sliding doors

This could have been me:

Seriously. Hear me out.... I met Simon Coronel on my first day of uni in 1999. We were doing the same course. Sort of - we were both doing arts/engineering and the uni had organised for groups of people from each course to meet during o-week. I basically didn't see him again until graduation day, when we sat next to each other. He told me he did magic while we were sitting through the calling of about one million names (gradution ceremonies are very boring, send a small child in your stead - you will appear brilliant to the crowd and save yourself about 5 hours).

Anyway, in this article he talks about how, during orientation week, he came across the Uni magician society spruking for members and joined. I too came across the magician society that same week. In fact I showed them a trick and their response was... underwhelming, frankly (perhaps so was the trick). I elected not to join - I went instead with an extreme left wing something, which sent me emails and letters that began 'Dear Comrade...'. I can't help but imagine what might have been...

Simon is performing at the Melbourne Magic Festival at the Northcote Town Hall, it's a bugger the gala is sold out but I'm going to head along to something so watch this space.

Kitty x

glass jars and aunties dumplings

I’ve been outfitting my desk at work. Check these puppies out! Glass jars! They make me look like a healthy environmentalist – all about oats and recycling! All I need now is a bicycle helmet and flat hair to compete the image.

Last night Carney I trekked across town for Auntie’s Dumplings (not our auntie) in Carnegie. Carney had stumbled across this nothing-looking little place on a job he was doing nearby and quickly became its number one fan. We expected basically nobody to be there – just us, aunty and the dumplings. Imagine our surprise when we pulled up to this:

Half of Carnegie was waiting to get into this place! We later found out that one Matt Preston (of Masterchef fame) was entirely to blame! We were eventually able to consume our irritation (after a mere 25 minutes in the cold, cold, cold) in a the form of a plateful of Shanghai buns and dozens of dumplings. So cheap! So tasty! And I don't even like dumplings!

Kitty x

girl power! and a rant.

This is was the front page of the age on Thursday morning, the day after Julia Gillard was sworn in. Two women in the top jobs - girl power Australia, eh? (For those not in the know, I refer to our new PM and the Governor General Quentin Bryce).

This is excellent news (if a little bittersweet, I do feel for K Rudd). But - and here comes the soap box - while it's tempting to say this is big coup for women, we've still a long way to go. For example, did you know that violence against women is the number one cause of death, disability and illness for women 15-44 years in Victoria? For men, it's smoking. Actually, if you want to read some pretty horrifying stuff, look at the Vic Health Community Attitudes survey here. It's full of depressing information like 'more than a third of the community think that rape occurs because men cannot control their need for sex' and '22% of the community think domenstic violence can be excused if the perpetrator feels bad afterwards'. Hopefully, you think this is appalling - how often I assume everyone thinks the same as me (clearly, they do not - insert many John Howard faux pars*). Was that a big jump - from Gillard to violence... suffice to say, this has been on my chest, it is an emerging topic at Planet X.

On a more upbeat note, when Carney came home with the following yesterday, I had a familar feeling... something was definately on sale:

Kitty

*faux pas? fax par? (French for 'gaff')

** I'm not saying you, if you are a man, are a violent man. I'm not saying men don't experience violence. They do. But the numbers tell us that intiminate partner violence has a bigger burden on society and is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women they know in private spaces. Men are more likely to experience violence by men they don't know in public places.

another day, another dollar

If anyone is looking for the oldest woman in the world, you’ll find her driving around Blackburn. She just spent the better half of fifteen minutes (!!) standing behind my car (as I waited to back out of a carpark) looking for her keys. There are old people everywhere today, I am sure they are breeding.

In other news, sometimes Planet X completely confirms stereotypes as reality (read: governments are slow moving and beaurocratic). Rather than cite examples in my own work (this would be far too painful), I’ll quote a colleague from Planet XY and assure you this is pretty much par for the course.

Planet XY set up a Christmas party organising committee in January 2009, to organise the Christmas party for December that year.
Approximately 12 people were on the committee from different departments and worksites.
The committee met every month for two hours, until August when they began to meet fortnightly.
In November (after a mere 10 and a half months of meetings), they decided that a Planet XY-wide Christmas party was too much work and that each department would be responsible for its own festivities.

There is no moral to this story taxpayers, sorry.
Best get back to the red tape,
Kitty

Bargain central

This is a great find - it compares prices of books on different online websites and tells you where you can get what you want cheapest. It considers international sites and postage as well.

http://www.booko.com.au/



Good one, eh?

Introducing... my hero

Wearing the world’s tightest pants, they have haunted me all day... Must limit their wearing to standing situtions (or loose the muffin top)... The worst part (aside from the enforced shallow breathing) is I'm struggling to justify the eating of one chocolate covered marshmallow bar. I am quite convinced eating this would alleviate boredom on this Friday afternoon... The clocks seem to have stopped over, you see.


tick... tock...


Other, less chaffing news, is quite difficult to come by I am afraid. I am in semi-study mode. I'm completing a uni subject to go toward my masters (should I elect to do this), and have to write a 1,000 and 4,000 word essay. I think it's done little more than confirm how much I don't want to study right now. BUT work paid for it, so if I do complete it it's one less subject I have to do in the long run. So, to fill the void, here's a new section I'm calling 'My hero'. What I really want is a section called 'idiots I meet and profile', but this is an attempt to promote a more positive view of the world.

Today's hero is Greg Morteson. I've just read his book Three Cups of Tea. He was a mountain climber, climbing K2 when the climb went pear shaped. He ended up in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, Pakistan and on leaving promised to return and build a school. He is sort of a bit of a dunderhead in some respects but goes on to build many, many schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan before and after September 11. He is promoting education of children, but in particular of girls - which is far more contentious in a Muslim country (I think this is fair to say). An aside - I've heard this elsewhere - if you educate boys in a village the individual boys beneift but they tend to leave the village. If you educate girls, they stay and build a community around the village and everybody benefits. See The Girl Effect. One of the many thrusts Mortenson's philosophy is that education can promote peace and in some of these areas you need to actually give something people to live for, rather than a cause to die for. Anyway, it's a bit slow moving at times, and there are lots of names of things and people and descriptive stuff, but it is a good read nonetheless.


On that note, peace out.

Kitty x

Planet X

I’ve been clogging up the fridge at work – yoghurt mainly, but also some ‘fresh’ (i.e. vacuum sealed) soups that Carney and I bought in bulk at Coles because they were half price ($3!!), making them tre affordable*. Thankfully they last until August otherwise we’d be creamy carrot with corriandar (my personal favourite) and organic pea-ing (less good) for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (We got 30 packets – perhaps I have discussed Carney’s penchant for bulk purchase before? I did not discourage him on this occasion). Anyway, I've been robbed! My best yoghurt went missing this afternoon! I am going to have to start licking things (and broadcasting the licking). A pox on your house yoghurt thief!

Thieves aside (included?), my work is full of some pretty interesting people. I work for a local government - let's call it Planet X. Planet X has probably one of the most diverse workforces you can get - there's everyone from the guys at the tip to finance types, engineers, librarians and childcare workers. Case in point - 'Patrick'. Patrick works in the mail room and has an (mild) intellectual disability. He delivers each departments mail and printer paper a couple of times a week using an extremely ergonomic (read ridiculous) shopping trolley. Patrick is always accompanied by ‘Mr Flibble’ (his real name), a penguin puppet. Mr Flibble could be quite cute had he not such a potty mouth! Mr Flibble and Patrick used to MC the staff Christmas party, but two years ago they made not-so-well-received jokes about the CEO and have been barred from the big stage ever since. This said, Mr Flibble is an excellant seller of raffle tickets - the f$@#ing c-bomb rolled me for a shiney fiver today. hmm... maybe cuter when Mr Flibble says it...

Kitty x

* 'French'** for 'very affordable'

**may not be French.

kitty, arteest

Check this out - the Australia Project:

http://www.australiaproject.com/

It is a website that 'they' have started to capture and promote contemporary representions of national identity. This is fantastic, because national identity is fascinating, fascinating and a subject I have many opinions on.

Anyway, I have submitted piece and it will be in the next upload (and I believe, the traveling exhibition). This is my picture - it is a wall of chewing gum in Camberwell junction that has been growing for years. I think it captures the idea of community and diversity...

Chewing Gum Wall, 3124

This wall of chewing gum has been made by a collection of strangers; age, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, political persuasion, eye colour, hair colour unknown. It expresses unity and defiance; the silent act of fingerprinting chewing gum onto the wall only to have the Council paint over it again and again. It is a secret war that has played out over years in an alleyway, off a carpark, in a suburb in Melbourne.

My tagline, which makes me smile, is 'artist', used ironically... In the same way national identity is what we say it is, so are individual identities. I'm not an artist but I am if I say I am. I am me because my dog knows me (nod Gertrude Stein). Actually, I think that might mean the opposite, but it's a nice quote.

Anyway, this is my favourite entry.

Kitty x