Category: being

A bit of a scatty post, but I’ve still got very sore ears and it’s making it hard to concentrate

Being the penultimate footy weekend, we sat around most of the weekend watching it. It was well-timed for us, because being night games in Australia made them afternoon games in Abu Dhabi.

The mister dedicated himself fully to the watching-ness of it, but after the first quarter of the first day, I got a bit twitchy, so I worked on my Commemorative Election cross stitch which I’ve been meaning to get around to.

I like to have the footy and the cricket on in the background, it soothes me. I guess it takes me back to the safety of childhood or something. The mister is always shocked that I can have been apparently watching or listening to an entire football game and still say, ‘Oh, is it finished? Who won?’

The cross stitch will be hung in the boys’ room. There are people who let their children develop their own political beliefs. I am not such a person. I would be, but I’m so right about my politics, that they don’t need to develop their own thoughts.

A funny thing has happened, just as I’ve been putting this blog post together. I have realised that this is a lot less true than it used to be. Events of the last few years – living outside a democracy, the swearing in of our first woman Prime Minister, the fear of living with Tony Abbott as Prime Minister – have left me caring very much that they learn to be politically engaged, but less inclined to bludgeon them (cross stitch evidence notwithstanding). I have been noticing more and more lately, that in politics and political action, I am much more like my mother than my father. The personal is political rather than the explicit political action of joining parties and so on. And that’s not the person I expected to be, I always thought I’d be much more involved in a political party than I have ever been.

Actually, this isn’t the cross stitch I was planning. I wanted to take the opportunity to do my first person cross stitch. That is, cross stitch an outline of Julia, pearls and all, but I just haven’t organised it, and I knew I could get this finished before the next election.

Fittingly, I completed it during the Collingwood Sydney game, so I was working on something else when Julia’s team got whipped by the Saints.

So now, all that’s left is the grand final. We have to get up really early for that. If I recall correctly, it begins here at 8 am. Which is definitely an early time to be watching football.

From miscblogphotos

PS You’ll notice that I’m a bit of a sloppy cross stitcher, and I don’t go back and correct mistakes – like if I start a line too low, or do a run of stitches with the crosses reversed from all the others, I very often just leave it that way. Unless it’s a present. If it’s a present I do undo it.

Oh-kay, enough with the Oh jokes now

Snippets from home tell me that Oprah is going to Australia. As John Stewart says, we’ll have to start calling it Ohstralia (how many ways do I love that man, and how much time do I spend plotting ways to sort of bump into him and possibly have his babies).

Anyhoo, as I was blogsurfing my way through lunch today, I discovered a campaign I think you should join.

Anita Heiss for Ohpera House
“Oprah is coming to Sydney and there could be no better guest or representative of modern Australia than Sydney’s own ANITA HEISS.”

There’s details of how to email the shOh’s producers and ask them to include Anita Heiss as a guest over on Anita’s blog and website. I’ve never written to Oprah before, but I’m going to do it right now.

this time with less laziness

That was nothing more than extraordinary laziness that last post. Goodness me, what would my self help books think of me?

Fifi and Pen raise the questions to which I should have posted the answers, so let’s see the question again. When considering whether or not to include someone, or something someone has done, in my blog or memoir, a question I sometimes ask is:

Does the person have right of reply?

Rather than providing me with a yes/no answer, the question acts more as a prompt, giving my thinking some direction. Probably, I could draw you a flowchart of sorts, but I’m too lazy for that.

As an aside, much of this thinking is instinctive, subconscious or unconscious, but when I do need to take the time to sit and think it through (for example, every now and then I think, ‘Oh, I wonder why I have never mentioned such and such’), I find that I have made this a consistent starting point.

So, back to the question. Does the person have a right of reply?

Because the people I write about do not have their own blogs or write for publication, or speak publicly, I often consider that it is enough if that person has the right of private reply.

Consider the mister. He would never start his own blog or publish a piece of memoir or have the funds to plaster his comments on a billboard, but he has every opportunity to say (but rarely does), ‘Erm, do you not think the way you related that story was a little, you know, one-sided’. I guess the mister’s ultimate right of reply lies in my commitment to our relationship and the kind of relationship that we have.

My parents have a different kind of right of reply. For obvious reasons, they couldn’t actually write or say anything, but they’re my parents – I might be forty years old and they might be dead, but nonetheless, I am constantly seeking their advice and their opinions and chatter with them constantly. Of course, there is a danger in imagining the way in which someone exercises their right of reply, but I am confident that I come to those relationships with enough honesty that if I do make a mistake in how they actually would respond, it is an error of judgment and not one of defensiveness or lack of generosity or revenge. Also, my father gave me explicit permission to say whatever I wanted to say.

Anyway, when it comes to my parents I use a different kind of question, based around whether or not I have the right to tell the story, and the parent-child relationship is, I think, a unique one in our ‘rights’ to a story. Perhaps I will talk about this another day.

Some people do have a right of reply, but I still choose not to write about them. For example, an alarm bell rings if I imagine that person exercising that right, and even as I am imagining it, my heart races and my breath shallows. This is a sign to me that I can not write about that person with sufficient objectivity, which is, in turn a sign of other things, for example, that I am unable or unwilling to write with honesty or generosity. In such a case, we all lose. I am limited in expanding on this point by providing examples, because it would immediately mean that I have to write about people and events I have already decided I don’t want to write about. Sorry bout that.

What if the answer is no, no the person does not have a right of reply? Sometimes, I might decide that doesn’t matter and write about them anyway, perhaps because they are completely unidentifiable or sufficiently anonymous. But generally, if they do not have a right of reply, I proceed with caution, because it is so often a sign of a power imbalance (this is where a discussion about the rights to a story would be useful, and I really will come back to that another day).

In this case, I might consider the consequences. For example, in telling this story, is there more gained than lost? As a human rights activist, I have very often made the decision that yes there is more to gain by discussing this situation publicly, but as a blogger or potential memoirist wallowing in middle class privilege, I have to know that ‘giving voice’ is fraught with opportunities to patronise or appropriate. Am I doing either of those things?

In my previous life, this was less of a problem, but at the moment, I am definitely having to weave my way through this. Luckily for you, this is one piece of angst and over-thinking you will be spared.

I do have other things to say, and I know that this is all a bit superficial, but this cough I’ve been fighting for the last few months seems to be developing into one of those pre-sinusitis infections which means my ears are ringing and I’m quite light-headed (not in a good way), so I’m going to lie down and possibly go back to sleep for the afternoon.

placeholder

One of the questions I ask when I am deciding whether or not I have the right to include a certain person in a story on my blog or in my memoir is:

Does the person have a right of reply?

….and then, I started writing this whole post about exactly what I mean by that, but actually, I want to go and watch the footy instead. I will come back and finish it another day. Yes, yes I will.

Wednesday lunchtime

One day, not so long ago, but long enough that it could be once upon a time, my eldest boy said to me, ‘Mum, why do you have to take everything so serious?’

We were standing outside a shop in Marina Mall, and I had left the shop without the pair of sandshoes I needed to replace the others which had just about worn through the sole. There were too many shoes and I couldn’t choose and instead of crying, I swore at the mister.

Eldest boy was right. I was taking things too serious. Every time I went to a shop, I was thinking of airmiles and packaging in a land with no recycling and of money we didn’t have, and, because I had just finished sorting out three houses and only one of them mine, I was feeling the weight of things.

It was hard for me to see the funny side and I loaded every decision with significance.

When life is going well, when you haven’t quite grown up, you don’t realise, but there’s a lot of decisions in a day. It starts with whether or not to get out of bed and just keeps going from there.

Once you start thinking about every decision, well, it means you’re paying a lot of attention to the consequences of every decision, which means you’re constantly running through scenarios and that means you live every day several times over.

Which would be fine, except that you only ever get enough sleep to live your day through once.

Life is not exactly smooth right now, but it’s nice to realise that I don’t feel that way right now.

My heart, she is racing fast right now

Just now, just this very most-recent-past moment I got hit by one of those realisations you get hit with every now and then:

I am a grown-up.

Now, I’ve had that realisation before, but what just occurred to me, what just hit me in the very most-recent-past moment is this:

I am a grown-up FOREVER.

Fark.

That makes you think, doesn’t it?

Here, have a cake, they’re a few years old now, but cakes don’t go stale in cyberspace:

From miscblogphotos

twitter rethunk

Twice, I have deactivated my twitter account. The first time, I was able to retrieve it, but the second time, twitter wouldn’t let me reactivate it. I’m not sure that I would have deactivated it the second time if I hadn’t had the first success reactivating it, but given that I didn’t know I would be able to reactivate it the first time, maybe I would have (do you get that? sorry if you don’t – I’m feeling lethargic today and have only enough energy to write, not to redraft or rewrite).

Anyhoo, watching qanda one night just after I had landed in Australia on our ‘summer’ vacation, I realised that qanda would be even better if I were logged in to twitter. Then I started hooking into the #ausvotes updates regularly and before I knew it I had set up another account.

I joined twitter in a completely different way this time than I had the previous time. Instead of following anyone, I just followed the #tags. My, but it was fun. I guess at times I felt a bit stalky, always listening and never saying anything, but then I reminded myself it was just old-fashioned lurking. I’m sure I’m not the only one using twitter that way.

Writing about my decision to leave twitter, I hypothesised that the reason it was making me feel bad was because it was making me feel a bit like a 16 year old schoolgirl, back on the fringes again, but clearly that wasn’t it, because here I was quite happily on the fringe.

But I wasn’t completely wrong. At that time, twitter really did make me feel left out, and it did become a tool of desperation – desperation to be at home. On the one hand, I liked the sense of attachment it gave me to Australia, but on the other, it exaggerated the distance between here and home, especially at around five o’clock as the tweets tapered off and one by one the lights went out, and I was left with lots to say, but no one to say it to. I really was using a virtual conversation as a substitute for a real one.

So, I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do about it now. I mean, there aren’t that many events like #ausvotes where you can sustain events-based twittering. There’s plenty of people I’d love to follow again, but I want to be careful. You see, I’m coping remarkably well with my return to Abu Dhabi at the moment. I’ve had a great couple of days catching up with people, getting back to the gym and so on and I’m in a better state of mind than I’ve ever been while living here.

But I don’t want to test it. There’s still a little way to go before we leave. And not that re-joining twitter will be the make it or break it of life in Abu Dhabi. Just that there’s no need to break something that’s just been fixed.

Which all makes it sound a lot more agonised than it really is. Really, I just meant to tell you that I did go back to twitter. And just so you don’t get the wrong impression, when I left twitter I wasn’t wrong , I just changed my mind.

cracking up

I’m not sure of the happiest moment of my life, but I do know the funniest thing I’ve ever seen is this. I can’t tell you how many times the mister, my dad and I have watched it and it never, ever fails to crack me up.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teoL6FKEtCY&fs=1&hl=en_US]

PS for those of you who weren’t in Australia at the time, it’s from a series called The Games, a mockumentary about the staging of the Sydney Olympics. My, but it was brilliant.

Eid mubarak

I woke inexplicably early this morning, and, even more inexplicably, got out of bed. The sky was lightening. The sun, and the colours it creates, when not affected by the humid haze, are especially evocative here, ranging from peach to tangerine.

It is the first day of Eid-al-fitr and the air is filled with prayers, broadcast from mosques around the neighbourhood.

I don’t remember this from last year, so I can’t tell you any more about it than that it is very moving.

Thursday morning

Today is the 30th day of Ramadan, which means Eid begins tomorrow.

I had intended to follow that sentence with a comma (which, you are right to note, would have left it as a clause and not a sentence) and the words ‘which means the mister does not get a day off work’. Just in time, I realised that was a fairly disrespectful and narrow way to look at an event which means a lot of things to a lot of people.

I shall live through these days in the same way as I do Easter or Christmas. That is, events which mean a lot more to some people than they do to me, but are, nonetheless, opportunities to reflect a bit on life and all its wonders.