Philip Seymour Hoffman died at age 46. The same age I will be in 4 months time.

The fact that he is dead is tragic. The cause of his death even more so.  While I cannot speculate on his life and how he lived it I do know that nobody chooses to be an addict. No one picks up their first drink or their first drug with the intention of becoming an alcoholic or an addict.

Just because you are rich and you have all the trappings of that wealth it doesn’t preclude you from being human, from being scared or anxious, from feeling pain or emotion.  Just because you are famous it doesn’t mean you don’t have self doubt and think too much or care too deeply, just because you have minders and entourages it doesn’t mean you don’t get lonely or feel isolated.

Just because you have children it does not mean you are not human. Just because you use drugs does not mean you are a junkie.

With their sale of sildenafil tablets versatile team of volunteers, Kaar technologies Pvt Ltd India is able to partake in multiple social activities. Medicinal Cause- At times, sexual weakness could be discount online viagra the result of some sort of trauma or injury that didn’t heal properly. It has certain tadalafil cheap periods of meowing without apparent reasons. Erectile dysfunction is a most common problem these days and around one in 10 men suffer from erectile dysfunction. canadian cialis pharmacy An addiction is not the same as “living it up”, it’s not about taking drugs to have a good time. It’s an illness and Philip Seymour Hoffman was not just an actor. He was a human.

(With thanks to Zoey Martin at The Shake where I was first rocked by this video)

Rest in Peace Philip Seymour Hoffman and may your family find strength at this horrifically dark time.

Little Pencil started tae kwondo when he was four years old. I encouraged him to start because it was very convenient. What mother wouldn’t love a sport that took place in a shopping centre? He wanted to start because he was a boy and he had plenty of energy and a huge desire to kick and punch.

Even though my decision to start him training in martial arts may have been based on convenience, there were a few other factors at play. He was really small and I thought that knowing a few moves may give him some confidence, I had also heard that martial arts was good for focus and discipline and who wouldn’t benefit from that?

What I didn’t know is just how much he would get out of it, not just physically but emotionally, socially and intellectually.

[Read more…]

I woke up feeling very sorry for myself this morning. My litany of complaints was long.

• My son was going on camp today and as much as he was excited, the control freak in me was hugely out of sorts with the idea of having no contact with him for five days.
• It is ridiculously hot
• I have been having the most terrible nightmares and therefore not getting nearly enough sleep
• On a scale of one to ten of cranky I was an 11
[Read more…]

I don’t often write about politics. I don’t know enough about it to commentate or try and inform anyone else’s opinion. And today is no different – I’m not writing this post about politics, I am writing this post about being human. About having a conscience and treating other people with respect, with compassion.

Today Fairfax reports

An asylum seeker who was moved off Nauru to give birth is being locked up for 18 hours a day in a detention centre in Brisbane while her week-old baby remains in hospital.

The case of Latifa, a 31-year-old woman of the persecuted Rohingya people of Myanmar, has shocked churches and refugee advocates. She was separated from her baby on Sunday, four days after a caesarean delivery, and has since been allowed to visit him only between 10am and 4pm in Brisbane’s Mater Hospital.

The boy, named Farus, has respiratory problems and needs constant medical care.

Latifa is confined to the Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation, 20 minutes away, where her husband and two children, four and seven, are being held.

Latifa’s husband, Niza, is not allowed to visit the child at all, according to people in daily contact with the family.

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Latifa has spent nearly 10 years in a refugee camp in Malaysia, she was transferred from Nauru to give birth to her baby. I heard her speak, through an interpreter, about the terrible conditions she was experiencing there. About the heat, about her children being fed food that was uncooked and could make them very ill. The awful conditions of a life that she never chose.

Latifa is a mother. A woman trying to find a place for her family to live. I was born privileged, I have never had to run for my life. I have never had to worry about whether my child would die from heat, malaria or eating raw food.

But like Latifa my son was in the neo-natal intensive care unit. Unlike Latifa I sat by his side day in and day out. I left his crib to sleep at around midnight but snuck back in at around 5am because being without him felt like my heart was being torn out of my body. He was my baby and he was sick and I needed to be with him. His father spent every minute he could with him, he spoke to him, sang to him, read to him through the perspex sides of the humidcrib. He had spoken to my pregnant stomach for seven months and our tiny little baby responded to his father’s voice. It was not just the amazing nursing staff, brilliant doctors and 24 hour care that nursed my son back to health – it was the love he received from his parents at his bedside.

I am appalled by Scott Morrison’s decision. I am frightened about people in power having no compassion and no heart. I feel sick for the thousands of people who don’t have the right to safety, the right to asylum, the right to be with their children.  I feel ashamed by our government’s stance on asylum seekers.

Please join me in signing this petition here or this one here and writing to Scott Morrisson at scott.morrison.mp@aph.gov.au . The standard we walk past is the standard we accept.

I admit to still feeling a little “assaulted” by watching the first 20 minutes of The Bachelor on Sunday night. There were so many signs I shouldn’t have even given it a chance so I’m not sure how I came to lying in bed and watching it with my son

The whole premise of the show is a bit hideous. 25 conventionally attractive, hand-selected woman demean themselves to get the attention of a man they don’t know while fighting off other women in a contest to see who can lose their dignity first.

My husband actually thought I was joking when I left the room telling him I wanted to watch these woman fight over a man they might marry after meeting him on TV. I think I may have even heard him asking whether I had a temperature or was just feeling unwell.

Plus I don’t believe in chiropractors. Tim, the bachelor is no exception

But I am a soldier and I persevered because there was some element of car crash watching that I couldn’t escape from. For 20 minutes I watched. I sent about 20 flabbergasted tweets and then spent the next 20 minutes showing my son positive female role models and explaining to him that it’s not the way that women behave in real life and nor should they be portrayed like that.

I may have even tried to resort to some voodoo type techniques to erase his memory of what I had subjected him to. There was a lot I had to undo, it wasn’t just the visual impact of 25 women who all looked ageless due to the fact that their faces didn’t move, 25 women who seemed to have created their own hole in the ozone because of the amount of hair spray they had used and who could not walk in the shoes they had chosen to impress Tim with.
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I felt like I had to impress upon my son that all this plastic and fakery was not important. That people should be valued and loved for who they are not just what they look like and that love is not something you find through competition.

It was time to slash a few stereotypes and what better way to do that than a beer commercial. No seriously. Watch this. I don’t need to say another word

Who would have ever thought that I would rather my son watch an ad for beer over a bit of “family prime time TV”?

Well done Guinness, well done

The elections are over and I have no words, so I’ll use images instead.

I am sad about the results

Worried about them even

Because I remember these words from Tony Abbott

and these

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And I HATE the fact that they can’t remember this

I’m horrified that we have our own “George Bush”

But it’s done and it’s up to all of us to make the next three years count.  I strongly recommend you read this brilliant column from Andrew P Street  and

 

Anyone who has followed me on Twitter or Facebook or knows me in real life will know I’m a little obsessed with Offspring.  And I am not alone. Along with millions of Australians each week I have sat down and cried, laughed and cheered with the Proudman family. Sometimes I have wished I were part of the family, often I have given thanks that I am not part of the family and most times I try remind myself that they aren’t even a family – they are actors playing a very funny and dysfunctional family.

But they are brilliant actors saying the lines of supremely talented writers and they have made us feel part of their lives. They have made their characters real and relatable and flawed and funny and loved. They have made their story our story.

So I, along with thousands of other Australians last night, sobbed when Patrick died. I literally heaved. Howled even. With my 12-year-old son sobbing next to me in my bed as we lay watching in my bed with Twitter as our backdrop.

Obviously we were crying because the main character had lost her partner which is sad enough. Given that she was about to have a baby made it even sadder and the fact that he had lost his first baby and was not going to live to see his second baby just tipped me over the edge.  We cried with his sister and his partner who were left behind. We cried because of all the people his life had touched and how different their lives were going to be without him.  We cried because a character on TV had died and we sobbed because of the devastation it was going to cause all the other characters. And while clearly on the outside we were crying for Patrick Reid you don’t need to have a doctorate in psychology to know that it’s much more than that.

The reason you become involved so heavily in a TV show is surely because some of the characters resonate with you, you relate to what you are seeing and you can empathise with the situations played out.  When someone on TV dies you experience your own grief – not necessarily grief for the character.  I think Michael Lucas, writer of last night’s episode said it best on Twitter when he wrote (a day before the episode screened)

For me, when I watch a well-realised fictional death, all the unresolved grief from real deaths I’ve experienced comes out.

I’d say that is true for many of the tears last night.
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And sometimes you just cry because you feel sad, you empathise strongly with the character, you feel like a human watching another human suffer (albeit a fictional character) and you cry for their hurt. Crying is healthy part of dealing with emotion.  It’s okay to feel and acknowledge sadness, I have seen far greater damage done from repressing feelings than letting them show.

I’m not ashamed that I cried. I’m not embarrassed that I sobbed in front of my son over the death of a character on a TV show and I am proud of my son’s empathy that he cried too.

Did you watch last night? Did you cry?

and just to make you smile there’s this message from the Nyangan Police

Why do they put Wanted ads on during prime time TV?

Seriously?

Wanted is a fairly new program on Channel 10 that “works with the Australian public and police to help solve major crimes and bring offenders to justice.“ It’s basically Australia’s Most Wanted with a couple of words chopped off the front and added Sandra Sully.

The cases they’re discussing aren’t things like overdue library books or even grand scale espionage. Not even bank robberies or drug hauls – but murders. Chilling tales of unsolved murders of regular people like me or you.

But back to the advertising. And the fact that they talk about the cases they will be discussing later that night during prime time.  Specifically during prime time shows that I am watching with my son. I’m looking at you Masterchef.

Little Pencil is 12. He’s robust and strong. He can watch the scariest of movies and read the most nail clenching of books. He can also distinguish between fact and fiction. He is 12 after all.

And while 12 might be old enough to distinguish between fact and fiction it’s still young enough to be scared shitless by real crime. He’s fine with the news. He watches with me and he understands more global issues than I did when I was his age. He even understands that there is crime and murder and rape. But on the news it is somehow quarantined. We know what we are watching and we can deal with it in more “global” terms.
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We have had the “robbers” discussion more times than I care to admit and, even if this is not the best or most honest parenting technique, I have gone for the “it’s not going to happen to us” story mode.  I point out where we live, the proximity to our neighbours, the dog that barks at passing pedestrians and of course the flashing red sensors in the corners of the rooms which are linked to an actual back to base alarm (you can take the girl out of South Africa but you can’t take South Africa out of the girl).

Recently there was a shooting in a suburb where there aren’t normally shootings. It wasn’t really that close to home but it wasn’t that far either. For nights after that we had to go through the same conversation. About bikies and gangs and how safe our house is and how we should never join a gang (or smoke or get tattoos) for fear of getting shot. Hey I’m the mum, I can use whatever tactic works at the time.

He’s really not a nervous child and if you had to meet him it would surprise you that he needs to talk this stuff out – although if you remember he talks EVERYTHING out (click here to read about that).  He is a real “boy” who is not averse to a spot of violence in a movie, a boy who can shoot at enemies on a screen with no qualms and full understanding of the scenario. But deep under that he’s just a kid who’s scared of “real life crime”.

Every time a Wanted ad comes on I just know that we are going to be pulling it apart before bed that night. Dissecting it and discussing it and hauling out maps to show how far away we are from the crime scene. And while it’s well and good that he’s exposed to the news and to events that are taking place around him I’d like to have some control over what he’s being exposed to and at what time of night.

And if I had that control, I can guarantee you he would not be watching real life crime re-enactments.

Were you scared of “robbers” as a kid? Are your kids scared of them?