Friendship goals.

There is a part of my social life that sustains itself, with eat-streets and facebook and one catch-up flowing naturally into another. When I want to do something, I have a default group of people I recruit from.

For various reasons, I decided I need to invest a little more deeply in some of the other people around me. To build some more friendships that would be mutually beneficial, and also to love people who need a bit more love, and also to sustain friendships that I value through changes in life like marriage (theirs not mine). To fight the sometimes selfish gravity of old friends and comfortable ruts and isolation. The thing is, it's hard to know where to start, other than just by feeling like a failure or deciding I have enough friends anyway or putting it off until something happens spontaneously. I've got the means and the time and the energy at the moment, I want to actually do something, instead of vaguely wish and hope.

I decided instead that I should write down 5 things to do with 5 people, and do them before the end of the year. Then I would know I have invested some of my time in others. It sounds weird and cold, a list of "friendship goals". I'm not that kind of person. It's just that it is easier to do something overwhelming if you have a simple first step, like "1. see a movie with T". So I actually have a list.  I have no expectations of amazing results, and relationships aren't very measurable anyway; I just want to know that I've made an effort.

Garbage Ibis.

My teenage friends who now live in Namibia have been back in Aus, and I took a half day off to entertain them while their parents had meetings at CMS office. After lunch we walked to the ferries and caught one to Manly, hanging over the front of the boat we saw a dolphin, at Manly we had a hot chocolate before rushing back for the return ferry. Ferrys are so much fun.

I learnt many things about Namibia, such as they have not much Chinese food, and mostly all the restaurants do steak. They have mint flavoured toothpicks: I reckon there should be flavoured paddle pop sticks inside icecreams so you can lick the ice-cream up without tasting wood. And they pointed at an ibis, which they hadn't seen. I filled them in on how disgusting they are.

But I did have an interesting thought on garbage ibises. If Sydney suffered a severe depression or apocalypse type event, and food was scarce, we could eat ibises. They look about the same size as a chicken, but on taller drumsticks, and although they do fly they are currently pretty bold and slow, so they could be caught and eaten more easily than seagulls and pigeons.

File that away and hope you never have to use it. (Note: Ibises are apparently a protected species.)

Waist waste.

Revelation!

If you are a person who hates to waste food and will finish food even when you are already full, think of this:

If you overeat and it turns into fat on your body, it's wasted anyway. Might as well waste it in the bin. Bin waste is easier to get rid of than waist waste!

An Essay on Ladies Fashion and the development of the Toilet.

It is generally accepted that women wore long skirts for hundreds of years because they were repressed by society.

Possibly. It is nice that society has relaxed enough to allow both men and women to dress comfortably and casually. However! I think it has as much to do with plumbing.

(Boys who blush easily should stop reading now.)

I was surprised to read, in The Jane Austen Handbook, that Regency women like Jane Austen did not wear knickers. (I warned you!) Underneath those long dresses and long petticoats… nothing! Just some thin socks. I wondered, why? Weren't they cold? Didn't they feel naked? Why didn't they invent bloomers? And then I realised, they had no proper toilets. Women had to use potties. With a little imagination, the link is obvious.

Legged underpants (or trousers) would make it difficult to use a potty. The trouser is an awkward item of clothing to half-remove because it ties your legs together. I have no idea how exactly ladies used the potty, but I imagine having your legs in trousers would be tricky.

Big skirts are fine for potties, but very difficult for modern toilets, as shown in the movie 27 Dresses, where bridesmaid duties include holding up voluminous wedding dress while bride wee-wees. So bathroom development and fashion development is linked as follows:

Potty = long skirts,
Toilet = trousers or legged underpants.

Also, once you have legged underpants, like pantaloons or knickers, you no longer have to rely on long skirts for warmth and modesty; you can have any length skirt you like.

There you have it! Women's liberation from long skirts is linked to developments in home plumbing. The gradual shift from long skirts to short skirts/trousers could not have happened without a shift from petticoats to split-legged pantaloons to bloomers to knickers... which could not have happened without the modern toilet.

ETS.

I'm not sad for the death of the Emissions Trading Scheme. Trading pollution is moving the pollution around, and mostly moving the money around, hoping that somewhere along the way the pollution is reduced. That's my limited understanding of the matter, anyway.

Not that I have a better plan, except to live frugally and wait for the new earth.

My grandma's logic

My grandma tells me that men are liars and untrustworthy. Yet she still wants me married. To a man. You'd think by her logic that she'd tell me either to stay single or start batting for the other team.