The one who got away.

I’m rather sleep-deprived today, so I’m stealing an idea from The Daily Post blog.

Describe the one who got away.

For me, the one that got away was an opportunity, not a person.  And as usual, it was because of a guy.

All through high-school I was obsessed with French and planned to take a year off and live in France; travel, eat baguettes and brie, lounge in fields of lavender, you get the picture.   But just before my last year of highschool, I met a guy.  No hugely romantic story – we were both 17 and drinking at a mutual friend’s birthday party.  But it was love.  And so leaving him for a year, being apart, it was suddenly not an appealing prospect.  There was never any formal decision made on my part, I just stopped thinking about France, stopped planning, and instead planned to go to University.

In the end I’m glad I stuck with this guy, because I married him a few years later, and now we have the world’s cutest (and chubbiest!) son, and my life is complete.  But I do look people who have travelled (heck, half my highschool class seems to live in London according to FaceBook!) and feel vaguely envious and regretful.   But what would life be without a few regrets?  I’d rather regret not travelling, than regret not spending my life with the man I love.  And perhaps I will follow in the footsteps of my parents, who never travelled until we moved out of home, and in the past 5 years have been to Vietnam, Japan, France, Italy and the UK.  At least if we wait that long we should be able to afford it!

Immortality

So I’m going to try using one of the daily post 2011 blog post suggestions!

If you could live forever, would you? Why or why not?

To be brutally honest, I cannot think of anything worse!  We’re inundated with vampire films/books/shows at the moment who all portray characters who have been alive for hundreds and hundreds of years – I can’t imagine the monotony!  Especially those (like Twilight and Vampire Diaries) who attend high school!  Who wants to constantly repeat those years?

Yes, it would be amazing to watch the world change, to watch as history influences places and people, to see technology shape our interactions and our daily lives – but the flipside must be to watch everyone you love pass on, to be constantly surrounding yourself with people who will always die before you.  There is a saying in te reo Maori (the Maori language) that sums this up:

- He aha te mea nui o te ao?

-He tangata, he tangata, he tangata

-What is the most important thing in this world?

-It is people, it is people, it is people
I love this whakatauki (saying), it shapes how I live my life, and how I carry out my work.  Happiness, to me, is love and laughter, and being loved.  Yes, it would always be nice to have more money, weigh less, own more – but if the people I love are happy, then I am happy.

So no, immortality does not appeal to me.

The joy of a blank page

Contrary to North America, the new school year in the Southern Hemisphere starts in a couple of weeks, so we are being inundated with television ads about starting school.  And it’s making me remember back to the bizarre joy of stationary shopping.  There was just something, for me as a child, about a clean, new pencil-case, filled with pens that actually work, twink that hadn’t leaked, rubbers that were still their shape.  And clean, new books that hadn’t been written in.  Every year I would strive to write so neatly, but alas, my handwriting is atrocious.  One work-mate commented that it looks like a drunken spider had crawled over the page.  Sigh.

I never really noticed these perfectionistic tendencies until my current manager pointed them out in relation to my work.  It may have been sparked by the hand-over notes I wrote for my maternity leave replacement – all 18 pages of them.  Whoops.  I’m not the stereotypical perfectionist – I’m incredibly messy.  But when it comes to my work, or producing something, it needs to be as close to perfect as I can make it.

Seeing these ads for stationary sales has brought all these feelings rushing back to me, but it’s lovely to look back and remember my childhood fondly.  I was incredibly lucky to have a wonderful safe home and be able to enjoy my childhood (and not be in charge of the washing of a family of 14 at 6 years old, as I recently read in another blog).  Hopefully my son will enjoy just such a childhood; we may not have the money to give him overseas vacations every year or a thousand motorised toys, but he will remember the small things no doubt, like the thrill of the first day back at school, backpack full of new stationary, the year full of possibility.

Friendship, and the internet.

Well, it’s not exactly the suggestion from the PostADay2011 blog, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far!

I spend plenty of my time online, and connect with many people that way.  I talk to “real life” friends via facebook, I talk to “internet friends” by posting on forums (fori?) and sometimes the two collide.  Just today I had coffee, in real life, with a friend I met on the internet.

But it does seem that internet relationships are still judged as less real.  Is internet dating less valid than picking someone up in a bar?  Is flying halfway across the world to meet said person insanity, or merely a leap of faith?  Should one be saving thousands of dollars so that one’s partner can meet a platonic internet friend, and take in DisneyLand in one trip?

For me, I tend to turn to my online friends when I need support.  There’s something cathartic and, at the same time, self-involved about starting a new thread on a forum, all about whatever problem you have going on.  But hopefully, if you are a good internet friend, you respond to others just as much as you seek support for yourself.  So in that way, being an online friend is just like being friends in real life – with giving and taking, and some measure of equality.  We’ve all had that one friend who takes and takes and takes, and needs and needs and needs, and somehow is just too busy when the tables are turned.

Theres a lot of discussion around whether the internet is actually facilitating or stunting connection between people.  While I definitely agree that there are negatives (for instance, I’ll “catch up” with someone by looking at their holiday photos on FaceBook, rather than actually asking them about it) anyone who has met amazing interesting people online would be hard-pressed to deny the advantages.

Reality TV – Like it or lump it.

It seems, these days, that we are inundated with so-called reality tv.  And to be honest, I’m fairly promiscuous as television preferences go, I’ll watch basically anything.  But it does lead me to wonder, will this trend every end?  Will we get tired of dumping pseudo-celebs on islands, or judging skinny blondes on their ability to “smize”?  Where are the writers, where are the comedies and the dramas?  I guess the point I’m trying to make is that if I’m tired of watching them, chances are the rest of the world gave them up in 2008!

I am always interested in the real life side of the shows, such as Amber, from Teen Mom, who is in court for assulting her partner.  Or on a more local level, an NZ version of a “we’ll fix your restaurant” show took place of a restaurant in my suburb, and by the time the show aired the owners had changed everything back to the way it was, citing they were railroaded into making inane changes and that they were edited to make them look bad.  This seems to be a fairly common complaint, and one that makes a lot of sense.  Boring doesn’t sell, it doesn’t intice viewers.  After all, would any of us watch shows of such a shocking calibre as Wife Swap without the God Warrior?

So I guess, unless I am willing to work for a network, I will be sitting back watching as more reality tv unfolds.  Unless, of course, I suddenly develop a life!

Dammit. And shop assistants.

3 days in, and I missed a day!  So looks like I will need to slip another post in at some point to keep up.

Anyway.  I have this theory that countries should have compulsory retail service.  I think the mall would be a much happier place if everyone knew how crappy working in retail really is.  They would pick up the clothes that fall off their hangers, they wouldn’t leave piles of cast-offs in dressing rooms, and above all people would talk to shop assistants!

I have done my fair share of retail work (shoes, then clothes, plus an awful  couple of years in tele-marketing) so I am perfectly happy talking to shop assistants.  Because honestly, the answer to “Hi, how are you today?” is not “Just looking”.  Sales assistants do not bite, at least not unless they have some other, probably better paying, job on the sidelines.  And most of them frankly don’t really care if you buy that top you are looking at.  They won’t trick you into buying it, and making eye-contact with them does not imply a verbal contract.

I could not have been happier when I got out of retail work.  It’s not an especially fun job in the long-term.  There are definite benefits – store discounts, meeting lots of people, that really nice moment when you genuinely help someone find what they are looking for; but the hours are long, your feet hurt from standing and the pay and hours are often awful.  And every ex-retail worker has their own horror stories.  (Mine – three words.  Period.  White.  Pants.  ‘Nuff said).

So I guess what I’m saying is next time you’re in a mall, strike up a conversation with the sales assistant!  Chances are they’d love someone to actually talk to them, and they won’t try to steal your credit card numbers while you chat!

Oh, and in case anyone was interested, I didn’t love the Mormon Mommy Blogs.  Maybe it’s because I’m at home with a kid, I don’t really want to spend my non-kid time reading about kids.  So I’m still on the look-out for blogs that open up a world very different to my own!

Blog-O-Vision

I’m love seeing the range of blogs that are out there.  Without wanting to sound mean, I tend to view blogs like individual people – some of them interest me, and some don’t.  I love it when a person’s personality comes across in their blog, but I really love when someone is living a completely different life than I do.  And apparently I’m not alone in this, this writer just posted about her obsession with Mormon Mommy Blogs.

Perhaps this is the beauty of blogs, not necessarily to recommend products through sponsorship as many bloggers are starting to do or just to document daily activity or convince people of your supposedly unique viewpoint, but to allow outsiders a glimpse into a world entirely different from their own.

I might be popping over to read some of the Mormon Mommy Blogs now; I recently had some very nice Mormon young men from Utah on my doorstep.  Sadly I’m perfectly happy with my religion, or lack thereof, so I wished them well and sent them on their merry way.

Evolution of language

While I was in university I took one paper on linguistics, and really enjoyed it.  I love to look at the development of language, the roots of words and expression, and how usage changes.

Lately I’ve noticed, as have most people on FaceBook, people posting in long text speak.  It’s interesting, because it’s not about cutting letters down, just changing words entirely.  Wednesday becomes wednesdae; it becomes iht; hi becomes hai.  And because there’s a tiny grammar nazi inside of my just screaming to get out, I have to say it drives me nuts!  But then again, no living language stays the same, no matter how much we fight it.  The French, for example, have an entire government department devoted to creating French expressions so that people will stop using English words.

So I guess I need to look at the historical context next time I see a butchered FaceBook update, but I am really, really hoping this is a linguistic phase!

Identity

I’ve been thinking a lot about my own identity.  I think it is incredibly common for mums to question who they are and where they fit, so I don’t claim to be original in these thoughts.

Before I had my son so much of my identity was tied up in my work and my qualifications.  I was good at my job, I loved what I did and who I worked with.  And I’ll be returning to that job in about 6 months time, to become, at least partially, that person again.  But I’ll need to incorporate my other titles as well – wife, mother.

I guess the reason I started thinking about this today was because I started blogging again.  I’ve intentionally left this blog anonymous; I like being able to express myself without having to own the ideas personally.  Oddly enough it’s somewhat like therapy – you can say what you want without having to worry about how your thoughts will impact other people.  So I’m hoping returning to blogging will give me a chance to just be me – no labels.

It’s been a while

What a poor, neglected blog!
It’s been just over a year since I last blogged, and much has changed. Soon after my last posts, I discovered I was pregnant, which was a very much wanted outcome. To be honest, I had spent so much time focusing on getting pregnant, that I lost a bit of myself in the process. Since then I have completed the pregnancy, given birth to my son and raised him to a gorgeous wee five month old. But this isn’t his blog, it’s mine. So much of my life is wrapped up in him, for better or for worse, that I may have lost even more of myself. Hence my reasoning for blogging again. While much of my day is now devoted to repititious renditions of “Twinkle twinkle little star”, I am, in fact, a thinking adult. Hopefully blogging will help some of those synapses to start firing again!
I have found WordPress’s “Post a Day 2011″ blog, and will be attempting to complete it. This re-introduction will have to serve as todays post, as for the life of my I cannot think of the wackiest piece of advice I’ve ever been given, which is the suggested topic of the day. Or moreso I can, but it was all pregnancy-related, and I’m choosing to step away from defining my life and experiences by my reproductive capabilities. Perhaps this will be a good opportunity to check out other people’s blogs for a good laugh!