Schmidt happens
Reward the good, ignore the bad. That’s the advice I got where child discipline is concerned, harvested from many hours scanning blogs and rollercoaster forums. It’s good advice, it seems to work, with a bit of naughty corner thrown in occasionally and the odd zap from a cattleprod.
It works too well though. Puppychild is a good kid. She listens, does what she’s told, has confidence and is always eager to please. This is because I reward her good behaviour with heartfelt thanks and trinkets… many many trinkets and comics that pile up in corners and Kinder Surprises jamming doorways. It feels like I’ve messed it up, like I’m pushing the idea that materialism is the best reward. Her trinkets are starting to own her, I’m teaching her to be owned by clutter, just like I am.
I want to show her what appreciation at its most base level feels like, to feel that vast connectivity with life itself in its carbon-based efficiency and appreciate the fact that we’re not Blobfish, but that’s very difficult for a kid who can’t see past her own curly straw.
How I felt after my first bikini wax
Then I found the link to Plan Ireland floating around Irish Taxi’s blog.
Sponsor a chiseller
I remember the bleakness of Jack Nicholson’s character in About Schmidt, how throughout the film he fails to create a single connection with somebody, even his own daughter…anybody. It’s painful to watch. The bleakness thickens and threatens to envelop the character entirely towards the end of the film and it seems that he’s plummeting towards the edge of nothingness, but then Schmidt gets a letter… a kiddie coloured-in picture from Ndugu, a child he’s been writing months of emotional diarrhea to in faraway lands, and it evokes a beautiful reaction. Such a profound thing, to touch a soul thousands of miles away with a waft of a well-timed token.
Our letter arrived today. I showed Puppychild a picture of a little girl in Malawi who is the same age as her. Her mum is the same age as me. They smiled at us from printed photographs and we connected and Puppychild thought it was nice that she didn’t have to walk for a kilometre every day before school to get water for her ma.
When I had closed the atlas and finished explaining how basic our lives could be, kiddo set about drawing a picture for her little African counterpart of herself and herself holding hands in a savannah.
They shall grow up together and teach each other many things, two souls learning from parallel worlds.
I long to share a bottle with her mother by a roaring fire and have her tell me of stories of dancing and sisters and daughters who are stolen by Gulu Wamkulu people, how she bails her kids out with offerings of chickens and money, how fearful she is of her people’s traditions. Fearful of traditions. That sounds familiar!
So we post back. And we wait.
I hope they don’t find each other on Facebook first.
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.
Barefoot bandits
They say that when you get what you want, you don’t want it anymore. But what if it wasn’t yours to begin with? What if you took it as your own and used it to its full potential, then discarded it like a used condom… bound on its path of decomposition with no regard to how long that may take? Some people call that rape.
This is an arial view of the area of Knockree, Co. Wicklow. I can’t describe this place because no english word would fit properly. Past the prettiest Youth Hostel in the world lies a parking spot marked by a horizontal barrier. Once you’ve debarked yourself from your wheels you’ll find yourself on a path lined by mysterious darkened faerie paths and wild honeysuckle and you follow this for ten minutes or so until you come upon a bit of wood with an arrow painted onto its top. Follow this arrow, lep over the turnstile and then…
The wee hours of morning time are the best. A haze floats below your view and hugs the river like a firstborn so that you feel like you’re either flying, or are standing on the tallest mountain in the world. It is the start of one of those downward slopes that beckons you and casts a spell on you to make you forget the fact that you’ll someday have to climb back up again on the homeward stretch.
At the bottom of this path lies a river which shimmies through goblin groves and tree-filled troll hideouts. On the banks of this river are various camping spots and tiny beaches for your freed sock-smothered toes to dangle from, with ropes hanging from branches (possibly put there by aforementioned trolls), so that you can swing into the centre of the river on a hot day and let go, to plunge into the guinness-coloured water below.
I walked there today with Puppychild and Sir Fartsalot and found this:
Heaven raped. Small children denied from splashy footplay because of broken glass. Human shit wrapped shamelessly in skidmarked bogroll and empty crisp packet carcasses gathering algae where fish should leap. Shit from shit.
How can a nation can gather arms and unite as a proud nation against some random French fucker on a football team, yet at the same time vomit all over this same nation’s natural wonders and rape it of its purity?
Shame on whoever partied here. Shame on you assholes. You don’t deserve this country.
The day after tomorrow
I secretly believe that some day the world will change.
Some day we won’t sue our best mates because we slipped and popped a ligament on their decking, maybe we’ll even be able to get together with a few neighbours to build a skateboard ramp for the kids for the long summer weeks without fear of being so sueable. What a bunch of whingers we’ve become! Is it so much to ask just to be a kid once in a while? We need to evolve a bit more… I can’t wait to find out what my great-great-grand children experience in the future because I will be haunting them.
I know everyone is paranoid about our big brother and is convinced that things can only get worse, but someday I know our neighbours will be re-found and doors will be left unlocked again. Where is the bottom of the barrel where evolution cries on the staircase with its bottle of gin and wonders where it all went wrong? Maybe fifty years from now? Two hundred years maybe?
Someday we will degrade plastic (BAD plastic! You call yourself HDPE?! Pathetic. THIS is HDPE!!) to such a degree that we will power our tellies with the same gunge we roast our spuds and life will be good and they will laugh at the Noughties and point fingers at our hair and our paranoid misgivings and they’ll smoke their spliffs and they’ll love again.
And so I slither back into now and I can only smirk and try not to take pictures of my hair.
In the meantime, being that we cannot grow a playground out of nothingness, I need memories. Basic games that please the most gregarious of kids. I feel sorry for their boredom, but I feel sorrier for the pretty purple flowers I’ve planted which are bound to be desecrated by young f’las this summer. If we all as parents group together to buy a supply of stuffs for our chisellers, what would they be?
So far I have:
-Chalk
-Ropes for skipping
-Basketball Hoop
-Swingball
-Goalposts
-Various lengths of donated wood (you didn’t get them from me)
-Softballs
Any more ideas? I’m desperate, lads.
(Image robbed from http://www.justanotherartblog.com/)
Bloggers for Haiti
Can you imagine it? No, I mean seriously, can you imagine it with your eyes closed in a dark room when you’re all alone – what it might feel like to wander down a street with not an item of clothing to your name, the stench of rotting bodies all around you – everything you’ve ever known and loved, crushed under tons of detritus. Can you imagine hearing someone you love trapped under rubble, gasping for help and waiting… waiting for help until the voice gets quieter and quieter until it is no more? Would your kids have survived? If they got sick how would you protect them?
I can’t. I can’t imagine that sort of horrific chaos because I’m a seriously lucky individual and hopefully will never have to go through that. Humanity made me remember what I have to be thankful for and there’s no price you can put on that. Well… maybe the price of a family Chinese takeaway and a half-way dacent bottle of wine – if you’re one of the lucky ones, maybe you have more to give, maybe less. Sometimes money is too precious to be drunk.
*
Anyway, here’s a link to an easy way to help Haiti:
http://www.justgiving.com/Bloggers-For-Haiti
This is a simple idea set up by English Mum, a multiple blogger effort to fund Shelterboxes. Shelterboxes are basically containers full of basic survival equipment… tents, blankets, tool kits, stoves, colouring books, kitchen utensils etc… but they don’t come cheaply. Each costs about £500, but there is an undying dedication to send at least one box over. When I clicked the link early this morning, the site had raised £240. I clicked it again just a second ago, and found the number has amazingly jumped to £1,650!
A heartbreaking interview with a bloke who voices his frustrations at being able to hear his girlfriend and several other women screaming beneath a pile of college debris. It doesn’t have a happy ending…
…but this one does:
(Found at The Lede)
Please help English Mum shift some boxes!
*
Here is a link for UK outsiders – Shelterbox
An alternative way to donate – DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal
or UNICEF
I’ll have a virgin scotch on the rocks, please.
“I love you like my left ovary.”
This, coming from a chick you’ve only just met, is a pretty high compliment in my book.
I’d never have heard this if I hadn’t been struck by ‘Yes Man’ – Jim Carrey’s latest film. An invitation into town for a young wan’s birthday party on a frosty winter’s night while up the duff and unable to drink would normally have me gushing excuses; let alone the comfort-zone thing, there’s the fact that I’ve nothing pretty that doesn’t involve elastic to wear. No energy or cash either, but hey… sometimes when you say ‘Yes’ to things, you get led to situations that can be pretty damn interesting.
She was a corset-dealer from Connemara with long black-is-the-colour hair, she wore a candy necklace and drank red wine from the bottle with a straw, and I’d never have met her if I’d been sitting around on my arse at home.
Don’t you just love films like that?
HAPPY NEW YEAR T’YIZ ALL!!
Conduit for Kismet
I thought it was all about me yesterday, but it wasn’t. I thought the mysterious turn of events that held me in its favour was payback for a good deed I had done, but it wasn’t. I was just a conductor for a greater power.
This is how it happened.
I got into the car to go shopping for a few bits… the dodgy CD player in the car worked first time, which never happens, normally it would quite literally drive me to distraction. Every single one of the fifteen traffic lights I encountered on the way into the town turned green, just as I approached them. When I got to the supermarket, there was one basket left with my name on it. There was one jar of coffee left on the shelves which happened to be the brand I love, in the size I would normally buy it. The queues for the tills were at least five people long when I finally got to them, but just as I went to join the nearest one, a new till opened up and beckoned me forward… I went through during the supermarket’s busiest hour in less than three minutes.
Then, happiest of all happinesses, while purchasing an eight-pack of Guinness cans at the off-licence, I got carded.
Ask any thirty-year-old female out there… to be mistaken for an eighteen-year-old in an off-license is an unbelievably good thing. They almost didn’t sell me the alcohol because I couldn’t produce identification, but I wouldn’t have minded at all. I was grinning from ear to ear as I left the premises, which is when I got ambushed by a bloke with a sponsor card on the street. Apparently he was an ex-heroin addict who had kicked the habit, and was cycling to Cork to raise funds for Drugs Awareness. I was so happy, I gave him twenty euros which was slighly more than I could afford, as I discovered shortly afterwards when it came to paying for my parking ticket. I stood for a while wondering what to do, then I saw the wallet lying on the parking machine. An ID card lay inside.
“LINDA!!!” I shouted into empty space. A lady turned around from the other side of the parking lot, caught luckily by the accoustics, and returned to reclaim her wallet very thankfully indeed. She gave me three euros… more than enough to pay for the ticket. Strange.
Later on, I won a game of poker at home against The Accidental Terrorist, and Billy the Stoner. I won because my good day had given me the confidence to bluff well, and wound up with twenty euros in my back pocket.
So… effectively, Billy the Stoner paid for an ex-heroin addict to cycle to Cork, and THAT, boys and girls, is Kismet.
“It’s only a little prick”
K8 the Gr8. K8 the host of a 16 week old foetus, K8 the mother of a disabled child with a tendancy towards chronic chest-infections, K8 the mother of a school-aged child… K8 the skeptic.
I am at risk thrice over from this swine flu (H1N1) pandemic, and I’m forced to make a very bloody difficult decision indeed.
To vaccinate, or not to vaccinate?
The death of a pregnant woman earlier this week touched the hearts of the nation, she had contracted the virus and was unable to fight it. She is me, I is she… I couldn’t help but bite my nails when I heard the news. The vaccine was rolled out in Laughingboy’s school a week or so ago, but I refused permission for my son to have it. After all, the last time I allowed him a flu-shot it knocked his immune system so badly, he ended up with pneumonia. Santa at Christmas Eve in a ward full of sick children is a very sad sight indeed, a sight I’d rather avoid in the future.
I consider the facts as far as I can delve… this current vaccine seems to be the same vaccine that has been used for the same flu virus for the last twenty-odd years. Call me naive, but I figure that this H1N1 virus is slightly more intelligent than Mary Harney… I figure it has the ability to evolve, to mutate into a sickness that may, in all probability, flip the birdie at a vaccine that’s nearly older than myself.
“It is generally agreed both nationally and internationally that potential complications associated with H1N1 in pregnancy far outweigh any possible risks associated with vaccination in pregnancy.” www.rcpi.ie
The problem is, they don’t really know to the full extent, what those complications are, because it hasn’t been tested that thoroughly yet. My mother summed it up in one very highly intelligent (if not slightly scary) word; ‘Thalidomide‘. She’s right – there is always that possibility, no matter how remote. I am being asked to allow a toxin into my system… a system that is already slightly more volatile than it normally would be. Who is to say that my child won’t develop leukaemia or cancer or some other sort of miasm as a result of this foreign toxin? Nobody, it would seem.
From a truly sceptical point of view, there’s a chemical company somewhere with an enormous wadge of cash in its kitty as a result of this scare… whether this is a coincidence or not, I’d rather not guess. Is it a coincidence that companies in this financial climate need money now more than ever? I’m just saying, is all.
This whole thing smacks a little of a Stephen King novel – the media pulls no punches when it comes to scaring the bollix out of people like me.
To quote today’s Evening Herald:
“The vaccine is currently the best defence we have against the pandemic – and that message needs to sound loud and clear.”
I beg to differ, and I have the advice of not one, but two doctors behind my theory.
I wasn’t met with shock when I announced my decision not to be vaccinated, instead I got a warm smile. I was assured that viruses of all shapes and sizes are common in winter months, and they don’t all make the headlines. Ever heard of Clostridium Difficile? This is another bug making its rounds. Then there’s the famous Vomiting virus… that seems to have conveniently disappeared into oblivion, but I’ll bet my left boob it’s still hanging around.
No, the best defence against H1N1 for a duffed-up woman like me according to these doctors, is just to take care of myself. I am to eat proper food… raw fruit and vegetables, well cooked meat, three eggs per week, wholemeal bread and rice. I am to take a nap whenever the fancy takes me, and I am to think happy thoughts. There is no need for Pregnacare, or extra vitamins (bar the inevitable Folic Acid during the first month) or any of these prettily packaged gimmicks with happy pregnant bumps on the front, aimed at mothers who just want to do their best… they’re completely unnecessary as long as you follow the pyramid. I can do that!
I am happily considering the fact that the Health Service can keep their little prick.
So marks the famous last words of K8 the Gr8.
Tit for TAT
Gerry Ryan actually stopped talking about himself for long enough to let a very interesting subject through on his radio show this morning. That subject was male breastfeeding. Yes, that’s male lactation.
A young man named Ragnar Bengtsson, a Swedish father of a two year old boy has decided to conduct an experiment on himself to see if he can produce breastmilk in order to supply his future children. His theory is that if he stimulates his moobs on a three-hourly basis (playing havoc with his image at college), by December he should have stimulated enough hormones to produce milk.
This has been done before, apparently. In some cultures where powdered milk is unavailable, the death at birth of a baby’s mother has led its father to suckle the infant successfully to weaning stage. This fact amazes me… that throughout history, and in some parts of the world today, men are breastfeeding babies.
Three things are needed for boob-juice. Mammary glands, a Pituitary gland, and a hormone called Prolactin, normally produced by the Pituitary gland in the later stages of pregnancy. Men have (potentially) all of the above, given that they are born with the first two, the third requirement can in theory be stimulated into action without the help of artificial hormones.
I wish this guy the best of luck, without any fear of this idea taking off in Ireland whatsoever. Sweden’s male to female roles in the workplace are quite the reverse of what’s happening here, with 90% of women in the workforce and 16 months of paid maternity/paternity leave in most, if not all jobs in the country. This means that the concept of the ‘stay at home dad’ is far more liberal there. Children therefore bond with both male and female role models which can only be a healthy thing.
In Ireland however, men hold on to their well ‘ard image tightly while still wishing they were curled up in somebody’s womb. Most would happily pass a law against public breastfeeding, seeing it as an abomination, the destruction of the true purpose of breasts – the titty wank. It’s probably an unhealthy mindset, but I’m a sucker (sucker, gettit?) for butch. If I caught TAT suckling our future new-born child I fear I would grab that child and run as far away as possible from the beardy freak. But then, I’m not Swedish.
Having a child suckle a hairy boob, that’s an entirely eerie concept. Yes it produces skin-to-skin contact which is excellent for a baby’s psychological growth, but it somewhat blurs the idea of a nurturing mother, doesn’t it?
Then again, there are many women out there who don’t like the idea of breastfeeding for the fear it will saggify their breasts and muck up their nipple alignment which is devastatingly entirely true. Some don’t do it because they don’t have time, others are completely horrified with the idea. Isn’t it the right thing to do for the father of the baby to give breastfeeding a go if this is the case? Far healthier for the child, and daddy gets a taste of that wonderful bonding feeling that is a totally unique experience. It’s win-win, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?!?!?
PS… I’ve discovered via a link on the article’s web-page, that breast cancer among Swedish women has DOUBLED since the 1960′s. Coincidence or Kismet? I wonder…
The post in which K8 is told to bugger off
I went back to the Megalithic Tomb today, this time armed with bad-ass thorn resistant gardening gloves and a heady thirst for archaeology.
I worked hard for an hour, and was delighted to find a sapling Hawthorn tree, almost strangled completely with ivy. I freed it up to give it room to grow, and sent it some energy as you do… then began to work on the area around the entrance to the tomb to see if I could get inside.
A car pulled up on the road beside the field in which I was working.
“OI!!! What are you at?!” a woman in a silver car shouted from her driver’s seat. As I approached, she wound her window up to within four inches, as though I was about to attack her from the other side of a heavily barbed fence. She had a face on her like a Chihuahua chewing on an earwig.
“I’m very sorry to trespass… I…”
“You’re not trespassing!” she interrupted.
“I found this tomb over-run with brambles and thought I might take it upon myself to clean it up.” I smiled my prettiest smile.
“You have no business doing that!” she shrieked. “I’m sick of young ruffians coming in like they own the place and destroying everything, sick of it!!”
“I promise you, I’m no ruffian” I replied; “I used to be an archaeology student and this sort of thing fascinates me. I’m destroying nothing, only cleaning the place up. I’m very proud of it.”
“I’m proud of it too, so GO AWAY! When one comes in to wreck the place, the rest of them follow” she shouted.
“I didn’t mean to offend…”
“Well then GO AWAY” she shouted even louder. I began to get slightly pissed off.
“Look, if you don’t let me do this, then I can’t find a way to protect it. The Council could come in tomorrow and bulldoze the lot and we’d lose a seriously amazing piece of history.”
“It is protected!”
“I don’t believe it is… I looked on the archaeology information website and can’t find any record of it.”
“SO WHAT?!” she scowled.
“So… could you tell me how I can get permission to access the tomb to clean it up and protect it?”
“You can’t have permission!! GO AWAY!!” She smiled a demonic sort of smile and shut her window. End of conversation. I walked away, furious.
-o0o-
What are the politics behind this? Does anybody know? If I’m not trespassing then who is she to tell me to leave?
I hope the tomb faeries break the pistons on her crappy little car. Stupid bint.
So close, yet so far.
