I was brought up by Virgo parents. You may scoff at the astrology, but they were very stereotypical for that star sign, so go figure: health conscious and tidy to a fault. God help you if you left a phone book out. Raised with parents like that, you go one of two ways - become a messy hoarder in protest, or become a neat freak yourself. I'd like to think I'm not as extreme as they were, but I can't relax unless the house is uber tidy.
Jamie messing up the loungeroom
Thing is, we have a small house, so even a little mess makes it look less than harmonious, and I'm a big believer in tidy house equals tidy mind. So, everything must have a place. Just don't open my drawers - I guarantee you that they're a hell jumble. As long as my mother doesn't see inside my drawers - oh, the shame! - we're good.
My bedroom (we sleep in separate rooms, because sleep is precious) is always the neatest one. There isn't a lot in it - a bed, my surfboards, and a cupboard. That's it. I feel more peaceful when I'm not looking at a ton of stuff. Again though - don't open the cupboard.
Flaws, I have many, but keeping a tidy house isn't one of them (unless, those drawers, you get it, right?). My Dad used to say that the front door was the window to the house soul in the same way the eyes are the window to to the soul - a messy entrance says a lot about a person. I cannot bear more than one pair of shoes neat at the front door.
Could I improve myself? Whilst I'm answering the Weekend Experience community questions, I may as well keep going. This is fun. Of course. But some things I think, well, now I'm over 50, there's no way I can be bothered improving on some things, like tidy drawers. Life is too short. They'll get done when I feel like it and then I'll mess 'em up again. And I'm always going to walk barefoot and traipse sand across the house for Jamie to have to vacuum, and I ain't never vacuuming because, boring. God help me if Jamie dies.
Worst self? Often. The self that's irritable, in pain, stressed and anxious is not a nice self - she's snappy, terse, impatient. I find the best way to be in a marriage when I'm like this is to go to ground - tell Jamie I'm feeling shitty and it's not him, but I need space to process, to breath. I go walking, go to the beach, or lock myself in a room with a meditation or something. Self awareness is everything. You can think it's them but more often than not it's how you react to them. Taking a deep breath and saying nothing is inhabiting a better self.
One way to calm down is to go a'walking. I'm so lucky that we live right on the edge of the Otway National Park and the beautiful forest that's the Angelsea heath. You can walk for miles and there and get lost, or ride a bike, but that's more Jamie's thing. Last time we walked around the entire golf course but at the moment, I'm waiting for my hip to get better - no matter, it's better walking in winter anyway and far less snakes!
I am so in love with this place. It's full of good, chill people. I mean, what do you have to be an asshole about if you live in a place like this? I used to be embarrassed sometimes living in my old place, about half an hour inland from here. It used to have a caveat: 'I live here, but I have five acres', or 'I live here, but it's only half an hour from the sea', or 'I live here, but if I could afford to live on the coast I would' as if I had to make an excuse for living in that area. It's changed a lot recently as it's earmarked as a growth area for people who can't afford to live on the coast (or that might like living in a small rural town) but it used to be rather - redneck, I suppose.
If you weren't a fourth gen wool farmer or your family didn't have a street named after them you could never really fit in. Rural towns in Australia can be a little like that. They'll accept the Indian family running the grocery store but they'll be pretty intolerant of migrants and refugees otherwise. There can be a lot of intolerance and flag waving from people that have never really travelled and that read a particular newspaper that brainwashes them to believed migrants are stealing their jobs and taking over their country, in the same breath as making them believe that indigenous people are also a threat to their sense of belonging to a country that was stolen in the first place.
Maybe I'm being unfair, and of course I'm generalising, but there's an underlying racism in this country that makes it the 'lucky country' for only a particular demographic. Australia definitely isn't all white sandy beaches and turquoise waters - and the sharks aren't always in the water but the narrow minded, bigoted, racist, intolerant and untravelled and uncultured people on it's land. We are quite good at sweeping those things under the carpet or into a drawer. We sweep our history into a drawer, after all - massacres and indentured servitude and miscegnation of it's first people, and then we tell them 'they should get over it' even though for many it's in their living memory and created inherited trauma and disadvantage.
Yep, sometimes I am ashamed to call Australia home.
On the whole though, I feel lucky to have been born here, and it's a better, safer place to wait out the apocalypse than many places.
Well, that's it for the questions this week - I have a house to tidy and shit to sweep into drawers.
With Love,
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Drawers everywhere in your blog post 😆
Yeah I know, it isn't easy to keep everything tidy. Drawers can be a b*tch to keep organised, especially when not having enough of them. Wondering about those where history gets shuffled into. Never measured the space history needs.
BTW, from what I see and read from you story, you live in a beautiful place! Ok, perhaps the people need a bit of transformation, but from nature, surrounding and whatnot, perfect! The people, the rednecks as you call them, the uneducated and whatnot, can something be done for them to open their eyes a little more? To take 360 views at things? Interesting as you put it: They are scared for immigrants t take their jobs as well as for the natives, while yeah, we all know how Australia became a country.
You have a treat home! Keep on keeping it like it is. And yeah, next time tell Jamie to ly down on his own bed, instead of messing up the living space 😆😆😆
Ha, the drawers were a theme.. honestly I do tidy them occasionally :P
I think most people are set in their thinking and the alogrithms and particular media don't help. It's only when they have real interactions with the people they're hating on that their minds can be changed, but they are very good at keeping themselves separate.
And yep, we know how Australia becaame a country - these people conveniently twist things.
Yeah, haha, you know my Dad used to joke I'd be messing up the loungeroom just with my presence :P
True, people may change when being exposed to whatever they fear. And yeah, common problem peeps do not mix and/or dont try and figure out themselves their fears, the unknowns, but continue to complain regardless. A reason why in Europe last decade plus, the political far right gains popularity as well. Not a problem which is in Australia only, but anywhere in the western world.
A world of things we hide from view, eh? Not just in company, either. Interesting way to bridge the two topics. though you don't strike me as someone who'd sweep much under a rug, you know. :)
I still struggle with this. And with knowing how much of me is projection and reactivity, and how much is genuine. Still, where's the line between me reacting and you overstepping? Questions, questions.
Lovely reading you, as always. <3
Oh we all do! I think sometimes it pays to just breath before reacting, you know? As if you operate from THAT space, you have time to consider whether you're honestly defending a castle that needs defending, or whether you're jumping in with swords at the ready and it's not worth the fight, you know? It pays to pay attention to the body's sensations - as Dad used to say, use your yoga, use your yoga! There's battles worth fighting, and sometimes just... battles. You have to ask yourself if they're really, really worth winning - and why you're fighting in the first instance. I hope that answers the question - I'm probaby just crapping on with metaphor which is decidedly unhelpful.
I promise it gets easier with age. I got twenty years on you babe - but I still remember the reactive self I was round Saturn returning, clear as day.
I was answering all five questions - it was a challenge to run it all together kinda smoothish, haha!
It makes sense, yeah. Use your yoga is advice to be taken to heart, for sure <3
we are the same way. My wife keeps a tidy house, but not as anal as her late mother. The drawers and closets are usually a mess. Occasionally we straighten them up. But eventually they get routed again.
I beleive most countries have their darker parts of history they would rather sweep into a drawer and keep hidden and forget. Yours is not unique for sure.
Oof, yep, your country a case in point.
Yep.
Does one of your surfboard covers match the bedsheets?
Ha no....
Ahh I see, it just had leaf/floral patterns and a black backdrop as similarities.
Though matching would have been funnier XD
Especially if I had matching pj's as well!
I'm really happy for you! It's gorgeous too.
It sounds a lot like where I live now, an isolated, very hard to get to part of New York State, USA. People are, for the most part, accepting of differences of any kind. My friends from the NYC area often say "I'm afraid to go there" because of the stereoptypes of hillbillies that they see on their various government controlled news sources, but we are super friendly to anyone, as long as they are not harming anyone else. There is very little crime here, possibly because nearly everyone is heavily armed. I feel very safe.
I must have half a dozen pairs of shoes inside my back door. Every drawer is part junk drawer. Miraculously, I can find stuff, so I must have some sort of method.
If only that tenet applied to the whole world. As for guns, that's just so foreign to me. We feel safer because there AREN'T guns, but that's absolutely a cultural difference and I don't imagine either of us would totally understand each others in that regard! I'm glad you feel safe.
Ha! Thank goodness for drawers. As long as we know where things are, right?
How does only the government enforcement agencies having firearms make you feel safe in the current political environment? That is foreign to me.
I know, right, it's a cultural thing! For one, we don't have law enforcement like you do... Those ICE agents omfg.
We have different founding myths, for one. Yours is from
violent rebellion against a government. Ours was flawed but pragmatic. Your whole second amendment supports your founding mythology. Suspicion first. Your gun lobby and politics are all about distrust and fear - any regulation is seen as the first step to dictatorship. We don't have that belief. Our fear is we'll become a gun culture like the US!!!
Here, the government is largely seen annoying, overly bureaucratic, sometimes incompetent, depending on your leanings, weak and so on, but not imagined as totally an enemy you must resist with arms, unless you are some conspiracy lunatic that lives Woop Woop and goes on a mad spiral and kills cops like has happened a couple of times here, and has been very sad. There's never any cover up about cop behavior and government lies. We really really don't have a cultural industry built around how the state is coming for us. It just doesn't exist.
We just simply don't have an entire country built on the identity of gun ownership = autonomy. It simply doesn't exist. Guns here are for roo shooting, for farms, for deer hunting and sport, unless you are a criminal. Our big massacre that brought in more gun laws and an amnesty seemed reasonable to us - dead kids horrified us. It didn't challenge our identity because we didnt have one..meanwhile, school shootings in America make us shake our heads and go what the actual fuck.
Yes, you can kill people without guns. We had the Bindi massacre of late, but they had shot guns as it's less likely to own assault rifles. Yes, government response was knew jerk, but most people didn't care unless they were hunters, farmers etc (even most of us thought it wouldn't work - we believed AUSPOL should have done their jobs properly since the guys were on a list, and that continued division in society leading to hate had to be addressed more than anything).
We just never went the route you did.
We trust systems more than individuals with weapons - look I'm not saying we all out trust the government, just we don't see arming ourselves as a viable option. We would rather out up with a flawed system than millions of armed strangers, which we find fucking terrifying. We would never put up with dead children as background noise. We feel safe without guns because we have always been safe without guns. It's learned, cultural. Guns are freedom for you, not having guns is freedom for us.
I can't even recall a time where a cop killed someone in line of duty. Yes, it happens, and sadly, we have a larger proportion of indigenous people who die in custody for various reasons. But fuck, in your country it seems to happen all the time. Your authority look like mad soldiers out of a war movie to us.
Sorry for the long response. It helped me understand it better myself. I can't explain to you how lying in bed here, watching kangaroos leap down the street and joggers and dog walkers take their morning exercise, that seeing a gun here would paralyse us with fear and we'd be immediately ringing the police to save us haha.
.
I'm sorry if I offend here. I only hope to discuss.
You had, and submitted to, far more draconian measures during the covid con than we did in the USA. Mass vaccination of schoolchildren in school cafeterias, no? (Experimental medical treatments were never mandated on our children thank god) Are you forgetting the days you spent in a hotel, allowed no more than 15 minutes a day on a rooftop as your outside time? What went on in Australia during those years scares the crap out of me. Was there any resistance to that, or would resistance have been futile? Your country is one press release away from going through that, and no doubt even worse, to everyone again. So is mine.
Given what I see going on worldwide, not just in Minnesota, I think that kind of trust in any government, especially western, is dangerously misplaced. I'm now officially scared shitless. It will be worse the next time, and last time I was threatened with being shipped off just for having made a government-frowned-upon lifestyle/medical choice. That was not freedom, that was fascism. Worldwide, in Australia and New Zealand especially. Some tout those two countries as having done everything right.
Oh no I'm not offended whatsoever!! It's interesting to discuss! I hope we could do that here without losing a friendship!
I didn't hear of this! It was fake news. No child under 16 was forcibly vaxxed. Arguably, no one was, unless you wanted to work.
Absolutely we were draconian. I don't think we would put up with it again, especially as those fucking fines were waived, showing how stupid they were and how so many people broke the rules and nothing happened. I am not sure the government would even take those measures again. And especially people like us, well, I was breaking every rule I could. So much of it was idiotic and the premier of our state much hated because of it. We had state law, not national. It was so fucked up. Don't even get me started.
Fuck me no. I had PTSD from it. Still don't believe in guns though ;p
And I still don't believe in mandatory vax and losing your job over it. That sucked. I am not even sure that would happen again. I think we learnt a lot from that unprecedented virus. Forced medicine is absolutely abhorrent.
I'm absolutely not saying we all trust the government unreservedly. We don't. But we believe in a system without guns. It's not the only way.
I can see why you're scared shitless. You live in America ;p