Driving Test

I am going to be tested on my ability to drive today after which I might get a little card with my photo on it that says I'm allowed to do it whenever I want without anyone shouting at me to stop if I pull out in front of a large fast moving vehicle.

Doing this test feels like it's about more than just whether or not I can fluke a reverse park handle my vehicle with poise and accomplishment. It feels like a test of my adulthood, like a correction to the past, a movement away from denial. I am trying not to be too philosophical about it all. After all the first most important thing is not crashing. But up there is not having an existential crisis in the middle of an intersection. Remember always execute a right hand turn before questioning the nature of reality, or the profound absurdity of existence.

Of course, driving is really a test of my physical prowess, not of my worth as a human being. If I fail I will sit it again. I think there's something in that for all of us, don't you?

(A five legged fly just landed on my finger. I am sure it is an omen. But of what?)

More on Fred's past life

F: Starfish bite.
P: Do they?
F: Yes, my grandpa was in the water and one came up and was biting him.
P: Is this your Grandpa from before I was born?
F: Yes, before everyone was born. My grandpa was a doctor and he died. No, he didn’t die but his house was old and he went to live somewhere else and he take me to find my parents and you were the best choice. When he left England I was very sad to see him go. I’m never going to see him again. He’s going to live in Africa.
P: Did your grandpa have a wife?
F: Did he? Let me think about it. Let me think about it. No!
P: Did he have any other children
F: Oh yes. Lane. Jasus, Bosus, Dacy, Clacy, Jaelene and Janie. Those were all the names of his kids. And there was one named Jack. I don’t like Jack. Because he always sits on my grandpa’s best chair. He’s always doomed. He has orange hair. And he has dots like a dozo.
P: Are you going back to live with your Grandpa one day?
F: No. He’s never coming back.
P: Do you miss your Grandpa?
F: Yes. A lot

Video Killed the Radio Star

I am going to be on 3RPH this week, on the Children's Hour talking about The Indigo Girls. Only thing is, I'm not quite sure when that is. I found ancient reference online to a Children's Hour at 6pm on Tuesdays. So I'll be tuning in at 6 tonight to listen to myself gabble. Or maybe I won't. In Melbourne 3RPH is 1179AM. I am not sure (I am a font of unknowledge) if the Children's Hour is played in all states.

Being interviewed is weird because they ask you questions and sometimes you don't really know what you're going to say but you start talking anyway. Which leads to this strangely meandering answer. By the end of which you've forgotten the question.

Oh well.

silly and fun

is this

Stay and play for a minute or two.

Thanks for the Memories

How cool is this guy?

The upshot is a 15 year old South Australian, Rory Stokes, has 'busted' the myth that goldfish have a three second memory. What a great story to read about a 15 year old in the Age. It seems all we ever read about teenagers are the Corey (who now?) 5 minutes of infamy stories. I bet Rory also knows how to party, he just doesn't have to wreck a suburb doing it. And he'd be considerate. Of the, you know, fish.

Does make me a little guilty about leaving our fish, Sprinkle, Santa and Reindeer, behind when we moved. I hope the new tenants love them/found them. Perhaps we should send them a card.

Kahlil Gibran - On Children

I'm not a fan of Gibran. Overuse has made him something of a cliche and there's something about his tone that irritates me, I think I tend towards poems that draw on narrative and character rather than this sort of 'telling' language. A few people around me discovered him in late adolescence, when I felt my own tastes in poetry were far more sophisticated. I read a lot of contemporary Australian poets, some of the mid 20th century Americans, a few English poets, Roger McGough was a favourite. I had a big writer crush on W. B. Yeats and was romanced by his love for Maude Gonne. Sylvia Plath came later. But never Gibran. If you aren't sure who Kahlil Gibran is, rest assured you have probably heard some of his poems. Gibran tends to be the poet of choice for those milestone ceremonies - weddings, funerals, naming days.

But I came across this excerpt (below) in a book I'm dipping in and out of at the moment - Buddhism for Mothers with Lingering Questions by Sarah Napthali. I am not a Buddhist, or an anything. But as a parent, I struggle often. I struggle with tiredness, with a sense of not having my own space, with the lack of freedom that comes with having children. I struggle with boredom as I eat dirt and stick pies or make the horses talk to each other. I struggle with Fred's anger, with her tendency to fight every transition, from mealtimes to baths. I struggle when Fred tells me that the girls at kinder tell her she looks like a boy and laugh at her at rest time, saying 'goodnight boy' (and then she tells me that she made that up, so I struggle with confusion about what is her inner world and what is her outer world, and which one matters more). I don't struggle so much with Una because from the moment she was born I knew she was her own person, that she was mine for a temporary time. I've written about this before in this blog but that clear distinction, for whatever reason, is not there with Fred. Maybe it's because I see myself in her so clearly. Maybe it's because she was first. Maybe it's because Una navigated the process of separation from me, from the breast, so easily whereas Fred still clings to the space between us. Anyway, that is why this poem resonated with me. You can read the rest of the poem, but the last lines kind of thrash the lovely bow and arrow image to death, which is why I, and no doubt Sarah Napthali, omitted them.

As for the rest of Napthali's book, it's very much focussed on being in the present moment. Something I loved about motherhood when Fred was an almost constantly delightful baby - in the same way travel reduces you to be concerned only for all your basic needs and the rest of you lives in a state of constant reception, absorbing all these images, sounds and smells. But now, now that there's anger, it's hard to stay present, it's hard not to plan ahead or look back. Also as I said, I look at her and I see all my own childhood anxieties and fears. It's hard not to project them on her freckly, funny face, a face so like my own at almost five years old.

On Children
Kahlil Gibran
(excerpt)

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
...

A Dame called Diablo

I went to see Juno a few weeks ago, I meant to blog about it but I didn't. Juno is getting some criticism from feminist quarters for being anti-abortion, but to me it seemed pro-choice in the true sense of the word. Juno, 16 and accidently pregnant to her best friend, doesn't feel right terminating for entirely personal reasons, so she goes ahead with the pregnancy, adopting her baby out to someone ultimately as outwardly dysfunctional but open-hearted and loving as she is. To have witten the screenplay any other way, with an agenda in mind, would have belied these particular characters who dwelled within the world of the film.

Anyway, in my opinion it's a lovely movie with a quietly hilarious screenplay and a great team of characters, all of whom resonate off the screen, but especially Juno and her hapless boyf.

Part of the reason it's got a lot of press, in fact a lot of the reason there's a lot of jaws yapping is that the writer (yes, people are actually interested in the writer) is an ex-stripper. Diablo Cody says (of studying writing before she became a stripper):

"I never intended to get my writing out there. I always thought of published writers as honor roll students -- the real overachiever types. I never intended my work as a springboard to anything else. I write because I'm addicted to it. It's my confessional." (Wired Magazine)

Popular Myths
1. Writing is something good girls do.
2. You know, those overachiever girls who aren't interested in sex, smoking, drugs, but whose only real appetite is for reading.
3. Writing is an asexual activity.
4. The intellect is not an erogenous zone.
5. Raw imagination is less powerful than sexuality.
6. Exposing your body is the most vulnerable way of exposing yourself.
7. Strippers are not intellectual, strippers are sexual automatons, strippers are their bodies.
8. Writing is not a physical, inhabited, bodily activity.
9. Sensual writing is somehow cut off from the body. Writing is not a sensual act.

It's part of the bigger myth really, that being sexual, that being interested in sex and pleasure is antithetical to being nice or good. I'm glad that someone like Diablo Cody can get strong press because she is a writer who has had an unconventional path, and shows young people that going to uni isn't the way to become a writer. But it's a shame that the first thing anyone has to say about her is that she's an ex-stripper. Watching Juno, I am sure she is far more fascinating and complex than being simply an ex-anything. It's another label, another box to put her in, another way of parceling female sexuality so that it is at once permissive and punitive, simultaneously available and withheld.