If You Have A Friend Who Is Always Late

I'm going to start this off by stating upfront that I am that friend.

I am late to lots of things.

Some of it is due to optimism about how long the trip (and any tasks I need to perform before it) will take.

Some of it is due to being easily distracted.

Some of it is due to the fact that I would really rather be doing the thing I'm doing than the thing I'm supposed to be doing (eg, reading my book instead of going to a social gathering predominantly peopled with a bunch of folk I only tangentially know).


The point is this.

If you react with surprise, jokes, or sarcasm any time I turn up on time or early, I will stop trying to.

I will straight up give up on turning up on time because it's not worth the hassle.

I am already struggling against my natural tendency to think that the drive will be smooth and my low-level anxiety that I've left something important behind or might have forgotten the address.

If you add in making a big deal of any time I successfully combat and defeat these obstacles like I'm a sabre-tooth tiger that has spontaneously announced that actually it's a vegan, that's not helping.

I have years of trying to break this shitty habit behind me, years of that little voice whispering 'you're going to be late anyway, why put yourself through this stress?', and every time I manage to push past it in my attempt to be 'not that guy' everyone rewards me by pointing out that this is out of character because I am 'that guy'.

If you have a friend who is always late here is my advice:

• If they turn up on time or early just act pleased to see them.Seriously. You have no idea how useful this would be and how far it would go towards helping reinforce this behaviour and letting them break their habit. Try not to act surprised if you can but if your eyebrows go up anyway just keep the urge to comment on their earliness locked inside. Making people feel self-conscious is not helpful.
  The only circumstance that this wouldn't be good advice is if your friend thrives on attention and lavishing them with praise will ping the 'reward' button in their brain.
• Give them something to do.
  This may not be universal but if you give me a task which will help you then I am so much more likely to turn up on time. Ask me to get the ice for the BBQ and I will be there before the drinks have time to get warm.
• Do NOT tell them a different time to everyone else.If you tell me that the party is at 6pm and it turns out I manage to turn up at 6pm to find you going 'oh wow, the party isn't until 6:30pm/7pm, I just said 6pm so you'd turn up on time' I will not only feel embarrassed I will be pissed off.
  If you tell me 6pm for a party that's actually at 6:30pm and I turn up at 6:30pm and you tell everyone there what you did and they all have a jolly laugh about it I will not only be embarrassed I will be fucking furious. And I will actively start turning up later to things you host. Instead of being half an hour late due to bad time management I will probably be an hour late due to bad time management and also spite because fuck you.
• Do not just sound resigned when they apologise.I know this one is hard because if someone is always apologising for something but they keep doing it, you get over it after a certain point. But just like calling attention to the fact that someone has turned up early reinforces the idea that their habit is a given, going 'yeah, we know, we're used to it' confirms that this is the way everyone sees them and that trying to change themselves could conceivably lead to everyone still acting surprised every single time they turn up on time for years into the future so why bother?
  If the apologising drives you crazy just have a private conversation with them at some point and say 'Look, you're late to a lot of stuff and I know you aren't doing it to be a dick but apologising every time doesn't make either of us feel better. If you're working on it that's great but for now how about just stop apologising.' I can't guarantee that conversation will go smoothly, it could be hella awkward but the thing about apologies is they're supposed to be for isolated incidences, they're supposed to indicate you regret your behaviour and you'll strive to change it in the future. If you just use apologies like bandaids instead of trying to fix the problem you might as well stop apologising and just own the fact that you're routinely late.
• Don't be passive/aggressive about it.If you can't look someone directly in the eye and say 'it really hurt my feelings that you were late' or 'It's really important to me that you're on time for this one' then don't be passive-aggressive about it instead because passive-aggression has solved very little in the history of humanity. If you've told them it's important and they're still late, then tell them you're disappointed, they need to know. If you can't be honest about these things then your friendship will deteriorate.
• Don't baby them.Being late is a shitty annoying habit. I am not going to beat about the bush, it is goddamn annoying.
  It's annoying when people do it to you, it is bloody frustrating as hell when you do it to other people.
  But the point is this: a person who is always late to shit is a grown up who is managing their time poorly, they are not - unless they've experienced a brain injury or are neurodiverse* - like this for a special reason that requires you to tip toe around them.
  Yelling at them or being a shit-hole to them won't change their behaviour any more than it makes fat people thin or smokers quit but ignoring the problem or their behaviour won't do them or you any favours.

In summary, don't be a dick or a doormat.

You as the friend of a perennially late person deserve the respect and consideration that them doing their level best to turn up on time entails and they deserve the chance to change their shitty habit without being made to feel like they're a freakshow attraction every time they put the effort in.




Disclaimer: My lateness tends to be situation specific.
If it's something to do with an appointment (eg, the doctor or a dinner reservation) I will turn up just before, just on time or a handful of minutes late.
If it's something to do with a flight or a train or a museum exhibition that has a timed entry I will be aggressively early because the idea of missing my flight/train/museum time is hella stressful.
If it's something that is being held at someone's house and is probably going to run all day, I will probably be late.


*In this situation neurodiversity would refer to someone who has a neurological condition that makes telling time or keeping track of the passage of time difficult, or alternatively someone who experiences anxiety or OCD or another condition that would make it difficult to be on time/leave the house/be keen to interact socially comfortably.

The Imagination Imbalance

I've never been afraid of thunderstorms.

As children my siblings and I would sit at the window and watch violent electrical storms tear the sky apart with blinding spidery fingers of light and covered our ears to dampen the inevitable deafening thunderclaps that would follow.
When we could hear again we'd give measured and considered scores out of 10 for each display before shrieking with delight at the next one.

I would imagine what our neighbourhood would look like if enough rain fell to turn the streets into canals and allow us to travel about in dinghies, kayaks and speed boats instead of cars and of course we would act this scenario out for whole days at a time.

One day we were running around playing 'what we would do if everything was flooded' and some well-meaning adult decided to give us a firm but kind talk on the realities of flooding - the property destroyed, lives lost, lives ruined - and ask us if maybe we weren't being a bit insensitive?

We stared at them, stared at each other and ran off to keep playing but the fun had been taken out of the game for that day.

The thing is, now that I'm older I know that having water up to your ceiling would not be great for the neighbourhood but we weren't earnestly suggesting it should happen, random Reality McBuzzkillington!

Why not point out to me that the carpet is not really lava and that if a volcano really did erupt, those of us not killed by the superheated cloud of poisonous gases would probably be asphyxiated by the falling ash?

Why not run up to the kids playing sword fights and explain to them that being stabbed with a sword would really not be all that great? Or that the person you say can't stab you any more because their arm has 'fallen off' probably has leprosy and how gross real leprosy would be?

Kids use play to interact with each other, to learn to understand the world and to develop the parts of their brains that will eventually help them to imagine the lives of other people in an empathetic and responsible fashion.

Don't tell them it isn't cool to pretend you've just disemboweled somebody; they're not desensitised to disembowelling, they're just mucking around.

There are some exceptions to this thinking.
For instance, I can see how people in a community who actually have regular access to guns and who treat these weapons with caution and respect would discourage letting kids 'shoot' each other just in case they ever got hold of a real gun and didn't realise that when they shot their friends with that gun they wouldn't be getting up to swap places.

But the kids that pretend that their towns are flooded aren't going to go bust the dam for funsies.

The kids who pretend to chop off people's heads aren't going to start a skull collection.

The kids who pretend to be monsters who are eating you aren't going to become cannibals.

Just let the little nutters play, age brings context but youth is for imagination.

The Body As A Tyrant

This is ridiculous.

Did you know that if you start feeding your body breakfast first thing after a lifetime of getting around to food in the mid-morning it starts DEMANDING food all the time?

It wants morning tea.

It wants lunch super early.

It wants AFTERNOON tea!

It wants dinner before 8pm.

It wakes you up in the morning demanding MORE breakfast.

And if you start drinking the recommended amount of water and stick it out until it stops feeling like you're trying to drown yourself and then you forget to keep your intake up for just ONE DAY, you wake up the next morning feeling like you're heavily hung over.

I'm talking several litres of beer hung over.

So the lesson here is that you can muddle along for years treating your body kind of decent and it'll accept that but if you start treating it right the dang thing will get used to it and refuse to go back to your previous ways without a fight.

Uppity corporeal form.

A Balanced Diet: In Which Ricochet Overworks A Metaphor And Shouts A Bit

As I was leafing languidly through a recipe book I discovered something startling.
You can put hazelnut oil on salad.
I didn't even know they MADE hazelnut oil.
I wanted to try it.
Right now!
Delicious hazelnut oil infused French salad on my table, on my fork, in my tummy!
So I trotted down to the supermarket and... they didn't have it.
Neither did the other local supermarket.
Apart from being miffed it got me thinking.
If I hadn't read about these recipes and these items I wouldn't have known to look.
Obviously I haven't memorised the contents of the supermarket but gradually there has been a smaller variety of products on offer and then less choice of brands of those products available.
And strange as it may seem all I can think of is the internet and the proposed Australian internet filter.

Yes, I know once again I sound crazy but I'll explain myself. At great length.

If you haven't heard of it you can find an in-depth explanation of the filter here but the basic story is that the Australian government is using 'think of the children!' to propose banning the access to any webpages they find distasteful.
For the whole country.

Considering child pornography is already illegal and not just available to all and sundry who know how to use a search engine, this is a bunch of bull-twang, especially when they start listing other things to ban 'just in case the kiddies see them' including certain types of fetish pornography and pages discussing euthanasia, abortion, rape and video games.
Without context.

A test run of the filter, as it is now, resulted in the blanket banning of all sites that mentioned rape or child molestation including those which offered support and legal advice to victims.
All this is being offered instead of expecting parents to take responsibility for their children and said children's net use.
As the banned sites are to exist on a secret blacklist that isn't to be disclosed to the public it leaves the option open for the government to block pretty much whatever they like, including blogs or sites that post political protest material or criticism just in case this promotes riots, dissent or a change in government which is clearly not good for the kiddies.

So with that brief summary before you, let us return to my crazy-ass theory.

You go to the supermarket, you pick up all your corporation-approved and provided essentials and every now and then you'll spot something you haven't tried before or something you've not heard of, you have a look at the suggestions on the label and you think 'yes, I'll give this a go'.
Now imagine this supermarket is a metaphor for the internet.
They've decided that, oh I don't know, peanut oil should not be offered for sale because some people are allergic to peanuts and might accidentally be offered something cooked in peanut oil by some irresponsible or ignorant member of the public.
So they type 'no nut oil' into their ordering system and in one fell swoop knock half a dozen oils off the selection including macadamia nut oil and other such products.
People who used to buy this oil now can't find it and the supermarket uses the fact that these people are now forced to purchase other alternatives and aren't protesting this lack or requesting it en masse as a rationale to keep the discontinued products off the shelves.
People who have never heard of peanut or macadamia or hazelnut oil never get the chance to try them or even consider trying them.

Now let's imagine the person in charge of fruit and veg ordering is a weirdo prude who decides that any long, cylindrical vegetables may be too phallic to be offered to minors or unsuspecting virgin diners by lecherous chefs or dinner party enthusiasts who might be secretly getting off on it.
So all these fruits and vegetables are knocked off the system in favour of less arousing tubers and so on.

Seeing as many people these days use the supermarket (internet) as their only source of produce (information) and might not have the inclination, opportunity or awareness to visit farmers' markets (read books/newspapers or listen to radio stations) or are worried that produce (inforrrrrrmation!) from specialist stores might be out-of-date or dangerous to their health (if it isn't on the internet it might be behind the times or *gasp* biased!) the consumer is - to summarise - screwed.

I'll drop the metaphor to conclude lest I write any more torturously long sentences but my point is this:

No, of course I'm not advocating the availability of child pornography or pornographic material that is composed of the real-life assault of unwilling participants. That material infringes human rights and is rightly illegal.

But on the other hand, whilst I'm not personally interested in many varieties of legally produced pornography performed by consenting adults that cater to people with specific tastes that doesn't mean that I think it should be made inaccessible to the adults who do find it arousing if it is used in private with other consenting adults.

I do not think the government should be allowed to block access to websites discussing the ethics of euthanasia or even instructions and advice on how to help administer or self-administer euthanasia just because it isn't legal in this country and/or the legislators find the concept personally reprehensible.

I do not think a government should be able to have a secret list of banned material, or that the only criterion offered for a site being added to this list is that the material is 'distasteful'.
Who gets to decide?
What do they think will happen if the general public has access to this material?

The internet is a vast and sprawling cluster-hug* of data, some of which I never EVER want to see, but I do not under any circumstances want the government to tell me that I'm not ALLOWED to see it.
If the material is illegal or criminal then they have ability to prosecute, to contact the ISPs concerned and have the websites shut down.
Anything else is censorship which implies that people aren't intelligent enough to be capable of distinguishing reality from recreational fantasy or to make their own judgements on the validity of information presented to them or their own decisions concerning how to live their lives or whether/when to end them and enforces a narrow band of morality that is decided for the many by a select few.

If you're worried about the children, hold the government accountable to provide a good education system, adequate funding for hospitals and GP training and actually spend some time with the new people you saw fit to bring into the world.
Make some personal effort to make sure the world you're leaving them is a better place than when you entered it.
Don't expect the government to do it for you and for the love of all that is, don't give them an open mandate to do whatever they want under the claim that they're doing just that.


PS. I still want my goddamn hazelnut oil salad, dammit!



*Yeah, I'm still not swearing on my blog for funsies. You can now start replaying Grandpa Simpson's anecdote about tickling fluffy bunnies into their cuddle-bunkers if you so desire.

I Will Punch You Right In The Motherboard!

Alright electronic devices, it is on!

You and me! Right now!

I've always known you held me in contempt and now I have the proof and we are going to throw down here and now, last one alive wins!

No, I haven't had a computer disaster.
My refrigerator and microwave continue to function adequately.
Even if any of these devices had experienced a malfunction this would be a mere inconvenience.

It is not an inconvenience which has incurred my wrath.

It was an insult.

A direct and unmistakable insult!

The other day my sister took a break from studying and decided to spend a bit of time on the WiiFit.

She pressed the power button, stepped up onto the device and waited for it to start offering her exciting, brightly covered activities.

It greeted her.

She pressed 'next'.

It mentioned it hadn't seen her for a while, a specific number of days in fact.

She pressed 'next'.

It asked, by the way, had she seen me - Ricochet - lately.

She pressed 'yes'.

It asked how I was looking.

She pressed... 'next'.

It asked if I was looking a) the same, b) toned, c) slimmer or d) fatter. Select one to continue.

... She pressed... 'the same'.

It suggested change was more interesting, didn't she think so? Maybe she just wasn't paying enough attention to me to notice the change.

On an unrelated note, it went on, did she know that studies had shown that dogs whose owners paid more attention to them tended to be more highly motivated?

Excuse me?

EXCUSE ME!?

Have you just compared me to a dog, WiiFit? A lazy, unmotivated dog at that?

Is this, in fact, what you have just done?

I was under the impression that the WiiFit was something people bought so they didn't have to feel judged or pressured in gyms or when exercising in public spaces.
So they could feel comfortable going at their own pace in their own homes.

I didn't know that it gave you guilt trips and asked you to comment on the appearance of your friends and family!

No I don't use WiiFit that often.
For starters I only visit the family home on the weekends and when I'm there I often have more interesting things to do with my time, such as walking our real dogs in the real world in the real fresh air.

In addition I tend to prefer actually piffing a cricket ball at people or going for a swim or attending a yoga class to pretending to be a penguin flipping on an iceberg for fish.

You might be too big to fit in the microwave WiiFit but don't think that will save you.

You and me.

Some time soon.

Possibly with a mallet.

After all, it'll be good for my upper body strength which I'm sure you'll appreciate.

I obviously need the exercise!

Urge To Kill Rising

For her birthday my siblings and I bought my mother three seasons of Get Smart* and whilst I still love the exciting retro spy gadgets and the humour and what not I've discovered that I can't watch more than about two episodes in a row before I start to want to kill 99.
With a brick.

Apart from the fact the come-hither eyes and pouting started to bug me, what really had me twitching was the incompetence! Oh the incompetence!

Example: In one scene 99 and Max are both walking around a darkened building with their guns drawn looking for the villain. The unarmed villain gets the drop on Max, TV-comedy-fu chops him in the arm and disarms him.
99 still has her gun.
And yet in the next scene they are both tied up and awaiting their terrible fate.
Because the man was so scary she forgot she was armed or something.
I don't know.
But there she is tied to a chair yelling 'do something Max!' whilst he waits, much more securely restrained, to have his head cut off.

Just one in a long string of many instances of her being tied to something yelling 'do something Max!' whilst he is in a lot more danger and she has a much better chance of being able to move and save them both.
Despite the fact Max is a bumbling simpleton (not that there's anything wrong with that) and 99 is clearly more rational and observant she continually defers to his 'experience', asks him what to do and takes the backseat.

When, as she was dragged off-scene in one episode crying 'No!' in a tone of voice that resembled nothing more than a toddler throwing a tanty, I found myself yelling at the TV 'Oh if only you were a highly trained secret agent! Oh wait, you are!' I knew it was time to take a time-out.

And that's not even taking into account the episode where she's suddenly quitting CONTROL to marry some guy who proposed to her whilst she was on holidays 'because a girl's got to think of her future'** and keeps asking Max if there's any reason why he might want her to stay.
No, by all means, honey, you try and force him into a relationship by threatening to marry someone else and when he doesn't bite go ahead and almost marry the other guy because you already said you were going to and it's too late now.... Fstfgvr!

I know the show was light entertainment and it was all part of the formula that they crap up all the time and despite his bumbling Max gets to rescue the girl, I just wish that it wasn't also so heavily dependent on her bumbling.
The fact that the show gives the strong impression that her ineptitude was feigned so as to not challenge his masculinity or muddy the waters of her femininity somehow makes me more rather than less angry.
I know that 1965 was a vastly different time to 2008.
Possibly even implying her intelligence existed even if she didn't fully utilise it was progressive and exciting at the time.
But still! Fstfgvr!

Now here's a Don Adams related spy partnership I can get alongside!


Penny may not take credit for saving Inspector Gadget's ass all the time but his ass, she saves it.
All. The. Time.
Also when I was a kid I would have killed someone for a computer book. That thing was bad ass.


Ah, who am I kidding. I'd kill someone now for that computer book.



*Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeey! I've just realised my bastard siblings haven't payed me back yet! Son of a bitch! Crap, sorry Mum, not you! I love you!

**What, and being an awesome spy isn't a future?! Pfft!

Extra Protein And One-Sided Arguments

Oh gross! There's a fly in my beer!
Argh, I have been drinking that for ages!
How long has it been in there?
Oh jeez, it's still moving! It's swimming in my beer! That's just not on!
I mean I've never been that excited about the idea of the worm in the tequila* and fly in the beer was not part of my plans for the evening!
Game little bastard is still paddling about.
See, now I feel torn, I can't in good conscience sit here and watch the fly drown but if I pour it out I'll feel odd about swatting it like I usually would. The temporary reprieve would feel too much like mental torture. But I don't want a sticky, beer-flavoured fly buzzing unsteadily about my lounge room, bumping into windows and explaining to my Venetian blinds that they're great really, they're like his most awesome best friends ever and if anyone says differently he'll punch them right in the cord toggle.
I guess a quick death is more merciful than a slow one and at least it'll be drunk and probably won't notice.
Huh, well it looks like I managed to drink enough of the beer to be having an ethical dilemma about a fly (dialogue included) so I suppose I'd better forge on.

[Empty bottle, squash fly, hold memorial service, obtain fresh beer, place protective thumb over mouth of bottle]

OK, so before I got distracted by anthropomorphising insects and weighing up modes of execution I was doing what now?

Oh Right! Blogging! Right, OK, back on track...

I'm trying to work out whether I'm obsessed with advertising or just addicted to sass-back.
I thought I had gotten the bug out of my system with the exposé about the car wash but it persists. Then again, seeing as I've been talking back to the television for about as long as I've been watching it I shouldn't be surprised.

One of those exciting 'drugs = hugs' ads came on just now, explaining with upbeat music, a suspiciously happy family and some mumbling about dosages and side effects how if you take this magical pill your crippling back pain will dissipate and you will be able to swing your 30kg** child above your head like a loveable sack of potatoes and I found myself snorting and saying something like...

"Oh that's fabulous, so instead of addressing the root of the problem you briefly dull the pain enough for you to do extra damage to your already faulty body so that your kid, momentarily elated by their whirl about your head, will be extra crushed by having to resort to child slave labour to support your crippled ass when you crap out like a pile of crap"***

... or something completely rational like that.

The ones that tend to send me off on mini Lord of the Rings style rants with everyone's family trees and complex retellings of other rants included are the stupid cleaning product ads for toilets.

Did you know that there are germs in your toilet!?
No really!
The place where you put your poo has germs in it!
Oh my God!
But if you use this magic new cleaning gel you can get rid of the germs you can't see!
In your toilet.
Like inside the toilet.
WHO CARES!?
What are these magical germs going to do?
Form an army and dive up your bottom?
They're in the bowl of the toilet!
They are only a concern if you routinely drink out of the toilet and if you do that you've already got problems!
If you wash your hands properly after you've been to the toilet it doesn't matter how many 'scary invisible germs' you have in the bowl of the toilet which you don't touch, your hands are as clean as they're going to get!
Stop drinking out of your toilet!

Ahem.
I should probably take a bit of a time-out. I got a little overexcited.
Also I seem to have my thumb stuck in the neck of my beer bottle.
You carry on without me and I'll catch you up later.



*I don't think we even get that in Australia, probably against the quarantine laws. We are an incredibly laid back people until it comes to things like crop contamination, invading insects or suss looking animal products. On the upside, the cavity searches are is surprisingly gentle and they hardly ever hose you down with pressurised water any more.
**About 66 lbs.
***I had already had a couple of beers by this point (hopefully fly-free) and was a little more detailed in my objections than might be considered usual. For other people.