Sun shining, no-one making hay

So we've seen points scored by the ACTU campaign against Howard and Costello's class warfare blueprint. Barnaby breaking the coalition lockstep. Low community support for handing the rest of the Telstra family jewels to wealthy investors. A coalition of country and student interests who agree on keeping student control of student amenities.

So how, how, how is Beazley slipping so far under the radar and posting his worst figures ever?

To not elope

A couple of nights ago I heard my beloved saying to someone on the phone that we knew it could get bad, but not this bad.

I never underestimated the depths we could plumb preparing a wedding, never underestimated the capacity of close relatives to drive you up and right over the wall, into a bed of thorns on the other side of sanity.

Hence eloping was very attractive. Still is, though it's probably too late. I had 2 potential plans for a romantic elopement, which I'll share with anyone interested.

One involved a beautiful hotel on Jimbaran Bay in Bali. You get these private villas, Balinese architecture, with their own little plunge pools, on the edge of the cliff looking out across the ocean. We would go into the garden, I would turn and ask her, she would laugh and say yes (I always knew she'd laugh when I proposed, and she did) then I would lead her into the area where the plunge pool is, and it would be covered in flower petals, and there would be a celebrant there dressed in a simple white robe, and there would be a couple of people playing Gamelan instruments, and several kids in traditional outfits dancing along the side of the pool, and the music would stop, and we'd have a brief exchange of vows, then the music would start again and they'd all leave slowly, and when they were gone, we would undress and slide into the pool and be merry and conjugal. There would be Billecart-Salmon beside the pool for refreshment.

The other was simpler. In it we would go for a long weekend to Uluru- beloved has never been. We would go to Kata Juta (Olgas) and walk to the top of the valley of the winds, one of the most spiritual places I've ever been, and there i'd propose, and she'd laugh and say yes, and we'd have a simple ceremony back at the resort followed by champagne and lobsters under the stars.

Are you telling me formality, speeches, relatives ad nauseum is more romantic?

Something significant happened while you were changing the channel

These are dark days for the latte left. Being governed from the Victorian era is bad enough, but there has also been a several-year long overflowing of traditional aussie anti-intellectualism. Public enemy number one- well, perhaps on a par with radical islamic preachers- has been inner city uni educated know-it-all lefties.

Big Bogan Brother, meanwhile, has played a peripheral role confirming the low place intellect holds in the hearts of the masses, with stupid, simple or at best smiley and harmless being the qualities needed to get to the finals. Two years ago a small minded bogan cleaned up. Last year Merlin was hurled out by voters after being exposed as a non-citizen who has an opinion. The crowd also hated his gutsy if over-the-top protest for refugees, which just confirmed that he needed to go home.

This year something different has gone on. A quirky intellectual with a scrawny body has made it to the finals. Along the way he fell in love with one of the bogan girls, she spurned him, then went on a dumboid rant about being disgusted by men who kiss men. She was kicked out.

Even if Lefty Tim loses now, I've picked up a little ember that will warm me until the thaw. Waiting for the thaw is all lefties have at the moment. It's been very cold, very dark.

Could this leftward adjustment on Big Brother be the first sign of change from the heartlands?

Maritime Union of Australia think so:

It has been really heartening to see the Australian public fall in love with Tim, and all the values he stands for.

Aye comrade Tim, nice work.

Nodding while the Important people speak

It isn't surprising Henry Kissinger actually says nothing of any remote value in his opinion piece in the Australian. He's a realist, so intellectually he should be against the Iraq fiasco, but he's also instinctively in bed with the hawks.

What is surprising is the ease with which this alleged war criminal saunters from one high-paying gig as a speaker to another, being treated with deference. I'm sure Bin Laden would have lots of interesting stuff to say, but there must be a point where someone is too unpleasant to be given such respected gigs. No?

On TV, must be cool, must play...

Everything is driven by TV.

I've enjoyed poker since year 9. I must have watched a 007 movie, got all excited, and bought a gambling rule book. For a little while I convinced my nerd herd to switch from Dungeons and Monsters-with-faux-Welsh-names to poker. For cash. At school. Sometimes even in class under the desks.

Big sums changed hands. Once someone got ahead by 50c and there was almost a scrap.

But since then none of my friends have shown any interest. Pantera, Porn, Piss, Poker- eusgem generis* I would have thought! But no...

Until it comes to TV. Even poker comes to TV, and of course in bastardised form. World Championship Poker- absurd, though in fairness it can't be any more boring than Golf or Cricket.

So now 2 of my mates are hooked, and I'm about to spend the weekend in Rutherglen with them and our partners, drinking wine in the day and trying out my best poker face at night. Beloved is a sharp corporate lawyer so I'm hoping we can team up and extract a few cases of wine from the others.

I'm in her good books again. Last night we sat on the couch, sipping Green Tea, picking through the real estate pages of Melbourne Times, pointing out places we'll buy when the market crashes, and the world was in tune.

(* Spelling's probably off- maybe the usage as well!)

Mix that gene pool, among other things

Is DNA testing the End of the Affair, times 2 billion?

One in 25 fathers not biological parent, says study.

Oh well, maybe 1 in 3 of those shared his own genes somewhere else. What a fascinating species we are...

Forgetting how you got there

The libs continue to back down on, 'clarify' and otherwise demonstrate their quiet regret over the workplace revolution they planned to impose via the rubber-stamp Senate. How they could have deluded themselves that only the business vote matters is beyond me. They've been winning on the back of the 'upper working class' family suburban vote, and it's that vote they've needlessly put at risk in order to pursue their ideological hatred of unions and the notion of workers' rights. Not that Labor is taking much advantage.

Ah, it feels nice to slip in some domestic poliblogging, it's been a while...

A woman's work is never done (until she consigns it to the 50s)

Another fight, another day in the dogbox. I came back late from seeing a movie with mates, she washed the dishes, she got stroppy. This isn't uncommon, though I've changed my domestic habits drastically since we moved in.

If Janet Albrechtson has a redeeming feature, it's as an advocate for confused men. Like all right-wing rottweilers she sometime says that which needs saying, and while I generally agree with Mark Latham's take on her, when I'm in the dogbox over domestic chores I wish I had a framed copy of one of her articles on the subject to look at.

I can't find a link, sorry. But the argument goes a little like this...

Modern women may well be carrying the bulk of the housework while also pursuing careers. They may well see this as an obstacle to feminism, one perpetuated specifically by the men in their lives who don't pick up a half share of everything. They may take this out on the men in their lives, and become bitter.

They may in some cases be right.

But what they have done is move into a new paradigm, where women and men both pursue careers and individual dreams, and brought an out-of-date notion of household with them.

Cleanliness, tidyness, and household efficiency are all relative. I'm messy compared with my beloved. She's not hyper-neat though, and would soon get up the nose of a hardcore anal retentive. I'm very neat and clean compared to the house full of arts students I lived with in 2003.

When one person is devoted full-time to housework, it is feasible to clean the floors, bathroom, sheets, clothes, once a week, plus cook dinner at home and wash up several times a week. But here's the nub:

one person doing housework and one person working long hours and pursuing an interesting life does not add up to the same amount of time for chores as two people both working long hours and pursuing interesting lives.

Women shouldn't return to domestic slavery, that's awful in my opinion. But they need to learn what the much-derided bachelor has long worked out - that if you have a career and a life, then you find ways to be efficient and don't spend a second more than you have to on household work.

I apologise for generalising and acknowledge there are many exceptions.

I've decided to transition....

Sorry for the inconvenience this will cause the handful of you who've linked or put this site in favourites.

I'm going to keep the narrative of the wedding preparation going, but broaden the scope of the site a bit. I thought about the wise counsel of a certain commenter who pointed out that the gift of a printout of this site might be akin to a cat dropping a dead mouse on its owner's bed. Beloved doesn't mind me writing about personal stuff on a blog, but I don't know how a dedicated site that uses terminology stolen from a book about affairs would go down, and we are going through so much testing at the moment I don't need to add to it.

This site will shortly become something idiotic to do with Armagnac. Why? Because it's a magnificent spirit, and when I'm melancholy I often deliberate on spirits (though my budget usually only gets to about Glenfiddich).

I hope you'll stay with me; I'll continue to post about the wedding, just that I'll keep it to the more traumatic stuff that's worth writing about and discussing.

And unlike previous projects I'll avoid letting politics become too dominant: I'm thinking short pithy political observations with links, coupled with longer personal pieces where I enjoy the writing better.

Sorry to be so navel gazing, stay with me...

Circling the rim of a nasty lava pit

I've reached the dark rim of the volcanic invite caldera.

Invites go out in days, not weeks, and the list is almost final. This is the point where hard decisions get made. We've fought several times, and probably will again.

Ingredients for a testy debate about invites:

Someone who likes small lists, and doesn't like large crowds or being the centre of attention.
Someone who likes to invite everyone they've shared a beer with, likes big crowds and is an extrovert.
Someone who's moved constantly and has friends all over the world that they keep some vague form of contact with.
Someone whose friends are mostly drawn from the one large group who tend to attend each other's functions en masse.
Someone who has lots of good friends of the same gender littered across their past.
Someone who gets jealous easily.
Someone who has always vowed that they would not have B-lists, or throw a wedding if they couldn't invite everyone special to them.

Initially we put close to 200 on our list, with the expectation that quite a few wouldn't be able to make it and so we'd end up with an ideal number of about 140-150. We tested the waters and got indications from people.

Now we are down to the 'ideal number', and beloved would prefer to draw a line and send out the invites. But I always hoped to be able to use some cancellations on my side to invite a few more friends.

Beloved obviously hasn't counted the numbers up in this way, but nearly all the rejections are mine, from my overseas family and friends. Only around 1/3 of the invitees are from my side of things, and it upsets me that it has to be such a big deal to invite 3 or 4 more people.

B-listing friends is not me. It is not who I am, at a fundamental level. I'm experiencing high levels of emotional dissonance at the moment, only partly relieved by having bought two outstanding albums which I'm rotating constantly through the stereo.

Yesterday she gave a small patch of ground, and it made me warm. I don't want to call the numbers game, I don't want to pull the list into territory where she'll be uncomfortable. I just want to get through this.

She agreed to me inviting a handful more. In return I've sounded them out, but if they don't respond to their emails within days then I'm moving on, conscience salved.

A silly distraction

Via Boynton, I learn that putting sentences through a thesaurusizer is lots of fun, especially if you do it a couple of times. Here's some wedding vows, thesaurusized:

I rub the lamp thee to be my legal matronage baron as the sparks fly upwards beyond remedy do us still small voice within, in stick in the throat and in denominational, for richer or for working for the privileged duty, and refusal if you force down the throat a point of sex devise regeneration someone and so on or energy on which occasion me up the picket fence or buy a porsche.

A goer?

Children and Denial

Beloved and I are blessed to want the same thing here. 2 to 3 kids would be great, thanks.

There seem to be a lot of couples who wear a level of denial about this issue, and it's sad. I have no agenda; I understand completely why some people don't ever want them, and why others are clucky as. But the thing is, it is such a deal-breaker of an issue, and so many couples push it under the faux-Persian rug.

We have some friends, well, they're more hers than mine after the woman told me she earned more money than me in an attempt to win an argument, but friends nonetheless. He's a great guy, perhaps a bit borderline too-cool and chilled. She's manic, but genuine. They have a great rapport, they're a very good couple in most respects.

But she's deeply maternal, it comes out in so many things she says, while he states baldly that he never wants to have kids. Never. No interest at all.

You can't ignore an issue like this. Unless one of them genuinely changes their mind, they will do one of three things:

bad- go on in denial until it comes to a head in a few years, then break up in a big sad mess;

worse- she'll give in, and resent him deeply for the rest of her life;

maybe good, but likely worst of all- have a kid against his wishes, and he will either suddenly grow to love the child, as she'll be hoping, or resent it and be a bad father or even leave.

Unless one of them genuinely changes their mind.

So they need to talk now, and see whether this can be resolved, explore with each other and individually the extent of their feelings about this.

I think it's toughest for the woman in these situations. Until technology moves a fair bit further forward, a woman who wants kids desperately and who suddenly confronts reality at 35 and breaks up from her life-love is in a terrible place.

From panic to panic...

Thanks for your feedback, I'll stay with this project and stop fretting for now. There's plenty else for me to tie myself into reefknots over.

This is invitation week. I'm trying to contact everyone who is on the invitation list on my side to see if they can come. Many are overseas, and if they're unlikely to make it then I'm not spending $5 a piece on sending them a lush-looking invite. I'm also hoping to free up some space to invite people I want at the wedding. I always vowed if I ever had a wedding I would invite everyone I'd want at a big party, but it hasn't come out like that.

On the list there are relatives. Relatives I like. Relatives I don't mind. Relatives I quite dislike.

My closest friends are all on, but several live in London, Hong Kong or Bangkok and so most are unlikely to make it. Neither is my little sister. This leaves me with heavy boots, to plagiarise the fantastic book I just finished.

There are friends who I see or hear from infrequently who I've had to put on the maybe-list. I don't like having a so-called B-list, but it's inevitable if you hit a self-imposed ceiling, and it's easy to impose ceilings when you're shelling out on good food and grog all night. They aren't B-list because I don't like them, they're maybe-list because of all the people who have to be invited.

Which means every cancellation can be put to good use. And I'm not overly close to most of my relatives. Yet I must admit feeling a bit, I don't know, miffed that not one member of my mother's family is likely to come over. They're in the UK, so it's individually understandable, as it is with my overseas mates.

But collectively?

The fact that at a wedding full of relatives not one member of that wing of my family will be present is significant given that I'm my mum's only child. I think she'll be sad about it, I think it will drive home her sense of isolation that no doubt she's felt ever since moving across to Papua New Guinea and meeting and marrying an Australian in the 60s. Though I can't blame any of them individually, collectively it's disappointing. Pounds trade pretty favourably for dollars. Cheap airfares are everywhere in blighty. You get that, I guess.

Still, if in the wash I get to invite a couple more real friends, and they know how to enjoy a beer and a laugh, it will turn out ok...

Questions for YOU a week (or so) in...

I've discovered the joys of personal blogging.

Some of you reading this know me as a bit of a blogging neurotic, who has started and stopped a few projects. My beloved certainly does; although she has little interest in blogging I've imposed my blog neurosis conversation on her countless times. You may know the conversation- I know there are quite a few out there who suffer similar blog neuroses.

Problem with blogs is they're so easy to start, and the process of coming up with a blog is so creative, that it is always tempting to start a new one. I started then deleted about 3 before getting into my first proper blog. It was primarily political, but included some personal posts, including the previous brush with mortality alluded to in a post below and the moment I became engaged. They always went down well, and I enjoyed writing them.

That blog was aggressively political and opinionated, and at times I felt very prone writing it, given that I had opted to display my name and suburb. So I shut it down. Then I started a much more formal political and academic blog, to force myself to write in a certain way and to focus on certain issues. Global issues. Then I started writing this.

Ladycracker asked why I started this, was it as a relief from wedding preparation? In part yes, but in part to explore a more engaged, personal writing where I really express myself and don't think about hits and links and getting in on debates that are raging. Where I try to capture more subtle feelings that are crushed by too much politics.

So I'm sharing my blog neurosis with you, dear (small handful of ) readers. Do you like the focus on the particular, the groomzilla theme, or would a broader mix of thoughts be more interesting? Should I stop dividing the personal and political so much, and reflect on both in the one place? Do those who read my political stuff prefer my personal writing anyway? Should I stop staring at my wool-filled (I'm a guy after all!) navel?

Do any of you have blog neuroses you want to share?

UPDATE: Neurosis B is font and layout fretting, which made me wonder- do you find this template readable and accessible, and if not, what are your favourite templates?

Sibling dystopia and the passive-aggressive fraud

Been reading about so-called passive-aggressive syndrome. My brother's stay with me was on one hand very enjoyable, but on the other we argued, at a pretty minor level, all the time. It wore me down a bit...

I tend to be vocal and extroverted, and frequently make it clear if I think TV shows, celebrities, politicians or prevailing social assumptions are unmitigated crap. It's the way I am. But I prefer to play the ball over the man, to use a mediocre cliche, in that I have high tolerance levels for different tastes and outlooks among friends and associates.

My brother asserts a highly critical worldview in theory, yet in practice watches all the mainstream TV shows and defends the mainstream line at every opportunity. But on an interpersonal level he is highly critical and argumentative. This repeatedly manifested itself as argument where I would be laying out attacks on the subject matter while he replied with attacks on me personally.

I believe there is a difference between arguing about something external and attacking a person you are communicating with, though the two are often painted as one and the same.

Anyway, this led me to looking up passive-aggressive syndrome. No, it doesn't appear to be either of us- we'd be too direct about anything we didn't like putting up with. What I did note was how this appears to be a particularly questionable example of what is just different, non-mainstream or subversive behaviour being labeled 'abnormal' :

The term "passive-aggressive" was introduced in a 1945 U.S. War Department technical bulletin, describing soldiers who weren't openly insubordinate but shirked duty through procrastination, willful incompetence, and so on. If you've ever served in the military during wartime, though, or for that matter read Catch-22, you realize that what the brass calls a personality disorder a grunt might call a rational strategy to avoid getting killed.

Indeed, it's equally arguable that to follow orders blindly when it puts your life at risk is abnormal, given that survival is the highest instinct. Check out the criteria for diagnosis :

passive resistance to fulfilling social and occupational tasks through procrastination and inefficiency; complaints of being misunderstood, unappreciated, and victimized by others; sullenness, irritability, and argumentativeness in response to expectations; angry and pessimistic attitudes toward a variety of events; unreasonable criticism and scorn toward those in authority; envy and resentment toward those who are more fortunate; self-definition as luckless in life and an inclination to whine and grumble about being jinxed; alternating behavior between hostile assertion of personal autonomy and dependent contrition.

So what's wrong with any of that? They're just grumpy bastards, surely that's no worse than being stupid and acquiescent?