IKEA Rage!

Sunday morning IKEA trip was nearly the end of me. Towards the end of our journey through the store, pushed along by the mass of men, women and prams, we realised that we hadn't written down the shelf details to find the flatpacked items near the store exit. Back we went, like salmon swimming upstream, trying to relocate the items we wanted to purchase. Diligently, we wrote down the aisle and shelf details and returned to the flatpack area, only to find that a couple of the items did not appear where they should have been. Eventually, we found a sales assistant, who explained to us that some of the items were actually available in a different part of the store...back where we had come from. Back we went, this time like salmon swimming upstream while pushing a large trolley with flatpacked parts of incomplete furniture on it. We find the area in which the additional part of the furniture is supposed to be stored, but guess what...there's none there. After finding another elusive sales assistant, we were informed that they were out of stock of that particular part. Arghhhhh! Back to the flat pack area to get our next item, which of course is not where it's supposed to be. Instead there is a small notice "Please obtain this item from the main furniture aisle". So back I go yet again upstream. Eventually I find the damn stools, but they are locked to the wall. Another sales assistant tries to avoid me, but eventually I corner her and ask her to release one of the stools for me. She says she has to make a phone call first. I stand close by, to make sure she doesn't run away. She has a lengthy conversation on the phone (how hard can this be?) and eventually hangs up to explain to me that she is not 'authorised' to release display stools to customers, but that there are 80 of them in the flat pack area. I beg to differ, explaining that there were no stools on the shelf, but a little sign saying to get the stools from the main furniture aisle. She then explains that the sign was referring to the main furniture aisle in the flat pack area. ARGHHHHHH! I head back to Ange, who is not answering my frantic calls on her mobile. When I find her she says that her phone has no service. Apparently IKEA is a mobile phone service black hole, just to make the whole experience a little more challenging. We go back to the flat pack area to look for stools. Can't find them anywhere. But I see a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye and pounce on the unsuspecting sales assistant and demand to be taken to the stools. He looks panicked but then directs me to an enormous pile of stools just near the checkouts. ARGHHHHHHH!

Finally we escaped from the IKEA vortex. They should offer free counselling at the exits. Honestly, next time anyone suggests a trip to IKEA, I am going to recommend rolling in some broken glass instead - honestly, it will be less painful.

Bedding

Just down the road from my apartment is a church yard. One of the buildings has a wide veranda around it, and in the summer one or two homeless people sleep there. A couple of months ago when it started to get cold, I was walking past early one morning on my way to work. I noticed that the man sleeping on the veranda only had a thin blanket and was shivering. I immediately decided to get out my spare blankets and old doona and leave them on the veranda on the following weekend. The next day, however, as I was walking past to go to work, I noticed that someone beat me to it. On the veranda was a big pile of mattresses, sleeping bags, and blankets. Other people obviously noticed too.

Since then, it has become much colder, almost freezing, at night, and a few more people have been sleeping on the veranda. I guess it's warmer with a few bodies together. This morning I walked by at about 7am, and it was about 4 degrees celcius (just above freezing) and as I looked over at the bodies huddled under the blankets, I saw something rather touching. A cat was curled up on top of one of the bodies, fast asleep and obviously making the most of the body heat, and no doubt also giving a little comfort to the person sleeping below.

This afternoon I was walking home with my just-purchased sets of new sheets for my bed, and as I walked past the church yard I suddenly realised the enormous luxury that I take for granted on a daily basis and I was suitably humbled.

Brazilian Wax

This is hilarious!

Degusthaustion!

Last night Ange took me out for a belated birthday dinner. She took me to Circa at the Prince, one of Melbourne's top restaurants. It is actually just down the road from where I live, but I had never been there. The decor is lovely and they have a large number of wait staff on hand to give you constant (but not intrusive) service. We decided to have the 8 course degustation menu which took us 4 hours to get through! Hence our renaming the concept to encompass the exhaustion involved in the process. The food was glorious: Ange had the normal degustation menu and I had the vegetarian version. That was fun as I didn't really know what each course was, so I was experiencing all these tastes and textures often without knowing what they were. I did find the menu on the website this morning though and discovered some of the mystery flavours!

We decided just to order a bottle of wine rather than have the degustation wine list as well. The couple sitting next to us had the whole degustation extravaganza which involved a specially matched glass of wine or liquor with every course. I think I would have passed out after about the fourth glass, and not been able to make it to the end of the courses!

It was actually lovely to sit still for 4 hours and have the chance to talk for that long. In our lives these days we don't often sit still that long, let alone in an environment where there's nothing to do except talk - no television, other people to entertain, etc. We both enjoyed it, although we were exhausted and in danger of slipping into food coma by the end of the night!

Blonde moment of the week

Yesterday I rushed home from work to have a shower and get changed to go out to dinner. I took off my jacket, my sweater, my shirt, and then had a moment of "what the.....?!" because I didn't have a bra on!!! Yes, I had gone to work sans-bra and hadn't even realised. I'm glad I didn't notice until I got home or I would have died of embarassment all day at work. I can't believe I did that - I must have been half-asleep that morning when I got dressed. Luckily I had so many layers of clothes on that it wouldn't have been noticeable to anyone else. Hilarious!

My last week in the US

Love, Marriage and Sex - preferrably in that order

I'm sitting in an airport lounge in LA waiting for my connection back to Melbourne. May need to have a couple more drinks to make sure I sleep! Anyway, on the flight from Boston to here I was pondering something that has been bugging me lately.

Some of my friends and colleagues now have kids at that age when they start asking questions about sex. One of the American trainers at the course I just attended told a funny story. Her friend's 7 year old daughter came home from school and asked that question that parents dread: "Mummy, what's sex?" Her friend explained it in an "appropriate way" suitable for a 7 year old to understand. Long pause. 7-year-old says "So, do you and Daddy do that?" Even longer pause. Mum says "yes, sometimes". Even longer pause. 7-year-old thinks about this for a moment and says "You know, I think I'd understand it much better if I could watch you doing it"!!!! Glad I didn't have to explain to a 7-year-old why that was not going to happen!

But I digress. My real issue is with what is an appropriate way to explain this kind of thing to children. Another colleague of mine was telling me a similar kind of story lately, about having to explain the concept of sex to her young daughter. She told me that she had said that sex was something that happens between a man and a woman after they get married. She must have seen the look on my face and quickly explained "well, I don't really expect her not to have sex before marriage, I mean we all do, but I thought I should get her to aim high at least while she's this young". Funny though, it wasn't that part so much that bothered me. It was more the "sex is something that happens between a man and a woman" bit. Just in case anyone reading this hasn't figured this out yet, I am a lesbian, and my colleague knows this.

So, this conversation, so typical for parents with kids of this age, has bugged me for weeks, and I am adding a lot of my personal baggage to contextualise it. Let me share (purge?)... When I was growing up I didn't even know that there was such thing as gay men and lesbians, let alone transgender, intersex and all the other labels that we like to attribute to people. I did have a very similar sex talk with my Mum at about the age of 9, when I clearly remember that after my Mum explained the mechanics of the male/female sex act I said "eeeew, I will NEVER do that"! I wonder if Mum remembers that, she'd laugh about it now! Anyway, at some later stage, I found out about gay men and lesbians, but I had a very negatively stereotypical image of what they were like. Gay men were VERY effeminate men, and lesbians were VERY masculine women, and not only that they were really weird and evil. They were nothing like me.

I recently had a bit of a talk with my mother about 'when I realised I was a lesbian'. She asked. I think she feels that she didn't support me enough and that I may have been happier earlier if she had done something differently. Maybe. But as she pointed out, she didn't ever know anyone who was gay or lesbian (as far as she knew), so she really couldn't give me any broader kind of sex talk or support than she did. She did her best.

I am confident that children of glbti families are now given a wide range of information about sex, gender, etc and their freedom to be whatever works for them. And I would like to think that many heterosexual parents who are now exposed to a more 'normal' (I use that word with some trepidation) vision of homosexuality also have much more open discussions with their kids. But after the conversations I've had recently, I'm not so sure. All these people I've spoken with are not homophobic - well not in the conscious ugly sense of the word. But it doesn't seem that any of them have explained any options other than the standard hetero-normative view of sex to their kids. Is it because this is just easier? Is it because you tell what you know? Is it because they can't quite figure out how to explain homosexual sex (I mean, what DO lesbians do in bed?????!)?

And then the whole marriage thing. You see, if the highest standard to encourage your children to reach for is sex within marriage, then my relationship with my partner is automatically substandard, because we can't get married. And, on a related note, even within the heteronormative framework I worry about this as the standard, having known it to come unstuck with a few of my friends, who believed strongly in not having sex before marriage, and thus didn't think about contraception before marriage and then 'accidently' got pregnant before marriage in the heat of the moment (and here I don't mean necessarily sex in the standard heteronormative way either, a couple of them didn't actually 'do it' - in their words - and still managed to get pregnant - virgin mothers almost).

Anyway, I think a more interesting conversation would be about what marriage actually means to people - other than the actual wedding ceremony, that is. Anyway, that's another dissertation or two in the making.

Enough ranting and raving for one stop-over!