Parents Who Hid Child’s Gender for Five Years Now Face Backlash
When Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper had their son, Sasha Laxton, five years ago, they decided that rather than make a big splashy “It’s A Boy!” announcement, they’d keep the news to themselves. Instead, they only told a select number of relatives that little Sasha was a he; to everyone else the child was referred to as “the infant” and described without gendered pronouns. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge …
CAPTCHA Your Future [Chaos Magick]
Just a thought:
Every day I submit several online forms with a “type the magic words” anti-bot security feature. Sometimes those words seem relevant to one another or to something I was doing at the time.
Are they trying to tell me something?
BTW, If I now say “yes,” then I’m officially a bit of a twat unless I’m suffering some sort of delusions. But I’m not, on either count, so hold your fire.
I’m proposing a kind of Chaos Magick.
What I’m thinking — and be just as aware as I am at this point that it is my brain I’m talking about and my brain that is doing the thinking, so there’s a bias in there somewhere — is that maybe if I recorded the words and what I was doing each time, I’d be able to see either
- an amusingly coincidental pattern [cool!]
- an absence of pattern, amusing or otherwise [ho hum]
- something else that I didn’t predict [awesome! unless it's scary]
As a total aside, when I tried to type “at this point” a couple of paragraphs ago, I typed “that is point” instead. My brain trying to agree with me, or just the usual sleep deprivation talking?
Anyway. So I will. Capture my CAPTCHAs, I mean. I can screenshot them all for a week or 2 and see what I get. Probably nothing. Maybe a nifty word cloud or something. Maybe the brain that’s so far at the back it’s actually part of my spinal column will pick up patterns the rest of me is too clever to notice. Gotta be at least as easy as Nostradamus.
Image credit: Accretion Disc
If your dad’s got a motorbike then you win, even if your dad is ginger.
This is pretty much how I remember the logic of comparing and competing about our parents when I was a kid.
I remember my sister telling people her dad was a strong man. I told him this and he said she was right. She meant like in a circus though, with a fancy mustache and tight leopard print pants with the fashioned-in braces.
I’m only thinking about all this because we went with the Animal to visit some of his other kids yesterday and I was reminded of how important it is, at a certain age, to be able to brag about your family and especially your parents.
Let’s not let them down, eh.
Productivity: How to crush procrastination for good
Here are 5 concepts I’ve discovered that can make a disorganised and lazy grunt like me a bit more efficient:
1. Procrastination isn’t a problem, it’s a solution
But a very poor one. Every bit of time and energy you spend finding ways and means to put things off is a piece of your life that you will never, ever get reimbursed. If this is your solution to things you don’t enjoy or things that scare you, you’re fucked. So, here’s how to remove procrastination from your life.
2. Do the stuff you hate first
The more you put off something that you don’t feel like doing, the more you realise that it can be put off, the more the world shapes itself to your laziness. It’s like a huge vacuum cleaner made of memory foam, sucking your will to live and get on with shizzle. So get up, do it while your procrastinating synapses are still half-asleep, and you won’t have to put it off anymore.
3. Or, don’t do it at all
Does it really need doing? Does it really need you and no-one else to do it? Because, you know, if you’ve been getting away with not doing it so far, then maybe that’s your solution. Just openly don’t do it; no procrastination there. If it must be done, ask someone else to do it for you. Pay them if it saves you from having to procrastinate.
4. Do something else first
Wait, isn’t that procrastination? Nope.
If you purposefully decide that you will do undesirable task X at a certain time, but first have a scheduled appointment with something more enjoyable, that’s called planning. Thoughtful planning will leave you feeling energised and calm when you tackle your task X.
5. Stop smoking (yes, I will, I will)
If you smoke, say 20 cigarettes a day at 5 minutes each, you’re wasting 100 minutes every day. If you also spend 5 minutes walking outside and back each time, that’s 200 minutes a day. More than 3 hours, every single day, spent on something expensive that’s killing you. That’s more than 50 DAYS a year you could have spent thinking, working, or carrying out vital maintenance on yourself (yes, you have to eat, sleep and shit to remain productive; showering helps too).
Maybe I’m on a wrong ‘un here, but it seems to me that if you can find ways to remove the procrastination from life, then you can fill all the time you were going to spend wasting time with something a bit more exciting. Thoughts?
Image credit: ronocdh
Related articles
- Completely Relevant News: It’s Not Procrastination (Really!) (wins.failblog.org)
It’s been a fucking riot. You twats.
Yesterday we heard there was a tiny attempt at a mob looting in our overpopulated suburban town centre. This may have something to do with the recent riots in Tottenham and outwards, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that too many people in this town and others are bored, sulky twats who think the world owes them a living just for existing.
Harsh? Only a bit.
True? Listen, I used to be one of those bored sulky twats. I know what I’m talking about.
I wouldn’t have started a riot, but I can remember watching the Rodney King riots in LA on my TV screen and thinking something along the lines of “hell yeah”. Before I grew up, I saw it differently – rioters were righteous, the authorities unjust, oppressive and reactionary. I assumed this unless it was explicitly shown to be otherwise. Because I was a twat.
Before I grew up, I threw rocks [small ones! pebbles! but I still did it] at another kid in a riverbed, just because the other kids from school were doing it already. He was an unpopular kid. The thought of what we did makes me sick now, but at the time I did it without thinking. Because I was a child and a bit of a twat.
The problem isn’t that riots get started by a group of angry people whose tempers have frayed to hell. The problem is that riots are propagated by further groups of people who see a chance for a creepy admixture of depersonalised retribution and entertainment.
You are thoughtless wankers. You’ve burned homes, taken lives, and stolen from an economy that’s already been fucked every which way. And it’s not just you. Almost every talking head and chav-on-the-street has annoyed me with their general lack of a proper grasp on the situation. The world hates your face. All of you.
You’ve stood in front of TV cameras braying about respect and shitty policing [riot supporters] or social deprivation and lack of opportunity [middle-class think-gooders] or criminal gang culture and appropriate response weapons [politicians have been far less supportive of domestic rioting than they were of recent violent uprisings on the other side of the world].
The Animal asks me, if the rioters had a problem with the government then why didn’t they go to attack the government? And I tell him,
*sigh* Because they haven’t got a problem with the government, they’ve got a problem with everything that isn’t them and theirs. Frequently got problems with those, too.
*double sigh* Because they don’t in fact know where the fuck to find “the government”. Most of them have never attempted political action of any kind before. Many of them are, however, familiar with fighting and breaking shit up to relieve tensions and resolve disagreements in subcultural politics.
We’re all tired. I’ve got a cold [this has nothing to do with anything, really, but adds to my overall feeling of impatience and weariness]. Just stop being complete fucking idiots and fuck off home, yeah?
Related articles
- The Psychology Of A Rioter (huffingtonpost.com)
- British PM Misses Point of Social Media, Threatens Ban (readwriteweb.com)
The problem with “free”
For a month or 2 (OK, maybe more – my sense of time is hazy when I’ve been procrastinating hard) I’ve been the proud owner of a free .co.cc domain name and free 000webhost.com hosting. I haven’t made any good use of it, but it’s sucked up a fair amount of my time: checking to see if the registration had been activated, requesting activation, waiting, checking to see if the nameservers had been updated yet, waiting, twitching, reading the support resources, visiting the non-existent site to will it into being with my steely gaze, emailing support and waiting a week for a reply.
All I wanted it for was to poke around: instal WordPress.org, play with themes and stuff, test things I wasn’t sure about before I did them anywhere important. I didn’t see any point paying for something I was only going to use for fun and exploration. D’oh.
Top quality fun and exploration are well worth paying for. I wouldn’t say “oh, I’ll only ever use free sex toys because they’re just for fun,” or decide that my walking shoes have to be free because I’ll only use them to explore. So why was I focused on getting my test on for free?
Because the internet’s sposed to be free, yo.
No.
In the end I got pissed off and paid about £20 of our quaint English pounds to some guys online in exchange for a year’s hosting package that’s probably a lot higher-spec than I need, and includes a free .com domain name registration. I didn’t compare web hosting prices and find the best deal, I didn’t ask all my self-hosting friends for recommendations. Shit, I didn’t even tweet for help.
I just got bored bored bored of the dicking around with this free stuff and decided I was happy to pay someone who would do it a little bit faster and better; then I paid the first people I googled who looked… faster and better. And they were. I still had to live chat with a techie about getting my domain registration arranged, but that was quick and painless and live, dammit, so I wasn’t left frustrated and grouchy.
Oh, my aching internet-addicted bones.
I’m not saying all free stuff is bad; I have some excellent free or “freemium” stuff that I’m very happy with and whose support service is actually quite supportive. But I don’t want to embrace the false economy of saving money by doing everything myself, when my time is worth more than the fee for assistance.
So this morning I looked at my situation and grokked this: I could spend a few hours messing with my new setup and export-importing all my content and adding plugins and dancing with widgets. Or I could spend some cash and have my new site set up for me. I’d been intending to do it all myself, to benefit from the learning implicit in any new activity. But I realised the knowledge to be gained is largely “how to point and click”, and I’m pretty sure I could pick it up whenever if I needed to. So again, I’d rather spend a little cash and save the hassle than spend the time (when I could be earning money or chilling with my family) to do it myself.
Problem solved through the application of cash. So if you have cash, great – your takeaway is to spend more of it on saving yourself for the good stuff. If you don’t have cash, that sucks and I’m on my way. Leave me a comment (or email me) about who you are and what you’re doing for money; I’ll get back to you and help if I can.
Image credit: Gisela Giardino
Shh… Even sleeping babies can hear you’re unhappy
You know those times when you’ve argued, wept, or otherwise stressed out while your baby was sleeping? Turns out if a baby can hear you, it still knows how you feel.
fMRI scans of sleeping babies aged from 3 to 7 months show activity in the middle temporal gyri, right lingual gyrus and medial frontal gyri when human voice sounds including crying, laughter and other neutral noises were played to them. Basically that’s the same as you’d expect to see in an adult listening to those sounds, awake.
What’s more intersting is that unhappy human voice sounds – crying etc – activate the insular cortex and gyrus rectus more strongly, again just like in fully conscious adults. So babies can hear us and interpret our mood from our voices even when they’re asleep.
Nobody’s really sure why this is. Maybe the babies are processing the sounds and learning as they sleep. Maybe they’ve already learned to recognise those sounds and associate them with maternal stress they experienced in the womb. Maybe they’re just evolved to be alert to any sign of danger while they sleep, and people arguing or crying around them could potentially do something dangerous.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad that science has finally supplied some evidence to back up all the anecdotes and old wives’ tales about not doing your freaking-out in the same room as your sleeping infant.
Source: New Scientist
Image credit: ECohen
“You will keep getting older, and then you will die.”
I’ve been a bit of a mess lately, with the broken rib and the dodgy customer in Belgium [I didn't tell you about that. I'm probably not going to, either] and daily news reporting and the baby swimming lessons [yes, we do those - tell you later] and the family and well, everything you normally have to do but sorer because of the rib.
I looked at my feeble attempts to engage with The Tao of Awesome, and figured I could do better, so I decided to run it again from the start. Then I failed to start.
Today I got an email with a new post from Johnny B Truant. It was long and said a lot of epic shit. But the one thing that stood out the most was this:
You will keep getting older, and then you will die.
I want that on a fucking T-shirt. Printed normal and with a vertical flip so I can read it in the fucking mirror.
Know how temporary you are. Know that you are running out of time every nanosecond. Know how irrelevant you are to almost every other force and particle in the universe. Know that this means two things:
- You must act now.
- If you fuck up, it’s not the end.
Figure out what you really REALLY WANT and then go after it with every fucking piece of you, right now. Repeat. Don’t stop. Ever. There isn’t time.
You will fuck up, repeatedly, for definite. No way around that for anybody. But unless it literally kills you, you will by default survive and keep on rockin’.
Time is running out. Now. It isn’t “Do or die,” it’s “Do *then* die.”
Get on with it.
Image credit: chim0
Animal Intelligence: Crows learn who to mouth off at
This is awesome. New Scientist says there are crows on the Uni of Washington campus who were subjected to an experiment 5 years ago in which they were temporarily captured & released by someone wearing a particular mask. They learned to recognise the mask and flashmobbed anyone wearing it; they followed the wearer around, cawing at top volume.
Nifty thing is, only 26% of the crows did that 2 weeks after the start of the experiment. After almost 3 years, 66% of the crows exhibit the same behaviour when they see the mask. That includes birds who weren’t even born yet when the trappings happened – they simply learned who to ‘scold’ from their parents.
This struck me as amazing and even cute, but then I had to think: what if instead of following people and cawing at them, the birds had turned to terrorism? If we’re not the only species that can learn a behaviour from others around us, we’d better hope they never learn to copy the ways that humans react when we feel oppressed by sinister external forces.
As people and especially as parents, we need to remember the crows before we display prejudice, anger, hatred and aggression. Let’s not have our children grow up screaming at masks only we’ve taught them to fear, when they don’t even know what’s underneath.
Just a thought. Yours?
If you want to read the whole paper, it’s here.
Image credit: crowdive
Absorbing the Tao of Awesome: Lesson 1
OK, back to this. Johnny B Truant is now on Lesson 3 of The Tao of Awesome (which showed up in my inbox this morning); I am on Lesson 1 (just). Meanwhile, I have a newly broken rib. It only hurts when I breathe.
So here we go: Johnny will now take my avalanche of to-do and teach me to turn it into a manageable and less-fuck-up-able working system. The secret is to do less things that don’t matter, and spend more time on things that do matter. Cheers, Truant.
But he promises it’ll work, though easier said than done. I’ll end up doing the important things before they become urgent, and dealing with urgent things according to whether they’re important. Plus I learned that it’s possible to do business without being a slave to long pointless phone calls and meetings. By refusing to have them most of the time. Now that is pure fucking awesome.
The task for this lesson: make a master to-do list and mark everything on it as either “important and urgent”, “important not urgent”, “urgent not important”, or “neither urgent nor important”.
Dude, you’re hurting me. To make a list of everything that needs doing would require me to integrate my personal Basecamp with my client’s Backpack with my 3 Google to-do lists and my Yahoo to-do list and my hard copy to-do sheets. And the notes on my phone. And my appointments calendar. And all the unactioned items in my various email accounts. And the laundry. And the cleaner I promised the Animal I’d hire.
So, I admit I fudged this one somewhat. My master list lists all my other to-do lists, and some of the most obvious and unavoidable to-dos (like work, pay rent, buy food) plus some special requests (like have sex, read Wired, book a holiday) . It’s maybe 5% of the wildly disorganised to-do list that’s in my head. Maybe I’ll build on it later. Should’ve used my notebook instead of scrap paper.
The categorisation of each list item, though, was actually kinda fun. Lots of stuff that was important AND urgent, of course. But not all of it.
My crash test verdict on The Tao of Awesome: Lesson 1
This was pretty painful. And that’s when I shirked by only listing my to-do lists and my worst to-do worries. I hope I can catch up.
Let’s see what happens in Lesson 2.
Image credit: moonlightbulb
Baby TV: Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Baby TV, at first glance, seemed like a great idea. 24 hour broadcasting, no advertising, just developmental programming for the under-3s.
A couple of the shows I watched were OK (with the volume really low, at least – all that singing is hard to take at times). There were some nice short animations that I found quite appealing. And I figured the lack of advertising would make Mini-MI a bit less likely to start demanding happy meals and branded character merchandise.
Then I started picking up on the odd thing here and there that set my teeth right on edge. My most jaw-dropping OMG-they-didn’t moment thus far came from Learn with Baby (2006), in which the twee but slightly breathy voice-over lady enthuses, “There are many different shapes of eyes: slanted… big… and small!”
That’s wrong wrong wrong on so many levels. Except the ones where it’s not even wrong, just bollocks. I mean, for a start, none of those are shapes. Slanted is an orientation, big and small are sizes. All of them are relative measures referring to the rendering or presentation of a shape, hence not to do with the shape itself. It downright pisses me off that they’re leading ickle babies up the geometric garden path.
And did they get Prince Philip to script this? It might as well say, “There are big and small versions of normal eyes, then there are some weird people with slanted ones.” I should sue them for the injuries sustained in dropping my jaw to the fucking floor.
They’re lucky I’m British and accustomed to hearing that shit from our noble prince consort, so I just switched to a different channel.
Image credit: Stannered
Absorbing the Tao of Awesome: Introduction
A few days ago I was trundling around Twitter when I saw this tweet from @JohnnyBTruant:
I have a new course. It’s stupidly cheap. You should buy it. “The Tao of Awesome” : http://bit.ly/myIt0h
I was sufficiently intrigued curious procrastination-inclined that I clicked the link. 
I wasn’t disappointed. Not talking about the course, you understand – it’s barely begun. But I’ve liked that Truant’s style since the first time I saw his writing: blunt yet tangentially anecdotal, authoritative but not in a you-can’t way, with infrequent use of mild language. Frequent use of the other kind, which I personally like cos it makes me feel comfortable.
I debated for a bit. I asked the Animal, who gave his usual “I don’t want to tell you what to do” answer. I decided the $39 fee might be worth paying if I get even a little bit better at keeping on top of things — work, baby, boyfriend, friends, blog, health, relatives, travel plans, oh godspleasehelpme i’mdrowning — and when I said as much on Twitter, the allegedly awesome dude replied to agree. So I signed up. Small fee, potentially good payoff; I’ll take that bet.
The course intro email arrived the other day, and I read it this morning (I’m always behind, with everything – that’s why I want to grok the Tao of Awesome, yes?).
So it goes: “change your life… get things done… get the RIGHT things done”. That’s a bit more interesting. Some more motivational copy, and here’s the first official task: read the post at http://bit.ly/iupCeN, and grasp that progress is king while mere accomplishment sucks monkeys. It’s called kaizen, apparently, though to my jaded corporate-whore ears it sounds suspiciously like Continuous Personal Development.
My crash test verdict on today’s The Tao of Awesome:
It brought to mind that proverb, “Thought without action is a daydream; action without thought is a nightmare.”
Which is fucking awesome, because ever since I first heard that saying it’s stuck with me on account of how it describes half my worldly problems in one sentence. [It may well describe the other half, too; I can't tell because I don't even know what my problem is half the time].
Let’s see what happens in Lesson 1.
Image credit: Kevin.Qiu
uPVC God
We’ve been getting a lot of visits recently from god botherers. Except that they’re not bothering god – I understand their own is quite pleased with them, and I don’t think the other gods give a toss. They’re bothering me.
The ones that came this morning looked like double glazing salesmen – the suits, the briefcases, the earnest-faced older man and the slightly dodgy sidekick with the skinhead and stocky build. But they had pamphlets with something about light and truth written on the front. I’ve had doorstep debates with the older one before, during which he tried to convince me that
- eternal life isn’t against the laws of nature that his god allegedly designed
- there’s no reason to think our Sun will ever run out of fuel
- I should do a bunch of stuff I don’t want to do now, so that I can have an eternal life I don’t fricking want later.
I have no idea what religious group they’re affiliated with. I didn’t check.
Now I’ve sold double glazing myself in the past, for the evil Anglian Windows. Almost everyone I know has worked for them at one time or another, usually as briefly as possible. None of us enjoyed bothering people who didn’t want or expect to hear from us, interrupting their day, and then trying to sell them something they rarely needed or could afford. So why is it an approach that appeals to religious groups?
I much prefer the Jehovah’s Witnesses who call on me. Those nice friendly middle-aged ladies never directly tell me that my beliefs are wrong or that I’m going to be frowned on by their god and not allowed into the dead people’s party, or that I should do what their god says. They just bring me interesting-yet-unlikely reading material about intelligent design and stuff.
And I say that I’m happy to accept nobody knows what happened in the gaps in the fossil record, and we don’t know for sure exactly how non-living stuff produced living stuff; I just doubt (for a plethora of reasons) that what happened was a personal intervention by the hand of their god. But I’ll read whatever they put through my letterbox anyway, I tell them, because they mean well. I do wonder, though, about their conversion rates. You’d think a god would have figured out a more effective marketing mix by now.
But maybe he’s making good profits [if you think that's an amusing pun, kindly look in a mirror & give yourself a scathing eyebrow raise] already. Self-help shit sells by the bucketload, no matter how vague, ill-conceived or poorly expressed. People will pin their hopes on it, they’ll pay for it, and they’ll follow its instructions, and they’ll blame themselves when it “doesn’t work” for them (i.e. they don’t become perfect beautiful beings with perfect beautiful lives).
Now that just makes me sorry for all the lonely, gullible, needy, vulnerable people who open their door to two smiling faces with all the glib answers they need to realise there’s a big hole in their lives, and that hole can be filled with uPVC. I mean god.
uPVC god.
Identity = a mode
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle, philosopher, 300-something BC
Related Articles
- What Aristotle Taught Us About Web Content Development (verticalmeasures.com)
A rant about toilet paper quality
I’ve got a stinking cold & am reduced to using toilet roll to stem the torrent issuing from my nostrils. This has led me to notice the scratchy-yet-structurally-weak quality of our latest multipack of toilet rolls.
We bought them from a supermarket known for its low prices and copycat brands. Let’s call it, say, ALDI. Bloody Aldi. Every time we go in there, we spend ten times as much as I expected and still come out thinking we’ve saved money.
The issue I have with their bogroll is this: the packet says something like “Super Softy Luxury soft toilet roll”. The paper is not soft. Neither is it remotely luxurious. Now I’m annoyed. All I really wanted was something cheap to wipe my arse on, but you promised me super softy luxury and you let me down.
When I buy cheap toilet rolls that are labelled “Extra Value economy rubbish” and come in basic packaging, I expect to get economy rubbish and I’ve never been disappointed.
Don’t make promises you won’t keep.
And don’t use cheap tissue when you have a cold – the pain is never worth the gain.
It must be love
The bloom of this rose is made of chocolate wrapped in shiny red foil. I am most pleased.
Happy Valentine's Day.
xxx
Don’t wait for the right time
Image by Neal via Flickr
What do you wish you’d done this past year? And why the fudge didn’t you do it? What crappy excuse did you give yourself?
- I wish I’d charged some people more money for my work. I didn’t because I was afraid nobody would be interested in hiring me at a higher rate.
- I wish I’d dyed my hair back to its usual red/pink. I didn’t because I don’t get much time in the bathroom since Mini-MI was born, and I have to prioritise basic bathing.
- I wish I’d got more professional photos of myself when I was pregnant, and lots more photos of Mini-MI in her first 9 months outside the womb as well. I didn’t because I thought it was more important to earn a semi-stable living from my writing than to keep up my deeply unpredictable modelling career.
- I wish I’d said exactly what I was thinking, and done what I was thinking, to a whole bunch of different people, on a plethora of occasions. I didn’t because I felt that keeping the general peace should take precedence over keeping my own peace of mind.
Don’t wait for the right time. It doesn’t happen. If I’d waited for the right time, I wouldn’t have a job — or a partner, or a baby, or a place to live — right now. Whatever it is, say it now, do it now, don’t delay, don’t wait for anything.
Oh, and don’t be a dick. There are probably some things you genuinely shouldn’t do, and I’m not taking the blame.
Xmas bah-humbuggery ftl
Image via Wikipedia
Don’t you just love xmas? The decorations, the food, the family, the unwrapping of presents? The hellish experience of going anywhere near a shop; the hours of cooking a bigger dinner than necessary; the leftovers; the icy cold if you’re at northerly latitudes; the tons of xmas emails/texts/tweets/Facebook messages clogging up your account?
I like solstice, I like winter. They’re phenomena that seem worthy of some awe, and they inspire archetypal reactions in me – introspection, self-appraisal and a sense of liminality that encourages action. As a scientist, as a pagan, I can appreciate this time of year, but xmas leaves me cold.
The Animal’s in there making dinner for our family & friends, Mini-MI is playing on the rug in front of the tree, and I’m loitering outside smoking (yes, I know, but I’m going to give up in 2011, ok?) rather than make the “xmas hates my face” speech to them again. Am I being a twat? Yes. Would I rather go back to bed than finish wrapping and tidying and stuff? Absolutely. I am awkward at receiving gifts, and feel socially inept this time of year.
[At this point the Animal appears like an angel of mercy to bring me a hot cup of tea. I literally weep with gratitude, for my fingers are about to freeze and fall off. I realise "angel of mercy" bears connotations of euthanasia and, um, whatever the right term is for murdering the enfeebled, but you know what I mean. He's a darling.]
Yay. Let’s get on with it then. Watching Mini-MI unwrap presents and chew the paper cheers me up. Adz the Russian showing up in his dressing gown to make us all an Elf Yourself video helps too. The Animal, in his new dressing gown, is warm and snuggly. We have three different kinds of meat, several types of cakes and biscuits, a gingerbread house, jelly and cream and key lime pie. Later I shall put Mini-MI in her skeleton suit underneath her Santa robe and make her look like Jack Skellington. Or the Hogfather. As you wish.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
R.I.P. Dawn
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, we were losers. There was me, Dawn, Rookin, and the variety pack of geeks, neurotics and drunkards that we called friends. We hung out every day and every night, doing not very much but being glad to do it together.
When we felt the call to form a sucky garage-punk band, there was no hesitation: the three of us would join up to conquer the back yard. We argued more about the band’s name than any other aspect of the whole affair. (We passed over “Wasted Angels” – too L.A. glam metal – and “[Something-or-other] Babies” – too grrl-grungy – and finally settled on “LizardSkin”. If I didn’t have other things on my mind right now, I’d feel shame.)
See Scott Pilgrim‘s band, Sex Bob-omb? That was, essentially, us. Or, to put it more correctly, we were that. Dawn played drums, Rookin made Sonic Youth noises on his guitar through a home-made amp that occasionally picked up Russian radio. I twanged a bass guitar and droned/yelled/whispered/screamed in the style of the day. We played support slots at a handful of bars and charity shows, taking our friends with us in lieu of any real fans, but really we were more of a gang than a band.
Dawn (drums) and Rookin (guitar)
Dawn’s parents let us practice at their house, where Rookin and I had to stand on the landing because her drum kit filled her entire bedroom. It was 1993, and I used to carry my bass on my back through the woods to Dawn’s place, until a little girl was found dead in those woods under worryingly unclear circumstances. The whole town was shocked by the reminder that death could come unexpectedly, at any time, to any of us. After that, we didn’t take those shortcuts so much anymore.
Dawn was the first of us to settle down. We had sworn to one another that we would never succumb to The Three ‘M’s: Marriage, Mortgage and Motherhood. By the time I was leaving town to seek my fortune, Dawn was a mum in a house in the suburbs. She seemed happy there, having a second child soon after the first. Gods, how she loved her children (and the Land Rover). She looked so together, fulfilled, managing to unite responsibility and immaturity in some unfathomably Dawnlike balance.
By the time I got married a few years later, with Rookin as my best man, Dawn and her husband were cheerfully abstinent from the worst excesses of my wedding reception. She seemed to represent the happy family life I wanted for myself. Unfortunately, I’d taken a different path and was about to spend the next few years struggling with drug addiction and bipolar disorder. I lost touch with almost everyone, one way or another, and Dawn was among the friends I failed. She still lived not far away from me, but I didn’t visit or call. I was too tied up in my own life to catch up with anyone else’s.
Years later, having cleaned up my act and moved to a nice house in the suburbs myself, I bumped into Dawn outside the train station. Her children were with her, looking much older than I would have expected – I hadn’t realised how much time had passed. Soon after that I separated from my husband, which (though I was incapable of realising it at the time) marked the peak of a year-long manic episode. I moved back to my mother’s house, drank lots of rum, and did only half my job with only half my brain for a while.
When I regained some clarity a few months later, I was glad to find Dawn on Facebook. She, just like me, used Tank Girl as her profile picture and status updates as her stress release system. We chatted occasionally, but more often simply commented on each other’s posts. I don’t think we ever even exchanged phone numbers.
It was a dialogue en passant; rarely directly addressing one another, we nevertheless kept a sense of friendship, support and mutual admiration. When I found out I was pregnant, she was among the first to congratulate and mock me. When she posted enigmatically pissed-off status updates, I would commiserate and offer help she always refused. I suspect that without Facebook, we might never have communicated at all. We were busy doing all the busy things that busy people do.
On Monday 15th November 2010 Dawn was killed in her home, where she had returned to collect some belongings after separating from her husband. She died due to asphyxiation and head injuries; her husband is now awaiting trial. The news trickled through the town’s networks, triggering cascading phone calls between people who hadn’t bothered to speak to each other for years. Armchair vigilantes ranted about justice, capital punishment, and the current barter value of eyes and teeth. We were stunned, appalled, bewildered. We loved her, admired her, lamented her.
Some of us were doing so from a greater distance than others; Rookin and I talked about the weirdness of grieving for someone with whom we hadn’t kept up a full friendship. I suppose we’re grieving for the loss of that potential, like a security blanket we didn’t need to use but still wanted to hold onto. It always seemed as though we three remained connected, no matter how much time passed or where our lives took us. Our rare chats had a sense of picking up right where we left off. But I feel hypocritical, guilty, like we don’t have any right to be distressed because there are so many people feeling more intense grief than ours.
We left it too late and she’s already gone.
On her Facebook profile, she wrote:
“I will skid broadside into Hell, thoroughly used up and worn out, with a fag* in one hand and a coffee in the other screaming ‘Whoa, what a ride’!”
That was Dawn in a nutshell. She was a wonderful woman – a loud, aggressive, rude, immature, caring, funny, maternal, vulnerable whirlwind, burning past in a Land Rover while texting and throwing a cigarette butt out the window. Unforgettable.
[*If you think in American English, for "fag" read "cigarette".]
***** It may be too late for Dawn, but it’s not too late for other victims of domestic violence. If you’d like to make a donation to Women’s Aid, text ACT to 84424 and a £3 donation will be made from your phone credit. Or you can see other ways to donate at the Women’s Aid website.
You can take the girl out of the torture chamber, but…
“I like to inflict happiness. If that means suffering, I assist.”
I said this to someone earlier today, and it snagged my thoughts for a while.
The notion of happiness as inflicted, implying an unwilling victim. The choice of “assist” [unspoken "...with"], rather than inflict, indulge, provide, or any other verb that only flows one way. The phrasing, the sound of the sentences in my head, the way that voice came so naturally when the conversation turned to domination and submission, sadism and masochism.
To clarify, because I’m aware I may not have mentioned it before:
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I was a professional dominatrix. I did this because it paid well, and it sounded like less effort and trauma than working in a call centre. I liked the shiny clothes that felt like armour, the accessories made of steel and black leather. I was good at it. The words and mannerisms came easily, the psychological game was a ritual I found satisfying. The drive to mesmerise and torment my prey was instinctive.
I left that line of work more than a decade ago. I don’t miss it. It was sad to go so unchallenged, to be left with nothing to push against, to know that any resistance I encountered was offered only with hopes that it would be overcome.
The instinct is still there, but the flavour of the game has changed. I’m one half of a matched pair, as likely to be a happy little kitten as a prowling tigress. My love is multifaceted, refractive, sparkling at the centre of a radiant spectrum of desires. You can’t take the torture chamber out of the girl, but that doesn’t matter when you already have the key.
The Pit of Despair… don’t even think about trying to escape.
I am now almost a week late. No, not my period. I’ve been meaning to blog the Beltane festivities at Butser Ancient Farm since I went there last weekend. I took nifty photos of the wicker man burning, made my own twig staff with a star on the top, and everything. Then on the way home, everything kind of died. again. I can’t even think about trying to escape. The chains are far too thick.
The Pit seems almost reassuring by now. When I’m there, I reach an altered state of consciousness in which I experience moments of perfect calm. Clarity. I see what is, but the insight isn’t painful. No blame, no guilt, no wishes, no fear. No Id. Just Ego, in the Freudian rather than popular sense.
[Interjection to quote Wikipedia: "In Freud's theory, the ego mediates among the id, the super-ego and the external world. Its task is to find a balance between primitive drives and reality (the Ego devoid of morality at this level) while satisfying the id and super-ego. Its main concern is with the individual's safety and allows some of the id's desires to be expressed, but only when consequences of these actions are marginal. Ego defense mechanisms are often used by the ego when id behavior conflicts with reality and either society's morals, norms, and taboos or the individual's expectations as a result of the internalization of these morals, norms, and their taboos."]
When I’m stressed beyond a certain point, I shut down.
But, as Peter Falk said, “She doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.”
Coming up next: MI does the Wicker Man at Butser ancient Farm.
Machiavelli Id
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