Counting electric sheep
Things were tough last Friday night. A recent rash of local house break-ins had me edgy, and a pretty violent lightning storm boomed itself around my bedroom in surround sound and killed any chance of sleep stone dead.
I dozed fitfully and dreamed of weapons that I could use against a potential burglar, then had vivid and graphic nightmares about the various ways my weapons could be used against me.
Gradually more and more members of the family joined me in my bed as the night went on, and I woke in the early morning to find I’d been breastfeeding the dog.
THERE’s a day that can only improve by comparison.
Playing God
Try to imagine for a few minutes that you’re a Deity, a remote entity looking after a country roughly the size of France, and in this country there are several billion people all milling around doing their workaday jobs and living happily.
Life is good for this country for several years, you’re doing a good job it would seem. Then one day a small group of terrorists moves in to the country and starts creating havoc… what would you do to take care of your country?
Would you:
a) Detonate an atomic bomb thus killing said terrorists instantly, and sacrifice several billion happy people so that your country is doomed to restart its population from scratch?
b) Recognise that the country’s own law inforcement is making good progress with the identification and capture of these terrorists, and maybe help them along a bit with re-inforcements via your super powers?
c) Run away?
-o0o-
Sir Fartsalot developed a fairly high fever last week, bugs are rampant this time of year and I had run away to Galway for a girlish weekend thus depriving him of my antibacterial b@@b juice… a bad dose of the snots had taken hold of him. Immediately I was faced with the question above, and from all angles I was ordered to choose answer (a) and it was inferred that I would be a bad mother not to.
“Bring down that fever!! Bring him to the doctor and get him antibiotics!!! Quick!!!”
What nobody seems to realise, is that a fever in a person (above the age of… say six months let’s say) is a very GOOD thing. It means that the body realises there’s something wrong, and it’s reacted by kicking all self defence mechanisms into gear. Roast dem germs out. Swollen glands rock!
Why everybody has this urge to dose a fever with paracetamol in order to surpress it is beyond me. Why I’m ordered to nuke the kid’s immune system with antibiotics is just plain lunacy!! Yet, it’s an argument I have again, and again, and again, and usually my theory works but nobody seems to notice. Echinacea, a good diet and gallons of water works most of the time… the chidler’s antibody population blooms.
Weird.
This phobia we have, this distrust in our own immune systems is a beautiful cash-cow for pharmaceutical companies, but people are blind to it. They have us terrified of influenza under any name, they have us overdosing on vaccinations, and they terrify us with threats of the potential with that ever-steady mantra they sing: ‘better safe than sorryyyy!’
It’s all bollocks, I say. Not nearly enough stock is placed in a mother’s instinct like it used to, but then again there’s no money in that so things shall remain exactly as they are and I shall argue and be deemed a bad mother and I don’t care one little bit.
Burning the cradle at both ends
Every day. Every sodding day.
Every day I wake up and swear blind that I’ll go to bed early for a change. I hate waking up… that is I hate waking up when I know I have to get up; I love waking up and finding out that I don’t have to get up for another two hours, no surprise there, my homo brethriens. My best friend is the snooze button on my mobile phone (the same phone I won two years ago! I’ll miss my Ericsson should I ever go iPhonebound).
It’s just so HARD to go to bed at night.
From 08:00 to 21:00 every day, I belong to somebody else, many people in fact. Six dependants depend on me to keep them alive and happy, and this causes quite a lot of noise, because I can’t deal with them all at once: My baby needs input and a clean bum-hole. My eldest son needs music and attention and someone to remind him to stop grinding his teeth. My daughter loves to hang around with me and do things with me and asks me constantly to look at her doing funny things, which is a beautiful gift and something I adore and enjoy very much, but only in medium doses. My dog needs exercise, a luxury I’m too lazy to afford him which cuts me up, and he whines and gives me big dark sad eyes to rub salt on the wound. My cat meanders around my busy feet and trips me up… and through it all, my husband needs silence while he sleeps. Daytime silence, three children and a large dog – these are difficult things to shuffle!!
-o0o-
And so the last child is tucked into bed, and Einstein’s theory of relativity kicks in.
Silence. Pure, peaceful silence, the possiblities endless.
And so I dive for the fridge for a can of beer, and I wonder how to fill my night. And while I wonder how to fill my night, I fall into the Facebook pit and drown in stupid television and give in to the munchies and waste my hours on pointlessness. When 11pm comes round, I feel unfulfilled and ignored. I can’t go to bed unfulfilled and ignored!!!
-o0o-
It seems to be a common theme among people, that need to burn the candle at both ends. Two hours of selfish time is just not enough when you’re a nightowl like me. Sleep tortures us and wakes us up at night time and hates us the next day, and stolen naps create demons with sticky eyes, it’s just not fair. You know what I mean.
I vote for a re-jigging of the 24 hour clock… Days should be longer and weeks shorter for starters, I bet the moon would be up for that. The sun might get in the way somewhat but we’d get used to it pretty quickly with a bit of black-out lining and a heavy duvet. It can’t be all that difficult to arrange, the re-invention of time!?
The three day week… yet another thing I’d do if I was Teeshirt.
