The Cerebral Mum

I mentioned in my first history tutorial notes over in my egregiously behind study blog that I didn’t find the small group discussions very productive, but when I finally went again last week (I’ve missed tutorials due tothe ovarian cyst), I was expecting something a little better than what I got. Yes, we were put into small groups again and, not knowing anyone, I just joined those I was closest to.

We were given questions to discuss. Did anyone talk about them? Not at all. Even when the tutor sat with us they didn’t stay on topic. It was so bloody annoying that I eventually got up and moved to another group. (Way to make friends, eh? Chalk me down as another obnoxious mature-age student.) The second group were not talking about history either, but at least they were discussing another university subject and not football.

For philosophy I have only missed one class and that tutorial is fairly quiet as well. I have to give them credit though, because Plato is pretty difficult to engage with as well as being somewhat daunting. I’m think that when we start on Nietzsche next week, they’ll have more than can relate to and more will be said.

But this brings me back to my sexism. I’ve actually spent some time talking to my female tutors and I like and respect them both but while we (okay, it’s only me) are in sexual stereotyping mode I’ll just say that there is one teaching style I like which seems to be fairly rare amongst the women: The Martinet.

I like The Martinet. He gets down to business. He knows that you’re in class for one reason and one reason only. He expects you to talk, and he expects you to do your reading. And so you do. Because if you don’t, you look like a dick.(If you can’t imagine the kind of person I mean, think of The Nazi on Grey’s Anatomy and remember me kindly because I have provided a female, though fictitious, example.)

Captain Slusher, an old teacher of mine that I’ve mentioned before, was a perfect Martinet. He came into class for the very first time, towering over us all, and gave us a lecture about his expectations; about what he would and would not tolerate, about what constituted an excuse and what did not. It’s pretty hard (for me, anyway) to dislike someone who is up front about where he stands and then applies those principles; who is hard but fair. And it has the added benefit that when you’ve done well, you know that you have done really well.

Perhaps that is a weakness on my part - wanting an external impetus - but I like to be pushed. If I can just breeze through a subject with high marks, I guess that’s okay, but I’d prefer to be stretched. I like having to earn every last percentage point.

Incidentally, I have only received one mark so far, for a 500 word answer to a weekly question for philosophy. I only wrote 350 words and I thought my answer was fairly shite. I got 95%. Don’t get me wrong: I was really chuffed (and surprised) by that and I probably did a happy dance for two days straight. It was the first mark I’d received in over a decade. Who wouldn’t be chuffed?

But I’m looking forward to getting marked harder and getting whipped into shape as expectations rise over the course of my degree. (Don’t throw that in my face if I don’t get an HD for my first history essay next week. Just let me cry.)

And I’ve been wondering… What will I be like when I start teaching? Will I be a soft touch? Or will I try out The Martinet style and have it come across as though I have some repressed, chip-on-my-shoulder issue with my womanhood. (Another pretty awful stereotype.) Because, you see, the beauty of Captain Slusher was not only that he was uncompromising in his standards; he was also bloody funny.

And I’m not. Funny, I mean. I’m too serious, too intense, too everything. And my sense of humour is obscure and personal. Whatever game face I decide to go with, it’s going to need a lot of work.

[Btw, there was an interesting review of the movie Smart People which discusses the stereotypes of academics. I might be biased, because I have a blog crush on Jake Pure Pedantry but it’s worth a read. It might even be worth watching the movie. ]

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Me, I’m an exhausted girl. With a headache. But I just wanted to quickly let everyone know that The WinterWarm Project is now live.

It took me much longer to get running than expected, not because the work was hard, but because I seem to have minimal skills at coping with pressure these days. I’m working on that.

Anyway, the site is finally here. At the moment, in order to get the knitted items to us, we only have a Melbourne post box, so items will need to be sent to us. Melburnians can use the contact form on the site to organise a pick up or drop off. The delivery options will increase throughout the year though, and we’ll be doing a lot of work when Mum is here in July, organising freight sponsorship to help us with that.

Anyway…

Run on over and check it out. (You get to see what my Mum looks like!)
Spread the word if you can. (I’ll be adding a few different images you can use in your sidebars over the next couple of weeks.)
Help out with the knitting/crocheting if you can. (We’ll slowly begin to add free patterns to the site, so subscribe.)

Anyway, we’re excited!

xx cm

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Watching 2020 today was depressing.

The joy at Howard’s political demise was, not unexpectedly, a short-lived euphoria. I quite like Rudd, if only for the fact that he is an unashamedly intelligent man and intelligence is not a much loved quality in Australian life, but the 2020 summit didn’t feel like “a breath of fresh air”. Yes, it had a very different atmosphere than anything that would have been possible under Howard, but all I was left with was a feeling of frustration, and worse, disillusionment. Not disillusionment with the government which, in my opinion (I’m a philosophical anarchist), has little to offer anyway but with the complete lack of ideas.

Philosophical anarchism isn’t about storming parliament or violent revolt (though I understand the inclination): It’s about organic change which renders our current political structures obsolete. It’s about building alternative ways of doing things. It’s a positive philosophy, a humanist philosophy. It is optimistic about what humans are capable of.

And it is independent.

2020 is supposed to be about ideas. And there were none. Each “stream” - health, the arts, etc - came back with the same tired thoughts. We should set up a commission, an independent body, an “insert new political job title here”. We should educate the public about… And as my particular anarchism has always been somewhat socialist, I hated the voice in my head which was getting angry that no one could think of any way to improve our society except having the government spend money. And my sense of social justice hated that I don’t care whether or not there are indigenous representatives on every art board even though I am fully aware that if the government “makes it so” it won’t do anything to put indigenous art “front and centre”.

Indigenous art will never be front and centre. Art will never be front and centre. And should “cultural production” be in the government’s domain anyway? I hated that the majority of my thoughts in response to what I was hearing sounded like right wing echoes. Why should the government prop up the arts, I thought. Surely, if the arts cannot maintain themselves, our society is bankrupt anyway. And does art really flourish under the aegis of bureaucracy? I don’t think so.

I don’t want the government’s fingers in every aspect of our society. I want a society that can support itself, that wants to support itself. Today, I’m disillusioned by seeing how much it doesn’t want to, how much it thinks everything is the government’s responsibility even to the point of choosing what food we eat (banning “unhealthy” food was one suggestion).

As far as I’m concerned, if we must live in nation states and pay our taxes to them (and for the foreseeable future, we must) then they should provide healthcare, education, social security where needed and maybe some infrastructure.

Then they should fuck off.

I can’t remember who said it, but if man is incapable of ruling himself, he is surely incapable of ruling others. I always thought that, maybe, one day, ruling ourselves we could manage. Today, everyone abdicated. Today, everyone was a child looking to an imagined parent to orchestrate their lives. Obviously when someone envisages a world of adults that isn’t the greatest thing to watch, but worse than that, today I couldn’t even register the potential for it.

And I don’t know what that says about me and my “optimism”.

[Note: This is really not a balanced explanation of my political stance - Rather, it is just a tired response to a moribund event. ]

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While I was getting ready for university this morning, I had CNN on in the background. Blah blah… Pope mobile… Blah blah… Sexual abuse scandal… Blah blah… White House… And then Bush says…

“…end the Dictatorship of Relativism…”

WTF?

So off I go to school, with my course readings for today’s philosophy tutorial, wondering if Bush has any idea what that phrase means, and if he thinks we need a War Against Relativism to complement the War Against Drugs and the War Against Terrorism. (Although, if the enemy of his enemy is his friend, he could join forces with the terrorists for this new fight.)

On the train, I start my reading… about Plato’s Theory of Forms and the philosophical life. After weeks of struggling to engage with a text full of unacceptable premises and metaphysics, there was some meat there of more interest than “rational” arguments for the immortality of the soul. And my head was full of ideas (I think I sketched out 3 different books in my head during my reading) so…

I miss my train station and go all the way into the city.

Okay. No drama there. The tram I switch to goes through the city anyway and I’d left early. I board and begin reading the supplementary text. It is painful. Reductive, meaningless quibbles about words, pretending to elucidate while saying nothing. Yawn. So I throw that back in my bag and pull out Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Ahh… Nihilism: That other alternative to the absolutism of Plato and of the 2 millenia that followed…

I go 20 minutes further down the tracks than I am supposed to.

I get to my history lecture on time. Why do we always pay attention to the Hollywood Ten rather than the 1000s of civil servants who got the same treatment under McCarthyism? I reckon there is a thesis in the little, unsexy people. Oh, and Gary Cooper was a dickwad.

Anyway.

I move on to my philosophy tutorial, to discuss The Forms - those pure essences which cannot be perceived with human senses and which the objects and qualities we experience in our “reality” are but shadows of. We talk about Beauty. If two people disagree about an object’s beauty, can both be right? According to Plato, no. Beauty exists as an absolute. If one cannot recognise it where it exists, it is a failure of the mind. Someone must be wrong. According to most of us - living, as we apparently do, under the Dictatorship of Relativism - beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

(Curiously enough, that proverb is a bastardisation of Plato’s words in The Symposium - “beholding beauty with the eye of the mind” - where he was saying anything but what we mean by it today.)

After a quick trip to the library to get some reference materials for my research paper, I get on the tram - which is late, then slow - but I manage to get off at the right stop and board my train. Which is late and then, almost home, stops altogether. Between stations.

Through the window in the dark I see the driver on the tracks, then the police. Great. After a while we move on to the next station. The police walk passed the carriages toward the driver and we hear an announcement…

“We apologise for the delay. We had.”

Er? Whatever the problem is, I guess it’s none of my business.

I make a phone call. B will come and pick me up so I disembark. Over a policewoman’s radio I hear, “…man on top of the woman…” Curiouser and curiouser. An ambulance is parked on the verge of the tracks and a police car is blocking the road. An announcement is made that the train has stopped in order to divide the carriages. (Yeah, right.)

B arrives, and I go home, still wondering about the contextless Dictatorship of Relativism. So I look for a transcript online and discover the phrase is not Bush’s, but The Rat’s. (Note: choosing to respect people’s private beliefs does not necessitate respect for the Papacy.)

Ratzinger said in 2005…

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.

So, to escape my relativist, liberal freedom (which, apparently, is a perversion of the idea of redemption) should I go with Plato’s Forms, or Ratzinger’s Christ? (And don’t those possessives speak to how much I currently suffer under The Dictatorship?)

Also interesting, given today’s history lecture on the Cold War, are the passages there (and in an earlier address) about the particular “winds of doctrine”. Methinks someone is still suffering from a Red Scare.

To sum up though, I went to university then came home.

Who the hell knows where Bush was going.

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Often the trackback goes unacknowledged, and I’m not known for staying on top of these sorts of things, so this post is simply to say thanks to all those who have linked to my posts during the first quarter of 2008. Well, all those that I am aware of anyway.

So here it is…

• Adam at The Body Shop Activist
• Andrew at Get A Real Blog and On Blogging Australia
• Bettina at Dances to the beet of her own drum
• Child Person at Child Person From The South
• Commander Khan at Random Tangent
• Duncan at Pacific Highlander
• Gill at Even In A Little Thing
• Guera at A Roaming Aussie Mum
• Joh at Joh Blogs
• Karen at Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum
• Kate at A Byootiful Life
• Kelley at Magneto Bold Too
• Leigh at All For Women
• Lightening at Lightening and Lightening’s Blogworld
• Marj aka Thriver at Survivor’s Can Thrive
• Mark at Him That Writes
• Meg at Dipping Into the BlogPond
• Megan at Imaginif
• Mike at Crooks and Liars
• Rosemary Nissen-Wade at SnakyPoet
• Tanaudel at Errantry
• Widdle Shamrock at The Musings of a Green Knee Capping Leprechaun

Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

xx cerebralmum

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Caspar loving gadgets as he does quite some time ago ate my phone, which involved so my drool that he fried the circuits and I was phoneless for quite some time. That didn’t bother me too much, because I’m somewhat phone-phobic and hate talking on the damn things. I do however, like SMSing. It’s short, to the point, and happens in my own time frame. And useful for things like “Get milk” or ‘Home in 5. Make coffee.” So after a while a long suffering friend, who I don’t talk to enough, posted me an old one of hers. And when I say old, I mean old.

Smessing (That’s what I call it - Spread it around.) on it is a pain it the butt. The screen is microscopic and it takes a dozen button presses just to get to the smess screen and you can’t even set the default to predictive text. But it serves its minimal purposes, and all my numbers and old saved smesses were on my SIM card so nothing was lost. But another thing about it that doesn’t function well is that there is no keypad lock. Left alone in my bag or pocket, it’s free to dial people I haven’t spoken to for years, or people that would barely remember me whose numbers I really should just delete. I can live with that. The amount I use it, a couple of random calls won’t increase my monthly $20 bill.

Today, however, it did something very bad.

It deleted all my saved smesses. Including the few I had kept from Caspar’s dad.

They weren’t really important, I guess, in the scheme of things. There were just a few simple things. A line from one of our favourite songs, a one word message which said, Tulips, and other things in the private language of our short-lived, ill-fated, star-crossed romance. And I know that I don’t need the “evidence” that our relationship was meaningful - because I know it was despite its end - but it made me sad that they were gone. All I have left now of him which is concrete is the worn Ralph Lauren Polo cardigan he loaned to me which never got returned and a letter opener in the shape of Richard the Lionheart’s sword, and the empty envelope from the flowers which arrived after Cas was born; the ones that did not need a card. It isn’t much.

It isn’t like I looked at them every day, or even think of him frequently. He’s there in the background, in my memories - as a good memory - and life moves on. But now I’m feeling a little tristesse. Perhaps I’m sentimental but I guess that that is a far better thing for a single Mum to be than angry or hurt or bitter. Well… I might be a little angry.

At that damn phone.

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I’ve been shite lately. Obviously. I don’t even want to look at the date of my last post. I haven’t been reading my friends blogs. I haven’t even been reading my emails much. I think there are a gazillion people online that I haven’t thanked for various things. And a few offline as well. At some stage, things just got “all too much” and I left my computer off, zealously, and buried my head in sand (aka Sci-Fi DVDs). And when you feel like everything things all too much and so ignore them, it actually makes you feel worse.

So here I am, back again and feeling somewhat miserable and stressed, but I’ll probably feel better by the time I finish this post. There are so many things I have to do right now. I can’t even begin to enumerate them. I know people say to break it down into small parts, and to write lists and tick them off so you feel like you’re getting somewhere, but when the task of writing such a list is overwhelming, I think you’re pretty much screwed.

So I’m starting my baby steps - again - here. And apologising to all those people who deserve much attention and haven’t been getting it from me. I can’t promise you’ll be getting it any time soon, but now at least you know that I am thinking about you.

Sometimes, I am the life of the party. And sometimes I am a very antisocial creature. My real life friends are mostly aware of that, and don’t worry when they don’t hear from me for months on end. That’s just me. I think internet relationships are more tenuous. They don’t, for me at least, have the strength of years. So I feel more guilty when I don’t “water” those friendships. Which, again, makes me want to bury my head in the sand.

I’ve been slack at taking photos too, so I have no picture of “Monday’s Child” (I don’t want to cheat and use an old one) but I can promise that he is still as gorgeous as ever. And we started toilet training a couple of weeks ago.

Caspar will be 18 months in 2 days, which is apparently on the early side for toilet training these days, especially for boys. (Yes, I scanned a couple of pieces of the child rearing literature before ignoring it and Skyping my mother.) He’d been showing signs of readiness for a while, and I had a potty on hand but decided that trying to get him to use the potty when he was interested in the toilet was a stupid idea. So I looked around for a toilet seat for him. I didn’t think that would be so hard.

I just wanted one of those seat and step combined folding things. I thought they were pretty standard. But no, I couldn’t find one anywhere. Just seats and separate steps which were too low. And ridiculously high tech things which convert into Lear jets or some such and had a similar price point. After a couple of weeks searching for simplicity, I gave up and just bought a padded seat because he didn’t want to wait any longer, and holding him over the bowl was not fun for my back.

(I also shopped around for some plain undies - without crazy patterns or “licensed” characters. I loathe “licensed” characters on everything. It was worth the extra pennies not to have to look at them 10 times a day.)

Of course, the standard seat didn’t fit on our toilet, so out came the hacksaw to remove some excess plastic and we were off.

One other issue is that Cas still doesn’t speak so has no way of telling me that he needs to go so I’ve had to be a little vigilant about keeping an eye on when he’s fidgeting. Kelley from Magneto Bold Too and Leechbabe from Stuff With Thing (I think - it was a while ago) both gave me a couple of handsigns I could use so I taught him one of those as a way to say “toilet”. He learned that pretty much instantaneously. Of course, learning it and using it are two different things.

Overall, it’s been a simple change. To be honest, throwing a couple of pairs of undies in the washing machine is easier than laundering nappies. And he gets it. There have been a few accidents, obviously, but also a few days accident free. We’ve even gone out a couple of times without a nappy. And he’s actually really great at weeing on the loo. He doesn’t even need rewards. He’s happy just to get a piece of toilet paper when he’s done and to wave bye-bye. The pooing, though? Not so much.

In the couple of weeks, we’ve only had half a poo in the loo. But he’ll get there. Toilet training is not as bad as I thought. Maybe because I decided not to stress about that, at least. It helps to have a Mum that says it takes longer than they say it does, and to not be a sucker for the Potty-Train-Your-Toddler-In-A-Day Brigade. If he’s fully toilet trained in six months, that’s good enough for me. Although, after seeing how well he’s doing, I doubt that it will take that long.

So there you go. I wrote a blog post. That’s one thing I can cross off my gargantuan non-existent list. And I feel a bit better.

Although still a crappy person for not, figuratively, returning my friends’ calls.

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