Music Monday: This One’s For Kim

The other day, Kim said that she was embarrassed by the ’90’s. How could one be embarrassed by the ’90’s? It was an awesome decade!  Being the good friend I am, I have decided to dedicate Music Monday to Kim just to “embarrass” her a little more. 🙂

So, without further ado, I give you Glycerine by Bush. Remember this one, Kimmie? 😉 (Also: How freaking HAWT was Gavin? *swoon*)

And, I couldn’t resist posting this in honour of the interpretive dance routine that Amy and Kim choreographed while sitting in the back seat of my car (Tell me you remember that, Kim):

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Fish Custard

In case you have been living under a rock, there was a rebirth over the weekend. No, not the zombie messiah known as Jesus, but the  Time Lord known as The Doctor! Yes, that’s right, Eleven made his debut and it was … pretty damned awesome if you ask me.

It’s true that Matt Smith is making me squirm and break out into fits of innappropriate giggles due to his strong resemblance to someone I know and, once upon a time, knew well. It’s just weird to “see” a friend in the TARDIS, ok? 🙂 Especially considering my penchant for reading Doctor Who fanfic smut, this is doing strange things to my brain. I will tell you one thing for sure, though: I will NOT, under any circumstances, be reading any Eleven themed smut. No way. NO! Oh god, that’s just … No. It’s just No. That’s what it is.

But my personal mental issues aside, Matt Smith is pretty brilliant as the Doctor. The only thing I can say against him is that he’s not Ten. Oh, Ten, how I miss thee. The silly grin, the babbling, the suit, the Converse sneakers, the hotness, the habit of exclaiming “Allons-y!” Ten, you were awesome and will be missed sorely. But, I always have smutty Ten/Rose (and sometimes a third party) fanfic, I suppose … What? I didn’t say I would be giving up Who smut entirely! That’s crazy talk!

This new season also heralds in a new era for Who. Stephen Moffat is taking over as head honcho from Russel T. Douchebag … er, I mean Davies. I have to say, this makes me very happy. Russel T. Davies did a lot, I’ll give him that. He revived Who in the first place and created a lot of awesome (Captain Jack Harkness is an obvious example). But, there is no denying that he is a douchebag more interested in money than turning out quality TV. He sold his soul to the devil and I hate him for it. Stephen Moffat, on the other hand, wrote Blink which is one of my all time favourite episodes of ANY TV show, hands down, let alone just for the Doctor Who category. The man has, so far, turned out all sorts of awesome and is a win in my book. In fact, I just did a search for info on Stephen Moffat and, it turns out that he’s written just about every one of my favourite Who episodes! Including The Empty Child/Doctor Dances episodes where Captain Jack is introduced. I am still pretty sure RTD is responsible for Jack but, wow, Moffat just got cooler in my eyes.  I know it’s a little early to say this (because he could turn out to be just as big a douche as RTD) but I find myself wishing he had been in charge when we had Ten. Oh, the coolness Moffat + Ten could have created …

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m excited about the new season of Who and, if you haven’t seen the newest episode then you should. You really, really should. Because it is awesome. Good luck, Matt and Stephen, I’m sure this season will prove to be brilliant AND fantastic and whatever word it is that Eleven chooses to be his favourite adjective. Allons-y!*

*  I couldn’t resist. Yes, I am a nerd. You just read an entire blog post about Doctor Who which probably means you are a nerd, too. So there!

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I’m Feelin’ The Love!

Twitter is a wonderful thing. It’s provided me with countless hours of time wastage and entertainment. I have also met some pretty awesome people through it. One of whom being Rachel, AKA Shiny. Not only is she awesome, but she also lives in Perth which meant I got to really meet her … and drink beer with her … and we plan on doing it again (the beer part for sure). 🙂 Any woman who chooses her kittens based on their colours in order to name them Gallifrey and Skaro has got to be pretty awesome … AND she likes Ani DiFranco too! Shiny is a nerd with taste. Except for the liking me part. I haven’t quite figured that out yet. But, amazingly, she felt compelled to award me with this:

I’ve never gotten a blog award before! Of course, I’ve only been blogging for a few months, so that’s not really such a big surprise. It makes me feel special all the same. There is just one catch to this award: I have to list seven things about myself. Hhhmmm, this may be harder than it sounds. Ok, here you go, seven things about me in no particular order:

1) I once went skinny dipping at Mount Ranier … while lots of people watched. No, the watching part wasn’t planned … just a bit of a stupid oversight on the part of my and my friend’s teenage selves (I won’t out her unless she wants to out herself). Although, I suspect my friend knew what she was doing and just strung silly old me along unawares. 😉 It was the summer I met The Geek, he was visiting and we took him to Mt Ranier because that’s what you do with tourists. There was a beautiful lake just under the parking lot/observation point. It was a warmish day (for Washington) and we hiked down to the lake. We decided that it would be refreshing to go skinny dipping (actually, we were daring each other to do it all the way down … I should have known better than to enter into such a dare with this particular friend). The Geek was still chasing me at the time so I was uncomfortable with stripping right there in front of him. So we went to the other side of the lake. Only to find out later (via the sound of some tourist shouting “Hey, there are two girls down there without any clothes on!”) that we had decided to strip & swim within perfect view of the observation point! I’m sure a few of them have some blurry pictures of naked teenagers in their collection of vacation photos …

2)  I almost became a primary school teacher. When I moved to Australia on a student visa, my chosen major was Primary Education. I did a year of the degree and went to two minor pracs (one in a primary school and one in a high school). It was at the end of that year that I realized that I would make a terrible primary school teacher. I do not have the patience for it, nor am I creative enough to invent lesson plans. Oh, and the rest of the people in my year at uni? Could barely stand most of them. The classes I had to take bored the crap out of me, too. My hat goes off to people who can be teachers … It’s a fucking hard and thankless job.  I am not cut out for it.

3)  I’m 30 years old and I still don’t know who I am. It freaks me out. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up nor do I have any idea what I’m doing now (other than trying to survive the early years of motherhood). I have ideas but I’m not sure they will ever pan out nor am I sure that I will *like* them if they ever do pan out.

4)  I care more about what other people think than I should. I pretend to think I’m awesome but I don’t really think I am. And now I’m admitting to it which is just a big freaking paradox in and of itself, isn’t it? I worry constantly about what other people think and how they view me. It doesn’t stop me from being a weirdie, dreadlocked nerd but it eats away at me just the same.

5)  I consider having my babies naturally at home to be the most empowering and feminist thing I have ever done. Sure, there are things about the first birth that didn’t go exactly as I had hoped (and I may blog the birth story later to explain this).  Consequently, there is a little bit of mother guilt that things went so well for the second.  But those things don’t matter. What matters is that I trusted my body and I did it. I pushed two children out of my vagina in a warm, safe home environment lacking in harsh lighting or superfluous machines that go “ping.” I did it on my own without Drs interfering, without unnecessary medicalisation of the process. Me, my womb, my vagina and my babies working together to create the best moments of my life. If I accomplish nothing else in my life, at least I did that.

6)  I consider succeeding in full term breastfeeding the second most empowering and feminist thing I have ever done. The first time around wasn’t easy. In fact, it was a fucking nightmare that brought me to the brink and back. But I persisted because I knew I could do it and could conceive of no other way to feed my child. After we overcame our horrific problems, I fed with pride. Anywhere. Everywhere. And I still do since Cub is only 19 months old and will likely be feeding for at least another year if not more.  I may hate other parts of my body (especially post baby) but my breasts doing their intended job of feeding children are things to be proud of. I don’t wave them about, I don’t make a big deal about what I’m doing but I do it when I need to, where I need to, regardless of the age of my child because I know that it’s the right thing to do and I know that buying into the idea that a breastfeeding woman must hide is misogynistic, prudish nonsense.

7)  I am essentially a very lazy person and I hate it. There are lots of things I don’t do  because I decide it’s not worth doing or would be too hard to do before I even try. I wish I could change this about myself but, then, that would be too hard, too.

Now, I am supposed to pass this award along to someone else who deserves it. The problem is that I am only just getting started on keeping up with blogs so I have a short list of those I’ve thus far added to my very, very new blog feed … and most of them have already been given this award! But, there are two who, to my knowledge, have not received it  yet and who deserve it for various reasons:

Stay At Home Mayhem

Spilt Milk

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The Plains of Passion … er, I mean Passage *snigger*

Thanks to a certain person who may or may not have an alter ego known as Tito, I have recently discovered slash fic. If you’ve been living under a rock or having a life outside the interwebz (in which case, what the fuck are you doing reading my blog?) and don’t know what slash fic is, I suggest you Google the term. Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m going to hell. But, if I’m going so is Tito and the authors of said slash fic, damn it! Sweet … maybe we can party there …

Anyway, laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of this stuff today brought to mind my first encounter with smutty fiction. So I thought I’d share because I’m in a share-y mood and, hell, I can’t think of any other topic to blog about. 😀

At the innocent young age of 13 (or maybe 12?) I found Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series. It started out innocent enough. Clan of the Cave Bear was tame (apart from the rape scene which, in my innocence, I completely glossed over without really processing what was going on). I liked the movie so I read the book. You see, I was very, very innocent. Did I mention that I was innocent? Yeah, there was a lot of shit in that book that went totally over my head. Anyway, I then went on to read the rest of the series which, as I got older and read more, didn’t go over my head as much. I learned stuff. Oh, I learned stuff. In fact, I believe those books were the way I found out exactly *where* the penis was supposed to go. It took me till the second book to get that, btw. Yeah, innocent. Innocent and a little stupid and a lot naive. Anyway, the point is … I eventually got the point. And then I learned more stuff. *snigger* Educational, that series. 🙂

And, hey, as educations go it wasn’t a bad one. Ayla’s a strong, ass kicking woman who invents the bra, the spear thrower (she had help from her man for that), using pyrite and flint to start fires, domesticates the first horse, invents the freaking needle and manages to be the best cook & medicine woman the world has ever seen on top of being a minx in bed with the most well endowed man ever to live. Most of the books describe the matriarchal society of Cro-Magnon humans (Auel’s romanticized idea of it at any rate). So, yeah, I could have had a worse smutty series of books to start on.

Note that I was reading these back when most of my peers were barely past picture books. What can I say? I went to a public school in New Jersey. Anyway, I was pretty much the only person I knew reading these books at the time … which, I think, is how I got away with reading them to be perfectly honest. You see, no one had any idea of the education I was getting … least of all my parents.

After 8th grade, my parents split up and we moved to Washington State where I met Kim (everybody say hi to Kim!). At some point Kim and I discovered that we’d both read the infamous series. Immediately we had running jokes about mammoths, Jondalar’s *ahem* talents and the fact that Ayla supposedly invented most of the technologies that set Cro-Magnon humans apart from their cousins, the Neanderthals. We laughed till we cried over certain *cough* scenes in the books and nicknamed the fourth book The Plains of Passion rather than it’s true title of The Plains of Passage because… Well, let’s just say the book is all about a big, long journey in prehistoric times. There wasn’t much else to do but shag … and Ayla and Jondalar do … a lot … about every 5 pages. It’s a LOOOOOOOOOOONG book.

At some point there was a gathering at Kim’s house consisting of a lot of angsty, bored teenagers and no adult supervision. That happened a lot during my youth, actually. It’s a wonder I got out of the whole thing as relatively pure as I did, to be honest. Anyway, back to the point … Kim and I, once again, were laughing about The Plains of Passion and the mammoths (I still can’t even write about it without sniggering!). Finally Amy gets curious enough to ask us what the fuck we are on about. The book gets taken out and shown to Amy. We laugh about how “gross” it is, etc. Amy starts flipping through, finds a scene (not hard, it happens every 5 pages) and the following occurs:

Amy: OMG! You’re right! This book is DISGUSTING!

Kim & I: Yeah, it’s hilarious. *histerical laughter*

40 minutes or so later ….

Kim & I : Um, where’s Amy? *looking around*

We find Amy huddled in a corner, reading intently, flipping pages, then reading intently again. We tease her mercilessly.

Ah, the memories.  Here’s to Jean M. Auel, educating naive young women everywhere and here’s to Ayla for … well, being the super woman of prehistoric humans. Oh, and while I’m at it … here’s to Kim for sharing the laughter with me over such an educational series of books. 😉

So, what was your first smutty book? Come on, spill!

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Where The Bloody Hell Are You?

My best friend and I at 18

I’ve been in Australia for 9 years now. It’s been 8 years since I’ve been back home for a (very brief) visit. It’s been around a year since someone from back home has visited me. Before that, it had been 6 years since family and friends visited for my wedding. I won’t count the visits from each of my parents after Bug’s birth as that was a stressful time and I was more focused on having become a parent for the first time.

Over the years I have watched several of The Geek’s family members go to the US for holidays while I stayed here, pining for home, missing dear friends. I’ve sat here for so long first saving for a house, now saving to keep the house. I thought moving overseas meant that I might have a well traveled life. I was wrong. I don’t even get to see the state I live in let alone go back home or anywhere else. I see other people going to my home country, or going all sorts of interesting places and I sit here. It’s hard. I know it will change one day … I hope it will change one day. I wait and hope that someone will visit again so I can reconnect with at least one person. But I also know that it is not exactly appealing to a single and/or child free person to hang out with people with small children on an overseas holiday.

Part of homesickness is missing people. In fact, its a HUGE part of it. I’m feeling that part a lot lately. A friend of mine is in Rome at the moment and he’s been blogging about it which has facilitated more interaction with him than I’ve had in years. Damon and I were a part of a pretty close knit circle of friends back in high school. Most of us have drifted apart over the years as people do but it feels more pronounced to me since I am also so very very far away. I miss them. I miss them all. They were a huge part of my life when the foundations of who I am were being laid. Sure, we’ve all changed and grown since then. Some more than others. But I still feel a really strong connection with many of those people despite how far away we are both literally and figuratively. Perhaps it’s *because* I am so far away. Who knows? For now I hope that someone else will come visit so I can reconnect and reminisce. So I can feel closer to home even if I’m not really very close at all. Visits from old friends do that. They help salve the homesickness even when they also make it that much worse. They’re the next best thing to actually going home and I’ll take all that I can get. So, who’s next to visit? Anyone?

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