I’ll have a pint of serotonin, please.
Right, that’s it. I’m sitting down to write something, anything, on this poor blog. I’m sick of being afraid of it and feeling the nausea surge in close proximity to anything socially computer-related, much like that old friend or relative that needs calling upon, the longer you leave it the worse that feeling gets.
All I want to do is to be invisible, dammit! I want to stay indoors at all times and answer the door by cracking it ajar to give strangers the beady eye before yelling at them to get off my territory ’til I release the rabid cats. I don’t want facebook or twitter, don’t want people to know what I’m doing, what I like or dislike, or where I’m hovering. I just want to be a non-K8. Healthy it isn’t, but oh-so familiar, comforting and predictable it most definitely is.
And yet now a corner has turned in our lives as TAT drops out of the workforce and hangs up his taxi plate… driving was probably not the best profession for a man with a dodgy back to partake in, but surgery looms nonetheless and disability has been claimed so I must take over and get a job.
Get a job?!? Ahhh! You mean I have to go out into the scrutinous public eye and do stuff and be bubbly and interesting all of a sudden? Somebody pass the bucket… I’m not at all sure about this, don’t feel well all of a sudden at all at all. Normal people scare the bejeesus out of me.
But, you’da bin so proud… I did get a job as a bar-wench in a local pub and it was almost fun, that one day I worked. Shame the pub closed down four days later, hey.
So what now? Prostitution? Dog pedicures? Getting this blog out of the darkness might be a good start.
So how have you been?
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.
Of Overpopulation and Things
If I was the Teeshirt of Ireland I would do the following two things:
1. I would solve overpopulation of prisons by putting criminals of a lesser threat to hard work in war-torn or third world countries. Fraud is such a clever felony, I’m sure such a brain would be of great use to school children in Malawi, it’s such a waste having them rot away in their en-suite (all mod cons) prison cells and chewing through so much tax.
2. I would make adoption of said third world or war torn orphans faaaar less expensive. Couples all over Europe have trouble conceiving kids of their own, yet have large houses more than capable of rooming several disadvantaged kids but they can’t, because adoption (at least in Ireland) costs roughly the same amount of yoyos as a brand new Jaguar X-type. I don’t understand why with a bit of vetting, they’re not throwing those kids at us. They should be on sale in Lidl, they should be giving them out free with Happy Meals but they’re not!! They’re leaving them to die or selling them to rich people who aren’t necessarily better parents just because they’re rich. So bizarre.
Thankfully I’m not the Teeshirt of Ireland and never will be (because the country would most likely go to pot and all the small furry animals would die because I seem to have that effect and would probably have a hard time explaining that to Ryan Tubridy).
I would however welcome the present Teeshirt of Ireland to read my blog and steal my ideas and also fertilize my crops in Farmville for me sure aswell while he’s at it by way of thanks.
Speaking of small furry animals…
I miss Worzel Gummidge :(
I have been told today by two seperate people out of the blue that I need a Christening cake. I had no idea that there was such a thing. I have decided that I won’t bother, but will obsess about this constantly for the next week until the last second when I will change my mind and most likely pay over the odds for something that tastes a bit weird. I know that now, but will do nothing about it because that’s just the way it is. Acupuncture would probably fix this kink in my general thought pattern, but I can’t afford it! I need a new head. That’s what it is.
(image thieved from here)
Pass the Bread Soda
That’s the thing about eight-seater taxis… you’re so muffled up the front in the driver’s seat that you can’t hear the bloke behind you spewing his Bacardi all over the kip so by the time you find out about it, it’s too late.
There’s an Aviation Day in Newcastle happening right about now, I had meself all geared up to bring the kids for a bit of face-painting, flight simulating and skydiver admireage, but it just wasn’t meant to happen I reckon.
Nope, it just so happens that our eight-seater taxi is also Laughingboy’s only mode of transport so one whiff of the pen in that taxi when I opened her up was enough to convinve me to make other plans. The heat of the sun had warmed her insides up a little, see, so the vomitus belch of stench that erupted was so strong it just wasn’t worth tolerating for the sake of an interview with the Irish Air Corps.
Fuuuck.
AND I’ve lost my rubber gloves.
Is there such a thing as cranial Viagra?
I feel I should apologise to those of you who still read this blog. The fact that you patiently wait for content that is sporadic at best, and you leave comments even if I don’t always have time to return them, this amazes me and I’m so unbelievably thankful to you for that loyalty. I feel like I’m behaving a bit like a spoiled brat sometimes.
It’s not so much that my family takes up most of my time, it does, but there should always time for a quick update… I just can’t figure out what the hell I’m supposed to write about, without the end result seeming so much like a bag of shite. There’s a constant scanning mechanism in my brain beeping away, searching for something interesting or funny to say, but my sense of humour seems to be wedged in that dark spot under the bed that is impossible to reach, even with a broken coat-hanger. It just sits there by itself, grumbling and gathering fluff and won’t come back out of its own accord no matter how much coaxing I do.
Blogging is just so difficult all of a sudden! Content must be original, interesting, heartfelt without being maudlin. It must be brief and memorable, and true. It can’t be re-gurgitated, can’t be contrite or honest in a negative way unless a healthy dose of vitriol is involved (vitriol to me might as well be a brand of cough-medicine though, it just doesn’t appeal to me at all at all), and it can’t be so sweet it makes your teeth ache. I have worry. I have stress and boredom and niggling doubt all rolled up in a gooey ball. I have negative thoughts that don’t go down too well in blogs, and gripes about people and things that should not be written about. Apart from that, there are dodgy YouTube clips and stupid Facebook applications filling the rest of the fug.
I think The Secret Fire killed it for me. The pressure to create something as good as, or better than that post is almost impossible, a fact that one or two people have pointed out to me before. This truth feeds my insecurities and I agree with them, and feel like giving up because it’s so unlikely that the planets will align themselves again so perfectly. But I don’t give up, even if I probably should. Maybe some day the Mojo will come back, maybe it won’t.
So I suppose the rest is in the hands of Saint Jude, and in the meantime, thank you so much for hanging in there!
The Health Fuckup Executive
I’m very envious of those parents who can just bring their kids for vaccination jabs and be done with it, without worrying about what this stuff is actually doing to their immune systems. My protests seem so absurd, why the hell not give the kid something to ward off deadly diseases if it’s freely available?! How irresponsible am I to even CONSIDER not vaccinating them? The dirty great big needles loom over my babies and I do it anyway. Bar useless influenza jabs, the rest are just not worth gambling on, surely.
Puppychild got her two jabs against a multitude of diseases last month. I got a nasty dose of the flu straight away, then passed it to the Accidental Terrorist who then caught pneumonia. He’s been floored for almost three weeks, hemorrhaging money as he goes. Coincidence? Dunno. Dunno.
Sir Fartsalot got a BCG (tuberculosis jab) on July 5th. The teeny pinprick hole in his skin did not disappear, it slowly grew and grew, and turned into an abscess. A large purple eye-shaped growth with a pus-green pupil gazes at me and wills me to prick it out of its misery and all the while my boy-o cries. He cries when I feed him, when I pick him up, when I strap him into his car-seat, lots of tears and red-faced misery usually follow. So much suffering, so much blood-stained gunge erupting from my babóg’s arm.
It’s so un-fucking-fair that the HSE cannot sort its shit out.
I read that in 2002, a previously dodgy EVANS BCG was withdrawn from public consumption, to be replaced by the SSI BCG.
An article written in 2005 states that there have been 152 reports of local complications like Sir Fartsalot’s since the new vaccine was rolled out. I can only presume that the figure has doubled by now. I brought the kid to the doctor, to a local A&E (where I was told to bugger off because they’re not insured to treat babies), and to a paediatric A&E. They told me not to worry, that it was a normal reaction, that they get this sort of thing all the time.
ALL THE TIME???
I read that occasionally, such swellings result in lymph node infections which is a very serious thing indeed.
‘Not to worry!’ they say. O, but I do worry. I worry a lot.
Meanwhile Sir Farsalot hasn’t yet had his 6-in-1s, a process that was supposed to begin two months ago. The vaccination program for children looks like this:
- At birth: BCG tuberculosis vaccine (given in maternity hospitals or a HSE clinic)
- At 2 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine)
- At 4 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C.
- At 6 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine).
- At 12 months: Measles, Mumps, Rubella, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine).
- At 13 months: Meningococcal C, Haemophilus Influenzae B
- At 4-5 years: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C; Measles, Mumps and Rubella (by second injection)
- At 11-14 years: Diphtheria, Tetanus
- At 12 years: Human Papillomavirus (Girlz only)
That looks like a rocky road to me. A road full of miasms that will give our great-grandchildren strange side-effects, I fear. I don’t know what to do.
Why on earth do people still trust the HSE after all its fuckups? I sure as hell don’t, especially not with something as important as my kids, but yet those around me tell me I’m crazy.
Better crazy than dead though, hey?
Stop playing with yourself Daddy
‘There’s an app for that’. You know that ad on the telly (there’s an app for that too) for iPhones which shows all the fantabulous (there’s an app for that) things that it can do? I don’t have an iPhone, but TAT does… I’m sure it’s lovely but if it won’t flip sausages while I colour in pictures of Spongebob, I have no interest.
He won’t go to the toilet without it now. We walk past distant gunfire, waiting for our turn on the loo while TAT conquers spy allies. Sometimes he catapaults birds. Puppychild has to thump loudly and tell him to stop playing with himself frequently which is wrong in so many ways.
“It won’t wipe your arse though will it?” I scoff at him when he finally emerges with a burnt matchstick and a pins-and-needles limp. “No app for that, is there?”
It’s all very affecting, this waiting around for TAT and his crapps. I don’t know if there’s a helpline, but I’m pretty sure there’s an easy way to look for one if there is.
Please don’t chew your gum near my baby
It’s your lunch break. You scarf down an onion bagel, a packet of crisps and a can of diet fizz, all washed down with a cigarette maybe. On your way back to the office, you pop one or two chewing-gums to dull the pungency of it all and congratulate yourself that you’re doing your teeth a favour even if your smokey lungs are shot. Two out of three ain’t bad, sure.
-o0o-
It’s not your lungs you need to worry about though, it’s the other thing… the thing that was in most of what you just ate. Crisps, diet (‘zero’) drinks, chewing gum, diet yoghurts, artificial sweeteners, breakfast cereals, aspartame, aspartame, aspartame. It’s in sugar-free children’s medications, in a bid to prevent tooth-rot. It’s in 1200 of the products you consume, and it’s very slowly mucking up our genetics and making us say things like… ‘isn’t it funny how people are dropping like flies with cancer these days?’.
Unstranger’s recent post reminded me of E951, the toxin that in 1980, was voted against by the FDA Public Board Of Inquiry on the grounds that the data was flawed, there were brain tumor findings in animal studies, and there was a lack of studies on humans to determine long-term effects.
Aspartame was since approved spuriously via pressure from Donald Rumsfeld, apparently. Urm… ok.
“The official story is that aspartame was discovered in 1966 by a scientist developing an ulcer drug (not a “food additive”). Supposedly he discovered, upon carelessly licking his fingers that they tasted sweet. Thus was the chemicals industry blessed with a successor to saccharine, the coal-tar derivative that foundered eight years later under the pressure of cancer concerns.” (according to this)
Aspartame basically metabolizes into Formaldehyde from amino acids and methanol, which eats you (so to speak) slowly, causing severe health problems at exceptionally low levels of exposure. It disguises itself as illnesses such as Lyme Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Hypothyroidism, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, and Attention Deficit Disorder, to name just a few.
Some of the symptoms of aspartame poisoning include:
Headaches, Dizziness, Muscle spasms, Rashes, Depression, Fatigue, Seizures, Tachycardia, Insomnia, Hearing Loss, Anxiety attacks, Loss of taste, Joint Pain, Vertigo, Tinnitus, Irritability and Breathing difficulties.
Because it metabolizes into a poison, it is believed that it can also trigger or worsen things like brain tumours, Alzheimer’s Disease, Diabetes, birth defects, epilepsy, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Parkinson’s Disease.
Side effects can occur gradually, can be immediate, or can be acute reactions, but! It’s a billion dollar market, so SHHH!!! don’t tell anybody!!
Here I sit with a tobacco pouch with the words ‘Smoking can damage the sperm and decreases fertility’ emblazoned in BIG lettering on its side. I have no sperm. I have plenty of children.
I’m worried about the warning that’s absent from my bottle of 7UP Free that should state ‘This product contains a chemical which eats holes in your brain. Do not consume if pregnant.’
But there will never be, because there’s no money in that lark.
Because we could all be run over by a bus tomorrow, I guess.
