July 31, 2004
Casualty
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Yesterday, at about 16h30, acknowledging that my fingers needed a break from an XHTML marathon, I peeled myself off my chair, tumbled out of the office and around to the Coles express around the corner for a bar of chocolate, with additional plans to get hold of some coffee a little further down the street. The cashier was one I haven't met before — a tall pretty Asian girl who was particularly cheerful — in contrast to my tired, wrung-out, look-what-the-cat-dragged-in disposure. I suppose this discrepancy provided the perfect setting for slightly odd conversations. Though in this instance, we began quite normally ...
"How are you doing?" she chirruped.
"Oh, not too bad." I tried to speak properly and not moan. It was difficult. It seemed as if I hadn't moved my mouth for several hours and my eyes had trouble focusing.
"Finished, for the day?"
"Just on a break."
"Still going then?"
"Yeah, I'll probably be at it for another couple of hours. Yourself?"
"I finish at 7 tonight, but I've only been here since 1 o'clock."
"That's not too bad. I've been in since about 9."
"People usually look really tired at this hour."
I smiled. Or tried to. "So you're used to zombies walking through the door at 4 o'clock?"
"Oh really?"
I blinked. What did she ...? Ahh, parse error. The exception handling kicked in and I said, "Yes, really." Politely muttering some pleasantry, I paid for the chocolate bar (something new, exotic and way too sweet), and we bade each other a good afternoon.
Posted by sniffles at 10:57 PM | Comments (3)
The words have marched around my head for days and I have ignored them. They make the loudest racket, keeping me away from sleep, robbing me of gentle awakenings. They rumble around and I have tried to pay them no attention because, for once, writing them out, releasing them from this prison of my mind would just open floodgates over which I have no control.
Occasionally, they burst into song. Sometimes songs I am familiar with, songs I have sung, sometimes songs I have never heard before. Maybe this is why I always keep music around me — to silence the cacophony in my head.
The train held those defeated by the day, those worn out by the effort of making meaning of their daily existence. We rolled south-east towards tomorrow's sunrise, numbed by the passing of time.
Posted by sniffles at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)So ... I've been pretty boring lately. Dad visited from overseas, so there was a lot of family stuff going on every other evening — and between that and work I've barely had the time (nor energy) to do anything apart from read and knit. (Yes, knitting is in fashion here at the moment, and I'm such a fashion victim ...)
I finally finished reading "The Work/Life Collision" the other day. There were two passages from its final chapter I was thinking of quoting: one being a summary of the direction Australia is heading, and one on the changing culture of motherhood due to the increasing number of women in the workforce. In light of the policy announcement by the Labor party today, I thought the latter would probably be more appropriate:
Motherhood is undergoing a paradigm shift with new work patterns. In practice it is shifting away from a model that placed the woman/mother at the centre of the domestic sphere. Now, mothers sit on unstable terrain. What should they be? What are they? The fact that there are so many ways, now, to be a mother has made society uncertain about mothers, and a profound anxiety frequently attaches to the business of being a mother.
This anxiety is expressed through criticism (and self-criticism) of many forms of mothering and mother's decisions — even where these decisions are clearly household and community decisions, with partners, employers, government all ghosts at the table, effectively shaping outcomes. This critique and the "mother wars" it provokes, is visited upon women in many ways, on many issues. This is most obviously evident in competing discourses about mothers — whether "proper" mothers, welfare mothers, working mothers, at-home mothers, super mothers. The self sacrificing ideal of traditional motherhood has given away to a much more diverse set of possibilities in practice, but the cultural hangover of the intensive, self-sacrificial mother means that most of these possibilities are lived out by women amidst an epidemic of guilt, persistent adjustment and readjustment, and internal and external conflict.
Among other indicators, we can read the costs of these outcomes in divorce statistics. Many of these experiences are privately felt. But some find social expression in community conflict and controversy — over child care (to use, or not to use), over paid work (to do, or not to do), and over voluntary work in the community ("I'm doing yours"). An important component of a new Work/Care regime is liberation from the cultures of intensive mothering, greater expectations of fathers, and greater valuation of care itself.*
While the policy seems promising and I applaud its ideals, I rather detest the fact that it is being marketed as having women as its specific target. After all, women's happiness and comfort also affect that of the men we live and work with.
* Paragraphs are inserted by me for easier online reading and do not exist in the original text.
Posted by sniffles at 10:00 PM | Comments (5)
Posted by sniffles at 03:31 PM | Comments (9)Telling you that I love you seems an inherently selfish act, so I said these words to you while you were sound asleep, to relieve myself of the explosive emotion that would otherwise destroy me from the inside — this immense, uncontrollable pressure trapped under my skin, of a love too big to be contained within my heart alone.
Perhaps my moment of weakness would somehow benefit you — drive away your doubts, bring you a certain pleasure — but that would have merely been a convenient side-effect. It is only for the sake of my selfish existence that I give in to the binding power of these words ...
The sky is very blue today; clouds passing by paint with splashes of indigo, in valiant attempts to obscure. The winter wind, like a young untamed child, tears wildly around every house, every tree, every other living thing.
I stand huddled in the doorway of a shop that has been closed for some time, waiting for the bus to appear around the corner, my left hand and my pen frozen into a single scrawling entity. The song echoing in my ears carries memories of another time, another place, another day. But today, I stand in the biting wind — first turning into the doorway for shelter, finally cramming my body up against the tarnished doorknob in poor attempt to keep out of the wind's way, blatantly ignoring the sign threatening "Danger - Keep Off - Authorised persons only" above the door, thinking about how much I want to tell you that I love you more than everything there is.
— "630 bus-stop @ Huntingdale station",
Sketches from Melbourne and Love (anonymous).
