The six highly annoying habits of new parents
So, you’ve got young kids. Congratulations!
But everyone around you already knows that you do. They can see it in your dazed, exhausted eyes, and hear it in the artificially optimistic tone you adopt when talking about how wonderful parenthood is.
You probably assume that all your single friends are happy for you, and maybe a little jealous. On one level, they probably are. But on another level – and I hate to break it to you – they find you approximately as annoying as a Billy Ray Cyrus CD. That’s scratched, and skips.
(Note – that’s a very 1990s reference, because most parents haven’t been in tune with pop culture for at least the best part of a decade, and probably haven’t had time to figure out how to get music from the internet.)
In this column, you will discover all of the things you do that annoy your childless friends, but which they haven’t felt comfortable raising with you. Some of them may be delighted not to be going through what you’re enduring, while others may want to have children but be unable to for various reasons, meaning that you’re inadvertently rubbing it in.
So here’s the definitive list of the stuff you’re doing that’s driving your childless friends bananas, and which you should probably stop. And when I say “bananas”, I mean not just the fruit, but like when your child smears banana everywhere. You know what I mean.
1) Don’t talk too much about your kids
Nobody is as interested in your children as you are, with the possible exception of the grandparents. Even your other friends who have kids only put up with you yammering incessantly about yours because it gives them license to do the exact same thing, and attempt to one-up you in the unspoken contest between all parents about which of their offspring is the best.
There’s nothing wrong with updating your friends on your children, of course. Like anyone who’s not a total narcissist, we like to hear what the people we care about have been up to. But there needs to be a time limit, particularly when this is generally a one-way conversation. When you start talking about feeding strategies and sleep difficulties and the tiny amount of developmental progress your child has made since the last time you updated us, we don’t really know what to say. So we just nod and say something like “Isn’t that lovely?”
It’s like when somebody tells you a dull story, belatedly realises and says “I guess you had to be there”, only you never belatedly realise. And we didn’t need simply to be there, but also be closely related to the child, and to have recently had our definition of “fascinating” rewired by sleeplessness and hormones.
Don’t get me wrong – you should talk about your kids. Of course you should. Just, and trust me on this, not for more than ten minutes per encounter. Oh, and to be clear – that’s not ten minutes per child.
2) Don’t bring the kids to unambiguously adult events
You’d be annoyed if someone turned up to your kid’s third birthday party drunk and started dirty-dancing on the hors d’oeuvre table, so the opposite degree of consideration needs to apply at events where that kind of behaviour would be appropriate.
In general, any evening function is a no, unless they’re young enough to sleep or old enough to play mindless video games and only speak when they’re spoken to for five seconds before going back to their game.
I recently went to an evening birthday party where most of the guests were parents, all of whom had ditched their kids for the night. As a result everyone had a brilliant time. If even one child had attended, all the parents would have felt a sudden rush of guilt and started leaving. Don’t be the parent that just can’t bear to dump little Timmy with their grandpa when the occasion demands.
3) Don’t let the kids take over your house
You know how when you’re on holidays at the beach, you come back and tread sand everywhere? That’s what children’s junk is like. That’s understandable. Kids have the attention spans of gnats, so they’re constantly tiring of one toy and bringing out another one without putting the other one away first.
Nevertheless, if you have your non-childless friends over, you need to tidy up. We don’t want to cower in between piles of children’s toys. Of course we understand that as soon as we leave, your children will empty several enormous buckets all over the living room floor, but please, while we visit, let’s just briefly pretend that there’s a semblance of control.
4) Don’t let them colonise your workplace either
Some colleagues decorate their workspaces with so much of their children’s paintings, photos and paraphernalia that it’s practically a museum display. It’s great that you love your kids so much that you want to be constantly reminded of their existence when’re sitting at your desk and look in any direction at all, but it’ll make people wonder whether you even want to be there.
The answer’s no, of course – we all understand that, and feel the same way – but in order to stay sane there’s kind of an ongoing agreement in the workplace to pretend that we’re all happy to be there. Turning your workspace into a shrine to your infants, if nothing else, reminds us of the outside world.
5) Don’t fail to control your kids in public
When your children misbehave, it’s not only annoying and noisy, but it makes us feel incredibly awkward. It’s not our place to tell one of your children to stop trying to assassinate the other. It’s very much yours.
Childless people understand there’s only so much you can do, and there’s no need to be some kind of brutal dictator because that’s embarrassing for everyone as well – but couldn’t you at least try to impose something resembling order? Otherwise we’ll have to say something and you’ll get all huffy and defensive.
6) Don’t put your kids on Facebook
It’s. Creepy. And it makes us look creepy if we accept their friend requests. Plus, when they’re teenagers and actually allowed to use the site, they won’t want all their parents’ pals in their friends feed, surely. Just post your inevitable, incessant stream of photos from your own account.
Childhood games forever
I have a new Australian sporting hero. It’s been a long time since Steve Waugh’s retirement, but finally, the former cricket captain’s steely-eyed place in my heart has been filled. When I grow up, I want to be Feliks Zemdegs, even though at 17, he’s 19 years younger than me.
On Sunday, Feliks won a gold medal – yes, gold, a colour largely unknown to, say, Aussie swimmers in recent years – at the World Rubik’s Cube Championship in Las Vegas. He solved the cube that was a feature of just about every birthday party during the 1980s in a mere 7.36 seconds. Go and watch the video, it’s awesome. And it’s not like it’ll take up much of your time.
If that wasn’t impressive enough, Feliks also went on to win gold in the 4x4 category. That doesn’t mean he somehow solved the cube while bumping up and down in an all-terrain vehicle – it turns out there are extra-hard cubes with 16 squares on each side, and even 5x5 ones known as “The Professor’s Cube”.
Now, I don’t know how Feliks got so amazing at solving Rubik’s Cubes in only a few short years. I’d rather believe that he’s prodigiously gifted than believe that he’s spent just about every waking moment of his adolescent life playing with plastic toys that most of the rest of us abandoned forever at around the time of the bicentenary. And I’d like to know whether he chose the Rubik’s Cube or whether, like the wands in Harry Potter, the Cube chose him.
Perhaps his parents had a Cube dangling above his crib from an early age, or perhaps he picked one up from a coffee table as a toddler and never put it down. Perhaps he took it up to impress girls, ultimately discovering that it only impressed those very few girls who were also into rapidly solving Rubik’s Cubes, if indeed there are any.
It doesn’t ultimately matter, because he’s the best in the world at his art, and which of us can say that?
If his time wasn’t so thoroughly impressive, I might even have wondered whether his win was largely a result of Rubik’s Cubes’ relative unpopularity nowadays. At first I wondered whether his victory might be akin to winning the World Championships of Solving 900,000 Piece Puzzles in that very few people could be bothered competing.
But no – the kid’s a pro. Well, I doubt he’s literally a pro, in that he can make a living merely at being good at Rubik’s Cubes. But it was extremely impressive nevertheless. I still remember spending literally hours trying to solve those things, and I never even came close.
With our cricket and rugby teams losing in recent weeks, and the Brits triumphing at Wimbledon and in the Tour to boot, we Aussies need to take our sporting icons where we can find them, and that means in the sport of Rubik’s Cube. If we have the world’s fastest competitor in a sport that seems more or less to involve organised finger-twiddling, then I say congratulations, Felix – and long may your fingers twiddle. In fact, so prodigious is his ability at using those dancing digits to spin the Rubik’s Cube exactly the way he wants it, I’d seriously consider drafting him into the remainder of the Ashes series.
I’d like to see the Australian Institute of Sport hire Feliks to set up some kind of Centre of Excellence in the sport of Rubik’s Cube, and perhaps other childhood leisure pursuits. Who knows – perhaps within Australia’s 23 million inhabitants there might also be lurking a potential gold medal winner in the sports of yo-yo, elastics or hula hoop.
And there are world championships in chess – so why not other board games like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit or Hungry Hungry Hippo? I was pretty nifty at Pictionary back in the day, I’ll have you know, and I still rate my skills at manufacturing plausible ridiculousness while playing the greatest board game of all, Absolute Balderdash. We could probably unearth a Dungeons & Dragons champ somewhere in the suburbs too, lurking well away from natural light.
Finding new sports to compete in needn’t be restricted to merely sedentary activities. Bullrush is another juvenile pursuit that should have been played to world championship level. It was always one of my favourite pastimes, and it should be developed to the level of a televised, professional pursuit. I’m sure that some of my former classmates are more worthy of being paid for their skills at ducking and weaving than, say, the NSW State of Origin team.
And I would have loved to keep playing handball after primary school. If handball courts around the country were like those public basketball courts they have all over America, I’d gladly head down there to try to hustle the locals in a scene reminiscent of White Men Can’t Jump. The tough-talking locals would assume that Pudgy Balding White Men Can’t Hit Power Shots, and I’d prove them very, very wrong.
Feliks Zemdegs, I salute you and I only wish there were more like you. Because the more gold medals and world championships in unusual activities there are, the greater Australia’s chances of winning some of them.
I have questions about skincare products
Last weekend, I made the mistake of walking into an upscale cosmetics shop. I got a little bit excited because it was some fancy brand from New York that had just opened here in Australia. Everyone at the lunch table on Sunday had heard of their products except me, and their collective enthusiasm gave me the strong impression that regular use of said cosmetics would definitely transform my skin, and probably my life
Skincare is important to me because, in the spirit of the oversharing that has by now become customary to regular readers of this column, I have very dry skin. I thought it was because I have Scottish skin, but on Googling “Scottish skin dry”, I’ve discovered that dry skin is more of an issue with Scottish terriers, which is a touch disconcerting.
But whether or not my ancestry is Scottish or Scottish terrier, the problem remains. So I’m always in the market for fabulous skincare products that make my skin – I was going to say “moist”, but that’s just icky, even though the stuff I use is called “moisturiser”. And “wet” doesn’t sound appropriate, either. So let’s just say that I wanted my skin to be not-dry, however that’s defined.
After lunch I went and checked out this new shop, feeling like Harry Potter did on first entering Diagon Alley, only with eczema on my skin instead of a lightning bolt. The staff wore lab coats, which I felt might have been somewhat overstating their qualifications, but they were certainly friendly, perhaps because there were very few customers.
One of the white-coated characters offered me a free consultation, and, as I almost always do when I hear the word “free”, I said yes. What followed was a bizarre process where she put a range of different creams and liquids on the back of my hand while painstakingly explaining to me what they did, none of which I understood.
Let me try and recreate the laboratory process. There was a cleanser first of all, whose purpose seemed fairly self-evident. Then there was a toner, which was a chemical-stenchy liquid whose purpose entirely eluded me – tone refers to shade, and it was clear, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how it would improve my muscle tone. To be honest, it smelt more like photocopier toner than anything else.
Then there was a separate tube of moisturiser and a scrub with little rough beads in it and something called Transformer. She explained that if I applied various combinations of these products throughout the week, my skin would be as smooth as a radio station that played nothing but Michael Bublé.
(Who, I must say, has excellent skin.)
There was only one problem with her expert prescription for my life. I simply can’t see myself spending ten minutes applying a complicated range of skincare products each morning. I’m more than happy to slap a bit of something or other on my cheeks while showering, but I don’t want to overthink things. Besides, what if I toned or moisturised before I cleansed by mistake, and the entire process fell to pieces like a US whistleblower’s asylum application.
I said I’d think about it, and went back to staring at the shelf, trying to make sense of it all. The twenty-cent piece-sized area of my hand where she had applied all the products felt great, admittedly, but strange. It was almost too pure, like it was the hand of an 11 year old choirboy.
The shop assistant’s chemistry experiments on my hand involved a mere fraction of the products on offer for men. The shelf also contained body cream and shaving cream and shaving oil and post shaving cream and eye cream and eye depuffifier (that’s not a word but it promised to do that!) and foot cream and anti-wrinkle cream which I can’t for the life of my imagine any man purchasing, but perhaps they do.
In the end, after reading every single label on every single product, I bought a small bottle of moisturiser to try on my dry skin and a small tube of face stuff that seemed like it had a bit of everything in it, including suncream. These two items alone cost – you know, I’m not even going to admit to the precise amount. They cost as much as a nice meal. For two.
To be fair, the moisturiser seems excellent – almost worth the money for someone with eczema. It’s like this magical de-Scotlandifying cream that gently placates my hyperirritable skin. I suspect I’m using too little of the face stuff to have properly tested it because I’m so freaked out by how much the stuff costs, but it may well be a decent product as well.
I walked out of the shop, thoroughly confused about skincare – and that was after exploring only the simplified blokes’ range, not the dozens of items available for women. I may decide somewhere during the process of using these supposedly magical products that I can’t live without them, but right now, the skincare stuff in the supermarket that costs $5 for a giant pump pack is looking pretty good value for money.
And perhaps I should just leave my skin well alone. After all, it’s my Scottish heritage. These moisturiser peddlers can take my money, but they cannot take my freedom. Even if it’s just the freedom to have, well, really dry skin.
'Minority Report' could soon be how the majority of us live
In the 2002 movie Minority Report, advertisements literally heckle the hero, John Anderton, as he walks along beside them. They know his name, his preferences, and altogether too much about him - a vision which the likes of Facebook and Google have already made excellent progress on translating into reality.
To further illustrate the horror of this, if you imagine it being Tom Cruise instead of the part he plays, the personalised advertising network might have popped up with ads for elevated shoes and super-high-bouncing couches, but known under no circumstances to show him a trailer for a Katie Holmes movie.
While our society hasn't quite managed holograms that accost you, I can only assume the blueprints are sitting on a workbench somewhere as we speak. Because every week or two, advertisers figure out some new way to colonise some hitherto peaceful space within our society with their incessant yammering. And the somewhat stalky behaviour exhibited in Minority Report has a parallel in the recent behaviour of the US department store Nordstrom, which admitted to monitoring its customers’ location within their stores by monitoring their Wifi connections.
The other day I was at a petrol station filling up my car. No sooner had I detached the pump from the bowser than a screen sprang to life above it, forcing me to endure non-stop jingles as I stood there resentfully. Apparently it wasn't enough for the petrol station to be slugging me the exorbitant price that petrol goes for nowadays, no - they had to snatch a few extra cents by annoying me as I stood there, consuming their product.
Advertising is on the walls of public toilets, on the screens in front of us as we catch flights (you’d think that paying thousands of dollars for airfares might remove the obligation to watch ads before inflight movies on long-haul flights, but no), and on our screens. The other day I used a movie app on my phone to figure out which film to watch, and found that I had to watch another 30 second ad before watching the movie ad for the movie!
It has colonised sport to the extent that now we speak of the Airline Wallabies playing an International Bank tour match in the Other Bank’s Stadium. The Socceroos aren’t formally known as the Australian football team, or anything like that - apparently they belong to the airline as well. These teams’ press releases and tickets and social media accounts use the sponsor’s name as well - there’s literally no way of avoiding the marketing. If you go to the ground, ads are painted all over the grass, are visible as distracting animations along the sideline and even display constantly alongside the action on the big screens. And of course the post-match interviews are conducted in front of those stupid, ugly, tedious backdrops littered with sponsors’ logos that have become as much a fixture in modern professional sport as betting and doping scandals
I presume before long, teams will drop any identity beyond their corporations’, and we’ll see different brand names competing on the field. Already, several Japanese baseball teams are simply owned by large brands, and represent them on the field.
I’ve no doubt that somewhere deep within the UN or the Trilateral Commission or whoever it is that really runs the world, some innovative advertising representative is negotiating to change our calendar so that each day, year and month is named after a brand instead of a number, as in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest where years are named after things like adult nappies. After all, one man’s dystopia is one marketing guru’s innovative brand exposure solution.
I still can’t quite believe it’s true, but the other day there was a report of German train commuters who had leaned their heads against the window glass hearing advertisements piped directly through their ears using their bones to conduct the sound. Imagine the horror of just leaning your head to get a few moments of zoning out on your tedious daily commute, only to have ads funnelled straight into your cerebral cortex.
The only hope is that instead of the onslaught of advertising influencing consumer sentiment in a favourable direction, it will instead create a backlash - of the sort of which Naked Communications generated this week when it tried to swap interviews with Kevin Rudd for advertorial.
Perhaps when we shop in the supermarket, we will begin choosing the brands that aren’t so rude as to interrupt us, or book our holidays with the airline that isn’t so arrogant as to insist that national teams be referred to exclusively with its name. Perhaps we will appreciate a sponsor who gives a brief, interesting presentation at the start of an sporting event, and doesn’t subsequently insist on their stupid ugly logo visually polluting the jerseys and the field and the scoreboard and the sidelines and the presentations and practically every frame of the contest we’re watching for a rare chance to relax in our otherwise frantic, overstimulated lives.
I for one will try to follow this mantra whenever I can. Although fear that my brain is becoming so addled by advertising that I literally can’t even remember the names of any other brands.
Why I do not most ardently admire and love Mr Darcy
We need to talk about Mr Darcy. That much was made abundantly clear by the news this week that a four metre-high statue of him emerging, dripping in that famous puffy white shirt, has been placed in the famous Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park.
Sarah Lyall, writing for the SMH, aptly summarised the rampant Darcyphilia that has followed that scene ever since the BBC’s adaptation in 1995: “Mr Darcy... caused serious chest palpitations among those viewers who were not dead, and remains perhaps the only time a man dressed in a damp, puffy white blouse has ever looked truly hot on screen.” Which I think is horribly unfair to Jerry Seinfeld, but I digress.
It's clear that many women still haven't gotten over the sheer sensual, ovary-melting delight of a sopping Colin Firth. The Daily Mail (the world’s foremost authority on the trivial) published a survey in January which found that Mark Darcy was women’s favourite fictional gentleman, a result only 95% percent undermined by the fact that the sadomasochistic Christian Grey from Fifty Shades was close behind.
Mr Darcy is hardly ideal – he’s a barely-reformed monster. But I have to concede defeat on one early point: Colin Firth. He’s intelligent, classy, passionate, with that fancy accent and smouldering eyes – look, I’d probably turn gay for him. (Col, if you’re Googling yourself, please contact me via DL headquarters, okay? And also, swoon).
This isn’t an article about whether Colin Firth is the ultimate guy, because he probably is. He was extraordinary in The King’s Speech, excellent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and wasn’t even all that bad in Bridget Jones’ Diary, which is really saying something.
So let’s look at Jane Austen’s Darcy, if we can somehow divorce the original character from Mr Firth and his fetching aqua-blouse. Elizabeth Bennet disliked him intensely at first, and she was correct. The novel’s title supposedly details both of their character flaws – but while Darcy’s certainly proud, Lizzie is far from prejudiced, because she bases her reaction on his behaviour on several occasions. Indeed, in the value system of her society, there should be a strong bias in favour of her liking him.
At the Netherfield ball, he refuses to dance with Lizzie, which is just rude – not to mention foolish in the extreme if we’re talking Jennifer Ehle – and then makes critical remarks about her appearance. That, is the behaviour of – to use language that would not be welcome at Longbourn, let alone Rosing’s – a pompous jerk. Honestly, that would be rude at a dodgy 21st party in 2013, let alone in the excessively formal, polite world of Regency England.
Then, he tries to prevent Bingley from marrying Jane, which is appalling. Jane is lovely; any notion of social status dividing them is absurd, as she is a gentleman’s daughter. Also, his suggestion that Mrs Bennet was embarrassing was hugely unfair. If any of us were judged by our parents’ capacity to make us squirm on occasion, who among us would ever marry? I bet if Mr Darcy Senior and his wife had survived to make it into the story, they would have been more unpleasant than he is.
Next, he proposes to Lizzie, but rudely. Again, a pompous jerk. If you can’t be nice when asking a woman to marry you, when can you?
Now, let’s look at the case for the defence – all the things that later endear him to Lizzie. He relents on Bingley – well, whoop de do. And he goes to considerable effort to sort out the nefarious Mr Wickham and making him marry Lydia. Yes, but he was partly responsible for creating the problem there, wasn’t he? As he acknowledges, he should have warned them.
And what’s more, he was in love with, and wanted to marry, Lizzie. Oh sure, he kept the Wickham stuff a secret – but that was a precursor to a big reveal, wasn’t it? ”Hey, you know that thing where your sister shamed your family? Sorted.” It’s kind of like how I fix women’s computers to impress them, only with fewer calls to tech support.
All the nice stuff he does for the Bennets, like being so gracious as to let them visit his stupid big estate, and paying off the other jerk in-law, was entirely motivated by self-interest. He surely hadn’t entirely abandoned hope of convincing Lizzie to marry him, so it would have been far more awkward for him to marry into the Bennet family himself if Lydia and Wickham hadn’t gotten married.
Seriously, name me one thing Mr Darcy does that’s genuinely kind and isn’t motivated by his love for Lizzie. She told him he was a twat, so he set about making himself less twatty, but honestly, so what? That’s what we all do when we want to impress someone – we pretend to be a better version of ourselves, at least for long enough to get them to sign on the bottom line.
Oh sure, he’s a nice brother too, but our families, and particularly our adoring younger siblings, are the easiest people to be kind to in the world. The real test of Mr Darcy’s character is what he does to a social inferior that he doesn’t have the hots for – and we see that when he first meets the Bennets.
So, to summarise in a thoroughly unprejudiced way, Mr Darcy can go jump in the lake. Again. Ideally never to emerge.
Although if what women truly dream of is meeting someone who is openly rude to them, tries to ruin their sister’s happiness and then is helpful and kind only a long time after they’ve professed to love them, then I guess men everywhere should be grateful that the bar has been set so low.
Can't sleep, I'm too busy watching cat videos
What’s more, the smartphone and tablet revolutions have taken made the internet almost ubiquitous. Now we can access those cat videos on the street, in bed, in the waiting room of the psychiatrist whom we’re seeing because of our obsession with cat videos – just about anywhere we can get phone access. The internet truly offers just about anything. anywhere – and the exciting thing is, we’re only at the beginning of this revolution. Before long, we won’t be watching cat videos – we’ll be the cat.
But one thing the internet has not given us is better sleep. This week, a prominent Australian researcher warned that the light generated by backlit smartphones and tablets can mess with our body clocks. Professor Shantha Rajaratnam of Monash University says that the light emitted by these screens can disrupt our body clocks. Apparently the effect is worst with the blue spectrum of light, which is precisely what these devices generate, and when it’s shining close to our faces, which is precisely how we hold our phones and tablets.
While I gather some of the research underpinning this conclusion is fresh, I’ve been hearing this theory about our bodies interpreting screens as daylight for years. And I haven’t yet been successful in acting on it, even though I often have difficulty getting to sleep.
When I can’t sleep, I get bored, so of course, to allay the boredom, I pick up the phone that’s charging by my bed and look at it. And it works brilliantly to quell my boredom, but quells what remaining sleepiness I have as well.
I’m sure most of us know the sensation of being physically tired and yet mentally alert from staring at a screen too long. That tension headache that feels like a vice is being applied to your forehead, the sense of pressure building up behind our eyes, the painful dryness of your eyeballs, and that haggard feeling while your mind keeps racing. You know it’s unhealthy, but it’s difficult to stop. That’s precisely what it feels like after I’ve spent hours reading my phone screen – and it’s worst of all in an otherwise darkened room.
Facebook can become tedious – when you’re lying there late at night, you’re predominantly looking at posts by friends holidaying overseas – but Twitter provides a constant stream of information, much of it fascinating. After midnight Australian time, Twitter is busy in the US and UK, and news stories flit across the feed, tempting me to read them and find out what’s happening. Or I’ll discover something funny, and then that’s me comprehensively distracted, potentially for hours.
One of the biggest traps when I can’t sleep is, strangely enough, Wikipedia. I’ll often look at something because there’s a news story on Twitter that makes me want to know more about another country’s history, or some scientific phenomenon, or some forgotten piece of pop culture, and then I’ll keep clicking on links within Wikipedia articles in a long chain, until I’m looking at something completely different. I’m scared that some day, I’ll start doing this, and literally won’t be able to stop.
I’ve just looked through the history on my phone’s Wikipedia app, and in the last 48 hours, my Wiki reading has included the following: Arthur Boyd, the Phantom Zone prison dimension in the Superman comics, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Les Misérables, lactose intolerance, former South African President P.W. Botha, the humourist Danny Wallace, poker, Ecuador, the technical definition of a patent and Sonny Bono’s time as the Mayor of Palm Springs.
Approximately 0% of these topics have any practical use, and probably fuel some fairly surreal dreams when I am finally able to sleep. For all I know, I may well have dreamed of a lactose-intolerant Tori Amos being trapped forever in the Phantom Zone.
And yes, I am honestly saying that these research missions have been preventing me from sleeping, even though I concede that this activity would have made the average person drift off in no time. My threshold for entertainment when on an insomniac Wiki-binge is astonishingly low. I once spent a solid hour reading the fake history of the various disputes within WWE (“kayfabe”, I now know it’s called”), which is a form of quasi-entertainment in which I have absolutely no interest during daylight hours.
Reading about how The Rock was good, and then went faux-bad (and in fact the story is far more complex than that) is, objectively, not a better use of my time than sleeping. And yet it’s what I do, time and time again.
If wrestling wasn’t distracting enough, emails drift in around the clock – and my phone is not yet smart enough to distinguish between the ones that matter and the ones that are a 3am mailout from some stupid videogame website to which I gave my email address 8 years ago. I always find, for some inexplicable reason, that I need to check.
Then there’s the chatting. Every month, I seem to spend more time typing text messages to people who via Skype or Google Chat (I refuse to call it “Hangouts”, despite their recent rebranding) or Whatsapp or LINE or Facebook Messenger or some other newfangled app. The current phase of internet evolution seems designed to rip away those last few remaining shreds of the ability to concentrate that we have left by making it easy for people to interrupt us.
Nowadays, my phone barely even rings anymore. It’s probably not even accurate to call it a phone anymore, when it’s primarily a handheld computer. Star Trek’s label of ‘communicator’ is probably more appropriate. And ‘distractor’ is more accurate still.
Smartphones are a wonderful antidote to boredom on the bus, or waiting at an airport, or indeed whenever you find yourself at a loss for something to do. But they’re also a powerful antidote to sleep. If I want to sleep properly, what I will have will have to risk, ultimately, is a tedious period of lying there with my eyes closed before I can finally manage to sleep. And I’ll have to embrace the notion that doing this is healthier than distracting myself with a gadget.
Somehow I’ll have to convince myself that checking my email, or reading the latest tweets from Egypt, or replying to some random message from a friend in a different timezone, can wait until the morning. And if I can’t do that, then I will simply have to banish my phone to another room when I need to sleep.
Julia Gillard's moving experience
This week, spare a thought for the political staffers in Canberra who have been subjected to sudden, dramatic change. Spare a thought for the dozens of Members of Parliament who will be doing the same thing after the forthcoming election, whenever it is. And spare a thought for Julia Gillard, Tim Mathieson and the now-deposed First Cavoodle, Reuben. All of them will be spending the next few weeks and months navigating through one of the most unpleasant, stressful experiences any human will ever have to ensure.
I’m not talking about losing one’s job, as troubling as that must be – I’m talking about moving house. I honestly can’t think of a more cruel humiliation to make somebody endure after what Julia Gillard has just been through than forcing her to move, more or less immediately, out of her formal residence – undoubtedly the most fancy digs she will ever inhabit.
The loss of one’s job is sudden and painful, but moving is a slow, agonising grind, a tedious, miserable, seemingly endless process of packing up every single possession you have, lugging it around, and then unpacking it again. While the sympathy her supporters may feel might perhaps be tempered by the acknowledgement that she forced Kevin Rudd to do exactly the same thing three years ago, the weeks ahead will undoubtedly be enormously challenging for her.
I hope the Prime Ministerial budget extends to movers who will take care of everything, and that she didn’t have many personal effects in the Lodge to begin with. Can you imagine anything more soul-destroying than having to box up all the official presents you’d been given, to carefully wrap the framed photos of your days of triumph (although perhaps not the ones from 2007), and to lug them all out to the dodgy van you’ve borrowed from your mate?
While this is going on at home, at the same time, she will have to change offices in Parliament House, and move her treasured Western Bulldogs paraphernalia back into a regular backbencher’s suite. And then in a few weeks, she’ll have to box all of it up as well, as she leaves politics. And then after the election she’ll be packing up her electorate office. A series of painful series of moves awaits our first female former Prime Minister.
I’m in a position to sympathise with the protracted form of torment that Julia Gillard and her parliamentary supporters and staff will undergo in the weeks to come, because I have been moving this week, and it’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on my most reviled enemy. For various boring reasons, I’ve moved house at least once a year, on average, since 1997, and if I have learned one thing from life, it is this: nobody should ever move house.
Well, perhaps we should move out of the family home at some point after reaching adulthood for reasons of practicality, but I even doubt the wisdom of that, to some degree. Because, in short, it is relentlessly awful.
For me, moving goes like this. First I take all my major items of furniture and all the stuff I use everyday – my favourite clothes, my computer, my TV, my stereo. That’s quick, easy and satisfying, and generally takes only a few hours. Then I set it all up in the new place, and sit back, usually watching a few TV programmes just to “test” whether it “works”.
Sure, the books are a pain, and moving the fragile kitchen stuff is always a bit of a hassle – but most of it is fairly straightforward. After I’ve done that, I’m perfectly happy, and congratulate myself on having created a lovely new environment in which to live.
But then I have to go back, reluctantly, to the old place and contront the utter chaos that remains. Unfortunately, over the years, I have accumulated a literal truckload of junk. Old gadgets that don’t quite work but seem too valuable to throw out, mementos from school and uni, knick knacks, presents that never really found a place in my life but seem callous to discard, and above all, mail that never seemed of any importance. Boxes and boxes of it, unsorted. And then here are the random lamps and old printers and soccer balls and bedlinen and DVDs and – just, stuff. It takes me hours and hours to move all of this stuff, and when I’m done, my new abode is crammed wall to wall with, well, crap.
In short, if anyone ever wants to try another adaptation of Stig of the Dump, you’re most welcome to film in my apartment.
I know I should go through it all, and file, and sort, and above all, throw away – but really, who has the time? I try and spend my weekends relaxing, not doing agonising physical labour. Besides, I did a major purge only last November, and despite this, I still seem have retained roughly half a tonne of stuff that I clearly have absolutely no need of.
I know this, because I’ve just moved approximately a whole uteload of stuff that I literally never touched in the 12 intervening months. It just sat there, reproaching me, and I never even unpacked the boxes. And yet I don’t dare to consign them straight to the tip, because somewhere in there will be an exercise book I wrote stories in when I was in Year Two, and the school magazine I worked on, and above all, lots of photos of family members and friends who are no longer with me. They are worth keeping, I think. At least, I hope.
If I’ve accumulated all of this junk during a relatively short, uneventful life, I can only imagine how much paraphernalia builds up when you’re Prime Minister – and how psychologically troubling every single memento must be when you are forced from office. Perhaps in time, Julia Gillard will come to view her time in the Lodge fondly, but right now, I have no idea how hard it might be to open any of the boxes the movers will soon deposit in that oft-discussed house in Altona.
Right now, I would gladly sign any undertaking never to move again, even if it means someday cramming a family into my tiny apartment. Any hypothetical kids I may have can sleep in loft beds in the living room. And if I am ever Prime Minister, I solemnly undertake never to move a single possession into The Lodge, just because I couldn’t stand the psychological agony of having to move it all out again.
Why do men wear ties?
Julia Gillard’s comments at the launch of her Women for Gillard initiative have put the spotlight on men in blue ties. And it’s certainly true that blokes who haunt corridors of power tend to disproportionately favour baby-blue as a tie colour. Tony Abbott is notably fond of blue ties, having worn a stripey one on the cover of his book Battlelines which I found curiously reminiscent of his old school tie from St Ignatius’ College, Riverview. He wore it again at a campaign debate in 2010.
Now, I must now confess that there’s a reason I was able to recognise a Riverview tie, and that’s because I went to a fancy private school myself, and we used to debate against boys in those stripey blue-and-white ties. Who, due to the superiority of Jesuit rhetorical education, would always win.
I do feel a bit of a bind about the “old school tie” thing, because while I recognise the problematic nature of the patriarchy, and realise that my schooling perpetrated a powerful boy’s club, I really enjoyed school and very much value my network of old school friends. I was fortunate enough to meet some extraordinary people during those years, and I’m delighted that I can stay in touch with them. And I have to concede that what this means is that I’m quite attached to my old school tie – figuratively, not literally, since my old school ties were made of black polyester and looked pretty ratty even when brand new.
That said, I always wished my school had been co-educational, and I still think that gender divisions in education are an anachronism that inhibits social progress and gender equality (but that’s a topic for another column). If the scourge of single-sex education had been blasted into the history books where it belongs, then the metaphor of the “old school tie” would also be destroyed, and so it should be.
And I would hope that everyone was lucky enough to leave school with a network of close, like-minded friends with whom they stay in touch, regardless of which school they went to. But I recognise that my good fortune in getting into my high school plugged me into a network from which I benefit to this day.
“Old school ties” are such a potent symbol, though, because in our society, powerful men almost always wear neckties. Julia Gillard’s point this week was that if she was removed from the political process, we’d be back to being run by a bunch of blokes in ties: ironically, and perhaps entirely deliberately, that argument holds whether she were replaced as Prime Minister by Tony Abbott or Kevin Rudd.
Now, there’s nothing stopping women wearing blue ties themselves, of course, and admittedly, they can sometimes look rather elegant doing so. But on the whole, women have been too sensible to make neckties a part of their everyday wardrobe.
And this brings me to a question that first confounded me at the start of Year 7, when it became clear that I would have to wear a tie every day for the next six years of high school: why wear ties in the first place? Which sadist made the rule that ties looked smarter and more ‘proper’ than open necks?
Everyday male dress has no other purely ornamental elements, unless you count the cummerbund, and I absolutely refuse to do so. And yet, for some reason, blokes persist in fastening bits of coloured cloth around our necks in the morning – and for some reason, we have been coerced into believing that we look more serious and formal when we’ve done so, rather than less, which is in fact the case.
The necktie tradition is about as practical as making men in high-powered jobs tie a brightly-coloured bandana around their head in preparation for a big, serious meeting – and Peter FitzSimons has already helpfully demonstrated exactly what that would look like.
(Okay, so lots of lawyers still wear white wigs, but honestly – if it wasn’t for the law of contempt of court, people in the dock would openly snigger at them.)
Imagine if every man who held a serious corporate job wore a national flags tied around their neck like a football fan, or Cub Scout scarves fastened with woggles, or beach towels. They’d look thoroughly ridiculous. Why, then, have we convinced ourselves that neckties in an elongated diamond shape looks professional?
I asked this question the other day, and a woman replied that they’re like a giant arrow pointing down below our waist. That’s the most plausible explanation I’ve heard.
Then there’s the bow-tie, which looks and is treated as being far more frivolous than the tie, but is actually less silly when you think about it, because at least it doesn’t flap around and get in your way. You can’t accidentally tip a bow tie in a bowl of laksa, for example, which happened to me during my brief corporate career.
The tie has its origins in soldiers’ neckwear, and the modern form dates back to a fashion that began with Croatian mercenaries, and was picked up by the French monarchy in the form of the cravat – a word which, interestingly, has its origins in ‘Croat’. But that’s no justification – based on this image from Wikipedia, Croatian mercenaries also got around in knee-high boots and cloaks that made them look like Little Red Riding Hood, and we don’t see merchant bankers donning either of those things today.
So, neckties are a throwback to military days – which is surely all the more reason to discard the custom of wearing them. Really, we need to move on from ties. They only get in the way, and is it really so bad for men to have their shirt buttons visible?
Instead, men who feel the need for colourful ornamentation should do what I myself have begun doing in recent years in an attempt to be just that little bit more rock ‘n roll in my day-to-day life, and wear brightly coloured boxer shorts.
I’m sorry, that might be too much information. But a world where powerful men wear undies with cartoon superheroes on them would, in my view, be a far more civilised and sophisticated one than the one we live in now, where if a man wants to be taken seriously, he has to tie a garish piece of silk around his neck.
The Joy of Unclehood
Some of my friends had children early, a development that was generally greeted by the rest of us with bemused pity. My fellow childless friends and I would visit homes inundated by kiddie knick-knacks, and then, as we headed home, wonder how on earth they coped with the avalanche of Duplo and dirty nappies, grateful to be retreating back into self-absorbed normality.
When you're still somewhat young yourself, the prospect of having to sacrifice sleep and socialising to provide for a creature that at first can't even talk and then has a vocabulary largely limited to discussing Peppa Pig seems roughly equivalent to being under house arrest, only with less free time for watching grown-up TV.
But then at a certain point, you realise that having children around might not be the most hideous thing imaginable, and then your friends start having them, and you start thinking that it might in fact be manageable, seeing as you're much more competent than your friends and your own children would be considerably more delightful than theirs.
Finally – and this is the stage in which I've found myself lately – it becomes a case of peer pressure, and it's like being the last person to get a Game Boy, except now it's an actual boy, and while they're not nearly as good at playing Tetris, they still seem kind of fun.
But for some of us – the lucky ones, in my view – there is a halfway house between carefree irresponsibility, and the full-time burden of parenthood. And that is being an uncle or an aunt.
I remember the day my nephew was born, a little over three years ago, with great fondness. But the day that really sticks with me is the first day I was left alone with him, a few months after that. His mum had to run off to do some urgent task or other, and I had no clue what I was supposed to do, and was absolutely terrified that I'd drop him, or somehow cause lasting psychological damage. Then, when he immediately began crying, I somehow figured out that the task was simply to occupy him, so I just wandered around the room, showing him things to distract him until he cried, at which point I moved on to show him something else. It worked, more or less – even though I kept showing him the same three or four pictures, fortunately he seemed not to remember that he'd seen them before. I felt like a childcare virtuoso.
As an uncle, I've experienced a lot of the fun of playing games, and reading stories, and sneakily feeding while distracting, and coaxing to sleep, and hanging out with young kids. And I've had to cop very little of the sleep deprivation and hideous clean-ups involved in parenthood. What's more, I've rarely had to do it for more than a few hours at a time, which has tended to suit me just fine. These experiences have given me confidence that I could cope with the full-time gig if I had to, but made me appreciate my freedom as well.
I was lucky to have an abundance of uncles and aunts growing up – seven, to be precise, plus their partners on top of that, and they were lovely to my brother and me. Being babysat by one of them was always a special treat, especially since they never quite understood our parents' strict television-watching rules. I'm hoping to carry on that tradition of not applying parental discipline for many years to come.
In fact, one thing I particularly like about unclehood is that it's almost expected that you'll be annoying in various ways, like when I got my nephew a drum kit for his birthday this year. He loved it, and his parents seemed to think it was funny – that might wear off as I keep giving him an upgraded, louder version every few years.
Recently I introduced him to Angry Birds, which is his major obsession at the moment. I've argued that it's a superior pastime to passively watching movies for a child, and it's teaching him geometry. Really, though, I just like being able to play Angry Birds in the middle of family occasions, and looking like I'm being a nice uncle who's spending time with his nephew.
I have a niece now as well. She's only a few months old, and I've been reminded that just having her hold my index finger in her hand while she lies on her back and smiles is a wonderful source of satisfaction, insofar as it means she isn't crying. I'm looking forward to introducing her to video games and noisy toys a few years hence as well.
Unclehood and aunthood aren't statuses we choose, of course. If your sibling is in a stable relationship where children are possible, anything you do to encourage them to reproduce will inevitably seem weird and/or creepy – besides, dropping unsubtle hints about storks is the kind of thing parents do in excessively familiar wedding speeches. Just sit back and hope it happens, and then you'll be in for a treat. You'll finally get to win the argument about which kid has the more rock'n'roll lifestyle, while simultaneously getting to experience what's essentially an edited highlights reel of parenting.
Whether or not you ever get to have children of your own, the uncle/aunt relationship offers maximum emotional upside with very little downside. And if occasionally you wonder what it'd be like to have someone calling you mummy or daddy and clinging to you as though their very life depended on it, I've found that any such pangs can rapidly and effectively be salved when you leave your sibling to it and take off for a night out.
Unclehood might be the closest I ever come to parenthood – it's impossible to know. But I am sure of one thing, which is that I can't imagine life without it. It's a wonderful feeling every single time my nephew runs up to give me a big hug hello, and I'm willing to admit that it can also be wonderful sometimes when, after my arms are exhausted from throwing him up in the air and catching him, I can simply hand him back to his parents.
What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing
Once upon a time, a bachelor by the name of Bertram Wooster contributed a piece on ‘What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing’ to a periodical known as Milady’s Boudoir. He was the narrator of PG Wodehouse’s legendary Jeeves stories, and generally known for a series of extravagant sartorial disasters that were only put to rights when Jeeves intervened and got rid of, for instance, his white mess jacket with brass buttons.
I have neither butler nor mess jacket, but I share his interest in questions of wardrobe.
Fashion can be a challenge for us blokes. But I have always believed that with a minimum of effort and expense, we can nevertheless always look – well, perhaps not stylish, but kind of okay. And if you’d like to look kind of okay, or have a gentleman friend in your life who might benefit from appearing less ridiculous, then these are the style tips for you.
No brand names
You can’t always avoid brand names. But when you can, do – or at least try to keep them subtle. The problem with brand names is that they file you into one of three categories, all of which are, in my view, unpleasant.
Let’s start with the early adopters. If you, unlike me, have some fashion gold-panning ability that lets you identify the Next Big Thing, and consequently discover the achingly cool new jeans brand that’s big in Japan but no-one knows about here, then you’ll look like you’re trying to impress people. Admittedly, you may actually impress them, but when you wear the distressed denim with the purple safety pin jammed into them instead of a brand label (I’m making this up, but is it any stranger than Ksubi’s Liquid Paper logo?), you make people like me think you deliberately want us to ask where you got them. I refuse to do this.
The second option with brand names is that you give the impression of conforming with everyone else and being unable to think for yourself. I remember when every second guy was wearing Mambo or Okanuis (this is going back a bit) or Ben Sherman or Diesel – it got terribly predictable, and made them look like sheep.
And the third option is that you stick with a brand name once the cool kids have decided that it’s incredibly lame. I can illustrate the horror of this outcome with a simple scenario: imagine being the last man alive who wears Ed Hardy.
But if your clothes have no brands, then they never go out of style. Admittedly they never go into style either, but that’s a trade-off I’ll gladly take.
Conservatism is best
You're aiming for “timeless classic” here. A well-made pair of blue jeans or a charcoal woollen sweater is always going to look good, regardless of prevailing fashion. Whereas if you went along with the "distressed jeans" fad, what you'd have now is a pair of jeans with holes in them that you're now too embarrassed to wear – or should be.
Note that when I say "conservative", I don't mean "suitable for wearing at a golf club dinner". So, no boat shoes unless you're actually on a boat. And even then I'd question them, frankly.
Solid, dark colours
My wardrobe is predominantly black, navy, dark grey and occasionally brown, sometimes with a white or light blue shirt. That’s about it. Well, I do have one fluorescent orange t-shirt that I bought in a moment of madness, but I try not to wear it out of the house.
With this palette, I always dress boringly and predictably, but I rarely look ridiculous. A black long-sleeved cotton shirt and a nice pair of jeans looks absolutely fine in just about any social scenario – you’ll never feel overdressed, or excessively underdressed. Plus, wearing black makes you look a mildly like an arts administrator, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Indifference beats excessive effort
I’m the first to doff my cap to a genuinely well-dressed fellow. I find myself doing so regularly when I visit Melbourne, a town whose menfolk somehow operate on a higher sartorial plane. In Melbourne, you will often see fellows sporting a gorgeous vintage shirt set off by the perfect waistcoat, perhaps coupled with a lovely woollen tie. Every second barman in the Victorian capital has hair Brylcreemed with dazzling precision and a painstakingly waxed moustache.
I appreciate such elegance, but then I imagine the sartorialist spending hours browsing through vintage stores and then standing at home in front of his mirror each morning, trying different combinations, and then spending forever in the bathroom, pruning his facial hair with the excessive care that OCD-fuelled retirees devote to topiary. And I think – surely it’s not worth the effort. Dressing well consumes time I’d rather devote to things I care more about. Admittedly, they include Game of Thrones and trying to finish Angry Birds Space with my nephew. But I still don’t think looking amazing is worth the enormous effort required.
Don’t pay too much
I am happy to waste large sums on the things I love, like holidays and gadgets, but because clothes don’t matter much to me, I resent paying a lot of money for them. This is why my favourite places to buy clothes are the ultra-cheap category killers like Uniqlo, Muji and H&M, which sell reliable, unbranded basics at cheap prices.
None of these chains have come to Australia yet – and yes, I know this makes me seem like a massive tosser. (As I say, I shell out for travel, not clothes.) But let me put it in these terms: imagine an IKEA for clothing.
There’s an obvious problem with all this, and that’s the recent revelations about garment factories in Bangladesh. I’m willing to pay more to ensure workers are treated well. But I’m not willing to pay a lot more for fancy brands. I’ve always felt that no articles of clothing, except perhaps a suit, should cost three figures. They just aren’t worth that much to me. Sure, I’ve occasionally worn properly tailored shirts and that kind of thing, and I can appreciate the quality and craftsmanship and the superior materials – but i’m too cheap to shell out for them. And on the rare occasions I’ve bought an expensive article of clothing, I only stress about whether it was going to get stained or damaged in the laundry.
The exception that proves the rule
Last year, I went to Hawaii, and the tropical heat got to my head, so I found myself purchasing a wide assortment of absurdly bright Hawaiian shirts. Admittedly, they were only $20 or so apiece (despite being made locally) – which some may nevertheless view as overpriced given their appearance. But I had enormous fun appalling my colleagues and friends with their extreme garishness. It was the perfect way to make them appreciate the reliable dullness of my usual wardrobe.
In conclusion
If you follow my advice and stick to the kind of conservative, boring and cheap clothes I wear, then you could look conservative, boring and cheap too!
But here’s the great thing. Virtually nobody ever comments unfavourably on my wardrobe, because it’s just too dull to be noteworthy. And if they do, I just ask them how much their outfit cost and roll my eyes. Because the bottom line is this: if you put considerable time and money into your wardrobe, then you will undoubtedly end up someday wearing a sarong like David Beckham. And that means I win.
Green means go, red means stop
You know what the greatest social event of all time is? A traffic light party.
I’d better qualify that, hadn’t I? I mean the greatest social event of all time for single people. Who are the only people that matter at social events, in my opinion – couples only go to those things to lord it over everyone else, as far as I can tell. And then the joke’s on them, because then they tend to get pregnant and never socialise again except for those nightmarish but mercifully short toddler birthday parties they insist on throwing. Although I’ve noticed I don’t get invited to so many of those since I wrote about them for Daily Life. Funny, that.
Anyway, traffic light parties are amazing for one simple reason: you can tell who’s single.
Let me make another quick qualification: anybody who attends a traffic light party in orange deserves to be ejected instantly. Honestly, it’s even lamer than setting your Facebook relationship status to “It’s complicated”. Nobody cares about your tedious psychodramas. Either you’re up for it or you aren’t, and the last thing anybody needs to hear about is why you’re wearing orange because your boyfriend/girlfriend is putting you through hell and why are you even here anyway? Go home and sob on the sofa.
Or it means you’re a jerk who’s revelling in putting someone else through the wringer. Either way, nobody cares or likes you. So there.
So, a traffic light party with only green and red colours would be the greatest social event of all time. Well, there’s a problem there too, because green looks a great deal less attractive than red, so there’s a danger you’ll spend the entire event yearning for forbidden fruit. And why are you even at a traffic light party if you’re in a relationship, anyway? Oh yes, that’s right – smugness.
Perhaps the ultimate traffic light party needs an extra colour, to even up the score against the hot red-wearers. Perhaps it needs the option to wear black if you’re utterly desperate. After all, when traffic lights are broken, they go black, so why can’t we?
Or perhaps you could also wear white if you’re one of those unusual people who really isn’t into dating or sex much and is perfectly happy being single. That’d be both a challenge, and a subtle hint to others not to waste their time.
Or perhaps you could wear yellow if you have a fetish where you – no, that’s disgusting, let’s stop there. Red, green and black are the only acceptable colours at the traffic light party I’m definitely holding and to which you should totally come.
Traffic light parties are great because... okay, they’re not actually great. They’re usually conducted in one’s early 20s and therefore embarrassing and so everyone gets too drunk and it’s ultimately entirely horrible.
But there’s a broader point here. We badly need a system for ascertaining whether people we meet are in relationships. It used to be easy,when people wore wedding and engagement rings, and tended not to cohabit before getting engaged. Sure, just about every other aspect of those systems for relationships were demonstrably inferior to what we have today – but when there’s a ring on it, you know not to waste your time. Or, I suppose, to go for it, if infidelity is your thing – I’m trying not to be judgemental here.
Otherwise, what happens at parties is this. We (and I really mean “I”, but I’m trying to embarrass myself less than usual when I write about this stuff) approach people who seem attractive, try chatting to them, but not in a way that explicitly counts as flirting in case they happen to be in relationships. We never go right out and ask whether they’re single, because that’s embarrassing too; so instead we just converse about any old thing in the hope that they’ll mention a girlfriend or boyfriend if they have one. Nor will they go right out and say “I’m single”, because that’s embarrassing too. Later on, if you’re really lucky, you can ask a mutual friend if they’re available. Wouldn’t it be better if they had a ring?
Over the years, I’ve – sorry, we’ve – okay... I’ve developed an almost uncanny ability to hone in on the unavailable women at a party. Honestly – it’s almost as though I have extra-sensory perception – or perhaps it’s just that women suddenly invent imaginary boyfriends if they suspect I might be interested? On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour – an hour – talking to women before they subtly mentioned their husband, or child, or on occasion, both. Admittedly some of these people have subsequently become good friends, and that’s fine, and perhaps I wouldn’t have even gotten talking to them if I’d known they were unavailable, and instead opted for talking to single women who ultimately rejected me, and it’s better off that I’ve gained wonderful friends through this process.
But couldn’t the system be a bit less ambiguous?
I don’t give Facebook credit for much besides excellence in ongoing privacy abrogation, but they did try to sort this out in their early days. You can set your status to single / married / engaged / in a relationship or the self-involved “it’s complicated”. There’s a “widowed” too, distressingly. But here’s the thing – single people don’t use the system. Because it’s embarrassing to admit to being needy, and we’d like to pretend that we have all sorts of intrigues going on when really we don’t.
And that’s why traffic light parties are a good idea – because they encourage honestly, wrapped up in the idea that it’s all in good fun because it’s fancy dress. Of course it’s not fun, by the way. If you’ve been single for a while, going out and trying to meet people becomes a matter of steely single-mindedness.
So it’s in this spirit that I welcome the news that Prague is setting up special train carriages for single people. It means you can have a traffic light party on the way to work, every single day! And it’d be so easy to start a conversation – in Australia, anyway. You could just talk about how late the train was, and how horrible the carriage was. Simple!
Actually, the idea’s creepy, isn’t it? When I commute, I just want to listen to music and read. And besides, Australians don’t tend to chat up random strangers. And it may, of course, lead to the sexual harassment that some Japanese cities have introduced special women-only carriages to prevent. Because a significant proportion of men are terrible, and so forth.
Probably traffic light parties are terrible as well, and I’m just forgetting because I haven’t been to one in about a decade and a half. They certainly seem terrible the more I think about them. And they don’t account for same-sex relationships either, which probably need a whole separate colour scheme. I got asked if I was gay at a party on Saturday night, and there I was thinking my poor dress sense made the answer perfectly clear.
We aren’t likely to broaden the system of ring-wearing to anyone in a relationship – which would make life easier (and besides, gay marriage seems to be some years away, Kevin Rudd’s recent conversion notwithstanding) – so instead we’re stuck with the system society has devised: where you simply have to talk to people at great length and hope they’ll mention a significant other, if they have one.
But let me make one simple request of everybody who, at a traffic light party, would be wearing wear red. If you get talking to someone at a party, please find a way to mention your partner within the first five minutes. Work it seamlessly into the conversation with something like “That reminds me of something my partner was saying the other day”, or “I must tell my partner about that, s/he will be fascinated”.
It’s kindest to be subtle, but even “By the way, I’m seeing someone, so there’s no point you chatting me up” will be appreciated. Even “Would you please just give up?” ultimately saves time.
There’s a reason traffic lights were introduced in our busiest streets: they make everything run more efficiently and safely. I only wish the same were true of the fraught process of trying to chat people up.
Sorry; I meant to write “we can only wish”. Definitely “we”.
My life in the Mushroom Kingdom
I remember the first time I saw the videogame Super Mario Bros. It was at the house of two friends from primary school, twins, who lived right next to North Sydney Leisure Centre, where I went for after-school care. Sometimes I’d duck into their house for an hour or two (I’ve no recollection of whether I was allowed to do this) and sit on their sofa and watch agog while they made a chubby little plumber eat mushrooms of dubious toxology, jump on reprobate turtles and leap balletically atop flagpoles as he attempted to rescue a princess from a spiky, bad-tempered dino-lizard. Sometimes they even let me have a go. I felt the way I imagine our ancestors felt the first time they gathered around a fire.
And there was fire in the game, too, or at least fireballs if you ate one of the white flowers – something I could never get to work in real life.
When you think about it, the world of Super Mario and Luigi (the Doug Pitt of videogame plumbers), makes little to no sense. The odd creatures that populate Nintendo auteur Shigeru Miyamoto’s world seem to have been assembled either at randomly, or courtesy of acid consumed in a reptile park.
And yet I was transfixed by the athletic little plumber. Imagine being able to play something that amazing in your own home, I thought. You’d never get anything else done – and reading books would certainly go out the window – but on the bright side, the Mushroom Kingdom would have its monarch restored, at least until Bowser came and kidnapped her again in an endless succession of sequels that has made Mario the highest-selling videogame franchise of all time.
You’d think that she might have made better security arrangements in the interim – after all, the Mushroom Kingdom seems fairly well-resourced, and yet its only defence infrastructure is a duo of tradesmen, who are surely neglecting the Kingdom’s drains and sinks on account of their constant need to rescue the princess.
By 2013 standards, the Nintendo Entertainment System’s graphics were very basic. It can’t have had more than a dozen colours. And yet the machine was absolutely revolutionary – they sold 61 million of them around the world. And it began my lifelong love of videogames. For nerds of a certain age, that bleepy, bassy music first heard in the underground Level 1-2 will always be close to our hearts.
A few years later, in high school, I got my first videogame console. It was a Game Boy – which, with its monochrome dot matrix graphics, might be the only more recent videogame system that made the NES’ graphics look high-tech. But you could play it anywhere, and I absolutely loved it. Super Mario Land was my favourite game, and the first time I finished it was a red-letter day in my adolescence. In those days, you had to play platform games through from the start every time – there were no wimpy saves games.
Like many kids of that era, I became addicted to Tetris, as well, somehow convincing myself that because it involved geometry, it was somehow beneficial to play for hours on end. Although I do use my Tetris skills every time I have to pack too much luggage into my tiny car.
Nearly thirty years after I first saw Mario in action, it’s still my favourite series. I don’t like games that require too much time commitment or detail. If I can’t figure out how to play it in a minute or two, I’m not interested, which is why strategy games and lengthy first-person shooters have tended not to do much for me. I’ve always enjoyed the rule-breaking, open-world Grand Theft Auto series, because hey, we all feel like driving a semi-trailer through a crowded pavement sometimes (or is that just me?) and a recent favourite is Portal 2, which has incredibly simple gameplay but increasingly fiendish and original puzzles, as well as an excellent vocal performance by Stephen Merchant. And of course Singstar’s a favourite because it allows me to inflict karaoke on my neighbours. But simple platform games still get me every time.
I don’t get as much time to play as much as I’d like nowadays, and I’m seriously behind on my gaming – I’ve only scratched the surface of GTA IV, and the fifth episode is on the verge of being launched. But it’s still one of my favourite ways to wind down. The immersive nature of videogames is what makes them so relaxing, I think. When you’re bouncing your way through the Mushroom Kingdom, or driving around Liberty City, there’s absolutely no room in your head to think of anything else. Many videogames require absolute focus so you don’t lose your virtual “life”, and the chance to escape from everyday life from an hour or two is an enormous pleasure.
As I approach forty, I’ve begun wondering whether my generation, the Mario generation, will ever grow out of videogames. The Playstation 4 is close to launch, and the absurdly-named Wii U has an incredible-looking New Super Mario Bros game available for it. (Although at least one writer thinks that 1991’s Super Mario World remains a better option for it!) I doubt I’ll be able to resist upgrading to at least one of them so I can keep my occasional videogame habit alive. After all, if I don’t rescue poor old Princess Peach, who will? Besides the millions of other purchasers, that is.
These days, kids have constant access to videogames from a young age. I know one three-year-old who’s already surprisingly adept at Angry Birds. Today’s kids are growing up in a world where video games are available in your pocket all the time, and on the enormous screens that are already ubiquitous in our homes. Indeed, my phone’s full-colour 3D-generating capacities would utterly humiliate my beloved Game Boy. But video games, those early pixellated pioneers, will always hold a special place in the memories of those of us who still remember the first time we saw a video game being played on someone’s TV and scarcely believed that such a technological miracle was possible.
Realistically, the next time I’ll get to spend hours a day on videogames like I did in my teens and university years is when I retire. Perhaps instead of trudging around a real golf course, I’ll instead choose to play through a virtual one on my Playstation 11? My enjoyment may fade as a busy non-virtual life continues to preclude spending as much time mashing buttons as I’d like, but I certainly can’t see myself giving it up completely. And I hope I’m not the only one who sticks with them, because retirement homes strike me as the perfect opportunity for some intense multiplayer gaming. The term ‘deathmatch’ might take on too literal a meaning in that context, I suppose, but I can’t think of many better ways to go than having my cutting-edge Nintendo Wii U Me Them Together controller prised from my cold, defeated hand.
The CBD is the place to be
When I was a kid, Saturday mornings were sacred. Each week without fail, we started the weekend with a run to the shopping centre. Back in primary school, our regular haunt was Crows Nest Plaza, and if my brother and I behaved ourselves during the long, tedious loop through the supermarket, we were rewarded with a little square of fudge from the health food store. (“Health food” had a slightly different definition in the 1980s.)
In high school, we frequented Woolworths at Neutral Bay, a suburb whose very name implies blandness – presumably when names were being handed out, it sat on the fence. By then, we were old enough to grab our own groceries to toss into the cart. In my case it was almost always peanut butter, in hindsight one of many poor adolescent nutritional choices. We didn’t look in any of the smaller stores nearby because by then, Woolies had developed their trademark stock-everything fresh-food format, and it was just easier to buy the week’s supplies from the Fresh Food People Who’ve Gradually Destroyed The Other, Independent Fresh Food People.
We’d fill the boot with plastic bags and sometimes the back seat as well, and when we got home, we’d carefully transfer our purchases to the fridge and freezer and pantry. The weekend shopping calculation was critical – we had to buy enough to fill our packed school lunches each day and cover each night’s dinner because if we ran short, it meant shelling out for takeaway or wasting an hour or two more on a return supermarket run or, worst of all, braving the local mini-market, which meant paying considerably more to choose from an extremely limited range, very little of which was fresh.
Back then, life was organised around these missions to more built-up areas. We had a few small stores nearby like the newsagent who was our go-to sweet vendor, the perpetually grumpy dry cleaner and the little video store which went broke years ago. But anything more complicated, like seeing a movie or shopping for clothes or going to the post office or browsing in a record store, meant a special trip to another suburb in the car or by public transport.
We lived fairly centrally – just a few stops north of the city on the train. But the places we could easily access on foot were, as a rule, streets of houses like our own. That was how everyone we knew lived, with the exception of one family who had bought an old fire station in the CBD. That seemed exhilarating, and yet eccentric – why would anyone want to spend their weekends in the place where everyone went to work?
Then at uni I moved into a house right next to campus, and my addiction to convenience began at roughly the same time as my addiction to coffee. Everything I could possibly want – or afford, more to the point – was around the corner, in the nearby shopping strip or, at worst, at the mall just down the road. My suburb had supermarkets, a post office, a cinema and even a discount department store, and I soon began to adapt to a life that required no planning. If we wanted to cook, we went and bought exactly what we needed on the day, but given the abundance of great cafés and cheap Thai joints food a stone’s throw away, that wasn’t even necessary. And if I fancied croissants on a Sunday morning, there they were, a short stumble away. As were several pubs, the source of most of those morning after-stumbles.
Back then, we had to pay our rent in cash, but that was easy because the bank was right there. So was the post office, for that matter, so we could pay the phone bill. And during the years of perpetual 21sts, it was easy simply to buy a gift on the way to the party, and get them gift-wrapped on the spot. Scoring pot was just as convenient, I’m told – I was one of those “square” students you hear about.
My student days got me accustomed to a life where everything you wanted was available right there, whenever you wanted. And when I left uni and had to find a place to live, it was a simple equation: if the choice was between space and convenience, then I’d choose convenience. And that’s why my first post-graduate apartment was in Potts Point – which is almost unaffordable nowadays, but back in 2003 represented pretty good value if you chose an older building. It’s one of the most built-up areas in Australia – nearly everybody lives in apartments, and their buildings tend to have shops on the ground floor. I loved the extraordinary array of food on my doorstep, even if I sometimes had to step over people who had passed out on my doorstep to get to it.
At the end of that lease, there was only one place I wanted to go: to the city proper. People look at me strangely when I tell them I live in the CBD, because I’m not a backpacker on a working holiday visa, sleeping in a two-bedroom apartment with nine people crammed into it, or a multi-millionaire in an enormous apartment with panoramic water views. I have a small balcony instead of a backyard, and there’s always plenty of traffic on the street outside, as well as crowds of people in various states of intoxication. But I’m a short walk from a supermarket, a cinema, endless restaurants, and also my work, and I still can’t think of living any other way.
So while people find my preference for convenience over space odd, I find everyone else’s preference for quiet, residential streets and spending hours each week commuting equally unfathomable. And the great thing is, the city keeps getting better. Small bars are been opening in rapid progression, and so are new restaurants and retail and leisure developments. More and more residential building keep going up, squashing more and more people into less and less space, and that means an ongoing increase in convenient facilities, and also Pie Face outlets.
I’ll probably sing a different tune if I ever have children – and if I want to sing tunes, incidentally, there are karaoke bars everywhere in the CBD. I’ll probably conclude that it’d be lovely to have a backyard and a barbeque and my very own Hills Hoist. In fact, I’ll probably end up driving my own tribe to the local shopping centre every Saturday morning someday, the way my parents did. But until that day comes, I’m a devoted city-dweller. Because in the end, who needs space when you can walk to yum cha?
That’s right, I can walk to yum cha. And yet people ask me why on earth I'd want to live in the city. My question is, why don't you?
Where is Spotify for television?
As I was writing this article, I discovered that the rapper Chris Kelly, one of the two members of backwards-clothes-wearing teenage rap duo Kris Kross, had died. Mac Daddy, that is to say, rather than his colleague Daddy Mac. Hearing the news made me suddenly nostalgic for the time in the 1990s when a particular variety of commercial rap tracks dominated the charts – the Vanilla Hammer Era, I call it. Back then, I was able to obey their order to jump around for more than two minutes without feeling exhausted. It was a happier, jumpier time.
Hearing the news made me want to hear ‘Jump’ again. Gratification took me a mere 3 seconds, courtesy of YouTube. Which got me thinking how amazing I would have found that back when they were in the charts, when we had to carefully record songs from the radio onto cassette, or go and buy a bunch of singles.
Nowadays, we can listen to any music we want at any time – and do so legally. Before ‘Jump’ began on YouTube, I had to watch an ad. (By which I mean, I waited for five seconds and clicked ‘Skip’.) But the quality of YouTube videos varies, and it’s not suitable for extended listening – which is where streaming services come in.
We are on the cusp of the music-streaming revolution, a wave so potent that even Apple haven’t managed to get their heads around it yet. In the past year or so, we’ve gained access to an abundance of streaming services nowadays, so many that it isn’t yet clear who the dominant player will be. Spotify, Rdio, MOG (which also has ‘Jump’), Deezer, Pandora and others besides – all of them are legal, and all of them are an extraordinary musical cornucopia.
I keep hearing that Spotify (which is probably the dominant player, thanks to its tight integration with Facebook) doesn’t pay artists very well, but I suspect the licensers have correctly calculated it’s better than nothing – which is the realistic alternative. Plus, imagine a world where just about everybody pays over $100 a year to Spotify or its equivalent, and you’ve got a fairly healthy revenue stream.
After decades of painful adjustment – the Napster and Limewire wars, and Metallica, and all of that – the music industry has finally managed to offer what consumers want – all of the music, all of the time. And once you’re used to the constant availability of just about every song or album you’ve ever heard of, it’s unthinkable to do without it. And so, I’m a streaming service customer for life, or at least until something even better comes along, and I’m sure most of their customers feel the same way.
The music industry tried shaming people into not pirating, and it didn’t work. But now even though I know how to pirate music, there’s simply no point, even if I had no moral concerns. I have no interest in Bittorrenting an album when I can just stream it. It’s not worth the extra mouse clicks, and I don’t care about having the album files on my hard drive. Plus, I can access Spotify or Rdio or MOG (which has free bandwidth on Telstra, incidentally) on my phone when I’m out and about, or in a car, and my illegal download is far less portable, having to be converted and copied and more besides.
As far as I can see, everyone wins from these streaming music services. Even the artist wins compared to how things were before streaming existed. (And perhaps the business model can be tweaked to improve royalties.) As far as I’m concerned, the legal-music debate is over. You know, like vaccination.
When it comes to television, though, we’re still a decade behind. (Actually, Celebrity Splash may have put us two or three decades behind, but that’s another rant.) One thing, though, is clear: Aussie TV and movie viewers want the same instant gratification we now get from streaming music. That’s why we’re one of the world’s piracy hotspots. (C’mon Aussie! Or should that be Arrrr-sie? Sorry, that was a terrible joke. I’m still thinking about Celebrity Splash, and it’s destroying my usual bonhomie)
Let’s take Game of Thrones as an example, because the premiere of Series 3 set piracy records last month. Tellingly, there were nearly as many requests for it from Australia as in the much bigger US and UK markets. Eminent figures like John Birmingham and the US Ambassador have called for the BitTorrenting to finish. And yet it continues apace, just as it did with music. Pirates have minimal capacity for shaming or guilt-tripping.
So, using it as a case study, what are the legal ways to get the new series of Game of Thrones? Well, you can pay for Foxtel, which costs a pretty penny – at least $60 or more to get the channel that offers GoT.
But Foxtel is an increasingly antiquated platform because it doesn’t really play with computers. If you have Foxtel, like I do, and forget to record those Thrones, what then? Well, you can try and find it in the schedule, and series link it, and save them all to your IQ box’s hard disk, and then watch them at some point. There’s also a complex way of streaming recent episodes by navigating through a series of submenus, but they don’t come through at high definition.
Or you can pay $33 for it from iTunes, and download each episode on release. That’s not an awful lot to pay compared with a DVD box set, but it’s a lot compared with free. It’s a lot more for one series than you pay with Spotify, where you pay about ten bucks a months for everything.
What I want with TV and movies is what I have with music now – the capacity to watch whatever I want instantly, at high quality, on any device, with a well-designed, convenient interface. I want instant gratification at a lowish price – something like $10 or $20 a month instead of the more than $100 a month that Foxtel wants to charge. Let’s say that I’d gladly pay up to $50 a month for all the music, TV and movies I could stream via any device. Give me that, and I’ll gladly pay it forever.
Now, TV is more complicated because of live events and sport. There’s still scope for broadcast, instead of everything being on-demand. And music is rarely time specific, unlike current affairs shows or topical comedy like the Daily Show. Plus, there’s also a shared experience to be had when watching a show like Q&A and ranting on Twitter along with everybody else.
But the number of shows that need to be enjoyed live like this is shrinking. Built into the formula for the TV streaming service of my dreams, I’d like to be able to see those kinds of shows live. But everything else should come on demand, on any device.
This need is precisely why Netflix is proving so enormous in the US. It offers – well, not everything, but a lot, for a mere $8/month. This offer has proven so successful that Netflix now consumes a third of US internet traffic. (And I can’t help wonder how much of the remainder is taken up by, ahem, adult entertainment.) Many people subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, which costs about the same and offers most commercial TV shows. Americans are cancelling their cable connections in droves, and why wouldn’t they?
Netflix is earning so much revenue that they’re now commissioning their own original programming. The popular political thriller House of Cards is exclusive to Netflix, and they made all the episodes available all at once, interestingly. They’re also making new episodes of the wonderful Arrested Development.
In Australia, Quickflix is trying to replicate the same formula. I haven’t tried it in a year, but at first I found the quality and range limited. I should look again, because I’m curious to see whether it’s improved – especially since they’ve just acquired Game of Thrones series 3. But Quickflix is also making all their customers pay to get disks delivered by post the way Netflix used to, a business model which seems doomed and I’ve no interest in cross-subsidising.
I suspect Netflix will set up here and sweep them from the market before they’ve gained a solid foothold, but the best of luck to them anyway, because they’re probably the closest commercial provider of the kind of streaming service I’d like to see.
In amongst all this, I want a few live channels for broadcast “event television”, news, and sport. They have to be available on any device, too.
Ultimately, someone needs to step up. There are currently too many players and formats and none offers enough of everything at a sufficiently cheap price. In particular, Foxtel seems to be trying to offer lots of different ways to watch live TV, via iPad and X-Box 360 and TBox and several other devices, without embracing the need to build a system that does proper on-demand streaming of their shows. Personally, I don’t care about channels, I don’t want schedules, I don’t need hard disk recording. I just want a mass of content that has every good show from today or the past, streaming immediately, in high definition, on any device. And I’m prepared to pay for that, but not as much as they’re currently trying to charge.
Does that seem too much to ask? Well, now you understand why piracy is so popular, because it offers almost exactly that, for free. Okay, so there’s a worse interface and a delay of a few hours. But still, it’s a lot to ask pirates to give up. And Foxtel co-owner Telstra is well aware of that, seeing as their Bigpond subsidiary sell a 500 gigabyte/month home cable account.
Let’s not forget the ABC’s iView, which is free, available on lots of devices and offers comprehensive content. But it expires quickly, and streams in relatively low definition. (Incidentally, I work for the ABC.) The commercial providers all have their own platforms, too, which is irritating. Hulu-style consolidation badly needs to occur.
Historically, the Australian market has taken longer to get these kinds of services together, because we’re so small. Pay TV came here decades after the US and Europe had it. But in the internet era, there’s no limitation on this kind of service being offered besides commercial negotiation. Both prospective models of the NBN will offer sufficient speed for high-definition video (and I don’t want to get bogged into that debate here and now), so we can guess that a comprehensive Netflix-like service, that offers every TV programme and movie you could conceivably want through the same interface, mightn’t be too far away.
Finally, let’s not forget the key ingredient that makes services like Spotify so compelling: it has almost everything. You can try to stump it, but in my experience, you rarely will. That’s what I want, everywhere, all the time.
The only problem is, I want it now.
Why put it off until tomorrow when you can procrastinate today?
For the last few years, I’ve been trying to write a novel. It’s a bit of a cliché to say you’re doing that to try and impress people, I know, and I regularly do precisely that at dinner parties. But I have managed to finish them before, although I wish I could remember how.
The novel I’m currently writing was supposed to be finished 18 months ago, but I still haven’t finished it. In the meantime, I’ve completed lots of other tasks that objectively aren’t as important to me in the grand scheme of things as finishing my novel, but which I temporarily convinced myself were so urgent that the book could wait. Essential tasks like, say, spending three hours reading about the bridges of New York City and its environs. (Note: my novel is not set in New York City.)
As a result, while I know very little about motivation, time management or writing novels, I have become quite the expert in the art of procrastination. Please allow me to share my secrets with you in lieu of anything important that you might need to do.
There are two levels of procrastination. The most straightforward is finding things that will prevent you from sitting down at your desk in the first place, or whatever it is you want to do – it doesn’t have to be a novel, and given the state of the book industry, it probably shouldn’t be. I have found that my procrastination skills are valuable for preventing me achieving any number of other goals, such as embarking an exercise programme. But the more advanced level, which is the level at which I’ve recently become adept, is when you convince yourself that these other, objectively irrelevant tasks are in fact an important part of your work process. Nowadays, when I have clearly been doing anything but buckling down and typing, I’m nevertheless able to pat myself on the back for a good day’s work.
Find the perfect working music
I like listening to music when I write, but generally it needs to be vocal-free, mid-tempo, and avoid major dynamic variations, all of which can distract me. Often I listen to jazz piano, because I find that only having one instrument helps with this, and Art Tatum is a particular favourite. But it’s always a temptation to find something new, and tell yourself you couldn’t possibly start typing until you do.
Wikipedia chains
Now, if you’re writing a proper historical novel, or anything that aspires to depth, Wikipedia will not be sufficient for your research needs. If you’re me, and just need to check the odd fact here and there, Wikipedia is perfect. But it is also a brilliant source of ongoing distraction, because every article is full of links to other articles. Instead of simply checking the information you need, enclosing the page, you can instead click on one of these links and read about something else, and then on that article, click another link, and so on, to infinity, or at least the 4.2 million articles Wikipedia currently contains.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re looking up the Sydney suburb of Potts Point, where my novel is set. Its main street is named after Alexander Macleay, who was a member of the Linnean Society, which is into zoology, a subsection of which is herpetology whose meaning I’d forgotten but involves studying amphibians such as the newt. And suddenly I’ve jumped from Research Which Is Helping Me Write A Novel to reading about the toxicity of the newt. (Did you know that they “produce toxins in their skin secretions as a defence mechanism against predators? I didn’t! Fascinating!) Now, the great PG Wodehouse used newts extensively in his Jeeves novels, but it’s hard to see how his little poisonous friends will help me.
I can follow these Wikipedia chains for hours, and unless I step back from the computer and managd to ask myself exactly how the page I’m reading is fitting with the work I’m doing, I will simply keep clicking and telling myself that I’m getting the book done.
Workspace renovation
This is one I’ve been using since high school, when I convinced myself I really shouldn’t begin studying for the HSC until I’d rearranged my bedroom three times to achieve the perfect working environment. If you need additional motivation, just convince yourself that feng shui is real, and that your current environment is stopping you from getting things done. I can guarantee you that moving furniture around will definitely stop you from getting things done.
Game of Thrones
Television is a time-honoured means of procrastination, and early in my writing process, I found myself lying on my sofa, devouring the HBO TV series Game of Thrones. That helped me waste a few dozen hours. But – and this is where things get a little more advanced – I somehow convinced myself that after I finished the TV series, it was absolutely essential for me to also read the books by George R.R. Martin, to gain insight into how to write bestselling novels with popular TV adaptation. And so it was that I convinced myself that finding out more about House Stark of Winterfell’s protracted struggle with House Lannister of Casterley Rock temporarily seemed a great deal more important than, say, my own work.
The brilliant thing about the books is not only that, well, they’re brilliant, but that they’re very long. Whereas most novels – and certainly mine, touch wood – come in below 100,000 words, the word count for Martin’s work is currently 1,770,000 words, so it has the capacity to distract you for months. It also significantly increased the number of dragons and spooky undead warriors in my novel, which might prove awkward since it’s meant to be a contemporary romantic comedy.
Exercise
Yesterday somebody asked me why I’d embarked on my current exercise kick. You’d think a quick look in the mirror would be enough to convince me that I should hasten to the nearest gym forthwith, but when writing this article I realised that it’s another form of procrastination. I only have a few hours in my work day to devote to writing before I have to go and do my day job, and if I spend them doing something else inherently virtuous like exercising, it’s much more difficult to feel guilty about the lack of progress on my book. I’ve also found several studies which argue that regular exercise improves concentration, so I can tell myself that all of the exercise will help with writing a book once I eventually get around to it.
Cooking
I don’t usually bother to cook much for myself, as I’ve discussed previously. But with a novel to write, I’ve become quite the home chef – or at least, a mediocre home chef. It’s very easy to convince yourself that you can’t work well on an empty stomach, which is true, and that it’ll be healthier if you cook yourself, which may also be true unless, like me, your most frequently cooked dishes involve melted cheese.
I’m not alone in this one – in fact, the term ‘procrastibaking’ has emerged to describe the trap of cooking instead of working. Kudos to whoever coined that and added it to Urban Dictionary instead of finishing an assignment.
Grand Theft Auto
I haven’t used this for a few years, but immersive, long video games can be a real trap. Grand Theft Auto appealed because it has a long-form narrative like a novel (hello, ‘market research’) and makes you question – or in fact break – society’s rules. I used to tell myself that driving stolen cars around on pavements stimulated creative thinking outside the square. It certainly helped me break the rule that you need to meet deadlines.
Font and layout
I’m quite proud of this one. Even when you’ve finally written your first sentence, you can then spend a great deal of time playing around with how it looks. I used to try to format my Microsoft Word pages to look like novel pages, with the right size and line spacing and indents and everything. (Now I use Scrivener as my writing software, incidentally – it’s amazing, and has a handy fullscreen mode to prevent procrastination.)
I must have tried out every single text font in Word in an effort to pick the right one, and even printed quite a few test pages to see how they looked. Hint: Wingdings really isn’t much use.
The above should be more than to get you procrastinating like a pro. The best strategies, though, come from within – so please let me know how you procrastinate in the comments below. Reading them should help me defer the writing I need to do for a few days more! But in the meantime, I’d better get back to not writing my novel.
Might as well face it, I’m addicted to latte
I drink alcohol rarely, I’ve never smoked so much as one cigarette, and my experiments with more potent substances have been so infrequent that in certain circles I’m considered a limp Puritan. But there is one substance that’s approximately as essential to my day as oxygen, and that’s coffee.
Before the first flat white of the morning (well, skim flat white nowadays, in a fairly token concession to the get-fit programme I keep writing about in the hope that words on a screen will somehow magically translate to action), my head feels woozy. I’m exhausted even by the daily mental process of figuring out how to physically transport myself into the shower and assemble a set of clothing suitable for wearing in public. And using my brain feels like trying to operate one of those old-fashioned hand-operated rail cars that crawls reluctantly along the track, its rusty cogs grinding and squeaking.
If I leave the first coffee for too long, my body begins to rebel. If I go coffee-free until 10 or 11am, I get a headache which increases in intensity as the day progresses, as though I were Monkey, and Tripitaka were chanting the mantra to makes my headband shrink. Sometimes I even wonder whether I’m coming down with the flu, on account of the persistent headache and general feeling of lethargy.
Cruelly, my brain is working so poorly at these moments that I’m not always able to reason that I feel bad because I haven’t had a coffee yet. Eventually the cogs will churn until I manage to figure out why my head feels cloudy, and limp towards the closest acceptable café for the remedy.
My list of acceptable cafés is ridiculously small, by the way. I am a hideous coffee snob, and live in a part of the inner city that is packed with excellent, albeit expensive cafés, so it’s relatively easy to indulge my absurd quality standards. I have no idea about wine and dress in cheap clothes from mass-market chains, but when it comes to coffee, I consider myself quite the connoisseur, chucking about the term ‘crema’ as freely as confetti at a stationer’s wedding.
Eventually I will order my morning coffee, and the day can begin properly. Within a minute or two of appeasing its caffeine craving, my brain has snapped to attention and I gain the power to address the day. My cerebellum magically transforms into a piece of sophisticated machinery and enables me to do more sophisticated tasks like writing, thinking and deciphering the various National Broadband Network policies – unfortunately “copper” sounds too much like “coffee” for me to be able to think of anything else before this point.
My first coffee tends to be followed in short order by the second, which is often a macchiato or perhaps even a piccolo latte – a delicious variant, but difficult to order without feeling ridiculous, as I discovered when I asked a colleague to get me one and she burst out laughing and flatly refused to place such an embarrassing order.
Midway through the afternoon, my synapses start to become sluggish again, and I stroll down to one of the three thoroughly excellent cafés located at the perimeter of my workplace for a refuelling session. I’m very grateful to be able to feed my obsession so close to work, but then again, outstanding coffee is readily available throughout every major Australian city nowadays. This will be enough to get me through the rest of my day. I’ve learned not to drink coffee after dark, because it makes it difficult to get to sleep.
So, here’s a bit of maths, which I can do because I’ve already had two coffees today, and therefore the operation of the Calculator app on my computer isn’t beyond me. I drink approximately 2.5 coffees a day, since I have fewer on weekends and don’t always have two in the morning. I generally pay $3.50 per coffee, because I go to swanky coffee shops. Multiply that out by 365 days and you get...
YOU GET $3193.75.
Yes, apparently I spend over three thousand dollars a year on coffee. Which seems almost unbelievable, but numbers don’t lie, or so I’ve been told by people who are better at maths than me. Who may themselves be lying, I have no way of telling..
This is an absurd amount, and it seems even more ridiculous when you look at it as $61 per week, or $266 per month. (I’m pretty nifty with the calculator for a mathematical ignoramus.) But perhaps it’s worth it for the sheer joy coffee brings to my life each day?
The chief benefit is that I really like the taste of coffee, whether as an espresso shot or diluted in a long black, and served with or without milk. The unfortunate thing here is that I only like the taste of fancy espresso coffee, made by professional baristas with borderline OCD. I dislike instant coffee, and even the stuff made in plungers tastes sour and bland to me. Worse still is the drip-filter stuff they drink in America, which tastes of drab misery.
I realise that this makes me seem like a wanker – or at least, it might have until a few years ago, because as the ever-growing popularity of swanky coffee demonstrates, Australians’ obsession with the bean is only growing. So, part of what I’m paying is undoubtedly a snob tax.
Also, and this will make me seem an even worse person, I like cafés. I like sitting and chatting and reading the paper and thinking, and I like their atmosphere. Sure, I could drink herbal tea, I suppose, but drinking coffee in places specifically designed for the purpose is something I very much enjoy.
Next we come to the costs, which are measured not just in the rather large number of dollars I pay for the pleasure. I enjoy coffee making my brain work each and every day, and in fact I’ve discovered that the best time to do any writing is immediately after having a coffee, but this has to go into the “cost” side of the equation because of the slightly awkward topic of addiction.
Clearly, I’m an addict, and not just in the sense of “hey, I loves me a cup of steamin’ hot joe,” but in the sense that if I don’t have it, I get withdrawal symptoms. My brain views caffeination as normal. There is a chemical dependency at play.
Now, I could detox, but that would require several weeks of agony, and more self-control than I generally possess. Besides, I don’t really want to give it up – it’s pleasant, and harmless in smaller quantities. It’s not like cigarettes or, say, heroin – there’s a perfectly acceptable level of use. Also unlike cigarettes and heroin it also doesn’t conveniently make you thinner, especially if you drink it with full-cream milk. Or kill you, admittedly, but life is full of trade-offs.
There’s also a question of quantity. Are three cups a day too many? Well, an article I randomly found on the internet says that three cups a day makes you live longer, and this entirely unrigorous scientific approach is good enough for me.
Okay, sure – if it really is dangerous, maybe tell me in the comments section below, unless you want me to die. But I’m assuming two or three per day is okay.
Thinking about it, the obvious solution is to limit myself to one café-made coffee per day, at a cost of around $1000 per a year. And then if I need a second or third, I can learn to live with the taste of plunger coffee or get a home espresso machine – some of the pod ones produce surprisingly good results, and are very easy to use. They can cost several hundred dollars, but given my annual expenditure, I’ll nevertheless be saving.
The most sensible solution, of course, would be to give up coffee. But I enjoy it, and it doesn’t seem to be especially bad for you. Besides, Al Pacino drinks it, and so does George Clooney. So it must be good, right?
The other thing about coffee is that you get what you pay for. Some convenience stores and fast food outlets charge a dollar for machine-made espresso, but the difference with a coffee made by someone who really knows what they're doing is significant. Or at least it seems significant to me. While I wouldn't mind spending less per year with experienced baristas, I don't begrudge paying a premium for quality ingredients and skill, even though some cafés I know are now charging $4 when you drink-in.
Finally, there's the image factor. Drinking coffee is associated with inner-city types who like sitting around and having pointless, pretentious conversations about things like literature, often while wearing skivvies and using words like "ephemeral" and "performative". And that's undoubtedly me. So in the end, if I'm going to be judged as a coffee-swilling wanker no matter what I do, I may as well enjoy my daily cuppa.
Cooking for the extremely lazy
Right now in my life, two powerful forces are currently conducting a battle. My habitual laziness in respect of all domestic matters is locked in a death struggle against my powerful hypochondria.
Well, I probably won’t die – but like I said, I’m a hypochondriac.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying to reduce my excessively high blood pressure – a challenge at which I’m succeeding, fortunately. Well, fortunately for me, at least. I’ve also revealed the results of my various inept experiments with gym classes. But as many commenters have somewhat snarkily pointed out, the remaining element in the formula is cooking for oneself.
Now, I live by myself (the subject of yet another plaintive column), and I’ve long maintained that it’s not economically effective to cook for one, especially when you factor your own time into the equation. But the reality is that it’s the only way you can exercise substantial control over what goes into your body. So if you’re trying to watch your intake of things like salt and fat, you really do need to bite the bullet, unless the bullets in question are those tasty chocolate ones, in which case you probably shouldn’t, because those bullets can kill people too.
(By the way, my research into this matter uncovered the website chocolateweapons.com, which I really can’t keep to myself. Because hey – if you’re going to kill yourself with unhealthy food, you might as well do it in style.r)
Anyway – for the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to solve the question of what I can eat at home that won’t take any more time than getting takeaway. Because if it’s labour intensive, and if I can’t chuck it together in less than about ten minutes, the reality is that I’m simply not going to do it. I can’t think of anything more depressing than spending an hour slaving over a stove with a little apron on, and serving a fancy meal with candles and white linen... for myself.
Wraps
Wraps might just be the most practical foodstuff ever devised. They come in airtight plastic packets so you can make a six-pack last for days, they’re considerably less stodgy than bread, and best of all, you can, well, wrap things in them. I know, right?
Within the tasty envelope of a wrap, you can just chuck a bit of salad, and maybe some low-fat ham or salmon or really anything at all, and you have yourself a little parcel of deliciousness. I’ve found it’s particularly well-suited to cherry tomatoes because it doesn’t matter when the insides go everywhere. And you don’t need feel the need for butter or some kind of butter-substitute the way you do with bread.
Best of all, some prepackaged wraps come with paper holders so you can eat the wrap without the need for a plate, saving on washing up.
Tuna with tomato sauce
If you’re like me and trying to eat more seafood, tinned tuna is a simple and tasty solution. I’ve discovered that if you combine it with pre-made tomato salsa, whether you get the kind that comes in a jar or is freshly made in a plastic tub from the refrigerated section, the results are ridiculously tasty. Get the sort that has a hint of chili in it. You can use it as a pasta sauce, or chuck it in a wrap, or just serve it up with a side salad. Seriously – I know this is ridiculously simple, but it tastes amazing. Amazing.
Microwave ratatouille
I really like eating roast vegetables, but they take time. Admittedly you can just chop them up, chuck a bit of olive oil on them and leave them to cook, but it’s still a bit too tricky for my purposes. So I’ve started cutting up capsicum, zucchini, eggplant, onion and a few tomatoes and microwaving them. Purists would probably suggest a bit of garlic too, but I’m a bit too lazy. The results are not quite as delicious as roasting, but sufficiently delicious for me.
Instant salad
I know it’s really, really lazy to buy pre-made salads, and the results aren’t as tasty as if you buy the lettuce and the other ingredients and make it freshly. I also understand that they’re way too expensive relative to buying the elements separately. But that has to be weighed against this critical point: you don’t have to make a salad.
The other day, I bought a really nice instant Greek salad where you just had to combine a few sachets and hey presto – it was like being in Greece and eating at a mediocre taverna! I also added a bit of tinned tuna to make a complete meal a less incomplete meal.
The part where this actually counts as “cooking” and not just “opening a packet” is that you should make your own simple dressing, because the presupplied one won’t be as nice – the Greek salad’s one was way too sweet. Just use a bit of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic, perhaps a hint of dijon mustard and pepper, and you should be sorted. (I used to add sugar and salt too, but now I’m trying to watch out for those things).
The grill pan
As you will have gathered, most of my cooking consists of a concerted effort not to cook with anything more sophisticated than a microwave. But the time comes when you need to do something a little more elaborate. And this is where the grill pan comes into play.
If you don’t know what they are, imagine a mini barbecue with a handle and edges to stop stuff spilling out. I have a non-stick one that rinses clean, and all I need to do is put a bit of olive oil onto it, heat it up and then grill a bit of chicken breast or fish or lamb over my big gas burner. It’s quick, incredibly tasty and involves the element of naked flame that makes me feel like I’m standing at a barbecue – an essential element for men to enjoy cooking, for some unclear reason.
The particularly excellent thing about a grill pan is that it’s easy and quick to cook a portion small enough for one, and then you can grill the other half of the little meat packet at a later time, because nobody seems to sell meat in portions small enough to supply one person, because apparently very few people are big enough losers to need to cook for themselves. Tthere, I said it.
Soup
I used to eat a lot of tinned soup. But you can now get pre-made vacuum-packed soup, which is slightly more gourmet and consequently slightly less depressing. The trick to making soup not feel like the ultimate culinary cop-out is making your own croutons by chopping up a slice of toast.
And yes, I am honestly describing microwaving pre-prepared soup and adding croutons as a form of culinary innovation, which I am recommending to you. And yes, I am well aware that this makes me possibly the most incompetent person writing about cooking in the Australian media.
But surely I get points for honesty, at least?
Bon appetit!
So there you have it – the sum total of all that I have discovered about cooking healthily in my first few weeks of trying. And by now you will have concluded that a) I really can’t cook, and b) I care more about convenience than the quality of the output. These two things are undeniably true. But when you’re cooking for yourself, the only person you have to impress is yourself, and I’m already pretty impressed with myself just because I’m not ordering takeaway.
I intend to keep experimenting with cooking, and perhaps one day soon I may even try a simple stir-fry. The important thing is to have fun! And by having fun I mean getting out of the kitchen as quickly as possible, because no matter how hard you try to convince yourself, cooking simply isn’t fun.
Seven convincing reasons to have babies
Babies! Lots of people are having them. It’s how the human race survives! But just in case you’re one of these strange people who’s inexplicably opposed to the idea or doesn’t want to “give up your life” – if you can even call your sorry, childless existence a “life” – allow me to point out all the reasons why having children is a wonderful thing to do.
You have complete power over them!
As a parent, you have as much absolute power as Kim Jong-Un without the nuclear arsenal or unlikely friendship with Dennis Rodman. When they’re newborn, babies are more portable than most dogs, and will just lie there in a pram or bassinet. Plus, unlike dogs, you can take them into fancy restaurants and just park them on the floor. Not only are they powerless to object, but they don't even have the capacity to articulate an objection.
As they grow up and begin arguing back, you can impose whatever punishments you like. Grounding, limiting television, even imposing a diet of gruel, Oliver Twist-style – all these potential punishments are open to you, and there’s no court of appeal besides the other partner. (Or, in certain cases, DOCS – do bear that in mind.)
It’s also good to be aware that you'll pay for this later when they're teenagers, and won't do a single thing that you say, even if it’s entirely reasonable and clearly in their best interests.
You’ll never be stuck for something to do!
You know those days when you wake up with nothing planned, and spend half the morning wondering how on earth to fill the acres off time? That feeling of wasting the day will soon be a distant memory after your first child emerges from the womb. Instead you’ll have a busy schedule of ferrying your children around to birthday parties, sporting commitments and visits to zoos, museums, parks and the beach. If you should find yourself not doing this at any point during a weekend or holiday, your child will soon set things straight by whining at you until you drive them to the stupid shopping mall to see some stupid movie at the stupid multiplex or whatever.
The universal rule of parenting is that the only time parents ever get to themselves is during brief periods of slacking off at work, and at night after the kids have gone to bed when you get to sit at the kitchen table and catch up on your overdue tax return. Even those times can be interrupted at any moment by a sick or worried child, so don’t ever tell yourself you can relax. If this ever makes you feel a little trapped and overwhelmed, don’t worry – your kids will move out of home eventually, and shortly afterwards expect you to take care of their grandchildren.
You can buy stuff “for them” that’s actually for yourself!
Bigger houses, better (“safer”) cars, in-ground pools, expensive holidays, video game consoles – just about any purchase you desire for sheer materialism’s sake can be justified as being “for the kids”. As long as there’s some benefit in which your children can share, you’ll seem like a wonderful provider instead of a selfish hoarder.
Unfortunately children are infernally expensive to begin with, and soon begin constantly demanding that you spend money on them, so you’re unlikely to have any spare discretionary income to devote to these kinds of purchases. But it’s nice to know that you could blow your cash guilt-free if you ever did have any.
You get constant, adoring companionship!
Your children will celebrate openly whenever you come home, and will be absolutely desperate to play games with you, games that you haven't been able to enjoy since you were a kid yourself. What’s more, for the first decade of their life, you’ll get to beat them every single time whether it’s at chess, tenpin bowling or bareknuckle combat. Even if you were always mediocre at cricket in your schooldays, you’ll have no difficulty removing your six-year-old’s middle stump with a full-paced yorker.
Plus, spending time with your children will allow you to enjoy entertainment that’s normally frowned on for grown-ups, like the Muppets and Pixar movies. The only drawback is that you will also be forced to watch Dora the Explorer.
This joy of simple companionship will come to an abrupt end in your child’s teens, when you will suddenly embarrass them more than anyone else on the face of the earth, but until then, it’ll be great.
You’ll never be stuck for small talk again!
Have you ever wondered what to say to a taxi driver, or bartender, or dull colleague with whom you’re trapped in the lift? When you have kids, you’ll never need to talk about the weather again! Just embark on lengthy updates about your child’s mental and physical development, subtly intended to suggest that your kids are better than those of the person you’re talking to, and that you are therefore also a better parent and person.
If the person you’re talking to doesn’t have children, don’t let that dissuade you – just adopt a pitying facial expression and keep talking about your kids anyway.
The freedom of being stuck for conversation will also apply when you have lengthy discussions with your child about things like dinosaurs and Bob the Builder and minor orcs from Lord of the Rings and how their friends’ parents let their kids do things that you won’t let them do.
You’ll find that your kids ask questions constantly, as though you’re some kind of walking Wikipedia. The best way to deal with this is by giving them false information for fun. For instance, tell them that Alice Springs got its name because of a girl called Alice who had wonderboots with giant springs on the soles that let her bounce high in the air.
You’ll be able to miss any social occasion you like!
Whether it’s a potentially lame party, a tedious family function or an embarrassing school reunion, children give you a permanent get-out-of-lame-social-event-free card. Your dorky colleague will completely understand why you couldn’t turn up to his barbecue when you tell them your kids are sick. After all, who’d rather be at home with vomiting kids than eating lukewarm sausages and drinking warm beer in an all-concrete backyard? Well, you, since it gives you the chance to catch up on the latest episodes of Game of Thrones while occasionally pausing to give your kids a glass of flat lemonade.
Conversely, there will be times when your kids are sick and genuinely prevent you from going to social events that you did want to attend. And they’ll bring germs home from the petri dish of infection that every educational institution in the country is, and make you horribly sick too. But then again, this entire question of going to social events is entirely academic to begin with, because wrangling kids will leave you too tired to ever leave the house in the first place.
You’ll experience the joy of narcissism!
Remember how Austin Powers’ nemesis Dr Evil created a “Mini-Me”? Well, that’s exactly what you’re doing! Your child will resemble you more than anyone else on the face of the earth ever could, unless of course you have a twin. You’ll constantly be thinking “Oh, that’s exactly what I do!”, and when you look them in the eye, you’ll see yourself looking back in miniature. This ego-gratifying similarity begins very early in life – as your newborn lies there and drools incoherently, they’ll remind you of yourself at the end of the office Christmas party.
This similarity is why most people find it easier to be nice to their family than anyone else – it’s almost like being nice to yourself. And the wonderful thing is, when your offspring succeeds, it’ll almost as though you succeeded, which is why stage parents become so obsessive.
This simple fact of genetics will also mean that the flaws you find most problematic about yourself will probably be replicated in them as a constant reminder of your own inadequacy. And you won't even be able to object, because they'll say – but dad, you pick your nose too.
There’s also a chance of your offspring instead overwhelmingly resembling the other parent, which can be lovely except if the relationship breaks down, in which case it’s a constant painful reminder.
This piece is dedicated to my newborn niece, whom I’m sure will be a delightful exception to any minor downside of parenting mentioned above.
Dom's Great Gym Roadtest
Gyms. Some of us hate them, some of us tolerate them and some of us love them on account of Stockholm Syndrome. But they're a good way to get fit, especially if, like me, you can't simply go jogging because their knees are dodgier than an HSU credit card bill.
Now, it turns out that merely being a member of a gym isn't quite enough for you to get into shape. And so, in a bid to lose a few kilograms along with the vast quantity of money that I've already shed from my bank account, I have embarked upon a bold new experiment. I've been trying a wide variety of classes at the gym to figure out which ones work, which ones don't work, and which one are too much work.
Cycling
These sessions are often known as "spin" classes because like political spin, they're almost entirely fictitious. You ride a pretend bike for a pretend number of kilometres up pretend hills and along straights while loud music is played and disco lights flash so you can pretend you’re somehow simultaneously in a nightclub.
Up the front, the instructor will exhort you to go hard and really pump it up the hill, while barely raising a sweat themselves because they're so ridiculously fit. I imagine this is supposed to provide you with something to strive towards, but in my case just renders me resentful.
Who's it for? As long as you have an active imagination, these classes are clearly a great way to burn a lot of kilojoules and get your legs strong. After my 45 minute class, my knee was so overworked that I could barely walk home, leaving me to wish I was spinning the tyres of a wheelchair.
Hot yoga
My body's more inflexible than a parking inspector, so trying to twist it into the various poses was an enormous challenge. Rather than "downward dog", my signature pose was "defeated dog on the way to the vet's to be put to sleep".
While my predominantly female classmates easily contorted their bodies into positions that circus performers might have hesitated to attempt, I often found myself taking a breather, kneeling on the mat and panting. Plus, it was HOT – I also frequently had to wipe the mat with my towel because I'd dripped so much sweat onto it.
The most challenging part of the class, though, was at the end when I had to avoid giggling while the entire class chanted "Om" and then "Namaste". For some reason they all seemed to be under the impression that they were sitting cross-legged alongside the Maharishi on the banks of the Ganges, not sweating in a CBD gym and about to put on a suit and head off to work for a bank.
Who's it for? To my skeptical mind, yoga's about as spiritual as Kings Cross when an American navy ship's in town. But although it's relatively low intensity, I reckon regular prolonged stretching would do wonders for my inflexible, untoned body. In fact, the class left me highly motivated to learn the secret of folding my body into the shape of a paperclip, just like my classmates. As for the “hot” variety, I'm not sure if the heat helps for anything besides working up more of a sweat, but I bet it's a treat in the middle of winter.
Pilates Reformer
This was probably the most pleasant experience – not only do you get to lie down throughout, but you get to play with giant springs! You lie on a "reformer bed" – essentially a bench that slides along rails, and yes, that is as bizarre in practice as it sounds. You can adjust the springs to provide different degrees of resistance to tailor your workout to your own needs, and for someone with a knee problem, this really was the ideal exercise. There are also leg straps that feel a touch bondagey, to be honest, but at least provide variety. This had the least physical impact on me of any of the classes, but perhaps I wasn't setting the springs high enough?
Who's it for? People who like lying down and are able to resist the temptation to play with the huge springs and send them flying dangerously across the room.
Boxing
I think the idea of two adults punching each repeatedly other in the head is both barbaric and dangerous, even if one of them is Mike Tyson and in many respects deserves it. So I approached this class with a degree of hesitation.
But then I put on the gloves and started thumping the pads, and to my surprise, I really loved it. It’s very satisfying to punch people who can't fight back because if they did, you wouldn't hold the pads for them in return. I enjoyed punching the bag too, because as an inanimate object, you're pretty much guaranteed it won't retaliate.
So – boxing is exhausting, and hurt my knuckles, but I really enjoyed it. Maybe those schoolyard bullies were onto something?
Who's it for? People who don't mind sticking their hands into gross gloves and pads filled with your own yucky, stinky sweat, or worse still, somebody else's.
Aquarobics
The last thing you need when you're a bit tubby is to work out in a swimsuit, frankly, or so I thought. After my aquarobics session, I’d like to amend that – in fact, the last thing you need is to be the last to arrive at a class where all the other members are female and pause to watch you awkwardly descending the ladder.
Aquarobics is a clever idea because it's easier to move heavy objects (such as my body!) in water. So in a sense it's a lower-impact workout. But then again, the water offers sufficient resistance that just walking through it counts as exercise, especially if you're doing so sideways while performing star jumps.
For me, it was a pleasant return to my toddle delight at mucking about in a swimming pool with foam floaty things. But I did feel a tad self-conscious being not only the only guy in the pool, but the youngest attendee by some margin.=
Who's it for: A different demographic from me, apparently. But it certainly seems like a good class if you’re new to the gym, and for those carrying injuries it's gentle yet surprisingly demanding.
Cooldown
So there you have it: my first-hand experiences of fitness classes. I think if I could only choose one, it’d be cycling, simply because it left me the most exhausted – but hot yoga and boxing were also gruelling yet satisfying. To be honest, each class had something to recommend it – but I don't know if I can manage five classes a week!
I was left wishing I could combine them and get to punch people from a floating bike while lying down in a heated room. I shall ask my gym whether it can introduce a Hot Boxbikearobics Reformer class.
Disclaimer: The above is based on my actual experiences of actually doing the actual classes, I promise. However it ought to be abundantly clear that not only am I not a fitness or medical professional, but a near-total ignoramus, and therefore this report should be relied upon only for the purpose of laughing at me.
Why isn't there healthier fast food?
My blood pressure is too high.
Now, don’t worry. I wouldn’t want your own blood pressure to skyrocket in shock at the potential loss of these delightful columns of mine. My readings aren’t so high that I’m highly likely to drop dead tomorrow (I say, touching the plasticised wood of my desk), but they’re higher than they should be. And certainly high enough to do something about it.
Of course, there are reasons for it to be on the high side just now – it's been an exciting week. I was already on the edge of my pew waiting to hear which septuagenarian, socially conservative man would become the new Pope, and then the excitement of a new Chief Minister of the NT in the same 24 hour period was almost too much to bear.
But I got multiple readings over the course of a few days, and the message from the doctor was clear: I need to make some changes. Lifestyle changes, he said – he didn’t want to prescribe medication, not ot when I’m relatively young, at least compared to the College of Cardinals. Do plenty of exercise, he told me, and watch what you eat, especially fat and salt.
Sure, I replied, that’ll be fine. And I vowed then and there to head to the gym at least every second day – a vow which I’ve been able to keep for 10 days now, which by my standards is an extremely long-term relationship.
But changing my diet is a challenge, and not just because I have minimal self-discipline and a devout love for the snacks. The problem is that I’m unable to cook for myself. And while it’s true that I don’t really know how, as I’ve admitted before, that’s not really what I’m referring to. I don’t have time.
Honestly – I don’t. Not just because of this high-paced modern life and all that, but because I generally work from around 2 or 3pm until 10. And this means that every evening, somewhere between five and six-thirty, I undertake a quest for dinner. A solitary but nevertheless heroic race against the clock to eat and get back to my desk within the space of about fifteen minutes. And even though there’s an abundance of food on offer, a cornucopia if you will, the problem is that pretty much all of it is junk.
I mean ‘junk food’ as in ‘fast food’, but also in the literal sense of stuff you could comfortably chuck away. We have a branch of just about every major fast food outlet around the corner from my work, and any one of them will gladly serve me up a hot meal quickly and reliably, at an inexpensive price. It’ll be tasty, at least superficially, and it’ll be filling. Too filling, in fact. And that’s the problem.
While the nation’s food courts are full of healthy options during weekday lunchtimes, trying to find a quick, nutritious meal at dinner time is harder than finding a scandal-free sporting code.
Take the most popular chain. Pretty much any meal deal at McDonald’s will use up around half of your daily kilojoule intake. The Big Mac alone will provide 44% of your daily intake of saturated fats (PDF link), 37% of your sodium intake and 24% of your energy intake. Add fries and a dessert or sugary drink, and you’ll be well on the way to blowing your daily budget for fat, salt and energy just in the one meal. Delicious!
I won’t go into too much more detail about the issues with Maccas’ menu, because Super Size Me already did that, but let me just say that it’s a hard place to eat well. As demonstrated by that poor McDonaldLand character Grimace, who has not only grown morbidly obese from a life of guzzling McDonald’s, but whose blood pressure is evidently so high that he’s turned purple.
Now, I accept that McDonald’s, KFC and the rest of them have their place. I understand that it’s food you should only eat occasionally. What I question is the fact that in our society, these foods are often the only easy food option. I’ve been to several country towns where literally the only late meal I could get after 10pm was McDriveThrough. And driving along any main road, you’ll find multiple outlets that are only too happy to fill your stomach, as well as your arteries.
No matter where you go in the developed or developing world, you can find a branch of McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut. And at any one of those branches, you can find the same menu items and order the same food with the same reassuring taste. And it’s almost all terrible for you.
None of this is the fault of the fast food chains, to be fair. It’s our fault as the consumers who choose which businesses prosper and fail. And McDonald’s tried introducing a healthier menu with sandwiches and salads, and nobody bought them. What does it say about our society that the only food you can find just about anywhere in the world is incredibly bad for you? Since we’re supposed to eat good, healthy good most of the time, and dodgy junk food only some of the time, why is it only the bad stuff that’s on-sale everywhere?
Admittedly, there is one exception – Subway, where it’s perfectly possible to stay within dietary guidelines if you stick to things like ham instead of meatballs and can resist the melted cheese and cookies. But it gets boring to eat a ham sub every day – I’ve tried.
When I was young, I used to eat at McDonald’s all the time. I’m embarrassed to say that I used to choose it even when there were other, better options. That’s probably how I got into this whole blood-pressure/overweight mess in the first place. Nowadays, I’d genuinely prefer a salad, or a bit of fish, or a vege stir fry, or a bit of chicken, or indeed anything tasty and healthy.
(And okay, if I’m honest, I’d prefer a gourmet wagyu burger to all of those things. I’m trying to change.)
But there isn’t anywhere that wants to sell healthy takeaway foods to me. The alternatives don’t exist. And so the unhealthy fast food joints continue to prosper, even though in our increasingly gourmet society we all know that we can and must do better. It’s a vicious circle which is making our bodies literally circular.
We’re all working harder, and eating out more, and supposedly more conscious of our waistlines as they nevertheless continue to balloon. So why aren’t there dozens of chains selling soup, or steamed vegetables, or lean, grilled meat, or salad? Even some of the specialist salad chains – Sumo, I’m looking at you – tend to chuck brie and bacon and cream into their supposedly healthy sandwiches. Even Asian options like noodles and rice dishes tend to be high in carbs and loaded with oil. And don’t get me started on the coffee chains like Starbucks and Gloria Jeans, whose snackfood cabinets will burn through your recommended daily intake faster than Bob Hawke downs a yard glass.
The first person to create a genuinely healthy, tasty fast food chain will either get fabulously rich, if we humans are indeed capable of some modicum of dietary self-control, or do their money because we ultimately can’t resist unhealthy crap when given the option. (If the latter’s true, we’ll probably all die out anyway.) The fact that Subway is now the world’s largest fast food chain, by outlets if not by profitability, is encouraging. I just wish more entrepreneurs would be brave enough to put their money on the line to find out.
In the meantime, my only genuine option if I want to eat healthily and with a modicum of variety at dinnertime is to buy frozen, low-fat dinners and cook them in the work microwave. I’ve tried this before too, and it left me doing something that I didn’t believe was possible – appreciating airline food.
After weighing the options up carefully, I can reluctantly concede that Lean Cuisine and its ilk are marginally better than a premature coronary. But how I wish there was another option.