On Tuesday, I went to Hell

Dear [local government body],

Here is my idea of Hell: sitting trapped for four and a half hours in a large room full of strangers with no food, coffee or even water and nothing to do but listen to a succession of amateur musicians maim and torture perfectly innocent pieces of music.

You provided me with this experience on Tuesday evening.

Here are some thoughts around improving your Eisteddfod:

1. Call me over sensitive, but stationing a couple of surly old women on desk and door duty does not make for the warmest welcome one could envisage. Further, closing the door and having them guard it like rabid bulldogs during performances could be construed as slightly condescending, aggressive and offensive. Personally, I’d choose a committee of Rick Springfield and his clone in strategically torn jeans to greet and seat, but failing that, someone with half a smile and no God-complex would be an improvement.

2. Consider this: the success of your event is reliant on parents -
• allowing their children to participate
• giving up their regularly scheduled evening laundry/gaming/cardio sessions/television to ferry their children to and from your venue
• (often) staying to support the proceedings.

Bear in mind that these parents have only their mobile phone apps (on silent) to interrupt the tedium of shrieking piccolos and oom-pa-pa-ing euphoniums (not to mention scraping chairs, clanging music stands and the occasional collapsing drum kit).

Pop quiz:

Do you seat the parents at the front of the room where at least they can pick their children out from the sea of tubas and cymbals on stage or do you herd them like cattle to a designated area of rock hard plastic chairs at the rear of the room?

Think about it.

Hint: cushions are your friend.

3. Instead of soliciting prize donations from service clubs and charging fifty cents for a photocopied sheet of paper masquerading as a program to raise funds for your event, sell food and coffee. You have a captive (and largely desperate) audience of parents, rellies, friends (and other hangers on who couldn’t think of an excuse for non-attendance fast enough). By nine o’clock, they would pay almost any money for a dry ham and cheese sandwich and a piss weak instant coffee, if only to break the interminable monotony. This opportubnity is a fundraiser's wet dream.

4. It’s clear that you are music zealots. This is fine. I am a tolerant person, all for diversity and harmony. However, it would be preferable if you did not inflict your fervor on unsuspecting adult community members. Some people have a life outside music. They have dinners to cook, families to care for, sleep to be enjoyed. Is it really necessary to have 762 eisteddfod sections? Word of the day: downsize.

5. Further, do not infect impressionable children with your zeal. Music is not the centre of their universe. They also have sport, homework and chores to deal with. Occasionally, they need to eat and sleep.

6. I know it’s nice for the soloists to have an audience, but sandwiching – count ‘em – SEVEN of them between the band sections reeks of rent-a-crowd. It’s one thing to listen to my own child – listening to some stranger’s brat annihilate Debussy is a cruel and unusual punishment for an unsuspecting citizen. Without this musical detour, I could have been home with a chicken burger and a glass of sav blanc ninety minutes earlier.

7. Fact: many students who perform in one section, also perform in other sections. Sometimes, they perform in five or six sections. Short lesson in cause and effect: children who perform three nights running become tired. Tired children are cranky. Cranky children irritate their parents. Irritated parents swear up and down there will be no eisteddfod participation next year. Tip: rethink your scheduling.

8. Pointed question: does it really take the adjudicator 10 minutes to figure out whether a band comprises mainly gifted protégés or talentless dolts?

9. Begging audience members to stay when you are already running an hour and a half late and it is past most of the parents’ bedtimes is pitiful. Don’t do it.

10. Three hundred females. Two toilets. Do the math.

Yours,

The Monstress


Image: Pixomar

My partner is a kleptomaniacal cross dresser

My partner is a kleptomaniacal cross dresser.

That is, he steals my black socks and wears them. It doesn’t seem to matter if they have pink stripes, yellow polka dots or purple daisies. He wears them anyway.

You would think that after spending all day every day in a room with thirty hormonal, judgmental 12-year-olds, he would succumb to pre-teen pressure and desist. But any tween ribbing (good natured or otherwise) seems to slide right off him like eggs off Teflon (or socks off sweaty feet).

You would also imagine that working in an industry where the ratio of men to women is something like 1:30, one of his female colleagues would have gently worded him up on his fashion faux pas. But if they have, it’s had about as much impact as a nerf ball on a Sherman tank.

When we first cohabited, he announced that any black socks in the house were his. I thought he was kidding. Then I found everything from my black trouser socks to my lacy love heart socks in his drawer and realised he was serious.

I think he was amused by his black sock rule. I think he thought I ought to be amused, too. After a month of having to hunt for any pair of my black socks, I no longer found his little sock foible endearing. After a year of  finally tracking down my expensive silk socks, only to find them pilled and stretched beyond recognition, I could no longer see the funny side. After a decade of living with a partner whose sock drawer closely resembled a black sock devouring vortex, I was more than a bit over the sock saga.

I tried pointing out the vast differences between black Explorers and frilly black knee-highs (you Tarzan, me Jane) to no avail. He still wore my black socks. I tried explaining the question in to which he placed his masculinity every time he donned floral footwear. He still wore my black socks. I tried crying, shouting, joking, bribery and the silent treatment. He still wore my black socks.

I could have worn his socks, but floppy, holey Explorers were just not my scene. I could have hidden my socks but he’d only have hijacked them during the laundry process. I could have just capitulated and gone with blue or green or magenta but there really are some occasions where a girl needs to wear black socks. Besides, by the time we had hit the second or third year of our relationship, he had manoeuvred well in to the navy, forest and scarlet realms with the excuse that they all look black in his drawer in the dark. My two excellent points (one: turn the light on, two: why are my socks in your drawer in the first place?) seemed to bounce right off his ear drums like a kid on a castle.

I continued to pursue a solution in a non-screaming-and-tearing-my-hair-out kind of way.

And he relentlessly, systematically and heartlessly continued to kidnap my socks.

Finally, after more than a decade, three pairs of miracles materialised. I found them in Target: black socks with iridescent rainbow stripes/stars/dots on the bottoms. For all intents and purposes, black, but totally and unmistakeably feminine and distinctly mine, even in the dark...or so I thought.

He wore them today – the ones with the stripes.

But that’s okay. It won’t happen again.

On my way home from work tonight, I am going to K&D to buy a chainsaw to cut his feet off. Then he won’t need socks anymore.

Mwah-ha-ha-ha!

Conversational dynamite

Looking for a conversational gambit to put a rocket up a dying dinner party or dreary car trip? I have two words for you: man bag.

Contentious, much?

See, you’re already lining up your opinions, rallying your arguments and frog marching your supporting examples towards the spot right between my eyes, aren’t you? Whether you’re pro or ‘not unless hell freezes over’, chances are you’re not anywhere near the fence. For some reason, the man purse turns even the most mild mannered person into a green, bulging, shirt-shredded, red-eyed menace.

I’ll be up front. I like a man with a murse. These accessories are practical, stylish and demonstrate the unwavering security a fellow has in his own masculinity. This is sexy.

Besides, with all the gadgets everyone carts around each day, it's only fair that men have the same options as women have. Equality. See? How else are you meant to transport your phone, laptop, wallet, emergency hair product, cigars, hardcore porn, Samurai sword and other masculine items to and from your home?

(And you can forget putting them in your mum’s/sister’s/girlfriend’s handbag – do you know how much this pisses her off?)

Hark? Is that the lame chorus of ‘backpack’, I hear?

I have one primary objection to the backpack solution: style (or total lack thereof). A clean, brand name backpack is fine for the gym. It is not cool for the cocktail bar. Further, a backpack in any business context is not so much a bag as a public declaration of your utter fashion ineptitude.

And as for using a briefcase as a carryall - what are you? My dad?

Did someone really say ‘bum bag’? Just go crawl back under your abalone shell ashtray, will you?

Man bags are hip. They are happening. They are now.

So, if a guy you know turns up for a lunch date or meeting carrying a satchel, a messenger bag or even an over-sized leather wallet with a shoulder strap, you can leave the gay gags packed up and the snide ‘girl’ asides under wraps. Some of us think he’s got sex appeal. And he’s certainly got his act (and his iPod, keys and shades) together.

Hell, fellas, maybe one day soon, you’ll stop being a scaredy sheep and get one, too.

Cacophony

Music to make your ears bleed

There are two people in the world who like the bagpipes – my partner and the person who lent him a CD probably entitled How to torture mercilessly anyone unfortunate enough to be a passenger in your car. (Or perhaps someone lent him the CD as a joke and he just hasn’t twigged yet – in which case there is only one person in the world who likes the bagpipes.)

To be frank, when presented with the option of listening to a CD of bagpipe ‘music’, I would rather listen to a) a Tassie devil screeching for a week, b) all three High School Musical DVDs - at full volume - one after another, c) a Justin Bieber song (okay, half a Justine Bieber song).

Alfred Hitchcock once said, ‘I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.’

Personally, I think bagpipes sound more like what would happen if you ran a feline through a garbage disposal; taught a cow to yodel to Marilyn Manson and played back the soundtrack in slow mode; or recorded a hippopotamus giving birth...to a caterpillar D4.

The only time I have ever heard a song with bagpipes in it and not wanted to hack coat hanger hooks through my eardrums is in AC/DC's It's a long way to the top. This is because AC/DC’s cool-factor marginally outweighs the bagpipes’ horribleness.

Imagine if your child came home from school and said they were going to learn to play the bagpipes. Hot cross buns on the violin was excruciating. As a result of Three blind mice on the bagpipes, you'd get a doctor's certificate for a month off work. And when you impaled the music teacher's head repeatedly on a large spike, the judge would rule the homicide justifiable.

Listening to the bagpipes is worse than hearing fingernails screech down a blackboard. It also tops the whine of a dentist's drill. It has more of a shudder-factor than the squeal of polystyrene, the shriek of microphone feedback or even the relentless irritatingness of a Crazy Frog ringtone.

If a migraine were a noise, it would sound exactly like the bagpipes.

(I hear CDs make excellent clock faces, sculptures and coasters.)

See also 20 people who shouldn't have inflicted themselves on the world.

Dole, anyone?

Dear [office junior],

Thank you for sharing with me your interpretation of your position description. It’s often refreshing to be exposed to another’s perspective. Unfortunately, this was not one of those occasions.

This may come as a surprise to you, and perhaps I am being naive, but when I asked you to fax a document for me, I truly expected you to smile, nod and do it. (Throwing in a ‘yes’, a ‘right away’ or a ‘no problem’ would have added a certain je ne sais quoi but one can’t expect too much for $40k a year – or whatever the hell we pay you).

So, I must admit, I was a smidge taken aback when you said, ‘I didn’t realise sending your faxes was part of my job description.’ In fact I was so surprised by your words and, more especially, by your tone – which, if I am brutally honest, I would have to conservatively call ‘narky’ – that I felt my hands curling in to white knuckled fists and my cheeks flushing with a hue akin to the colour of beetroot. Obviously, we were experiencing a wee glitch in our interchange.

Our teensy miscommunication escalated when I then said ‘excuse me?’ I am sorry. I can see how you might have misinterpreted my words. But, just to clarify, this was not, in fact, an invitation to repeat your previous assertion. Conversely, it was, my attempt to graciously present you with an opportunity to amend your earlier (unintentional, I’m sure) faux pas and reply with a smile, a nod and an appropriate action (faxing my document, for instance). (I think we’ve already covered off the lack of additional je ne sais quoi and the reason for this.)

You certainly can’t have meant to insert your ballet flat so firmly into your pastel-Australis-ed mouth. After all, it wasn’t as if I asked you to fetch me coffee, pick up my dry cleaning or floss my teeth, for heaven’s sake.

In any case, I sincerely apologise if you considered my rapid retrieval of the document from your hand as ‘snatching’ and I certainly didn’t mean for you to overhear any words of displeasure I may have muttered as I walked briskly and purposefully away (did I mention my genetic predisposition towards Tourette’s? Poor me! But we all have our crosses to bear...).

As an understanding and tolerant mentor to younger, less erudite staff, I would have been satisfied to leave matters be once you apologised, albeit succinctly (though you might work on the delivery of your smile, dear – it bore an alarming resemblance to a corpse’s rictus – or possibly a snarling bear’s maw.)

However, I was dreadfully embarrassed to discover that our senior manager somehow, miraculously and completely inadvertantly got wind of our exchange. I simply can’t imagine how that happened!

It’s a terrible shame that she didn’t seem overly refreshed by your perspective on your position description either. Perhaps this sad lack of understanding shared by myself and our learned management is a generational anomaly. (Although I noticed the other office girls of your approximate vintage are giving you a wide berth in the tea room, as though knuckle-raps from senior management may be contagious. Silly, superstitious girls!)

In any case, I wanted to express my commiserations that your probation period may now be truncated and, should this be the case, I do wish you well in your search for more suitable employment (perhaps something more solitary, such as night cleaning or stacking supermarket shelves would be appropriate).

Yours, ever so sincerely,

The Monstress

PS One wonders if it might have been easier just to simply send the damn fax, really, doesn’t one?