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31 December 2001

Ho Chi Minh

Is lovely. Actually, I'm not going to summarise the places I go to. I don't want a chronological graph of personal growth and wowness. But I'm not sure how to avoid it. Not without abandoning a journal altogether. Maybe there's something inherently, dodgily, voyeuristic about documenting places you only see for a few days. It's insulting. Maybe the only solution is to make sure you stay everywhere you want to write about for more than a little while. Yes, I think so. And it wouldn't be so bad either.

26 December 2001

Henrietta, We’d Best Be Moving Along

Henrietta isn't a real person - but she could be. Millions of families, every year, (someone of them probably with mums called Henrietta) pick up and move on, for no reason better than They'd Best Be Going. It's bad enough when you're at someone's house, the clock strikes 9pm, and you start to feel like you've stayed too long. Why has time, as community glass ceiling become so prevalent? We'll be examining this and other fascinating sorts of issues in the paragraphs to come.

Like many things, it's easy to call it another one of life's unexplained idiosyncracies, and get in the station wagon. But is that good enough? This person doesn't think so.

Koko Yama, is a woman I found amongst the growing ranks of people dissatisified with the current community paradigm. She claims that "Children need a stable home." She didn't explain why, so we'll just have to take her word for it. "And what has happened that removes the need for long term community," she continues, "have we suddenly become content to exist as autonomous entities simply because the individual has managed to secure itself a voice." When asked what she thought the way forward was, Koko replied "More public funding of community programs, and more emphasis on building awareness in the community of the value community brings." Some people would suggest that the sacrifices involved are too great, and that given our quality of life, there's no longer any need to band together. Why can't communities simply form when and where they need to. Why do they need to be permanent, and with a particular group of people "They just do, OK," was the, now familiar, response from Koko.

As for Henrietta, and the family she's hypothetically struggling to raise, in, what some are calling, The Age of the Nuclear Family (as in fission, not fusion) - where does this all leave her. Out in the cold? Or merely another contented Land Rover owner, in a community, that's not longer even sure it should being calling itself this.

Chief Fireburner

A guy (let's call him 'Chief Fireburner') at a Letting Lose the Stallion Inside course half-jokingly asks the lecturer 'When are we going to get to the sex?'. The lecturer brushes him off with a 'maybe later'. Chief Fireburner accepts it, and doesn't say anything else. But the lecturer picks up on this later and uses it as an example of how men are too submissive and aren't assertive about what they want. The lecturer asks the Chief's wife (Lurleen Hardapple) 'Is that what he does in bed?' and she nods in agreement.
So Lurleen, it seems like Fireburner here really respects your decisions?
Oh yes, Steve, he does. It's terrible.
So you see folks. The Chief here is a classic example of men, who in respecting their wives, fail to get the sex they really want. Lurleen here would love a good fuck, but the Chief is just too much of a pansy-man to give it to her. And I'll bet a lot of you out there feel the same way. All the ladies who never initiate or say yes to sex even when they really want it, put your hands up.
[Most female hands go up]
And all the men who listen to their wives when they 'claim' that they don't want sex.
[Most male hands go up]

What we have here is a classic male dysfunction. I'll call it for now the 'respect dysfunction'. I'm sure you can all see by now how unconstructive respect in a healthy marriage is.

Deep down, women really want a wild man in bed. It's up to you guys out there to know when to be wild and when to be civilised. Real men know this instinctively. But the boys are going to have to learn it the hard way.

11 December 2001

Lantana

I saw Lantana the other day. I liked it - but it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. I didn't enjoy it as much, at least. But it was interesting. There were no goodies and no baddies. For most of the movie you were under the impression that one person would turn out to be a monster, but it never happened. Which made it very real. I don't know if real life has real monsters. Perhaps people pretending to be monsters. Or people who're not sure how to play the human role, and figure it makes sense to act monstery. And no one in it was sorted, everyone was messed up, and their problems didn't seem like vehicles for the story.

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