I am not Michaelia Cash

Good morning everyone. Over here at the Lily Pad we're mourning celebrating surviving the start of the school holidays. So it's board games, boredom and tantrums ahoy.

Something weird happened this week. I went off-grid (because I'm cool and groovy and hip with all the latest digital terminology the young kids use) for two hours because I had to drive to the thriving metropolis of Colac. 

As an aside, Colac was very nice to me although JEEBUS it was cold. Come on everyone, wave to Colac! Hi Colac!

In those two hours you changed your Prime Minister.

I mean, come ON. I look away for JUST A MOMENT and this is what happens.

Never. Going. Off. Grid. Again.

Maybe.

As a result, I spotted this particularly edifying speech by Coalition Senator Michaelia Cash, who is the Opposition Spokeswoman for Women (whatever that means):




For Dog's sake, people, please know that, despite sharing similar names and I assume internal gentialia, this woman is NOT me.

Look, here's Michaelia Cash:

Scary image source

And now here's me:

See? Nothing. Alike. (Plus I spell my name correctly).

I hope that's cleared up this common but appalling misconception.

In way of apology for putting that hateful and ridiculous performance into your eyesockets and earballs, please bask in the majesty of the Aurora Australis, as it appeared in Geeveston, Tasmania, last night.

Gorgeous photo from Huon Photography

See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

Dramatic Pansy is dramatic (and other miracles)

Hi kids. Thanks so much to everyone who's read my praying mantis travails and had a giggle at Russell Brand.

I'm busy again with other "work" but I'm around here and there. 

If you look very carefully, you might spot random body parts belonging to The Frog here. Apparently boobs are extremely controversial and, along with fun, should not be allowed.

You can also catch me having a dramatic whine about the state of Australian politics over at The Shake. 

For now I'll leave you with this week's miracle - the pansy my son bought me for Mother's Day died in suitably dramatic fashion in the frost two nights ago and then BEHOLD! It rose from the dead on the third second day! (Mainly because I brought it inside out of the bloody horrible weather we've been having).

Dramatic Pansy is dramatic

It's a Monday miracle! Praise be to baby cheeses!

See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

How (not) to interview a guest on national television

Hi folks. Today I'm working on boring non-bloggy-type stuff but I'm also writing some HILAIRE stuff for The Shake.

In the meantime, I give you some awesome from Russell Brand, taking down some idiotic morning television hosts in the US. 

Oh America. Any more conservative and you'd suck yourself up your own arse. 

If you're pushed for time, watch from 5 mins onwards. Rabbits. Headlights. Perfection.

See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

How I took a praying mantis to McDonalds (nature is an arsehole but humans are worse)

Nawwwwww such a cutie! But keep away from my fries, OK?

Last week I took a praying mantis to McDonalds. It was a female False Garden Mantid and I took her there by mistake, but it’s not the first time I’ve taken insects to random places. 

I remember having one of those plastic bug catcher toys as a child, a book on Australian insects and an insatiable curiosity.

Oh and a magnifying glass. Sorry, ants. I was an arsehole.

The praying mantis was a personal fave.

My long-suffering mother would ask, “You haven’t brought any creatures home today in your school bag, have you?”

“No mum.”

At that moment there was a more than 70% chance that in my bedroom was a 15 centimetre-long brown mantis swaying gracefully, tilting its weird triangular head from side to side, wondering how the fuck it had ended up on the bed of a small child in the suburbs of our nation’s capital.

There were also the countless tadpoles and frogs. Butterflies. Grasshoppers. Spiders. Snails.

All judiciously caught and brought into the house to be “looked after”. More often than not this served as a euphemism for being stared at for an hour, forgotten and allowed to run riot around the house.

Do you know how small a newly hatched praying mantis is? I do. The little nest I’d lovingly installed in my bug catcher broke open, spewing tiny, perfectly-formed mantis babies out through its holes, along the mantel piece to dubious freedom. We were finding miniscule mantis kids all over the lounge room for weeks.

“Watch out mum, there’s a mantis on your chair!”

(Deep sigh). “Of course there is.”

There I was last week, some 37-or-so years later, pulling out of the McDonalds drive-thru. I looked up and found my gaze unexpectedly caught in the steely triangular glare of two beady little green eyes.

Look at her ickle face! LOOK AT IT!

What the fuck?

Yes, there she was, a little green mantis, sitting on my car bonnet LOOKING STRAIGHT AT ME. Like the next wave in hood ornaments for the uber-environmentally-friendly motorist.

Except her look was anything but happy.

Her look said “How could you leave me on that basil plant? How can you expect me to survive on a diet of grasshoppers and aphids AND WHERE ARE MY FRIES, BITCH!?”

I was temporarily stumped. What to do?

If I drove off and she was blown away not only would she smash into the windscreen, breaking her exoskeleton and my heart, but she would also never get her fries.

So I did what any person in my situation would do.

I slowed down to 30 kilometres an hour, turned my hazard lights on, and inched home slowly in the left lane so that my praying mantis wouldn’t get blown away.*

I then took photos of her and tweeted about our little jaunt, before lovingly popping her back onto her basil plant. And not once did she bite me, despite me not sharing my fries with her because I love nature and all but come on, there are limits.

As a child, what I liked about creatures was that if you piss one off they’ll run away, bite or sting you. Nothing much has changed.

Nature is an arsehole, but at least it’s honest about it.

Unlike humans.

What a couple of fucked-up weeks we’ve had. Politics here has reduced itself to tales of men in threateningly blue ties, threats that an LNP government will interfere with our collective uterus, questions about the PM’s partner’s sexuality, and accusations that the leader of our country has breasts.

How very dare they.

Humans really are arseholes.

I’m always rescuing creatures that could bite or sting me and releasing them while those around me are screeching “Kill it! Kill it!”

They may have a point, but frankly I find humans far more vicious. So I’m off to find a small animal to take on a trip to the post box.

* Yes I know they have wings and she could have flown away SHUT UP.

My son found the photo and created a Minecraft/Praying Mantis mashup.
You're welcome.

 Have you ever taken part of nature somewhere random by accident?

Would you change your gender, if you could never change back again?

Who are you calling a sequential hermaphrodite?!
© Deviney | Dreamstime.com

Hello you wonderful person you. How are you doing? How's that cold? I recommend Vitamin C and a hot toddy. 

I know, I've been neglecting you lately. 

My work has been mentally busy (appropriate I guess) and I've been a bit of a writerly tart, slutting about in online mags instead of here.

Fear not, I'm back blathering on about vaginas and nature and toilets again.

On the subject of vaginas and nature and toilets, did you know that some creatures can start life as one sex and then change into another? It's called dichogamy, and those creatures are referred to as sequential hermaphrodites.

No I'm not about to confess some major life-changing decision.

Sequential hermaphrodites can be born either sex and change to the other, or have both sets of gonads but perform either female or male functions during different stages of life. Thank you Wikipedia.

How terrific would it be if humans were sequential hermaphrodites?

What would the impact be?

Most sequential hermaphrodites can only change once, so it would probably be an all-or-nothing deal. 

Would we all be men? Or all women?

What would be the advantages of changing?

Fellas, imagine how much more wardrobe space you'd need.

Gals, imagine not having to sit down to pee.

Imagine what a different movie Finding Nemo might have been if Marlin had behaved like a real male clownfish. Male clownfish stay in their anemone and change to female if a mate is lost, so they can attract another mate and continue making perfect little sequentially hermaphroditic offspring.

Nemo who?

Would you change your gender, if you could never change back again?

While you weren't looking... I was talking about child safety, mental health and vaginas (AGAIN)

Hi everyone!

Well, not everyone, because not everyone reads my blog.

Hi lots of people!

Hi some people!

Hi a small number of people approximating 0.001% of the Australian population!

I've been busy lately, tarting around elsewhere.

For example, I had a bit of a rant about the lengths we may - or may not - want to go to in order to raise awareness of racism over at The Shake.

Also over at the Shake I talked about Eurovision and weird bearded contratenors in sparkly black dresses.  As you do.

Oh and Margaret Thatcher's vagina.

For a change of pace I was NOT talking about vaginas, and instead talked about Seasonal Affective Disorder at the Modern Woman's Survival Guide.

So please go wander, read, comment and generally enjoy more discussion of politics, female genitalia and mental health.

Not necessarily in that order.

As I typed this post it occurred to me that Blogger was highlighting "vaginas" as incorrectly spelled. I called bullshit on this on Twitter:

The answer is "vulvas" or "vulvae".

You're welcome.

Suicidal kitchen appliances, alien life forms and why I'm never making cake pops again

This story of suicidal kitchen appliances and alien life forms is sponsored by The Good Guys Kitchens. Please keep reading - I need your help!

As domestic goddesses go, I make a pretty good blogger.

I’m about as domestic as the average not-very-domestic-thing*.

I’m not good at keeping my house neat or organised, and I’m not at all handy.

However, those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I like to cook.

I’m not too shabby at it and I have some nifty kitchen appliances. The kitchen is my favourite room in my house.

I’m one of those annoying people who tweet photos of food they’ve created, like this gorgeous cake:

Or like these wonderful cake pops:

Yes, those are mutant cake pops and they’re in the bin, where they belong.

I tried to melt the poorly-named "melts" in the microwave, as instructed. Suddenly the microwave started making pop, hiss and bang noises, accompanied by a suitably dramatic light show.

Cake pop melts don’t melt on the stove top, even over a bowl of gently boiling water. False advertising if you ask me.

White ones turn to concrete.

Blue ones start to melt, then turn to weird blue glue that won’t attach itself to the outside of a cake pop. No matter how hard you scream, cry or swear.

I couldn’t give those splodgy blotchy blue monstrosities to other people’s children, so in the bin they went. Next to them went the red melts which no doubt would have melted perfectly on the stove top but by that time I was ready to murder the inventor of the cake pop with one of the handy plastic cake pop sticks supplied so helpfully in the kit.

Breathe.

The new, firework-free microwave** is now installed and I’ll be checking the state of mind of all my kitchen appliances regularly to avoid any more suicidal mid-baking-disasters.

It makes me wonder about the rest of my kitchen. We live in a hundred-year-old-house that’s starting to fall apart.

I am as handy as I am domestic, and our house needs some love.***

The last person who renovated our house did it all themselves - clearly without the help of experts like The Good Guys Kitchens. Witness the lack of ventilation under the house. Witness the non-existent ground drainage. Witness the inexorable progress of our house down the hill on which it was built. Oh the humanity.

Thanks to ill-advised DIY renovations, despite keeping my house clean, a new life form is growing on our kitchen bench top. The idiot person who renovated our house used very poor varnish on the wood**** and it’s deteriorating. The varnish is now sticky, so when you pick paper an appliance your hand something up off the bench, nine times out of ten you’ll find it’s fused in place for posterity. Next to the sink, water permeates the wood and has created Fred:

Fred is a new alien life form. Or maybe mould.

Whatever he is, he’s big and ugly and growing each day. At this rate our house will soon be nothing but a large brown stain with a car port.

We need a kitchen renovation. In the meantime does anyone know how to remove Fred? 

Failing that, does anyone speak alien mould?

What renovation disasters have you seen?

* I was thinking maybe a big cat, like a Cheetah. Although apparently they’re actually the biggest of the small cats. I know they’re the only large cat that purrs, because I’ve heard one. Then I realised a Cheetah is fast and I am built for comfort, not speed, and then this whole comparison thing broke down. 

** So far.

*** And new drainage, floorboards, weatherboards, cupboards and bench tops. Love is definitely not all you need.

**** Yes badly-sealed wooden bench tops in a wet area. I don’t. Even. What? 

Depression is a lying little bastard - Part 1 (guest post)

© Alptraum | Dreamstime.com

Today I have the honour of hosting a guest post by Gaynor Alder.
This is the first part of a series on how she beat depression.
This post can also be seen at MWSG.

“If you haven’t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful” – Sophia Loren

Me: Get up off the floor Gaynor.

Depression: But, why?

Me: C’mon Gaynor. You can do it. Just get up and go lay on the couch.

Depression: What’s the point? I’m not going to feel any better on the couch.

Me: But you can’t lie here all day.

Depression: Why not?

Me: I should have a shower. Maybe blow dry my hair and put on some lipstick?

Depression: Why would you waste your time doing that? Why don’t you crack that bottle of wine in the fridge? Go on, that will make you feel better.

Me: But it’s only 11am.

Depression: So?

Depression had invaded every part of me, its weight heavy on my heart. A sorrow so great it should have instantly identified itself, instead of hiding in the shadows and dishing out its pain by slowly seeping through the cracks of my confusion. A sorrow that once its tears formed puddles at my feet, dropped me to my knees with its piercing and persistent pain.

This was no garden-variety depression, none of your general malaise and misery on offer here. This was the deep debilitating kind that straps you to your bed and meddles with your mind, making a complete mockery of who you are. Sadness was surging through my veins with ferocious velocity. I was as flat as a day old pancake and I wanted to know where the fuck the maple syrup was?

I held onto hope like a child clutching at a bag of lollies that were in fear of being stolen by a sibling, but depression is a lying little bastard and kept telling me I was never going to get better. Attacking my self esteem with all those nasty things it was saying about me, isolating me from everyone and holding my confidence captive, so it could pin me down with its force and strip me back to nothing.

There were plenty of people telling me to pull up my socks, but every time I tried, I discovered the elastic was long gone and they’d just end up around my ankles. They could have tried to walk a mile in my Pradas, but they’d long been gathering dust in my wardrobe and had not seen the light of a dance floor since depression had decided to barge in one day uninvited like a bunch of teenagers with a six pack of Bacardi Breezers.

Sure, I tried all that positive thinking bizzo and even though I’m naturally an optimistic person, it did jack. Because let’s get one thing straight, this is not a self-indulgent negative mindset, this is an illness.

Know that I’ve been to that place, when you think you’re never going to get better. Know I’ve been to that place when you don’t know how you’re going to get through the night. Know that I’ve felt that endless struggle just to get through every day, hour and second. Know that I have been to that place and I have returned.

Follow this series each month as I share how I overcame a decade long battle with depression. From a rocky love hate relationship with medication, psychics wearing purple crushed velvet skirts cleaning my aura with feathers whilst telling me the problem was in my past lives, coping with the people kicking me whilst I was down, to finally finding a kick ass crack team.

Have you fought depression? 

Gaynor Alder is a Melbourne based writer with a penchant for vintage glamour and all things Parisian. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Modern Woman's Survival Guide magazine and editor-at-large Teenage Girl’s Survival Guide, gallivants around the world as a Travel Writer testing the thread count of sheets and the fluffiness of hotel pillows and freelances in public relations.

She started writing The Modern Woman’s Survival Guide, after the umpteenth person told her, you know you should really write a book. Her fingers struggled daily to keep up with the thoughts that desperately wanted to become words on pages, to take centre stage in a book that she knew was going to become the new voice of womankind. Her calling, her destiny, her whatever you want to call it, Gaynor writes because she can’t not write.

You can catch her being awesome here:

www.gaynoralder.com
www.teenagesurvivalguide.com
Facebook - www.facebook.com/mwsgmagazine
Twitter - @themodernwoman

Conversations with my brain: Nature is an arsehole

Why the fuck is there a picture of Stras at the top of this post?
Looks delectable (cough). Mmmm.
Read on.
Image

Brains really are arseholes.

I guess that explains why I failed Biology.

Seriously, though, it doesn’t help me one bit when I try to sleep and my brain decides to write a comedy routine. An hour-long comedy extravaganza, as it happens.

And a pretty shit one at that.

It was called Gently Mental and one day it may appear somewhere other than inside my head.

Or not.

One of the themes from this questionable comedy classic was how much nature, as well as my brain, is an arsehole.

Nature has no trouble with not being nice. It just does what it pleases, lets it all hang out, without ever fearing judgement.

The natural world has absolutely no problem at all being a total bastard, and frankly, I’m jealous.

Take a few examples:

• PT Barnum, the arsehole possum (may he rest in peace, wherever he is*)
• The bird that landed on my head
• The lizard who hid in my bag
• The butterfly that wasn’t
• That damn Bongo calf

I recently talked about how I disposed of a particularly objectionable slice of beetroot.

That wasn’t the last example of my creative food disposal techniques.

Have you ever eaten Stras?

Strasbourg is a type of lunch meat, made from the snouts, ears and bums of various unidentifiable hooved animals, mixed with sawdust.** It's also called Devon, Fritz, and OH MY GOD IS THAT EVEN FOOD?!

This delightful combination is mashed together and moulded into a tube. You then slice this tube up and inflict it on your children in the guise of “Stras sandwiches”. Often served with tomato sauce.

Stras sandwiches were a lunch of choice on the camping trips of my childhood.

Safe to say, my hatred of Stras is only outweighed by my hatred of pickled beetroot.

Me:        “What’s that noise?”

Brain:    “It’s coming from under the log. Oh no.”

Me:        “Now mum’s looking under there. We’re in trouble now.”

Brain:    “It sounds like something’s eating under there. Jesus! What kind of moron would voluntarily eat that crap?”

Me:        “It’s a Blue Tongue. No denying it now.”

Brain:    “Why not? We could pretend that Stras occurs spontaneously in nature.”

Me:        “Nope, I’m going to confess.”

Brain:    “No don’t be a fool! Shit. You’ve already done it. Idiot.”

It’s quite hard to deny that you’ve thrown your stras under the log you’re sitting on, when there’s a massive Blue Tongue lizard sitting under there chewing on a big slab of the stuff. And not being quiet about it.

There it was, munching away, thinking its reptilian Christmases had all come at once.

A windfall for you, mate, but pretty damn embarrassing for me. Thanks, bastard.

* Under a pile of rubbish at the Whitehorse Recycling and Waste Centre, I suspect. I know, I’m going to hell.

** I have no idea what’s really in Stras. Please don't tell me.

Have you ever caught nature being an arsehole?

The Beetroot Incident

Image

The beetroot slid down. It left a slimy trail as it oozed towards the floor and then stuck; a monument to childhood arseholery, hovering, purple and pickled, on the while wall.

Best place for it, really.

Beetroot. What even IS that shit? And who in their right mind feeds it to a three year old?

My mum, that’s who. A brave woman.

This was back before the fear of not being nice had grabbed me. Back then I had a modest but swiftly developing talent for creative food disposal.

We had to eat everything on our plates. So I threw that slice of shitty beetroot as far from the plate as my chubby arm would send it.

Problem solved.

Nothing was ever said about The Beetroot Incident, but I feel it’d be unreasonable to think my mum could have missed a pinky-purple circle of beetroot at eye-level on her kitchen wall.

When you’re small, rebellions tend to be on a pretty minor scale. No setting fire to the house, or running away for me. Food was the mutiny of choice.

Now and then I wonder about that stain. Is it still there, on that Canberra council house wall, capturing a beetroot slice’s precious last moments for posterity?

I hope so because The Beetroot Incident was the first memory of the hatred of pickled beetroot I harbour to this day.

It was also the last memory I have of being so consciously, joyously un-nice.

Are there any foods you're tempted
to throw at the wall?