After three months of living in a house we’d planned to buy, we’re moving again.  I don’t really want to go into the reasons, suffice to say we’re just not happy here.

This means another upheaval: packing, arranging the transfer of utilities… but it will be worth it in the end.  Even if I have to go almost two months without internet again.  Hopefully, though, that will not be the case this time.

That’s also an explanation for why I’ve been so tardy with new posts: we decided on 19 October to move, I gave notice here on 20 October.  I started house hunting right away, and found us a place in Blackrock, Louth.  However, last week Thursday I discovered that the owner intended to put the house back on the market after a year.  We really don’t want to deal with living in ahouse that’s being shown, and we also very definitely don’t want to have to move again any time in the foreseeable future.

That meant a mad rush to find another place, as we’d arranged to move on 7 November.  I was frantic and depressed, as it’s not easy to find a house to rent when you’re a family of nine (five people, four cats).  I was just starting to despair when on Friday afternoon, I was showed a lovely four bedroom house with a landlord who is, according to the agent, a very nice guy.  He doesn’t mind the cats and is prepared to give us a long lease – he works and lives on the continent (that is, somewhere on mainland Europe) and the house is a rental property with no foreseeable prospect of becoming anything else.

So.  I’m packing.  And cleaning and stuff – thank the gods we were only in here a short while, there’s some stuff I haven’t even unpacked from the previous move yet.

Via Picture is unrelated

From Makezine comes this excellent Halloween effort:

It’s strange that in a country where religion was king until a very short while ago, I feel there is greater religious freedom than I perceive Americans experience.  True, the schools are still heavily influenced by the Catholic church.  Mother Mary stares me in the face when I walk in the front door.  Religious pictures grace the halls.  There are religious lessons in class.

But religion doesn’t get stuffed down my throat.  My kids read story books during religious lessons, at our request.  Nobody looked askance at us for this, and the school staff are friendly to me and treat my kids no differently for our views on God.  I often get the feeling most modern Irish people are Catholic the way I’m a Boer – they were born into a society that revered it, grew up with it, but as adults it’s more an afterthought than something they embrace.

From entries in blogs I follow written by Americans, I get the feeling that for all their secularism, they have a much higher percentage of people who identify as Christians and are really serious about it.  Fox News is a glaring example of this demographic’s strength: it would have died a quiet death if it didn’t have support.  People watch this shit.

And shit it is, I’ve concluded from numerous clips I’ve seen on YouTube.

Bill O’Reilly is the worst television host I’ve ever come across.  He simply shouts his guests down, with a superior, shame-on-you attitude to everyone who does not subscribe to his views.  I’ve read many articles analysing opinion given by various well-known Fox News hosts, which pointed out their erroneous views, poor grasp of facts and strong bias.  It’s one thing to not be too well informed – hell, I’d be the first to admit that I’m shaky on facts, as I live in the worlds I create in my skull.  I don’t keep up to date as much as I could with what’s happening outside my head, never mind outside my town.  I often get things wrong, and hope if it’s ever pointed out to me, that I’d be humble enough to admit my mistake and correct it.

It’s another thing to attack an individual or an organisation with accusations that are easily showed to be untrue, if you do so through a medium which thousands, if not millions, of people are exposed to.

When I was a radio newsreader in South Africa, I felt a huge responsibility, knowing 150 000 people listened.  One of the reasons I got out of the profession was because I realised I’m not naturally on top of things.  I can tell you a lot about fantasy and mythology, about the accepted characteristics of an Elf or a Wood Sprite, but I wasn’t too hot on who’s the current minister of finance.  And that’s just not on.

I think I made up for this by carefully checking my facts when I compiled a story.  I knew my weakness, and did my best to compensate.

Perhaps that’s the problem with Sean Hannity’s remarks about the Coalition of Reason’s print ads in the subway. He asserted that Christian groups are not given the freedom to advertise in the same way.  It proves to be embarrassingly easy to show he’s mistaken.  What’s more, I am left with the impression that he’s a pompous ass who doesn’t give a shit for the environment, as well: he made fuming claims about advertising in the subways, while it seems he never takes the subway himself, preferring to use his SUV.

I would guess it’s not impossible that he is secure in his view of himself as well informed, and perhaps this leads to mistakes.  If you’re too sure of yourself, you don’t always feel the need to confirm what you think is true.

Sadly, the majority of his viewers probably share his opinion of himself, that he is a reliable source of truth.  They are left with a world view that is skewed, believing a lie.

It’s a shame, really.  But what can you do.

I come from a country where racism is a problem.  I suppose I don’t need to say more than: “South Africa has eleven official languages” to give an idea of the cultural diversity and related mess they’re sitting with there.  Because of the Apartheid disaster, a lot of people are super-duper sensitive about racism.  It gets ridiculous sometimes.

One example of where I shook my head and rolled my eyes, was when cricketer Brian McMillan loudly urged an Indian bowler to toss him a “Coolie Creeper”.  The brouhaha surrounding that was unbelievable.  Yes, he’d messed up, but I couldn’t help but think the guy was so ‘colour blind’ that he forgot he was playing with an Indian and used a ‘we’re all buddies’ term that was insensitive in the circumstances.  The whole mindset is not to discourage racism, but to make people over-aware of the race of whatever person they’re dealing with.

I also resented the way the incident was handled.  Wouldn’t a quiet word with Brian, explaining that his old-school terminology was hurtful, have been much more productive than an official complaint and a national scandal?  That said, only those directly involved would know the spirit behind the incident, whether it was the final straw in an attitude that was generally insensitive and derogatory, or a one-off where he was so unconscious of race and colour that he didn’t watch every word.

I often get the feeling there are some black people who are constantly on the lookout for insults.  They’re always poised to be offended, and therefore the smallest little thing can set them off.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to take a walk in their shoes.

The setting is not important, but the day before yesterday I was one of a group of people attending a lecture.  I was the only non-Irish person there.  In the course of discussions and working through sample cases, I happened to mention a few things which revealed our approach to child rearing and my views on what constitutes child abuse.  Among other things, for instance, I mentioned that sometimes, we leave our children alone at home.  Yet it wasn’t the only place in which my perspective seemed drastically different from the norm.

As the day progressed, I felt progressively more isolated, different, out of place.  This has a lot more to do with me than with the environment, I hope.  I do tend to sink into a depression of ‘I don’t belong here’ when I’m confronted with a situation where I should mingle.  Children’s parties are a living nightmare for me.  I also anticipate that this would be something a lot of my online friends would identify with very strongly.  However, I can’t deny that there was also an element of that uncomfortable silence and a tactful change of subject in the situation.  Not that precise action, but the same atmosphere.

When I drove to the venue for the second day’s training, it took a lot of self-discipline to not turn back home and tell them all without words to go fuck themselves.  I dreaded the sense of condemnation I felt in the company I was due to spend the day with.  Cognitively, I could understand that this was probably 99.9% my own insecurities and stupidity.  I’m sure just about everyone there would have been surprised and impatient, possibly even angry and insulted, had they known how I felt.

Still I couldn’t get rid of this resentful anger.  Yes, I sometimes left my kids alone at home – when we lived next door to a retired couple who were always there and knew the kids well, across the street from my son’s best friend’s grandma who was also more often home than not, and on the other side of a small green from the local fire station.  ‘Alone’ didn’t mean in an isolated farmhouse or something.

That might not be considered adequate.  It’s certainly not my first choice.  Yet I wished I could force those women to live for just a month without a single family member to turn to for babysitting, without a network of friends gathered over a lifetime, without a babysitter handy (they’re very hard to come by here).  I wished I could make them be with their children, never go out, never be alone, for just one month.  I would add the extra strain of one of those children being just that little bit disabled, just enough for you to have challenges such as having to explain every single technical detail of every decision you make, of your younger son in tears because his brother, with typical autistic rigid thinking, is on his case over this or that all the fucking time. I want to make them do that, without a break, 24/7 with only a few hours off on a Sunday.  And then ask them if it would be okay under the abovementioned circumstances to leave the children alone at home for an hour or two.

I lived like that for about a year before we considered the kids old enough to stay at home for ten, twenty minutes at a time.  We judged it safer than for me to haul them through traffic on the busy main street every time I needed to go buy bread or milk.

The way I felt yesterday, if someone had made even the mildest of comments about the way I live my life, I would have bitten their head off.  I realised then that this is probably what happens to a lot of black people.  If you’ve dealt with stereotyping, humiliation and prejudice for years, chances are you might overreact to small things.  Other people don’t have the perspective you have, knowing that this little thing was like a shovel of dirt that landed on the peak of a huge mountain of other dirt piled up over time.

That doesn’t make overreaction okay.  Everyone facing this sort of challenge needs to keep doing the right thing, even when it’s difficult.

I was all right by the time I arrived at the training venue.  I’d put my feel-better music on the ipod while I drove, and given myself a mental lecture: not only did I have as much right as anyoen else to attend this training, it was also up to them to come up and say so if they had a problem with me or anything I said or did.  Only in that way would I have an opportunity to put my actions in perspective.  And if they chose to gossip and point behind my back, that was not my problem, and only showed their own immaturity and ugliness.

Most likely, though, this was all in my imagination, and these ladies didn’t give me a second thought, never mind spend any time pondering my lifestyle and making judgements.  I’m sure they had much better things to do.

I’m sure I was one of the more annoying kids in school.  I wasn’t a rebel, and I wasn’t a nerd.  I was something in between, probably more self-absorbed than most, and with more kinks in my soul than I realised at the time.  I tended to ask questions, to point stuff out when I thought it was wrong.  This habit was not bad in itself, but I had no consideration for diplomacy or tact.  I look back with regret on the way I handled a lot of stuff as I grew up.

I can’t really think of any other reason why Mr Fick hated me so much, but he did.  He must have despised me from the moment I walked into his class the first time at the age of ten.  I was entering Standard 3, the school year in the system used in South Africa at the time when the subject ‘Hygiene’ turned into the subjects ‘Science’ and ‘Biology’.  Same teacher, but separate periods in which each was taught.  And we got a more specifically qualified teacher to impart the delights of these subjects to our fresh young minds.

We were given the task of copying a sketch of a germinating bean plant into our copy books from the textbook.  Later developments in my life showed me that I’m pretty good at drawing.  I therefore have no doubt that the sketches I produced were accurate and well done.  When Mr Fick saw them, though, he had a serious problem with them.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon, Sir?”

“Why did you make these pictures so small?”

They were just under half an A4 page each so I could fit two sketches onto a page, bigger than the pictures in the textbook.  I don’t want to describe the rest of this conversation, it was nothing special, but I still find it upsetting to go back to that place.  The upshot of it was that Mr Fick told me to return to my previous year’s teacher and ask her if she had a space for me in her standard 2 class, as I was too stupid for standard 3.

For the record, and at great risk of sounding like a braggart, my IQ is somewhere between 143 and 147.  It was tested by an educational pshychologist when I was nine years old, as part of a study of gifted children for his doctor’s thesis.

Of course I cried, and I think that’s what he wanted.  I have often wondered what motivated him to do this, as his complaint about the sketches was clearly very lame.  What I think today is that he saw I was a headstrong child, and he wanted to break me, perhaps as an example to the rest of the pupils.  I made sure, however, to keep my tears in check until I was out of his sight.  I shed my tears in the toilets before going back to the class I’d been in the year before.  I managed to look and sound pretty calm when I explained to Mrs Grobler what Mr Fick wanted.  She clicked her tongue, I remember that, and said, “You go back to Mr Fick and tell him my class is full, I don’t have a space for you.”

I stopped in the bathroom again, cried a little more, but made sure I was outwardly calm and my face was washed before I returned to my Biology class.  Mr Fick peered at me quite intently as I gave him Mrs Grobler’s reply.  I think he saw that I’d cried, and that seemed to satisfy him.  He told me to sit down and re-do the sketches for homework.

My mom helped me to do the sketches again, and in a small jab at the arsehole who’d humiliated me, I remember her doing the sketches herself, using a full A4 page for each of them.  Today, if I were in her shoes, I would handle the situation differently.  I would be all over that school like a rash and you can bet that teacher would be left in no doubt whatsoever over my feelings regarding an adult who tells a child she’s too stupid to have advanced to the next year.  In front of the whole class.  I’d have insisted on an apology from him to my child, also in front of the whole class.  And I’d have reported him to the education department.

Times were different then, and my folks didn’t want to make waves.

I hated Mr Fick for the rest of the three years I was forced to attend his classes, learning Biology and Science from him.  I hated these subjects, too, and found them to be horrible.  I couldn’t understand them, and it never occurred to me that Geography, which I loved, was also a science.  That perhaps my hatred of Science and Biology had less to do with my interests and more to do with my traumatic introduction to them.

As an adult, I found myself in a position where I had to learn about Science whether I liked it or not. Firstly, I spent some years home educating my children.  And lo, every time I taught them some simple scientific principle I was drawn in and lost, fascinated with the rudimentary stuff I was learning by teaching them.

I wanted to master a few basic issues to answer the deep and disturbing questions I held about the religion I adhered to.  Slowly but surely, I struggled my way through papers I still think are way over my head, so that I could understand the theory of evolution and the hypothesis of abiogenesis.  I still want to break out in a cold sweat when I dare talk about science, because I always picture a scientist reading something like that preceding sentence and doing a facepalm.  Yet the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn, the more I realised I have probably an above average interest in science.  I’ve now read a few layman’s science books, and I religiously follow two science blogs, Laelaps and Primate Diaries.  I’ve just started reading a book called ‘Introducing Chaos’, about Chaos theory, and though I know it’s the scientific equivalent of baby food, I am fascinated, absorbed, and I do manage to make sense of this stuff.  Only just, but I do.

I have to wonder how much of my aversion to science is thanks to Mr Fick.  And I wonder, if he was never a part of my life, how much of an aversion to science I would have had.  These days my thinking has changed in small ways.  I think about the scientific principles at work when I pull out the plug to let the sink drain.  I think of them when I write stories, and when I talk to my kids about the world around them.

Thanks a lot, Mister Fick.  You did a great job on this pupil.  I think you should be glad there isn’t a hell.

And I know that sounds over the top – the guy was just an arsehole, not an axe murderer.  Yet personally I consider the crime of killing a child’s spirit, of killing their thirst for knowledge, a serious one.  Mister Fick should never have been a teacher.  I can tell you more tales of his stupidity, but I think I’ve made my point.

And now back to my happy life.  I’ve wasted enough time even thinking about a guy who was just a pathetic, sad human being, needing to humiliate children to feel like a man.

You might hate me for this later, but here is a link to the 2008 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest.  In which people get rewarded for writing terrible prose.  My favourite out of all of them is among the honourable mentions:

Behind his pearly white smile lay a Bible black heart, not like the Psalms with its, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” but like Revelations where God just smites people.

Go check it out, but make sure you have a good while.  There’s a lot to chuckle about.

When you want someone to do something, offering a carrot – an incentive – always works better than hanging a threat over their heads.  Never have I seen this better illustrated than in this video.

It also is a striking reminder that we need to bring fun into our lives in whatever way we can.  What an awesome and blatant demonstration of how easy it can be.

Apparently, a document from the Ministry of Defence in Britain advising staff on how to stop documents leaking onto the internet has been leaked onto the internet.  Hahahahahahahahahaha!

And I hate it.  But let’s make the best we can of it, shall we, and let lolcats help us through the ordeal:

That’s about how I look at the moment, and how I feel, too.  Micky had this last week, and though he’s still not quite over it, he’s volunteered to let me stay in bed while he went to fetch the kids.  What a man.

Time to lie down again.  Hopefully I’ll be better tomorrow!