Do you want some cheese to go with your whine?

The kid doesn't want me to read to him any more. Waaaaaaaah.

It's because I couldn't keep making up different manly voices while reading Lord of the Rings. I was doing fine until we got to Rohan, and suddenly there's a bucket load more dialogue and way too many manly men. My throat got very sore indeed (which was useful for orc voices).

The Noodle also announced yesterday that the problem with Lord of the Rings is that only one character has a personality. Any guesses?

Kitchen frenzy

Somehow today turned into a bit of a baking festival, with pumpkin scones, egg and bacon pie and meringues (to use up the left-over egg whites from the egg and bacon pie). As a result the kitchen is full of bowls with remnants of sticky stuff, variously orange, yellow and white. Also saucepans from the pumpkin.

The pie turned into a kind of spready omelet on top of pastry. The scones turned out a right treat. The meringues are looking a little too cooked on the outside, and still have 15 minutes to go according to the recipe. Our oven is hotter on top than on the bottom to a sometimes alarming degree, so I fear we might have slightly brown, slightly chewy meringues instead of little fluffy bundles of sugary cloudliness. But they cannot be worse than the last lot (shudder).

Also we are going to sit outside and listen to some kind of symphony this evening and my assignment is nearly ready to hand in.

All of which makes it sound like a good day, but really it wasn't so much.

Assignment stress

Frankly, you'd think I'd be over it by now, but apparently not. Why are study deadlines different to any other deadlines?

Things that are abundant in Canberra

Open space
Roads
Hot air balloons
Acceptable without being brilliant coffee
Downright bad coffee
People in grey suits
White through the pale colour spectrum to beige buildings
Trees
Roundabouts
Pizzas that Greg Combet likes*
Short ugly sentences
Long complicated ugly sentences
School children who are used to the Deputy Prime Minister dropping in for a photo op
Friendly but quite incompetent hospitality staff
Cliches (please imagine the accent over the 'e' - if I were a better than quite incompetent blogger I would be able to add it in).

*I don't actually know if he likes them, but I have seen him buying them and smiling at the same time, so either he was looking forward to delicious pizza, or is just very polite to friendly but moderately competent hospitality staff.

Sweet nostalgia

On the one hand, tomorrow marks 97 years since the first sod was turned for this wonderful national capital of Canberra. Let us all be grateful that it is not called Shakespeare or New Albion or SydBriMelAdPerHo or somesuch. Lady Denman, we salute you.

On a smaller, but tastier, note of nostalgia, Mr Muddle's Melting Moments, courtesy of the Mr Men Cookbook, are just as delicious to me today as they were 30-odd years ago. Mr Muddle, we salute you too.

Some kind of shock (not G-rated today - strong language and adult themes)

Over at Blue Milk there's a bit of discussion about such things as shaving one's underarms and legs and the nature of feminist decisions and choices.

Last night on Hungry Beast they showed a segment about cosmetic surgery on people's vaginas, which seems like a super-sized version of the same kind of issue, that is, who has the right to determine what is acceptable, appealing or attractive about a woman's body?

Apparently some women feel that their vaginas are not the correct or acceptable shape and have surgery to alter the profile. The TV show had some footage of a scalpel peeling away some of a woman's flesh, the bit of the labia minora that was exposed outside.

The thesis of the show was the censorship, from the Classification Board, is to blame for women's skewed view of their bits, because the Classification Board is more likely to accept smooth looking vaginas in soft porn photos than bulgy, bulky or more lippy looking vaginas. These ones are then refused classification or sealed away in plastic and popped up on the top shelf (implied the show - I don't know the truth of it).

I think this is a bit of a long bow to draw. I don't recall the Classification Board being a particularly large market for pornography, actually. The magazine designer Hungry Beast spoke to (and showed photo shopping many women's bodies) claimed that it was never a commercial decision to alter the appearance and that it was only in response to Classification Board guidelines. It seems most disingenuous of the designer to say so, and really rather disingenuous of the show to accept it without much dispute or analysis. After all, it is not the Classification Board insisting that women who appear bulgy or bulky in other areas of their bodies are never, ever seen in pornography or other kinds of magazines. Somehow that just happens, apparently.

The key point of the program, though, that women feel pressured into getting surgery on perfectly healthy bits of their bodies is bloody terrible. What bothers me more than anything is that women thing they have to go to these lengths to please their partners or some imaginary potential partner, and that their partners must be so hung up on appearances (in an extraordinary narrow way) that they are encouraging, supporting or pressuring women into something so ridiculous.

Kaz Cooke wrote in the eternal classic, A Modern Girl's Guide to Safe Sex, that a bloke once told her (and I paraphrase) that he would put a kettle on his dick if it meant getting a root. I can't help thinking that people who are attracted enough to each other to want to get down and dirty shouldn't be looking at each other's active ingredients in a such a critical light. They should be thinking more along the lines of 'woo' and 'hoo' than - 'hmm, if only I could get this other person down to the surgeon licketty split then I could really have a good time'. Frankly, that seems a bit more than dysfunctional and spilling over into something like controlling or abusive. And not based on mutual attraction at all. Leaving out other discussions of love, respect and fun and all.

Also, factoring in recovery time, surely that surgery would put you off your game for quite some time? Why would a surgeon do such a thing to someone anyway? Is there any risk of infection? And who spends all their time thinking so much about the appearance of their vaginas? Do they not have good books to read?

Disclosure: I really have utterly no experience of pornography at all, and haven't spent a lot of time thinking about appearance issues, so this came as something of a shock to me.

Work and School

Does anyone else go through occasional periods of just not being the kind of employee they would like to be? Or perhaps more accurately, not being the kind of employee you would like to work with?

I think I've just been through one. I hope it doesn't happen again for a long, long time.

The Noodle also had a bad day at school today. He said that nothing was wrong, exactly, but nothing went right either. He had 20 minutes of fun reading Asterix after he got home from school and the rest was a write-off. The dinner we made was horrible to his tongue and he melted down over his symmetry homework. The difference between a year or two ago and now is that he went back and finished his homework after a few minutes calming down instead of being inconsolable for hours. That's a good thing.