Whiplash entry!

DILEMMA: What on earth do you give as Christmas presents to a tribe of your beloved's nieces and nephews when

a) you've never met them

b) your limited contact with small people means that you have no idea what kids are into these days

c) the assortment includes males and females between the ages of 2 and 10

d) time and money aren't endless?

 

ANSWER: you whip up a bevvy of customised aliens!

This is a pattern I drew up some time ago for these little green men of the Hungry Zine 'space' issue...

It has been modified in a couple of ways. I used safety eyes ringed with felt instead of detachable-and-chokeable-onable buttons due to the age of the recipients. I also made them smiley because I was worried that they might be a little spooky for young folks when they had their original penetrating stare.

They are made from various scraps of vintage and appropriated fabrics - curtains, clothing, and furnishing fabric. They are stuffed with polyester in their extremities and a belly full of bulgar wheat so that they have a satisfying bean-bag feel when you throw one at your sibling.

Here they are mid-assembly when I was putting them together during a train journey...

...and all completed, adding intrigue to an otherwise ordinary bunch of Christmas lilies...

They were a real hit with their new owners (except the youngest, who liked her Fisher Price truck much more because it had buttons that made noise) who instantly wanted help to make them clothes. The pink one with blue eyes ended up as an angel called Talia with a pink felt dress, and pipe cleaner halo and wings. The green one became a bad-ass bikie with a black waistcoat and bandanna with eye holes. The purple one became a super-alien with belt and wings.

Next mission: make some aliens for myself that I actually get to keep!

Behold, my sophisticated cutting and pasting and colouring-in using Microsoft Paint. I am like, totally, a trained visual artist. Can't you tell? Two years at TAFE baby, yeah!

Newtonmas is the alternative seasonal shebang for secular scientists like myself. We all know that Lil' Baby Jebus was not really born on December 25th and that the Christians conveniently appropriated a big fat pagan party. "If the heathens are already at it, we'll just switch gods on 'em and they won't even notice," and lo, it was so. That's why Christmas has such a bizarre blend of churchy blah-blah and pagan trees and yule logs and feasting.

ANYWAY. Sir Isaac Newton, inventor of gravity and glass prisms and other cool stuff WAS genuinely born on December 25th. This is fact. Thusly I am celebrating Newtonmas by throwing an apple in the air and watching it fall to the ground to toast the old bloke with the big hair.

I'm probably not going to post anything for a while because, well, I can't be arsed. I plan to spend the next couple of weeks doing some dedicated eating and noodling. I will leave y'all with a splendid anecdote that a collegue told me. She witnessed a child of a yummy-mummy-latte-set type announce the figures in a nativity scene as "The wise men, and that's Joseph, and Mary, and Little Babycino."

Happy Newtonmas. As I wrote in the printed version of the card above, may you observe this occasion with the gravity it deserves.

The Curmudgeon's family have started arriving for Hexmas. They aren't just a tribe... they are several amalgamated tribes. There appear to be several hundred children orbiting the two primary parents, but that is an illusion fostered by their speedy and erratic movement and that they bear six heads of matching white-blonde hair. I can't remember which is which, let alone keep track of them... I have to stop and count out loud to see whether there has been a net gain or loss after any particular burst of energy.

I have been a bit of a princess (moi?) about the descent of his family because I'm very fond of my livebird-centric and comfortable existence where I can fully indulge my Curmudgeonettely tendencies and curse Christmas and all that it stands for. But I must recant. The kids are nice. They are bright and friendly and curious. They were looking after one another rather than running feral and brandishing weapons. It was very cool to see them stare, mouths gaping, at everyday Melbourne stuff like wacky buskers and public art, in the way that only the very young or very regional can do (and they are both). The Pater Familias arrives this evening.

Truth be told, I have always been a little bit jealous of folks who had large and unruly families who filled every moment of time in late December. But most of all, the Curmudgeon is pleased and proud to introduce me to his tribe, and I'm pretty lucky for that. Not that previous love interests have hidden me in a cupboard or made me wear a paper bag on my head, but it's been a while since someone was so genuinely delighted to have me hanging about. 'Tis a privilege and I mustn't be so flippant about it.

Maybe I should buy myself a lavish birthday present. Because lord knows, I deprive myself of so many shiny things all the year long... and wouldn't it go nicely with my new red shiny telly cabinet thing? And all the other orange shiny things I seem to have acquired, almost by accident, recently?

Actually I should be thinking about a more practical splash-out (ha) on a water tank. It's been on the cards since I moved into the house almost exactly a year ago. I want to water my vegies without guilt - we're on serious water restrictions now due to the drought, and while I don't give a shit about having brown and crispy grass (Squid loves it because it's good and scratchy for rolling on), I need to keep the drink up on the young fruit trees and the other garden edibles. I got some very lovely contributions to the tank fund for my birthday.   

Recent adventure of note: birthday visit to the Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne. It's unlike any botanic garden I've ever seen. Very sculptural, and with astonishing bursts of colour. It reminded me of the visual boredom I felt about the European landscapes with unending emerald greens, and how I longed for the complexity of my native country. It's harsh and spiky and by no means lush, and I love it. The 400-year-old Xanthorrhoea grass trees are enormous and venerable. In the centre is a huge splash of red soil from the Top End... it's soo.. RED!

Did I mention it was my birthday?

This is Thingummy bob with his caretaker, Miles...

And yes, Miles is appropriately horrified at the crude and unsophisticated nature of his toy. Fortunately, Intelligent Design (me) is here to steer the evolution of the genus Thingummy, and his new cousin will be receiving the finely-honed 2.0 version below.... if I can bear to give Thingummy jig up.

(The nerd in me just couldn't resist the biology injokes... sorry.)

 

I heard that Neil Curtis, writer and illustrator of The Memory Book and Cat and Fish among others, died yesterday. He was a guest teacher when I was at TAFE and he was unique and wonderful and obtuse and difficult. So sorry to hear that the cancer won - my money was on Neil kicking cancer butt just to be contrary.

Excuse the magical thinking, but the cool change yesterday and this morning felt like we had been almost forgiven, somehow. The weekend was blisteringly hot. Bushfires are out of control in the north-east of the state and we folks in the city know it by the smoky haze in the air, the sun that shines bright orange, and the nightmares in the newspaper each morning. I can't help but think that we ephemeral humans really pissed off the planet and now we're subject to its rage. This sort of extreme weather is not part of the natural cycle, no matter how much Prime Miniscule Johnny denies it. Melbourne, the four-seasons-in-one-day city, is now stuck with erratic meteorological variability on a scale that has never been seen before.

 

I'll back down from the apocalyptic thinking now and head into my own cosy little life. Despite the oppressive heat, I went pup-shopping with Brudda and sister-in-law yesterday and came away with a winner. She's a sweet little spotty black-and-white thing called Clover. Here she is curled up against their other dog, Rusty.

 

 

 

There was a little piece in The Age's Sunday magazine by Sonya Hartnett, describing her relationship with her dog. Apparently I'm not the only one who's batty about their pup. "Every dog should be thought of as ace," she writes. "An animal lives a bright, honourable, rugged life. It lives the best life it can, and then meets death bravely. To know a fine and clever animal well - to touch its coat, to follow its thoughts, to see the world, even for a moment, through its eyes - is a privilege." It made me think of my grandfather and his dog Topper who had to be put down when the family emigrated because the military-trained dog couldn't be re-housed. Papa swore off ever owning another dog because the sorrow of losing them was too great. We've had many dogs in our family and when they die, it's unspeakably awful. But Harnett is right. The best thing to do, when you can, is go to the pound and find another.

 

I am looking forward to the Boxing Day family gathering that will now have as many dogs as family members - five. Bring on the bedlam! On Christmas Day itself, wholeheartedly reviled by this ex-retail and atheist grinch, I will have to pretend I don't hate it as much as I do because the Curmudgeon's large and child-laden family are schlepping down from up North for the festering season. My own family is small and always has been and I find large family gatherings very overwhelming. I might be doing a lot of hiding in my room with the dog while the Curmudgeon holds court.

 

Finally, I was commissioned to make another monster by the recipients of the first and I've been very slack because the baby for whom it was to be made is now weeks old. Whoops. Anyway, I closed the house up early on Saturday and it stayed quite cool inside, giving me no excuse but to knuckle down and make a monster. The recipients of the first one christened him Bob, short for Thingummybob... naturally this one is Jig, or Thingummyjig. And once again I'm reluctant to part with it. I think I'll let it hang around for a few days before sending it off... photo to come.

My new telly cabinet from the Swedish Beast. For my telly, on which to sit. I have to keep looking at it because my eyes love, love, love its redness. And shinyness. It's just so.... red!

I got heckled by some old guys on a park bench today. They called me something in another language which sounded, to my ears, like a feminised version of 'prosciutto'. Could be entirely innocent, but I can't help but suspect that I have been likened to purchasable meat of some variety or another. Mmmm, dry and salty. 

String of brash expletives. Apparently I am plagued by gremlins at present. My wallet went walkies yesterday (my head aches at just the thought of all the running around and card replacing and money-borrowing) and today I've lost my work pass. Now I can't get into or around the building. The second one I've lost in a year. Idiot.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Knew I shouldn't have got out of bed today. Or yesterday, it seems.

I have a little theory about why folks often screw up their faces in disgust when they see a picture of themselves. The funny thing is that often their friends will love the picture, but the subject just hates it. "But I don't look like that!" they protest.

All of us have facial asymmetries of one kind of another. I have various spots and moles and so on, but I know that my left eyelid is lower than the right, especially when I'm tired, so it look a little droopy. According to Just-So-Story-telling evolutionary psychologists, asymmetry is ugly because it is an indirect marker of low fitness. (Evolutionary fitness, not jump-around-in-aerobics-fitness.) Personally I've always liked kinda wonky faces and I find them appealing and interesting... but I've never claimed to be anything but an evolutionary dead end.

Anyway. Asymmetry. So when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we become accustomed to our uneven features and they are no longer prominent or oft-noticed. However a photograph shows our faces as they appear to others, not a reversed mirror image, so we see our asymmetries not only swapped to the other side, but effectively exaggerated due to the cognitive adjustments we've already made that permit us to ignore them in the first place. This image we see resembles us closely but is just different enough to our mental image of ourselves, facilitated by the confounding mirror, to freak us out. Whereas this image is exactly what our friends see and to them it's a good reproduction of a face they know and like.

I reckon psychologists could, if they haven't already, play around with photoshop and adjust portraits a few different ways. When asked, the portrait subject would claim that their mirror reflection is their true selves and protest that something's wrong with the untouched portrait.

Amateur psychology over and out.