Am I sure I want to do this?

From the aforementioned and amusing Ten Tips for a Bionic Weblog, emerges a fundamental question and explanation:

"1. Are you sure you want to do this?
Posting a weblog or any kind of personal web page should be fun. If you are not having a good time, why bother? If you are doing this for reasons other than personal satisfaction, chances are you will be disappointed. If you're not having fun putting it together, how can you expect other folks to have a good time reading it?"

Yesterday, I crapped on a bit about inner and outer personas.

To the general public, I tend to present as a person quite reserved in temperament. Friendly, maybe. Shy, mostly.

My close friends and family know me to be of a somewhat more open persuasion, frequently loose with lurid language, fairly forthcoming with my fears and insecurities, of which there are a great many, I'm afraid to admit (there I go again...).

Some might say blogging liberates one's inner persona. For a while this was true. And like most liberations, both public and private, was exceedingly enjoyable.

As time goes on, however, and the dust has settled after the first heady days of liberation, the inner memeweaver has come to feel rather exposed. Not an enjoyable feeling, unless you are a person who is more used to wearing their heart (or their bile) on their sleeve. In these mountainous climes, I usually tend to favour multiple layers of long sleeves leaving nothing exposed to the creepy cold. This is more than just a physical preference, and prompted by necessity, if nothing else.

So, at this point in time, I find myself at something of a crossroads. I'm not sure I like the random, midnight ravings of this frequently zombified introvert to be published. It's the public bit that's disturbing, not so much the raving. Even though, gentle Blogburgers, I do have the utmost respect for those who might read and comment thoughtfully.

On the other hand, a weblog can be just a more public form of diary and before this I've always turned and returned to journal-keeping as a way of unravelling my thoughts about the world as I see it. Tonight, in a characteristic fit of rummaging, I found my most recently kept handwritten journal and spent a pleasant few moments reading the last entries, indulgent snippets of family life, thoughts on people I'm close to, on my job and my colleagues, on the town I live in, on my ideals and aspirations and not so ideal moments. This is the stuff I enjoy musing upon. I have no other reason to keep a diary, electronic or otherwise.

Enoch Powell once said, 'To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit'. This blog has a rather vomitous title and theme. And while I don't doubt for a moment that bloggy purging isn't sometimes laced with viral notions that might resonate, even manifest, in others from time to time, I don't think the particular kind of rumination I feel compelled to produce at this stage in my life is all that fit for public consumption. Better to gag privately than to be gagged in public.

In so saying, I'm undecided as to where this leaves the memeweaver mid-retch. One conclusion I have drawn though is that the mouse is mightier than the pen. Another is that there is nevertheless much more heaving to be had, and weaving to be woven. The mouse is always about the house. But where did I put my humble biro?

Stop it! (Continued)

Following are some more dubious pieces of advice I've been given, which are nevertheless no less memorable.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that, unlike my flatmate of yore, I don't believe that most people are shitheads outright. However, I do believe that most of us, said flatmate included, have an inner shithead, which lurches out of us from time to time, causing us to say inappropriate things, behave badly and generally just get the shits. It's reassuring to be able to blame your inner shithead for impatient outbursts and generic unfriendliness. Mind you, some of us have an outer shithead and are instead blessed with an inner good person, who occasionally shines through. The term 'shitheads' is broad enough to cover both inner and outer shitheads sufficiently enough to suggest that most people are indeed shitheads (from time to time). In my opinion, the people to really worry about are the arseholes. And, truly, the inner arsehole is the worst aspect of an arsehole.

So, anyway...

11. Don't be a thickie: take a sickie. (pamphlet slogan composed by a nutty anarchist activist whom I later ended up marrying)

12. You've gotta fight for your right to par-ty! (Beastie Boys ... admittedly, this is fairly sound advice that really just begged inclusion in my list)

13. Pick up the baby and put down the pipe. (my Methodist minister grandfather in a letter to my father shortly after I was born, in an attempt to convince him to quit smoking. There wasn't anything wacky about my dad's tabaccy - it was just ordinary tobacco he was smoking in your average Edwardian pipe. He moved on to small cigars some time after receiving this letter, so followed his dad's advice in his own way.)

14. Milk animals are sometimes used to foster human babies ... The goat is the best for the human baby, but the only drawback with goats is that they are over-clever and therefore often rebellious and difficult to manage. (Juliette de Bairacli Levy in Nature's Children, lent to me prior to the birth of my first child by my mother-in-law, who apparently followed it religiously)

15. People like links about monkeys, robots, sexual perversion, and any combination thereof. Well, at least I do. I cannot stress this point enough. More robot monkey sex links please. (Metascene, 'Ten Tips for Building a Bionic Weblog')

In the spirit of this last, it seems pertinent to offer the following link, which features robots minus monkeys and sexual perversion, but which is nevertheless supremely bionic.

Stop it, and other worthy pieces of advice

Following in no particular order are some of the most memorable pieces of advice I have ever been given, along with their sources, a list that could easily be updated should any of you myriad readers wish to provide me with similarly valuable gems of worldly wisdom.

1. Stop it! (The Large Moth via MadTV)

2. Do what you're good at and what you enjoy. (my high school principal)

3. Always store tomatoes at room temperature, not in the refrigerator. (Stephanie Alexander)

4. Look both ways before crossing the street. (Sesame Street)

5. All you really need to know in life is that most people are shitheads. (older flatmate in the first share house I lived in)

6. Drugs are bad, m'kay? (Mr Mackey on South Park)

7. You mustn't bump into cars, Mummy. (my daughter)

8. Be true to yourself. (a friend who was always true to herself, despite the disapproval of others, including me)

9. Pedal with your ears. (my piano teacher)

10. When a mistress of a house is an early riser, it is almost certain that her house will be orderly and well-managed. On the contrary, if she remain in bed till a late hour, then the domestics will surely become sluggards. (Mrs Beeton's Household Management)

We interrupt this extended period of blogapathy to announce...

...that I have just finished Ian McEwan's Atonement. Finally. What an amazing book.

Yes, I have a PhD in English, but for now that's about as much analysis as a bad case of blogapathy will allow me to muster. Don't blame it on the freezing cold. Don't blame it on the uni break. Don't blame it on the quiet nights. Just blame it on blogapathy.

What I will offer though, in the spirit of McEwan's masterpiece, is a shortlist of things in my life for which I feel compelled to atone. And no, I have never made false allegations which led to the wrongful conviction of an innocent man on a charge of rape. However:

• I feel very uncomfortable about paying for a cleaner. She is a lovely person who comes once a week for a couple of hours and does a great job. Yet, I can't help feeling somewhat of a failure for not cleaning the house on the weekends like thrifty, houseproud people. I worry about the impression it makes on the cleaner when the same black holes of indecipherable clutter remain unsightly and untouched week in week out. Or the same books lie in the same cluttered pile by my side of the bed half-finished and continually added to, without ever being reduced (well, at least I've now finished one). And let's not go near the ironing. I think she must wonder what on earth I do with myself. In fact, sometimes I wonder that too. I console myself with the thought that I can spend more time doing things that I want to do (hang out with my family, work and use the skills I'm trained in, have friends over to a clean house on a saturday morning, sit on the couch on the weekend doing bugger all instead of rushing madly around the house with a broom and a mop). But this doesn't seem to rid me of the guilt at my own lack of self-discipline and fifties wifeliness. Or the thought that I am a traitor to my stock - methodical Methodists on one side, hardworking working class on the other. People who iron underpants on both sides, in other words.
• I am also a chronic procrastinator. If you have been paying attention, you might have noticed me blogging when I should have been studying/cleaning/reading/wifering (get over it, people, it's a word and I'll use it if I want to). Unfortunately, procrastinating also extends to contacting old friends, responding to e-mails, returning phone calls. It is responsible for my periodic blogapathy. It interferes with my intentions of tackling the most difficult of work tasks. It renders me a bit of a time waster when I use chatting to other people to avoid being at my desk (bad! bad!). After all, it took me six years to finish a thesis that should have only taken three and in that time I held down several dead end jobs, cohabited for much longer than necessary with a useless stoned twat and spent a lot of time frequenting shoe shops and immersing myself in Dr Phil, when I should have been making myself ever increasingly erudite. As it is, I am one of the worst-read English graduates ever to slither from a student union building. And here I am again, avoiding a career in academe (a prospect which came to fill me with dread, the more time I spent with academics) by avoiding my study of the law. Every now and again, I dip into The 700 Habits of Highly Ineffective People by Jonathan Biggins, usually when I should be doing something else. The bit about procrastination had me laughing so hard as I read it in bed one night that I cried and nearly fell out. Or maybe I was crying because it was all so very, very confronting. It felt a bit like someone had set up a camera in my head and was playing me back the footage, reality TV style. Hilarious and simultaneously humiliating. Either Biggins has lived with a serial procrastinator. Or he is one. I prefer to believe the latter. Although I can't understand how he would have been able to bring his book to fruition if that were the case.
• The next bit is rather ugly, so best put in the form of a haiku, so as to mitigate its awfulness somewhat:

I whinge and I whine

I bitch and I moan and I

Feel bad afterwards.

There's only one thing worse than being a grump. And that's a guilty grump.

So, anyway, as far as atonement goes, I feel I have made up for some of my sinfulness by being a half decent parent. I didn't procrastinate becoming a mother, shotgun wedding and all. My kids may have crumpled clothes and a cluttered room, but they are happy little tikes. My daughter, in particular, is a chip off the old block - throwing predictable tanties, walking around the house muttering 'for God's sake', and shouting 'shit' in front of the other toddlers when she fell off the climbing frame at the park today. And I guess the best thing I can do for her if I ever see her bitterly regretting her outbursts of discontent, is to tell her to 'stop it' and not apologise for herself. That would be atonement indeed.

Winter magic

A small fairy, a baby dinosaur, a giant and his giantess wife all donned their beanies on a rainy Saturday morning and went in search of some winter magic. They ran into several other fairies and the giantess chatted to a fortune teller she knew. While rainbow coloured sprites juggled and bounced on and off each other's backs a cavalcade was ascending the hill, African drummers at its head, the tall grass on their masks waving wildly in the cold drizzle. They spotted friends - a witch, a troll and a belly dancer - in the crowd and a pig that delighted the small fairy. Banners floated by declaring maternity wards remain open, koala sanctuaries be banned and elves be freed, and a visitor from behind was heard to remark, 'I didn't think it would be this political!'.

After the final drum sounded, there was a slow pilgrimage down the street, past stalls where temptations were glimpsed - woven baskets, $2 Penguins, a Flight of the Conchords t-shirt - beyond the heads and shoulders of many others. A search for face painting proved fruitless and veggie burgers lay at the end of seemingly interminable queues. The feet of the giants were hurting as the fairy fluttered from atop the giant's shoulders and the baby dino wanted rather to be slung on a hip than to stomp. The decision was made to leave behind the tiresome mortal shuffle and spirit themselves back to their cave by the mountainside. From there, with cups of steaming tea, as the little ones played amongst the feathered and furry beasts, they could see the real winter magic - mist like dry ice floating out of the cauldron of the valley below.

Memeweaver v Bastard of a Contracts Exam (18th June 2009)

The facts of the case:
Memeweaver (the plaintiff) entered the local church in order to fulfil her undertakings to the Bastard of a Contracts Exam (the bastard). While she felt she had provided sufficient consideration by cramming relentlessly in the (too) short days, sleepless nights and agonising weeks leading up to the performance of her contractual obligations, the bastard was supremely (some might say inevitably) inconsiderate in return.

The plaintiff found herself in the presence of a previously unknown third party, The Annoyingly Overbearing Mature Age Contracts Geek (the annoyance), who proceeded to compare the shoddily handwritten nature of her notes to his own superior typed version and to inform her of what he had discovered about the subject matter as a result of doing all the past papers of the past five years and downloading countless others off the internet. The plaintiff was, as a consequence, very nearly induced into performing an illegal act.

The plaintiff felt by turns naked and suffocated as the clock ticked on relentlessly and the expected hand cramp set in. She maintains her attempts at performance were frustrated by the misleading and deceptive nature of the questions. She made a unilateral mistake as to the identity of one of the parties in one of the many hypothetical disputes. Writing about discharge, she felt absolutely repudiated. She thought she might have to produce an anticipatory breach on numerous occasions throughout the ordeal. The unconscionable conduct of the bastard became most apparent in the last question which featured what appeared to be a fundamental misprint concerning one of the parties (either that, or it was a question about privity... oh, shit), which induced the plaintiff to note the misrepresentation in her answer, thereby no doubt pissing off her marker and causing valuable marks to be avoided.

The plaintiff finally staggered forth toward the exam convenor in order to submit the scrawled evidence of a mind under duress. Upon returning to her desk, she was met with a hovering annoyance, who proceeded to inform her that he found the bastard had been kind to him and presented him with everything he had expected. His inquiry as to the plaintiff's impressions was met with a curt response, indicating an unequivocal termination of the conversation.

The issue:
The issue is undoubtedly whether the plaintiff's sorry attempts to satisfy the bastard will be awarded with a pass grade. If the law finds the plaintiff to have been negligent, she will be subject to an order to repeat Contracts next year, a prospect that fills her with renewed repudiation. In any case, next semester she will be undertaking Torts, a subject that is bound to be equally as tortious.

The result:
A decision as to the outcome of the case has been adjourned to an unknown future date.

The remedy:
The plaintiff is half inclined to sue for damages. The last fortnight left her deprived of sleep and sanity. Realising this would be fruitless, she has settled for a recovery order, pending the unresolved outcome of her case, and anticipates the resumption of a normal existence, a reasonable sense of humour and a hearty attitude of 'fuck you, bastard' from the get go.

Unspeakable sorrow and deathly silence

A visibly upset Large Moth told me quietly tonight about a former colleague whose very young child passed away suddenly and silently overnight.

We found ourselves discussing the fact that you can't help but imagine your own child into the same scenario, sense the absolute horror of it, the bottomless pain of it. In many ways, this is an empathic response. But we really don't know how it would feel, and we never will, to actually be the parents of that child. To have created and raised and loved that unique and special child. To have then lost that child.

The consensus from people who have been to hell and back seems to be that just about the worst kind of response to someone who has gone through something as awful as this is to express to that bereaved parent that you, even as another parent, might understand anything of their own pain. By doing so, you deny them the grief over their own child, who is actually gone, not just hypothetically so.

Silence is equally as damaging. Not so much silence immediately after the loss, but more the silence in the months and years to come, as everyone, except of course the parents, returns to business as normal and gradually forgets about the person that was. We live in a death-denying society, which in turn denies life to those dead.

On that subject, this is very touching.

This seems helpful, especially comments from parents at the end.

We are not at all close to the parents of the child who died last night. I don't know her name. I hope to find out tomorrow. Writing her name on a card seems the least we can do.

I don't think I ever fully realised until reading about situations like this that a child's memory constellates around their name, the name their parents chose for that child and loved through that child. And continue to love.