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.

Drawing

Slowly slowly slowly I have built an unwavering confidence in my art. I'm convinced that it's worthwhile.
My conviction is the result of a million failures. Every single drawing of mine is the carving away of unwanted lines, I draw and erase and redraw and erase. Every person I draw is loaded with the ghosts of many others, an evolving person who I've decided at some point to stick down on the spot. Every successful drawing is only the product of many failures. 

In a really lovely way you can't have one without the other. To be really good at something you also need to know what it feels, looks and sounds like to do poorly at it. So in a very grand way, the notion of talent is a farce. Talent is the accumulation of mediocrity. You won't become worse at something by doing it continually. It follows that I'm convinced that I do well, and only because I do [verb], continually.

Why bother doing well creatively? For most of my life that question underpinned my drawing practice. I couldn't rationalise the benefit of hunching over paper for hours. I was looking at my art as though it existed only for me, like an extension of my body that it wasn't anybody else's right to touch. Now I know that an artwork is comprised of at least 50% your brain, and without other people looking at it an artwork might as well be a rock. So now my drawings are like little half unwrapped gifts, things I want to give away and watch grow up at some distance. Little parcels of politics, commenting on this and that in witty, underhanded ways.

Lots of creativity theorists talk about the "zone". It's the psychological landing strip where you can spend five human hours watching a pencil land and take off and think without too many words. It's like pleasant anaesthetic, where everything beyond the white rectangle of paper becomes dull and fuzzy, and everything you do on the paper has your unadulterated attention. Anybody can get there.

Paper! Paper! burning white

Take my sacrificial rite!

A thousand drawings not so great

Consigned to this flat tepid fate

In these lines I'm poorly scrawling

There's a good one, and it's calling -

"Hi I'm here, come pull me out,

And quick you fumbling dawdling clout!"

Endless numbers counting endless days

Today eight years ago a silent thing happened and that thing was really an unthing, an undoing, it was a death and the person who died was my father.

Today I attended the last class of my degree. These are remarkable things, and that's why I'm marking them by writing, but I feel so ordinary.

I don't really believe that death is the end of someone's influence and I don't really believe that I'll stop learning. Some sort of passage has been marked by the arbitrary ascription of numbers to days, and without those numbers there would not be these anniversaries. I carry my fathers death everyday like I am a little holy shrine. More and more the things I do and say seem more and more like the things he did and said, which makes me feel like death is just a veiling, biology prevails.

Croc teeth

Being quite gay*, I have a pretty good gaydar.
I knew someone in my high school year was gay four years before she did from her body posture in class.

Being homo you also develop a pretty good homophobestrobe which detects the presence of fear inside other people (a bit like gaydar but uses electromagnetic pulse instead of radio waves).

I've been lucky enough to encounter homophobia from institutions and individuals, sometimes in the form of non-recognition, sometimes in the form of physical and verbal abuse, sometimes in the form of denial. Some people decide not to talk to me because I'm gay. Reciprocally, I decide not to talk to some people because I'm gay.

Why would a sane person walk onto the flabby tongue of an open-mouthed crocodile? I don't hide, I just choose not to let myself get mauled by people with sharp teeth. How do you see the dimensions of someone's teeth? Listen to their vocabulary. Listen to their ideas.

I am all for dentistry. People can get all kinds of work done, teeth filed down, braces, dentures, fillings... People change. And I know that opinions and values are social constructions that can be de-constructed, and I'm interested in reconstructing them by being rational e.g. "is it better to ignore something that exists or acknowledge something that exists?", "is violence an appropriate response to a non-violent phenomena?"

I find marginalised and repressed people often have a wicked sense of humour. You can either hang yourself or laugh at the fact that mainstream society, media and politics aren't talking about you when they say "family", "marriage" and even "love" because of something as inconsequential as your sexuality (love in advertising is heterosexual love). Either get hurt by it or hurt yourself laughing over it.

This leaves me in a problematic space. Being comfortable with yourself means you have nothing to prove, yet being a member of a minority group means constantly having to prove that your existence is legitimate.
Proving that you have the right to have nothing to prove... It's like undergoing a job interview for the position of Yourself.

              I believe I am the best applicant for being Myself.

                                                                                                                     Why do you believe that?  

             I've been Myself for 23 years.

                                                                                                                     How will you perform in that role?

            I won't perform.

                                                                                                                    Why not?

           It comes naturally to me.

                                                                                                                    Are you sure you're qualified?

*by quite gay I mean mostly, partially, occasionally, absolutely, annually, casually, semantically, linguistically,  literally, litigiously, strictly, spiritually, sporadically, superficially, religiously and not gay, because sexuality isn't a salami you can slice.

Sandwiches

Teaching is all about making sandwiches.

Whipping up a sambo is essentially the skill of telling it how it is in a digestible format. Slap praise on either side of some gristly criticism and your communication is flavoured with encouragement. I guess this is also called tact.

For someone who grew up with one parent imbued with the social talents of a snail and the other with the etiquette of a very vocal parrot, tact was one of those skills I didn't inherit. I cultivated it over 23 years of keen observation and trial and error.

The parrot half of my DNA still fluffs up in a rage at the idea of having to mediate the truth, and my snail side curls away at the thought of having to tell the truth. I've mostly rewritten all that programming and now I'm as diplomatic as a dachshund.


How does the teaching sandwich relate to the wider world beyond report writing and assessment feedback?
Try making a sandwich for your lover, your mother, your best friend. Sandwiches can be squeezed into letters, phone conversations, post-it notes, dinner conversations... Sandwiches can be about politics, culture, real estate. My favourite part about sandwiches is that you can make them cynical.

e.g.
"Dear Raine & Horne,

Thanks for managing our lease.

Please fix the blinds, let us repaint, fix the tap in the laundry, fit proper ventilation into our bathroom and buy us a new mailbox.

Once again, thanks for managing our lease.

Yours Sincerely,
__________"