Complain

I was in a foul mood after cycling home from uni one day. Walking into the family room, the first unfortunate person to come into contact with me was my dad. “The traffic out there is ridiculous!” I raged. “It took me at least ten minutes to cross each major road. Cycling in peak hour sucks!”

Dad, a keen cycler himself, leapt to the rescue. “You know, you could always go to the nearest set of traffic lights and wait there, it’d probably be quicker. Actually, there’s probably a better route you could take. Let’s get out the Melways, I’ll show you the way I ride”.

I knew dad was trying to help – he was showing me he cared about my problem. But instead of being grateful for the advice, I just got angrier. “I’ve already worked out a way to get to uni! The traffic is just impossible!”

It’s not that I didn’t need a solution to my problem, and I did end up taking some quieter back streets to avoid those main roads. At that moment though, my main issue wasn’t actually the traffic, it was feeling frustrated. I didn’t want an answer, I just wanted to complain.

There’s a lot that gets said about fundamental differences between men and women. People say that men are more logical, women are more emotional, and usually I find this a sweeping generalisation that’s rarely fair.

In the case of complaining though, I have to admit that I’ve found a pattern. If I told my mum or sisters about how annoying it was to get home that day, I doubt they would’ve presented me with something different to try. Instead, they probably would’ve said, “that sucks. I know what you mean though, the traffic was really slow on my way home too.”

That’s why I find this ad so amusing –the ‘perfect’ man says, “when there are no women to listen to, I practice my listening face”. It pokes fun directly at this divide between men wanting to fix things and women wanting to understand.

Complaining, in moderation, is a way that people put their problems into words, vent their frustrations and – most importantly – seek empathy. No matter what problems we face, the worst part about them is feeling alone.

If you’ve ever found it more comforting to confide in someone facing the same challenge as you are, you probably know what it is to feel better through feeling understood.

Once when I was having trouble getting through to a friend, I talked to someone for an hour about different approaches, tactics to try, ways to manage my stress levels and what was going wrong with the current situation. After the conversation, I reflected that the best and most helpful thing she had said was, “that must be really hard for you”.

It’s great to get advice from someone who cares about you, and problems do need to be fixed in the end. But sometimes, what you really need is just to be heard.

Banal

@LuluAttack: I’m going to watch the 1938 movie Robin Hood and eat soup for dinner

@PalpFaction: I’ve had a pretty good dvd day

@kassi_grace: Went all the way to Tafe to be told I could go home. I got out of bed and everything!

@jessamy_sesame: it’s choc chip peanut butter biscuit time

I’ve been on Twitter for a little while now, and one of the major criticisms I hear about it is that it’s full of trivial details about people’s lives. It’s even been described as the most boring, banal pastime ever invented.

People telling you what they had for lunch. Quotes from TV shows. Silly little thoughts that go nowhere. But while it’s true that many tweets are devoid of depth and substance, banality is just what makes the medium so successful.

People adore the banal, and nowhere is this more apparent than the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Big names and bigger headshots are splashed across posters and promise their prospective audiences untold amounts of hilarity. But when you go to a show, instead of the mysteries of the universe, you get a catalogue of the very small things in life indeed.

Arj Barker

At this year’s comedy gala, we had Russell Kane hunting for girls with low self-esteem because he has none of his own, Wil Anderson impersonating a pushy fragrance salesman who told him it wasn’t a fragrance, it was a weapon, and Sammy J divulging a range of ‘secrets’ that included eating a friend’s lasagne, texting while driving, jaywalking and pissing in the spa.

Frank Woodley

And people laugh their figurative heads off. Because when it comes down to it, the banalities of life are the things we spend the most time doing. Brushing our teeth, waiting for the train, losing our keys, being irritated by customer service. Even extreme sports calendar models can relate to wanting that extra few minutes in bed in the morning.

It’s the little things that make up every day that we share with other people, knowing they do the same things. And through telling stories, cracking jokes or posting these mundane realities on Twitter, I think whatever keeps us together as humans is worth celebrating.

Boring or not.

Perfect

I found the process of learning to write pretty frustrating. In primary school, my teacher would ink out these incredibly well-shaped letters on the whiteboard and I’d struggle to copy her, my own lettering a squiggly mess. Once I’d started to get the hang of it, I had a dream of myself skimming my fingers over a page and producing typed print. I assumed if something kept getting better, surely the end result must be that it becomes perfect.

Over time, my handwriting became neater and neater, and now it’s a tight cursive – but there’s still crooked lines, skinny loops and sloppy corners. It’s not a flawless print, and it never will be.

Even in popular use, the idea of ‘perfect’ usually ends up just meaning ‘adequate’ or ‘to a high standard’ – for example, the perfect candidate for a job is the one that fits all the criteria. I hardly think an employer, upon finding an employee they deem ‘perfect’, would realistically expect them to turn up to work at 9.00am on the dot every day or never make a mistake.

Likewise, although a great deal of fuss is made over celebrity bodies, if there was one ‘perfect’ quality to determine beauty, how could people differ in their opinion of the most beautiful woman?  The perfect body just doesn’t exist.

Nothing in life will ever be perfect, not even in airbrushed magazine covers or movies. When a girl sighs in the 1999 film American Pie that she wants the act of losing her virginity to be perfect, her friend is blunt: “It’s not a rocket launch. It’s sex”. Her point was that it doesn’t have to be meticulously planned out (although even rocket launches have their share of imperfect moments).

I’m never going to have a perfect life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Life is a damn messy business. You try at things and fail, you make mistakes, you waste your time and lose some things forever. That’s what makes all the good times so worthwhile. And I’m not going to spend my life waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect man, the perfect idea or the perfect time.

It’ll never come.

Being a Dickhead’s Cool

Hipsters. We’re all jumping on the bandwagon to bag them out – but what are they, and when will they stop playing ‘80s synth?

As a sometime Bachelor of Arts student (albeit one with a major, which means I’ll actually get a job one day), I see hipsters every day of the week. You know the ones. They’re wearing an old knitted jumper with see-through tights to look as though they don’t care about fashion. They’re crowded into the café-that-also-sells-vinyl-records to deliberately not be seen at Starbucks. They love screenings of obscure movies. In fact, they love obscure anything at all because it makes them feel like they know more than the average, “mainstream” person.

Hipsters are also the least favourite subculture of the masses right now – they’ve taken over the place of emos for being shot down, with a raft of anti-hipster sentiment present in memes like Hipster Ariel and the infamous Being a Dickhead’s Cool song.

But why?

Style over substance is the main complaint here. While emos were denigrated for being melodramatic – complaining about how tormented they were although most of them came from very wealthy backgrounds – the gripe with hipsters is that they pretend to be knowledgeable and trendy, when in fact all they have down is the look. Superficiality rules in hipster-land, an ethos that is easily detected and hard to accept.

It’s the utter insincerity of the hipster that really irritates me. Just because someone spent five minutes on Wikipedia reading about Dadaism doesn’t mean their collage of photos is any more incredible than the zillions of other collages in the zillions of other bedrooms around the world.

The thing that annoys me the most, though, is that hipsters spend so long trying to look so unique and nonconformist that actually, they all end up looking the damn same. And isn’t that the most “mainstream” thing of all?

Really, the hipster movement has some positives. Hipsters are, after all, highly educated people who recycle, make an effort to avoid overly sexualised trends and aren’t afraid to have an opinion.

If only they didn’t smother it all with petty, egotistical wankery then people might actually start taking them seriously. Until then, I guess they’ll just have to keep on having new age fun, with a vintage feel.

Breasts

Of all the prejudices that make living in this society just a little bit harder, the shit that breastfeeding mothers cop is right up there with Things That Make My Blood Boil (along with shouting men on carpet advertisements and Bratz dolls).

I can’t think of a harder job than being a new mother. You’ve just had a fresh human ripped from your insides, you’re sleep-deprived, wading through domestic chores and don’t get a moment to yourself. Then you step outside for a glimpse at your old, baby-free life, and WHAM.

Some dick complains about you breastfeeding your child.

The "disgusting" act of breastfeeding

Seriously? People can’t take a pair of breasts out in public? When it’d be fine if they were advertising perfume. Or pumped up with silicone and on the front of a men’s magazine, or on display attached to a sunbathing beauty.

These breasts? Fine. Breasts actually doing their job? No way.

Try this on for size: Feeding infants is what breasts are FOR. It’s what they’re designed to do. The amount of whinging about this astounds me – women can even be charged with indecent exposure for breastfeeding in America.

Women being asked to leave restaurants for nourishing a child is especially insulting. It’s a restaurant! You’re eating! I’ve seen fully-grown adults dine in public areas that make far more indecent viewing than a quietly feeding baby. And what’s more, if you don’t breastfeed an infant, it won’t take that quietly – and I’d much rather share public space with a feeding baby than a screaming one.

...but not welcome anywhere else

To combat this sort of stigma, some health care associations and other companies have put up signs reading: ‘Breastfeeding welcome here’. Their intentions may be good, but all this implies is that it’s not welcome anywhere else, that women need a designated area to breastfeed. As though it were something to be ashamed of doing in public, like urinating or smoking, instead of feeding a child.

A lot can go wrong if a baby isn’t fed – they can suffer from lack of energy and nutrients, miss out on important bonding with a parent and get fatigued. All the people walking by have to put up with is a glimpse of a breast.

Ridiculous

In 1959, a nine-year-old boy went to a library to borrow books to quench his thirst for knowledge. And he was refused. Because he was badly-behaved? No. Because there wasn’t an adult with him? No.

It was because the library didn’t lend books to black people.

Fast-forward about twenty years and Dr Ronald E McNair held a PhD in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a specialist in laser physics. The idea of refusing him books at a library because of his race seems, to us in Australia in 2011, ridiculous. Who cares if someone’s black? Or a child? Or religious, or a woman, or gay? Shouldn’t they be allowed the same privileges as the rest of their society?

The sense of injustice I felt when learning about the refusal of books is very similar to the way I feel about the current legislation against gay marriage. I don’t see being gay as a disadvantage, or a handicap, or as a problem. Human rights should apply to all humans. And I don’t understand why a rational government would prohibit gay people from marrying each other and being allowed the same rights as people who, through no conscious decision of their own, happen to be heterosexual.

Apart from an unsatisfying move by Centrelink that accepts de facto relationships into their system (purely because it means they can pay people less if their partner earns a certain amount), the changes to gay marriage have been slow despite the fact that 60 per cent of Australians support it.

The shifts are coming. Gay marriage is on the political agenda now, with Penny Wong openly in favour of it. Hasn’t convinced J-Gil yet, but it must be tough being in politics and trying to keep everyone happy.

I’m glad that things are changing, however slow. I hope not only that change will come, but that when we look back in another fifty years, that the idea of not letting two people get married just because they’re gay will seem just as ridiculous as not letting someone borrow a book just because they’re black.

Lost

Walking in to my university today, I saw a young man pondering over a large map of the campus. After four years of being around the same place I know it pretty well, so I asked him what he was looking for.

“I’m just trying to work out where we are,” he replied.

I pointed out the intersection where we were standing, but was still curious – I wanted to know where he was supposed to be.

“Oh, I’m enrolling today – but I came early so I could have a look around,” he said. “I think the best way to get to know a place is to get lost in it”.

Surprised at his eagerness for discovery, I said, “I’m glad you’re so interested,” to which he told me, “the world is interesting”.

His enthusiasm was admirable. Here was a teenager, at 8.30am, purposefully wandering around his new university because he was so keen to explore. It was a stark difference to most of the students I’ve encountered during my degree, a large proportion of whom seem to sleep in, struggle to their classes, make up an excuse about why they haven’t done the set reading and then shoot out the door as soon as their session is over so they can whinge to their friends about their latest assignment.

Now, I know that uni isn’t for everyone. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes your lecturer sucks. A lot of the time it’s hard work, because a degree wouldn’t be worth anything if it was easy. And yes, with family commitments, a social life, recreation time and part-time jobs, life can get pretty draining.

But if you’re not enjoying learning about something, are you really going to enjoy doing it? Students are preparing for their career, a series of jobs they’ll be spending most of the rest of their life doing. Someone with a bad attitude towards their studies is likely to end up in a job they resent, trudging in to an office to perform mediocre tasks while they sigh and wait for the weekend.

What’s the point?

This morning’s young man was right: the world is interesting. I think that as we go back to uni and work, instead of taking what we have for granted, it’s time we all got lost more.