Digitally Dumb? Why I Refuse to Buy a Smart Phone

Okay I’ll get it out of the way. I don’t have  a smart phone. There I’ve said it. My penance is the embarrassment I feel admitting it, and that’s plenty.
 

Lacking a smart phone is not just a minor social fail, like being a teetotaller, not having a partner, or not being able to drive (hey at least I can drive). It is a failure far more drastic, marking you as fundamentally irrelevant to modern culture.

If you don’t have a car, you’re saving the environment. If you’re a renter, you can drop everything and hike through Mongolia for a  few years without worrying whether the tenants are trashing your place. If you don’t have a smart phone you’re just pathetic – unless you’re over seventy and then you’re excused.

A dumb mobile phone is outdated while totally lacking vintage charm. While smaller than a smart phone, it manages to be the telecommunications equivalent of those big clunky computer monitors. Even checking it is embarrassing because you can only be checking two things: text messages and the time. Better not to take it out at all.

Nor does it work as a badge of honour that marks me as a struggling garret-dwelling artistic type. Many homeless people have smart phones, and good on them, as without a stable base it’s their only way of being plugged in.

I like to think not having a smart phone is a form of rebellion. But no-one cares about my tragic mid-life refusal to conform. No-one cares about anything. They are too busy looking at those tiny screens. While they all seem terribly serious and absorbed, everyone knows that everyone else is playing Temple Run, checking out potential sexual partners on Tinder or Grindr, or scrolling their friends’ selfies on SnapChat.

There’s been plenty of hand wringing about how the once-collective public space has been parcelled into thousands of tiny little mind spaces – why can’t iPhones be we-Phones? Being in a crowd feels weird these days, as if everything’s a bit virtual because the people around you are in parallel worlds unknown to you. They’re all off on their own unique trajectory (too often unfortunately into the path of oncoming traffic if the stats can be trusted).

You notice this lack much more when you don’t have your own personal brain extension to retreat to. You notice and you miss the collective ‘we’ even though that might be the most fragile of webs, like three people waiting for a train at a lonely suburban station.  You feel the mental absence of those around you and you want to draw them back into the vaguest of curiosities about who you are.

That public loss is why, when bus or train drivers introduce themselves over their microphones and make corny jokes, everyone seems to enjoy it. One driver did this on the Gardenvale line going into the city on an overcast Sunday afternoon. As soon as his friendly ocker tones ruptured the dull anonymity of the carriage it felt like being on a country train going to some mystery location. ‘We’re expecting to reach our destination,’ he told us, ‘when the train reaches Flinders Street. Have a lovely trip.’ He was never going to get a gig on Saturday Night Live, but he made the whole carriage grin. For a few short minutes we were as one.

Smart phones don’t always successfully keep their owners plugged in. I’ve made the mistake of assuming that my smart phone owning friends would be reading their emails twenty-four hours a day. I’ve cancelled things at the last minute only to receive desperate calls that have put decades-long friendships at risk (‘I’ve just spent half an hour riding here from Collingwood – where the hell are you?’)

Then again I benefit from the giant well of knowledge that is other people’s smart phones. Walking through North Melbourne one day and hopelessly lost, I asked a labourer at a building site for directions, and he got out his iPhone. You don’t really need your own when there are others’ to fall back on.

I already spend too long in front of computer screens as a freelance writer and editor. I’m not exactly deprived of Jack Russell crosses obligingly teaching babies how to crawl, or elephants shedding tears when freed from decades in chains. I even have a PVR where I can store and watch as much television trash as I want. I don’t need yet another screen.

It’s just so uncool not to have a smart phone. But contrarian that I am, the more uncool it is the more stubbornly I’ll hold out against the cultural pressure, like someone who only gets away with not vaccinating their kids because most other parents do. One day, they’ll probably be a legal requirement. Till then, I’ll remain a digital dag.

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’Tis the Season to Be Melancholy – Enduring a Bout of Christmas Depression

Pic: Mike McCune

I have been suffering Christmas depression since I first became an adult. It was a long time coming because if truth be told my parents were as reluctant as I and my four sisters to give up the old rituals – we still put out our Santa sacks even in our late teens, although by that stage they were thankfully left under the tree rather than at the end of our beds. Perhaps it was after the last year of the Santa sacks that the Christmas depression first showed itself?

Here, for the record, are the symptoms: weeping uncontrollably at one’s desk; regretting the entire life course one has taken; and a pall covering everything as if one is living in a fake, Truman-style world that can offer nothing that is authentic or remotely interesting.

And perhaps the most clichéd of all, wishing fervently that Christmas could take place every second year instead of annually. Wouldn’t that be more sensible?

These kinds of seasonal depressions follow their sufferers around like drones. They seem to find us. We do not choose them. Anyone who, like me, suffers anxiety and depression throughout the year is a prime candidate.

Each year the scale of the attack is completely unpredictable. One year, swept up in a pre-Christmas deadline frenzy, the whole shemozzle completely passes me by; another year there might be faint twinges a few days before Christmas, while the following year I will be swamped by dark ruminations as soon as December hits its stride.

More than anything, their weapon of choice is the past. Reels and reels of negatives (the word having two meanings here) of all that is irretrievably lost. By a certain age we have all sustained many losses and regrets, but at Christmas some regrets seem to be more equal than others.

Namely not having a family of one’s own. Reading stories about families is a big no-no for me at this time. In fact you would think Monica Dux’s Things I Didn’t Expect (When I Was Expecting) would be a fine book for a single, child-free woman to read around Christmas, with its tales of collapsing vaginas, stigmatic nipples and psychopathic mothers’ groups. You’d expect someone like me to be sighing with relief and thanking Fortune I’d somehow wiggled my way out of that. And on one level I am. As a feminist, I certainly don’t feel a woman’s worth and identity depend on her status as a mother. It is the whole family orientation of Christmas that sinks the (Santa) boot in. When I found myself envying Dux despite (or perhaps because of) what she’d been through, I knew it was going to be a bad bout this year.

You’d also think getting into the thick of the shopping scrum would help, and it can for short periods. But if you stay too long you’ll be hit by a percolation of hissing irritation that threatens to bubble over into a bad case of mall rage. All these people with lines of children attached to them like charm bracelets, throwing money around like they’ve just had a big win at the races, are not fun or edifying for a single person to witness for long periods.

And if you’ve made a decision not to buy a lot of presents at Christmas, as I have this year, that leaves you without an important compensation for the Christmas frenzy – spending money on other people. Research suggests that no matter how much or how little you spend, it actually feels better to buy for others than to buy for yourself. As someone with ten nephews and nieces I’ve given up trying to pick a present for each one of them at Christmas; and while that saves me time and effort and helps the planet a tiny bit, it also robs me of a chance to leaven my Christmas depression with a dose of therapeutic giving.

Just because other people go through similar torment doesn’t mean you get to join a fellowship of sufferers. This is because there is something deeply personal about how we celebrate (or don’t celebrate) Christmas, demonstrating how individualistic our society has become. At this time, whether or not we are Christian, we are forced to withdraw from the social world and into the bosom of our family networks. And whether those connections are firm, fragile or merely frazzled, we are stuck with them like never before. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ we ask each other. We rarely say, for example, ‘Can I catch up with you on Christmas Day?’

This Christmas, I will play my usual role as black sheep in the Christmas nativity of my birth family. And I will be grateful to do so. I know a friend who is spending Christmas Day alone, and another friend who hosts a small gathering of fellow Christmas ‘orphans’ each year. I have decided not to extend an invitation to these friends, simply because I don’t want to impose the tricky-at-best family dynamics on them.

This reluctance to meddle with tradition also suggests that my own Christmas depression has become for me an inextricable part of the annual ritual, along with feeling left out because I can’t join my champagne-quaffing sisters on Christmas morning (dietary reasons), eating a kilo of roasted cashews before lunch to compensate, goading my father into political  arguments by making extreme left-wing comments while he tries to eat his Christmas pudding, and falling asleep in the spare bedroom at 5 pm precisely.

Despite the above, wishing all my blog readers a safe, peaceful and stress-free festive season.

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A New Direction for Slightly Nutty

Sorry that this blog has been left fallow for so long - I've finally decided the direction I want to go in blog-wise. I'm more or less amalgamating Slightly Nutty with my other blog, Melbarts, to create an informal arts/politics/culture blog.

The new blog is called Feminist Culture Muncher and really came out of a need to justify my frequent telly watching!

My Inspired Shopper book is not yet ready, but it won't be long now. In the meantime I've reactivated the Inspired Shopper blog.

It feels strange to be 'moving'. In fact, there are many things I would still love to write about on Slightly Nutty - it's just that the other projects take greater priority at this time. And many of the kinds of concerns I've been airing here I will continue to air on the new blog, although I'm not sure how frequent entries will be at the moment - I'm aiming for shorter, more frequent entries than the ones in Slightly Nutty, but we'll see.

Hope to see you all at my new locations!

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Dedicated follower of fashion: bargain hunting, ethical and sustainable fashion, feminism and the retail cycle

One of my favourite hobbies is hunting for fashion bargains. I love swooping in towards the end of the retail cycle (ie at the sale stage) and finding something that is, say, less than half the price of the original. An example: recently, at Sportsgirl, a baggy grey summer cardigan for $15.95; original price: 49.95. I’ve honed this skill to the point where I ‘know’ which shops to go into and which to avoid, whether I’m wasting my time or not and whether I need to buy something that I’ve tried on (I even wrote a book about this skill, and started an unsuccessful blog; now I’m resigned to using this skill for my own betterment, rather than that of humankind!)

As a former 12-step person, I’m constantly scanning my behaviour to ascertain whether it’s slipping into compulsive buying territory. I’m also aware that my shopping hobby gives me a kick because there are so many less consumer-oriented, more social pastimes that are just too hard. In some ways, too, it’s been a kind of return from exile to an earlier preoccupation: coming from an all-girl family, I grew up adoring clothes, but ditched that interest entirely when I became a radical feminist at the age of 19. For over a decade I lost the ability to dress in a way that suited me, and my shopping adventures have enabled me to gradually recover that. I also don’t spend that much on other forms of entertainment like restaurants and the cinema.

But of course, following fashion in a time of catastrophic global warming seems frivolous to say the least. This is something that I struggle with. I sometimes rationalise that by buying towards the end of the retail cycle I am not really a part of it. But this is not true: when you pay full price for a piece of clothing (which I do only rarely) you’re subsidising the likes of me. The full price of an item takes into account that a certain percentage of stock will not ‘move’ until offered at a discount price. So my bargain-hunting behaviour is definitely factored into the entire retail equation.

Ethics and sustainability
I also struggle with the notion that, because I mainly buy from the cheaper chain stores, I’m subsidising cruelty – the appalling working conditions at some Chinese factories, as well as the sometimes equally dreadful conditions Australian outworkers face.

Plus I’m contributing to the many problems caused by China’s reliance on coal – global warming, poor conditions at coal mines, and dangerous levels of pollution. China burns more coal than any other country, and 80 per cent of its electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. To feed its giant economy, it’s starting new coal-fired power stations at an estimated rate of between one and two a week. As well as illness and deaths caused by carbon pollution, at least six coal miners die on the job in China every single day – the figure used to be higher.

Now, I’m not so sure that buying at the higher end of the market – designer clothes or even upmarket chains like Country Road (a label I buy from very occasionally, and only at sale time) – would make much difference to this. After all, Country Road clothes are also manufactured in China.

However, it does make sense to buy more expensive clothes that last longer, and buy fewer of them. The quality of Country Road clothes, for example, is surprisingly good. They wear so well that you can easily find yourself wearing an item over three fashion seasons.

Buying an item that you will get much more wear out of is surely better for the environment than buying something you only wear three or four times, but it does not resolve the ethical dilemma of workers’ conditions. I’d like to think that workers making clothes of that calibre have to be treated a bit better to keep the quality up, eg needing to complete fewer garments per hour, but I have no idea whether or not that’s the case.

And buying a garment manufactured in Australia doesn’t necessarily let you off the ethical hook. I bought a top recently from a cheap chain store, Supre. The top had a tag on it proudly declaring something along the lines of ‘Made in Australia – bringing jobs back home’. But this doesn’t mean that the workers who made the top weren’t exploited; they could have been piece workers paid at appalling rates. Despite much community activism, the Australian Government has so far failed to end the exploitation of these workers.

An Australian organisation fighting worker exploitation in the garment manufacturing industry is the FairWear campaign.

They’ve introduced a Home worker’s Code of Practice that they lobby manufacturers and retailers to sign. Manufacturers who have signed it are entitled to include a No Sweat Shop label on their clothes. While the list of companies that are signatories is currently disappointingly limited (but significantly includes Bonds, Collette Dinnigan and Maggie T), whether more sign up really depends on pressure from consumers: if they think we don’t care, they will do nothing.

The Code has been signed by many more retailers than manufacturers. These retailers include Big W, K Mart, Country Road, Target, Sussan, David Jones and David Lawrence (Witchery hasn’t signed, and nor has Supre, which I mentioned above). However, the obligations of retailers are far less onerous than those of manufacturers, and they may not even be selling clothes with the No Sweat Shop label. Of the duties of the retailer signatories, The FairWear website says:

If a retailer is provided with evidence that a supplier is not meeting their obligations in relation to the Code or relevant Awards and legislation, the retailer will inform the non-compliant supplier that if the problem is not resolved, all of the supplier’s products will be removed from the retailer’s stores and will not be sold. Such action from Code Signatories has proven to be an effective method in changing the behavior of unethical manufacturers.

FairWear’s website includes a sample letter to send to retailers who haven’t signed the code.

FairWear should be lauded for its work. But why does the federal government allow such a code to be voluntary? It should be law, not something you sign up for because you fear a consumer backlash. And what happens if the garments are sourced from overseas? How much control can the retailer have over the manufacturing process in that instance? And how do we actually know that the retailers are sticking to their promise – who is keeping tabs?

Meanwhile, a group of FairWear supporters have started their own Facebook page, at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19858516103&ref=ts&v=info.

However, action on this front doesn’t stop the problems of coal-powered electricity, pollution, and global warming.

Ethics and sustainability – recycling
Buying second hand clothes offers a way out for many consumers concerned with ethics and sustainability. One thing I’ve become very good at in the last few years is throwing clothes out that I don’t wear any more, and taking them to my favourite op shop (I’m quite fussy about this – I think some op shops charge too much, and I don’t support them). I now have culls every three months or so, and it feels good. I also buy a lot of books and household goods from op shops.

But, truth to tell, I don’t buy a lot of clothes from them. I think it’s partly my taste, but also because the clearance prices at Target put some of the price tags at op shops to shame. I think e-bay and the idea of on-selling is at least partly to blame for this. Op shops want to give their low-income customers a bargain, but they don’t want their shops to be free-for-alls for those who will just clear the store and resell the underpriced stock at exorbitant prices. However, I think they sometimes overdo the pricing and many op shop clothes are simply too expensive for what you get.

Buying clothes on e-bay and vintage clothes stores are other well-known alternatives to buying new. Another option is the growing trend of clothes swapping – in Australia, The Clothing Exchange holds regular clothes swapping events.

Ethics and sustainability – new clothes
Sustainable, and in some cases ethically produced, fashion seems to be a growing market, although the GFC may have damaged it somewhat. This article has a great list of fashion labels that produce sustainable clothing that are available in Australia (it’s not always clear whether they’re ethical in terms of working conditions). And a great sustainable clothing range can be found at www.purepod.com.au – again, the website doesn’t mention ethics.

Fashion facism
There’s another, much less urgent but still significant issue that being interested in clothes brings up. If you set aside the fashionable aspect of clothes for a minute, most people need to own a set of clothes suitable for a variety of different weathers and occasions. It concerns me that much of the ‘fashionable’ clothing this year doesn’t even offer the most basic of choices for women in some areas.

Take sundresses. There are two lengths available – above the knee (the mini dress) and down to the feet (the maxi dress). Embarrassingly short, or uncomfortably, impractically long. The embarrassingly short is perfect for young ‘gels’ who are happy to show off their legs (although I don’t imagine all young women feel comfortable doing this), but the ridiculously long version of the sundress is another extreme, and merely brings out the paranoid feminist in me: why, on a 34–45 degree day, would you want to be burdened with a dress that covers your entire body? For years we’ve had a huge variety of sundresses available that skirt the knee – not this year.

Talking about skirts, things are even worse on that front. This year’s miniskirts are in the main ridiculously short compared with last year’s, showing a substantial amount of thigh. Again, that’s fine if you’re an 18-year-old out on the town with your mates. But this silly length includes work skirts: retailers are happy to pressure women into wearing embarrassing, impractical clothes in the work place.

There are many reasons why women may not want to reveal that much leg, apart from feeling vulnerable and having to be careful while sitting down. Some of us have knobbly knees; some of us have prominent veins; some of us have thighs we don’t particularly like. In a youth-obsessed culture we’re told not to reveal our legs if they don’t literally shape up; but at the same time fashion wants to force us to. Liposuction, anyone?

Retailers who pretend to offer genuine choice in fact do the opposite. Country Road recently released an upmarket new label, Trenery, designed for an older demographic and selling in a new set of stores. You’d think that offering skirts and dresses below the knee would be one of its basic objectives. Instead, the catalogue features a tall young woman with long skinny legs wearing – you guessed it – dresses above the knee! There are also lots of very short shorts available for the daring older woman who’s happy to reveal all.

Please don’t even start me on the towering high heels we’re supposed to totter around in. I’m not joking when I say that they should come with a government health warning along the lines of ‘if you wear these shoes for two hours or more you run the risk of significant spinal, ankle and/or foot damage’.

Real choice
But consumers do have choices: the choice not to buy clothing from retailers who couldn’t care less about their supply chains, or fashions that degrade women; and to consider sustainable options. Although I only buy clothes I feel comfortable with, I don’t think I could easily give up my love of fashion altogether. But I can tell retailers and manufacturers what I think of their contempt for workers’ rights, only buy when I need to, investigate sustainable clothing, and refuse to participate in the most misogynistic aspects of fashion.

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Christmas: a time to stress, get depressed, and then rest!

A very happy Christmas to my tiny circle of blog readers and fellow bloggers!

My blog is not quite a year old, but I can’t imagine life without it. Sometimes it’s hard for me to blog, but this blog has kept me honest with myself.

Nothing in my life has changed on the outside, and I’m certainly not ‘cured’. But I feel as if I’ve gone through quite a lot of internal changes this year. I think mainly I feel more grounded, less deluded about things, more realistic about my life and its limitations. But I’m also looking after myself better; after months of thinking about it, I finally started meditating.

Unfortunately I haven’t cured myself of my yearly dose of Christmas stress.

I thought I’d be able to avoid it this year. I thought I could sail through the frenzied shopping malls, last-minute work projects to finish and two sisters about to have babies unscathed. I thought I could just pretend it wasn’t happening really, go on as usual.

But it got me in the end.

Actually that’s not true. A million things have been stressing me out, from the tiny (never-ending skin problems) to the gargantuan (climate change), and Christmas has just opened up another front.

Every year, my sisters and I buy presents for all seven nieces and nephews. This means that not only do my sisters have to play Santa to their own kids but they’re happy to keep buying presents for all their kids’ cousins on our side of the family.

This year, with two new arrivals on the way, I unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with my sisters a Kris Kringle for the children’s presents: I suggested we each buy one niece or nephew one good present, spending $40-50. But instead of agreeing to this change, my sisters said they wanted to continue the current system themselves but would let me off the hook completely. ‘Don’t buy them anything – Don’t worry about it’, they said, shaking their heads and taking my delicate equilibrium into account.

I kidded myself by declaring that indeed I wouldn’t. So I didn’t, until a third of the way through this month, and then I got the Christmas guilts and imagined the disapproval I’d receive if I turned up on Christmas Day with gifts only for my parents and the adult Kris Kringle. It would look unforgivably Scroogish. This led to some last-minute searching, but I’m finally done.

Next year I swear I’m buying them all an Oxfam goat. I’ll be more organised and plan it in advance.

A bad thing happened that has not helped my mood. A bird got caught behind my ancient gas heater. The first time I heard it I was in the loungeroom and some birds outside in the front yard had started twittering really loudly all of a sudden. Some of the twittering sounded very close, as if it was inside the house. I wondered momentarily if something had accidentally come down the chimney and got caught. I didn’t want to contemplate such a thought so I dismissed it as an auditory illusion.

The following afternoon as I lifted weights I heard a desperate scrabbling around behind the heater (which wasn’t on). When I heard it I realised immediately that the creature making those desperate movements must have been cheeping the day before, perhaps calling out to his friends and family outside to come and rescue him.

This was deeply distressing to me. One of my worst fears is being buried alive, and to think of an animal trapped, starving, thirsty, in the claustrophobic dark with no understanding of how it entered this state of horror was awful.

I had to go out to an appointment but arranged to meet Dad back at the house that evening. We opened the grill of the heater and had a careful look around with the torch, but saw nothing. The creature did not make a sound, which would at least have helped guide us. It was either too tired, dying or dead – although perhaps by some miracle it had escaped?

It would have been a huge job for a plumber to dismantle the heater and what would they have found at the end of it? Probably, by the next day, a dead bird.

I shed a few tears that night after Dad had left. I dreaded to hear more forlorn, hopeless scrabblings. I turned on the tele and switched the channel to a Spanish movie on SBS. In the scene taking place a female character held a colourful, exotic bird in her hand. She released it and it flew away.

I was foolishly comforted by the thought that one way or the other the little captive would soon be ‘free’. But the thought of it suffering so near to where I was living my life as if all was normal was deeply disturbing.

About this time the twin of Christmas stress – Christmas depression – made its appearance. I felt a sense of deep mourning for all the things that were lacking in my life. To a slightly lesser extent I’m still in the grip of this.

But one thing I’ve realised during this time: all the books I’m reading right now are about sad or evil things. I know that the world is in pretty dire straits and there is a lot to be sad and angry about. But more often next year I’m going to read some lighthearted books as well, just to balance things out. I’m determined to get to know the humour section of my local library.

Anyway, it’s good to know that in a day or two I’ll be able to succumb to total slothfulness and have a good ‘blob’, to rest a bit and gather my resources for the year to come.

I wish peace and joy, as well as rest and celebration, for everyone.

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Buying less, caring more: towards a sustainable, non-growth economy

Woke up early this morning with a blog entry clamouring to leave my brain and get onto the page.

There are two different knotty issues that I’ve been thinking about a bit lately and wanted to place side by side because I think they could illuminate each other. I’m not trying to solve these problems so much as simply start to look at them in tandem. Before I do that I want to warn that I’m just as much a part of the problems as anyone. In fact, it’s my own inconsistencies that lead me to contemplate these issues – the gap between my ideals and how I live my life!

So here goes.

Buddhists tell us that all living creatures want to be happy and enjoy the world. Yet our fast-paced capitalist society treats the earth, as well as human and non-human animals, as resources that need to be productive or at least managed. The effect of this is that we all overlook just how much care and nurturing the earth and its creatures need. In a sense, the whole set-up in many Western cultures requires us to do this if we are to function ‘properly’.

I suppose I’m talking a bit about sustainability here, but with a living creature component.

In his popular blog Rocky and Gawenda, former editor of The Age newspaper Michael Gawenda writes about the effects that his tiny, mischievous dog has had on his life. Since Gawenda’s retirement from full-time journalism Rocky has become his close companion: every morning they rise at dawn and go for a long walk along St Kilda beach.

But Gawenda still has many work obligations, and in an article in The Age a few months ago he wrote of his reluctance to acknowledge the depths of despair that his regular abandonment of Rocky produced in his beloved mutt. He feared that one extended absence had led to an estrangement so great that Rocky would never fully recover the depth of trust and affection he had once displayed towards his master.

In the article, Gawenda reluctantly grappled with just how delicate the emotional make-up of a non-human creature such as Rocky might be, and how much such a creature might require in care and attention.

When we start to be willing to look at a situation like that, the needs of the world can seem too overwhelming. In fact, it is nothing more than an invitation to put living beings before gain – an invitation that the world constantly tries to draw us away from.

Michael Leunig is a Melbourne cartoonist, illustrator and artist turned writer. In his regular pieces for the Age, Leunig contemplates life from the slow lane. Living in the bush, he is alive to its nuances, and documents with great honesty the rhythms of his own emotional life as he relates to an increasingly dysfunctional wider world.

Leunig is far from perfect either: his failure to see the sufferings of women denied agency and power in the world, as well as his inexplicable hostility towards Australia’s embattled intellectuals, not to mention thought itself, are baffling.

In 1995 he produced one of his most controversial cartoons, ‘Thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre’. A tiny newborn lies in a crib at a child care centre. The child is in despair because it believes that its mother has abandoned it, and it then turns that despair in on itself, deciding that it must be unworthy. Feminists were furious.

No doubt one reason for this cartoon being controversial is that Leunig was pointing out an unpleasant truth: our society does not really want to think about the complexity of the needs of a single child, and instead puts the work ethic and the dollar first.

But what I think made feminists angry was the assumption that only one half of society was responsible for this grave failure to care: women. For one short moment, Leunig was able to contemplate the giant need and great loneliness of a single child; but it was too painful for him. Rather than remain in uncertainty, and invite the ‘negative capability’ that Keats suggests and that he himself claims to be comfortable with, he simply reached for a convenient scapegoat. If he could blame women for the problem, he no longer had to deal with its full implications.

Jeff Kennett was the conservative premier of Victoria from 1992 until 1999. Gung-ho, aggressive and revengeful after many years in opposition, and having inherited a huge debt from the outgoing Labor government, he seemed to take great joy in shutting down hundreds of government schools, carrying out mass sackings of public servants, and privatising the electricity industry (which caused massive job loss).

But since retiring from politics, Kennett has changed. A former chairman of beyondblue, an organisation that publicises depression and assists sufferers, he now regrets his failure to consider the social effects of electricity privatisation. This infamous right wing warrior made the following admission in The Age of 12 December:

It’s very easy to change the natural order of life but it comes with a huge social and economic cost. If I was in office ever again and implementing change as I did in the past … I would make sure that I had a lot of education in place … I would try better to understand the impact of change.

Although many people see the categories of right and left as outdated and meaningless, I don’t agree. It’s been said that what distinguishes them is the left’s willingness to actually consider the effects of political and economic decisions on the ground, for individuals, communities and particular groups, to look at the micro as well as the macro. Through his involvement with beyondblue, Kennett has learned to do this and is a wiser human being as a result.

So – what’s the other issue I wanted to look at? I know this post is getting long, so I’ll try and keep what is an infinitely complex topic outrageously short.

The journal New Scientist had a great collection of articles in its 18 October 2008 issue on why the continued growth model of economic development simply wasn’t possible any more. It’s not a matter of ideology – the earth can’t sustain continued growth any longer because its resources are finite, and they’re fast running out. Rapidly rising population is a large part of the problem.

In his contribution, Tim Jackson looks at the sustainability–growth issue in terms of the need to reduce carbon emissions. He warns that if we factor economic growth (which itself seems to require increasing population) into the equation, ‘the idea that technological ingenuity can save us from climate disaster looks a whole lot more challenging’.

Jackson goes on to calculate how low in carbon emissions our economies would have to be by 2050 if we a) want to stabilise greenhouse levels in the atmosphere at ‘a reasonably safe 450 parts per million’ and b) factor in projected population increases, continued economic growth and the need to eradicate extreme poverty. He demonstrates that to achieve such a stabilisation, ‘the carbon content of economic output must be reduced to just 2 per cent of the best currently achieved anywhere in the European Union’. It would, in other words, necessitate more or less ‘complete decarbonisation of every last dollar’ – a well-nigh impossible task.

But if economic growth is the problem, adopting a different model would represent a change of gargantuan proportions. How is it to be done without causing widespread suffering? In fact, reducing growth in a chaotic fashion already has increased poverty and death – In March 2009 it was estimated that the recent global financial crisis would lead to the deaths of an additional 200,000 to 400 000 children.

Any discussion on changing our economic system to one that doesn’t rely on growth must look at how we can reduce consumption without increasing unemployment and causing widespread hardship.

What would a sustainable society and economy look like? Because goods would be built for the long term, maintenance and repair would become major industries.

There would be major government investment in services that have been sorely neglected for years such as public transport and social housing, as well as huge investment in renewable energy. But let’s not forget that, worthwhile as these investments are, they will still rely on the world’s natural resources to be farmed and dug from the ground (eg iron ore).

The need to care more, which I’ve identified in the previous section of this blog entry, is perhaps one of the solutions. Caring could be a significant form of employment in a sustainable economy. More teachers in classrooms. More childcare workers in creches. More psychologists and psychiatrists and counsellors in psyche units, community health centres, mental health outreach teams and jails. More nursing staff in aged care centres. More doctors in the western suburbs, new suburbs and rural areas.

But a lower consuming society would also leave more time for its citizens to care for each other, which wouldn’t cost anything, but would save a lot of money.

In the long run, this would lead to a reduction in crime and incarceration. Community bonds would strengthen.

Caring for the earth, through environmental employment projects and community vegetable gardens, could also increase.

I’m not an economist and can’t even begin to discuss here what the nuts and bolts of a non-growth economy would be, how it would actually sustain itself, pay its workers and feed its population. My point is that we need to start discussing what such an economy would look like and how we could move towards it. And perhaps the fact that the world demands so much care and attention – so much more than we can currently give it – is one reminder that something needs to change.

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Dark of the moon

A time of creeping statis. I don’t want to do anything. I could happily crawl into bed and stay there all day, basking in sleepiness.

It’s the dark of the moon. At this time it seems to me that everything active, yang, and exterior wants to come to a halt. The energies for change, action and movement are low. It’s a good time for withdrawing, for contemplation.

But I’m feeling things beyond that.

Not depression exactly. Grief, partly. The loss of two extended family members in the space of weeks. One sudden and shocking, the other, sadly anticipated, to some extent for years.

I’m also getting over ten days of extreme editing. (‘Extreme Editing’ might make a good business name – why haven’t I thought about it before?) I was asked to edit a long, complex report on a topic I had some familiarity with.

A cold slowly hatched itself, invading my brain with a sullen, quiet exhaustion. The report came in two parts, the first part unfinished while I was editing the second. I was too cottonballed to stress about it.

I hunkered down for a long stretch of concentrated thinking. I don’t know where I drew the energy from to carry on. I’m a low energy person at the best of times, and here I was with a full-blown cold and a tight deadline.

The cold was a textbook one – not, I kept telling myself, the infamous swine flu. First utter exhaustion without other symptoms, then a violent persistent cough that got worse at night (by the third night I had learned to cough in my sleep). Then a hopelessly runny nose for three days. And the horrific body image problems, looking in the mirror at the red rimmed eyes and nostrils, the swollen cheeks, the unwashed hair, and thinking I had never looked so ugly.

Struggling to finish editing the report, I didn’t get beyond the front and back yards of my flat for six days. Towards the end I was running out of vegetables, meat and fish. The last morning I breakfasted on brown rice.

It wasn’t that drastic in terms of actual hours -- I didn’t slave away till 1 in the morning, as I had on previous jobs in the long ago, enthusiastic days when I still believed I could make it as a full time editor. In fact, I got quite good at intuitively knowing when I had done enough for one day. It’s just that, even resting, I didn’t have enough energy in those last few days to get properly dressed and drive to the supermarket.

At times like this that I am confronted by the reality of not having a partner, and the huge practical difference that makes. Ideally, partners can support each other’s careers at different times in reciprocal ways, leveraging the partnership so that both have a better chance of success. I fantasised during this busy time of someone humming away in the background, cheerfully asking me if I was hungry as I slaved away, and what time would I like dinner? Instead, dinner was often fried eggs or a bowl of cooked chickpeas!

My body and mind are now claiming their payment. They demand rest. I want nothing but to stare into space, even though aimlessness terrifies me.

One thing that struck me was how magical, glossy, and delightful were the simple actions of washing my hair, dressing carefully and putting makeup on to take that much-needed trip to the supermarket after I’d finally uploaded the edited report. Bringing treats back home for lunch, and eating slowly as I read the newspaper. I can’t describe the feeling of freedom of those simple actions.

The next day I spent almost three hours swanning around the Chadstone shopping mall. Happily surrounded by the anonymous crowd. Wonderful to freewheel, to luxuriate in unstructured time.

Until the next big job of course. I like doing lots of small editing jobs but let’s hope the next major project is at least weeks away.

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Furni-phobia: the fear of buying big-ticket consumer goods

I have just bought a new, LCD, digital, HD (not 'complete' HD -- there aren't enough pixels) flat-screen TV and had it installed by the combined efforts of the nice aerial man and a long-suffering friend of mine who is electronically advantaged. And I feel slightly traumatised.

I knew this feeling was coming and I was prepared. Every time I get a new, expensive-ish bit of furniture, brown- white- or blackgoods, or anything that significantly alters my domestic environment I go through a 'trial period' where I am convinced I have made a huge mistake and I should just go back to frittering away my money on clothes.

I know where and how this started. For many years I just didn't know how to shop. I rarely had enough money to buy new household items so acquired my parents' or friends' cast-off fridges, crappy vacuum cleaners and so on. When I ws forced to buy something new I just went for the bottom-of-the-range model and I rarely shopped around.

Then I started to earn a bit of money and somehow found myself with a luxurious wool underlay and top-of-the-range, down-filled doona that conspired to overheat and dry out my entire body so I'd wake at 3 in the morning feeling like a piece of dehydrated meat and screaming for water (that was 2002 and I still haven't got around to selling that almost unused underlay on eBay).

My next try was a heater and for this adventure I turned into Goldilocks, returning the first heater because it was too cold, the second because it was too powerful, then skulking to another shop to buy a heater that was 'just right'.

So I kind of taught myself to shop. I'd been in a twelve-step program and I used the 'letting go' techniques I'd learnt there along with a new-agey concept of intuition I tried to use in my life. And I did get better at shopping, I really did. But it took ages and much trial and error. To this day, buying anything significant involves months of research, browsing and soul-searching until the heart-wrenching decision is made and I reluctantly hand over my card.

And then guess what happens? I convince myself that in fact, despite my gut feeling reassuring me, I have yet again stuffed up, under-researched, not done enough internet searching, not been to the right shop -- what was possessing me that I didn't go there, what was I thinking?

I shouldn't be too hard on myself. The fact is I'm on a low income now so when shopping for a big-ticket item I'm caught between two competing needs -- I can't afford to buy anything approaching the luxury model, but the bloody thing has to last for years. I guess an easy way of expressing this is that I'm looking for value for money. I'm an expert bargainer, and have perfected the down to earth, look-em-in-the-eye 'what's your best price?' once I've made up my mind.

The familiar adaptation process occurred soon after the new mattress arrived. (Two to three weeks before delivery because of Christmas/New Year? No problem. I could wait. It was going to be a big adjustment.) It looked beautiful, so tall and imposing with its luxurious latex pillowtop ('you have to get a pillowtop', my sister had said, 'it feels like you're sleeping on a cloud').

I had been back to the same chain store again and again, going to different branches so I could pretend I was a new customer and spending ten-minute stretches lying back on the mattress I'd provisionally chosen -- sales assistants advise that you have to lie there for ages before you get any idea of what a mattress feels like, because at first it feels great just to be lying down.

(This was a horrible experience. The recession had just started and there was never anyone else in the stores, even on Saturday mornings. Just acres and acres of inviting beds. Sometimes I walked into stores and went straight to the beds and lay down on one of them and then the sales assistant would sidle up and say something like 'looking for a mattress are you?' and it would all feel way too intimate).

Anyway, after the mattress finally arrived I quickly convinced myself that it had been a huge mistake. For a start it was almost impossible to make my bed. My pillowtop, relatively inexpensive as it was, is so heavy you can't really hold it up to tuck the sheets underneath, except at the corners. And because it is so tall, it obscures the deco Danish bedhead I'd bought for a song on eBay only six or so months before. Then of course I couldn't sleep because the mattress was -- well it was too comfortable! It felt too indulgent, too foreign.

And one morning, after a day of sitting, both on public transport and at a theatre, I woke with my upper back aching, having spent too long on my back in the luxurious hollow that the latex had soon developed. I rushed to the internet to discover the truth, and sure enough, latex pillowtops were notorious for sinking in the middle and creating bad backs! That was it, I was going to return the bed before it ruined my spine beyond all repair. Why, oh why hadn't I gone to Beds for Backs? No wonder no one was in those conventional mattress stores -- they were all at Beds for Backs, looking after their spines!

But still my gut feeling said, don't worry, it's fine. You did make the right choice.

A similar feeling assailed me last night about the new tele after my friend had gone home. He'd adjusted the picture so that the golf no longer looked glittery and I could no longer reassure myself that I had made a terrible mistake and would have to return this piece of crap forthwith or sell it to my sister. So the telly was just too right. The screen was too big, the experience too overwhelming after watching a tiny little toy box with a 'bunny ears' aerial for almost 20 years. This monster would swallow me up and turn me into a televidiot.

And then after watching a rock show I never normally bother with I drifted exhausted to bed, and my mattress, my mattress, well it just felt so comfortable, so comforting -- so -- right.

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Post Christmas

One of those days where I feel as if I haven't achieved enough. Yes, I had a list and it was good that everything got crossed off but the list had such choice items as 'Walk Jordan' and 'put script in'. Nothing very challenging. And I spent almost an hour browsing at Chadstone when I had determined to go only to Medicare to get my refund from the dermatology appointment. But I went to Target and ended up trying on a pair of pants for $18.80 – they were so huge they floated on me, but size 8 would have been perfect – and then I looked aimlessly through the bargain books at Borders.

I'm almost ready to challenge myself again. I've given myself a week off to recover from what was a kind of 'throat cold'. My throat has been hurting for weeks and finally the thing sputtered to life, causing helpless fits of repetitive coughing and a throat that felt like it contained a hard, angry red box whenever I swallowed. The cold's almost run its course but the sore throat gets worse at night, so much so that whenever I lie down the phlegm burns it and I can't sleep.

J has sauntered into my life. One minute I was uncertain, frightened, waiting outside Readings bookstore for this acerbic stranger to appear. We had 'hooked up', for want of a better term, on an 'adult' internet dating site. The next thing he was walking beside me apologising for being late and my first impression was that his chunky, olive face and body were solid, assimilable, and that there was no awkwardness of one person being taller. He is wrong in every way that matters – fashion sense, suburb sense, interest in books – but that makes it, somehow, possible.

And will it be? I have no idea. All I know is that it is the first relationship in living memory where I am using my intuition and not my rational mind. I'm taking it meeting by meeting. After the first time I assumed it would be a one-night stand. I left his place squinting in the hot midday Blackburn sunlight, totally enervated, appalled at his sleep-induced farts and rubbings, relieved to think I'd probably never see him again. 'See you round', he complained after my perfunctory lip smack. I motored away, up and down the Glen Waverley hills and into my blessedly solitary life.

But afterwards I felt as if I had abandoned him to all that was not easily solvable – his unemployment, his regret at moving, his own solitude. I had abandoned him and still my pelvis felt heavy with his body, my organs had plugged into his and still reverberated. I kept on remembering how he had been turned from me in the dim lit morning, the back of his head lodged deep in the pillow, his body doona-covered, his short dark hair all unmoving when he murmured 'I'm awake'. Such consciousness in the stillness, like something light and unknown watching me from an unseen vantage point.

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