A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age!

Some food makes me feel like I’m a little kid again.  I’m not sure why but when you have it… it just reminds you of some of the simple little things you’d have as kids.  I have a list (as all good little OCD-like nutters do) of foods that remind me of being a kid –

Watermelon slices – seed spitting competitions
Spaghetti jaffles – ‘I can’t be bothered cooking’ sunday night fare
Dumplings – cooked in stew… stodge stodge and more stodge
Beetroot sandwiches – nothing else, just beetroot
Vanilla slice – one Mum used to make with Saos
Plum pudding – every christmas I can remember
Country Captain – bizarre chicken dish Mum used to make
Tomato soup – with white bread on cold rainy days
Mangoes – stolen from someone’s tree, juice going everywhere
Sweetcorn on the cob – grown in Mum’s garden every September
Luncheon sausage – cooked on the BBQ out camping
Roast pork – fighting over the crackling

I’m sure there’d be heaps more if I thought about it longer… strangely enough the only ones that have transferred into my own cooking repertoire are the spaghetti jaffles, mangoes, the tomato soup and the sweetcorn!  Don’t go near the rest if I can avoid it 🙂
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Oh……I can’t look!!!!

My house is falling down around me…. thank Christ they’re doing it on purpose!  The theory bit of ‘Hey!  Let’s build a rumpus room on the house!’ was cool.  Yep, no problems there… architecty dude to do the plan, structural engineery dude to design the footings, certifier dude to sign off on all the council required obligations etc…  Yep… no probs – all cool with that. 

The practical bit of ‘Hey!  Let’s build a rumpus room on the house’ is a little bit on the stressful side for some strange reason…. 

Imagine if you will an anal retentive home owner… the sort of person who sorts their cottons and pins by colour, their pantry all squared away by product type, their books by genre (then region and timeframe) and their CD and DVDs in alphabetic order.  Also, imagine this particular home owner as the sort of person whose 18mth old son had mastered the art of using coasters under his sippy cup and would (without prompting) arrange all the shoes by the front door in neat little pairs.  In addition to these particular weirdnesses, imagine the aforementioned home owner also arranges her clothes in her wardrobe by colour… has entirely different sets of cushions for her bed that match her various manchester sets… keeps her collection of Disney cartoons arranged in chronological order…  has all her friends heraldry imported to her iPhone for use as their particuar caller ID picture…  would happily re-purchase two seasons of The West Wing and three seasons of The Sopranos to have sets with matching covers… AND who uses a plastic table cover to protect the kitchen table top and THEN uses newspapers to protect the protective plastic cover if doing something potentially messy!!!  . 

Not a difficult picture I’m sure.  Add to all this, a tendency to physically twitch should someone have the audacity to SIT on her freshly made bed… a habit of constantly correcting the Small Child for putting his fingers on the walls…  an absolute inability to leave a coffee ring on the kitchen bench… a palpable discomfort when items in her room have been moved or altered in anyway…. and altogether, has a frequent air of discombobulation should ‘things not be quite right’.

….  and now….  take to her home with a sledgehammer!!!!

Yes, I daresay it is an understatement of the year to declare that I’m finding the practical side of ‘Hey!  Lets build a rumpus room on the house!’ somewhat disconcerting.    😐

It rarely passes my lips… but regularly spews forth at 90wpm.

I know I will eventually get around to writing down about yesterday’s appointment… I feel like I need to get it out of my head but I also feel that I need to ‘process’ it somehow??    Maybe if I just start writing t it will become ‘processed’ :S  Obviously I have no idea what I’m talking about here, so feel free to tune out… NOW!

Ok.  Yesterday went to the TrickCyclist and I wanted to discuss my continuing bouts of the Nervous Nellies when driving as well as maybe discuss the viability of me going back to study… cos honestly I feel ill equipped to make a decision on this at the moment, even though I am aware I desperately need something to keep my mind distracted as I’ve been going slowly insane in my little world of pain over the last few months.

Instead she asked me how I was going lately and I mentioned how we fared last week in the flood (and my little trench digging episode that flared up my back pain) and I also mentioned that we’d had house guests for most of the week as my cousin Eric-the-Half-A-Bee and his wife were helping Mr K with the work for the media room they’re building.  Which led onto a discussion of how these thing make me feel (don’t you hate it when they ask you that?)  I think I can boil down what I reported at that time to this –

I feel extremely frustrated that I can’t participate in the building work.
I hate being unable to contribute and watching others makes me anxious  🙁
It bothers me to be perceived as an invalid or worse – as work shy or lazy.
I recognize I physically can’t do these things but it shits me to tears nonetheless.
I find it stressful to play hostess when there are people here all the time.
I feel it’s very rude to leave my guests to their own devices and go off to rest.
Yet it’s exhausting to keep my ‘everything’s fine’ facade on for lengthy periods.

At which point the TrickCyclist asking me how I would respond if I knew someone in a wheelchair who couldn’t participate in certain work projects and would I consider them lazy or useless?  Which of course I said, no reasonable person would.  She feels this is the same thing.  That the people around me know and understand my limitations and don’t judge or begrudge my inability to perform certain physical tasks and that my tendency to persevere regardless of personal discomfort is ‘abnormal illness behaviour’.  By which she explained I’m quite literally (and habitually) ignoring my own physical needs that might alleviate or at least mitigate my pain levels, largely due to unrealistic expectations that I PUT ON MYSELF.  Expectations that no one else around me shares.

It’s weird really.  I’ve always thought that I dont really care that much about what people think of me with the exception of about 20 core people in my life.  Yet I expend all sorts of effort and employ a dozen well used tactics to avoid telling people just how much I’m struggling to keep it together.  When I meet up with friends and they ask how my back is going, I usually respond with a “Ah you know.. same old shit.  How is your work / girlfriend / court case / dog / adulterous affair and / or kid wrangling  going?” and thus the topic is swiftly changed, thereby avoiding having to actually communicate to others what living with my back pain is actually like.  I acknowledge that I do this, because even though I know that people only ask because they care… I quite simply don’t want to deal with people’s sympathy or pity.  I used to do the exact same thing when I was on IVF.  It always felt like self preservation… sparing myself any emotional disquiet that frequently came from discussing such topics, and having the additional benefit of sparing my friend futile uncomfortable conversations.

i dont care what other people think

The other side of this self effacing pain management (??) behaviour is that I’ve become quite unsympathetic (and blatantly disparaging even) towards people who suffer what I perceive as temporary painful ‘inconveniences’.   Which wouldn’t be a problem… except that over the years it has come to apply to just about ANY injury or ailment that I perceive will heal eventually.  Quite literally I’ve felt myself (inwardly) having very uncharitable reactions to people suffering temporary pain – regardless of how much swearing and hopping up and down in acute pain is presented right in front of me.*

Got your fingers jammed in a door or caught in drawer?
“Oh poor poppet – get your shit together you’ll be fine in a moment.”
Just had an operation and you’re chowing down on pain killers?
“Snort… you have no idea what pain is about, you’ll be right.”
Did you knee in while out fighting heavy in the war?
“Ferfucksake!  More fool you… get over it already.”
Fell off your mountain bike? Copped some bruises, lost a few chunks of skin? 
“Dry your eyes Dortothy.  No sympathy from this quarter, totally self inflicted
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Broke your foot, bitching about pain and having to hobble around on crutches?
  “Suck it up Princess.  You’ll be fine in due course”.


* With the notable exception being when the Small Child is in pain…
and even he gets more ‘tough love’ than other kids his age do I’m sure.

So why do people carry on when they’re in pain and make a fuss over their injuries she asks me?  My response- ‘because they actually need assistance if they’re badly incapacitated…. or because they’re not used to painful stimuli and want to elicit sympathy from the people around them…. or because they feel the injury is somehow unjust and they want empathy… or because they’re angry and want to put the pain back on others by looking for someone to blame, I dunno.’   Shrug.

She says yes, these are all common and valid responses to pain – So given that everyone reacts in these ways, and given that people understand I have constant pain which comes with many limitations, and acknowledging that people wouldn’t think less of someone for being sensible and avoiding doing things that worsen their condition…  why do I work so hard to keep my pain to myself?  O_o

Ahhh… Oooh! Werewolves of Amazon!

I was going to write about how unsettled I was when I left the trickcyclist’s office this morning but instead have decided to drivel on about something completely banal rather than dredging up some unsavoury sludge from the remnants of my all too frequently psychobabbled brain.

threewolfshirt

Most people probably saw the strange little internets phenomena of the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt for sale on Amazon.com that has recently grabbed hold of the popular imagination of web dwellers everywhere (though the reasons for this ellude me entirely).   If you haven’t read any of the reviews this product has attracted and you have a few minutes and some memory to spare for some nonsense then it’s worth a squizz.  It’s just become this self perpetuating ‘thing’.  It seems one weird review deserves another… and another…. and another… ad infinitum.  Until you have a full fledged avalanche of geekdom descending on an obscure and unremarkable product causing a demand that far exceeds anything this bizarre little t-shirt deserves.

“When I put this T-shirt on for the first time, my wife left me!  Thank you, Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt,”
“The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt gave me a +10 resistance to energy attacks, +8 Strength… and I have successfully solved 7 crimes in my city”.

Apparently the manufacturers are pumping out some 400,000 more of them at the moment in an attempt to keep up with the demand of a 2,300% jump in sales rankings.  Truly this defies logic…. and yet… I am strangely compelled to consider acquiring one for the Small Child.  But never fear I shall fight the inclination and the Small Child will remain untainted by the trend… which no doubt will be ‘So totally last week, Man!’ by the time the item reaches Australian shores via Amazon’s uber-useless warehousing and mailing systems.

We used to say ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’… but I think that particular idiom may be in need of revision.


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I don’t trust no bastard to do what they’re supposed to.

Update on last week’s ‘Fatality Free Friday’ community awareness campaign that focuses on road safety etc…

5 fatalities occurred on Fatality Free Friday (last Friday 22/05/09).

But they’re calling it a success because normally they expect to see 5.3 fatalities on Australian roads on an average Friday.  So yay for that 0.3 of a person who survived last Friday.  😐   Still… as a concept I personally think it’s like putting the mockers on someone.  Superstitious BS on my part but… there you have it.

On a slightly related topic….

Last night we were driving to Eleven-17 (favourite local restaurant du jour) for dinner and were driving along Wynnum Road where the Gateway passes over it.  There are FIVE lanes under that overpass… the two right most lanes are turning lanes to turn onto the Gateway northbound and the other three lanes all continue in a westerly direction towards the city.  I was in the centre of these three lanes about two cars back while stopped at a red light.

Just as the lights turned green… some complete and utter moron came flying up the right hand side – WHICH IS A TURNING LANE THAT GOES ONTO THE GATEWAY – and absolutely caned it (he was damn near flying) to race to get in front of the traffic going towards town instead.  He barely made it… if the car taking off from the lights had been going slightly faster or if he hadn’t braked to let the wanker in… he would have either ploughed directly into the median strip (and at that speed he would have taken out most of the road furniture and possibly even rolled his vehicle) or he would have had to swing hard to the right which would have thrown him in front of three lanes of oncoming traffic. 

It was quite simply one of the most stupid fucking things I have ever seen someone do on the roads in 20 years I have been driving.  I just couldn’t believe anyone would do anything so dangerous and downright imbecilic… and to what end?  SO HE COULD GET TO HIS DESTINATION MAYBE 30 SECONDS FASTER!?!?!?  Fuck you prick!

It has totally freaked me out all over again.  I don’t want to get in the car.  I don’t want to share the road with these people of obviously defficient intelligence.  I don’t want to drive…. anywhere… ever again!  I quite deliberately had a couple of wines with dinner so I wouldn’t have to drive home.  But then this morning it’s unavoidable.  I had  to take the Small Child to school and to me – it feels like everyone on the road is potentially going to do something unbelievably stupid which could result in screeching brakes and the sickening crunch of twisted metal. 

Just on our way to dinner.  Nothing special about that.  Nothing remarkable at all.  But we very nearly saw a horrible disaster unfold right in front of us.   And all I could think was – it doesn’t matter how good… or how vigilant… or how careful… or how responsible… or how smart YOU are when you’re behind the wheel –  there’s always the possiblity that some totally brain dead delusional fuckwit out there (who thinks he’s invincible) that will do something so unbelievably stupid and ill conceived…  that could fuck up your life up forever.
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