think about donating your Christmas cheese wheel

Around this time of year I find it difficult to handle the complacency and abundance of wealth found in Australian society.

Here are some things to be thankful for:

- Militia aren't running our country.

- If you live in the city (which 89% of us do) you can be sure that there will be a selection of cheeses available at your closest supermarket.

- You can probably make a little cushion from your chin fat to take a nap on (67% of us are obese), and if you can't, you can develop one thanks of afore mentioned cheese abundance.

- You can get a job with some hard work. The highest our unemployment rate has ever been was 10.90% in 1992. Right now it's harder to get work in the US and the UK. The latest stats for Zimbabwe say 70% of its citizens don't have work. 

- Ok so rent prices might be a bit exorbitant in certain urban locations... but hey, we have infrastructure that hasn't been dilapidated by war. 

- Our racism is subliminal, not violent - except for when it bubbles up into sporadic spontaneous riots - meaning that people here can live by their diverse ideological and religious convictions without being publicly flogged or incarcerated or told what to wear, say, how to pray or how to eat. I can stand at Town Hall and hear the Hare Krsna's chanting on George St whilst Muslims hand out flyers and Falun Gong activists ask me to sign their petitions.

- If you need to go to the toilet, you can go to a toilet! You can extricate your excrement by pressing a little button. What's more, these miraculous sanitary water-powered shit-redistribution systems are available cost-free in public high pedestrian traffic locations.

- If you're thirsty in the shower you can take a sip and not die from cholera.

- We have a public welfare system that doesn't thrive on bribery.

How do you explain the privileges of a society to the children who have not seen their privilege? How did I ever learn to see my privilege?
I watched world news when I was growing up. Sometimes I would wish we had a junta or a revolution or some obvious human rights abuses so that there was some kind of motivation for young people to care about politics... Hardship motivates people to strive for better lives. Instead we have comfortable lives. Complacent lives.

Of course I wouldn't exchange the lucky fortune of living in this land for being thrown into war or famine or a typhoon, but I would change our education system so that it holds compassion as its core value.

Statistically accurate "Cheese Wheel of Bad Luck"

wherein "you" are represented by a tiny little wedge that has been extracted and "lots of other people" are stuck in the bad cheese.

Café

I got a new job the other day being a waitress in a café.
The customers come in pretty much one demographic and nearly all of them look like this:

They cluster in little immobile groups and croak and chirp for hours. I've been to this café with my own grandmother. That was the day she told me that her naked body looks like one of those flayed roast chickens that hang in butchery windows.

Before I left for work the other morning I was chock-a-block busy trying to not howl in the foetal position (had been circulating the lower pole of my dual-polar feeling disorder) but once I was given the task of feeding these shrunken pudgy white people I felt so much better. Probably because they say "thanks darlin'" or "thankyuh sweetie", and some of them tell me about shark nets and ask me where I live. An old guy was even quite angry, but I didn't mind because at least he felt something and said how he felt. The middle aged couples who come to roost at tables don't have such interpersonal skills. They nest amid a little bank up of paraphernalia they have bought as Christmas gifts. They concern themselves with a newspaper or staring.

On my lunch break, I noticed how the ground was constructed of tiny little pebbles all glued together and thought that was curious. I saw a tree branch waving in the reflection on my phone screen. Little bits of nature all abstracted were silently poking their nose into the artificial compound of the shopping mall in which the café is positioned.

So, even when I'm working cash in hand in a soulless temple to consumerism and slapping off nasty hormones to avoid becoming a bowl of tears, there are things to be grateful for. Older generations who have more manners than mine and weeny little rocks with polished noses.

Self-Care Methods when in a Pit of Pity/Existential Doubt/Chaos

- Carefully put your foot into the pit to see if you can feel the bottom. Too deep? Then don't invite your friends in, they may drown. If you can touch the bottom then the sadness ain't so bad and it could be quite relieving to take a paddle with friends (establish whether you are currently in a pit or puddle).

- Try and express gratitude, even if only to yourself, for the things in your life that are good e.g. you have two hands and running water.

- Pay attention to your body by bathing it or just sit for a while and think about how your body has been breathing for your whole life.

- Write out the gunk, it's like soul vomiting.

- Don't concern yourself with what others would think of your behaviour or emotions during this private exorcism, after-all it is private and doesn't need others to make it legitimate.

- If you can't see causes, don't go on a brain-mashing hunt. Maybe it's not always possible to think rationally about irrational feelings.

- If you are inclined to spend 24 hours in bed, don't. Take the lethargy outside and just sit in the weather, somewhere quiet.