Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Oops, ergh

It occured to me I was going to blog about 'eating and other important stuff'. Suffice to say, this was really just the arbitrary inclusion of words in to the title of my blog to increase its audience appeal (ha!) and thus readability by the masses (double ha!).

I was, however, contemplating adding that I feel I have become an eating machine lately, and that writing this blog (for all its previously discussed self-serving egocentricity) is encroaching on my terribly-important-exercise-time.

Because any excuse will do, right?

facebook cleanouts, eating, and other important stuff

The rise and subsequent ubiquitousness of facebook seems to have lead to a newer trend, the 'facebook cleanout'. This is an exercise of culling 'friends' that a person (the facebook user, who is conducting said cleanout) has deemed to have had insufficient contact with in order to maintain them on their friends list. While I understand the fundamental principle of the exercise (trim the fat, clean out the closet, spring clean, etc) the concept of a facebook cleanout represents all sorts of other confusing aspects to me, particularly those surrounding the notions of friends and acquaintances as we previously understood them.
To me, the beauty of facebook is not in its ability to maintain contact with close friends and family, but rather, to keep some kind of connection or running commentary of a person with whom contact may otherwise be lost. My family, for example, is extensive and widely spread around Australia. Facebook has allowed me to maintain some level of contact with these people, even if I do not actively participate (at least, not in a Facebook sense) in their every day lives and happenings. Ditto old school friends; particularly those about whom my mind would occasionally wander and well, wonder.
And while Facebook can serve as the perfect venue for (at least part of) torrid friendships and bizarrely motivated personality quizzes (which romanticised stereotype from this arbitrary tv show/movie/popular culture icon/species of amoeba/suburb/friendship group/school are YOU?) it can also be a means of maintaining distant, non-confrontational (though slightly stalkerish) contact with people you actually care about. It's also a great conversation topic, "oh, her? Yeah, I'm facebook friends with her. Boy, she LOVES karaoke, cruisers and tacky heart shaped pink gimmicky virtual gifts..." etc.

It's also the perfect venue for time wasting, and how else to time waste but to look at "oh-I-remember-Georgie-the-one-with-that-never-wore-matching-socks-to-school-when-I-lived-in-
Sydney-no-this-was-my-second-school-I-think's profile, and find out that the never-wore-matching-socks thing actually manifested in to some kind of awesomely cool and creative career as a cutting edge fashion designer (or some such romanticised stereotype)... Oh yeah, and according to which breed of dog are you, George is a French Bulldog. Go figure.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Episode IV: a new blog

Wow!

After much deliberation I have deleted my old blog account. The reasons for this were numerous; I was not able to merge the old blog with my current google account (and logging out and in with different user names really doesn't suit my incredibly lazy style) but also, and quite fundamentally, I felt it was important to close the door on that particular episode of my life. Certainly an episode best left behind a closed door, or at least not some readily accessible point (metaphorically speaking, of course).

So then, here I am. Older, and with any luck, wiser. Or even wizened, as the case may be.

That being said, I was feeling somewhat stumped for a topic to blog on. Or rather, a topic to blog passionately and extensively on. Many spring to mind, however: the inexplicable non-acceptance of moves towards a more socialised model of health care amongst Americans (specifically, residents of the USA), and following on from that, the lack of acceptance of scientific evidence from otherwise educated and informed people on issues such as evolution/creationism, and the "vaccination debate"... issues that present as complete no-brainers to me, and, ironically, I suppose no-brainers to others, but I mean this in a much more vindictive manner (there! I said it! People that believe these ridiculous ideas ARE stupid! You must be to abandon all sense of reason and logic - "hey, if we ignore all the facts and evidence, those funny looking kids were right!" etc).

Ergh.

Apart from this... I taught my daughters how to play uno this evening. They took to the game with gusto, and... beat me. G played her cards close to her chest (figuratively and literally) and Y sought advice for the first couple of games, then went on to deal me several vicious plays in the subsequent game. Funny little things -clearly too clever for their own good! I shall have to perpetuate some kind of facade that I have been deliberately losing in order to maintain my god-like parental status (look! I made a people!), a status on which my grasp has become increasingly tenuous as the girls get older.

And so, here it is. My new blog. I wanted to retain the name of my old blog, simply because I like it, but blogger would not allow me to do so. So I figure I can retain the title, if nothing else. While it is a tad more egocentric than I would like, it also I suppose accurately captures the necessarily egocentricity of a blog of this nature. But... just to satisfy my own vanity, I am going to squint at the word egocentricity so that the letters blur and it reads more like eccentricity. Because carefree eccentricity has such lovely, serene appeal to it.