Excuse me, would you like a seat?

During both my pregnancies (and god and some pretty effective contraception, there won't be any more), I caught public transport pretty almost daily.
I can count, on one hand, how many times I was offered a seat on a bus or a train.
Admittedly, I am of the festively plump persuasion, so I can understand people's hesitancy in leaping to their feet lest I just be retaining chips, rather than a foetus.
But when I was eight months along and had 10kg of baby and amniotic fluid and guts and black stuff sticking out the front of me, it was kind of hard to miss.
And I'm not complaining (well, maybe a little bit). Pregnancy isn't an illness and I was still pretty fit and well, so perfectly able to stand for 20 minutes or so.
But it got me to thinking about people offering anyone seats, or opening doors or showing any other common courtesy.
People of my father-in-law's ilk use this as the reductionist argument against those crazy feminists who "won't let blokes hold the door open for them". The thing is BLOKES DON'T OPEN DOORS for anyone. Actually, NO ONE OPENS DOORS FOR ANYONE ANYMORE.
Besides which, since when are good manners sexist?
I was taught to think of people in a more difficult situation than you, and to do what was practical in order make their lot a little easier. Get up for the old lady on the bus, help the guy with the crutches off the train, whatever.
I can report though that the pursuit of shitty manners is an equal opportunity concern. I will always remember the day when I was on the bus about eight months pregnant, and two fat bitches (see the festively plump comment from before, so I can say that), watched, from the reserved-for-less-mobile-passengers seats (being fat doesn't qualify you, molls), as I helped a woman with her small child off the bus with her pram and they didn't lift a goddamed obese digit to help.

Good manners don't demean the "fairer" sex, they show respect for your fellow humans. And as far as I can see that isn't a gender politics issue.

Whine 'flu

My daughter had a fever yesterday, so naturally, I thought she probably had swine flu and imagined her little body hooked up to tubes and an oxygen mask in the ICU.
And here I am, edumacated media-aware journalist as victim of MEDIA HYSTERIA (which by the way is a misogynistic word because its origins are from the use to describe women's "unusual" behaviour).
I've probably got too much time on my hands (like my neighbour who patrols the street like a war-time volunteer should someone mistakenly pull into his driveway, or accidentally brush leaves into his immaculately concreted yard). I consume a lot of media. Radio on ABC all day, practically attached to my phone and the computer with a USB, TV in the evening, so it's very hard to protect yourself from overexposure to the same message. As well as the 24-hour news cycle which demands a fresh story for each update.
It also makes me think about how you control a message from a PR perspective as well where you have media champing at the bit for new information, and you want to give it to them without creating panic.
And from a consumer perspective how do you protect yourself from overreaction?
The democratisation of information is a truly wonderful thing, but it places quite the burden on responsible people to invest a lot of time and energy into getting balance and perspective from their information.
It's actually a pretty cogent argument for "real" journalism, that you need to be able to trust the source and information.
*gets off soapbox*

My daily Twittascope

Today, you will spend a lot of time reflecting... on yourself. The morning may begin with some strenuous physical activity you feel the need to share with everyone, followed by the inevitable gripe about work.
Later in the day, you may find yourself in the middle of a flurry of activity on the internet where you spend a lot of time talking about what you're doing (not much), which others find endlessly fascinating.
Watch out towards the end of the day, you might go out with the gfs and who knows, you could meet the man of your dreams... which you will document in minute detail on the interwebs. Or perhaps you'll just sit at home and watch a chick-flick (and Tweet all the way through) because you're sad.

Charlie

Charlie was my dog. He was a beautiful tan and white beagle and he would have been seven in August.
On June 25 Charlie died. He had lymphoma. My husband and I decided that rather than put him through chemo, we'd euthanise him instead. What an awful decision to have to make, and how it's made me ponder on life, death, faith, regret as well as happiness and love.
It's divested me of any vestiges of a sense I might have had that there is a "higher power", because who would put a wonderful animal like Charlie through cancer? (or anyone for that matter).
It's made me incredibly sad too. Telling my three and a half year old son that his "big brother" Charlie wasn't coming home was truly one of the most painful things I have ever done.
Everything I do around the house reminds me of him. When I open the front door, I always look down in anticipation of the little brown nose poking around the edge of the door and the whole body wag that would greet me and the kids each and every time we returned home.
When the kids have leftovers in their bowls, I have to stop myself from going to scrape them in his bowl. When I drop some food on the floor I wait for the instinctual click of dog claws on lino as Charlie scampered into the kitchen to see what gastronomical delight had fallen into his territory.
The way he would bark and feint resting on his front paws while Baby Chocolate would lunge at him cackling with joy. And the way he would come to my side of the bed on a cold evening and use his nose to flick at the edge of the doona in the hope he could scramble underneath for a cosier night's sleep.
I have also been meditating on how I was very impatient with him at times and yelled at him. What I would do to take back all those angry words I had for him from time to time. He was a great dog, but had a distinct naughty and willful streak, which only made him more lovable.
Even with two crazy little kids screaming around the place, it seems so very quiet without his gentle and quiet presence.
It's also caused me to ruminate on regrets and how I'd like to live a life without them.
Dogs are amazing creatures and if you like them, I highly recommend Dogs Never Lie About Love (sounds crap, but it's a great book). They are pure creatures who express emotion purely, and frankly, we'd be nicer if we were more like them.
As much as I regret Charlie's passing, and god I do, my life is better for having known him.

Girls are pink and boys are blue

I have two kids. One boy and one girl. With both of them, I have tried not to reinforce gender stereotypes when it comes to how I dress them (I don't put my son in a dress, I'm not that progressive) and what toys they play with. My son has a couple of dolls, and my daughter likes to play with her brother's cars.
But one day, my son told me he "HATES" (in capital letters) Dora the Explorer, because she's a girl and she likes pink. I have no idea where it came from, but it goes to show you the power of socialisation. After much counselling, he's softened his stance on his hatred of pink. (I pointed out that daddy has a couple of pink shirts).
I dress my daughter (who is an infant and is wispily bald) in a reasonably neutral way, despite the mass of sickly candy pink clothes that spill from her (blue) cupboard. Yesterday she was in denim overalls and a blue and white striped t-shirt (with a pinky/purple cardigan with a rosette on it), and still a slightly older lady at my gym thought she was a boy. Older people do it to me all the time. If she's in blue, as far as they're concerned, she's a boy.
But even with me, when I am shopping for my little girl, I unconsciously reach for the pink toothbrush.
I don't know what the point of this blog is really, other than to point out why we have such social conventions and why they're so important to people. Is it because they provide order and predictability?
BTW I don't like Dora either, but mostly because of her oversized head, not coz she wears pink.

Death and shit

It fascinates me the way people are lauded in death. The furore over the Chaser's song the year before last about all the dead celebs was a great example. Is it because we're confronted by our own mortality in a world obsessed by 24/7 media coverage and celebrity? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jade Goody, the young British woman who tragically died from cervical cancer on the weekend. In anyone's language, it's a tragedy. She was only 27 and she had two young sons. The unusual thing about it is that her death was reported by the BBC World service as an actual news item. You may well ask why, I certainly did. Apparently her death was newsworthy because she was on Big Brother in the UK where she thought the region of England called East Anglia (or East Angular as she pronounced it) was in another country. Her fame grew for the wrong reasons when she was on Celebrity Big Brother and made racist remarks to one of her housemates.
Why oh why are people captivated by this? The grotesque thing, which is probably fitting really, considering she lived by reality TV, she also died by it, with her final days managed by PR "guru" Max Clifford. She said she did this to ensure her children were provided for. But what is that going to do to them when they grow up, and even now? Not only do they have to deal with their mother's untimely death, but what is normally an intensely private situation has been played out in the full glare of the media. People have compared it with the death of Princess Diana. And it's true. There was misplaced, mass hysteria then, and now too.
And if people in the public dare call it for what it is, they're lambasted. Noel Gallagher of all people actually put it the best I have seen:
"I mean, I've got fuck all against Jade Goody, that's nothing to do with me," Gallagher continued. "But it bends my head. That, to me, sums up, in one tiny five-minute thing on the news, what an embarrassing place Britain is right now. You might as well shut Number 10 Downing Street down and get Max Clifford to run the country"

Fuckby League

Sorry about that last post. It was a bit vociferous and self indulgent. Oh hang on, that's what blogs are for isn't it?
I've had a shitty 24 hours, so you'll have to excuse me once again because it seems I have at least one leg in my cranky pants today. A lack of sleep and chasing small, screaming children has a way of doing that to a body. Luckily I have a lot of good TV series on DVD that keep me just enough in a fantasy world to make all this a little more bearable.
It's such a middle class whinge, isn't it? As soon as I typed all these complaints I thought of all the other people in the world doing it so much tougher than me. And that would be most of them, really. As if I have anything to complain about.
Today, I'd like to rant about the abhorrent way in which the Manly Rugby League club went about its tawdry little smear campaign to try and discredit the alleged victim in the sexual assault case against Brett Stewart. Media Watch did some great coverage of it. You can see it here on their website.
I can believe the club would do this because they seem to operate in a boozy misogynistic bubble (actually, I do worry it's more wide spread than that), what I can't believe is that it made it to air on Channel 9. Surely there was someone in the newsroom who voiced concerns over running "news" which wasn't actually new, and which has no relevance to the case at hand. Trying to discredit the victim in this situation is what the defence counsel always does and even they have been asked not to do this kind of thing in court, but we all know TV journalists are above the law (hello Ben Fordham). Watching Peter Overton reading the story I thought to myself "you have a daughter, how would you feel if she was in this situation and someone tried to use something you'd done to discredit her claims of assault". It's just appalling.
What I wonder is if it's just isolated left wing housewives like me who think this kind of shit is wrong, or can most people see it for what it is? I hope so.