Amnesia Tastes Like Chicken

Bet you thought I’d forgotten about you, you thing you. Two nights on, and I’m ready for zombie-hood. This is where I put in a trigger warning, but I’m not sure what exactly I’m warning against. Heroin and children. This one won’t be funny.

It has been a rough week or so on the thinking-and-feeling front, though the attention this post will give it makes it sound a lot worse than it is. I do have a life, after all. Peaches Geldof. Heroin overdose. Small children left behind. Commentary. It’s the commentary that’s caught me.

Beyond feeling vaguely sorry, and hoping it was accidental, I didn’t think about it very much. I did roll my eyes a little, because I could see the gear-up of the media…and blort. It isn’t as if I knew her. So vaguely sorry it is.

My biological mother was a heroin addict. And here I don’t have much else, because I remember very little. I can’t validate the dichotomy of loving her and wanting to escape, of feeling horrible things and never being able to produce an example. I have vague memories - being hit across the face, we had two cats, seeing horses for the first time, landing on a bed after being thrown (it was soft - and it might have been play), pointless sympathy from adults and not understanding it - and a scar on my shoulder. I remember Mum talking about it, saying “She doesn’t remember…we’ll tell her it’s a birthmark.” I looked at it when I was nineteen and I think it’s a cigarette burn. Very by-the-way. Barely visible now anyway.

Amnesia is annoying. It feels as if I belong to a club, but not really. And I didn’t (don’t?) belong to the rest of the world, because all of “this” happened to me. As a kid, I mostly thought that people were shit. That the nice smiling faces people wore were just faces. That kindness was a con. That if I was alone with anyone…but I didn’t know what would happen. It would just be dark and bad and somewhere, probably not out loud, I would be screaming. That makes everything in my head sound like an armed camp. And for a while it was. Years, even. But there were good people who lived their smiling faces, who were good. And I wanted, hoped it would get better. I wanted to be kind. Not like Them.

I was fostered when I was five, by someone who used to babysit me. Actually, I showed up for a babysit and asked if I could stay for good. Apparently that’s a big deal at five, but I have a vague feeling that Mum might have teed me up to do it.

And, you know, I’m so much better off because I can’t remember (please insert ambivalence at appropriate point). Except sometimes I do. The memories are still in there, and I walk softly if I think they’ll surface. So celebrities dying of overdoses, I don’t get all tightened up, but I do avoid finding anything out. When I was younger, I would read these things and viciously loathe the person who died, blaming them for their problems. As I got older, I guess I made peace with it. I was in a better place. Mum wasn’t a terrible person, and without memory to back that up, how would I know?

I know: she was clever and creative and artistic; the feel of her arms around me; she taught me to read the word extraordinary (extra-plus-ordinary, sound it out). But I also know it was always dark; I was afraid; she was afraid. I don’t want to remember but sometimes I do. Maybe what I imagine is in there (which I don’t - I only imagine its dimensions) is far worse than reality.

So I come across this article, and reading it again for this entry, realise I totes missed the author’s background, and I think I just explained how the above came to be written instead of a straightforward sum up and general silliness (always my first choice).

But I have no position. I can’t be unambiguous about drug addiction or addicts. But then I came across this one, and I still can’t bring myself to read it closely. I haven’t read any of the links, and may never do so. This screaming rage is something I really can’t stand (and I may rebut some wussypants thoughts somewhere near the end).

I don’t understand the second article, really. Heroin addiction isn’t going to make you person of the year. Unless you’re completely upfront and don’t give a shit, you’re going to lie to people about your addiction. The second piece points out children of addicts are statistically fucked. I’m using the technical term. And rants about motherhood and celebrity, and so freaking what? You just “proved” that Peaches stuffed up herself and her kids. Nice job in her defence. Remind me to hire you if I want to go down for something I didn’t do.

I could pick a position on what Peaches did and stare luridly in at her toddler, but I think I’ll pass. I’m stuck on, “you so totes screwed up there, girlfriend”, but even that seems rude. I didn’t know her. I could talk about the need for help for the disease of addiction. I could talk about the stupidity of victim-blaming. I could, but I won’t.

Pointless sympathy, on the other hand, drives me right up the wall. Now, I can raise the metaphorical two fingers and ignore you, but when I was a powerless kid, sympathy only made me feel pitiable. I already believed I was the most worthless thing alive. Cut that shit out.

So. Screaming rage. I avoid it. I try. And I wonder if I’m weak for doing that, if I am nothing but a big fat chicken. And then, spiralling, wonder if that it’s that original feeling of worthlessness makes me pause first, and (want to) fuck off when the yelling starts. And then I remember or, more rarely, have those moments of peace, where I’m not angry, not furious, and the answer doesn’t seem to matter that much. But I would like to know if leaving rage behind is an answer (not so much whether I’m a big chicken). There is a lot I would not have survived without it.

If the answer is love I need to find an immediate bucket, because that is just too saccharine for words. It might be, it might not, cynicism aside, but I don’t think love is the answer for me in particular. Love was a door. A way of seeing other possibilities. What I don’t want is to be enraged. Furious. Yelling at the the world*. Forever looking backward and assuming it will happen again. Some other bastard will hurt me, and it will validate every horrible thing I’ve experienced. Reduce me to a little one shivering in the dark. Afraid of bad things happening, I’m fine with. That’s caution and repeating the past can eff off.

* Yelling at the world, or having stern words with it, is surprisingly easy to do with a clenched jaw. You don’t clench your teeth, you just tighten your jaw. I don’t know why I’m offering advice on this - although being icy and controlled can be hilarious if you manage to keep your temper - the headache afterwards can be bad.

The story continues (one of the few times I go back and edit this thing).

At the risk of repeating myself, love and peace, peeps.

Not Even On Hiatus

On Saturday night, we sat down with dinner to awesome tv: The Last Starfighter, Stargate and Dark City. I fell out, as did husbandly and small lad, at Dark City, as it was getting late. I didn’t last two pages into a book.

I thought we had Stargate, at least, on DVD, but it turns out we don’t. (Here’s a shock: our DVD collection is organised alphabetically, it was easy to tell.) But until I checked, there was a frisson of watching a movie on tv that we could watch anytime, but didn’t. As if it was something illicit, a kiss in the dark from an acquaintance. And oddly, as if we were showing it to the Man: we are actually watching, with rapt attention, a show on free-to-air.

Yes, that’s bizarre. Free-to-air is there to be watched, but their behaviour towards their viewers is schizophrenic. They want us to watch, but fail to tell us when something big, something huge, is going to be on. Sherlock springs to mind here - channel 9 didn’t give an air date for months after its release overseas, and never bothered to explain why or why not. When they finally did, it was saturation-bombing advertising, that as a fan, was just infuriating. Did I tune in? Of course I did. And when the next season comes around (please please please please please), I may skip the air dates and simply wait for iTunes.

That disregard for viewers has been building for a while. It seems a rare fish for shows to start at their original air times. Or they’re offset: instead of showing on the hour or the half-hour, it’s three- or seven minutes past. Frustrating if you’re watching a show and a smaller member of the audience has an actual bedtime.

And it’s backfired spectacularly in my case. Castle. I’ve watched Castle since it started, which is a story in and of itself, but with Nathan Fillion on board (and nary a desperate housewife to be seen), never mind the extraneous circumstances.

Fast forward quite a few years (is it season seven this year?) and up until season four, I was as happy as a clam. I used to have it on in the background at work. There are parts of all three seasons I could recite along as I moved bags of blood from one place to another. Then in season 4, channel 7 did something weird with the schedule. They fast-tracked the first half, and left us hanging for the second.

Let me tell you, watching the first half of a season on repeat in anticipation of the second half really kills the buzz. Even one that includes Cuffed, where our heroes end up handcuffed together. With a tiger lurking somewhere. Oh Matron. No second half yet. Okay, I’ll wait. Second half, check, fast tracked fifth season. Eheu.

I try not to make the same mistake with season five, and don’t watch it too many times. But it’s been months, channel 7, and you’re not telling me an air date. Castle is curiously locked down on the internet, or perhaps I don’t look in the right corners, but it’s telling that I looked in the first place. For shows I love, I want to be shown, not told: finding spoilers ruins all the fun. Plus interminable fan arguments about what it all means, dear, are just dull. I also watch Doctor Who, and wowsers, no thanks on the arguments, I’m not one of the writers.

With Castle, it’s a gigantic shame, because I love The Final Frontier (yes, present tense), a wonderful take on all things geeky. All that was missing was Lrrr from Futurama saying wide-eyed “Is Joss Whedon here?”. But so it goes, first half shown, second half, maybe months later. After watching the first half all wide-eyed and ZOMG what happens next? I have to go on with my life without it.

Which I duly do, and second half comes on, I can’t be bothered downloading the shows half the time. Externally to scheduling, I work nights, so tv can be a bit hit-and-miss; I rely on iTunes for downloads. And then my internet fell over and died, so downloading a one-hour show took most of a day. That extra delay distanced me even further, and though I saw the first show of season six, I haven’t bothered anymore.

I may go on with it eventually, but that break has happened, and I don’t think even nifty 3-D printed casts will repair it.

As an aside, channel ten actually pulled out SEASON FINALE for the mid-season break in season two of Elementary. Yes, I really believe that when season one was twenty-three episodes and season two is…thirteen? Puh-lease.

There we are, though, goggle-eyed, watching our fillums last night, and in a quandary. After dinner we all have our showers, wash dishes, et cetera. Sometimes I iron. But we don’t want to now, because awesome movies. Well of course, we fit everything into ad breaks, with one of us calling out when said breaks end. Nice in stereo.

I did have more, and one day I may tell the story of the first episode of Castle, but I want to check my dates first.

Have a lovely, lovely day.

Chips and Gravy

Speaking of hayfever, now small lad has it. At first I thought it was the leftovers from a particularly nasty flu we all copped in June, but the last week has seen him sneezing all the time, and one eye is continuously red and half shut. Yes, I’m a terrible mother: we only go to the doctor if we’re dying. We are going next week though.

Probably he’ll be referred to a specialist, and a scratch test later we might have something more targeted than blanket antihistamines. Fingers crossed. I’m hopeful that he’ll grow out of it, but in my half-knowing things and living with hayfever myself, I don’t think the odds are that great compared to if, say, he’d copped this a few years back. He’s getting older, and this may be something he has forever.

You know that moment where you feel powerless and awful for something that you couldn’t possibly change, couldn’t even know about, but there are consequences for which you’re the cause? When I was pregnant with small lad, I had a glucose intolerance. It’s one step down from gestational diabetes. Aside from looking after my diet and being all pricking of the fingers (so nothing wicked this way would come), I felt as if I’d failed small lad before he’d even appeared. Limited family history aside (one aunt with type II diabetes), there is no way I could have known this would happen. And it wasn’t much of a problem for his nibs. He was a bit bigger than he might have been without all of the extra sugar crossing the placenta, but nothing dangerous. But that feeling of failure persisted.

With this hayfever, I feel the same way again. I thought this was a bullet he might have dodged - the inheritance of allergy is of the process, not the specific allergy - and he’s shown no signs of anything until now. But it’s my fault, I wail (in my head), since it’s my genes he’s showing there. Because of course I’m responsible for them. Snort. I think that kind of thinking is taking responsibility too far, but that’s my kid there, and he’s practically perfect in every way.

And I read that part out to husbandly, small lad heard and:
SL: “Not in every way.”
Me: “Practically perfect, so not completely.”
SL: “Okay then.”

The last couple of days I’ve spent mostly in my own head, so I have nothing to report. I started reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which so far (all of the first chapter) is a beautiful read. I may have to go through this book very slowly, since my own “year” of magical thinking after my mother died lasted three or four. If I include staying in pathology, then I’m not going to admit just how many it has been, because it’s just too depressing for words. And for someone so supposedly smart, I’m dumb.

Except I’m not. Dumb, that is. I had (and still have) a life going, and if it wasn’t everything I wanted it to be, enough of it was to compensate. That will have to do, and thanks part of my brain who likes grabbing shit and smearing it around, you can shut up now.

When I was a kid, we hardly ever used the oven unless it was a baked dinner deal. Roast meat (beef/lamb/chook), roast potato and pumpkin and peas you could drink off the plate because they were boiled to buggery. I mention this because I’m sitting in the lounge with the white noise of the oven in the background, and I reflect that we have oven-cooked things all the time.

I don’t know why my mother and grandmother “saved” baked dinners and other oven things for special occasions. I wonder if my own cooking habits are the result of having power from a grid, and NOT having to stoke a fire and keep it burning for hours, or if it’s that small lad has potato issues and will only eat them certain ways. Or because baked potato is damn easy to do and it gives me time to do funky stuff with the rest of the vegetables. Or because I like chips, and the slightly upmarket diced and covered in fresh herbs seems a better dinner choice than just chips. Clearly, I am the queen of ever-recursive discourse. Or maybe just lists.

Moot point, since I’m not cooking tonight, husbandly is; I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that (until I see the sink later, but into every life some rain must fall). And he’s made gravy. Nom nom nom.

Love and peace.

Impending Doom May Not Be As Impending As It Appears

My knees are cold. I don’t like winter this year. It may have something to do with me dressing for summer when I go to work, but…air-conditioning! Which wasn’t working particularly well at four yesterday morning. There was shivering. Actual, teeth-chattering shivering. This morning as I sallied forth, I wore a jacket. Shocking!

After five nights on and not very good sleep (I think I should start charting these things, because after nearly twenty years of shift work, I’m clearly not very good at managing it), the last two nights were flipping awful. There were some work issues, but meh, I have five days off now. Consider raspberries blown.

Disjointedly, here is the tiniest of tiny round-ups, because I have no central thesis and my laptop is freezing my fingers again.

In the vein of flipping awful, I found myself thinking the worst about, well, everything. Impending doom. It’s when I feel this way that I fear losing husbandly and small lad the most and my wonderful brain can well imagine - and I’m going to stop there before falling down that hole again. Being an old hand at making myself miserable, I ponder pretty things and giggle at nearly everything. Humour is on my mind at the moment, because I found myself having been a smart-arse and (almost? actually?) offending people, but with absolutely no offence meant. We were all terribly polite about it, but I’m going to wonder when I make remarks. That some of it had to do with address (as in who was being so addressed), doesn’t change the hurt feelings.

It’s a problem with my viewpoint. I see a great many things as absurd and worthy of laughing at, but not in a mean-spirited way. The latter leaves me feeling like slime and I’d hardly pour it all over someone else. Mean-spirited humour could not be any more awful. If pulling wings off flies and calling them walks makes you snigger, you’re a twerp. Graduating to twat if you’ve made it past your thirtieth birthday. If it stops being funny when it starts being you…for straightforward slipped-on-a-banana-peel humour, it’s a no-brainer. But in complex situations, recognising an absurdity can be taken as complete, balls-out insensitivity. Ouch. Now I think I’ve dug myself in even deeper, I’ll move on.

And now, a smart-arse.

A feeling of impending doom, unlike mine, can be a sign of an ABO-incompatible blood transfusion. It’s a given in blood banking that receiving an entire unit of incompatible red cells is fatal, so that feeling is entirely accurate. Score one for our brains. I went to look it up this morning, because I’ve heard of patients surviving, and was delighted to discover that death ain’t necessarily so.

This morning I went shopping for husbandly’s birthday (it’s today, eep, I’d almost forgotten). Sitting at traffic lights I felt like a Nigel no-friends, being on my lonesome in my lane, and the one next to me was a line of about a squillion cars turning right. I vaguely wondered if I should panic about whether or not I was going in the right direction. I didn’t panic, even though I wasn’t carrying a towel. Enough sleep? Enough said.

I wandered into a shop that has a policy of searching your bags as you leave. Today to the point of counting how many DVD’s I had in the bag compared to the docket. Yes, yes, I know, theft is a big problem for stores, but really, searching my bag every single time I go there is insulting. Do I bother saying anything? I don’t know yet. But, JB Hi-Fi, I infer your name should be Ho-Fi, given the implicit moral compass of your customers.

Next to food. I’ve been reading about the advantages of a2 milks. While I poo-poo the ideas about a1 being worse for you, I have persistent dermatitis on my hands (fark! it’s under my fingernails now). In my case, it’s because of the soap we use in the lab, although it started from prolonged exposure to histolene, an orange-pith-derived xylene. Histolene was billed as safer than xylene, but so much for that. It’s depressing that eating an orange means a lot of slicing and dicing to get rid of the pith, but I shouldn’t be eating citrus anyway. At least I can have limes.

I can’t effectively remove my exposure to the chlorhexidine* wash we use in the lab. I take the ever-lovely (not really) QV hand wash to work, but the sheer amount of chlorhex smeared all over the place from everyone else’s hands means I’m exposed no matter how I try to manage it. I can use cortisone cream, but it leads to thinning of the skin, and really I just don’t want to. I’ve had periods when I haven’t had dermatitis at all, but I started scratching up my arms two weeks ago after an hour in the lab, and oh gusty sigh. I have a lovely beeswax-and-hemp hand cream that I use (and yes, I now slather it EVERYWHERE), but it isn’t terribly practical. Plus, I’m waiting for the day that someone starts thinking I’m a stoner, because the fragrance is a bit interesting.

Anyway, a2 pundits talk up a2 milks as reducing allergic symptoms. Since I’m also a package with hayfever, it might be worth a try. Every little bit helps. Eheu. In the supermarket I go looking for a2 milk, assuming from the hype there will be something that is 100%, and says so explicitly. Err, no. Dairy Farmers crack me right up, with their pretend hand-writing font declaring their milk “Naturally contains” a2’s, but the brand with the big a2 on the label blurbs about both types - and theirs is “rich in a2”. Wait a minute…I don’t think I drink enough milk. Bugger it.

I get to the checkout and see Men’s Health in the magazine stand. One headline? “FIGHT FAT AND WIN!” Since fat is basically a gelatinous mass, I would certainly assume victory.

* Just why the effing hell we’re using chlorhex, an ANTIBACTERIAL wash, is beyond me. The predominant biohazards from blood samples are viral.

I’ll close with an exchange I found in my phone as I went to keep my notes this morning. People thought I was crying as I walked along after finding it, because I was giggling and trying not to, pausing and bending over laughing so hard, and I’m amazed I wasn’t escorted out of the shopping centre. I’m certainly not showing my best side (indeed may not have one having read this again), but small lad’s responses were brilliant. Apologies to anyone who has seen it before.

We were driving into a Westfield car park, small lad and I, and had to wait at the crossing for the SLOWEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD to cross with her empty pram. And pause. And cross.

Me: Ahh, you f***ing cow, could ya just move instead of standing there like a f***ing lemon?

Woman’s friend comes up behind her and they keep crossing. Slowly.

SL: MUM! Mind your language!

Me: I don’t give a shit, f***ing bitch.

SL: MUUUUUM! That child was looking at you.

I have no idea where this child was. The windows were closed, so I don't think anyone could hear me. Pause.

Me: Sorry {small lad}. Sometimes I’m like a twelve-year-old on a sugar rush.

Pause.

SL: A very RUDE twelve-year old.

Jock McPlop and Sun Tzu

I’m waiting for someone to answer a phone. I have it on speaker, since I’m up to five minutes of brr-brr brr-brr. The ringing beats the dumbo-gumbo service announcements intercut with upbeat (!) music when on hold. I never feel very upbeat listening to that hold music, unless feeling Hulk smash counts. It might.

In the interim, I need to start keeping more thorough notes for this thing. I’ve been pretty much sitting on twitter the last couple of days (or rather, the spare time therein), and could I possibly stop qualifying every damn thing I say?

Ahem. Sitting on twitter, check. Laughing so hard I can’t breathe, check. Wanting to vomit and bawling at the next scroll, check. The feed from Gaza and the current atrocities is being documented with photos of dead children. I’ll pass by on the effectiveness of shock in transmitting a message, because really, I’m not shocked by this, I’m hurt by it - and I can’t do much but protest. And cry. Well, whoop-de-doo. Not to denigrate my own feelings, but it isn’t very useful. And worse, I’ve seem some snide commentary on people switching off on photos of dead children from Gaza, but not from continued no-news about asylum seekers. Yes good, let’s all feel smug and superior about our humanist cred. Or, let’s not and say we did. Or just not.

Given civilian bombings, planes full of people being shot down and the supposed end of the world the Abbott government is trying to save us from (yeah, I’m not seeing it either), perhaps the current thing on facebook isn’t such an odd duck. The idea is that you post three positive things per day and nominate three of your friends to do the same. I’ll confess I’m not nominating any friends, because I don’t share my toys. Strangely or not, my facebook and twitter worlds rarely collide, so one of yesterday’s positives was a great way to share some of the fun of twitter, to wit: #RemoveALetterRuinABand.

My personal favourites:

• Crowded Hose
• Dire Traits
• Taking Heads

Since I have strange associative thinking, somehow the last one lead me to thinking about a link I saw from an anti-vaccination something-or-other. I didn’t read past the first few lines because I was tired and then angry (I know, I was shocked too - I so rarely get angry, right? Right? RIGHT?). Possibly I fancied taking a few heads, which is pretty boring linkage, but so it goes.

The last few go-rounds from anti-vax palaver have included statements around how “Big Pharma” want us to vaccinate our kids because they make money out of it.

It’s an odd argument to make in Australia, where the majority of children’s diseases are on the immunisation schedule and therefore covered by Medicare. The ones that aren’t covered, as chickenpox wasn’t when small lad was getting his shots, can be paid for by anyone wanting the vaccine.

You could, if you really felt like it, start arguing that Medicare is paid for by us, and thus zee BP’s are still making a quid, but seriously? Or #srsly? Big drug companies are essentially businesses - built around the idea of providing a product and getting paid money for it. They may also be the source of all evil multi-layered conspiracies against the rest of us schlubs (if that role hasn’t been taken by Google), but I digress.

Some of the arguments against the BP’s have the sense that several tens of exclamation marks were removed in the final edit - for tone, there’s nothing like shrill hysteria to make me listen, no ma’am - and boy does it make me tired. Some of that shrillness is probably derived from the stridency of the anti-vax arguments themselves, which I’m going to avoid for the moment beyond a something-to-declare statement at the end of this post.

That BP’s have little or no regard for their customers is nothing new - and here I link a transcript from an episode of 4 Corners from 2004 - A Bitter Pill. Worth the read.

But the mercenary nature of capitalism and the possible profiteering by pharmaceutical companies is an odd argument for refusing vaccination for either yourself or your children, particularly where the vaccines are free.

If your choice is to forgo vaccination, then whether the vaccine costs anyone money is completely moot. Your answer is no, so you won’t be handing over the loot. If your next argument is you shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s anything via Medicare, then let me introduce you to society and wow that’s the kind of mercenary thinking that Big Pharma does, isn’t it? Sun Tzu might have said, “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy”, but whose aim in life is it to be a turd?

I can get behind the idea that the behaviour of Big Pharma and their attitudes towards research and development need adjustment. Most forward R&D (such as an HIV vaccine) is not done by companies, but by independent research funded by taxpayers, which is simply insane. They’re making a product for sale, ergo they are responsible for costs in R&D, or at least the lion’s share. Independent testing and research is crucial, but shouldn’t be driving directions for companies whose livelihood is in providing medicine.

And here is where I have the real problem with anti-vaccination arguments using Big Pharma. In arguing either for or against vaccination, the connection is counter-intuitive: “I’m not vaccinating my children because you’re just making money off it!”.

Err, they’re supposed to make money off of it. I’d rather pay a drug company to make drugs than than Wee Jock Poo-Pong McPlop from Aberdeen, whose qualifications consist of being an offscreen toilet cleaner in an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth.

As a secondary argument (possibly quaternary), it must be nice to not have to repeat yourself with your reasons for refusing to vaccinate. But it’s weak, and it undermines the other stuff.

Something to Declare? Thank you, I will. I studied immunology and microbiology at uni, work in health, and get the point of epidemiology. We’re vaccinated in our house, and I fundamentally disagree with you not vaccinating your children: the risk is not only to you, but to other people you may infect. That risk rarely seems to come up as anything in anti-vax literature. But, if you wish to object, even conscientiously, I’m not going to stand in your way. That’s freedom, baby.

One last thing. Small lad dropped a cup in the kitchen and it rolled away. He watched it and declaimed, “Fly! Fly!”. When I answered, “Thou may’st revenge!” he asked what I was on about. I really need to catch him up on Bill.

Love and peace, peeps.

Whingeing and Ranting

I’ve made a kind of promise to myself to do something, anything, that isn’t work, house things or TV (although I usually combine the last two), and at the moment it’s this thing, for want of a better name. Given my terribly dilettante approach to regularity, I don’t want to say “my blog” because I think I’d have to duck my head and gulp at the same time. Which I did, even if you couldn’t see it.

I don’t offer any guarantees that I have anything interesting to say - to all three people who read this (which is, quite frankly, a relief) - but I refuse to only go to work and come home and go to work, occasional dinners out notwithstanding, and feel guilty about how much luckier I am compared to large swathes of others. I refuse, dammit.

I’m having trouble writing (or doing anything) for long periods of time. Used to the brevity of twitter and facebook, that usually isn’t a problem, but I have other things I want to do, and the lack of attention span is a complete pain in the backside.

It’s mostly attributable to my job, where if the phone rings, I have to answer it, and generally stop whatever I’m doing to take up a new thing, and then return to whatever I was doing in the first place. Or go back to the first thing, do the second thing - I don’t always get to decide, because it isn’t up to me whose patient goes first, it’s up to who’s bleeding right now.

As an aside whinge, I can pretty much be guaranteed that if I’m doing something long and complicated and time-sensitive, the phone will ring. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. And if I’ve had to get up more than once, the phone will ring just as I should be reading the end result. For anyone in the know, I’m talking about auto-adsorptions, elutions, antibody things that aren’t in cards and multiple phenotypes - where one patient needs all the things to check all their things. (Why can’t all phenotyping methods be the same? Why dammit, why?)

With most of the things I have to do, it hardly matters whether I have to stop and start a bit, because a lot of the tasks I do are quick, so big whoop, I do it my way. But that intrusion of the phone is like a claw under my scalp, trying to scratch its way out every time.

And whinging aside (see what I did there?), it has taken a toll on my attention span. So here I am, doing this thing to redress the balance.

Having stared at the cursor a bit, I’ve gone on to check twitter and facebook, and holy crap, a passenger plane brought down by a missile? What the shit? To go all sweeping generalisation on everyone’s arse, the people in charge are really screwing this up. How are we still having armed conflicts? Again, why, dammit, why?

What makes me even angrier, and I know I’m going to sound like a lone hippy yelling “hey, man” against the dark, is how this will be turned into a run around complete with sabre-rattling and blame. Continued demonisation of one group of people over another. There’ll be arguments in tea rooms. Please. As if anyone in our happy group of campers (all employed, have roofs over their heads and food on the table) can possibly understand what it’s like to be either a) so desperate that violence is the only light at the end of the tunnel, or b) have violence as the only escape because culturally, that’s all you have had. I don’t think I do, and I try for an open mind.

Violence in large chunks is simple arse-hattery, and understanding why someone acts like a shit doesn’t excuse them, but demonising only perpetuates the shit. And I think around here I’m also ranting about a really crappy graphic I saw on twitter last night about how “Muslims” are trained to be terrorists. To flip that on its head, the largest powers on this earth are primarily judeo-christian democracies: and bombing the crap out of a third-world country isn’t going to win you any trips to heaven, despite the idea that might is right, or rather, God is on OUR side, not theirs. Bollocks.

We’re better than this. We’re smarter than this. The assumption that people doing bad things are a them is a comforting one, but also stupid. Just stupid. We’re all us, kids. All people.

Right, well I haven’t been clear, but I’m going now. Love and peace, peeps.

Right Before the Murderer Gets Caught

It’s so cold my laptop is freezing my fingers off, and what I really feel like doing is making a potato salad. I’m the only one at home and potato salad is an iffy dinner choice for small lad, even if paired with sausages. And sauce. And dinner is eight hours away. Harumph.

I’m a hospital scientist, and this is my day off.

I’m annoyed by everything at the moment, but mostly because I didn’t sleep enough on my day of sleep in between, went to work Tuesday and didn’t do my best. I spent yesterday evening second-guessing what I’d done the morning before and please, brain, just lay off. I didn’t fuck up, I was just slow.

Other than poo-pooing myself, this kind of annoyance has no particular focus, I can pick up anywhere and start ranting. For hours. I don’t want to inflict that on anyone or deal with the consequences of shouting at random people, so I shut up. Which also annoys me, and gee I love this spiralling gyre leading inevitably down to mind-numbing, eye-squinting, teeth-clenching rage if I don’t get out of my own head. Soon everything will be in caps.

Cooking would make me feel better, but small lad and I have entered some kind of power struggle over food…and it stinks. I know better, and it hasn’t been an issue (much) before - a dietician friend had clued me in before small lad came along about how to feed a littl’un. We’ve always been fairly relaxed about food, and careful about what’s on offer. Some junk, of course, but beyond the Coco Pops and occasional crap (fast food, in other words), it’s meat and three veg or variations thereupon (by which I probably mean fruit, but don’t take my word for anything today).

But small lad’s tastes are changing and I’m struggling to keep up. Dammit. Some of it, too, is my fault. He has a habit of asking what he can have to eat in the afternoons after school, and I tried out letting him decide what to eat - with the proviso that he’d have to eat dinner. It didn’t work, and dinner time started being a struggle. Gah.

Today I have half-arsed plans about something that isn’t sitting around (boom-boom) “resting” where I usually fall asleep right before the murderer gets caught, but I’ve only gotten as far as what I don’t want to do. This two-on-two-off bit of my roster is the pits. I should probably start drinking coffee again.

My laptop has warmed up and my fingers are no longer freezing, so that’s something, and when I’m finished here I’m going to make a cup of tea. Mmmmmm, tea.

Mmmmm. I need that tea. Take care, and laters.

Olive Snipe and Film

I’m working my way through Alias, which for some reason I haven’t seen all of. That sentence sounded okay in my head. I really have other things to do (and I’m not watching it when small lad is around since I’m not sure about its suitability for kids), but meh, I used to watch it on and off, may as well get through it.

Eventually I’ll get through all of Game of Thrones and Walking Dead, too. I’m slow. Actually I’m more than a little paranoid about what’s playing when the lad is home. It seems stupid, but I don’t like watching things in “my” study, since a) it’s too cold in there and b) I’m away from the action.

Since the action lately has been Mr T’s Something-Or-Other-Involving-Fools (There’s A Shock), I should probably rethink that. Since it gave me the chance to paraphrase Stephen King last week (“Yes, but if it stops being funny when it starts being you, it’s not really funny”), I’m not complaining much.

I usually line things up to watch while I’m ironing (MY GOD DOMESTIC SIDENOTES IN THIS BLOG NOTWITHSTANDING WHEN DID I BECOME A HOUSEWIFE?), but I haven’t been doing any ironing. Now that we’re running out of laundry baskets and I’m sick of the sock hunts (like snipe hunts, if they came in pairs and were found under beds and in dusty corners*), ironing it is.

* “Baron, sometimes you are so wet, one could shoot snipe off of you.” The Robin Hood movie with Patrick Bergen and Uma Thurman. It came out in the same year as the Kevin Costner one. Its editing was rushed for its release date and the dye colours in the taxing the textiles scene are impossible, but you can’t have everything.

Speaking of films, and with a crappy segue I am, so please come along, we’ve worked our way back through the Matrix trilogy and the Pirates of the Caribbean lot (which always makes me sad, then angry, then cross, then angry, then angry some more). In there was also the Lego Movie, which I liked more the second time around. Because I’m high maintenance and difficult, I’ll admit it still isn’t my favourite - that twee saccharine I’ll stop now because I hate giving spoilers. But…ERK!

I was going to rant about Pirates, had half a paragraph or two (then remembered I’d ranted on facebook), because it’s harsh and quite horrible - Ellison’s hell in “Hitler Painted Roses” is a luxury compared to some of the Pirates mythology - but I think I’ve done enough ranting about it, and it’s not what I wanted to talk about anyway.

Olives.

Olives are what I wanted to talk about, since I love them and got some in a restaurant recently that lived up to the hype that is a good olive. I love olives. Green ones, black ones, ones with pimentos – I’ll even have a bash at feta-stuffed giant green ones, although I draw the line at involving anchovies.

When I saw the olives in Matrix Revolutions, I was drooling, and certainly not over the Merovingian. Creep. Those gorgeous dark-green globes on a twisty-metal cocktail stick. The feel of the cool fire of a martini (especially vodka, nom nom nom) balanced by the warm comfort of a great olive, oh yummy. My mouth is watering now.

I want those olives. I want to make a pitcher of martinis (like in MASH, because functional alcoholism is hilarious*), and pour out into frosted, probably specially purchased cocktail glasses, and plonk those olives right in. Then pick them out again, as I drink.

I fire up Google, thinking I can probably find out what variety of olives they were. Ha!

What I found instead was a crowing about a continuity error in the scene – the Merovingian has one olive on the stick, then two. I also found multiple (very interesting, but beside my point) explorations of the meanings in the Matrix trilogy. Yes, but, dammit, I’m looking for food not philosophy. Ba-doom-tish.

(And, parenthetically speaking, I think that error is more clumsy-ish handling than bloomer. There are two olives in the bottom of the glass as Seraph, Morpheus and Trinity approach. Then Merv gestures with the cocktail stick with one olive on it, right at the end of the stick. It seems pretty logical that – although we don’t see the Merovingian’s hands – he picks up the second as he talks.)

(Continuing with the sidebar, because I seem to care about this: the point of this scene establishes the Merovingian as a hedonist. He continues a business discussion while rooting around for an olive to eat, in an ever-so-sophisticated martini – it’s not that hard to work out. If you haven’t seen the movie (if you don’t like olives, you don’t care, and may be a heathen), watch this scene closely. As he talks to them, he doesn’t just eat that first olive whole, he tears off half, leaving the remaining flesh on the stick. And we see it, oh yes, sitting there, teeth-marked, the flesh begging to be finished. And it might matter too, if in the world of the story, someone had to conduct a long negotiation with him. Poison an olive, whoopee, problems solved. Instead Trinity is about to point a gun at his head and thus ends negotiation. Oh well. End of sidebar.)

I still don’t know what variety of olive they used. I’ll just have to be surprised the next time I find an olive that lives up to the hyperbole. Most of which I’ve created for this post, and more power to me.

* Don’t know where that snark came from, but it’s staying there now.

I’m now very sleepy in the eyeballs, and this turned out much longer than I expected (and I should be asleep - I'm posting this later but it's the afternoon as I type).

May all of your olives be hyperbolic and your sock hunts go better than mine.

Black Plastic Baby Head.

It’s the last day of school holidays today and we are sitting around in our pyjamas. Which is par for the course unless we have somewhere to go, but don’t tell anyone, I think I’m ashamed I’ve passed this on to my kid. Sometime today we’ll have to do useful things, like getting organised for school tomorrow, which is far less work than it sounds, even if it does sound terribly important.

I spent yesterday pleasantly squiffed on gin and white wine (sequentially, not simultaneously) and have a far better head today than I expected. Waking up at four a.m. this morning (as I usually do) with one ear spinning was gross, but reading blogs and resolutely ignoring it did the trick. Some more sleep helped too.

At one stage I fell asleep while propped up reading - one advantage of working in the MOST UNCOMFORTABLE LAB IN THE WORLD is I can sleep in almost any position, although I seem to drool more these days.

The dream about the extraordinarily loud hand-held slide projector that sprouted a black plastic baby head cut that nap short, and a good thing too. The grinding noise was so loud I was afraid it would wake the house, but of course it didn’t because it was all a dream.

This is a very disjointed entry.

I was going to go on at length about marriage and motherhood not being definitions but rather priorities, but honestly, I can’t be bothered. I really did have it all planned out, but I’d rather just be silly. Or something.

Whatever.

I think I’m done for today. Maybe some more later. Tomorrow, unless of course I get a self-venting spleen tonight. See yerz.