Wednesday 29 July 2015

Take Me Away, Shuffle Function Wednesday - 29/07/15


The Rules of Shuffle Function Wednesday.
  1. Pick a song.
  2. Put your player on shuffle.
  3. You cannot skip any song.
  4. Sit back and relax.




Conditions of my Parole
Puscifer
Flight of Icarus
Iron Maiden
This Heart Attack
Faker
In The Lake
Emilie Simon
Divinations
Mastodon
Humiliation
Kate Miller-Heidke
Man In The Moon
Grinderman
Iron Lion Zion
Bob Marley & The Wailers
Home is where it hurts
Camille
Still Alive (featuring Sara Quin)
Jonathan Coulton
27
Breaking Point
Every Single Night
Fiona Apple
Thanks For Today
Kate Miller-Heidke
A Distinctive Sound
Gotye
The bends
Radiohead
All The Aces
Motorhead
Carousel
Mr Bungle
Poor Doggie
Eagles of Death Metal
Kids With Guns
Gorillaz
Poltava
Sabaton
Betrayal/Forgiveness
Apocalyptica
Dance of Death
Iron Maiden
Think
Aretha Franklin
Green Onions
Booker T & the MGs
Quote Unquote
Mr Bungle
Stripped
Rammstein
Love’s Not A Competition (But I’m Winning)
Kaiser Chiefs
Warrior
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Epilogue
Dionysos
Let’s Have A War
A Perfect War
Hexagram
Deftones
Unit
Regurgitator
Eraser
Nine Inch Nails
Little Sister
Queens of the Stone Age
Everyday Formula
Regurgitator
Lady Helen
Devin Townsend
Under The Milky Way Tonight
The Church
Sucker (feat Norah Jones)
Peeping Tom
Hurt (Quiet)
Nine Inch Nails
Until It Sleeps
Apocalyptica

Sunday 26 July 2015

Beyond Comprehension


I want to start this post with a general spiel about what people consider normal, or refer to an article I've read recently, or any of the usual intros that these things often kick off with but this time I honestly can't.

What I'm starting with is this: my 21 year old cousin does not know how to cut her own fingernails.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I've always known she was sheltered, a bit lazy, and that her parents do more for her than they should* but this was the first time that I truly grasped the magnitude of the issue.

We were at a family gathering and halfway through she realised that she had netball afterwards and had to trim her fingernails first or she wouldn't be allowed on the court.

She didn't have anything useful with her so she started biting them off.

Seeing what she was up to, I pulled out a basic set of nail clippers that I keep in my handbag and passed them over.
These sort of dealies, you know the ones.
She thanked me, put them over the end of her nail without opening them and then proceeded to swivel them about, trying to get them to work like a man unsure of how to apply a can opener to a can in a way that will produce food.

Starting to get a bit worried now, I said 'oh here let me get that' and popped them open for her and demonstrated the clipping motion.
She thanked me again, applied the clippers to her fingernail, clamped down and then instead of clipping through, ripped the end of her nail off, then calmly applied it to her next fingernail to do the same.

At this point I think my brain started screaming, and a nail later I managed to get my body to move, plucked them out of her grip and said 'let me tidy those up for you'** and cut her nails for her because Jesus Electric Sliding Christ!

How do you get to 21 without learning how to cut your own nails?

This means that someone else has been doing it for 21 years!

Outside of the times she's presumably gnawed them off.

And if she hasn't learned how to trim her own nails what else hasn't she learned?

There have been a lot of articles written about helicopter parenting*** in the last decade particularly.

Articles about how helicopter parenting is leaving adults stuck in adolescence because overly helpful parents have sought to protect them from disappointment too effectively or have not been able to step back and allow them to learn from their own mistakes.

Articles about how parents are pushing their children into learning environments or professions that make them miserable in the belief that they're setting them up for success later in life which will counterbalance today's misery with future happiness and security.

One of the most extreme manifestations of this inability to deal with 'the real world' or life in general comes in the form of Japan's Hikikomori, individuals so overcome by the pressure to succeed or the fear of social missteps that they lock themselves in their rooms, barely emerging for years.

This of course the extreme but it all has to start somewhere.

Wanting your child to be successful, to achieve their potential, is an admirable goal but it has to be seen within the context of a full life.

Kids also have to be taught how to manage their time, to cook, to take care of themselves, and to balance priorities.

This means introducing chores, encouraging them to manage their own responsibilities during childhood and letting them experience the consequences of failing.

I know my parents bailed me out more than a few times when I panicked about having left an assignment until the last minute or accidentally left it at home and begged for someone to run it to me at school during lunch time so I wouldn't get in trouble.

They also let me fall on my face sometimes so that I realised that I'm the person who needed to remember to do my homework because no-one else was going to do it for me.

My Dad wouldn't give me the answers, he would ask me questions until I started forming my own.

It was a balance that did see me wide-eyed and more than a little nervous at the idea of failing academically but in a position where I could - after having a bit of a panic - manage to talk myself down and through what I needed to get done.

I'm still a bit prone to doing things at the last minute because I know I'm smart enough to get away with it in certain situations but I've also come up against enough situations where being smart doesn't cut it because the task required time and effort to be put into it that couldn't be papered over with a good vocabulary.

But I learned this through trial and error, sometimes having to run smack bang into consequences multiple times before the lesson stuck.

Without encountering natural low-risk failures during their younger years, kids can't possibly get a realistic view of what failure means and how to cope with it or overcome it as they get older.

Every prospective failure will be seen as terrifying.

And you will end up with someone who can't cook, doesn't clean up after themselves, drops out of multiple university courses and can't cut their own fingernails.

Because good lord, there is an age at which children should be put in charge of their own personal grooming and it is a lot younger than twenty-friggin'-one!



*She's been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder in the last 4 years so now the waiting on her is more of a 'keep an eye on her so she doesn't hurt herself' thing rather than anything else but I can't help but think that if they had given her more rules to follow and boundaries to respect that 'none', she would have been in a better place to deal with her mental illness.

**I know I should have shown her how to use them properly and returned them to her but by this stage I just couldn't bear the idea of her doing something else outlandish. I did point out that if you squeeze them firmly they cut right through and I had shown her how to open them and close them but I'm guessing the lesson won't have stuck.

***See, this is where I would have started this post if I could have stopped my brain wailing 'Her nails! Can't even cut her own nails!'

Wednesday 22 July 2015

Take Me Away, Shuffle Function Wednesday - 22/07/15


The Rules of Shuffle Function Wednesday.
  1. Pick a song.
  2. Put your player on shuffle.
  3. You cannot skip any song.
  4. Sit back and relax.




Over and Over
Hot Chip
Ether Sings
Laura Veirs
Fatal
The RZA
Go Forth And Die
Dethklok
Shake It Out
Florence and the Machine
Once Sent From The Golden Hall
Amon Amarth
.execute
Slipknot
Pour Some Sugar On Me
Def Leppard
Isku pitkästä ilosta
Korpiklaani
The Blood Is Love
Queens of the Stone Age
Regular People (Conceit)
Pantera
Spelunking
Laura Veirs
(Just Like We) Breakdown
Hot Chip
Quiet Houses
Fleet Foxes
Your Winter
Sister Hazel
Lounge Act
Nirvana
Readymade
Beck
Deceiver
Disturbed
Beautiful
Karma Zoo
Morning Birds
Kristin Hersh
Free
The Martinis
Do It Again
Queens of the Stone Age
First Day Of My Life
Bright Eyes
Three Little Birds
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Rock The House
Gorillaz
Dirty Love
Motörhead
Sickman
Alice in Chains
Vesaisen sota
Korpiklaani
Hallowed Be Thy Name
Iron Maiden
Risingson
Massive Attack
35 Ghosts IV
Nine Inch Nails
Lament of a Mortal Soul
Arch Enemy
The Man Who Would Be King
Iron Maiden
Rollercoaster
Machine Gun Fellatio
Runaway
YeahYeahYeahs

Sunday 19 July 2015

Things I Learned When I Was Supposed To Be Learning Other Things


Every now and then you find yourself in a learning environment where you are supposed to be absorbing a certain message, following a particular course of study, and instead the message/lesson/memory that you take away from this experience has absolutely nothing to do with what you were supposed to be taking on board.

About a year ago our workplace went through a Lean process where we had to map out all the steps of our work, identify which were vital, which were repetitive and how we could streamline the whole thing to make ourselves more efficient.

The people further above us in the workplace got to see exactly what we did and how much we did, how many steps there were, how many people we had to consult and/or wait on for confirmation or input.

We were supposed to get a better understanding or overview of our own efforts so that instead of simplifying our work into a number of key steps we acknowledged the individual sub-steps which preceded, followed or made up the big ticket items.

In doing this we would be able to identify and eliminate any replicated steps, skip any that didn't add value to our method and save time and effort!

What I walked away from this process with was 'Did you know that if you peel post it notes by keeping the note level as you unstick it instead of pulling it straight up from the bottom they don't flip up in that annoying fashion when you stick them to things!?'

Last year my sister and I attended a cooking demonstration run by the Eolian Society in Melbourne and saw them prepare several traditional dishes, were given copies of the recipes and got to taste each of the things they had made.

It was a fun and informative gathering with way more people in attendance than I had anticipated but the thing that I ended up telling everyone about afterwards was 'Did you know there is a really easy way to fold up your plastic shopping bags for storage?'
The lady running the cooking demonstration had done a quick demo on this as well and it had obviously made an impression.

The method she showed us was this one and now instead of a bulging bag full o' other bags I have a box full of neatly folded triangles which once again probably pleases me more than it should.

Look at them sitting there all nice and neat and regular!




This seems to happen a fair amount with me.

I go to a class that covers one subject, they make a brief reference to something else and that is the thing that sticks in my mind.

I guess I could say that I'm easily distracted and need to work on my focus.

OR I could say that life lessons are everywhere and you should always leave yourself open to learn them whenever or wherever they occur!

That sounds much better, kind of like it should be plastered across an inspirational poster.

"You're not flaky! You're open-minded!"

Wednesday 15 July 2015

Take Me Away, Shuffle Function Wednesday - 15/07/15


The Rules of Shuffle Function Wednesday.
  1. Pick a song.
  2. Put your player on shuffle.
  3. You cannot skip any song.
  4. Sit back and relax.



Python For A Pillow
The Fumes
With The Teeth
NIN
Crazy
Little Birdy
G7 Dick Electro Boogie
Regurgitator
Shadows And Dust
Arch Enemy
Lonely Is The World
Black Sabbath
For Absent Friends
Opeth
Straight Through The Heart
Dio
After School  Special
Mr Bungle
Me And Mr Jones
Amy Winehouse
Idaho
Nerina Pallot
Come And Get It
AC/DC
Midsummer Night
Korpiklaani
Mandelbrot Set
Jonathan Coulton
My Tortured Soul (with Eric Wagner)
Probot
Heritage
Opeth
Morning Dreams
LadyHawke
Twist
Goldfrapp
Public Enemy Number One
Iron Maiden
Lucky Ones
Lana Del Rey
Hours Of Wealth
Opeth
Such Great Heights
The Postal Service
The Frail (Version)
NIN
Dark Lines
The Gossip
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Apocalyptica
Why Does It Always Rain On Me
Coldplay