The Border Fail (and post without a point)

Occasionally, I check out the website for the Border Mail, the news rag in my home town. It's mostly for comedic value to read about small city goings on and to shake my head at the forum it seems to provide for some pretty terrible right-wing conservativeness (V8 car races? Stimulating the local economy! Gay marriage? Burn in Hell! New ALDI store? The most exciting event since the Queen visited! Climate Change? Unscientific tosh!). It's a shame that my grandmother has as her limited sources of "current affairs" the Border Mail, Readers' Digest Magazines and John Laws. No wonder we have so many arguments when I visit!

I think my Dad once said (or said that someone once said) that you only have to fart to get on the front page of the Border Mail. And you clearly only need the IQ of a sea cucumber to get a letter to the editor published. [Except, that is, for the guy who wrote a fake letter complaining that daylight savings was to blame for climate change. Following that, letter, a number of concerned local citizenry/climate change deniers all wrote completely ridiculous letters chorusing their agreement. Brilliant.] The letters pages are often a hoot and I get a kick out of reading them when I'm visiting the folks. There seems to be an inordinate number of people writing in to thank a kind stranger for finding their dog or wallet or keys, or not causing them to die on an emergency trolley in the local hospital, or giving their husband a bottle of water as he sat under a tree on a hot day while he waited for his wife in Lavington Square (this one was for real - Mrs Senior Citizen was no doubt shopping up a storm in Big W for some control briefs and a Copperart urn. Any sensible person knows to pass out under a tree in similar circumstances).

One of the funniest letters to the editor I've read recently was from some poor biddie who wrote in to thank the "kind couple" who minded her handbag by her poker machine at the Commercial Club while she went to attend the Members' Draw. These letters all seem to end with the same astonished conclusion that the writer didn't think that nice people like that existed anymore (probably because the population nowadays are all gay, lefty, global warming gullibles who can't wait to see "this great country going down the toilet").

So, anyway, back to the comedic value present in the BM - recently I noticed this story and the magistrate's comment at the end is classic understatement:

http://www.bordermail.com.au/news/local/news/general/i-was-just-airing-my-penis-not-flashing/1687116.aspx

Combine that with the story about the mother in jail on driving offences whilst pregnant with her 10th sprog, and you start to get a pretty bad impression of the place. I wonder if the handbag minders and dog finders and community quilters despair.

(This really wasn't a post intended to appear intellectually superior to readers of the BM, I just really wanted to point that story out. I would call it a pretext but can you have a pretext that appears at the end of a story? Hmm.)

Top 5s

This week's theme is "pissweak attempts at emulation of certain celebrities through questionable fashion choices". Alternatively, "if I remember these from the 80s, why does anyone in their right mind want to go back there?!".

We were never really trendy or cool kids as far as fashion goes. A lot of our clothes were hand-me-downs or home-made. Some home-made items were the source of much tension and angst, and my mother often stubbornly refused to countenance any wailing objections to certain clothing. I'm thinking in particular here of my primary school uniform, which my mother sewed herself and into which she inserted puffy sleeves (I think the pattern was from 1964). The social implications of this were dire. I tried to iron them flat. I also walked around with my hands on opposite shoulders trying to squash the sleeves down and make those bloody puffballs yield so i could be like the other normal girls with their normal bought uniforms with normal flat sleeves. When none of these methods worked, I resorted to wearing my school jumper over uniform to hide my sartorial shame. For nearly the whole of summer. Sorry mum, it really was horrible as a 10 year old kid.

Outside of school, I tried to pass myself off as cooler than I was by copying certain styles I'd seen on tv shows or Rage, or in Smash Hits, using my limited wardrobe options. (In these GFC days, I guess you could say I may have actually spawned the concept of "shopping your wardrobe".) Of particular note, I remember these looks:

1. Martika. Cutoff denim shorts, short brunette bob hairstyle, white t-shirt with orange cheesecloth shirt over the top that I used to wear open and knotted at the shirt ends. Oh yeah, I felt the earth move. Because it was rocked by my fashion sense!


2. Punky Brewster. I had some Punky Brewster merchandise socks. One was pink, the other was blue to match Punky's l'il tramp style. Actually, I think they might have been my sister's and I just wished they were mine. I did wear them though, and we probably scratched each other's eyes out over that even though we could have probably just swapped all our regular pairs of socks around and there would be plenty of Punky style to share.


3. Eastern bloc athlete. I once owned, and LOVED, a red tracksuit set that had elasticated cuffs on the pants and the top, and puffy shoulders. There was also a wee Snoopy patch sewn on the left breast of the top. I do remember once wearing this with my black school shoes and white socks, so it's entirely open to conclude that I resembled less an eastern bloc athlete outfitted by a Lithuanian bedazzler, and more one of those daggy (but terribly cute) Chinese kids you see wearing what appear to be pyjamas as normal day clothes. And I've seen the busloads of Chinese tourists at Bondi Beach. Black shoes and white socks are clearly de rigeur in the People's Republic.


4. Collette, of "You Can Ring My Bell" fame. She spawned the whole bike pants as fashion item craze. I had a couple of pairs of flourescent trimmed bike shorts that I wore to death. And never once on a bike, funnily enough. I think there are a lot of girls out there sharing collective responsibility for this particular atrocity. And I think the leggings around nowadays are just a longer form of bike pants.


5. Shannen Doherty. This was due to the long and blunt hair cut I was sporting in 1992. I think I may have even tried to pass myself off as Brenda/Shannen at a dress-up party by wearing a purple Esprit t-shirt over a long-sleeved white top, with Levi 501s and Doc Martens. I wasn't really allowed to watch 90210, though. I did a Dolly quiz one day to be told that although I was clearly clueless about the trials and tribulations of the West Beverley High set, I shouldn't worry because the girl down the street would have all the episodes taped. And you know what, it was true. So I would go to Bianca's house and we absorbed the dramas of Brenda, Brandon, Steve, Donna, Dylan, Kelly, Andrea and David (and no, I didn't have to look that up on Wikipedia!). Her dad watched several episodes with us too. Looking back, this now seems kind of weird.

Public Service Announcement Fail

My public service announcement to myself to be nice and to not procrastinate just got stamped with a big fat red FAIL. I prepared multiple copies of a variety of court documents in complex proceedings involving a number of parties. They have taken me ages to prepare. I duly printed them, faithfully checked and collated them and, with careful positioning of the stapler, securely fastened them. I then gave them to the Overlord to sign and they were returned to me not long after, with a decree to re-do about half of them again, because that half had a signature block with a dotted line, and the other half had a signature block without a dotted line, and we should be careful to be Consistent. Yeah, Consistently Frustrating. And never mind that the documents were based on our own firm's precedents. You never noticed it the billion times you looked at the documents before.

So, it's now the afternoon and not only haven't I finished the documents yet, I've just consumed my feelings in the form of a large iced mocha chocolate. With cream.

And I might need to call the paramedics to get the pencils out of my cranium.

If you can't say anything nice about anyone, come sit next to me (WARNING: self-indulgent blog post)

I've been bitching and moaning too much lately.



Bitching about work, moaning about the neighbours' child who, elephantine-like, runs up and down the adjoining hallway at ungodly hours of the morning. I've been bitching about people on trains as regular reader(s) know and people at work who can't help themselves but do weird passive aggressive things like move people's lunch to other fridges and even put someone's hair straightener, which was left in the ladies toilet, actually IN a lady's toilet. Heck, yesterday I was even getting a bit too worked up about my skirt riding up uncomfortably around my waist and how it was all Andy's/the world's/Miley Cyrus' fault. I think I need a holiday. Or maybe just a weekend of watching this or this will cure me (for now).



Anyway, I'm going to try and be nice and heck* if I can't be beatified before the year's out. At the very least, maybe i should stop procrastinating so much and stop dwelling on the things I don't like doing and just get 'em out of the way:



If there's a task that must be done

Don't turn your tail and run

Don't pout! Don't sob!

Just do a half-assed job!

If you cut every corner

It's really not so bad. Everybody does it

Even Mum and Dad.

If nobody sees it, then nobody gets mad!

* I just read No Country For Old Men. Hence the southernisms that appear to be creeping in, y'all.

Words that should be in the dikshunerry

I'm currently getting back in to the routine of incorporating some physical exercise into my day, other than walking 500m from my house to Banana Joe's grocery, after having a bit of a spell on the bench. I didn't do a Geoff Huegill or anything, but I was feeling decidedly meh so I thought it about time to rediscover some cardio-based virtuousness.

So, early on Saturday morning, I was schlepping around Waverley Oval at the group training I used to do when I lived east-side (before I was keeping it real and gritty - literally - in the inner west). After multiple trips running up and down a flight of stairs (numbering 75 odd), I had these:

quobbles. uncontrollable wobbling of the quadriceps muscles; typically experienced when trying to drive a car after a period of intense exercising and your leg shakes when depressing the clutch.*

*Acknowledgements owed to my sister in coming up with this word. It is a bloody good one.

Quobbles are usually followed about 2 days later by the inability to rise easily and gracefully out of one's chair at work (I haven't figured out a new word for that yet, I'm sure one's out there). Luckily my desk is a temple to the gods of date loaf and apples right now, and if I had a thermos I'd be almost totally self-sufficient today.

A long time ago in a land far away...

...called Canberra, I went out with this guy for about 6 months. He was a German PhD student in inorganic chemistry that I met at a party at a share-house in O'Connor. My housemates used to unoriginally call him Ze German, so I will adopt that name here too.

Anyway, it was a fun time and we went on a nice jaunt to Cairns and the Daintree, and caught up with a Canadian guy who Ze German had met in Melbourne. This particular Canadian fellow had skipped his vast and pleasant homeland after being overpaid $10,000 by his employer - so he quit his job, and landed in Australia. (He wasn't quite sure what he was going to do when he got home and had to face the music - he seemed to think that they couldn't do anything to him if he had already spent the money.) The Canadian had two main hobbies. One was selling pot to backpackers, and the other was magic tricks - stuffing the lit cigarette into the t-shirt (SPOILER! fake thumb), card tricks, etc. Ze German became quite intrigued and slightly obsessed with learning about card tricks and magic tricks. Being the thoughtful person that I am, on our return to Sydney I went to a magic shop on Pitt St Mall and bought him a pack of trick cards as a farewell present, thinking it might give him something to do on the 20 hour flight back to Frankfurt.

After Ze German returned to Deutschland, we kept in touch sporadically, as you do, until it all dropped off as we moved on to other places and people. In one of those phone calls, he did tell me that he had been practicing his magic tricks and was actually starting to do some small corporate events as a magician, but I assumed it was just a small moonlighting gig to his day job as a research chemist. Recently, though, my friend Heather sent me a link to his latest website and it looks like the world of redox reactions and cations has given way to entertaining a lot of weirdly smiling Germans on a much bigger scale.

It's a funny world. To think, if things had been different, I could have been Claudia Schiffer to his David Copperfield. Or just hopefully not Siegfried to his Roy.

Top 5s

Whoops, am a bit late with the Top 5 challenge for last week. Anyway, I thought it fitting to have this week's Top 5 game on Favourite Ways to Avoid Getting Shit Done (aka Procrastinating). I went to a "Time Management" workshop today at work (ironically as a way to avoid Getting Shit Done At Work). There were the usual coloured textas and butchers paper, and a presenter who was like a cross between a Playschool presenter, Magda Szubanski (in the physical sense) and Tracey Ullmann (think crazy voices). The workshop began with the perenially unhelpful "helpful hints" ("Just do it!" "Give yourself rewards for finishing tasks!" - if I did this I WOULD be the size of two badly parked volkswagons). In the group sessions, you could literally feel the "engagement" and "ideas sharing" pulsating around the room (I believe I was making myself a coffee and helping myself to the biscuits when this was going on). But then it all descended into everyone craning their necks to observe the argument between the presenter and an arrogant male wanker lawyer type about whether homelessness was a "lifestyle choice". And yes, this had nothing to do with procrastination or how to avoid it, so you can guess how pleased I was about this particular two-hour black hole of my day. But no-one made me go, so I guess I can't complain. And the biscuits WERE good ones.

And since I'm tired, I'm gonna fill this out later. When I get around to it.

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