The Loser
Well sure, now and isn’t it a while since we played a game?
- I don’t like your games, I always end up being laughed at.
Well isn’t that the point, to have a laugh?
- Not if I feel bad about it, no.
But if there isn’t a loser, there can’t be a winner, can there?
- I agree, but what does losing mean if it’s all the time?
It means you haven’t found the game you’re good at yet.
- Find me a game that I’m good at and I’ll play with you so.
Sure I don’t know what you’re good at, will we just play cards?
- I don’t know how.
I’ll teach you! You’ve a face like a tomato, you need something fun.
- I don’t want to be taught, I just want an easy life.
Sure if you can’t be taught then how will you learn?
- Eventually.
How’s about we get a grip?
- That’s easy for you to say. You’re not me!
Yes I am.
- Fair point.
So what will we play?
- I don’t want to play anything, I just want to watch TV.
Let’s play ‘what happens if you only have a week left to live!’ What would you do?
- Sleep.
That isn’t true. I bet you’d get a degree in Metaphysics or something.
- You have a lot of faith in me!
That’s because I am you.
- Is that what you’d like to do?
Not really. I’d go out and go crazy.
- That’s kind of pointless though.
So is sleeping.
-True.
So what will we do?
- Write a blog post?
What about?
- nothing.
What’s the point in that?
- I dunno.
So let’s play a game!
- Let’s play ‘leave me alone’? I have things to tidy.
You’ll go crazy if you don’t play.
- I think it’s too late for that.
So you think you’re already crazy?
- Maybe.
But if you were crazy then you wouldn’t realise it so therefore you’re not crazy.
- Shut up and leave me alone.
Nope!
- I hate you.
I’m your inner child, you have to listen to me or I’ll broken your face.
- Fair point. What are we playing?
Let’s play ‘Hide and Seek’. I’ll go hide and you have to find me.
- That might take a while.
I have all the time in the world. You love me though, I know you’ll find me.
- Eventually.
I hope so.
- Me too.
Weird rituals
The handy thing about being the overlord of the school library is the ability to make it my hovel. If there was a zombie apocalypse I think it’s the first place I’d go to hide out. I have a Lord of the Rings poster in there, not the new release one, but a graphic that was done for the book series a while back. I like to scatter odd poetry books and fact books about whales and motorbikes about the place. And cushions. Lots of cushions.
There’s a blackboard at the rear of the little library room, this year I’ve decided to chalk up an aul’ Word of the Week for the laugh. It’s difficult to decide what the week’s word should be though, it can’t be too long or too short, and must be relatively comprehensible to your average nine-year-old.
This week’s word is:
Delenda
De`len´da
Meaning: Things to be deleted or destroyed.
To use the word in a sentence, ‘The spam comments on this blog are among my delenda today.’ It would make a lovely name for a cat, if you’re a fan of irony.
So far the past words of the week have been ‘Jagged’ and ‘Laconic’. Have you any ideas for good words? I run frequent blanks.
I leave you with a creation of Puppychild’s;
I made the skull out of scrunched-up newspaper sticky taped together, which Puppychild wallpapered over with kitchen paper and a PVA dilute mixture. When it was dry she painted it and skewered its brains with a coat-hanger and hung ripped-up plastic aprons onto it before performing her weird ritual which of course I asked nothing about.
Happy Halloween, pagans!!
The sort of post that should really be TWO posts.
Don’t you hate it when you can’t remember your username and password for your blog site? That’s a bad sign. Baad blogger. Baad girl.
So I learned an interesting fact recently…
-o0o-
Onions are spurious artifacts. They make you cry. They’re good for clearing paint-smells out of a room. They are the base of any good bolognese recipe. But they are also toxic under the right circumstances. Did you know that?!?
Apparently in the olden days whenever somebody was sick, a half-onion was placed by the bedside, because onions absorb bacteria. It’s one of their better traits. So when you’re at a barbeque and you’re about to sue the dude that’s frying the burgers because you got sick after eating a double-decker with onion relish, think twice. It’s not the meat that’s at fault, nor the cook. It’s the chopped up onion that’s been sitting there for hours absorbing the E-coli around it. It’s why you should -NEVER- store a half onion in the fridge… it’s absorbing the random bacterium in fridge-land and it’s going to make you hurl unless you cook it properly. That is all.
-o0o-
The second part of this post shall be…
How to amuse 100 children?
I like doing the whole fundraising thing for Puppychild’s school. It’s nice meeting with parents and shooting the breeze. It’s nice to share the fact that children don’t just drive you crazy, but keep you sane at the same time.
But…
Movie nights are an integral part of fundraising and they’re the background money-spinner, and yet they’re a dodgy entity.
I mean… I can’t sit still for a whole movie, and I’m an adult. I start wanting munchies, I start wanting to roam or knit or chew my nails and I’m middle-aged for gawd’s sake. How on earth are a whole bunch of 5 – 12 year olds supposed to sit out an hour and a half of film quietly?? We’ve tried it before, and the first-aid kit was broken out because there is such a thing as attention deficit disorder but it’s not limited to those special children, it pretty much exhibits itself in 50% of the ticket holders in most of the films we’ve shown so far. Sugar will do that to small dudes. Parents are starting to not send their children in for these events for this reason, because boredom breeds injury.
I need an alternative to the standard run-of-the-mill movie night. I need a murder-whodunnit-night, or a disco-on-an-extremely-low-budget-night or something. Do any of you have any strange or crazy ideas?
When I say strange or crazy, I mean strange or crazy.
Is there anybody out there who’s ever had to amuse a hundred children on a low budget? I’m guessing that most of you haven’t… but if you had, how would you do it? Should we be sacrificing hamsters to Hermes?
No suggestion would be too weird or inappropriate.. you know me by now.
Erudition regarding knackers
Okay so you may or may not remember a post I wrote four years ago in which I slagged the knackers… I’m still not sure whether I meant that stuff or not. It was sort of knee-jerk, but I didn’t take it away because it was heartfelt too, and it was also my second most commented upon post and I’m shallow like that. But that was then.
Here’s my story for today:
Puppychild bursts through the front door with gusto, gushing about a party that is to be taking place the next day, at 3pm. She begs me to go, there is little reason why she should not, given that the party is in a house but twenty footsteps away and we are doing nothing else that day. The family of the child that is having the party is hovering outside and pregnant for my answer.
Thing is, the child that is having said party is a traveller. This is also why saying ‘no’ was difficult, for what reason would I give aul’ Puppychild?
I said yes, after ten seconds of frantic deliberation.
I bought a cheapo teddy random collectible for the kid. She’s a sweetie… she seems to have respect for me and asks me questions and lets me ask questions in return. Her family have been seen to throw rubbish around, the father bulldozed a cyclist once as he was pulling into the estate, he attempted a hit-and-run, but he drove home which was all of twenty feet away and promptly got busted. I swear, you can’t make this shit up. The younger sister of this family wanders into unlocked houses and cars and takes random things. It’s all very spurious.
But still, Puppychild’s pavee buddy is all of six years old.
I had frantic discussions with The Accidental Terrorist last night, we spoke about prejudice and why sometimes it is not and is deserved, and why it might not be, and why travellers may or may not be likened to the Mississippi fiasco. We argued about age, and development and building harmful bridges and burning same. It was all very confusing, and we agreed to give up, as you do.
The party came and went.
It turns out, that of all of the children in our estate (that would be twelve and a half (net) children) that were invited, only one turned up.
Puppychild gave said kiddo the cheapo teddy, kiddo played with that teddy that whole day and loved it to pieces, instantly.
We got a HUGE slice of cake delivered to the door a few hours after Puppychild came home.
I’m not sure whether to be happy,
or sad.
How to not lie awake at night
I lie awake sometimes at night and think of all the things I should have done or said. Thoughts of embarrassing moments cross my memory and I shudder and cringe and re-live horrible moments in intimate detail. Torture. I take things too seriously sometimes, maybe. It’s good to force those feelings out they say, focus on the positive. Guilt is a useless emotion.
Easier said than done though is that lark, focusing on the positive I mean… it seems easier to beat oneself up.
But then adults are always hard on themselves, it’s in our programming. We’ve been told to be responsible and to support ourselves or the book will be thrown at us and it’s that, probably, that forces us to rebel on some level. I’m thinking to myself though that that’s where we’ve been going wrong.
I’m an adult, yes, but I shouldn’t have thrown away childish thoughts. I shouldn’t have assumed that every birthday should be the funeral of the years that have gone before, they’re still there, still within me, looking for approval and acceptance. We’re like trees, you and I, with rings inside counting our age… but trees don’t let their inner rings die, they keep them inside and it’s those rings that strengthen and support the adult tree as it grows, and we should be the same.
We should be allowing that inner two-year-old or thirteen-year-old to take part in everyday life, and we should embrace our five-year-old selves and love it and educate it and let it take over now and then. It’s natural. Feeling guilty is pointless. Blame the kid inside and be done with it.
When you walk into a room and you’re on your own and you spot a tea-cosy, put it on your head. When you see an errant traffic cone, rob it. If you see a patch of grass with daisies on it, plonk that arse down and start making chains. Sleep with a teddy-bear. Make mistakes.
Try it, if you feel like you know what I might be phaffing on about… feel your past ages and remember them, and remember how you felt at each stage. Let that kid judge you for a change, let it ask questions and answer them as honestly as you can because nobody else is listening. Listen to it cry and hug it, and let it giggle and make rainbows with garden hoses. It’s not lost, you just can’t see it anymore but it’s still there.
I sleep better sometimes, spooning with my inner seven-year-old me. She’s a messed-up kid and she has no idea what she’s talking about but then again, neither do I.
Why moaning in blog posts is a good thing
It was in the giving of advice to a new blogger out there that I realized I don’t practice what I preach. Much like leaving the light in the toilet on after I’ve used it, I can’t really afford to give out, for I do it myself.
This new blogger person was wondering if their first post was too negative (for the want of a better remembering of what the word actually was that they used to convey their naked embarrassment of having just splurged their innard thoughts on the interwebs for the first time) and if this first post wasn’t too much of a bad buzz and if it shouldn’t be taken down.
You know what it’s like though, to barf those dark thoughts into print, don’t you? Don’t you worry if people will be shocked, or will be spurned far far away from your web address never to re-visit again for fear of being appalled by how depressing your life is?
I told her to leave it there! Don’t touch it! It’s perfect as it is!
I told her that others relate to your worries in a strange sort of way, that people are more likely to relate and comment on your distress because they too feel those dark feelings. Blogging is a good thing, because it allows an anonymous person to relate in an honest way to the world. But…
I don’t do that. I haven’t the guts. I did it once, but deleted the post and also deleted it also from my memory cringe-bank though it felt good to write it down at the time.
So how much do you hold back and why? Are you afraid of offending your siblings and well-read-commentators, or are you just too yellow to tell people how you really feel? I’d be guilty of that latter, it’s far too easy to try to be funny instead and fail rather than have people judge you negatively but ultimately, who cares?
I say fair play to ye who have the balls to be honest. Fair balls. I aspire to be like you someday.
How to build a bomb-shelter in 364 days
It’s December 21st! Finally, the shortest day. It marks the end of death, of withering, of dark mornings which don’t be the best friend of alarm clocks at all - at all. It also marks the start of our final year together as a human race, in all possiblity.
Yes, K8 the Gr8 is a sucker for sensationalism but she wasn’t caught up with the doomsayers before who warned us that Armageddon was upon us and that we should brush up on our Bible passages…
Nope, I’m used to laughing at those who say the end is upon us. ‘Up your end’, I’d be declaring in gay abandon.
This is different though. The end of days is this time prophesee’d by the Mayans, a people who died out more than a thousand years ago but whose calendar is still accurate give or take 30 seconds or so. They foretold the rise of Hitler, the Stephen’s Day tsunami, their intricately calculated calendar foretold many things besides and ends mysteriously next year, on the 21st December 2012. Ooooo.
Of course, this too is complete bollox and completely mis-representative of Mayan systems and beliefs. But it got me thinking, how nature is an increadibly intelligent thing, how clever it is in maintaining order. Now that humans are breeding at a tremendous rate almost like a virus, wouldn’t it be feasible that nature might try to over compensate with natural disasters? We have had an awful lot of late, and I’m pretty damn sure it has nothing to do with global warming and most likely, absolutely nothing to do with God.
So what could be the end for us as an entire race? A meteorite? An inter-stellar conjunction leading to the interruption of our gravitational pull to the sun? Maybe mysterious methane emmisions from the North Pole will accelerate our passing into the next Ice Age and do us all in. Or! Maybe we’ll all accidentally turn into zombies.
I’m rooting for zombies. I think I stand a chance against those fuckers.
Either way, it makes me wonder. Why worry? We’ll all be dust this time next year. Bwah hah hah hah… etc.
The therapeutic post
Why is it so hard to ask for help?
Is it just an Irish thing, where you feel you owe someone a good deed just because they did something nice for you? The mafia would have theories about this and as yet, I’m not sure that I’m with that idea, or against it. Some people like doing nice things for other people. I get that. Do they secretly keep a mental note of how many times I’ve repaid them? That’s the thinker.
This wrecks my head. As a mammy of a ten year old kid trapped in the body of a baby, a hypersensitive yet outgoing seven year old and a toddler with a head-banging/electric socket fixation, how can I not accept help? This is probably that karma thing that people harp on about, helpful neighbours repaying me for the good things I’ve done, but still it leaves me guilty. I didn’t have kids so that I could be weak, I had them because I knew I could handle everything on my own! It just seems so stupid that I should need anyone else. Selfish, even.
But then, life is more complicated than that.
She and I, we went to a Rattle and Hum gig last weekend. I had a ball. I danced the Streets have no Name till the Elevation came home, but that’s whiskey for you. I dragged her back to my place for a Bailey’s Coffee because I knew she was a complicated lady that needed to talk. And talk she did! But amongst it all, she told me that there was something between us that she couldn’t see, that made her uncomfortable. She knew we could never be friends, but she didn’t know why. I had no idea what she was talking about but the fact that she’d minded wee Fartsalot A LOT in the last few weeks was playing on my mind so now I’m confused.
Like Christmas cards for instance. You’ve just received one from Uncle Mohammed and there’s plenty of time to return the postal festivities, do you rush off a quickie for tomorrow’s post, or do you send a half-assed poke on Facebook? It’s up to whatever you can do in the moment. Or what you can push extra hard to do, maybe.
Do your actions really define you though? People tell me that ‘as long as I don’t take the piss, I’ll be okay’, but I don’t believe them. I don’t believe that a million thanks are enough.
What is a girl to do?
Crocs my arse.
‘Would you not put some aul’ shoes on the poor child’s feet?’
they say to me, eyeing me up and exchanging worried glances with onlookers as Sir Fartsalot wombles barefoot, only two weeks qualified as a provisional walker. It’s adorable.
He jaunts around on hot tarmac and stony patio and squishy grassy patches, on sharp pebbles and fluffy carpet, the more textured the better. Touch is so important for learning and what better way than through your feet? I’ve no idea why they make shoes for babies. Welly boots are pretty much all they need. Shoes are often too tempting for babies to remove anyway… have a look at the floor of your local toy shop or supermarket, littered with socks and sandles they are, in a little oddsock parade of wasted money.
And ANYWAY, runners are a hazard to your health!
I’ve always thought it funny that sports brands advertise shoe support so well and get away with it. They put cushioning in every available crevice of the sole of your foot and tell you that you’ve just parted fairly serious money for something that’s great for your feet when it’s entirely the opposite case! They have us all suckered!!!
Think about it, if you support something, you make it weaker don’t you? If you try to correct something that’s already perfect, say by walking around on just your left leg and a pair of crutches for a year… chances are you right leg won’t thank you for it. It’s why marathon runners usually end up with dodgy knees, apparently.
Imagine running barefoot through a forest on a warm summers day after a rainshower to absorb it of all its squelchy nourishment, and tell me it doesn’t sound tempting. And how good for your body would it be if you actually went and did it every now and then?
I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and loved every word of it, it all made so much sense.
Doesn’t it?
Which reminds me…
Here’s a video showing you how to put your cat in standby mode:
Maybe this trick will distract the neighbours from the baby’s feet for a feckin’ change.
Buried Treasure
I was clearing out my bookmarks this evening and looked what spilled out!!
-Floaty-mouse images of Dublin City in June 1961 and June 2011, a then-and-now sort of collection. Look at all the dinky cars! (Stolen from Jo :)
This is what real love looks like.
-US Actress Tina Fey’s ‘A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child’; it’s as though she’s inside my head.
-10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling Read these, and write them out twenty times, you naughty children!
-How to make a gift box out of a bank note. For when you couldn’t be arsed buying that voucher.
-Arty Bollocks Generator because everybody needs an artist statement!
Oh, and a creepy picture by Lori Nix. Click the image to magnifify it.
