In praise of being ordinary

If you can accept for a moment the idea that ’simple is best’, I am sure you will enjoy 1000 Awesome Things.

This Blog is a view of the world celebrating discovery of simple pleasures within reach of ordinary everyday life, without being maudlin or preachy. Each awesome entry gives the same sort of pleasure a dad gets when he tells a dad joke, or when mum puts comfort food on the table for the family.

Regularly updated each weekday by Neil Pasricha, the site was launched on June 20, 2008. Pasricha now attracts 40,000 people each day to join his discussions on topics such as how to enjoy wrong coloured foods

Starting with small delight #1,000 and working towards #1, the site is now nearly half way to its goal. For each entry so far Pasricha has provided a warm, opinionated, biased, idiosyncratic take on everyday goings-on. He provides an explanation for each choice, and some of the pieces are quite detailed in their description and affects.

The illustrations are original, quirky and really add to the flavour of the blog.

The blog has good reviews from BBC, CNN, and Wired magazine. Someone on Wikipedia said their five favourite posts were:
· Ordering off the menu at fast food restaurants (#949)
· Old, dangerous playground equipment (#980)
· Smiling and thinking of good friends who are gone (#829)
· Mastering the art of the all-you-can-eat buffet (#864)
· Old, classic board games (#847)

My favourite so far is thing #565, ‘Moving forward and moving on’.

This week 200 of the best posts so far are being published in book form - The Book of Awesome. On Amazon, the book is rated highly by those who have seen a copy.

Pasricha says that he works in an office, and is just a regular guy who loves the smell of petrol, sleeping on the cool side of the pillow, and peeling an orange.

Writing these blog entries has had an effect on the man driving 1000 Awesome Things. He says:

I hope we hear lots more from this guy

I think that I’ve forgotten my share of useful facts. Mostly because they’ve been superseded by new stuff I’ve had to learn.

I forget stuff all the time. I forget to comb my hair before I leave for work. I forget where I put the car keys. I forget the names of people I met this morning, and I forget the faces of friends I haven’t seen in 20 years.

Sometimes words I want don’t jump to mind; I need to wait a few hours for the cobwebs to fall away.

Without my diary I wouldn’t remember half the jobs I am supposed to do next week. Even with a trusty organiser I’ve now booked myself to be in two different cities on the same day next month. I’ll have to tell a fib to one of my family; and we all know that a fibber has to have an excellent memory.

When I go to the grocer’s I take a written list; otherwise I come home with wrong purchases. So what’s new? I had to carry a written list when I ran to the corner shop aged ten; and when I lived with mates, aged 20; and in my thirties, when I was married. Today, in my 70s, if I don’t have a shopping list, I forget to buy tissues and toilet rolls that I need.

The most common trick the forgetting fairy plays is when I re-heat a cup of tea that’s gone cold, and ten minutes later I wander around the house looking for my cup, forgetting to look in the microwave oven.

But I have always forgotten such things, with little concern that I might have become abnormally absent-minded.

This ability of mine not to remember everything is nothing unique. There have always been normal people who get on the train with odd socks, or a with a dress tucked into knickers, because they forgot to check in the mirror.

Mostly I suspect failure to recall occurs because we get distracted, or because we are not sufficiently interested in routine tasks, of what we’re doing, and so, need to operate on auto-pilot.

Forgetfulness and distraction are a part of ordinary daily living.

I am told we can do exercise to help muscle-up our memories; there’s a game a memory training guru played, where he showed me a tray with 20 objects on it, and then I was expected to try and recall the items when the tray was removed. Most of these tricks really didn’t help in the long scheme of things.

Now, with hordes of drone-like baby boomers worried about growing old, they appear to have a deep fear of not only loosing skin elasticity, but they are being told they may, proabably, also lose an inevitable  fight with Alzheimer’s. There’s a whole new industry in researching and caring for dementia patients.

Whereas in days of yore, relatives would simply lock grandma in a home and take her for a Sunday drive once a month, now the aged care industry organises sing-songs and knees-up for their bed-bound, foggy-minded oldies.

Despite the growing industry of care and research, there is no known cure, nor way of preventing, memory loss -  yet. The best advice I’ve had in 70 years was from my grandmother, in days before the I-phone apps, who said if I had to remember something, to tie a knot of string around my finger. That would give me a clue that I had to remember something.  

I believe they – the professional care support industry - mean well, and they believe they are essential to the welfare of oldies and their families, but a full house of empty-headed geriatrics is bread and butter to this industry. Every day, especially in Twitter, I see new research warning of an increase in memory loss. And demands for higher wages for helpers in the old folks home.

How can I know if my forgetfulness is unusual, a result of memory fading like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, or the onset of progressing senility and dementia.

Perhaps I am loosing my marbles and I am in their target ( what’s the word, I’ve forgotten, its on the tip of my tongue) – a yes, target demographic.
 
Despite all the proclaimed tests for early warnings of loss off mental facilities, if my grey cells die and memory fades, it will fade away imperceptibly, like hearing loss or receding hair lines. I probably won’t notice anything other than my frustration because the crossword puzzles seem to be getting harder to solve.

Perhaps there should be a dash of cold reality from the Aged Care industry. Reality about what the aging baby boomers, their parents and children can expect, without scaring them stupid. What is ordinary memory loss, and what is tragic debilitation.
 
I searched Google and other web search machines for answers. Incidentally, one of the suggestions from a serious scientist said that use of web search engines was likely to cause us to lose the power to remember; well they said that, centuries ago, about the evil of printed books, didn’t they. But I digress. In the search I found a useful web blog: geriatric care management , with advice to “Help Manage the Care of an Older Adult”. Assuming, of course, this is an adult who has passed over to another dimension, and needs help from family or the helping industry.
 
“Alzheimer’s is not forgetting your keys. It’s forgetting what your keys are for.”
 
This was an “Ah Ha” moment. Its OK, and normal, to forget where I put my keys.
 
If I am strapped to a chair, and fed mush, I probably won’t care what the keys are used for.

Last night in Sydney the local  Chinese community gave Sydney a priceless cultural present to celebrate Chinese New Year.
This was a Twilight Parade, with elaborate floats, magnificent costumes, dancing, drums and dragons. Lots of dragons. It was reported as the largest Chinese celebration for New Year, outside of China. Who knows if that is true or not. It certainly felt true, as the parade worked its way through the centre of the city.
This has become a major event on the summer calender, for those who know that it is on. But The Chinese New Year doesn’t get a quarter of media promotion that is given to other festivals on in Sydney during summer.
More than 3 000 Chinese-Australians gave of their time energy and talent to make this parade happen. Ordinary people; mums, dads, kids, tradesmen, bankers, shopkeepers, chefs and clerks.
There were a few poobahs up the front of the parade, councilors, politicans and glamorous movie stars, soaking up glory. But the rest of the paraders were our neighbours and schoolmates.
About 100 000 people came into town to enjoy the spectacle as spectators. But that means about 4 million people didn’t get to see this magnificent cultural celebration.
And how did the media bring this massive event into our homes. About 7 seconds viewing on the TV news, photographed in the dark. A small paragraph in the paper; with no photos. A story about a picnic in the park earlier in the day got more media coverage.
All those people who spent months rehearsing, training, practicing, making costumes, raising funds really add quality and depth to life in Sydney.
As I walked around Hyde park earlier in the afternoon I was constantly greeted with smiles, laughter, people pleased for a chance to show off their costumes and show me how they brought dragons to life during the Twilight Parade.

For more images of the costumes in the parade, have a look at my Flickr gallery

My grandmother was buried in an unmarked grave. Her choice.
I wouldn’t mind following her example. My choice.
If my grandchildren need some scratches on a slab of marble in order to remember me, then I have probably wasted too much of my time here on earth.
There are many paupers’ graves marked in pencil, with a number written on a piece of wood that’s been stuck into the grass. O tempore. O mores.
Something grander is needed for all the forgotten people.
The British tomb of The Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey holds an unidentified British soldier killed on a European battlefield during the First World War. This everyday battle-body is buried in splendour amongst Kings, and Princes of the church.
The idea for the British national monument was spawned by a rough grave on the western front, marked by a rough cross which bore the pencil-written legend ‘An Unknown British Soldier’.
The anonymity of the entombed soldier is key to the symbolism of the monument: since his or her identity is unknown, it could theoretically be the tomb of anyone who fell in service of the nation, and therefore serves as a monument to all of their sacrifices. My father died in the war, and his body was never recovered. I never knew the man, but by all the war memorials, I can know his deeds.
Now many nations have similar memorials, more frequently recognising unknown soldiers, sailors and airmen, rather than an ‘unknown warrior’.
I wonder why we can’t also have a magnificent public tomb for all the unknown citizens who may not have family or friends to see the good they have done passed on through time, rather than have that good interred with their bones.
I think of all the unknown and unrecognized citizens who are alive today who, when they die, may never be remembered. They haven’t been a burden on the state, there is no record of them having been a trouble.
They are everyman, the faceless neighbour down the street, the forgotten relative, the quiet unassuming stranger whom you pass in the city without a glance; Joe Public or Edna Average.
They go about their lives unseen, unsung and uncelebrated, living a life swimming with the tide.
These are people who are solid, hard working independent citizens. But forgotten. Death, as in life, really does mean oblivion for them. Sometimes their words and ideals might live on, quoted by millions, but recognized only as being from ‘anonymous’.
My idea is that the house of debate in every democratic parliament should have a magnificent memorial to the Unknown Citizen, built in a central position in the lower house. The remains of the Unknown Citizen would be firmly positioned between the leader of the government and the leader of the loyal opposition, so that every issue of debate would have ‘every citizen’ at its core. No politician in the chamber couldn’t avoid this symbolic memorial to constituents they never took the time to get to know.

Charles Wolfe. 1791–1823

Why is the Baby Boomer generation treated as if they are special and important? There’s nothing extraordinary about people born between ’45 and ’64, except there are lots of them.

I beat the rush. I was a result of the start of the war. In 1939 my mum met a handsome bloke, a new recruit who probably looked good to her in his new uniform. He enlisted almost as soon as war was declared. He probably used the old soldiers line “ I am going away, and might not come back. We only have tonight for me tor remember while I am over there, fighting”. He was right, he didn’t come back.

We war babies grew up in a society strongly over represented by women. I was on the map too late to have been a part of the great depression, but I can remember my family was still affected by the poverty from those times.

There was no male in the household to earn the normal male based income of the time, so mum worked in an armaments factory during the war, and my grandmother cleaned houses for the officers’ wives class. This was a time governed by shortages, not just shortage of cash. This was a time of rationing books, meat was rationed, petrol was rationed, eggs and sugar were rationed ” for the war effort”. Our family saucepans were taken, to melt down for aircraft parts.

My family saved string, darned socks and budgeted all week to give me threepence pocket money on Saturday when I started school.

Then I was too old and conservative (in my twenties) to really be bona fide participant in the youth revolution of the sixties, the one big time when Boomers did something for the world.  Boomer time was a time of plenty, and immediate satisfaction. They, and my grandkids want it all, and they want it now!

I was ready for retirement when most of the Baby Boom bunch were worrying about their mid-life crisis. The The government began to worry about the cost of paying pensions to that great swell of Boomers, so they announced a plan to give a big bonus to Baby Boomers to stay on at work instead of retiring. Sadly, I retired a month before the scheme started, so I missed out on a lovely big lump sum.

I went back to work because the pension for war babies wasn’t enough to live on.

And now the government has announced a new financial incentive scheme to encourage the Boomers to stay on a work. I am five years past the old retirement age; my employer has decided to make me redundant, to make room for more Boomers on the staff.

 I will work till I drop. After all, I am part of the generation who will make do. My only choice is to work independantly. The pension will put me on a new form of ration card

Now I am only a blogger. I am a late starter in this field. Its a new career, and I need to find a way to beat the Boomers, and make some living money from the business.

Comfort foods are familiar, simple foods that are home-cooked or eaten at informal restaurants. Peasant food, in other words, with some sentimental appeal.

Comfort foods have a lot of power to settle a trouble day, a bit like the orange Madeleine cake in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past

Comfort food is made from common ingredients, down-to-earth, and easy to prepare. Many people eat comfort food because it is generally easily digestible, is in their memory tasty and flavorful, or carries a promise of reward, like mum used to offer.

Often you can’t buy this stuff in restaurants, except some hip places which charge a fortune for being so up market, snooty and trend setting.

Foodstuffs that can nearly always be certain to bring me a feeling of childish security include:

Meat loaf

Mushrooms on toast

Tripe and onions

Lamb sandwich with pickles

Ploughman’s lunch for picnics

Corned beef cooked in a pressure cooker

Fish and chips on a Friday night

Chile con carne, not from a can

Lumpy custard

Christmas pudding with coins in it

Home grown figs, plums and almonds

In later life, when I started a new family, we found security in new comfort foods:

Spaghetti bolognaise

Shepherd’s pie

Any Chinese food

Grilled cheese on toast

Bubble and squeak

Pancakes

Home made biscuits

Birthday cakes

I wonder what my grandkids generation will consider to be comfort food, when they have had a hard day at the nuclear plant. They have had so many meals in McDonalds, so many pizzas, so many restaurant brunches.

Of course they eat well at home, but their houses are full of coffee table cook books from Jamie and Nigella. Their parents are so busy there isn’t time for them to spend a day cooking slowly and filling their houses with wonderful aromas.

One house which I believe would have wonderful memories of magical comfort foods is described in the One Ordinary Day blog, written by Michele. Wonderful food, good photography

http://oneordinaryday.wordpress.com/page/2/

There are about two hours on Christmas day that I really enjoy.

There’s the time early in the morning when kids first wake, trembling with excitement to see if Santa Claus has been to their house. There’s their pure joy when they open a few gifts. This Christmas spirit takes hold of the house for about an hour. Then the day returns to normal.

There’s an hour or so it takes to eat Christmas lunch - or dinner - together. That presupposes it is a simple meal, with a few special treats. Not an excuse for greed, envy, glut and surplus. If you are really lucky, you might get to share a second meal with another family, or friends. Then that hour is an added bonus. But as soon as your meal is over, don’t hang around to wash the dishes as a gang. That’s when the rot starts. Dish washing is never magic at the best of times, and Christmas day can’t change that. Just leave the table, and draw a curtain over the magic till next year. Life is back to normal.

In the Charles Dickens stories of Christmas, People knock off from work an hour early on Christmas day, to go home to have their meal together. Bob Cratchitt returns to work on Boxing day.

Compare his pleasure to expectations today. We expect to be allowed to leave work at lunch time the day before Christmas. What on earth for?

The day after Christmas is expected to be a holiday, to give us a chance to recover from our excess consumption on Christmas day. If Boxing day falls, say on Saturday as it did this year, we expect a replacement holiday two days later on the Monday. Bah, humbug.

In the old Christmas poem The Night before Christmas, we hear “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” Today the pre Christmas house is pandemonium, wrapping too many cheap gifts to make them look not-cheap, rushing down to the mall at 11.45 pm to see if shops run by people of non-christian faith might still be open and have some more wrapping paper that we forgot to buy in the six week shopping season before Christmas day.

Christmas decorations and gift catalogues start to appear in Woolworths and Target aisles as early as late August/early September, and the majority of shoppers do not even seem to notice anything out of the ordinary in this.

There are so many office and business Christmas parties that we can’t schedule them all in the month of December. So invitations start to arrive with RSVP for early November.

I can’t even begin to think of the stupid Christmas ‘traditions’ in Australia, without getting a headache, obligatory greeting cards decorated with fake snow and songs about sleigh rides, and mistletoe where Aussie bush flowers should hang, and images of fat people wearing heavy fur coats in the middle of our summer heat.

Excess in December has become an eighth deadly sin, up there for grossness with greed, envy, sloth, pride, gluttony, lust and anger. Summer celebration of Christmas is a constant demand for “more”, “bigger”, “sooner” and “holier than thou”.

Commercial Christmas has become too much.

UK scientists are looking for a 5ft 9in, 182 pound-weight man and a 5ft 4in 154 pound-weight woman to be immortalised as sculptures of Mr and Mrs Average of today

The Science Museum is looking for Mr and Mrs Average to represent the standard shape of modern Britons in an exhibition all about identity called Who Am I?

The winning entries – who for the men must also have a 38in waist and for women a 34in waist – will have their bodies scanned and then replicated in a full size nude to go on permanent display.

Members of the public, aged between 18 and 44, who match the average measurements – produced by the NHS Health Survey for England – will be given the chance.

According to writer Greg Callaghan, in a look at body shapes, in the Australian in 2008, Professor Maciej Henneberg, head of anatomical sciences at the University of Adelaide said that the first modern humans to arrive in Europe from Africa at least 20,000 years ago were as tall as we are today, only far more muscular.

By the time Shakespeare was penning Hamlet, the average European bloke had shrunk to about 165cm tall. Height only started to nudge up again after the bonuses of the industrial revolution

When Henneberg arrived In Australia in 1995 he was struck by the lack of basic research into our body shape. He found that the last major survey of body measurements had been done by Australia’s oldest manufacturer of bras and lingerie, Berlei, back in 1926, in which 5000 women were put under a tape measure.

In Oz in 1926 59kg (130 pounds) and 161cm (5 ft 3 inches)tall was average height and weight for a 28 year old woman. For a 30 year old Oz bloke then 174cm (5 ft 8 inches)tall and 72kg (158lbs)was the average weight and height.

In 2008 the average Oz woman had grown to 71kg (156lbs) and 163cm (5ft 4) tall, 12kg heavier but only 2cm taller than her great-great grandmother. The bloke has grown to 85kg(187lbs) and 178cm tall (5ft 10″), 13kg heavier than a typical male back in the 1920s.

But in the twenties, most people’s bodies were roughly the same shape and size as one another. Today, prosperous-looking people tend to be slim and poorer folk are plumper.

One result is that average clothes sizes in shops vary so much. A size 12 in one brand will be a size 16 in another. A medium shirt in one brand is sloppy around the waist, while a large will struggle to allow the button to meet.

Pressure and determination from ordinary people can, and will, help change political attitudes to things that damage the climate.

I’ve seen how actions from a few reduced an earlier poison threatening life through the environment, lead. The determination of ordinary citizens took on the might of the petrol companies and forced them to removed a major commercial lead additive from fuel that contaminated the air.

And I saw how the anger of one woman helped clean up a deadly mining town, run by one of the world’s biggest miners, when she realised how damaging their sloppy commercial practices were to the health of her children and others who lived near the mines.

I was born in Broken Hill.

This was a great mining town, source of massive wealth for the whole of Australia, producing mainly lead, zinc and copper, but also producing a death sentence or acute sickness for miners and their families, and anyone who lived around the rail line taking lead ore to the smelters further south.

I remember bitter tales and folklore told by my grandmother, of men dying in pain from working in the mines, of the poverty of the widows and of the pigheadedness of unions and management.

 There was a myth that the mighty Barrier Unions looked after their own workers. I am not so sure that was as true as the unions would have us believe.

  Take the “lead bonus”, for example. This was an extra payment to miners, introduced following determined social pressure, ostensibly to allow those who dug the metal ore out of the ground to share in the wealth their work created. There were good years in Broken Hill, when the price of lead sold overseas meant new clothes and holidays. The price of lead was especially high during the years of the war, when the metal was needed to make bullets and tanks.

But supposing, as my grandmother told me, lead breathed in from the ore and dirt and soil in the town killed miners and crippled kids. The widow often couldn’t work in that town - and until the lead bonus, miners didn’t make  enough money to pay for decent insurance – that cost a few pennies a week  but certainly wouldn’t make a widow rich. And at that time pensions were a dream only in the minds of very few politicians.

 Sometimes the miners’ wives grew sick from lead poisoning, caused by washing lead soiled clothes of the miners. Sometimes the children grew sick, playing in soil that was thick with contamination from dust blown in from the mine. Sometimes familes grew sick eating vegetables grown in soil saturated with lead dust and cooked in water filtered through lead.

The real economics of the lead bonus was to allow the miner to accumulate up some meagre assets, so when dad came home from the mine one day wearing a shroud, the family had some  possessions to pawn for food.

A massive memorial at the top of the mines lists names of those many men who died directly in the mines; The first name on the memorial is shown to have died from lead sickness.

My grandfather wasn’t around when I was born, thanks to the mines. My father wasn’t around when I was born - I sometimes think of the irony if the bullet that killed him in the war was made from lead from Broken Hill.

There weren’t health services in Broken Hill then as they have them now, monitoring and testing the children every year to measure the amount of lead in the tiny bones and brains. Kids were slow witted and sickly. My grandmother had seen what was happeing to the young children then, and she blamed the lead. She wasn’t going to let that sort of sickness happen to her grandson.

Although there was good work available in Broken Hill during the war, my grandmother and her daughters packed me into a bag and moved down to Adelaide.

There were some who stayed, those who had no way out or felt  loyalty to their mates.. The same sort of loyalty as happened in other parts of Australia, such as in asbestos mining towns. 

As soon as they could, my family got this young kid out of Broken Hill. You might think with that level of brainwashing I had about the dangers of lead, I would avoid the stuff at all costs. But the world I grew up in didn’t work like that. Lead was big money and a big part of our lives.

The house we moved to in Adelaide had lead in the paint on the walls. There was lead in the paint on my cot. I played with lead toy soldiers.

When I was about 10 years old my uncle showed me how to melt lead and make my own sinkers, so we could go fishing. I soon adapted that skill to make my own lead moulds for toys, using lead I picked up along the side of rail tracks.

My mother had a collection of lead crystal glassware, so sparkling! There was lead lining in the ice chest.

In my teens I had a lead belt that I wore when I went spear fishing, and I loved tinkering with old car batteries, a great source of acid and lead for weird teenage experiments. Sometimes I would try to be practical, and re-condition the batteries.

There was lead in the petrol I pumped into my cars, and in the air I breathed from passing traffic; I was 44 years old before the government banned the use of lead in petrol for cars.

When television came to Australia, there was lead in the glass of screens of the heavy monitors, to prevent radiation; just like in x-ray rooms. And so it goes.

Of all the blood tests I’ve had in my life, I don’t remember any doctor telling me that my blood was tested for lead deposits. I do wonder now if nosebleeds (those I had when I wasn’t fighting) were a symptom of lead in my system, if my slow wit could be traced back to those fishing sinkers.

When I went back to Broken Hill several times over the years  I met friends of my family who had stayed and fought the mining companies, to clean up the waste dumps around the mines and and make the companies pay to have the ore trains covered, so dust couldn’t drop off along the tracks. New mines were forced to pay for massive projects to remove top soil all around the town- in one place to a depth of dozens of metres - to get the surface lead out of town and make for some possibilty for a normal life.

It was individuals and citizens groups who forced these changes, not the unions, not the  political parties.

If one person, with a network, can force a giant company to get the lead out, I have high hopes the same will happen now, with ordinary citizens forcing polluters to get man’s excessive carbon pollution out of the soil, the sea and the sky.

I have been off air for a while. Not as a result of health issue , but what’s been happening at work.

For nearly a year life at work has been somewhat scungy . Heads have been rolling, members of the team I worked with have been moved to other sections in tears, and others were shown the door, swapped for newer and less experienced models. Management brought in a psychologist to  prod those who remained into being a team.

Stress like that is a condition  of working which many people suffer. It happens at all levels of work. 

I thought I was handling the stress and drama, but apparently not. I made a mistake, and the management gods had me as a plaything for a while.

As a result, I was dumped into an outer department; this was an easy solution to management’s problem of what to do with me.  The mistake I made, was the excus emanagemnt used to get me out of their hair. I made a mistake of judgement, nothing earth shattering, but they made a mountain out of it.  I keep hearing from intimates that their real problem was my being a bloke, a gender issue. I was a sole token male in a group of women. I don’t believe that affected my team work, but it seems to have been a problem for others in the team.

I used to come home from work drained by the dramas and go back the next morning tired and dejected.

Luckily for my self esteem, my banishment to another department and downgrading of my job happened at the same time as the state premier got dumped by incompetent political party management, and in the same week a leader in the federal parliament was dumped by infighting in his party, so I see that I am in great company with other notable outcasts.

Noteably there are equal numbers of men and women in the section where I work now, and its a happy team.

Now I am more relaxed. I feel as if I had been bog snorkelling, and have now surfaced (covered in mud, but able to breathe freely).

At least I feel like looking at the web again. Blood flows in my veins. Ideas bounce around while I shower in the morning. I can even tackle the morning cryptic crosswords ( still can’t solve them, but a few clues don’t look so frightening as when I was befuddled.

Let’s see how it evolves. life goes on.