Muslim World?
Frankly, I know what’s causing the hysteria regarding ‘What if the Muslims take over the city/country/world?’ its just the ancient territorial human feeling to protect one’s religion.
In a disgusting soundbite, Liberal (for you non-aussies, The Liberals are a actually right-wing/conservative party. The Labor Party is meant to be more left-leaning but lately have been just as conservative as the Libs) backbencher member of parliament Danna Vale said “we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence”.
See Abortion Will Lead to Muslim Nation
A double whammy, Danna managed to insult women, pro-choice activists, and promote religious and cultural discrimination. My first thought was ‘So what? As long as they don’t try to enforce laws to promote discrimination or take away womens’ rights etc. I’m sure as human beings they’d do just as good a job ‘running’ Australia. Just like Christian politicians infuriate me when they promote anti-abortion agendas because they are Christian, I don’t believe in mixing church and state, and do believe in allowing freedom of religion, but I fail to see what makes the idea of a Muslim-Australian prime minister any scarier than any other religion.
It’s the fanatical ‘conservatives’ I’m afraid of. Everyone forgets that all religions have their fanatics to give them a bad name. I’m scared of a ‘conservative’ Muslim politician the same as I’m scared of a ‘conservative’ Christian politician.
(Post Script – see Seeing it Coming for a great view of what will happen if we let the fanatics take hold)
Most people also don’t notice that it takes vigilance on the part of the people to prevent politicians introducing a catholic agenda, withdrawing abortion, contraception etc, the same vigilance it would take to prevent a muslim agenda trying to introduce Sharia Law.
‘Aborting ourselves out of existence’ what a farce. Apart from the fact that the abortion statistics are not accurate (they include miscarriages etc) do they really think all those babies would have been born without legal abortion? You’d just push the rate of women dying from illegal abortion through the roof.
My Damn Body, my damn choice. Women are not incubators for men’s or god’s children.
February Happenings
I want to re-write the entries I lost from the last month, so here are some comments to jog my memory:
29th Jan – BIG DAY OUT!!!!!
Mars Volta, White Stripes, Henry Rollins – Fantastic!
Wolfmother & Franz Ferdinand – great! But really sounded like I was listening to the album rather than a live show.
The Go! Team, Iggy Pop – I had to miss these guys because I had to make the traditional BDO decision on which acts you’re going to sacrifice for others, but from all reports they were incredible (I’ve gotten especially impassioned rants for The Go! Team in particular)
Saturday 4th Feb (?) – Lia’s birthday party – (Arieh’s cool cousin) Lia’s packed terrace house off chapel st had an amazing and entertaining party -filled with goths and artists, writers and freaks, poets and librarians and beyond. Props to Curly the soft spoken and fuzzy haired Urban Explorer, he showed me his expensive digital camera with photos on it from the latest expedition, including a huge cavern-like room that runs the entire length of the Westgate bridge. Stupid Karma to Lia’s housemate Carl (an awesome artist) who decided to instigate a ‘dead arm’ competition (whereby drunk males take turns punching each other in the upper arm as hard as they can. You are punched in the arm you punch with, thereby rendering your punch weaker and weaker as your arm is hurt. Unfortunately (fortunately if you have some sick stock in winning) as you keep drinking, your arm gets numb. Arieh had to take part because he was so surprised someone else knew what a dead-arm contest was. (why he chose to be amused rather than disgusted by this remnant of his Private School nightmare I do not know). Christian joined in after a time (which seems to defeat the purpose of each hitting each other in the same arm they punch with – he was a lot fresher than the others). About 3am when we got home Christian showed me his arm – it was mottled red, purple, black and brown, like someone had tried to whip the skin off. Arieh’s tattoo covered his so all your could see was bright red in the gaps. Intelligent. I was fascinated and repulsed. I had seen the game played before, but that was when I was in high school and guys were a lot stupider and quick to compete.
Saturday 11th Feb – To celebrate mine & my nana’s birthday’s which fall on the 14th Feb and 15th Feb respectively, my Mother came down from Bendigo & stayed with me. We, along with my brother Seth took nana to lunch in the hills near Lilydale and had a lovely day.
Saturday 11th Feb – That night I went into the city with Arieh & Lia, Andy (who kept buying drinks for us all, all night), Matt (who with Andy, accompanied me home (when Arieh piked earlier) & paid for the taxi, Jess and some other girl-friends of Lia’s. We went to the croft and had the obligatory walking around the city looking for somewhere else when it closed (3am – Melbourne is way more soft-core than Bendigo!!!!!!!!!!! My God!) including the traffic cone, fast food, and trying to walk on a glass void-ceiling incidents that all come with that brand of debauchery.
However the mood was killed pretty quickly after we got home and we realised our cat Spooky had escaped! She had never been out of the flat since we moved to Melbourne, and we realised she had jumped out of our second-floor window to the ground below. At around 5am, mum woke up (normal for her. She was staying with us for nana’s birthday remember) and helped us look. After a few hours sleep, I spent pretty much until sundown walking around the neighborhood calling for her. Arieh had been overtaken by a black and withdrawn mood, after one of his parent’s cats was squashed and died in an unfortunate accident involving his very upset father, who suffers from Parkinson’s, also the night before on the way to Lia’s a cat followed us and we saved it from getting hit by a car when it tried to cross the busy Chapel St/Alma Rd intersection after us. We ended up calling the number on its collar (its name was Chachi) to tell its owner where it was. She was in Queensland on holiday and was very glad we had called her – she called a friend to come and rescue the cat. So I guess Arieh thought he should have some good-cat-karma, or maybe it was a weird sign?
Anyway, we ended up going to bed on Sunday with no sign of her. I collapsed instantly from lack of sleep, but at midnight Arieh heard her meowing and scratching at the door 
Saturday 18th Feb – Kirk & Jodi’s engagement party. We had a lovely time with Kirk (Arieh’s cousin) and Jodi’s families.
Monday 20th Feb – Arieh started his Diploma of Education at Melbourne Uni!
Wednesday 22nd Feb – Arieh and I went to the last St Kilda night market for the year, with my old and beautiful friend Danni. Before Danni arrived Arieh and I walked down Acland St for the ATM, and got gelato and cheesecake, then walked down to the beach to eat it in the starlight. The market was very busy, packed with people, lovely stalls, fire twirling, devil sticks, dancing, drumming, music, very vibrant and happy. I got an awesome Hunter S Thompson Tshirt with Ralph Steadman’s artwork from Fear and Loathing on it!
Saturday 25th Feb – Took it easy this weekend as Arieh worked all saturday & I cleaned the house. Arieh got called by Christian at work, he had rolled his car the night before, whilst under the influence/s! And he’d picked up a homeless guy from the rain and was giving him a lift home! And after rolling into a ditch, the homeless guy’s bottle of vodka soaking the interior of the car in the process, the two of them managed to push the car out of the ditch and it started on the first go! DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE KIDS! Arieh and I met the news with “You Idiot! What the fuck were you thinking??!!!! Are you okay? Yes? YOU STUPID FUCK YOU COULD HAVE DIED!” and other scathing incredulous remarks, scolding him for driving under the influence, picking up homeless guys in the middle of the night (he’s a big guy, but no match for a knife when trying to control a car. Although ironically he would have had to be towed out of the ditch otherwise) and quite frankly made him uncomfortable with horror stories of my classmates who died in an awful crash in high school, and the tragic accident of the guy in Mildura accidentally running-down and killing 6 teenagers who were waiting for a taxi after a party. So with no injury other that an aching neck from the whiplash and the body of his car trashed but running, we felt it well within moral behaviour to alternatively berate him, and fawn over him for not being dead.
People die so damn easily. I could choke to death right now.
We met up with Christian on Saturday night & we went and saw Hostel at the cinemas. It was a lot less hard-core than I had worried about. I was concerned with watching an R rated movie in a cinema (If I see something that disturbs me I get inordinately angry at the imagined reactions/lack of reaction of the people around me). But I forget that not all R Rated movies are by Takashi Miike (although he did have a cameo! More to do with Tarantino’s pull than Eli Roth’s methinks! But Eli must have been rapt.)
Diary-X is Dead. Long live….
Well, ironically enough, after leaving my diary-x blog for over a year, I started adding to my huge journal again and noticed they had a ‘download journal’ option. Being the paranoid person I am, I immediatley took a backup.
Two months later Diary-X is no more. The hard drive died, the automatic journal hard drive backups were never working in the first place, and I have been clicking on diary-x user’s new journals trying to find a blog site my work proxy doesn’t ban.
Everyone’s entries are understandably bewildered and grieving. Over the course of a few years (yes, Blogs have been around before 2004 dammit) you can spend literally weeks writing and uploading other writing to your journal. The virgin-blog entries read like cyclone survivors: ‘I just can’t comprehend….all the photos and writing from my life in the last few years are just gone!’
Frankly I’m surprised more people didn’t make a copy of their journal. Out of paranoia I labouriously clicked through every one of the hundreds of pages of my journal, printed them off and saved a file, a few years ago (before the backup feature). Because I used the backup feature when it was introduced, I myself have only lost this year’s entries. All my new, happy entries, but replaceable all the same.
If I had lost everything and had no copies, I think I would have had to go home from work, such would be the grief I was stricken with. (I’m on a fantasy reading binge at the moment. Does it show?)
So my sincere wishes to those bereaved diary-xers.
However another thread creeping through the entries is ‘I must treat this as a new beginning.’ People are taking advantage of the purge to wash themselves free of past gripes, mistakes, grudges etc. I know this is merely a way to stem the grief from losing everything, but I was thinking this same thing when I started journalling again this year.
I had such a lot of angsty, hasty writing which I was loathe to edit (except when faced with legal problems) as it really did illustrate my feelings at the time. Although this made the journal unbalanced in the anguish department, it was my vent. When I started writing again I didn’t feel right tacking on my new entries to this monster of a saga, especially because most of the people who made it a saga are now far away in space and time, from me. After meeting my fiance Arieh and then finishing Uni, my life has hit a turning point in which the little crap that does occur is my own fault, and therefore I have an enormous feeling of happiness, contentment and security which I never really had before.
But I didn’t want to start a new journal, abandoning that which I knew was my past and myself. It wasn’t a censoring thing, there was nothing I was ashamed of, I just didn’t want my now-happy entries to appear incogrous to my past entries.
Now that decision has been made for me by Diary-X. And while I start a new journal here, I am safe in the knowledge that I can always cut and paste all those old entries from my diary-x backup. (The backup format is in some incomprehensible crap format which is really only useful for ripping out what I know to be the text in notepad. If anyone knows if there’s a reader I would be appreciative) And while I will almost definitley re-post my published stuff, articles, essays etc I think I will have a bit of a break, a bit of breathing room, first.
So until you notice entries behind this one, know that I am enjoying my sabbatical from my past.
