This time of year everybody's got one

TO DO: THURSDAY 17/12/09

8.20 PM UPDATE

1) Make a list*

2) Check it twice (and do naughty/nice triage)

3) Shop for cutlery for C, DO NOT forget to print out email w. details of pattern etc. Also, next time, try not to lock keys in car. Or iPhone, RAA card and spare car key. Yes yes, I know this is the second time in a year.

4) Ham. (NAUGHTY. You have lied about this to the ob-com sibling so if the Special Ham Place has run out then you will have to SUCK IT UP) Whew.

5) Ring father

6) Depending on outcome of (5), visit father and stepmother, with 70% fruitless detour to cake-decorating specialist shop: tiny decorations for Christmas cake, tubes of edible red and green icingy stuff for Christmas bows on the gingerbread cats (see #9) NICE

7) Remaining cards -- to D, P, L, J (and an electronic one next week for S as per tradition) but MAKE AND POST SNAIL MAIL CARDS TODAY or it will all get a bit pointless

8) Think through appropriate gifts/visits for D&M, also R&N (see Master List)

9) Make gingerbread cats. (Mind out for breakable tails) NICE

10) Buy some Useful Tins to Put Things In (especially gingerbread cats)

11) Buy a paper (look what happened this week when you didn't have a quick TV guide handy -- DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN)

12) Get tree and decorations out of cupboard in garage -- mind out for redback infestation

13) Ring accountant for appointment IT IS A MATTER OF HONOUR to do this before Christmas, so you had better hope he is not on hols: NAUGHTY

14) Spend 5 hours (as timed last year) getting tax records into shape: NASTY

15) Housework, cat care, day job etc etc


* A Master List, viz a list of the lists you have to make

Code for 'we don't care'

When I first saw this article about Publishers Weekly and its all-male-author Best Books of 2009 (ah yes, it's that time of year again), it took me a minute to work out the title: 'Why Weren't Any Women Invited to Publishers Weekly's Weenie Roast?' I'd always thought 'wienie' as in 'wiener' as in 'frankfurter' was spelt with an 'ie' not an 'ee', and it's not clear whether 'weenie' is used here as a variant or a disparaging pun (though I'd like to think the latter), but either way it is, in this context, American for what we in Australia call a sausage fest. Boys' Own, if you like.

It was only yesterday that I was looking around the nation's various literary-cultural-political mags, blogs and websites and noticing with growing dismay that the general ratio of male to female writers represented -- both the people writing for the journals and blogs and magazines and the people being written about -- seems to have nose-dived*, even just since the beginning of this year, back to the good old days where 'male' meant the norm and 'female' meant some lesser variant; yet again I was reminded of the great Simone de Beauvoir, than whom nobody has ever described this phenomenon better. 'There are two kinds of people: human beings and women.'

And it was only last night that an otherwise apparently intelligent commenter on a literary blog referred disparagingly to 'the worst kind of 80s PC', apparently meaning that all that silly nonsense about considering the presence in the world of female people and black people and gay people that we used to have to bend the knee to is merely a memory of a now-despised fad , like satin jumpsuits and big hair, and it's über-cool in 2009 to have sunk right back into our straight white male supremacist good ole boy ways, as into a comfy yet manly chair, clutching the remote in one hand and a stubby in the other. (I'm sorry, I would have liked to have put that another way.)

And then up will go the passionate cry of 'But never mind all this gender nonsense, isn't it just about literary merit??', and back will echo faintly for the nine millionth time from a chorus of exhausted feminists that 'literary merit' is not an exact science, but is rather assessed by the values of the dominant culture, and if the dominant culture is a sausage fest, then, well, you know.

(Though one must look on the bright side: that list of ten books by blokes may ignore the fact that Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro have both had books out this year, but at least it doesn't include the most overrated writer and sausage fest ornament of the 20th century, Philip Roth.)

I wrote here earlier this year about how gobsmacking it was that the Miles Franklin Literary Award judges didn't notice that they'd come up with an all-male shortlist in a year when there were at least five realistic female contenders for the prize, and apparently this kind of 'human beings and women' thinking is once more rife in the US as well. After pondering last night with such disquiet on the turn things seemed to be taking, I wasn't as surprised as I wish I had been this morning to see a feminist Facebook Friend linking that post about the Publishers Weekly list. Here's that post's hook, a line strongly recommended as the default comeback next time some bloke -- or rogue girl trawling for the boys' approval -- accuses you dismissively of being 'just PC':

So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that.

* It is however a relief to see that the November issue of Australian Book Review, which arrived today and which I just finished reading, does honourably buck this trend a bit: writers/reviewers include an Alison, an Andrea, a Belinda, a Claudia, a Gay, a Jacqueline, a Jane, two Judiths, two Kates, a Kylie, a Melinda, a Rosaleen (the lead article), a Sarah and a Stephanie, while the written-about include an Anna, an Emily, a Jan, a Jeanette, a Jenny, a Jeri, a Mandy and a Ruth.

Thursday: To Do

• Get up after less than 5 hours' sleep, knowing you will not go back to sleep and wondering why you have suddenly become insomniac: tick

• Finish current work novel (including over breakfast): tick

• Travel right across town to spend two minutes getting my fringe cut so I don't have to peer at the Governor-General through it in two weeks' time (nearly every weekday between now and then being taken up with 9-5 meetings) at the Admiralty House launch of this book, of which I am a contributing editor: tick

• Buy sheer anklets for trying on girlie shoes: tick

• Buy girlie shoes (see Admiralty House): FAIL

• Visit Papa Cat and be shouted at about the River Murray and the Rann Government for an hour and a half (Papa Cat is back in finer form than ever after his recent health whoopsie): tick

• Plan bulb planting (oops, typed 'blub planting'. That too): tick

• Plant bulbs: tick

• Sear lamb shanks, add onion, garlic, tomato and red wine, put in oven: tick

• Wash jumpers: tick

• Solve mystery of Amex card activation: tick

• Activate Amex card: tick

STILL TO DO

• Start next work novel

• Read 100 pages of PhD thesis to be examined, take notes

• Scan four book covers and attach them to emails

• Unpack, check, sort, label and put away four postbags of new books (approx 20-30)

• See if the one designer label (Peri Cutten) garment I own looks all right with the only dress I own that might conform to the vice-regal dress code. (It's an elegant black velvet jacket/coat thingy whose main claim to fame is that I once wore it to a dinner party where the partner of a very distinguished novelist was wearing the exact same garment except about four sizes smaller. We congratulated each other on our good taste, the only possible course of action in this situation.)

• Find the brooch made of black and pink pearls -- homage to Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson -- and loops of silvery gauze ribbon that will liven up the Peri Cutten a little, and the matching earrings

• Try yet again to find said dress code online and check if black is acceptable (it might not be; they seem quite strict. For instance, apparently you can't carry a handbag with a shoulder strap; it's a clutch or nothing. The expression 'clutch shudder' took on a whole new meaning this afternoon when I looked at how much some of them cost)

• Write and send cheque (charity)

• Write and send invoice (work pay)

• Write and sent email about aircon servicing (aircon servicing)

And finally, and most importantly, fit all of this around the season finale of Grey's Anatomy. Priorities, people.

Behind

That's behind as in not out in front, not behind as in bum, the latter being even more depressing to contemplate than the list which I now put before you. I am behind with the admin in particular, and in general with the ongoing project that is Life.

I once read an article about the importance of prioritising in the daily pushing-back of life's chaos. It recommended writing a list of every single thing you needed or wanted to do and then prioritising them into categories A (must be done, and ASAP, preferably today), B (is very desirable and should be done soon), and C (every intention of getting round to it eventually). A typical such list looks like this:

clean out the cat litter -- A
learn Italian -- C
pay speeding fine -- B/A
finish the current work novel and start the next one -- A
get a haircut -- B
go back to Tuscany -- C
write to H -- B/A
new front fence -- C/B

Etc. In practice what happens is that you get all the As done plus a handful of the Bs but the Cs never even get a look-in. However, as you can see from the forward slashes, Cs sometimes become Bs, and Bs often increase in urgency until they become As. Which is why I have made another list.

As inspired by some comments over at Laura's place about how one would spend the prime ministerial dosh if one were so fortunate as to be either an oldie or a breeder (and I, like Laura and Amanda, am neither, being, like them, too young for the former category and, unlike them, too old for the latter: like both of those fine ladies I too am what Amanda calls a 'full-time tax-paying-not-eating working schmo'), here, in alphabetical order, is the list of people I really need and/or want to contact, visit and/or hire:

Accountant
Bank manager
Beauty salon (special environmentally aware variety) (my feminist position on skincare, makeup, haircuts and so on is 'Assimilate and transcend'. Brought up in the 60s, what can you do)
Blood bank
Carpenter
Dentist
Electrician
Fence people
Gutter cleaner-outerers
Hairdresser
Local council (hard rubbish section)
Optician
Osteopath
Pest eradication people
Physio
Plumber
Plumbing supplies shop
Self-storage firm
TV antenna people
Tree surgeon
Yard-cleaning-up people

It's almost a meme, don't you think?

Some of these can wait a little longer, like the optician. Some of them can't, like the growing tree that is about to actually push the garage over. What I don't understand -- given that I can now afford at least some of these things -- is how I could have let that list get quite so long.