Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 21

The joy of…putting weird shit on your hair

It’s coming up to about two months since I washed my hair. That is, with the conventional stuff, you know, shampoo, conditioner, things you buy at the shops. Ms M and I both decided to ditch the bottles in favour of Seeing What Happens If.�� Since we started the big experiment, we’ve washed our hair with –

Baking soda. Cheap, easy to make (you just put a spoonfu in water), and gets the oil out. Other than that, thumbs down.
Green tea and sage leaves soaked in hot water.�� Sounds good but it feels like you went swimming in a swamp. Thumbs down.
Apple cider vinegar in water.�� Makes your scalp dry and does not result in lustrosity of any kind. Thumbs down.
Stale beer and eggs.�� My Thai massage lady suggested this (Ms M thought she was playing a joke on me).�� Works on her (long black shiny hair) but not on me (smells like scrambled eggs and the pub).
Stale beer by itself!�� Well, River God likes to leave the fag end of the beer in the bottle, on the grounds that it’s too ‘yeasty’ to drink. So why not avoid waste and tip it on your head!�� Not bad – the pub smell only lasts half a day – but again, hair still lacking in lustrosity. Mind you, I think it had a slight blonding effect (maybe cause it’s pale ale).
Honey and water (shook up in a jar).�� Apparently it has to be ‘natural’ honey and ‘distilled’ water, but what the hell, I used tap water, what’s the diff!�� Ms M did it and her hair looks nice enough, as usual, but I have yet to see head-tossingly glamorous results a la ‘You’re Worth It’.
Honey and a few drops of sage oil. Now it’s just getting silly!�� Cream and eggs, anyone?

And the upside of all this?�� BEFORE, I was worried about my hair thinning.�� I even tried pills (until my beard started growing).�� But AFTER?�� I’m pretty sure it’s thicker.�� Maybe it’s all the goop.�� THEY keep saying hair dyes and shampoos make no difference to female baldness but I remember when my eldest sister let her hair go grey (ie stopped dyeing it), that comb-over look went within a month. So there.

What is the dumbest thing you’ve put in your hair – and has anything made you look remotely like Salma Hayek?

Love at first sight, cookery, and other unlikely stuff

I’ve never fallen in love at first sight (although, as soon as I saw my hairy hippy I knew there was something about that man). But…

This last month I’ve been preoccupied with publishing my friend Irena’s Hungarian cookbook, which is an amazing work of love and detail.�� I met Irena when I was giving one of my talks on how the elderly can get around without a car (part of last year’s job) and this very old, short, foreign lady piped up from the back of the room ‘I wonder if you could help me with..’.�� Well, I gave her a lift home, and promised to visit her with some bus timetables, and the next thing you know, she was telling me about how she met her two husbands.

‘Back in those days’, says Irena, ‘you had to be a virgin, you weren’t allowed to do anything before marriage! So, well, I wanted to have sex, there was nothing to do but get married.�� But I didn’t love him.”

I thought only men did that! ”

But later, I was working in a cafe in Sydney – I didn’t know how to make coffee or anything but I was very pretty in those days so the owner didn’t mind – and this Englishman came walking in with his hat and his umbrella, and I thought, this is the man I want to have my child with!”

“But why?” says I.�� “I think I dreamed of him,” says she, “when I was lying alone in bed at night, my husband out cheating with other women, I dreamed of a man just like this, gentle, kind, tall.�� And then he came.”

And one thing led to another and they got married, and now I’m trying to format Irena’s cookbook so she can hand it out at our local multicultural festival in three weeks’ time. When I was in kindy I was the worst in the class at making my exercise book look pretty, so – but I’m doing my best, anyway.�� Besides, when me and Ms M went to Europe a year or so back, we were absolutely wowed by Hungarian food – the best I have ever tasted anywhere, and we didn’t even eat the meaty bits, being vegetarian. So I will be snapping up this cookbook as soon as it’s in book form, crappy formatting and all!

Love,though.�� Aint it funny? River God believes you haven’t lived until you’ve had a ‘great love’ (I’m pleased to say that I am apparently his).�� Do you believe in LAFS?

Here’s one of Irena’s recipes!

APPLE PANCAKES
Alm��s palacsinta

1 cup flour

Pinch salt

2eggs

1 cup milk

2 medium tart apples

1/4 cup soda-water

2 teaspoons melted butter

3 tablespoons caster sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Make a pancake batter with the flour, salt, eggs and milk.
Wash and peel the apples, then using the grater with the largest teeth, grate the apples around the core. It’s best to grate them straight into the pancake batter as apples brown very quickly when cut.
Blend the grated apple into the batter, then adjust the consistency with the addition of soda water. If the apples are very juicy you can omit the soda-water, as long as you achieve a thick, pouring texture.
Ladle 1/4 cup portions into the preheated and buttered fry-pan, and cook untill lightly browned on both sides.
In the meantime mix the caster sugar with the cinnamon and generously sprinkle each pancake as it comes out of the fry-pan.
Fold the pancakes in halves and serve while still warm.

Yields 8-10 small pancakes.

Staying Happy – Remembering today and forgetting about yesterday

When you’re trying to be happy but shit happens…

Today I was happy, because River God was in a good mood.�� He was huggable, he was kissable, he was talkative.�� He’d had a good time bicycling around the lake in the rain, got sopping wet, and that brightened his hippy heart.�� So he came around full of cheer and romance, and because I’m a bit of a litmus paper, I soaked it all up and was happy too.

Yesterday, things were different.�� I was at River God’s country residence, it was stinking hot, and we had a disagreement about the correct way to fill buckets with used bathwater.�� It was too hot to cuddle, it was almost too hot to be near each other, it was definitely too hot to consider intimate relations. River God was cross because in the middle of the night I crept out to my car with an old duvet and slept in the back of it, in the cool.�� “You shouldn’t have come then!” he mumbled (as one does in the small hours), meaning “I feel bad about you being uncomfortable but worse now you’ve done something about it’.

I’m one of those people who is fine as long as the people I care about are busy cherishing me.�� I wilt under criticism, coolness and being temporarily ignored.�� So the trick for me is to hold the memory of today (cherished, adored) against the memory of yesterday (grumped upon) until the sun shines again.�� I know there’ll be lots of sunny days and plenty of thundery ones too.�� So cheer up, me, and think of the good times.

Oh, and this is the country estate (roundabouts).�� You may think it looks nice, all blue and everything.�� But trust me, it’s much better when it’s all grey and misty, because that’s when River God’s trees grow.�� This is what the morning of a stinker looks like.

I donated money to a homeless guy – and he paid me back!!

You know the scenario.�� A fellow blogger says they’re a homeless single dad struggling to provide for their litte girl.�� They ask kind-hearted people to donate, to help them get back on their feet.�� You think, right.�� They’re probably living in a condo in Florida and spending all the money on champagne.

But – on the offchance,and because you’re in the midst of a ‘goodness’ spree – you DO donate.�� Then you forget about it.�� If he’s swilling champagne, so be it.�� If he’s been able to buy his kid shoes for school, so much the better.

But today, I got an email from a guy I donated to more than a year ago, thanking me for my contribution and offering to PAY ME BACK!�� Here’s what he said:

On��6/28/2013��you donated 20 dollars to me and my daughter when we were facing homelessness and I would like to repay the same dollar amount back to you. I would have love to pay you some interest on your donation but because Paypal took out processing fees from your donation I did not receive the full donation but I want to repay you your full donation amount.��
��
I have not gotten out of my financial crisis but I am slowly getting out and I think I can easily repay your donation without it cause me and my daughter any financial hardship then the one I have in my heart with owing and burdening society with my crisis.��
��
Therefore, I would like to send out a check to your home address today but I would like to confirm and verify your mailing address I have on file before I mail the check out (etc etc).
��
I thank you for your generosity and support.��

Respectfully,

Jorge Luis Oyola

Well I never!�� Obviously I declined his offer to return the money, but I am really pleased, anyway – both because my trust in Jorge was vindicated and because he IS back on his feet.�� And by the way, my tongue-in-cheek account of the wild goodness spree in question is on Amazon for free (KDP Select) from the 24th to the 28th December, right here.

Before you live the dream, you gotta work out which dream you’re living

I’m sitting on my inner city balcony, checking out the skyline. In a little while, I might stroll in to town to see a movie, pick up some pad thai, or maybe take a promenade by the lake. The whole thing is so chic it hurts.

At least, this could be me, sometime soon.�� River God and I are looking at buying Property – at the moment, an inner city apartment – each of us with our own dream of car-free urban living and sky-rocketing rental income.�� That’s what property does to you – it turns you into a real-estate dreamer, just the sort of person an agent likes to see wander in over their brochure-strewn threshhold.�� The question is,what exactly is the dream, and do we want it?

Are we going to be living The Good Life on our country estate, surrounded by rescue donkeys and lavender plantations?�� Or are we going to be inner city hipsters?�� We can’t do both (can we?). Are we going to live cosily in our little place round the corner from the blues bar – or are we going to rent our love nest out to strangers?�� Are we going to be scared to read the property section of the paper in five years’ time – or are we going to have trouble wiping off our smug smiles?�� Will River God have long since fled, due to uppity teenage kids (mine) and dogs who pee on the verandah (also mine)?�� Will I be glad to see him go, so I can sleep in for a change?

What’s your dream and if you got it, are you sure you’d want it?�� Is your dream by any chance a book for Christmas? If it is, you should head over to Smorgasbord for some pointers about what to read – my personal favourite is Bertram & Gertrude’s Steamy Amsterdam Weekend.

Shit Buddha forgot to say….

You’ve always wanted to know how to get reincarnated as a house cat – and now you CAN!�� Rose’s semi-demi-autobiographical work of almost-non-fiction, ‘And that’s Another Thing – Shit Buddha Forgot to Say‘ is now on the shelves at Amazon and you can have it for 99 cents (well, if you read my blog you got it for free) for the next three weeks or so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s it about, you ask? Well, have you ever wanted to cut your ex-lover into small pieces?�� Have you ever been tempted to take a homeless person home for a hot date?�� Would you dare to wear the Pink Tee Shirt of Doom?�� Go buy And That’s Another Thing and find out the answers to life’s most pressing dilemmas!�� And if you do buy it – leave me an honest review and I will love you for ever.�� If you leave me a dishonest but flattering review, obviously I’ll love you a lot longer than that.�� (No really, I do want to know what you think. I may even go back and change stuff.)

Hating Men

Imagine a world without men.

I guess the women would fight a bit. But probably not with nuclear weapons or sub-machine guns. There’d obviously be a lot of girl on girl action.�� But probably not much rape.�� There’d be hierarchies, with bossy women at the top and fieldmice at the bottom.�� But there’d be no pronouncements that women by their very nature need to be submissive and obedient to some other gender which happened to be born with a penis. Children would be abused, at times, by women who were stern, frustrated, or just cruel.�� But there would probably not be child trafficking and pornography on the scale that exists in the world right now.

There’d be no men trying to prove they know everything (or at least more than the other guy), no men interrupting you when they’re bored by your two-minute’s worth of self-focused conversation, no men having their little tantrums when the fridge is out of beer or you didn’t put their shirt in the wash, no men who can see the wood but never the trees, no men who make up ridiculous religions where god looks just like them and makes His rules to match, no men who ask for naked pictures on the internet from women they’ve just met, no men who believe in the ‘red pill’…

Imagine a world without MY men.�� Sweet, silly, generous, charming, well-meaning, muddled and kissable.�� What would the world be like without them? Would we really mind if they died out and were somehow replaced by sperm banks?�� I’m not sure.

Coming next?�� Hating Women (but someone else will have to write it.�� Mind you, they probably already have).

Should he…or shouldn’t he? Did he…or didn’t he?

Bloggers love a controversy, right?�� So here’s a storm in a teacup for you.

A Romanian orphan (yes, one of those) escapes from horrific abuse at the hands of ‘Mama’ and her cohorts, spends his childhood in the sewers under Bucharest, and is finally rescued by a visiting American aid worker.�� Safe in the US, he writes an autobiographical novel based on his experiences – the violent deaths of most of his friends at the hands of brutal police, persecution under Ceaucescu’s regime and the supposedly democratic one which replaced it, and revenge murders of family (not his) and the infamous orphanage staff.

The novel is called God’s Buried Children, and it’s on sale on Amazon.�� Therein the controversy.�� If you look on Amazon, you’ll see that lots of reviewers have got very hot under the collar because a) they’ve been asked to give the book five stars without being sent a review copy b) they’ve been contacted by email, I guess off Goodreads, and c) the book is poorly written.

One of the reviews is mine.�� My review says that I like the book a lot – sure, it’s not perfectly written but the writer IS a Romanian with no formal education whatsoever – and I think the cause (proceeds donated to immigrant kids) is worthwhile.���� It did occur to me when I was reading the book that maybe it’s some kind of con – but the little details you wouldn’t know unless you were there convinced me. The writing could do with editing – but there’s something poetic about it.�� It isn’t written in the understated Western tradition, but with an eastern European emotionality that I recognise from my Polish and Croatian friends.�� The author did email me asking for a review, but he didn’t ask for five stars and he did send me a free copy (I bought the book anyway).

So, well, read the book and see what you think.�� It’s only $3.99 (a small price to pay to be satisfyingly outraged or deeply moved, whichever it is).�� And by the way, Bucharest’s sewers are still full of third generation descendants of those original orphans – apparently the government’s only response so far is to block the entrances.

What is on my kitchen table right now?

Can you change the world from your kitchen table?

To see if you can, I invite six people around to chat about what bugs them the most – in the world, in our town, in our street, in my loungeroom (turns out it’s chiefly the little kids attached to participants, who make one hell of a racket the whole damn time!).  The idea is, me and lots of other people each get a little group together consisting of family, friends and randoms we met last night at the pub, and share what bothers us most and what we’d like to see change.  The whole process is recorded (literally in my case,on a little tape recorder which also comes in useful for interviews with underworld figures) then scrambled by an organisation called See-Change (get it? See…Change!) and provided to politicians so they can get to work doing what they’re sorta supposed to – carrying out the will of the People.

So, my neighbours and relllies being on the greenie, leftie side of things, the chat naturally turns to things like animal welfare, not towing refugees out to sea, the uncomfortably warm future foreseen for us by the International Commission on Climate Change, and how we wouldn’t mind paying more tax if we all GOT more for it.  I’m pretty sure most people who get involved in this kind of thing have the same bees in their bonnets, though. I can’t see a bunch of rednecks choosing to spend an hour chronicling their beefs with the world and then sending it off to an organisation whose claims to fame mostly involve growing organic veges on your townhouse terrace.  Unless you count talkback radio (the fuckhead’s forum).

And the politicians, when they get the hefty tome that is our collective opinion, will realise this.  They’ll either go ‘just as I thought’ (if they’re green left) or ‘bet they didn’t ask the local bankers/chicken farmers/mining magnates’ if they’re right of centre.

The biggest thing that came out of it for me was everybody’s sense of frustration.  The only time it remotely matters what Jim and Beth Citizen care about is Election Time – and then not much. The way the cookie crumbles on most things is beyond anyone’s control (except Mr Banker/Chicken farmer/Mining Magnate).  Ah, democracy.  Better than the other thing.

Oh, and what’s on my kitchen table right now? A lot of empty wine bottles.

I dunno why….but I friggin HATE you!

There’s this woman.

She’s got a grey crew-cut, a man-shirt and pants, usually cut off mid-calf with sensible shoes and short white socks.  She always smiles when she sees me and says ‘Hello Rose, how are you?’ as if she really wants to know.  I should appreciate that.

She’s got this pet topic, and whenever there’s a conference or a meeting ON this topic, she’s always invited to speak on it.  If the meeting ISN’T about the topic, she still speaks on it.  Hell, she organises her whole life around this topic, and even the filing system at the place where she works is bloody well organised around – The Topic.

She’s an academic, which means she thinks progress has been made on The Topic if someone has written a Framework, or outlined the Principles, or published Guidelnes, or held a Forum.  She likes the word ‘discourse’.  She also likes to say things are ‘wonderful’ and ‘amazing’ – things like ninety year olds getting into yoga, or international resolutions on the right to a clean street signed up to by Guatemala and Nigeria.  She is deeply into The Legend of Me, Myself, I.

I can’t see this woman without wanting to shoot her.  I’m sorry.  I just really, really hate her.  For no very good reason (other than being stuck in a room with her boring on and on for half a day, on a couple of occasions).  It reminds me of my dog, Coffee, who has this thing about a little curly-tailed pug that goes for a walk past our door twice a day.  It’s a nice little dog.  But Coffee just goes ballistic about it – clearly he’d like nothing better than to rip its harmless little ears off.  ‘Enemy dog’, we call it.

Have you got anyone you feel like that about – who just brings out the mean bitch in you?  Do tell.