Moment to Moment

Breaking up is hard to do

Dear Career,

I'm so sorry, my darling Career, it's not you, it's me. Actually, I think it's both of us. We've been together in some sort of way for about a decade now, but it's just not working out. You see, all this time you've been hiding your feelings from me: that you think I'm not a very good writer, that I don't cope with deadlines, that I'm a little over-trusting and naive.  You might be right.

And as for me, well, I've probably not been very committed to you either. I've been seeing a Life on the side, and frankly I find it more fulfilling and interesting than I find sitting down with you for eight hours a day. Life knows how to treat me: photography, knitting, books, my partner, dogs, sunshine, friends, and so on.

Yes it's true, all of these things seem to require that little frisson of excitement which you provided by monopolising all my time -- it made the stolen moments with my life oh so much sweeter. Oh and money, which you always provided in a grudging but usually reliable manner.

But lately those two things have been pretty lacking, frankly, and I  just seem to spend a lot of time in my pyjamas reading blogs and waiting for you to call. I've left god-only-knows how many messages with you, and I've emailed you, and sent you little reminders, and if I look in my 'Job Hunting' folder on my PC I can count just how many times I've tried to bridge the gap between us. Cearly, however, it's not enough for you to even bother about me anymore, and I'm not sure I know how to even try anymore.

And as for the money... I don't want to come across as overly entitled, but honestly, you think for all the work I did -- all the 14 hour days, the missed family events, the weekends I spent with you, the degree and the HECS, the sucking up to sociopathic bosses, the boring hours of mindless administrivia, and that thing that happened on the yacht -- I'd in a slightly better shape financially. I don't want to be rich, I've never expected that, but I did hope for a regular pay packet, enough to keep me above the breadline, so to speak. 

Of course some of this, much of this, is my own fault. Friends and family warned me that maybe you weren't the right one. They told me it would be hard, if I did pursue you, but for a while it seemed like you wanted to pursue me right back. But then the sour times set in, and I could see them all thinking 'we told you so'. And indeed they did.

So I think it might be time to say goodbye, Career. There are other people you could be seeing and I think they'd suit you better, and I think I might need a new direction. Even a new Career, and I guess I need to admit I've been looking around.

I'll always cherish our time together, especially those brief moments where it seemed like I was talented and interesting and worth giving money to; and you were fulfilling and possibly even leading somewhere better.

Fond regards,
Kate.

Ps -- if you do change your mind, you know where to find me.

YAFM

(Yet another f*cking meme).  This one, from Elsewhere, is full of pointless gender stereotypes, so take it as you will:

Spam

I just got 248 spam messages to my Gmail in two minutes. All were dated November 7. How weird is that?

More on Clothes

Mel responds to my post.

One of the things -- both annoying and wonderful -- about writing is how it takes on a life of its own once you've let it go. It always amazes and frustrates (and also inspires) me when people respond to my writing in ways I didn't intend or anticipate. Which seems to happen a lot with blogging, perhaps due to the nature of it all: hastily composed and read posts floating around linking and being linked, comments appearing (or usually not) and taking things into new directions.

Anyway, Mel says:

is Kate beginning with a quote from me advocating a thoughtful and open-minded way of analysing one's feelings about clothing one doesn't wear or like, and then finishing by saying her preferred mode of engagement is mindless mockery?

My immediate response to this way "aargh no that's not what I meant at all!"

Mel continues:

I couldn't disagree more with the idea that some clothing choices don't merit attention other than to dismiss them as 'ridiculous', 'silly', 'weird', or, in generationalist terms, as just one of 'those things' that 'the kids of today', aka 'Gen Y', do.

I also couldn't disagree more with this position, and it certainly wasn't what I was reaching towards with my little ramble on fashion. I don't think clothing should be dismissed as silly or weird or stupid, even if one initially finds said clothing silly or weird or stupid. Unless, you know, it is silly -- like people who don't wear enough clothes in winter, or the way that summer fashion for women seems to encourage unhealthy tanning. And so on.

But I do reserve the right, as I originally said, to have that reaction in the knowledge that it's not a useful reaction to have, and to enjoy things like Go Fug Yourself as a guilty pleasure (frankly, I think it's healthy to poke a little fun at the cult of celebrity and 'fashion' and Chloe Sevigny as a fashion muse and what have you. I think Go Fug Yourself does that, but it also crosses some lines that I'm not comfortable with, aka calling people 'saggy tits' and so on. Still, I read it and I laff and laff, and I'm not going to pretend I don't).

Indeed Mel's closing paragraphs in her post map out ways in which mockery or 'finding things silly' is a form of social control, and that's a real thing too: witness the mocking of emo kids or goths or mods, or anyone else who looks 'strange'.

Anyway, I said something else in the comments at Mel's which I wanted to repeat here:

Oddly enough, in Claremont, I tend to feel excluded from the 'community' by dint of being less well-dressed than other people, and perhaps there's an element of sour grapes in my own negative response to what I'd consider daring fashion choices.

There's a class-age-weight thing going on for me when I regard young women in 'daring' -- do I sound like a Nanna when I use words like daring? -- or high-end or expensive clothes. I can't afford those clothes (see my comments in the last post on shopping mainly at Target), I have the wrong body shape for most of them, I don't 'need' nice clothes for my day to day job, and I do tend to feel a bit envious when I see well-dressed young women for those reasons.

At the same time, I find a lot of women's fashion really stupidly sexualised, and I personally don't want to wear clothes which make me uncomfortable because I feel like my boobs are going to fall out, for instance. I also don't like physically constricting or painful clothes.

Throw into the mix my feminism, and my desire to not participate so much in pointless consumerism, and I find my 'relationship' to fashion and clothing -- including well-dressed people -- is somewhat complicated. The ideal solution, of course, is to 'wear what I want and stop caring'. But... but... it's not that easy, right?

Well, yeah, it probably is, but where would the fun be in that?

My other solution to my own personal fashion dilemma is that I'm going to buy myself a sewing machine for Christmas. I've been reading A Dress a Day for inspiration. (Oh and Twisty's posts on fashion and femininity, which you really should do yourself a favour and read, even if just to disagree violently.)

Anyway, I'm really fascinated by Mel's discussions of fashion and hipster culture, and if you want to further that particular discussion, please do so at Mel's blog. Alternatively, if you want to call me self-obsessed and boring, the comments are your oyster. Or something.

Profound thought of the evening

If it's wrong to have a glass of verdelho and mushroom pate on crackers for dinner, then I don't want to be right.

Ignominious Moments in Dog Ownership, episode #1278

We are walking around Lake Claremont. I am listening to my iPod, Jasper is happily chasing sticks. Then she sees the ducks. In the past, the stick has always proven more interesting than the ducks, but not today. Oh no, not today.

When you have nothing to say, do a meme

I could tell you about how Jasperella the uber-hund nearly got run over on Sunday, but I am still recovering from the shock. (She's fine, thankfully.)

But here's a meme instead, from Pavlov's Cat:

Could be worse, I guess

Nicked from Lauren at Faux Real Tho!

A short post on clothes that went a bit awry

Over at Footpath Zeitgeist, where Mel cooly dissects the 'meaning' of certain hipster fashion trends, she has a post about whether certain fashion items can be really called silly or be labelled bad taste. By dismissing some fashion as inherently stupid, Mel says:

We're not only creating arbitrary categories of 'good' and 'bad' taste; we're also creating a bogeyman of 'bad taste' -- saying that it doesn't follow the same embodied, pragmatic and affective processes that 'good taste' does. That it can only be observed with farcical incredulity and that people with 'bad taste' are fundamentally retarded in some way because they aren't ashamed of the way they look.

Indeed. But, yesterday I went shopping in Claremont and I saw:

1. A young woman wearing a short, tight, blue jumpsuit. Imagine a boilersuit, only a very  short-shorted version, and painted on.  Then with an orange cardy atop.

2. Another young woman wearing a strapless white terry towelling dress. The top was elastic, and the bottom was in the style of those little scoop-sided athletic shorts that were popular in the 70s and seem to have made a bit of a resurgence. It only just covered her bottom, and I don't know how she would have sat down in it.

A quick surf around the Net reveals these outfits could both be called 'playsuits'. I leave any analysis of the implications of dressing grown women in playsuits to your imagination.

Lull

Finished all my stories for various publications and the Spice Train has rolled out of the station to the printers, though not before nearly causing Anthony and I to come to blows over numerous sub-editorial decisions. Luckily (since he is much bigger than I am) we sorted it all out without resorting to fisticuffs, though I did raise my voice a few times.

It's amazing how invested you -- and by you I mean nerdy pedants like Anthony and I -- can become in tiny things like where to put a comma or the best way to describe wagyu beef.

Domestically, JW is up in Karratha doing his rockologist thing,  the dog is snoozing near the back door in her post-breakfast stupor, and even the cicadas in the backyard seem a tad subdued. It's quiet. A little too quiet.

As always after a period of intense activity, I am feeling adrift. What to do now? I have lots of things I could be doing -- Giftmas shopping, knitting some last-minute things also for Giftmas, reading some  of the books in the TBR pile, cleaning the house, going down to Freo to take some photos as requested by Christine Keeler at LP, reading the Stern report or at least John Quiggin's posts about it, obsessing some more about what I'm going to do with my life.

But instead here I am surfing the Net and still wearing my pyjamas. Look, it's a Turducken! And Mel says the rolled up t-shirt cuff is coming back! And this post, about a US magazine called 'Women's Household' is quite sad. Also, Bernice resists stereotypically feminine inability to change a car 's oil and tells us how!