Perhaps she just doesn't like your children.
Lots of love,
Pav xxx*
*See? Kisses! Love! Warmth! Empathy! And yet...
Posts
In which the pond does its best to distract from an ongoing genocide and
our Henry's bigotry ...
-
The pond wanted to start light today, because in due course things will get
genocidally heavy.
So it was pleasing to *see this lob into view at WaPo*...
1 hour ago
13 comments:
ROFL. That's all I can say. I almost choked on my orange juice.
And the word verification is "peeduts". I think it's a secret message about Latham.
Fabulous. We have been speculating that Mark Latham had to have children because no one else would ever love him.
Some of the most warm, wonderful and empathetic people I know have chosen not to have children. Bless them they still like mine, or pretend to. I don't know what Latham's problem is and I don't want to get close enough to find out.
Glad to see in the linked article that I still largely agree with my younger self. :)
Reading your link to the previous post reminds me that blokes ought to get in a gyno's strirrups for an occasional exercise in empathy.
Pav, that's so funny and so very naughty at the same time.
And love your old post to which you linked, Pav. I too don't have kids. I don't remember it as a decision, I was just never that interested. And I neither 'like' or 'dislike' kids, as well.
LOL. :)
I read your linked post - while I have no medical issues preventing children, it was mostly situational that I never had any. And now when I finally have a husband and want a baby, I find that I'm too old - or at least, my eggs are old and defective, as proven by three miscarriages and the genetic analysis on the last confirming the suspicion that my eggs are just too defective. After much soul-searching, we've given up. That's just the way it is. Hubby can't hope with even one bad night's sleep anyway, he'd be a shitty father while the child was young. :)
word verification 'resch' - what i want to do whenever i see mister latham.
I loved rereading the old post too. God, we had a narrow escape with Latham, didn't we. It's all too clear a memory how much I wanted him to win that election. Although, lots of the appallingness of the current state of politics in this country seems in the last analysis to be hangovers from the Howard era, and maybe things like the asylum seeker debate would be a bit less grim if Howard's tenure had been shorter.
Doorbitch says unbono, and yes: whatever bad things we might think of to say about Bono, at least he's not Latho.
Empathy forms in childhood and adolescence. It is a rite of passage that youngsters undergo as they move from the narcissistic me that is at the centre of their universe into the integration of the other - and the other's needs and requirements. It's got nothing to do with having kids and everything to do with how it was when you were a kid. And if it was good, and you personality is not particularly blunt and horrible and mean and shitty and just cause no one likes you, and you are going to make sure that you are as revolting as possible anyway like who cares, no one likes you - so it goes that the pathalogical solipsisms of your universe fracture and then.....wait a minute....
Anyway, I'm laying bets on the Daddy Dearest memoirs at 14 max.
That was a trip down memory lane! Gosh, can't believe 2006 feels so long ago.
But noice one, yes we did have a lucky escape from Latham, and I feel lucky being able to read your words regularly.
Your 2006 post is fantastic in so many ways (content, craft, tone - to name only a few).
So why is it, Pav, that I don't see your writing published more often, in essay form? The Monthly springs to mind but any of the Lit Mags would be lucky to have your work.
Perhaps you do, and I don't subscribe to the right magazines? Or perhaps you submit work and are rebuffed? Or perhaps they ask you for work and you rebuff them?
I'm curious because (a) I'd love to see your writing to have a wider audience but also because (b) I'm tired of reading opinion pieces by the same old white men.
And (she says, zooming completely off topic now) I'm also tired of opening the book review pages and/or mags to see review after review written by men. As if I need more men telling me what to think and read.
Why is it so?
Red Horse, thank you for those very kind words.
Paradoxically, actually making a living as a writer often entails doing the sort of work that doesn't show up nationally the way individual essays do. I had a lot more essays published when I didn't have my lovely, regularly paid job writing short book reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald, which I've been doing for over four years now and which I really like, especially the challenge of trying to say something interesting and useful in a small space -- it's like trying to write a sonnet. Before that I initially had a regular gig with the Monthly writing about TV and also writing longer things, but that relationship soured after the editor change and a difference of opinion over a commissioned essay that I spent a month researching and writing, that was then was spiked, and for which I was paid no kill fee. That's the only piece I've ever had rejected, mainly because I almost never submit stuff -- I'm in the fortunate position of getting offered enough work to keep me very busy and not to have the luxury of writing something on spec. When I can or want to do that, I do it on the blog, for pleasure. Writing to commissions and deadlines is a compromised pleasure and often very stressful.
There've been two big projects that have overlapped with that: working as a section editor on the Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature from 2006-2008, involving untold reading and research and 45,000 words of introductory essay and writer biographies; and then spending the last year writing the book on Adelaide for UNSW Press's series on capital cities, which praise the Lord is now with the editor and which was an amazing experience to write.
Re book reviews: subscribe to Australian Book Review or read the limited online edition, if you don't already; they've got a better track record with gender balance than any of the other reviews journals/pages and it's a really good literary mag generally.
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