Mo Bad Blues
At first it wasn’t too bad. In the right light, my mo looked fairly legit. It was rough and tough and ready to rumble, just like you might think I am, if you don’t know me very well. Seven days in, I could even be considered debonair.
Then the gingers came in.
Now, I don’t have anything against the ginger peoples. Some of my best friends—well, no, all right, that’s not true. I shun them. But I have several close ginger relatives. Lovely people. Really courageous. Also, there’s no problem with ginger if you’re a woman. For chicks, red hair means: “I am so aflame with animal passion, I could burst into fire at any moment.” I think we can all agree on that. But on a man, ginger hair is not popularly translated as “fiery, dangerous love beast.” It’s more “weird pervert from Accounting.”
On top of that, I keep accidentally cruising for gay sex. I don’t mean to. I just haven’t adapted to the signals my mo is sending out. For example, on my run this morning, I jiggled my eyebrows in greeting to a runner passing by. Usually, this means, “Nice morning.” But now, apparently, it means, “Nice thighs.” At least, that’s what I’m getting from the look of terror that crossed the guy’s face.
I’m beginning to catch glimpses of it in my peripheral vision. When I have a drink, it gets there before I do. The other day I blew my nose, and three hours later realized my upper lip was hoarding bits of tissue. Also, despite my private hopes, Jen has not been harboring a secret passion for circa 1970s tennis stars. Hairy, scratchy, ginger lip caterpillar: apparently not a turn-on.
It’s just as well I’m doing this for a good cause. Thanks so much to everyone who donated. I just want you to know, it’s because of you that I’m stuck with this thing until December.
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Mo Bad Blues
I’m growing a moustache
“I’m
growing a moustache,” I told Jen.
“No you’re not.”
“It’s for Movember. You know about Movember?”
“I know Movember,” she said. “But no. You’re not growing a moustache. They’re creepy.”
“Jen! This isn’t about the moustache. It’s for a good cause. It’s about raising awareness. You think I want to grow a moustache? Do you? Like, what, as if I’ve always secretly wanted to, but until now been denied by social pressure? Honestly!”
She eyed me. “You don’t actually know what the cause is, do you?”
“Of course I do,” I said, offended. “Frankly, it’s that kind of attitude that makes it so hard to get this particular cause taken as seriously as, obviously, this particular cause demands.”
Jen sighed.
“I believe it’s something to do with prostate cancer,” I said. “But I have a whole plan. I’ll announce it on my web site, see, and people can sponsor me.”
“Sponsor your moustache.”
“Right! Yes! They can sponsor my moustache.”
“It’s not just prostate cancer,” Jen said. “It’s men’s health issues in general, including depression.”
“Well, there you go. You can’t say no to that.”
She sighed again. “You’d better get some donations.”
House of Cuteness & Horror
A lot of parenting is like this: your gorgeous almost-three-year old daughter hops toward you, shouting, “Look, Daddy! Big jumps!” and you think: I hope she doesn’t trip and impale herself on that tree branch.
I don’t think I’m especially paranoid, but when I’m playing with Fin, I get flashes of her horrifically injuring herself about every ten minutes. When she actually does hurt herself, I’m mostly just relieved, because it’s so much better than it was in my head.
It’s a little weird to have your life filled with interlocking moments of joy and abject terror. They don’t mention that in the parenting books.
The other way parenting is like a horror show is how you periodically stumble past dolls arranged as crime scenes. Maybe it’s just me, but when I see something like this, I can’t help but think multi-vehicle pile-up:
And this strikes me not so much as “laundry day for Miffy” as “Hostel 3”:
And I’m sorry, I know Baby Puss got wet in the bath and needed to be dried, but there is no way to look at this and not see a baby on a hook:
But then you see this and forget all about it.
By the way, sorry for that long break between blogs. What the hell was I doing? I don’t even know.
My Age of Reason
I’m not a superstitious person. But I do believe your brain can
come to associate particular objects with particular feelings, and
this can affect you in ways you don’t consciously notice. So today as
I prepared my morning coffee, I thought:
Did I have a good writing day yesterday? Because I used my
Richmond Football Club cup: they won on the weekend and thus I was
feeling good about them. It was a logical choice. But today: would there
be a carry-over effect, or would the cup have absorbed too many
new vibes from the day before, and if so, were they good vibes or bad?
At this point I realized that I was standing frozen in the kitchen with half a teaspoon of sugar hovering above the cup. I’m glad no-one saw this, because it might have been difficult to explain how I’m not a superstitious person.
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My Age of Reason
Bad Potato
I’m
feeling irritable. It started last night, halfway through a paragraph
of the book I’m reading. Usually I read at night until I realize I don’t
care any more, but last night I cared, I was just irritated. Not at the
book. Just in general. It is a non-specific irritability.
Now my question is: Why? Am I irritated at something, without realizing it? Is there some psychological problem here I’m in denial about? Or is it more like I ate a lot of starch yesterday, and tetchiness is a biochemical byproduct of my body processing it? I don’t want to dig around for emotional unrest if the real culprit here is a baked potato with bacon and cheese.
Do you think it’s possible to feel pissed at anything? As in, you tell yourself to start feeling irritable, then you try to think what you’re pissed at. Because I think I can do that. So are emotions responses to actual events, or does your brain grope around for convenient excuses for feelings that are more to do with random neurochemical tides?
If emotions are influenced by what you put into your body, is there any such thing as a “true” feeling? And if there’s not, is there any moral reason you wouldn’t, given the technology, pop a pill (or twist a dial) to generate whatever mood you want? Because that’s no different to having a coffee or a smoke, is it? But if we’re doing that—entering artificial states of feeling, emotions decoupled from the world—doesn’t that make us… well, unreal? Is there anything more fundamental to our existence than the validity of our own feelings?
I don’t know. It could be the potato talking.
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Bad Potato
I have chickens
I
am renting some chickens. They’re out there right now, scratching in the
grass outside my study window. You might not have known you
can rent chickens—I didn’t, until Jen came home one day with shining
eyes and said, “Let’s rent some chickens!” But you can. In fact,
there is hot competition in the chicken rental industry, with
BookAChook.com.au,
RentAChook.com.au, and
CityChicks.com.au
competing in my local area alone.
I wasn’t so sure about renting chickens, but Jen said, “If it doesn’t work out, we’ll just send them back.” That was when I realized how ingenious the scheme is. You can’t say no to rental chickens. It’s a risk-free investment. And so one night a nice lady drove to our house with a chicken coop, a bag of feed, some hay, and Patsy and Flo.
We didn’t name the chickens. They came with little cards with their names and pictures on them, like baseball stars. They’re basically celebrity chickens, on tour. I could tell they were VICs because Deb, the BookAChook lady, didn’t really want to hand them over. As she went through the list of rules (do not feed meat to chickens, do not feed eggs to chickens unless they have been well-disguised, on hot days chickens enjoy settling in with a chilled ice bottle), I could sense her judging me, evaluating whether I was chicken-worthy.
We’ve had them a few weeks now, and I have to say, I’m impressed. They are very low-maintenance: you let them out of their coop in the morning, you lock them up again when they wander back in at night, but except for chilling the odd ice bottle, that’s pretty much all you have to do. They don’t make much noise, although they have begun giving quiet, hopeful squawks every time I come out the door, just in case I have a plate of strawberries. That’s quite nice, to arouse a hopeful feeling in another creature, even if it’s just because of strawberries. I think it was definitely time I got a pet. And on current form, I can recommend you try the chicken.
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I have chickens