Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 28

Please Help Find Nichole

Reblogged from M.S. Fowle:

UPDATE: Last night, May 20th, the body of Nichole Kristine Cable was found just miles from her home. Continue to keep Nichole and her family in your hearts, pray even if you've never prayed before. The perpetrator is still out there somewhere. As more information becomes available, I will update you all accordingly.

Thank you so much for your support.

Read more… 592 more words

Please re-blog Find Nichole! It could be anyone's daughter.

Yep, I’m a racist!

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!

The Brain in Bits

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?

Oh God, Why Did You Make Me So Ugly!!!

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.

Doom in Dubrovnik

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.

Why do Americans love talking about shit?

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?