Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Someone, somewhere, theorised that we spend half our lives waiting for something to happen.

Be that in a queue or in waiting rooms, or sitting around and waiting for someone in power to get the thumb out of their divot and get things done.

I, currently, have wasted half my day waiting for the men of the house to get their hairy arses into gear so we can finally finish fixing that fucking fence. They apparently spent all night programming - at work and at home - so  that they could have time to get things done today.

And the neighbour angry at our dog for barking came by again whilst I was sleeping and Hubby didn’t drop one golden word about the measures we’d taken already. Sigh.

I asked a few days ago as to whether or not I would be able to do the fence on my only. Hubby said one word, “no.” He wouldn’t even let me try.

So I have wasted half the week waiting for him to come home in daylight hours [he didn’t] so we could work on the fence. Now I’m feeling my weekend bleeding away because I’m waiting for him to wake up.

AND it’s my Mum’s birthday today [Nov 27th] and I can’t go shopping for her present because nobody’s awake to look after the kids.

Normally, I don’t mind waiting. It’s when I get some of my best writing done. But it’s hard to write when you’re sick with worry and stressing out about the things that need to get done but can’t because other people are fast asleep like the innocent.

It isn’t fair.

I spent every last cent I had on this. I work just as hard and just as long on it, and I’d do more if I just knew where Hubby put the damn essential tools… and nothing gets done today because the men decided they’d rather program all night and sleep all day.

The more time gets wasted, the angrier the neighbour gets and the sicker I feel from stressing out about the whole issue.

So whoever came up with that statistic must have me as a dot outside the curve, because most of my waking time is wasted waiting for other people to shift the thumb.

Is it so wrong just to want to get things DONE?

A Quarter to 2AM

Monday 28th of November.

That’s when I sat down to write this. Give or take a few minutes.

Someone rang our phone and hung up. Twice. Long about midnight.

As a means of waking me up, it’s very effective.

Once I’m awake, no matter what, I can’t get back to sleep.

It doesn’t matter how tired I am. It doesn’t matter what time it is. It doesn’t matter that there’s absolutely nothing keeping me from rolling over and going back to sleep. I just can’t find that restful place of slumber.

I’m awake for the day. And there’s still about three hours to go before I’m supposed to wake up. That’s three more hours in what is going to be a long day.

Today’s the day I’m going to arrange to get the dog neutered. This is supposed to settle him down a bit more. After that, I now plan on ringing the person who rang us back and ask politely what they were doing at about midnight.

I know it wasn’t our contentious neighbour. Max has hardly uttered a sound since the fence was fixed and we finally let him off the leash.

I know because I got up and checked on the dog after I gave up trying to find slumberland once more. He has kibble that he won’t eat and water. I suspect he’s not eating the kibble because his food bowl is a bit dirty. One more thing to do once the sun begins to peek over the horizon.

I worry about what to do about the neighbour. I can understand sleep depravation only too well. I’ve lived it for a few months, now.

St John’s Wort pills help me fight off anxiety and get to sleep, and the recommended dose is one tablet with meals. That means one pill in the night. No more. Having a source of white noise [air conditioning] helped me sleep through other neighbourhood dogs’ barking.

But it’s quiet, now.

Another neighbour, across the road and down the street a bit, has their lights on. I worry about them, too, even though I barely know them. BF in the morning is no time to be awake.

But they are awake. Or at least, they have some lights on.

And I’m awake.

At least I’m prepared to bop Max on the nose, should he bark with every other dog in the neighbourhood, come the dawn.

I shall add mocha and caramel sticks to my shopping list, and consume vast quantities of caramel mochachino [three months without! New record!] and tough it out until bedtime. It won’t even be the longest time I’ve been awake. My record on that is 36 hours. A day and a half. And I did that one without caramel mochachinos.

But my plans, like me, shall have to wait.

It’s 2AM.

The rest of the world is asleep.

And I wish upon our neighbours some wonderful, peaceful dreams. The kind that help them become better people.

Due to Circumstances Beyond My Control…

I had to spend my “me money” on groceries.

You might not think this is such a big freakin’ deal. You’re entitled to your opinions. Hell, you’re entitled to tl;dr everything I write. Just like I’m entitled to write what I want, when I want.

And, right now, I want to vent some spleen.

I don’t spend a lot on myself for several reasons: 1) I’m hella fussy. Anyone who’s read my blog entries on finding the right shoes would know that. 2) Everything - and I mean every last thing - I want or desire is not available in my area, not for sale, non-existent, or freakishly, fist-bitingly expensive. 3) Most of the time I feel like I don’t deserve the luxury of spending money on just me.

Seriously, the most money I usually spend on myself is about $20 on chocolate. That lasts me the better part of a month. A month and a half - or more - if I actually stick to my rationing regime.

Everything else goes to the household. Kids, mostly. Little bits and bobs to keep the spawn happy and the odd I-hope-you-like-it thing I find for Hubby.

So, if I want something big, I save for it. I scratch together loose change from cleaning, from pockets in the laundry, from shopping overflow and -yes- even from the footpaths. I collect it all in an old simmer sauce jar. When it’s full, I go cash it in and spend however much I’ve saved solely on myself.

It takes me a year to fill that jar with change.

A year’s worth of slow effort is worth a little self-indulgence, don’t you think?

Not this year.

This year, some neighbour decided they didn’t have enough to do and complained about our dog’s relative freedom. As a direct result, we have no money for food.

Let me unpack. The hound was a surprise gift from a relative. We had no time to prepare for his arrival and have been desperately scrambling between stopgaps ever since he arrived. Alongside the usual stuff like buying his food and necessities…

The dog is a border-collie cross. He loves rounding up animals but hasn’t any idea what to do with them after that. On the times he spends holidaying with the kids at Grandma’s little farm, he rounds the sheep up all day long.

The neighbours uphill from us have two cows. Our fence is one the dog can very easily slip through.

I’m certain you can connect the dots. If we let the dog roam loose in our yard, he’s soon in their yard and pestering the cows.

So we’ve had to tie him up.

I got a five meter length of chain [those plastic-coated wire long leashes are a sack of suck] and one of those can’t-tangle-it tether-posts and did my best. He has access to food, water, shelter and shade. And I have to make sure he doesn’t tangle himself anyway because he’s that kind of dog.

RSPCA rolls round because of the aforementioned complaint, and proceeds to tell me the hound needs exercise.

I say we have plans to fix the back fence this weekend past. It’s been four weeks in the planning already, and a belligerently unbelievable chain of errors has stood between us and fixing that effing fence.

RSPCA plans to be back sometime this week.

I go off my nut panicking about the fence, and volunteer my savings to pay for the materials.

As I write this, the fence is halfway done [we ran out of light, strength, agility and motivation] with the hope of getting it fixed all the way real soon now.

I have $14 in my bank account.

My regular budget for food and necessities is $200.

I had $84 in change in my jar.

I had $35 squirrelled away over the passage of six months.

I need to keep $50 for petrol.

So yeah, thanks a real bunch, concerned neighbour. If you’d just come over and talked to me, I’d have told you we were trying to deal with things at our own speed. Which, I admit, is rather glacial. We could have worked something out.

But, because you apparently would love to see us get into legal trouble for something, you had to go blather to the authorities. And now we’re completely broke, with no safety net, and barely enough money to get by until whenever Hubby’s indie business actually makes some.

Thanks a lot.

As if I didn’t have enough concerns on my plate, bleeding my soul dry, now I have to worry about whether or not we get to eat, next week.

Fuck you. Fuck you very much.

Hubby’s Shoe Adventure

Hubby had the quasi-ignorant opinion that I could find the perfect shoe if I knew where to look.

Let me outlay the criteria for you:

Comfortable.
Flat heel.
Decent tread.
Hard-wearing.
Leather sole. 
Size 9-10.
Sandal. 

Yeah, I have big feet. And no, I can’t go to drag shops for shoes because (a) I don’t know where any are and (b) I suspect they’d be full of 9-inch heel FMB’s. I can not wear heels. If I try, one of my ankles decides it’s Fuck the InterNutter Day and goes sideways at the most inconvenient moment when I’m moving at the fastest plausible speed.

I gave up on heels after the third time I damn near broke something personally painful.

Now, in the intervening years since the last time I visited Shoe-Shopping Purgatory, some nitwit in the advertising and marketing arena has decided that everything can be a sandal.

Let me set this out for you:

A shoe with anchor points on either side of the toes only is a Mule. Mules are for people who don’t lift their feet when they move, because if you try to lift your feet whilst moving and wearing Mules, you will soon be barefoot and your footwear will soon be airborne.

A shoe with three anchor points, one between the big toe and the other toes, and two on either side of the foot is a Thong, or a Flip-Flop if you’re hopelessly American. Thongs are for people who walk like chickens and automatically grip with their toes when they lift their feet. If you forget to do that, you quickly become barefoot, etc. etc.

A shoe with straps across the foot and the back of the heel is a Sandal. Sandals are for people who like air on their feet, but dislike the risk of flying footwear when they have to move fast. Sandals are made to not come off without some conscious effort on behalf of the wearer.

A shoe with no holes all the way around (except the hole for the foot to go in and maybe one for the toes to peek out) is an actual SHOE. It is not a Sandal because it has solid fucking sides, you moron.

…you can tell I got a bit tetchy in the accumulated sandal departments, can’t you?

In my continued journeys from shop to shop to shop… I learned something interesting.

Apparently, you need to swap shoes every day to both extend the life of your shoes and improve the health of your feet.

What. The. FUCK.

It’s bad enough I have to drop nearly $200 on a pair of goddamn sandals - my entire week’s food budget, mind - but TWICE?

Gyah.

Hubby was determined to make sure I could never bitch about my feet again, but we still went looking for cheaper alternatives.

Solid heels are the go. Or at least, solid insert-material-here heels. If they’re attached to a different substance, the risks of painful substructure rise astronomically.

And in an effort to be complete, he lead me into a Crocs shop. It literally stank.

My God, you could smell the carcinogens. It was thick in the air, an almost visible miasma of slow death in the making. I tried to breathe as little of it as possible whilst also attempting to encourage hubby to hurry the hell out of there.

I can’t for the life of me imagine why people linger in there. Augh.

Besides, plastic is also evil because it’s made from petrochemicals, an increasingly rare resource that is also polluting our environment. I could not, would not, endorse Crocs.

We eventually found cheaper salvation and some rather pretty proper sandals at a chemist’s, and then Athlete’s Foot. Yes, I’m wearing rubber soles, but they’re solid rubber. The likelihood of them picking up sharp things and embuggering my feet is small.

Besides, rubber can be made naturally and is therefore renewable. Not saying it is now, I have no idea how synthetic rubber is made… but it can be again when they run out of oil.

And cost - damn near $300 all up. And that was the CHEAP option.

Hubby said my perfect sandal would be solid rubber sole on cork padding. I said it’d be better with something impenetrable between said rubber and padding.

They don’t make it, alas.

And even if they did, they’d never sell it here.

I fucking hate the industry.

My Continuing Adventures in Frugal Freedom Finding

Keep in mind that I’m rounding out prices and, for everyone’s protection, I am obscuring the shops’ names. Clever readers will be able to figure it out in no time at all, I am certain.

As I write this, I have recently returned from a mat-hunt. Anyone who’s played WoW and does not want to spend a fortune at the Auction House knows what that’s about. You go out grinding for materials, or mats for short.

So here’s the breakdown:

* Coolite foam boxes from Grocery Shop C: Free! [Just spin them a tale depending on the volume you desire, they don’t really care]
* 40kilos of rocks from Garden Shop M: $20
* 2 rolls of cheap-arse gutter mesh (Same shop): $4
* One small flex-tub (Same shop): $5
* Side cutters or wire snips (Same shop): $7 
* Impulse-bought set of box cutters: $4
* big packet of 1000 paperclips (10 boxes of 100) from Stationers O: $11
* Compost tumbler I’ve had sitting around for a while: $600 [I think. I got $1000 back from the govt. Yay!]
* Pickets we’ve had lying around for about 10 years: Price forgotten [If you don’t have pickets you can scrounge any old thing to lift your boxes up. You can even use the old “college bookshelf” method of bricks and planks]
* Sweat-equity: (y)our precious, precious time and effort.

It took about three hours to round all this lot up, including finding some stuff I didn’t exactly need for the garden…

I plan on setting up in the afternoon, when hubby will be more amenable to mowing and setting up. That is when I will take some pictures and document everything for my next blog. And that is when all my loyal readers find out what the flying hell I’m doing with all this shite.

Stay tuned, freedom fighters!

Finding the Raw Materials - My Adventures in Frugality for Freedom

This Saturday was the day I was supposed to change everything. Or start changing everything.

The ONLY farmer’s market I could find nearby operated one Saturday out of every month. Odd, I thought, but I thought I made it understood that we’d be going together to get infos.

The day dawned and Hubby volunteered to look after the kids whilst I ventured forth on my ownsome.

Like shit, I said, and bullied the kids and my main squeeze into coming along.

To an event that had shut ages ago from lack of interest. The webmeisters in question had evidently failed to notice. Yeesh.

Far be it for me to admit defeat. I went scavenger hunting for big, foam boxes that the BigBoxmarts tend to throw out.

Turns out they arrive Sunday. Fury.

Still, I managed to talk the nice folks into reserving me three of them and I plan on striking five seconds after the doors open.

Hubby, meanwhile, bought a shitton of perishable and frozen goods as an excuse not to be roped into further adventures.

I took mercy on him and went on a pricing expedition to Big Garden Chainstores B and M. I hit M first, because it was newer. Turns out Big Garden Chainstore M is interested in selling one all SORTS of semi-useful and decorative crap for both indoors and outdoors. The garden section is relatively tiny, but their big bags of rocks and sources of mesh are relatively cheap.

B had the bigger gardening section and was actually willing to sell one some varying items needed for hydroponics… but they had no hydroponics-for-idiots starter kits. Just separate items for a whole ton more. Big Garden Chainstore B loves selling items separately, they get more money that way.

Next, I tried the long shot, the biggest dollar shop in the area. It used to sell all sorts of Demtel crap at much less than the easy-installments-of-X tallied up to.

It had been a long time since I’d seen any dollar shop selling Demtel-associated gadgetry, and this visit was no exception.

Maybe Demtel (and its relatives, you know the sort “but wait! There’s more!”) realised they were loosing their hats by selling their shite directly and stayed on the late-night television-only advert circuit. I dunno.

Still, at the end of the day, I know where to strike, come the morrow.

If you can imagine a plump, frumpy commando ninja who cackles occasionally and talks to herself… that would be me. Whisking from A to B to C with a gleeful little scamper and a lot of lookers-on wondering who that strange, lumpy ‘tard was.

And as soon as hubby lurches into wakefulness, that day, I’ll have my mats ready. All I’ll need from him is some fresh garden biomass (You’d know it as “lawn clippings”) to feed to the compost-tumbler and turn into industry-free high-quality potting soil

I Can’t Fix Everything.

I had a massive bout of depression, recently.

No, nothing epic. Just the kind that makes you feel like you’re backed into a corner and also that the gravity has been turned up by at least fifty percent.

I have been reading a lot of OWS and related topics. It’s sad for me that the greatest country in the world is threatening to implode because a few greedy arseholes find it more convenient to ship their investments to another country and thereby hasten their own culture’s downfall.

I can’t do anything about that.

I’m in Australia, and I live two hours’ travel away from a meaningful protest. By the time I got there, I’d have to turn around and come back. Because I have kids in school who need me to look after them.

My youngest is deeper into ASD than my eldest. Neither of them are completely independent, yet. Both need watching, because the instant I don’t, they do things they really shouldn’t.

My washing machine broke, this week. It was in a coma for another week before that and revived by meaningful glares from my darling-dearest. Now, I’m also in Delivery Limbo, where they say they’ll call in 2-5 days and mean they’ll call whenever the shit they want.

And that’s just to arrange for a date and time of delivery/installation.

So…. I’m pretty much chained to my house. Metaphorically speaking.

Plus, if I did trust my beloved to look after the kids, there’s another risk.

See, not everyone has firearms rights like America. Here in Australia, the people legitimately seeking to own a projectile weapon have to dance through an inordinate labyrinth of red tape just to get one. We have to carry a separate photo ID, maintain a membership in a very specific club, etc. etc. And not even think about breaking any laws.

Yeah, we don’t really have free speech over here, either. We pretend we do, but legally… we don’t.

So, by going to a protest that I back, I am technically breaking the law. And worse, because I’m a registered shooter and the owner of a muzzle-loading black powder replica Squirrel Rifle (estimated loading time, two minutes per shot), I am the worst kind of scum-sucking criminal ever born and should be punished appropriately.

Sigh.

We have a very skewed opinion on weapons and the people who own them, over here.

Anyway, I have digressed.

I’m feeling trapped, three times heavier than I should be, and generally in the doldrums. My dilemma for the day - one I can actually deal with - is whether to clean the whole house [a day’s task] or the laundry room that resembles a small apocalypse.

Either way I chose, I was certain, I lose. It’d be the wrong choice.

I tried to articulate this to hubby-dear and he said, “So… instead of making a choice, you’re choosing to do nothing?”

It woke me up.

Even if I made a bad choice, I could still choose to do something. And then I could do something else. Take my problems to pieces in bits I could deal with.

Yes, I occasionally need my butt kicked. Yes, I sometimes need help.

I worry too much about things I can’t control. Worry doesn’t change them. Neither does ignoring them. They’re still there.

So, this afternoon, in-between chasing the kids to do what they should be doing anyway, I shall endeavour to make the laundry room from the apocalypse tidier.

Not completely tidy, because that would kill me. Just tidier. A little better. Improved.

And, this weekend, I am taking my little tardis-car and going on a scavenger hunt. I shall be seeking out foam boxes that chain shops just throw away. I shall also seek out and relocate the door to the compost tumbler I bought earlier.

I shall purchase some seeds and sugarcane mulch and start growing some idiots-can’t-kill-it herbs and vegetables.

I can’t do a lot, but I can do something.

And maybe I’ll get some wood shims, too. For the next time someone sends me a credit card application. Not that I’ve had any for quite some time, but… the prepared mind is favoured by fortune.

And no matter what the results, I shall have something to blog about.

The Alien in the Playground

You can spot her from a mile away. The one kid playing alone. Lost in her own little world. She clearly wears a mixture of hand-me-downs and homemade clothing when all the other children are wearing clothes, relatively new, from the shops.

Some other children are approaching her. Even from this distant vantage point, you can tell their intent is not friendly. They are all bigger than her. Together, they could beat her into a pulp, but violence is not their pastime right now.

“Hey Weller!” The ringleader startles the girl out of her private reality. “You’re weird.”

This is clearly meant to make her cry. It doesn’t.

She folds her arms like the woman in I Dream of Genie. “Ah, Earthling, you’ve discovered my secret.” Two index fingers quickly become antennae. “Beep beep.” Now one hand becomes a telephone. “Beam me up, Scotty, I’m on the lam!” And now the little girl is laughing at them.

The year was 1979. That little alien was me. And that was the only time I could publicly laugh at the bullies.

They worked out what to do about it, later. They passed close by and punched me in the gut so quickly that if the imaginary observer blinked, they would miss it. They took out their anger on me because I was a natural target.

Skinny, undersized, bespectacled. Clearly from a lower income background than them. And, as they said, weird.

I was proud to be weird. I revelled in my freakiness. I didn’t think it made me special, or above them, per se. I just couldn’t understand why they would want to miss out.

Being a weirdo was fun - well, except for being bullied every day. It seemed to me that the normals [or, as I later learned to call them, mundanes] were missing out on a wider range of experience because those experiences were deemed “weird”.

Only weirdoes enjoyed Doctor Who. Because Science Fiction of any kidney was “too weird” for the mundanes. Only freaks watched Star Trek. But it was okay to like Superman because he was mainstream.

I knew much more than my contemporaries because I was interested in things. I voluntarily watched documentaries. I stayed up late to watch Star Trek [This being some years before VCR’s became affordable to my blue-collar household] and spent my free time in the library reading books. Big, thick books. With hardly any pictures.

It was their own fault, that last bit. If they hadn’t devoted so much effort to singling me out for bullying, I would never have retreated to the library in the first place. The library was a small area where rowdy behaviour was frowned upon and there was at least one teacher close to hand at all times. The library was my safe place. I could hole up in a corner and read the words that sent me to another reality.

In high school, I was worse. Skinny, bespectacled and weedy. The kid who always put their hand up to answer a question and who could talk to the teachers on their own level. I was the one girl in the school who passed out of it still a virgin. Still unattached to any males there.

To me, it hardly took any effort at all to avoid the boys my age. They were all… dumb.

Any attempt at conversation with them inevitably lead to the thing seemingly on everyone’s mind but mine: sex. Everyone in grade ten [that’s 14-15 year-olds, folks] or older had to lose their virginity or be ostracised. Having sex meant turning into an adult.

That’s what they told me.

That’s what I refused to believe.

I did not feel ashamed. Nor did I become embarrassed when they tried to ridicule me for being a virgin. I had made a choice and my choice was different to theirs.

“But everyone’s doing it,” they would cry.

“Not me,” said I.

“WHYYYYYYYY?” was the inevitable wail. “Don’t you want to be an adult?”

I tried to explain, when it began, that adulthood was more than connecting genetalia. By the third time, I gave up. They clearly weren’t listening.

The mundanes chanted, “Get a life,” like the freaks chanted “One of us” in the movie of the same name. What they meant was, “Do everything we do and stop being weird.” They wanted me to light up a smoke, chug a beer, and open my legs to the first numb-knuckle with an erection.

I knew, even then, that it would not work out. They would still deride me. “Sell-out”, “wimp”, “slut” and “whore” were just a few things they would call me.

A group of boys approached me once, on the way to a class. There were at least five of them. The spokesgrunt said, “Hey Weller. We heard you do it.” By “do it”, they mean “have sex”.

I started to edge around the cluster.

“Do you do it?”

My God, what irresistible charm. I should have dropped my knickers, spread my legs and screamed, “Take me! Take me now!” At least, that’s what they seemingly believed.

No.

I laughed. Loud and long, and continued on my way to the classroom. I was completely unafraid because this group had chosen to proposition me not five meters from a populated staff room. True adults were within and no doubt listening to the exchange.

Less than a week later, I was a “frigid whore” according to the sex-obsessed masses. I rolled my eyes at the oxymoron and continued on my way.

Less than a month later, I had someone ask me to my face if I was a lesbian.

I ignored them. I retreated to safe places and put myself in a survival mindset. If I could make it to University, they would not follow me.

I did. None of the mundanes were there. Especially not in my study zone, which was computers and technology. The geeks and weirdoes were here. At last, I belonged somewhere.

It’s hard to shake the habits of school and high-school. I had learned to become invisible and laugh at myself because everyone else did. At least that way, I said the joke first.

And when I found someone who thought I was worth something, who loved me for everything I am, who saw me even when I inadvertently blended into the wallpaper… it broke me.

I had a mental breakdown at age nineteen because someone thought I was worth love.

The mundanes, for all my appearances of ignoring them, had got to me. Tell someone they’re ugly for long enough and they’ll believe it. Tell someone they’re worthless… and they stop trying to fight.

My thinking broke into two parts. The dark side, that had learned to hate me and cling to the bad things, and the positive side. The positive side repeatedly said, “Look. There’s someone who loves you.” Or, “Hey, something shiny.” Life is a constant battle between the “up” part of my thinking and the perpetual downer who lives in the back of my mind.

I’m not manic-depressive. Not enough to medicate, anyway. I’m not classically OCD. I may be somewhere on the ASD rainbow, because I can recognise myself in the diagnostic checklist.

What I am, is weird.

I enjoy it.

Try it sometime.

It’s fun.

Harsh Truths we Should all Live With

These are truths I had to learn, myself. They’re not nice. Life is not nice. Neither are people you meet within it. Most of this is about them.

Though everyone is unique, you a not a special little snowflake. There are folks who think that just because they’re different, or think they have some kind of gift, then they’re entitled to special treatment. Not so. If you’re unique, then so’s everyone else. Get over it and move on.

Even if you know what you’re talking about, nobody is going to listen to you unless you’re saying what they’re thinking. And even then, it’s chancy. People around me do not listen to my good advice, my statements of fact, nor my warnings. They definitely ignore the I-told-you-so’s. Then they turn around and blame me for not telling them in advance. There are times I wish my life was recorded and replayable at will.

Anything you want, it is wise to earn. Trust me on this one. You spend above your income, you wind up having to earn more to fill up the debt. Living below your means is better, in the long run, as is saving for those big-ticket items. It’s more rewarding to have the item through hard work, than it is to charge it on the credit card and have a massive debt with compound interest.

By the time you have the qualifications for your dream job, it is no longer there. It takes four years of hard work to earn a degree. More, if you choose to do it part-time. Sure, it’s theoretically possible to get that job by working your arse off, but the odds are rigged against the “lower classes”. Kids from blue collar backgrounds pretty much have to have a part time job, or saved up practically from birth in order to just pay for the books and fees. So you exit university with a brand-new bachelor’s (or whatever) only to discover that the position you wanted has been shipped off to cheaper pastures, and nobody in your city/state/country is hiring any more. Or has been given to some trust-fund “special snowflake” who went to the right university or has the right pedigree.

Anger is not worth it. Specifically, hanging on to anger. You’ll only hurt yourself. And it’s the sort of pain that can get infectious. Better to just breathe it out, vent in the safest way imaginable or available, and move on with what must be done.

You will never be famous. It takes a lot of connections and a lot of luck to even have a fleeting glance at a shot at stardom. Stop practicing your Oscar acceptance speeches and spend the time in more worthy pursuits.

Deal with problems you can help with, whenever you can. Trust me, nobody else is going to do it, so you might as well help out. Helping someone (or even nobody, if it comes to picking up garbage) generates goodwill. There’s enough bad feeling out there, already. Plus, it can give you that nice, warm feeling of a good deed well done. Natural high FTW.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Esentially, “think before you act” in more poetic packaging. I tell this one to my kids practically every day. A few corporations should start employing this one, IMO.

For every right, there is an equal and opposite responsibility. Every right you have comes with a responsibility attached, maybe more than one. The right of free speech comes with the responsibility of making sure your words don’t hurt someone. The right to reproduce comes with the responsibility to make sure those kids you produce are cared for, fed and educated. Yes, even you, irresponsible male. You like to “ride bareback”, that kid is your responsibility too. And no, she did not “get herself pregnant”. You helped. Get over it.

There is no such thing as no choice. There is such a thing as no time to make a right choice. Many, many bad decisions have been made by people who later claimed, “I had no choice, I had to–”. You had no time. The first option in your head was the one you had to go with. This speaks more of a history of bad thinking than no choice.

Revenge can only go wrong. Revenge is its own bad news. It breeds. It grows each time in futile attempts to make sure the other party doesn’t try anything ever again. If family and friends get involved, it winds up becoming a feud. Then a war.

You will never get everything you want. If you’re very lucky, then you might get some of the things you want. The odds are always against keeping them. Best to mourn and move on. Stress is bad for you.

I can’t brain, today.

I have the dumb.

It’s been bought on by a combination of late nights and bad sleep, both through circumstances I can’t control (I’m a Mum, remember?).

I shall be working on tomorrow’s entry in the rare moments when cognisance presents itself. Slowly, so I don’t hurt my wrist. And possibly fuelled by an endless stream of caramel mochachinos.

Then again, given how weirdly poetic I get on sleep dep, I could possibly come up with something brilliant. Maybe.

Until tomorrow, bargle blargle bleh and muuurrrrrrrrrgh….