Doing it wrong: Food.

I usually avoid paying any attention to the news on television.  I often feel I'm better off being completely uninformed than being largely misinformed, and I know too much about how network television works to be able to take anything they say seriously.

But, I live in a house where the television is on at news time, and sometimes I hear things even if I'm not listening.

Some days ago someone on the news was talking about something (a budget?  A rate change?) that was going to make life harder for the people "doing it tough".  Someone said something about people having to chose between paying the bills or putting food on the table.  Someone else in the same story talked about people having to skip meals because they couldn't afford it...

This is incredibly callous of me, I know, but I couldn't help thinking "Well, they're clearly doing it wrong."

Yes, I know poverty is poverty, and it can be a real struggle to eat well... but we live in Australia, people - as long as you aren't actually homeless, you should be able to eat something.  You can buy a kilo of rice for less than $3 and a kilo of mixed vegetables for less than $2.  Curry powder, water and a tablespoon of flour makes it taste like something edible and you could feed four people with that.  It's not great, but it's food - and that wasn't even the best example.

As hundreds of generations of Asian peasant farmers will tell you, if you have rice, you have a meal.  I come from Northern European peasant farmer stock, and hundreds of generations of those will tell you that if you have a cabbage and a loaf of bread, you have a meal.

If you buy staples (especially if you buy them in bulk) when you have a bit of money, and you budget your food like you [should] budget your money, then you really shouldn't have to go a day without eating something.

Now, I say that as someone who has never had to raise six kids on a single income at minimum wage in rented accommodation, so I'm willing to admit that I could be very, very wrong.

And I'm also willing to admit that I'm prejudiced in this matter.  I abhor the kinds of people who spend their money on beer and cigarettes and giant TV sets and then complain about not having enough money for food.

There are people out there who are genuinely doing their best and still not making ends meet, and I wish the Giant-TV-Buying jerks weren't encouraging me to assume that everyone who can't afford food is going without basic necessities because they are morons.

However, I still have difficulty wrapping my head around the idea that people who are budgeting well can't afford a packet of rice.

Apart from making me wonder about their ability to budget, it makes me wonder if they are going without food because they don't know how to "approach" a packet of rice.

Jamie Oliver (so annoying, yet rather informative) drew my attention to the fact that "poor" people often eat badly because they don't know how to cook or can't see a meal as anything other than a hamburger or a pizza.

Do we have families going "without food on the table" because they don't know how to "eat poor"?  Have we forgotten how to eat like peasants?  Should we be teaching that in Home Economics in school?  Rather than teaching kids how to make quiche, should we be teaching them how to stretch a single chicken into four meals?  How to make a "decent" meal for a family out of 500g of mince, dried beans and rice?  How to use things like chili and curry to make the simplest meals tasty?

So much stuff is out there on austerity/ausperity at the moment, but who is it aimed at?  People who are genuinely poor and need to know this stuff, or middle-class hippies who have taken a pay cut and want to turn it into a project?

Mind you, I feel like I should put my money where my mouth is on this one.  I live like a laird - and, oddly enough, I always have.  In spite of the fact that I spent the first 15 years of my life living below the poverty line, I was raised by a genius who managed to give our family a Good Life even though we were living off a pension.

Apart from one year when I was living on a low-to-no income budget (and I've always wanted to take a second crack at that year, because I think I could have done it better), I've never had to be responsible for putting food on the table when money was particularly tight.

I feel like I should try living poor for a little while before I start waving my hands around saying "oh, but of course you can put food on the table for a pittance".  I think that would make me one of those middle class hippies treating "being poor" like a project, though, and that may also make me even more of a jerk than I already am.

Still, it probably is about time I started thinking about how much I waste on food (and how much food I waste) and whether I could be doing better with less.  I think I can safely say that, regardless of my budget, when it comes to food I'm still "doing it wrong".

Dear Lecturer

Your punishment for giving me an assignment I thought was a bit obnoxious to do is to be sentenced to read and mark my obnoxious assignment.

Suck eggs.

Adria Petty

So, Adria Petty is now my favourite music clip director.

I recently watched the video clip for Beyonce's "Count Down" in a setting where I couldn't actually hear the song - just watch the clip and pick up a bit of the beat.

It was so dang impressive I couldn't take my eyes of it.

I got around to catching it on YouTube today so I could hear what song went with the clip (and see the clip again), and discovered the music actually detracts from the clip.

How often do you find a music video that is better with the sound off?  

Most of the time I see these these things and think "what was the point of that?" rather than "awesome!"  Petty's clip was definitely in the "awesome!" category.

Spider vs Spider

So, today I learnt that one of the major predators for grey huntsman spiders is...

Daddy-long-legs spiders.

Apparently the daddy-long-legs are quite well known for having other spiders "over for dinner", if you know what I mean.  Known for preying on redback spiders and huntsmans, among others.

I find this absolutely fascinating, because daddy-long-legs spiders are small and spindly, completely harmless (to humans), easy to pick up with one's bare hands, and look like this:

While grey huntsmans (one of my favourite spiders, but not in the same league of "my goodness, that's an adorable spider" as jumping spiders) are rather large and stocky, a bit on the "ooh, scary spider!" side, and look like this:

They aren't dangerous to humans, either, and (according to the Museum of Tropical North Queensland) have never actually been known to bite - unlike the brown huntsman spiders, which apparently bite quite readily, and are painful, if not dangerous.  Not that I've ever been bitten by a huntsman of either kind, even though I've probably deserved it.  I have tried to move them on occasion, and that never went as smoothly as I'd hoped.

I played a wonderful "game" with a grey huntsman the other night, where I went to great lengths to catch it using the whole "container and paper" trick, only to find it sitting on the outside of the container staring at me as if to say "What?"  

Then I screamed a little, dropped the container and jumped back a step, while it ran away very fast.

Anyway, the idea of something the size of a small sultana being a major predator for something the size of a large prune is fascinating.

And here I thought daddy-long-legs were the also-rans of the spider community.

Other people's positivity

I've just been reading the latest post on Hyperbole and a Half, and I really feel like leaving a long comment on her post but she's maxed out her available comment space.  So I'll just write a comment here.

I can't say anything to the depression bit.  Although I have commented in the past that I often feel completely fogged out or emotionally blank, I don't attribute that to emotional depression so much as being tired and run-down.

I can, however, completely sympathise with the fact that other people are so damn needy with their positivity.

There are so many things I've simply never shared with other people over the years because what I want to say doesn't match the "everything is always fine and wonderful" line that other people seem to want to hear.

The things that I wanted to say were not negative, as far as I was concerned, but just neutral.  These were just things I had observed about myself, and I felt like I could be completely okay and at peace with them...  But you can't say them out loud or people will think you are being negative and try to talk you "around" to a more positive view of things.

Even now I can't give an example, because I really don't want to waste my time by having to read (or hear) someone telling me I shouldn't think like that and "it's all okay".

Well, duh.  Of course it's all okay.  I'm okay with this or that or the other, exactly how it is.  However, when you try to tell me that this, that or the other isn't true and I shouldn't say such negative things about myself, you make it *not* okay.

We don't all walk the same path, we don't all want the same things and we don't all feel soft and squishy in the same places.

Sometimes we just need to let people say what they say and think what they think without expecting them to "sell positive" all the time.

Being extra positive for other people is exhausting.

Allie mentioned how much difficulty she had trying to tell people that she felt suicidal because she didn't want to have to deal with *their* emotions.  I felt like telling her to find someone with Asperger Syndrome because they are so much better at being practical (depending on where they are in the spectrum).

"Normal" people are all "here, feel my feelings", while those of us who have to work hard at the whole empathising thing can more easily switch to "okay, so you just want to hear something practical?  Thank God for that."

You don't have to make things positive to make them "better" or "okay".  And you don't have to cure other people of their (perceived) negativity, just because it doesn't match your desire for positivity.  Let's accept a bit of neutrality in our lives - or at least in others'.

Bummer

Well, if this job inscription is anything to go by, I'm not even qualified to wash dishes in Antartica:

http://www.antarctica.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/21708/ACSO_2013_14_Final.pdf

You'd think that, somewhere in my life, I would have learnt something that could enable me to work for 6 months in a camp somewhere, but apparently not.

The rest of the jobs in the Antarctic division also require demonstrable experience in things I've never done.

Or a medical degree, but I don't have that either.

Textbooks

“What do you want to do?” she asked me, with a tone of voice that suggested she was ready and willing to laugh at whatever I said.  A group of us were sharing a drink after work, and somehow, in the course of the banter, I said I was going to retire early and find something else to do with my time.

“What do you want to do?”

“Make novelty ceramic dogs and sell them at weekend markets.”

That tickled her fancy.  She wanted a cheap laugh and she got it.  But then she turned half serious and said:  “But, really, if you weren't going to be a librarian, what would you like to do?”

“Write textbooks,” I replied.  She laughed at this even more than she had laughed at the ceramic dogs.  Then she seemed to noticed I had answered her honestly.

“Textbooks?  Why would anyone want to write textbooks?”

“They're endlessly fascinating.  I love looking at the design of them.”

“What would you write a textbook about?”

“I have a few different ideas.  I just need to learn more, first.”

It's true.  I love textbooks.  I love looking at course material - how have they designed it?  What's the layout, the breakup of content, the balance between information and activities...? 

I particularly like the textbooks that are usually set as “recommended texts”.  You know the ones I mean.  You get a list of textbooks for your subject, some are listed as “required texts” - these are going to be the textbooks you will actually *have* to read in your weekly studies to pass the subject.  But then there are “recommended texts” - books that will add to your understanding and make you a more rounded practitioner of whatever it is you are doing… if you take the time to squeeze them into your busy schedule.

Hardly anyone buys the “recommended texts”.  Even if you do buy it, you'll probably never find time to read it.  But I do love looking at them. They're almost always more entertaining than the “required texts”, and can be quite enlightening if you take the time to read them.  Which, I must admit, I rarely do.

These are the books I want to write:  the ones that have interesting graphic designs and chunky, textbooky layouts, but border on being non-fiction rather than course material; the ones that add to your understanding in almost completely non-essential ways; the ones you'll probably buy if you're naive enough to buy everything on the textbook list, but will probably never read because you don't have time for such things.

Why?

I don't know.  The heart wants what it wants.  I looked at a lot of different language books and materials when I was working on my last Masters, and at some point I realised I actually really loved this genre.  It's more than just information - it's also presentation of information.  It's more than just knowledge and ideas - it's the way knowledge and ideas are grouped and scaffolded and slowly sold to an unsuspecting public.

This genre challenges me with its need for clarity and brevity.  I am prone to waffling, and taking too many words to explain as much as I can.  Text books need to be concise and to the point.  How can I say all that needs to be said without wasting a single word?  Is it even within my abilities?

Maybe I will never actually write a textbook.  It may very well be that I never write anything beyond a few self-serving blogs.  I don't know.  But I can dream, can't I?