Sleepless Nights

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  • Not having fun

    I wrote a post for a PR company the other day, as part of a new website launch and three sentences in, I realised that I was having fun. I couldn’t, for the life of me, manage to be sensible, and so I wrote the post tongue in cheek and deeply satirical and then sent it off into the ether, hoping that the company would ‘get’ it and still want to use the post.

    What the hell I thought, if it’s not suitable, I’ll be serious and use the first attempt as a post for Sleepless Nights. Win|win.

    A week and some follow up emails later, I was told my post was great and it would be used, which is fantastic, but I’d also hoped to share it here, because that’s how much I enjoyed being silly. The post isn’t live on the site yet, so I can’t link to it, but it made me realise, I haven’t been having fun.

    I’m unhappy. Sure, good things are happening and I’m enjoying them – I really enjoyed the ABC International Women’s Day event I attended and I’m really looking forward to getting married and I’ve loved organising the Aus Blog Con … but I’m not happy, in myself.

    I had a conversation with Paul Smart during the opening of MONA about the importance of having fun. I agreed with him in theory, but also, while we were racing around the museum and having the best time, I realised how rare my having fun had become. Yes, I enjoyed things, but being silly? Having fun? I’d lost a lot of that. MONA FOMA made me realise how much I missed myself, the bent sense of humour and the darkly funny and the loving life. Doctors appointments leave no room for satire, or jokes.

    Life has been feeling like an endless grind of meltdowns and shitty nappies and being urinated on and stuff breaking and things falling apart and appointments and screaming and stress and really, where is my fun?

    Nan died almost two years ago and it doesn’t feel like that long, not when I’m missing her so much it hurts. It feels like a heartbeat and yet, at the same time, surely I’ve been living this way forever?

    I think grief sucks the fun out of life, really fast. Autism and a falling down house help, but the grief feels like a giant weight that sits, between my shoulders, making everything that bit more difficult.

    Nan died and then my hot water cylinder exploded and then my car died on the day of her funeral, at the fucking funeral home and there was a giant falling out with family and thousands of dollars worth of plumbing bills and then a baby who was having trouble feeding and a seizure and Ehlers Danlos and then Aspergers for Amy and then total social withdrawal from Isaac. Not to mention the two dogs killed within a few months and then just everything.

    Sometimes life is too much and surviving is all you can think about. It will get better, or it will be fine, become mantras and suddenly, it’s years later and you’ve been surviving, just, for so long, that you can’t remember when you last thought about how crappy it all feels now.

    I’ve gotten so used to things going wrong, that I don’t even tell people when things are meant to be happening, because surely, it’s all going to go to shit before then anyway.

    I’m going away this weekend, to Sydney, for the Aus Blog Con. I’m going to sleep in a hotel room without anyone screaming at me, and I am going to breathe deep and photograph everything. I am going to laugh, as much as I can, as often as I can.

    I am going to be silly and stupid and I am not going to care what people think. I am going to hug the group of women who have held my hand through tough times and I am going to eat with them and laugh and be myself and trust that they’ll like me anyway. I’m sure they will. I am going to meet new people and make new friends.

    I’m going to have fun, despite everything else, because fun makes everything easier.

    When I come home, I am going to spend four days quietly freaking out, because you guys? I am giving a talk to post-graduate media students at the UTAS on Friday the 25th, on blogging and new media and what I do all day and then I’m going to have coffee with the senior lecturer about something that might end up being a Very Big Deal, or it might not end up happening. I am trusting that telling about it won’t jinx it.

    And I am going to have FUN. And you’re going to have fun with me, because there is not enough fun lately.

  • Let’s talk about ducklings. Again.

    The unusual thing about this photo is not that I have ducklings sitting on my bench in a container – again, it’s that there are three of them and I found them before they’d started the dying process seriously. We could also argue that I probably shouldn’t put cold ducklings into a refrigerator box, but that box was the only one handy as I had handfuls of ducklings and anyway, it’s sitting on a hot water bottle.

    3 days after I had 17 ducklings stolen, I had another 9 hatch to the last duck sitting. These are the last ducklings of the season, before the long cold months send the ducks off the lay and mean that any ducks unfortunate enough to try sitting will likely lose their eggs to the cold, or newborn babies to a frost.

    These nine ducklings were doing really well – the mother is relatively good at it and everything was going perfectly.

    But I found a duckling dead this morning and so I when we got home from dropping Amy at school, I did a quick look around and found these three babies doing quite badly. Quite badly means that they didn’t run away, or flail about when I picked them up to bring inside.

    I’m not sure if it’s the cold damp weather, or what’s going on, but they should be okay now. All three have had some sugar water and I can hear quiet peeping from behind my monitor, so I suspect a full recovery will be made. In fact if the panicked peeping when they just saw Nathan is any indication, then they’ll be fine.

    Ducklings are fragile creatures and I can see why clutches of up to 20 are hatched, when they seem to die at drop of a hat. Not like baby chickens, who are tough and can be brought back to health from the brink of death.

    On the stolen duckling front, we still don’t know anything. The local policeman called in yesterday to see if we had heard anything, but we haven’t and neither has he, which is frustrating.

    So that’s me.

    What’s the strangest thing sitting on your bench today?

     

  • Aus Blog Con, a list of things you need to know.

    SO!

    I’m going to Sydney in less than a week – escaping the clutches of Isaac’s clinging and Amy’s whining and running away. Of course, they’ll be fine, but I am a touch worried about Nathan’s sanity and how he’ll hold up alone.

    The conference is set to run all day Saturday and I can’t wait. I’m going to be meeting some of my very favourite women, and getting to know a lot of women that I have read and admired for a while. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally made it happen.

    Considering I’ve been seeing a lot of posts around the place about tips and tricks, fashion and what not, I thought I’d add to the confusion and do my own.

    – I am nervous, in an excited kind of way. Meeting people in real life is hard for me and blogging is low pressure. That said, I cannot wait to meet and talk to as many people as possible. Some of your blogs I don’t know, some I’ve been reading from the beginning. I still want to meet everyone.

    – Because there are people whose blogs I’ve not had the pleasure of discovering yet, I will be asking for business cards from everyone. I like business cards, I come home and they hang around on my desk and remind me that I need to visit and check out new blogs. I would love if you have cards handy – it’s easier than scribbling on bits of paper.

    – I might have emailed backwards and forwards with you and still don’t know your real name. I have a terrible time reconciling blog names with author names and real names and just ugh. I’m used to introducing myself as Veronica from SleeplessNights (thanks ABC radio) so that I can give everyone a heads up as to who I am when we’re talking. Of course, we’ll all have name badges too, so that will help.

    – If you get really lost, or are terribly shy, look for the lady with purple hair and stripy socks. That is Frogpondsrock and she takes everyone under her wing and is the biggest extrovert I know.

    – I have bad joints and added issues. If I’m talking to you and I suddenly bolt for the toilet, I’ve just gone to throw up. Because I’ll be doing my least favourite things ever  (travelling, flying, buses, taxis, early mornings and a strange environment) I will be surprised if I don’t spend at least a small portion of the time being sick. This is relatively normal.

    – Anxiety, I have it. I plan to be as outgoing as I possibly can, but I might still end up hyperventilating in a corner. I’m fairly sure some of you will be doing the same thing?

    – Fashion. I am not fashionable. I am easily exhausted and broken and frogpondsrock will likely be relocating my ribs for me all day. Therefore, I will likely be wearing jeans and a t-shirt for most of the conference and dinner. It’s easier to hide braces under these things. I will pack a skirt and boots too, but it will be casual casual. The dress code is casual, so wear whatever you like.

    So that’s me.

    What things do I need to know about you?

     

  • Dear Internet, how much do you love me?

    Subtitled: Swallowing my pride.

    The last week has been like a giant snowball of things going wrong. Tonight, the kids bathed my iPhone and while it’s sitting in a container of rice, I’m not hopeful that it will work again. Considering it was given to me by a friend in the first place, I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

    I ran my finances a week ago and had to hastily look away. If I wasn’t an organiser of the Aus Blog Con, I would have pulled out of going a month ago, for financial reasons. Everything appears to have conspired against me, leaving us with bills to pay and things to replace and not much left.

    Of course, as one of the organisers I can’t pull out and while I can just manage to make it to Sydney, it’s only because I’ll be maxing out my credit card and eating rice for a month when I get home.

    Ideally, I’d love sponsorship by a company, who sell optus phones (because my mobile number is on my business cards and I really don’t think I can hold up to another mobile number change) and then I can stop wondering if the Universe is conspiring against me.

    But I also know that this is really late notice, and it’s very likely that no company will see this.

    So, dear Internets, if you would like to send me $5, I will be grateful forever. All donaters will score themselves a sidebar link under ‘People I will love forever’.

    There. Done. Pride swallowed.

    Now I’m going to go and mope over my dead phone, my dead garden and stolen ducklings.

     

  • International Women’s Day

    It’s a universal truth that women have had to fight twice as hard to get half the recognition of men. This year marks the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day and it shows us how far we’ve come from the suffragette movement of the early 1900’s. It also highlights how far we’ve still got to go, to reach true equality, in all things.

    I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m white and I’m living in a developed nation. I have access to health care, I have a reasonable expectation that I won’t be sexually assaulted or abused and I have access to legal channels if these things happen. I’ve got next to no risk of contracting HIV and safe sex practises in my youth meant that whatever risk I had then was negligible.

    Unfortunately, a good portion of women in the world are not as lucky, nor as protected as I am.

    UNHCR is working to raise awareness of women across the globe, who still don’t have access to clean birthing conditions, who are living in refugee tents with their families, who run a real risk of being raped, just living their life.

    90% of war victims at this point in time are civilian women and children, and HIV is running rampant.

    In Bosnia, rape was used as a specific act of war. The age old ‘if you can’t wipe them out, then breed them out’ was taken seriously and thousands of Bosnian women were raped.

    “Lustmord” at MONA highlights this, the work of ink on skin is a reminder of what the women lived through – the words taken from three different viewpoints, the rapist, the victim and a witness.

    Lustmord 1994. Jenny Holzer.

    I think the job that UNHCR is doing is fantastic, in all honesty. Providing clean birth kits to Somalian women to help decrease maternal and infant mortality is a wonderful thing.

    However.

    [And there is always a however with me.]

    I am a big believer in ‘Think Global, Act Local’. I support everything UNCHR is doing, wholeheartedly, but I would like to know what the mortality rate for Aboriginal women giving birth in the Outback is.

    The indigenous infant mortality rate in the Northern Territory in 2002 was 18.1/1000 births – higher than the combined non-indigenous infant mortality rate of ALL states and territories.

    The lowest indigenous infant mortality rate was 9.5/1000 in NSW.

    I’m sorry, but those numbers are horrific. We are a developed nation and yet, nearly 4 times the amount of aboriginal babies died in the Northern Territory in 2002? REALLY?

    The average life expectancy also throws up large issues. The average life expectancy for an non-indigenous Australian woman is 82.6 years, yet for an indigenous women in the NT, it is a mere 50 years.

    We have made huge strides in the last 100 years – International Women’s Day shows that, however, that entire hundred years was not forward progress for all women. The Stolen Generation (if you can’t wipe ’em out, them breed ’em out) is a sad history in Australia and the figures I have stated above shows just how far we’ve yet to come.

    All we can hope for is continued forward movement, because looking at those numbers makes me realise just how very privileged my life truly is.

    There is a push this year, to get people on social networks thinking about women who may not have a voice to speak out with.

    **

    Figures taken from here.

    Disclaimer: UNHCR contacted me and asked if I’d like to write about the work they are doing. I used this as my soapbox to get to talk about Aboriginal women; something that they didn’t bring up. I was not compensated for any of this post, nor would I ask to be. I like my soapbox, but you don’t have to.