28 October 2004

Turning 29 is A*C*E !!

My 30th year has got off to a cracking start!

Woke up early to a bright, sun-lit room (that’s a good thing - I like being woken by the sun)…. C-chan made me coffee and a banana smoothie, and played me happy birthday songs on the CD player while I opened pressies. I got:

- 2 new books (that I can’t wait to read)
- cheque to contribute to bike fund (to replace stolen bike)
- CD of Oboe concertos
- Candle
- Book voucher
- Dept store voucher
- Pudding basin

The latter was a present on request… puddings are going to be my latest cooking craze – you can look forward to it when you next come to dinner – chocolate steamed pudding, sticky date, golden pudding, jam pudding…

Good day all up!

26 October 2004

Defeatism...

…is a plaguing illness in some work places.

“I tried so many times, but they never change so I’ve given up”
(Ever thought you could try to go about it another way?)

Often you come across people who are fixed in their ways or views, and apparently can’t see how they are wrong or affect people negatively. Often so much is left unsaid, or talked about destructively behind peoples backs, rather than constuctively.

One of the most useful things one of my last bosses said to me, in the context of trying to bring about change of viewpoint, was:
“Just keep chipping away”

In other words: be persistent. (The opposite of defeatism).

But the image of “chipping away” is more powerful to my mind - the image stays there much longer than it would have had I been told to “be persistent”.


Amateur office place behavioural scientist, signing off.

19 October 2004

Phrases I don’t care to hear ever again....

“…in terms of…” – often very badly-used sentence joiner that helps you to change tack mid-sentence and re-iterate what you explained badly in the first place

“Give myself permission to….” – counsellor-speak, crossed over into the mainstream

“…step up and take responsibility for...” – as above

“…you’ve taken (insert adjective + noun) and made it your own” – only thing worse than hearing this on TV is when you hear people regurgitating it at morning tea the next day

“…at the end of the day…” – we can blame sports people and commentators for this one, which leads to another whole dialect of bad English...

11 October 2004

Bloated-ness (post 2004 federal election)

There are things that you can do that give you more of a warm, fuzzy feeling than paying a thousand per month into your mortgage/investments will ever do. We collectively are doing very little to improve life for much of the living things on this planet.

Lately, I have been pondering a fair bit about human nature, and have a theory that the sort of self-absorption that seems so prominent in society at the moment is probably what spurned religions thousands of years ago such as Christianity (I know too little about other religions to comment on those). Wise people realised that we achieve more when we work towards the common good, and when we look out for only our own interests, we self-destruct.

What is most disappointing is that we don’t show any signs of being much better as a whole than people were 2 millenia ago – wisdom doesn’t seem to have kept up with knowledge. We are unable to reach a standard of living and say “that’s enough, I have everything I need, and I will be satisfied with making other people’s lives better now”.

I myself am sick of having stuff, accumulating stuff, being sent stuff, being given stuff I don’t need just because it’s Christmas, and a society that doesn’t know when it’s taken things too far for the sake of income. Symptoms include:

- useless gadgets that you use once then forget
- needless remakes of films and re-recordings of songs with nothing new or interesting about them
- culture that is either brain-deadening or increased noise, but not at all enriching
- a satirising and cynical sense of humour that makes us feel witty, but seems to smother the urge for serious and constructive critique
- lack of long term policy and public planning
- having better technology but opting for the cheapest model
- packet food that takes just as long to prepare as the real thing, but with 5-times the ingredients, and 5 times the waste

I am party in doing or enjoying so many of the above things. However, last year we gave my in-laws a world vision Christmas card (which had a donation attached), and my Ma-in-law told us that it was the best, most true-to-the-spirit Christmas present she has ever been given. She was truly chuffed! That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?

08 October 2004

Get out of my dreams (and stay out of my car too)

Last night, I had a dream about spiders. Arachnids of all kinds are most unwelcome in my dreams, I tell you. I can still remember all too vividly the dream I had as a kid about giant spiders walking out of the house over the road from mine. In real life, I can't help but start at the sight of them, even if they are meters away, and not showing signs of being likely to rear their nippers up at me or take a leap my way. It seems that Arachnids are now the second recurring dream symbol that my subconsious likes to throw up every so often to make its point - the other symbol is the experience of being trapped underwater for a long time by a wave that breaks on me. Great.

In last night's dream, I was in a somewhat vulnerable position in a small room (not trying to be smutty here), then noticed that I was surrounded by several largish spiders that had somehow before escaped my notice. After some expert self-analysis, I have decided that spiders represent things that are most unwelcome in my life, and in this case, popped up quite suddenly.

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Forgive the obscure 80's song reference in this post's title, but you must be used me doing that by now.

01 October 2004

It's rainin', and it's rainin' good

Fell asleep to the sound of rain, woke up to the sound of rain...
Can still hear it raining outside, and I'm presently located not far from the catchment area!
What a nice sound!