in the actual exam – I think the majority of it will come from the four substantive requirements that I was ALL OVER like HOURS ago, but you know, you just NEVER KNOW so I took notes on what I have to say was the most poorly laid out, rambling piece of shit lecture EVER from this woman – and really, she’s awesome, I don’t know what happened but it’s like she got drunk on easements information and vomited it everywhere rather than gave a lecture. It is lucky I love her, cos it was CRANKY MAKING!

Now my shoulder hurts and I’m bug eyed and manic and am half tempted to do something silly like start in on covenants now. But I had a glance and her lecture will give a guideline on how to structure MY notes by copying and pasting for extra detail, so that’ll be like 60 minutes max rather than what was that? Three and a half hours???

And pretty much I’m just taking her lecture on mortgages and hoping for the best. She said that was all we needed to focus on, so I’ll take that and run with it. Maybe I’ll sleep with the text book open to mortgages under the pillow and hope I absorb it by osmosis cos that chapter is DAUNTINGLY LONG! I read it, I do NOT want to take notes on it if I do not have to – plus the other tutor gave us comprehensive notes which I shall be reading on the train tomorrow.

Wow. That’s a pretty long post about something that NO ONE EXCEPT ME is interested in. I hurt. Every muscle in my upper body is complaining. AND. AND AND AND. I THOUGHT Harry Potter was out in JUNE so had plans with mini FP to celebrate the END of the thing that’s absorbed my energy and confiscated our lives such as they were for the last month or so…but it’s NOT OUT! Grrr, stomp, grumble, shit, fuck. Fine. I have moped enough. To bed with a Phenergan to ensure actual sleep.

Oh, Obama -what the *fuck*?

Still digesting this. Please see here (found here).