Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 19

Lifting the Lid off the Goulash

May I introduce the best traditional Hungarian cookbook EVER!

My 89 year old friend Irena has finally published her book of traditional Hungarian recipes Lifting the Lid off the Goulash– a heritage cook book representing almost a century of cooking experience.  The recipes are drawn from Irena’s early life watching her mum make home-made pasta, dumplings and market-fresh dishes back in Budapest – and from Irena’s post-war life cooking for her English husband and gazillions of new friends in Australia.

Despite rave reviews from everyone who’s tried her recipes, Irena’s never made any money out of this brilliant and lovingly written book – in fact, she’s literally given it away. She’s a warm and generous person, so much so that she now, in her later years, has very little money to call her own.  So I’d like to invite you to buy the book if you can – because Hungarian food has got to be THE best food in the world, because this book has got recipes for damn near everything – but to help Irena at last realise her lifelong dream of passing her mother’s and grandmother’s traditional recipes on to the world.

Here’s a recipe for vegetarian goulash, which as a vego I love!  If you make it – and like it l- let me know via the Facebook page for the book, at https://www.facebook.com/liftingthelidoffthegoulash/.  I’ll be adding more stuff there soon!

MOCK GOULASH
Hamis gulyás

2 tablespoon cooking oil

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 tablespoon sweet Hungarian paprika

400g soup vegetables cut to bite size

½ teaspoon caraway seed

¼ teaspoon black pepper, coarsely ground

1 clove garlic, crushed (optional)

1 small tomato, skinned and chopped

½ medium capsicum, in one piece

¼ piece chilli pepper (optional)

½ kg potatoes, peeled and cubed

salt to taste

Nokedli (Hungarian dumplings) or soup noodles

 

Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed 2 litre saucepan. Add the onion, stir, and simmer until the onion wilts. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the paprika, then add all the other ingredients except the potatoes.

Blend in well, then replace the pot on the heat and add ¼ cup of water. Simmer while covered to allow the vegetables to release their juices.

Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in four cups of salty water.

Check the vegetables and stir occasionally so that they don’t stick to the bottom.

When the vegetables are cooked down to the fat, but still firm, add the half-cooked potatoes, together with the water in which they are cooked, and boil until both potatoes and vegetables are done. Adjust the consistency by adding more water if needed.

At this stage you can add dumplings or soup noodles, and cook together until they are also done. Serve with rye bread.

Best Friends in the Bath

Suppose you marry your best friend – and ask your soulmate to be the bridesmaid..

I was reading Chaotic Soul’s blog recently in which she celebrates her intense and sometimes stormy relationship with her soulmate – who just happens to be her BFF. It’s not a lesbian thing, it’s not about sex at all, it’s a meeting of, I don’t know, souls, for want of a better word.

Long ago I had a girlfriend.  We’ll call her Sian. She had charm, brilliance, beauty and a huge bum. Only the last saved her from my undying enmity (well, naturally – who likes to hang around with a girl who has everything you don’t!).

Sian liked men, motorcycles, Mensa and me.  I liked anything my conservative parents didn’t.  We fell into a certain obsession with each other – at least, that’s how it felt from my side.  We moved in together, sat in beanbags having immensely complicated conversations about the true meaning of life (which basically boiled down to ‘will the real genius in this room please stand up!’) and sometimes, we had baths together.

We would sit in the bath, little Rubinesque Sian and me, and talk about why we didn’t want to sleep together.  Basically, because neither of us were bisexual.  But we sort of felt we should be.  How could we be this close, our souls entwined, and not want to play with each other’s bits? I don’t know, but so it was.

The day came when it was clear I’d have to choose between Sian and my man.  One stood for security, solid middle-class values and babies.  The other lived on the wild side, and it was getting steadily wilder out there.  Marriage could be boring, but life with Sian – while intellectually stimulating and satisfyingly rebellious – was too far out of my comfort zone.

So I chose my man, and left my soulmate behind, no regrets.  I met Sian once, in some innocuous neutral situation, years later.

‘I don’t think about you often,’ she said, for some reason.

I think about her, though.  She’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who always understood what I was getting at, no matter how abstruse.  In her presence, I could strip down to my very heart.  I doubt she felt the same, but then Sian was a mirror, and showed only the room she happened to be in at the moment.  She had the knack of reflecting people back to themselves as they would wish to be seen.  I never worked out if there was a real Sian- or just an endless series of reflections in other people’s besotted eyes. I didn’t want to be a reflection of a reflection.

Do you have a soulmate?  How do you know when you’ve got one, as opposed to when you just both like shopping?

Yes!

Over forty? You could DIE any minute now!

Yeah, a bit dramatic, I grant you. But I’ve just been reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling, and apart from laughing a lot at his depictions of idiotic Americans on holiday and sour-faced English shop-keepers, I notice he refers to a lot of people who drop off the twig between about 40 and 55. Friends, acquaintances, random were-famous people, that kind of thing.

Course, you can die ANY time. I could’ve died when I was 19, strangled by some Italian psycho as I hitch-hiked around Europe with my pack and innocence. I could’ve died on an Australian highway, executing one of my notorious kamikaze driving moves in a (too frequent) moment of impulsive idiocy. I could’ve died of…god, lots of things!

But that would have been a bit of a fluke. From now on, death won’t be a fluke, it’ll be ‘rotten luck about Rose, but them’s the breaks’. It’ll be an inevitable – but not foreseeable – result of some part of me going rusty or losing a nut or wearing out its brake pads – like a stroke, or an aneurism, or galloping osteoporosis.

And it could happen AT ANY TIME!

So, what’s the plan?

Like the guy in ‘Yes Man’, we can choose between Totally Up for It and Just Say No.  I’ve become acutely conscious of this choice. Sometimes, I say No.

NO, I don’t want to go sky diving. I’ll take the aneurism. Physical danger is NOT fun for me – I leave that to people with the other gene.

NO, I don’t want to spend time learning to meditate. It’s boring. Bill Bryson makes me laugh, meditating makes me yawn.

NO, I don’t want to go to work any more. That is, I don’t want to, but right now I have to. But believe me I’m working on it. The last time I enjoyed having a boss was..let me see…in 1991. I am seriously over it.

On the other hand,

YES, I do want to watch a bit of mindless TV. I’ve spent most of my life going ‘Who’s Carrie?’ and ‘You’ve got to be kidding – cooking shows suck big time!’ at social occasions. Now it’s my time to be in the know. My Kitchen Rules. It’s even inspired me to try to make Crème Brulee, one day.

YES, I do want to dance in the lounge room with my superbly coordinated and expressive partner. I’ve waited my whole life to find someone who can match me in Weird Home Dancing, now I’ve found him, I’m using him. Up.

YES, I do want to throw my entire life away and move to some rural hideaway, despite the fact that I hate gardening, loathe farmers and have never spent more than the odd holiday in ‘the country’. But just because I’m not 19 any more doesn’t mean I don’t like taking stupid risks.

And lastly, YES, I do want to come and find my favourite blog friends like Darla and Mel and Trailer Trash and buy them a drink one day soon, on my way to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. It is SO going to happen. Before I have a stroke.

So what’s your number one Yes? Your absolute NO Frigging Way?

 

Yep, I exist – but do you?

I’m choosing a dress for my anniversary. We’re going out to the movies and I want to look nice. I’m shuffling through my half of the wardrobe and I come across this fitted, black on white print with a low scoop neck and no sleeves – and I think, wait a minute!

‘This,’ I tell my boyfriend, as he pulls on his least worst jeans, ‘is a dress I bought at the opportunity shop about, let’s see now, thirty five years ago! How about that now?’

He agrees that it’s a long time to keep a dress. He doesn’t know the half of it.

I’m fifty-two now, but back when I was twenty-five, I ran away from my husband of four years to live with my best friend. We slept in the day, we went clubbing at night, we woke up with strange men in the morning, and we visited op shops in the afternoon. In this dress, I lay in front of our fake fire, on the floor, and had champagne poured over me by some boy who’d obviously read that it was a turn-on. For the record, it stings!

I don’t tell my boyfriend this story: it wouldn’t be an auspicious start to our evening. But then, there are so many other stories – in the wardrobe, on the walls, littering the dressing table. We live in a house of ghosts.

The ring I wear, for instance. It’s a beautiful opal, set in gold, and by rights it should never have been on my finger. It was given to me by a man who thought it would make up for a litany of infidelities so tediously predictable that an episode of fidelity came to seem like an interesting surprise. I should have given it back, but I liked the stone. When I wear it, I always think viciously that it probably cost him a fair bit, and for what? A starring part in my diary as Baldy-Headed Pig Face.

There’s a painting of horses grazing on my wall. That’s Miguel, my Colombian. He was the best kisser I ever did meet, although he went overboard on the love talk. ‘I could drown,’ I remember him saying once, ‘in your eyes.’ Since the windows to my soul look like oysters with a nappy rash, I asked him why he felt the need to say things like that. ‘In Colombia,’ he replied, looking deep into my oysters, ‘girls get very upset if you don’t. They expect it.’

‘Well in Australia,’ I said tartly, ‘we think it’s mushy.’

Anyway, before he was deported, he gave me a picture he said he’d picked up at a sale. I always thought it was one of those brightly coloured paint by numbers efforts people sneak out to the garage sale while the faux-artist is at the beach, but no, it’s a genuine somebody or other. Perhaps the back of a truck was involved.

That pink feather boa? That was Geoffrey, who longed to tickle me with it as we lay sprawled in our candle-lit boudoir – but we never did. Those fishnet stay-ups? That was Alistair, who used to bring me things to get me in the mood – firewood, jumpers. Alistair once had an art teacher – here we are back to art again, how circular life is – who wore long white grandfather shirts and black tights. So ever since he’s been trying to get the objects of his desire into black tights. I was supposed to lounge about in these fishnets and say impossibly filthy things while Alistair did a Toulouse Latrec. In reality, the elastic tops make my thighs bulge like Arnie’s biceps, and if I lounged about in them for more than five minutes my legs would probably go numb and then gangrenous. The firewood came in handy though.

There’s a faded hanging on the wall, eucalyptus leaves of pink and purple and jungle yellow. It was a wedding present from my sister, and it’s seen every torrid affair I ever had. Thank god it’s not a video camera.

It’s not all about long-lost lovers, though. This morning, I had a sudden thought.

‘I wonder where Oobigoo Pikelet is?’

My boyfriend, who isn’t a morning talker, gave me an irritated look.

‘Who the fuck is that!’

Oobigoo Pikelet is a New Guinean carving, a household spirit or protector, who used to hang in the hallway of my childhood home in Sydney. My father brought him home from New Guinea when he was stationed there in the war, and now he’s mine. Morning Oobigoo, I still remember my father saying. Just as well to be polite, you never know.

Somewhere, in cardboard boxes, is everything I ever wrote, from the note to my mum when I was small ‘My Mum is Boring!’ to the novel I penned about a shy yet sensitive university student when (coincidentally) I was a shy yet sensitive university student. Every ticket to every show, every birthday card sent me by doting relative or hopeful suitor. Every tourist leaflet collected from every faraway place I’ve ever been and seen. The lot.

I’m not unique in that, I know. Every old lady I’ve ever visited in the course of a long charitable career has her special things, the things that remind her that she HAS had a life, even if it’s nearly over now. I was, I am – here’s the evidence.

So I know I, at least, must exist – but do you?  What’s your proof?

 

 

 

Why is a broken heart like a sucky blanket?

“I saw something nasty in the woodshed!”, mutters the batty and reclusive matriarch of Cold Comfort Farm, explaining why she hasn’t set foot outside her room for fifty years.  Long ago, something bad happened. Never forgotten, never forgiven – and comes in pretty damn useful for getting everyone to do what she wants.

When I was a child, I saw lots of nasty things in the woodshed. Half-blind in a typical Australian primary school full of the ebulliently-sighted, I was teased mercilessly. On one memorable occasion, all the kids lined up in the playground to sing ‘We hate Batface!’ with me the sole audience member. It wasn’t great.

On the other hand, it was fifty years ago and I think I’ve got over it. Or maybe, like an oyster, I’ve sort of built it into my shell, a piece of grit that will one day result in a pearl of great price. You can’t get that sort of quality without a bit of grit right?

When an ex-boyfriend of mine was a young thing, he went to bed with someone and failed to get an erection. The next morning, she alluded to this over coffee with her friends. Not very tactful. Ever since, he’s maintained an uneasy truce with sex – everything’s fine, just as long as everything is exactly as supposed to be, all the right things are said, and all the wrong things remain unsaid. He’s a great lover who can turn into a broken wreck with one throwaway comment.

So just his luck that one public holiday, just as we were getting ready to have a lovely time at home together , I sent my arrow right through the chink in his armour.

We’re joking about an upcoming weekend away in a friend’s house, and he quips,

“But what if they take a secret video of us having sex!’.

So I say, laughing,

“That’ll be fine, our sex is so hot, right!”, and then – what was I thinking – I add,

“Actually, we’ve got nothing to worry about, we don’t have any sex.”

As soon as it comes out, I know it’s the wrong thing to say. And yes, his face darkens, he goes all funny and stiff, and the next minute he’s nobly proposing that if I really have a problem with our sex life he’s prepared to let me go off and satisfy myself with someone else.

And I explain that I really, really didn’t mean it like that, it was just a smart alec thing to say, I’m very satisfied with our sex life, I don’t want to find a fuck-buddy, really I don’t.

At the same time I was guiltily conscious that actually, I probably did mean it, just a little. There were so many little caveats around our sex life, so many possible pitfalls and pratfalls, that sometimes we didn’t end up having sex for weeks. I never said anything, though. How could I, after HER – the chick who told him thirty years ago that his performance just wasn’t up to scratch.

So when do we draw a line under these things? I understand the male libido. I understand, as well as I can being of the vagina-owning persuasion, that there’s a lot of pressure on a man to get hard. I know a dick has a mind of its own: you can’t blame its owner if it decides not to participate in fun and games.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as holding on too long to hurt- so long that hurt becomes habit. How long is too long?

To digress, how did I get so blase about my rotten childhood, anyway? Well, I had this (other) awful ex-boyfriend, who like all miserable people wanted everyone else to be miserable too. As soon as he heard about my troubles at school, he insisted that we talk about what happened. No, I said – if I talk about it, I’ll cry, even now. It’s good for you to cry, he said, ‘you should bring your pain and suffering out into the open, it’s the only way to heal!’. In the end, it was a win-win – he got to make me cry, and I got to get over it. He was right – tell someone about your long-held-hurt, and eventually even you, the victim, start to find it more boring than painful.

And that is why a broken heart can be like a sucky blanket.  Sure, curl up with it for a while, dribble on it a bit if it makes you feel better – but eventually, you’ve got to throw it out.  You’re not three any more.

You think you know Mormons..think again!

Mormons.  One husband, multiple wives, generally found in Salt Lake City, except when knocking on your door just after the Jehovah’s Witness has given up, right?

But there’s a little known sect of Mormons that doesn’t – surprisingly – get nearly as much publicity.  These are the followers of Helen Jones, Joshua Smith’s great-niece who moved to San Francisco and established a small but insidious offshoot, which has been germinating darkly ever since.

How do I know?  My friend Kate belongs to it and jesus josiah, is she a long way from Utah!  Unlike the typical Mormon family of 32 kids and 4 wives, Kate has 2 kids – and 6 husbands.

What does she do with all those men, you ask!  Well, Brian takes her out for expensive candle-lit dinners on Fridays, while Steve actually enjoys ironing.  Andrew’s a journalist so when he’s not out covering stories he’s in being superbly entertaining.  Eric loves babies, and Kasim whips up a great couscous.  And Randy…is always there when she needs him.

Your typical Mormon squeezes all his spouses into one house and then breaks the budget trying to pay for them all. But Kate’s hubbies all have their own places & pay for themselves AND contribute to Kate’s enviable lifestyle (except for Eric, who’s the homemaker of the family).

“Some people point at us,” says Kate, “and call us names.  But we’re a happy family just like any other – happier, probably!  Obviously having seven pay packets is great, too.”

But can you really be in a loving, stable relationship with all those guys?

“Sure,” says my friend, with a shit-eating confident grin. “Of course, you get jealousy issues.  But I just tell them, hey, I’m head over heels in love with you all in your own special way, for your own special thing.”

I ask Randy what he thinks about it all.

“It’s only natural, when you think of it,” he muses.  “Women have much more sexual stamina than men…I have to admit I really like my nights off in front of the footy.”

But aren’t you jealous?

“Not really,” Eric bashfully admits, leaning down to give baby Clare a piece of fruit – but just then Brian pokes his head out from the kitchen.

“Sure, I’m jealous sometimes.  Like sometimes when we’ve spent the evening together slow-dancing to Joe Crocker, but I know I’ll have to stay out of her way tomorrow cause Kasim’s coming round….and he’s got bigger biceps than I have!”

“It takes patience and work, like any marriage,” nods Kate, “but I think it’s a great step forward for women, really.  Our needs are so much more complex…and, hey don’t take this the wrong way, but women are like iPods – more advanced technology comes in a smaller package.  it takes a lot to keep one woman happy…actually I think my boys are grateful they finally get to share the load.”

Who are we to judge!  (and for those interested in the gory details, see Love Times Three .  Personally, I’d pass on Baldy.

Just face it..you’re as old as everyone else thinks you are

“There’s a couple of old biddies out there looking through the window,” says my boss, peering through the blinds of his office. “Do you think they know where the front door is?”

Old biddies, he calls them, and oldies, and – when they’re being irritating – old buggers. We pass them every day in the corridor, dragging themselves along by a prayer and a walking stick, or shuffling towards us as if following a scent trail on the carpet, noses floor-ward. We tend to them as they gather in the community hall to hear someone speak on arthritis, or how to avoid falling over and breaking a hip, or (and this was a well-attended session) sex in the golden years. They like their tea and free muffins.

Is that me, I wonder as I watch them file in – that woman there with the spine like a snail shell? Is that me, that one spilling over the edge of her electric scooter, too infirm to keep the kilos off? Or how about that one, half-blind, three-quarters deaf, the delicate skin of her arms patterned with shallow scrapes and sores that won’t heal?

Not right now – no, now, I’m young, bursting with life and health, a mere girl at fifty three. And my boss, so free with his ‘oldies’ and ‘old dears’, he’s a vibrant sixty-five. None of us here, at this not-for-profit representing the older generation, is under forty.

To the kids learning to dance the cha-cha in the hall at night, we too are unimaginable. A ten year old will never be twenty, thirty, forty, eighty. It’s as if there’s some kind of ‘amnesia’ switch, inserted by a compassionate God, that only works in reverse – we remember the past but can’t really believe our future.

“You’re only as old as you think you are,” we say, and “I’m young at heart”. But I’m not, I’m as old as other people think I am – that’s a much more accurate measure. At fifty-three, I’m pre-occupied with remaining ‘bonkable’, like the actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her ‘last fuckable day’. I dye my pepper and salt hair brown with blonde tips, and look at myself in the mirror naked and think, you’re alright, girl – you’d pass for 30 from the neck down. And I would, I really would – my body is a thing of beauty still and I treasure it dearly. But so what? One day I’ll stop looking in that mirror, because I can’t bear to. Or because I’ve got dementia.

I remember once visiting an exhibition of plasticinated bodies. In the nature of things, a lot of these dead donations to science were old, and so I found myself standing in front of these naked, partly eviscerated corpses, with their sparse grey pubic hair, breasts like dirty wind-socks, testicles shriveled like New Guinean head-hunter’s trophies. And thinking, I too will come to this – whether I’m on show or not.

As I said, I work in a not for profit organization representing the interests of what we like to call ‘older people’, – people who are entitled to seniors’ discounts, who worry about pensions and cracks in the footpath, who don’t like to be called ‘old’. The equivalent ‘youth’ organization is entirely staffed by ‘youth’ with pierced noses and rainbow badges and very bad taste in rock and roll – but not us.

‘He’s a bit ancient,’ my colleague Will says when we’re interviewing an eighty-year old for a policy position. ‘He couldn’t cope with the work.’

And it’s true, these eighty year olds, they don’t know their google from their Bing, they ‘opine’ rather than analyse, and they’ve got more bees in their bonnets than the average apiary. They’re not like us bright not so young but then not so old either things.

But then, if I look for work elsewhere, I know I’ll be confronted by even brighter young things of 20 or 30. A friend of mine’s been unemployed for two years now – she says the interview panels exchange wry glances when she comes in. I asked my teenage daughter if I should change jobs, a while ago, because I was bored. She said, sure, but whatever you do, don’t stop dyeing your hair, mum. She knows, even at her age.

The worst thing anyone can call a woman is ‘old’. My partner took me out for our anniversary a little while ago and he didn’t like my dress. So as we’re sitting in the cinema, waiting for the movie to start, he says “When do you think you’ll change the kind of things you wear? Do you think you’ll still want to wear a dress like that when you’re sixty?”

Well, the movie was almost upon us, and it was our anniversary, but in a different time and place, I would’ve been very tempted to tip my mocktail over him.

He means, when am I going to play by the rules? As set out, for instance, by my elder sister.

“No strappy dresses after forty, they show your tuck-shop lady arms. No above-the-knee dresses after fifty, your knees get too wrinkly” (but for some reason you can make an exception for long unfashionably baggy shorts). “Don’t wear a low-cut top after forty-five, all they’ll see is that transverse line you get after thirty years of your breasts falling over sideways in bed.”

I look at him, my partner. One day, I hope (but don’t necessarily expect, given his lack of tact) we’ll sit on armchairs side by side in some country idyll. His hair will be white by then, what he’s got left of it, and his knees will be knobbly and his legs will be wobbly. He will fart without realizing it (instead of, as now, turning the act into a one-man concert) and his skin will be a mass of pre-cancerous lesions (if he’s lucky).

And I will make no pretences at being bonkable – my neck by then will be a continuation of my chin, a waterfall of downward-flowing flesh, and my hips will hurt, always, and perhaps people will still admire my clothes, but never the body underneath them. Which reminds me that one saving grace of becoming old is that when the skin on your face becomes as loose as silk, you will no longer have wrinkles. Instead, your whole face will slide gently earthwards, bringing the deep-carved life lines with it, into your polo necked jumper or perhaps – if you’re defiant, or Italian – your plunging neckline.

One day I expect – but don’t necessarily hope – that we will lie in our separate adjustable metal beds, in our beige-walled cells, and be visited three times a day by cheerful young people with bucket-loads of pills for us to swallow. These people will say things like,

“Going out to the Activities Room for bingo today, darling?” and I will probably not reply,

“Why don’t you just fuck off. I hate bingo.”

I’ll probably say instead, as old people are supposed to ‘Thank you dear, but not today.” By that time, it will finally have dawned on me that yes, I am, actually, really, indeed, old.

 

Does anyone think it’s odd..

That in all the hype around David Bowie’s death, there’s virtually no mention of his family?  And when there is, none of them are named, it’s just ‘the family’.  So much so that I had to look up on Wikipedia to find that he is, in fact, married to Iman and the father of 2 kids..

I quite like Bowie’s music, don’t get me wrong. But it just strikes me as..odd.  Anyway, what’s your favourite song?  Mine’s ‘Starman’ – it’s kinda upbeat and weird-sweet.

What kind of nutcase is that?

Have you ever googled things like ‘how to tell if your boyfriend is a Narcissist’ or ‘Common Signs of Sociopathy’?  If you haven’t, you’re in the minority – the forums of the interwebs overflow with people trying to work out what the hell issue their significant other has.

Don’t worry, I can help.  As an unqualified mental health therapist, I’m regularly required to diagnose various borderline mental health issues in the uncooperative subject (that is, I’ve never encountered a subject yet who agrees that he HAS a mental health condition).

The difficulty is that the exact symptoms (constant uncontrollable urge to whinge, obsession with relocating living room furniture, disinclination to work, ever) aren’t listed.  Instead they go and on about things like ‘does he hear voices?’ and ‘has he ever tortured the family cat?’.  How unhelpful is that!

I think we need to redefine the concept of ‘nutcase’.  What we actually have is three categories of insanity, which basically cover all of us (yes, there is no such thing as ‘sane’).

Normal. In a world of loonies, normal is the new nutcase. You’d have to be crazy to be sane, right?
Slightly off.  You can tell when someone is one egg short of a carton, because they spend a lot of time wondering what is wrong with the rest of the world, and why Other People make them unhappy.
Right out to sea.  When a person is swept out on the riptide of madness, they cease to be a land-based mammal, with all the sensitivities that entails.  They may become a shark, or a sea-monster, or a mermaid.  Whatever it is, they don’t belong in suburbia.

It’s really very easy to tell which of the three categories of nutcase your loved one (or acquaintance, work colleague, etc) falls into.  The American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is redundant.  Just complete this short quiz and receive an instant diagnosis.

Does the subject do weird stuff?  Is it..

weird but quite common
so weird he/she has to hide it from other people
so weird he/she has to hide it from him or herself
so weird that if the police knew about it they would arrest the person

Do you find this weird stuff..

erotic
annoying
boring
frightening
incomprehensible

Do the subject’s friends tend to be:

not here right now, please leave a message after the beep.
furries
invisible
not to be mentioned ever again because of that thing he did 20 years ago, you know what I’m talking about.
dead

Thinking about the subject’s ability to undertake the tasks of everyday life, does he or she..

Eat KFC once a week.
Eat KFC every single day.
Have sex with KFC
Eat the KFC delivery person for lunch.

 

Do the dishes just before the neighbour comes over for coffee.
Make you do the dishes, you’re uniquely adapted.
Let the dog do the dishes, he’s uniquely adapted.
Hide from the dishes in case they are listening.

 

Wear his/her clothes inside out.
Wear the same thing night and day for a week.
Wear your things whenever you’re out.
Why wear a thing, you can create amazing body art with blood and Bunnings.

 

Earn money for doing something productive.
Earn potential money.
Earn money for doing something that gets a lot of hits on Youtube.
Earn money for NOT doing something.

 

Remember that mum and dad still love him or her, even if they don’t understand his/her passion for manga.
Remember they do have parents, even though you’re not allowed to mention them or send them Christmas cards.
What parents?  My mother is a virgin I’ll have you know.

All you have to do is add up the numbers of the questions you said ‘yes’ to.  Anything up to 15 means your subject is normally insane, upwards of 20 means there are roos in the top paddock, and above 30 means, well, it was nice knowing you.

See, easy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rich beyond my wildest dreams..

Whenever I hear someone saying they’re glad they had a disabled kid, or got breast cancer, I think, really?  So if there was a pill that gave you cancer, say, you’d take it – just to experience the thrills that only a life-threatening disease can provide?  Right.

And yet.  Happiness is a bright yellow silk dress, dancing on the stairs to Leo Sayer’s Long Tall Glasses, walking through the mall with my arm around my son, seeing the sea for the first time each summer.

Richness, now, that’s something else – finding my lover tucked up with someone else, camping on a lonely Welsh hillside in the rain, lying in a bloodstained nightdress with my newborn in the crook of my arm, fighting for my life in a French forest, being responsible for the death of another living creature.

Like everyone else I aim for happiness but what I get is..frigging richness!  Richness can only be enjoyed, if that’s the word, in hindsight.  We look back and we think, well, I didn’t like it at the time, but it helped me grow, or learn, or some damn thing.  So je ne regrette rien, much.

But you know what?  Hindsight is all we have.  We’re always a moment behind the moment – our eyes take in the world, then our brains interpret it and feed it back to us in a form we can make sense of.  Our internal Board of Censors only lets us see (and hear, and taste, and feel) what’s best for us.  Best according to the committee, that is – not necessarily according to you.

So much as I’d like to, I can’t live ‘in the present’.  All I can do is try my best to enjoy the past.  So…what’s your most treasured unpleasant experience?