On grumpiness

1) Had a birthday a week or two back. I am completely the wrong age to welcome birthdays.

2) Since I neither am nor have a mother, Mother's Day is never much of an occasion for sweetness and light either. As my birthday, my late mother's birthday and Mother's Day always fall within a fortnight, it tends to be a slightly churned-up time of year.

3) It's nearly winter. Sooner or later the time will come when those of us fortunate enough to own a house will have to mortgage same to pay the power bills. Thank Goddess that at least I live in Adelaide, and even here I spent half of yesterday wearing my Port Power beanie. Inside.

4) I am seriously over watching other people pirouetting in public over their own cleverness in re-inventing wheels that I was re-inventing 20 years ago, and watching other people get praised and rewarded for things that, 20 years ago, were frowned upon in my workplace as not suitable pursuits for an academic but that these days are, in the same workplace, encouraged and rewarded in various ways. Also, you kids get off my lawn.

5) I cannot believe that the world is still full of people who do. not. get. the fact that gender-wise the world is not a level playing field. See re-invention, wheel, 20 years ago, etc. If you are one of these people, allow me to recommend the excellent Finally a Feminism 101 Blog.

6) An intermittently alarming health problem has arisen that, though not serious, means life-arrangements uncertainty in the short term (when will this surgery take place, and what sort of shape will I be in after it? What about the deadlines? What about the cats?) and mild but permanent diet-carefulness and deprivation in the long.

All of which is how come long time no blog. I expect to snap out of it shortly. I expect to drop a few dress sizes, too. Watch this space.

Reasons: a poem

Long time no blog
Cos I'm sick as a dog

*cough*
*snuffle*
*moan*

Normal services will be resumed eventually.

Time for some pronunciation (and other) whining

Writers' Week is about to start and I have to do a few things at it, so there's not been a lot of time to blog -- too busy trying to think up juicy, fruitful questions to ask Peter Temple and Michelle de Kretser on the basis of madly re-reading their novels. Been through two whole pads of Post-Its and counting. Thank God for Google. Picking the shortest books out of the pile for next week's SMH reviews copy, due in the middle of the week as per.

(One of the other things I have to do is decide whether or not to rock up to the panel session on The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. As the only section editor of the book who lives in Adelaide, I think that if they wanted me there at all then they would have asked me to be on the panel, which would have cost them nothing, and since they didn't, I think they'll have more fun if I stay away and they can let rip with the criticism of the contents without fear of resistance. On the whole I think this was a good call on the part of the organisers, because producing a book is like having a baby -- once you put something out into the world, you have to let go of it, allow it to take on a life of its own without interference, or what was the point of popping it out in the first place?)

Anyway, here's a discovery: I think this language usage/pronunciation irritation/allergy thing is genetic. One of my sisters rang up yesterday and at one point the conversation turned, can't remember why, to the word 'vulnerable'. 'What's this VUNNERABLE crap?' she demanded. 'They all say it. The newsreaders say it. The ABC newsreaders say it.'

'Oh, I know, I know,' I moaned. 'And what about CONGRADULATIONS? They've got little kids saying it now. New Meadow Lea ad or whatever, little squeaky childish voices the ad people from Mars think are cute, singing out of tune to their Mum. 'Yooooo ... order be ... congradulay-dud.' (As if it were not bad enough that one congradulates women on their choice of margarine.)

I remembered this conversation this morning while reading about the tribulations of postwar London: 'slithers of bacon from Argentina'.

Where do these things start? Why do they go viral? A thing like a shred or a splinter is not a slither, it is a sliver. Slither is a verb and only a verb. Snakes do it. JK Rowling called Slytherin Slytherin because snakes do it. Nothing to do with little shreds of bacon, bits of wood or toasted almonds. Especially not toasted almonds.

HEAT Heat

I'm seeing a lot of complaining from east of the border about how hot it is. Now the Victorians just aren't used to sunshine and you have to feel sorry for the poor sausages, but can I just say that since Sunday the maximum temperatures in Adelaide have been 35, 37, 37 and 39, with today, tomorrow and both days on the weekend forecast to go to or above 39. Which will make it by far the longest November heatwave in Adelaide on record. How Emergency Services plan to deploy themselves for the several hours on Saturday morning when the iconic John Martin's Christmas Pageant and the International Three-Day-Event are both on is anybody's guess. Organisers have refused to cancel either event and it could end up a Guernica of dead horses and passed-out Santas FATHER CHRISTMASES DAMMIT.

If the SA Government had actually done something decisive and productive about water catchment and management seven years ago when they first got into office, and if the Eastern States had not conspired to kill the river out of greed, and if we hadn't watched gigalitres of rainfall go to waste all winter, and if one out of two Adelaideans were not openly flouting the water restrictions and admitting as much to journalists from the Advertiser, I might feel less enraged about watching the garden die.

If we're getting February weather in early November, it's likely that February will be beyond endurance. I thought last year, around the time of the fires when the temps got up to 47 degrees, that we were in unchartered waters, but it looks as if this summer is going to be, like, unchartereder.

If cats really were as intelligent as they are supposed to be, then there would not be two tortoiseshells stretched out with feline expressions of reproachful suffering on the hottest room in the house, where there is no aircon and no insulation in that part of the roof, instead of hot-pawing it to the study or the bedroom and bunking down there for the duration.

And if it's just going to stay at 39 degrees for the rest of my life, then I'm not at all sure how long the rest of my life is going to be.

Concentration and the absence of concentration

I love working at home. I do. Anyone still toiling in academe will see that lovely phrase 'working at home' and feel their heart rate slow down.

However. Some days you just know, from the beginning of the morning, that this is not going to be a good work day.

Two background facts before I go on: (1) my electricity meter is inside the house, and (2) many years ago I used to edit a magazine, at a time when I was a heavy smoker. I used to do the layout myself -- this is pre-desktop; we're talking galleys, cutting boards, razor blades and paste-up glue -- so I would spend one weekend in four sitting at the dining table designing and pasting up the 40-plus pages. I could sit there and work, without getting up or losing focus, for up to four hours at a time. When I gave up smoking, my concentration span shrank from four hours to 20 minutes and that is how it has stayed. Focusing and staying focused is about fifteen times as hard as it used to be.

So when you sit down to start the day's work and you are two minutes and one sentence into the thing you have to have finished by the end of the day and you hear bash bash bash rattle rattle rattle on the screen door, you just know it's a bad start to the day. Dude from the electricity, come to read the meter. Let him in, let him out, sit back down at the keyboard ...

Bash bash rattle rattle again. He's back. I appear in the hallway just in time to see him trying to open the screen door. (Why do men do this? Why do totally strange men think it is perfectly all right to open your screen door and walk into your house if you haven't appeared instantly to let them in? Women never do this.)

'This thing' (he held up an electronic doodah) 'says you've got another one in there.'
'Yes, it's the meter for the hot water service that blew up five years ago and I've had gas hot water ever since.'
'But I still have to get a reading for it.'
'Oh yes, I know.')

I flashed on the rest of the day, and I just know it's going to be punctuated by delivery men, neighbours, charity collectors, aggressive children from Optus or AGL or Foxtel trying to make me sign 20-page documents in zero point type on my doorstep in the fading light, cold calls from charity callers who will make me feel guilty or market researchers who will just make me feel irritated, and so-called "courtesy" calls (I wonder whether any of the callers understand that this term for their job is dripping with irony) that are in fact about attempting to part me from even more of my money.

In days gone by I would not have minded any of this. When one has focus by the bucketload one does not mind, indeed one welcomes, the occasional interruption. Mostly I'm thrilled to have liberated myself from nicotine, almost 20 years ago now, but aspiring quitters should not be fooled, for the downsides are very real. You will, indeed, stack on fifteen kilos overnight and you will never get rid of them. And you will, indeed, acquire the concentration span of a grasshopper and you'll never get rid of that either.

This week's reading

The blurb says this person has already published six books so you are expecting a degree of professionalism, a sign that here is someone whose medium is language and who will therefore have also read a lot, have learned from editors and publishers, have made an effort to understand how language works and to master the medium of his/her art and craft. But no.

It's a set of uncorrected proofs, but these are errors of ignorance, not typos. In less than 300 pages, we have

'sprung' for 'sprang'
'lent' for 'leant' or 'leaned'
'he gave it to Ermintrude and I' (for 'to Ermintrude and me')
'slither' for 'sliver' ('bamboo slithers' -- I think this one is a sort of eggcorn: some slivers are sort of slithery)
'vocal chords' for 'vocal cords' (so is this one: there's an association of meaning between voice and music)
'cohort' for 'companion' (singular -- the sense in which it's used here is, oh, say, 'this wine is a perfect cohort for this cheese')
'inferred' for 'implied'

With one exception, all these errors have been made more than once. Then the finished copy of the novel arrives in the next batch of books and I check to see how many of these clangers have been fixed: two. But there are lavish thanks to editors on the Acknowledgements page. And it's a big major well-known international publishing company.

Perhaps said company has survived by doing away with the services of competent editors. On the other hand, considering how little editors get paid, you'd think it would make no visible difference to the bottom line.

As with all these usage whining posts, the point is that people who use language for a living -- writers, journalists, radio and TV presenters -- have a responsibility to use it professionally. There's no difference between this and the bathroom tiler being eight centimetres out, the pro tennis player being fifteen kilos overweight, the surgeon being a tad hazy about the difference between livers and kidneys. This is not a whine about the language of the alleged person in the street, who often knows better in any case.

Besides, page 19 of the next book restores your faith:

Inside, the diner is meant to look like the 1950s, but it doesn't look anything like how I remember them. Somewhere along the line, people became convinced that the decade was all about sock hops, poodle skirts, rock and roll, shiny red T-birds, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis. It's funny how a whole decade gets reduced into a few seemingly random pictures. For me, that decade was about diapers and training wheels and miscarriages and trying to house and feed three people on $47 a week.

This is another set of uncorrected proofs. But somehow I just know that any errors in it will be typographical or otherwise mechanical; that the person responsible for this seamless marriage of style and content within a vividly realised character's narrative voice is not going to say slither or lent or inferred. This is someone who understands his craft and has worked to master it.

Dedicated language usage whining post

Just because I haven't had one for a while.

A spy has recently heard and reported back two beauties:

'Do you want an internal line or an out-ternal line?'

(We had some fun with this one. The speech was out-temporaneous. Do you want outra cheese? That was an outcellent movie.)

And

'[.... if they do so-and-so], they will be shunned upon.' (Repeated several times in the course of the conversation.)

At first I thought the perpetrator was mixing up 'shunned' and 'frowned upon', but it's only just occurred to me as I was typing that that she may have been subliminally thinking of 'shat upon' as well.

Also, it reminds me of two that have crept into mainstream TV and radio newsreading over the last few years and that includes, alas, the ABC:

(1) 'A did such-and-such while B watched on.'

(2) 'X had never stepped foot there before.'

Now, B did not 'watch on'. B either 'looked on' or 'watched'. Nor did X 'step foot', which is a tautology; if you step, you do it, by definition, with your foot. X either 'set foot' or 'stepped'.

Thank you for your attention.

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.

A half-full glass in a toenail of a day*

I've spent most of today either sitting at the desk or rushing around like a mad rabbit to places like banks and post offices doing a big pile of mind-numbingly boring and in three cases quite expensive administrative tasks, several of which I ought never to have been asked or expected to do in the first place. When I asked the woman in the post office how much stamps were for a particular sized item, all I wanted to know was the answer. When I was going through the supermarket checkout, all I wanted was for big heavy items not to be dumped directly on top of small fragile ones. And when I checked the mailbox, there were two items in it, and one was my superannuation statement, informing me that over 9% of what used to be in that account had melted away like fairy floss on the tongue between the beginning of January and the end of June.

So the other item -- the speeding fine (and yes I did totally deserve it, thank you all for asking) for $202 -- seemed as nothing by comparison, and therefore setting fire to those ten $20 bills and watching them burn isn't going to be anywhere near as painful as it usually is. Hooray.

*I am aware that this is a mixed metaphor, but it is a much more original one than something the Prime Minister is reported to have said today: 'There are big bumps in the road ahead; it's not all going to be smooth sailing.'

Catastrophising: we does it

Every once in a while something happens, like a trip or a nudge or a poke in the ribs from the universe, some sign with no benign intent, to remind you of some awful mistake you once made, some failure you could not redeem, some path you could have taken, some person you might have been happy with, some behavioural atrocity you now cannot believe you committed, some entirely different life you might have had, if only this or that had been a little different.

It can be the introductory bars of a song on your iPod, or a birthday card you come across while you're spring-cleaning. It can be a book title or a voice on the radio or the sight of once-beloved handwriting.

You know them. You've had them. They haunt you for days. How happy you are in your current life has utterly nothing to do with it; it is about the past and the irredeemability of the past.

Getting one of these little nudges from the universe is like doing the kind of injury you can do to a muscle or a joint that you hardly notice at the time and then find yourself barely able to walk for a week. A pinched nerve, a strained ligament, a bruise, a sprain: minor but disabling, unable to be ignored.

I've had four in the last 48 hours. A song I stumbled across online; a dedication in a book I almost didn't buy; a couple of pieces of news.

The Bloke would point out, and indeed did point out, that I am warm, and fed, and dry. Which just made me feel morally inferior as well as beaten up.