18 Saturday May 2013
Posted in Random Rose, Uncategorized
One day as me and my (then) 12 year old daughter were discussing personal grooming fads, I happened to say to her,
Anyway, I’m telling you now, if you ever come home with a Brazilian, I’m going to DISOWN you!
And then we laughed. I think.
Years later she told me that this was a very puzzling moment.
I never thought you were a racist, Mum. You were always so left wing and everything. Half your friends were black! I just couldn’t understand what you had against guys from Brazil…
Me neither!
15 Wednesday May 2013
Tags
consciousness, michael singer, philosophy, ted talks, the brain, the mind, the self, the untethered soul
Do you believe there’s more to you than your brain?
For example, take talking to yourself.
GOD YOU’RE STUPID! Didn’t you see that coming!
Shut the frig up, you! Like YOU knew any better.
Do you do that? I do. But who are we really talking to? Who ‘hears’ us? Well, according to Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul, when we talk to ‘ourselves’ it’s really our brain talking, if you like, to our soul, our awareness, the true core of our being. It’s this awareness that constitutes the Real Me. Because, the argument goes, if ‘I’ can perceive my thoughts, then those thoughts cannot be ‘me’. ‘I’ am the one who perceives, the rest is simply ‘that which is perceived’.
It kinda makes sense. Like, if you’re looking at a dog, you know you’re not the dog. If you’re looking at your toes, you know you’re not your toes…um…ok it’s getting a little more complicated here. But stay with me. If you’re looking at your thoughts (gee I’m hungry, that woman’s got huuge boobs, I wish my boss would drop dead right now before she reaches this desk..) then you know you’re NOT your thoughts.
And then again, it kinda doesn’t. According to an article I read in the Scientific American, if a doctor chops the physical bridge between your left and right brains, you get TWO selves. As in,
Pass me that drink will you Ernest? (says one you to your right hand)
Drinking before 9am! You’ll do no such thing! (says the other guy in your head to your left hand)
In which case, what becomes of the True Self theory?
10 Friday May 2013
Posted in Random Rose, Uncategorized
As Quasimodo used to cry, alone in his bell tower.
And not forgetting my daughter.
Work sent me to a course on dealing with clients in ‘difficult situations’ and as part of it we learned to focus on feelings, listen and reflect what’s been said, leave solutions till last and then as the client’s prerogative.
I can do this. For a while. But when I ask my child in the morning, how are you? and get a dismal stare and the words,
Sad
I FEEL things I’m not supposed to feel. Like anger.
You’re sad. AGAIN. How convenient. Wonder if there’s maths at school today. Why can’t you just be happy? Like me! Then this can be a HAPPY household. Everybody enjoying themselves, more or less. Appreciating the good things of life, which we have got, in abundance. You, sad!!! What have YOU got to be sad about!
I’m not good with negative emotions, I’m just not. But because I’m a loving mother, and a good listener, I reflect, and probe.
“So you’re feeling down. Why’s that?”
“Because I’m so ugly.”
YOU’RE ugly! says alter ego. You want ugly? I’m ugly. And do I care? Not much. YOU are beautiful, beyond compare. It would take a team of witches fifty years to brew up enough elixir of toad to make YOU ugly.
I bet you just want me to say it. Again. Let’s talk about your flaws – how you haven’t got any. Let’s talk about how the boys at school all come and sit next to you at lunchtime. What sweethearts they are, to park themselves next to such a turn off.
Now we’re late, you for school, I for work. What the hell. You cry and I stay home. We talk about raising serotonin levels through diet and exercise, about doing a course in mindfulness together. I think about calling a psychologist, tell myself ‘tomorrow maybe’. I think,
I WISH ALL THE COMPUTERS IN THE WORLD WOULD JUST SELF DESTRUCT – ESPECIALLY THE ONE IN YOUR BEDROOM!
Not that you’re a social media addict, far from it. But your room is your world. A world with too many mirrors. We paste times tables and the periodic table on them. For good measure, we stick up a little list of Three Good Things.
You tell me what to put, I say, pen poised. What’s the first Good Thing you can think of, in your life.
Mum.
I guess that’s something. I wish I thought the same. I wish love was enough.
05 Sunday May 2013
Posted in Rambling Rose, Uncategorized
A little note: this September I’m roaming again, so I want to finish this belated travel series (set in 2011) before I start the next one. In this post, I move on from Korcula…
Is Dubrovnik becoming a City of Killers???
Nasty things sometimes happen in Dubrovnik (although not as often as in LA, probably). In 2008 an Australian girl partied with the wrong people and was discovered washed up at the bottom of Dubrovnik’s trademark majestic crags. Croatian police were accused of being unhelpful.
Looks nice, doesn’t it. But…
Still, as Lipstick Lucy (an ex work colleague with the colour sense of a set of traffic lights) said, ‘Dubrovnik ees most beautiful place I have ever been!’. So here we go…
From the island of Korcula to Dubrovnik in Croatia is a short (and in bits spectacular) boat and bus ride. On the way, the Croatian travel agent bitches about the European union. BEFORE the union, he says, Croatian farmers happily grew their olives and plonk and sold them for reasonable prices to discerning gourmets. AFTER the union, the price of everything had to go up, in line with the common currency, and it suddenly became uneconomic to produce small amounts of anything. Goodbye, small farmers, hello agribusiness. So he said, anyway.
The bus drops me outside the gates of the old walled city. Inside is a cross between a mall and a museum – everything is grey stone and white marble set around wide pedestrian boulevards fairly teeming with tourists. From the central boulevard, steep, narrow steps leap up to the hillsides above the town, and to more travel agents, tour operators, jewellery shops and rooms with a view. This is all kinda nice…except when you’re lugging your wheeled suitcase about trying to find your hostel.
It turns out to be in the opposite direction, and presided over by one of those (fairly ubiquitous) unshaven middle aged Croatian men in a wife beater and his beaming nonagenarian mother. In the room next to mine is a girl in a tee shirt and not much else doing something complicated to her hair. She shoots me a ‘he’s mine’ look (the owner and her evidently have an understanding) and I try to shoot her a ‘you’re absolutely welcome’ look back.
In the evening I climb one of the winding staircases up from the old town to where the cable car stop is. On one side, the walled city far below….
On the other, in the distance, those snow-barren mountains, grey bones under a hard blue sky.
Next day, I walk the narrow path on top of the old stone walls, sapphire sea on one side and the city on the other – and chat to some very nice mediaeval guys (actors, sadly, no time machine in sight).
Breakfast is by the boat harbour, small and sheltered and sunny, watching a European lady in her eighties trot by in little black dress complete with plunging neckline (remind me to drop the plunge when I reach that age).
Dinner by a tiny rocky beach at sunset, watching a gorgeous tanned blonde and her boyfriend frolicking off a row boat.
Sadly, no snaps of either. Next trip, I promise more bikini shots and not so many landscapes!
Best bit of Dubrovnik? All the little dogs, cared for I think but free, trotting about watering the marble monuments. And this happy little cat, sunning itself by the door of St Something.
14 Sunday Apr 2013
Posted in Rambling Rose, Uncategorized
Tags
America, American culture, American movies, crap, humor, humour, shit, the USA
I’ve been to the USA twice. Not for long. When there I was amazed by two things. The first one was how articulate even the average guy in a bar is. They may believe Obama is the anti-Christ and their grandmother was abducted by anal probing aliens, but compared to the average Aussie they’re models of modern eloquence. I have a fond memory of my American country-boy lover apologising once for his ‘mendacious articulating’. Men- fucking WHAT? (a red-blooded Aussie male would’ve said)
The second one was how uniformly everyone seemed to take the existence of a creator for granted. “You really don’t believe in God??? Who do you think made all this then? How did it GET here?”. In Oz, it’s more like ‘yeah whatever, you and the other 80 percent’.
Anyway, as a consequence, most of what I know about America comes from movies. And this is what the movies say.
People in America find crapping and farting of immense interest and humour. No romantic comedy is complete without the hero accidentally wiping his bum on grandma’s monogrammed tee towels, or the heroine giving way to diarroeah in the middle of a crowded street, or Romeo letting off a silent but deadly ‘Ooops – I think I may have followed through’ in the presence of his beauteous but tolerant Juliet. When I was in the good ole USA, and had to spend hours each day killing time by watching American tv, every ad break was full of blandishments to buy stuff to plug you up, get you moving, soothe your piles or oil your rectum. Virtually every sentence has an ass in it. Get your ass over here. I’m gonna whup your ass. You bet your ass I am. Who does his ass think he is! And the oddly heterosexual ‘I’m gonna fuck your ass so hard my dick’s gonna knock your teeth out!’.
American high schools are a bit like Abu Ghraib when the warders are having a party night. In Oz, being bullied usually means being called names when the teacher isn’t looking and maybe having your school bag tipped out on the way home from school or the chair out pulled out from under you as you’re about to sit down. In the US, the school wimp can look forward to having his head held down the toilet till he’s nearly drowned, or a rattlesnake put in his locker, or being playfully boiled in the shower, or having a bucket of blood emptied over her formal dress. When the jocks/homecoming queens are feeling good-natured, they might just throw a slushie, or spike your drink with laxatives, or upend you in a wheelie bin . What the teachers are doing while all this is going on, I don’t know. Don’t they HAVE playground patrols in the US?
So what I want to know is, is this a skewed view of our nearest and dearest imperial power? Is Glee really a reflection of what goes on in US highschools? Do you really think about poop all day, or is that just Hollywood mendaciously articulating?
08 Monday Apr 2013
Tags
argument, debate, ethics, family, fence sitting, free speech, golden mean, philosophy
If I had to sum up my theory of life in one phrase, it’d be ‘on the other hand’.
In a way, that’s not surprising – arguing, to my family, was like backyard cricket or watching the evening news – a bonding experience. Sometimes Dad would start the ball rolling..
The human body is disgusting, and should be covered up except for the purposes of procreation.
Sometimes it’d be my only brother.
You really should get into mind-altering substances (he’d say to the parents over dinner). It gives you a much BROADER perspective on things…
Controlled apoplexy was Dad’s specialty.
To me, life is a continual battle about where to put the golden mean. It’s like six billion (and counting) carpenters tugging at the same spirit level.
On the one hand, give peace a chance. On the other hand, aren’t we glad we invented the bomb before Hitler did? On the one hand, we have buddhists stepping around ants. On the other hand, we have research psychologists sticking baby primates in solitary to ‘see what happens’. Unlimited faith leads to bankruptcy and STDs. On the other hand, who can really rationalise love?
On the one hand, we all feel sympathy with indigenous people, disgust at rape and sexism, distaste for race-related prejudices, and concern about environmental degradation.
On the other hand – well we should admit that there IS another hand – a hand that’s as useful, ultimately, as our right hand is to our left or vice versa. The human race will never point in one direction, like a Chinese state rally. It’s always going to be a tug of war, where we’re all pulling to get the ‘other’ side just that inch further to ‘our’ side of the line. And THEN we can move the line.
That’s why I’ll never be a big fan of ists and isms and sitting in front of university halls trying to stop people with ‘diverse views’ getting in to their speaking engagements. What I’d like to see is MORE debate, not less. Let’s not say ‘how dare you say that!’, let’s say ‘this is how I think you’re wrong’. On the other hand…
What’s your sticking point? Have you got one? Are there things that shouldn’t be the subject of debate? Like what?
01 Monday Apr 2013
Posted in Rose's Reviews, Uncategorized
Why so angry?
I wish I had the guts to say that to my next door neighbour. Or, better still, I wish I could turn into the Hulk and leap up to the window from which she periodically leans to screech ‘Shut up!!!”, and jump up and down on her until she was nothing more than an unpleasant stain on the carpet. Why so angry? You really WANNA KNOW why so angry??? I’ll TELL you why so ANGRY!!!!!!
Only, Volya Rinpoche wouldn’t approve of that kind of thing. In case you don’t know, Volya Rinpoche is the suspect sage in Breakfast with Buddha, by Roland Merullo. I bought this book on King Midget’s recommendation and it was a damn well spent $6.
Along with Otto Ringling, the gluttonous, slightly priggish hero, the book prods you to ask yourself some of the more interesting of life’s questions. Like…
Why do you bother being good? (good-ish, decent, not positively evil)
Why do you bother doing anything at all? I mean, you can’t take it with you. You’re just going to die, right?
Why (do people get) so angry?
Why?
Breakfast with Buddha is about a guy who goes on a road trip with an annoyingly ineffable guru his long haired loopy sister foists on him, and ends up being converted. Apart from being a lesson on the risks of hanging around with those bald guys in orange dresses, reading this book had me thinking more deeply about life as I walked the dogs. Or really, just about the actual part of life that I was walking through – black sky, cool air on my face, gums with their bark peeling off like snake-skin, skitterings in bushes, dead branches against the stars.
Like the hero, I don’t like chanting Omm. I once went to a pregnancy yoga class, and flatly refused to sing to my unformed baby as he sat stolidly in my womb. Probably that’s why he’s recently joined a conservative political party’s youth wing.
Like the hero, I don’t believe in reincarnation, or love as the animating force of the universe. Unlike the hero, I’ve yet to meet a guru who’s going to convince me of all this. Still…
I used to think that faith is what you have when you want to believe in something – say, life after death – but can’t find any facts to back it up. I used to think that people should only believe in the rational – that anything else was a betrayal of truth.
Now, I see that the things I really, really believe – that good and evil are real forces, or perhaps directions, which we humans need to consciously move towards or oppose – that these things are not really based on anything but an unsupported hunch. If we really get down to why, there is no why. I just feel it. I don’t feel anything about the existence of god, or gods. I’m sceptical about reincarnation. I’m not sure I even have a soul. But I feel that the fight between good and evil, for those of us who know what it is – us human animals – is a real one, with real consequences, somewhere.
It’s as loopy as knocking on wood, or as the book’s ‘Spanakopita Cecelia’. Still, that’s faith!
Do you have groundless faith in anything? Is there a place for faith, if you’re not religious? Why?
And now for something completely different – a CREEPY PASTA! And I’m not talking mouldy spaghetti (google it).
29 Friday Mar 2013
Posted in Rewards for Rose, Uncategorized
Tags
I know I haven’t been a good blogger lately since I rarely post anything.
Ranin, of Sex and the Arab Woman, you’ve been awesome. Now if everybody were like you – never posted a thing but just wrote admiring comments on MY blog – how much better the world would be. For me. (just kidding!)
You’ve kindly given me a Very Inspiring Blogger award. In return, I want to celebrate in song!
Imaginary song. Ok?
Blogging: The Musical (imagine the following sung to the tune of Memories)
Blogging!
Oh I wish that when blogging..
All my readers were buyers
Of the books that I write.
But blogs are
Only read by other people who blog
So I guess that
Is a pipe dream….(crescendo..)
Oh blogging
Takes up all of my evenings
It makes me so boring
And it makes my neck ache,
And then there
Are all of the comments to do..
Is it worth it…
Yes it’s worth it for..YOUUUUUUUUU!
Apparently AS WELL as having to make up a relevant musical (that’s a lie), you have to nominate 15 other bloggers!!! and list 7 things you may not know about me. So, in the spirit in which I have begun, here are 7 things you may not know….
And the nominations are?? Well, this time I’ve picked philosophical blogs, because next to sex, breakfast in bed and my dog Coffee, I like philosophising (of course, what I like BEST is to philosophise DURING sex, AFTER breakfast in bed, TO my dog Coffee).
THANK YOU RANIN!!!
25 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in Random Rose, Uncategorized
Tags
children, drunk parents, fostering, humor, humour, imagination, kids, making up stories, parenting
“My dad is a jerk.”
On the weekend I took Beetle and her friend – a roly-poly, moon-faced little boy I’ll call Weevil – out to the beach. We don’t exactly have a beach here, but we have a lake in which, for about four months out of every year, you can paddle. The other eight months, it will kill fully grown boar hounds at ten paces.
I have to say that Weevil is my kind of kid. Whereas Beetle, sweet as she is, is kind of monosyllabic, Weevil is extremely chatty and has the imagination of a natural liar. As a verbal person (and liar) myself, I warm to that.
On the way to the beach, Weevil pointed out to Beetle at least three alien space ships, and explained that we’d better not stop in the pine forests we were passing because he knew for a fact that the Slender Man lived there and would chop us up into bits.
He said that his back yard was full of ghosts, which he’d often seen out his window at night, and that next year he was planning to buy a hologram camera, create a hologram of a pterodactyl, and ride it to school.
He suggested that the headless horseman was a bit of a traffic hazard at night, so we’d better not be late home. When I suggested that the headless horseman had a tendency to get lost, due to not having any eyes, he laughed, and explained that he’d teamed up with an evil pumpkin who provided the vision while the headless one provided the transport.
Both kids had a good time, but on the way back home, Weevil became visibly anxious. When I asked him what was the matter, he said that he was afraid that his dad might be drunk when he got back. He was scared of his dad, when drunk. Matter of factly, he told me that his dad was ‘a jerk’ – a direct quote from mum, I’d say. When we drove up to the house, he wouldn’t go in until we’d listened for signs of ‘loud music’ – which apparently meant his dad would be downing the tinnies.
Made me think, when kids have to cope with trouble at home, they come up with various ways and means. Beetle’s way involves turning inwards, silence. Weevil’s way is to immerse himself in a fantasy world.
An African friend once told me that in his village, children choose their parents. If they don’t like the ones they were born with, they gravitate to adults they like better, with the consent of both parties. I think Weevil and I would probably gravitate. He fantasises (about aliens). I fantasise (about being published). He chatters. I blog. We both like telling horror stories.
Have you ever been drawn to a kid that wasn’t yours?
19 Tuesday Mar 2013
Posted in Rambling Rose, Uncategorized
We talk of God and Poetry. Then I have to change trains.
Previous experience of Croatia: men with Cheekbones and unattractive accents who for some reason feel impelled to punch out Serbians at football matches in Melbourne.
But that’s all behind me now. On the train from Slovenia to Split in Croatia, I meet a dreamy young poet (who runs a boarding house for tourists – even poets have got to live!). He says I look like a woman who believes in miracles. I say that’s funny, because I don’t (believe in them, that is).
If I’d played my cards right (ie, got off the train early) I’m pretty sure I would’ve been in for a night of passion and romance in Belgrade ….
Anyway.
Split is a gorgeous, white-marbled town with a grand seaside esplanade, Roman facades, steep cobbled streets and a ‘white Russian resort town’ feel.
Of course, when I got there it was pouring, and looked more like an upmarket bathroom. Here is Diocletian, just padding out from the ensuite.
I would’ve liked to stay there longer, but I was only there for two hours – the time it took to wait for the ferry to Korcula, pronounced Korchula, an island in the Adriatic halfway between Split and Dubrovnik.
Here is the ferry. It is very CHEAP, as you can see. Buy one. Buy two! What the hell, buy the whole line!
Goodbye, Split! Now that I’ve left, the sun’s shining.
The ferry, for some reason, deposits people at the boring end of Korcula, so everybody hops on a bus to the main city of the island. Even in autumn, the British islanders are out in force, all socks and sandals, long shorts, floppy hats and butch haircuts – no wonder the French (are said to) roll their eyes at the idea of British fashion (of course, if they lived across a narrow channel from Australian fashionistas, they’d probably all go kill themselves).
But Korcula town is just..ummph!
It’s sort of built like a sloppy wedding cake, with the glittering blue sea sloshing gently against stone walls on three sides, and then tiers of ancient stone houses, battlements and towers spiralling up towards a jumble of mediaeval icing at the top. They SAY Marco Polo was born here. It makes a good story. Personally, I don’t believe it.
Can you see America from here?
In my little guesthouse, I have a whole room and balcony to myself, which is bliss after sharing with millions of noisy backpackers for weeks. In the garden, there are two little tortoises making sweet, sweet love, squeaking and sighing their little hearts out. If there’s anything more romantic than tortoises making out in a vege patch, I’ve yet to find it.
Expecting a picture, were you? Don’t be crass!
A couple of days later, on my last evening, I’m sitting on my balcony gazing contentedly seawards when I hear ‘Rose! Rose!’.
I can hardly believe my ears. It’s my American friend from Slovenia (an excitable San Franciscan, and the only woman I’ve ever met who has less sense of direction than I do) come to look for me, with two overweight sweaty Croatian artists in tow.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get the gun into position fast enough. So we go off to their bachelor pad and she tries to persuade them to publish ‘our’ book series – romances for the twenty-something tourist market, about vampires in Venice and so on. Eventually one of them explains that he isn’t exactly a publisher, more of a printer of sturdy Croatian text books. No nooky for YOU then!
In Korcula you can hire a boat and go out exploring the islands that cluster thickly round about in the wine dark sea. It sounds like a really good idea – which is why I’m going back this year, with Ms M, to do just that. My American friend says she will be there. Maybe we can think of a better use for scantily-dressed Croatian males, this time.
Any suggestions?
