Our Open Thread this weekend is hosted by a sea otter cracking a clam on a rock. [courtesy of Alan Vernon on flickr.]
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
This weekend I’m nursing someone through their recovery from the same reduction mammoplasty procedure that I had done a bit over 10 years ago. I’ve blogged about my breast reduction surgery here on HAT before; today I decided to put a post up on Feministe.
My goodness, your breasts were big. 😮
I have been trying to avoid reading anything about the death of Peaches Geldof because it’s not anybody’s business but her family and friends, but I have shamefully been sucked into reading Deborah Orr’s piece at the Guardian.
Ms Orr wonders whether the young woman “set the bar for Motherhood too high”. Umm, I don’t think it’s individual women who set that bar. I’m thinking it might be our WHOLE BLOODY SOCIETY??!!1? Why is Deborah Orr (Deborah Orr!!!1!)making this gargantuan error and blaming the young woman for “putting” too much pressure on herself? How about just feeling the pressure that every friggin’ magazine and newspaper pours out non-bloody-stop?
My sister is experiencing high anxiety about parenting her new baby. She, thank God, doesn’t have any celebrity status or substance use issues to make her life even more difficult. I am going to sneak into her house and sabotage her InterNet and steal all her baby books. I will then follow her around and smack anyone who questions her decisions with a decaying salmon. Shame someone couldn’t have done that for Ms. Geldof.
eilish, by the time I had the surgery my breasts almost seemed like they didn’t really belong to the rest of my body – they were a force of their own. So that’s another thing the surgery did for me, made me feel like my breasts were part of me again.
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re the Deborah Orr piece on Peaches Geldof (going only from your description) – it sounds like yet another piece that’s got sucked into the individualist myth/fantasy – that we all make our own lives without reference to external influences. I know I’ve read some really good critiques of toxic individualism (because of course a certain amount of individualism is inextricably tied up with personal liberty/freedom) but I don’t have time to search them out right now.
Scientists Discover Another Example Of Male Bias In Science:
http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2014/05/06/scientists-ignore-female-genitalia/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-07/french-law-allows-workers-to-donate-leave/5435968
Apparently, the solution to TAFE teachers being ripped off by their employer (our government) is not to improve their work conditions, but to enable their colleagues to reduce their work conditions.
How very neo-liberal-American. It’s just like the tipping system in America: they don’t pay wait people a living wage, it’s up to the customers to give charity.
There’d be no pressure on anyone to donate their leave, would there. Who’d be the bastard that didn’t donate their leave to the person with the dying child? I can see employer groups getting right behind this.
I spent so much time at yoga last night worrying that people might be worrying about my underarm hair I got it waxed off today. Now my armpits hurt 😦 I blame the (internalised) patriarchy.
Eilish – I don’t know about tafe employees but often employees can’t get unused sick leave paid out when the resign. So being able to donate some to a colleague when you have accumulated lots of it seems reasonable to me. And in most cases is just a cost to the employer since it probably wouldn’t have been used anyway. It’s something I’d be more than happy to do in the sort of circumstances described. Perhaps ensuring that donations are always kept anonymous would help reduce the risk of social coercion.
Chris, I don’t doubt many people would. People in America pay up to 20% extra on their dinner bills to help pay the people who brought their plates to the table. It’s uplifting to think we human beings can actually be good to each other sometimes.
I work with two women who don’t get paid sick days. There’s six people in our workplace.
I’m back home after a lovely and all too short holiday in Chicago – met up with my best friends and we went to the Art Institute, the Field Museum, Navy Pier and Division St for shopping (where the woman running one shop told me her dad’s from Bendigo!) I bought some lovely kitty jewellery – a silver brooch and an Edward Gorey watch, though that didn’t make up for being TOTALLY KITTY DEPRIVED the whole time.
If I was super-rich and spending much time in the US, I’d love to live in Chicago. I just really like what I saw of the place.
Oh, and I finally saw some eps of Sherlock on the plane home, so now I see a bit more of what people like about Benedict Cumberbatch (though I like Martin Freeman much better). Very good show, though I don’t know if I’d want to get it – Mum would never be able to keep up, and I’m not sure I’d want to sit through a couple of seasons (?) of Moriarty. Seeing him in flashbacks/dreams in Series 3 was more than enough.
Loved Watson giving Holmes a Glasgow kiss, though.
I am a complete Martin Freeman fan after watching Sherlock: funny, I was totally a Mr.Spock fan while watching Star Trek.
Mindy: apply sorbolene cream, in the shower. It’s the only thing that will help. And never ever waxing agin. Once, and only once, I waxed both underarms and bikini area. NEVER agin. That internal patriarchy is a bastard.
Googling Glasgow kiss.
Better known as a Liverpool Kiss, also sometimes a Geordie Kiss in other parts of the UK.
I have never been tempted to wax. Peeling band aids off is more than enough for me. I just wear t shirts to yoga. My internalised patriarchy has been whispering about weight this week. Well, not so much whispering…Honestly, I have had three kids and I will be 40 this year, must I really still cling to being a size 10?