TL;DR: I've had visitors, I've gained weight, I've been in an emotional funk, and I don't like the cold.
I've had a series of visits from family members recently, culminating in my folks being down here for close to a week. We all got together for a nibling birthday party over the weekend. In case you didn't know, "nibling" is the collective term for nieces & nephews. I only found that out a couple of weeks ago (cheers, Squib), and I intend to use it from now on. Writing "nieces & nephews" all the time is just too much rooting around. Anyway, it wasn't anyone's actual birthday; we tend to just have the celebrations on whatever date we can all get together, which is sometimes months after the event has taken place. Also, it's not uncommon for two or three of them to get rolled into the one celebration. I think it's good for them. It teaches them that there isn't anything special about their birthday. What's actually special, is having a family that loves them enough to celebrate it. I suppose, what's even more special, is having a drama-free family, where all the adults are fully functioning, and everyone pretty-much gets along. Heaven knows, that's gettin' pretty fuckin' rare these days. Even my sisters-in-law have had periods where sibling X and sibling Y couldn't be in the same place at the same time.
Anyway, owing to all the guests and partying and whatnot, I've been off my regular diet, which has led to me putting on a few kilos, and overall I've just been feeling a little bit … well, blech. So, in order to un-blech myself, I've increased my exercise regiment. Currently, my evening schedule pretty much looks like this:
- Finish work
- Exercise for a couple of hours
- Shower
- Eat a piece of cheese
- Start feeling cold
- Go to bed
Actually, I've been spending a lot of time in bed. Like, a lot more than usual. It's warm and snuggly in there, and it's a lot easier to sleep when you've had a really good workout. It's not all sunshine and roses though. The extra exercise has meant extra sore muscles, and the extra laying down has meant that I've started getting sore hips and shoulders.
Also, the YouTube videos I listen to when I'm going to sleep are starting to give me the shits.
See, they're predominantly made by Europeans, and for the past few weeks, they've all been complaining about how fuckin' hot it is over there. "Oh no" they cry, "the temperature has risen above 25°C, and I don't own an air conditioner. I fear I may perish in this beastly heat". Yes, that's exactly what they sound like. All of them. It's infuriating to listen to, when I'm freezing my tits off.
And no, the irony is not lost on me. I know that that's exactly what I sound like when I moan about the cold to people who live in Melbourne—or fuckin' Scotland, where even the summers are colder than the Queensland winters—but I can't help it; I fuckin' hate this time of year.
Oh, I also had this weird kinda revelation the other day, that I wanna get your opinions on. And by "revelation" I don't mean that I realised something that I'd never thought about before. More like, I thought about something obvious, and it gave me an emotional reaction that I hadn't felt before. And that emotion has kinda hung around uncomfortably ever since.
It happened while I was playing with the niblings. I noticed that even though I still think of them all as kids, they're not as little as they used to be, and some of them aren't really kids at all anymore. And then I thought about how my personal view of history is made up of three sort-of-distinct eras:
- The Cold War. When we all expected that at any moment, the world was going to end in a ball of nuclear fire.
- Fanatical Economic Liberalisation. The Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union dissolved. Japan's shadow loomed large over the Asia-Pacific region. China quietly began its economic reforms. All the "smart people" furiously agreed that privatisation, deregulation, free-trade, and globalisation, were the way forward—that contrary to all common sense, sending manufacturing jobs to the third world was somehow going to increase the prosperity of regular working folks here in Australia.
- Post 9/11. War for oil in the middle east. War with Islam in the west. Public adoption of the internet. The age of social media, video games, and amphetamines.
The nibblings have lived their entire lives in that third era. They will never understand what life was like before 9/11. No matter how much they try, they'll never really understand it. Oh sure, they'll learn about it, through books, and TV, and stuff people tell them; but their understanding will be academic, and it will be twisted and skewed by what they have grown up with. They will argue about it in political debates, siting this history book, or that set of statistics, but they won't fully comprehend what it is they're talking about. And when our generation is gone, that true understanding goes with us, just as any true understanding of the second world war was wiped out with our grandparents' generation. I don't like the word "zeitgeist". It's a word that has been seized by the most insufferable of insufferable fuckwits. But the truth is, you can't really understand why people do what they do, unless you can understand their environment—the prevailing thoughts and attitudes that surround them; and you can't really understand that unless you've experienced it first hand. You can't have someone explain it to you, and you certainly can't get it out of a book. We spend our lives building up this cache of wisdom and experience, only to have it die with us. All we can pass on is a shitty, blurry photocopy, that lacks most of the important details.
Of course, it's a two-way thing. I don't understand them either. I can remember being young, and talking to my mates about how shitty it must be for people who are so famous that they don't have any privacy. Having photographers follow them around, taking pictures of everything they do, and putting them in magazines for the world to see. It seemed like the worst thing in the world. Now, the kids do it to themselves. They talk endlessly about "likes" and "shares" and "views" and whatever the fuck else you get through Facebook and YouTube and Instagram. And then there's the hours upon hours that they sink into fuckin' video games. Jesus Christ.
The younger generation aren't a continuation of us. They're our replacements. They're sweeping our world aside to make way for their own; and while I don't "get" their world, I understand it enough to know that it's going to be fuckin' stupid. Not that the world we built wasn't fuckin' stupid, but the lack of progress is frustrating. Which brings me to the point of this screed—the feeling I've been carrying around since I had this revelation: All the mistakes my generation has made, the lessons we've learned, the growth that's come out of that—I feel like it should all count for something … but it's not going to, is it? What we call progress is really just trading one mountain of idiocy for another, and then another. And there's no way to break the cycle, because there's no way for children to learn anything meaningful from their parents' experiences. At some point, we're all going to be fazed out in favour of the newer model, which will no doubt be sleeker and shinier, and it'll probably have a touch-button interface, bit it won't actually be an improvement, will it?
Am I wrong? Please tell me I'm wrong.
Anyway, as a side effect, I think I realised why sport is such a big deal for my family, and why it's become such a big deal for me in particular. It's the one thing that binds us across generations. I don't play video games, and I'm not on social media, and for the most part, we don't like each other's taste in music, videos, or comedy; but we can all enjoy watching sport together, talking about sport together, and most importantly, playing sport together.
Which reminds me, Australia are up the shit with both the cricket and the wogball, and Queensland are up the shit with the State of Origin. Here's hoping the women's State of Origin goes better. I dunno if you'll get it televised down in Victoria, but it's on Friday night if you're interested.
How are youse all then, ay?
9 comments :
I see our replacements dropping litter (not just a wrapper, I'm talking wrappers, sandwich containers, drink bottles etc) all over the place. Whether they're rebelling by chucking stuff everywhere or whether they'll still do it when they're our age is anyone's guess but either way, it's depressing
A couple of hours? I would die if I exercised for that long
Even if they do grow out of it, by that time, there'll be another generation of young dickheads doing the same thing -- or something just as stupid and destructive, that a previous generation had already figured out you shouldn't do.
As for the exercise, it's not like I'm doing two hours of aerobics. I do targetted weight training on a bunch of different body parts, then there's the general balance and flexibility stuff, and then there's the yoga videos I've been getting off YouTube and trying to follow along with. You'd be surprised at how quickly the time passes. Especially if you're going at a (somewhat) leisurely pace.
I'm writing a big long response to this. Stay tuned.
Consider my curiosity piqued.
I have so much to say about this post I've had to open a Word document to write it.
" I suppose, what's even more special, is having a drama-free family, where all the adults are fully functioning, and everyone pretty-much gets along. " My sister was the non-functioning drama in the family, and she's spawned some kids who are only partially functioning. A psychologist I was seeing once told me that my sister's life would be chaos right up until it ended. She never told me what her basis for this diagnosis was, but my god she was right. We'd get respite periods where everything would be good for a few months or so, but a crisis would come where she needed drastic help, or money or something, and once again, we (my mother and I, rarely my father) would be forced to step in. And when we decided enough was enough, she's 40 etc she gave up her kids, and we refused to give her any more money (since she pissed her inheritance up the wall) and let herself become homeless. And then died too young, once again leaving us with even more emotional baggage. Only half of her kids (if we are lucky) will be properly functional either. Anyway. I wish I had had a fully functional sister. I wonder what that would have been like.
How do you find the energy to exercise for two hours after work? Mind you, I guess just eating cheese for dinner would free up a lot of time that is otherwise lost in cooking.
Sick of hearing Europeans whining about the weather. It's too fucking cold, they go on holiday in Spain or wherever and it's 35C and they think it's the bomb. Then when the hot weather hits their home towns, and it's only 27C or something, suddenly it's unendurable. Jeez, make up your minds. There are people on this planet who BUILD skyscrapers in 47C heat (and don't get me started on slavery in the Middle East) because they were born poor, and will likely die poor, and the only way they will be able to help their families escape that is to do physical fucking labour in heat that can - and often does - cause your muscles to meltdown and your kidneys to fail. But in England it's 27C and they are too hot and can't sleep. (mind you, last time I was there, there were a couple of days that were 37C and it was pretty fucking awful because nobody has air conditioning, and the idiots were telling us how lucky we were to be there when it was so warm, and I wanted to punch them in the face every time they said it because it was HOT and I hated it, but anyway, they just can't even make up their minds, argh... I hope none of my in-laws ever read this. Perhaps I should create a new alias for myself, haha)
You Queenslanders would be a lot more comfy in winter if you stopped living in wooden houses with holes in them you could drive a truck through without any heating. Get some heating woman! Put a reverse cycle a/c in your living room and be comfortable winter and summer.
I learnt about the Cold War from my mother and my history teacher. It was mostly over by the time I became aware of its existence, but I think I have written before here about how I believed in 1984 that a nuclear war was inevitable, that I would not live beyond 30 (and here I am, knocking at the door of 50 and I still can't believe it) and how I spent almost a year terrified of it.
I never believed in economic liberalism. I always knew it was against the worker. It's bullshit and everyone but the rich in power acknowledge it to be. I don't remember Japan looming over the Pacific, but rather the US. And now it's China. We all need to be learning Mandarin. Globalisation, in particular, never held ANY good for the working people of this country. Never.
Hard to imagine that none of my sister's kids will have a real idea of what our grandparents lived through, and their parents, and it's not until they reach our age that they will have any real understanding of what the older generations endured - and even then, it'll be like some impossible legend that can't be believed.
” What we call progress is really just trading one mountain of idiocy for another, and then another." Yep. You're not wrong. Another decade, two if we are lucky, before this ponzi scheme we call Western Civilisation dissolves into chaos, and if we are even more lucky, we will somehow be spared the worst of it.
Don't worry about the Rugby. Twenty years of dominance doesn't end because NSW won one series.
Some people obviously go off the rails because of circumstance, but then there's those that just seem hard wired to jump the tracks. It's hard, because no matter how big of a pain in the bum they become, you never stop loving them. Thankfully, I don't have that issue with my siblings, but I've seen it enough times in my extended family to understand. And I worry about the Terra. She has a wild impulsiveness and lack of self control that stands out against the other kids. I'm hoping she grows out of it … but I just dunno.
Don't you remember that period (most of the '90s), when Japanese corporations were buying up businesses and real-estate all over the shop? I didn't exactly have my finger on the pulse in those days, but if I remember correctly, it had something to do with them trying to stimulate their economy after the '91 crash, or something.
In any case, the kids who are coming up now won't even remember a time before economic liberalism. To them, the way things are now will be "just the way things have always been". Doing things any other way will be a hypothetical (and probably terrifying) unknown.
Of course, when that house of cards does come down, who knows what options will be put on the table.
As I said before, I'm exercising at a pretty leisurely pace. And at least half of it's yoga and stretching and crap. I like to go to bed early, get up early, and eat my main meal for breakfast. Also, cooking on the weekends and freezing meals saves a lot of time.
You might be right. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and run the heater all winter long. Not that it'll help when I need to leave the house. :-(
Also, you ever notice how our politicians love to talk about human rights violations in Iran, but never seem to get around to mentioning Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, The UAE, and Azerbaijan? Expect that to intensify, now that Iran's making serious efforts to get away from the petrodollar.
I watched that doco 'The Bomb' the other day with LittleSquib (who is not so little anymore). Has a great soundtrack by The Acid. Anyway, there were many scenes involving nuclear tests with animals which for some reason I've never seen or thought about and it was pretty heart breaking to see some poor dog chained up, trying to wrench itself away from the path of the blast
Suze, I hear you. I keep seeing these FB convos about the heatwave in Scotland (like it's 23C FFS!) and about how you should only take your dog out for a short time and people giving all these suggestions about keeping your dog cool like having a wet mat which you freeze and then they lay on it. It's nice that they care so much about their pooches but OMG, it's not that hot - some perspective, people!
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