Toasters, Spooks and Neeson

One has a new idea of how to inspire one's jaded fingers to write every day.  I really don't know which part of 'you will write something every day' my digits don’t understand.  So each day for the rest of October (loosely defined as 'when I can be bothered to make an effort') I'm going to pick out three significant things that happened during the day that grabbed my attention and wax lyrical about them for sentences and sentences until I get uber bored.

Sure, it will make for some mind-numbingly dull blog posts, but then I'm most likely definitely not going to read them.   Let's pretend that I started doing this annoying, stupid little activity yesterday.  Yesterday was all about toasters, spooks and Liam Neeson.

I haven't got much to say about the toaster situation, suffice to say that people who operate these semi-heavy machinery things oughta monitor their wholemeal bread more closely and attend court-appointed Toaster Awareness Seminars if they fail to do so.  But, alas, there are brave people out there who fearlessly put out flames of yeast and smoking slabs of over-cooked bread.  Now let's all pause to think about firemen for a moment...

I don't know how to segue effortlessly onto the issue of unearthly bodies, so I won't bother.  It seems spooks are everywhere.  That's ghosts, not spies; but I suppose they amount to the same thing.  Several people I know are currently experiencing seismic paranormal activity in their respective houses, and news of these happenings scares the living daylights out of me.  I don't even want to believe in the paranormal, but there is too much weird, unexplained activity going on.

There's enough scary and dodgy in the natural world to freak me out, let alone things that don't really belong here anymore.  No offence ghosts, but I'm looking at you.  And I would greatly appreciate if you would never come visit me at my home, expecially if I'd never met you when you were alive.

I'm fairly positive I saw a ghost years ago, and I have had a former pet come to me - who had died years before - so I know they are here, but I'm definitely in de river denial over it.  But still, they are here (italics used to denote spookiness).

Speaking of spooky stuff, last night I went to the movies to watch an action flick, and the cinema rudely ran a trailer of the new Paranormal Activity blockbluster - I think they are up to number 28 or something - and I accidently opened my eyes during a particularly terrifying bit.  Admittedly, I am a scaredy cat and find the mere sight of the movie logo terrifying, but anyway. 

Now, onto Liam Neeson, who would no doubt recognise a toaster if one apparated before his eyes in the middle of the night.  And then he'd shoot it.  I'm not trying to name drop or anything, but Liam and I did spend some quality time yesterday.  Sure, he was in a movie, and I was watching the movie in a cinema, but I really don't appreciate society insisting that I make that distinction.

Crankypants Ocean

I currently reside on the South Coast of Australia. When I say reside, I mean I’m here for five days. I came down for the sun, that burning yellow thing in the sky that I like to follow around, because it makes me happy.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I haven’t seen the sun for two days I would have been greedily lapping it up. And today, finally, the sun came out. THE SUN IS OUT!! I am so darn happy to see it I can’t even tell you. If I wanted to live in a dark, damp cave without the sun I would go and live in England or something.

Today is perfect beach weather – particularly if you were from Lapland and didn’t mind a bit of a cool breeze - so I decided to go for an early morning walk (um, 9:00am is my early) along the beach, but it seems the ocean had other ideas.

The first red flag should have been that there were no other people along the whole coastline, as far as the eye could see. The second red flag should have been that there were no red flags to tell people where they could and couldn’t swim.  The third was no surfers. 

The absence of these key features are not ideal near the sea – which can often be a cantankerous pain in the arse - and intelligent people probably would have noted that. I, of course, naively ignored the forewarnings, or lack thereof, and went along my merry way. And what I discovered is if you are not smart enough to realise that the ocean doesn’t want you around then it will soon tell you.

Maybe I had come at a bad time, perhaps the ocean was redecorating, and decluttering; it was certainly throwing out everything it didn’t want. Seaweed, coke bottles, bits of fallen trees, me. It was high tide as well, so I didn’t have much legroom, and at one point she had me pinned in at the seawall and doused me with icy water up to my thighs until I rolled on top of the sandbar.  Yes, I rolled, like Bear Grylls might do.  It was all very exciting.  And cold.  More cold than exciting, really.

I cursed a fair bit, laughed it off, and then came the wind; and when a strong gale and beach combine they produce a perfect machine gun effect that fires stinging sand bullets at your arms and legs. So I went running, sobbing, from the beach, or something like that. There’s nothing like being rejected by the ocean; a living, breathing body of water that doesn’t want you around.  I might try again later; when she’s in a better mood…

Coastal Retreat Treat

I'm kinda fed up with the whole Canberra thing.  I'm utterly bored and miserable here.  I'm not doing what I want to be doing for a career - how the hell did that happen? - and every day I get more and more fed up with it.  It's like groundhog day without Bill Murray.  I would do just about anything to be self-employed.  But how does one change careers when you are in a secure job?  How the hell do people just jump and change careers anyway?  Scary times, indeed.

My birthday is this week.  If you are interested - and who wouldn't be - I will be turning 18 again, with 10 plus years experience.  I'm taking the day off work, because there is nothing more annoying than people at work celebrating your birthday and making so-called humourous references to how freaking old you are and everyone staring at you while you try and cut the cake like they've never seen someone cut a fucking cake before. 

And you're supposed to smile and take it.  I know it's cake, and I will usually do just about anything for a slice of cake (there is vast empirical evidence), but the whole activity just to get the cake is annoying.  Happy birthday, indeed. 

So I've got a five-day weekend coming up and I'm going to a detox farm.  Yes, a detox farm.  You know the place; full of angry humans who haven't eaten chocolate for a week, wheatgrass shots and starry-eyed hippies, those people that God later turns into corporate executives just to make sure we never lose our sense of irony.  Well my detox farm is going to be sort of like that, but mostly nothing like that.  Because it's going to be fun, for a start.

I'm going to a house down the south coast of Australia to pretend that I don't live in Canberra at all and that I am actually a coastal local.  Although the weather is predicted to be downright summerish, so there will be a lot of my fellow Canberrans lurking around, so I will be forced to brandish a faux moustache and novelty glasses when I head around town so no-one I know will recongise me.  Small price to pay.

I will go to the zoo, I will write, I will read, I will walk, I will attend the markets, I will buy useless and possibly hideous trinkets at the markets, and I will snigger endlessly at the tourists who must go back to work on Tuesday.  Oh wait.

Play Safe

Following the abduction, rape and murder of Melbourne woman, Jill Meagher, last week, there has been a lot of blithering by feminists on a woman's right to feel safe on the streets after dark.

Of course women have a right to feel safe - we are bloody entitled to it - but events in Australia this week have shown that this theory clashes with reality, because rapists and murderers don't care about women's rights. And feminists are doing women a great disservice by not acknowledging that.

Exhibit A: SlutWalk in Canada, an annual event where progressives push a women's rights agenda when the focus for feminists should be on how to stay alive during a violent mugging / sexual assault / attempted abduction.  Yes, women should be able to do anything we want to do, and we should be able to wear anything we want to wear, but the reality is we can't.  It’s all very well campaigning how things ought to be in a perfect world, but women need real life skills that may save their life one day.

It seems to me a reasonable thing to do to ensure you have a safe night out is to look at things from the perspective of an opportunistic rapist/murderer, and then do the exact opposite of what they would consider the most suitable working conditions for doing what they do. Yes, that is totally unfair and often downright inconvenient for women, but, again, rapists don’t really care that we might find it unfair.

Rapists want you to walk home by yourself, and they want you to walk near back alleys, and they want you to have nothing to protect yourself with, and they want you to be drunk enough to make bad judgement calls about all these things. The Salvation Army have people on the city streets of Australia most nights, trying to protect vulnerable women from predators who target this exact behaviour.

A lot of women feel disempowered by having to take safety precautions on the streets after dark, but creating an environment where opportunistic rapists and murderers are unable to flourish means the predators are the ones who are disempowered.  None of this is fair to women, but who the hell wants to take the risk?

I think the police do a brilliant job overall securing and protecting the community, and they did a remarkable job solving the Meagher case despite the tragic outcome.  The police may say the streets are safe, but none of us feel safe.

I never, ever feel safe on the streets at night by myself, and I don't think I know many women who do. There is always a niggling fear in the forefront of your mind.  And no, it's not fair that many women feel that way, but that's life, and it keeps you cautious.

I think women should report every single occurrence where they feel unsafe on the streets; every event that they would previously not report because they feel that no-one is going to care, or that it's somehow so commonplace that it's not worth giving a statement.

Shut-Up Money - The new airline customer service

I've just started a complaints process against Qantas Airways, following their brilliant fuckup of my lost baggage in July, which left me fairly disgruntled and devoid of underpants for six days.

I was watching the mainstream news the other night and I spied one of the flying red kangaroo tails in a story concerning airline ticket costs or maintenance or unions or missing underpants or something, and I realised that the mere mention or sight of the airline now elicits a novel type of fury. On my pissed-off scale, qantas angry falls only a few places below road rage.

Following those jerks jerking me around for the first few days of my recent overseas jaunt, Qantas have offered me compensation - which more than covers my emergency costs - for losing then failing to deliver my baggage to me. They have also offered to provide me with a letter for my insurance company so I can recoup what I spent on emergency personal effects, such as underpants and the like.

Well there is a catch, of course. To receive the compensation and letter for my insurance company - which I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to anyway - I have to sign a confidentiality agreement. A secret underpants accord, if you will.

This release absolves Qantas and American Airlines, the other carrier involved in the complex, tangled mess, of any accountability or responsibility or answerability or liability for their indefensible customer service. It's been two weeks and I still can't sign the darn thing. I'm not sure I will be able to. 

I imagine that sounds a little ridiculous, because they are offering to cover my expenses more than three-fold, but I'm pretty pissed off that they want to wipe their slate clean, presumably so they can screw over the next passenger, and then the next and the next. 

I do recall that I was sobbing on the phone to their baggage claims call centre at one stage when I was in Florida out of anger and tiredness and desperation and sheer frustration with their customer service.  So I can't just take their shut-up money. I can't do it.

But it seems shut-up money is the new customer service. I was let down fairly appallingly by a major airline that probably should spend a bit more time providing a level of service to customers that is commensurate with the pricey airfares they expect us to fork out for a seat on a plane that isn't comfortable for ten minutes let alone ten hours.

And when things go wrong, which they invariably do, instead of some type of human empathy, you get a robotic reply from the Qantas Claims office that tells you they are sorry you were inconvenienced, but with no accommpanying explanation for the extensive list of right royal fuckups you experienced while trying to retrieve your baggage.

I suppose I was naive to expect they would bother to look like they care about customer service, but I certainly wasn't expecting a glib, veiled attempt at blackmail. I imagine it is merely a reflection of the litigious era we find ourselves in, so who can blame big business for taking this approach. It's probably standard business practice to them, but it's just more flawed customer service to me.

So I find myself in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I hate when life throws you pickles. Despite my disdain for any type of confrontation, and equal disdain for those who routinely choose to eagerly engage in it, I've decided that I'm going to be morally outraged for a while, push back a little, ask a few more questions about their complaints process, ask Qantas for a review of my complaint and then engage the ombudsman and trade practices people if need be.

What do I want from Qantas?  In a perfect world you'd expect something that vaguely resembles some type of accountability - or some loose explanation - in what appears to be a gaping hole in Qantas policy regarding on-delivery of baggage to cities they don't fly to.  But why would they bother with apologies or explanations when they have shareholders' money to throw at disgruntled customers to keep them quiet.

Am I wasting my time?  I am under no illusion that I won't get stonewalled.  But I can't just sign that thing. 

The Incredible Shrinking Mountain

I don't know if this is an Australian thing, but plastic bottles ain't what they used to be. Coca-Cola Amatil, the makers of the deliciously tasteless Mount Franklin spring water beverage, have decided that the best way to completely piss off the thirsty people of Australia is to use 35% less plastic in their new easy-crush bottles.

That's great, CCA executives; a container that's easy to crush when empty. But you know what that means? It means it's also friggin' easier to crush while your drinking it.  Or when you twist open the lid a bit too heavy-handedly.  I bet this was one of those massively stupid decisions that chief executives make when they are brushing their teeth in the morning. 

I thought I was bulking up a bit too much at the gym before I read the side panel advertising the incredible shrinking bottle. CCA claims that one little bottle now creates a carbon footprint that is 27% lighter than the previous little bottle. A lighter carbon footprint, my arse. You sell your products in plastic, you dickheads.  I imagine it's more to do with reducing overheads than saving the world, but kudos where kudos are due.

All the inner city hipsters with their hippy, environmentally friendly lifestyles have probably whipped out their special wind-powered calculators they use to measure the square root of their carbon footprint and have figured this is a good enough deal to stop drinking water straight out of a grimy tap in a back alley and start buying plastic.

Anyone who hoodwinks the hipsters into believing they are saving the earth – which has been perfectly capable of looking after itself for 4.5 billion years without their help - gets my stamp of approval. 

R.I.P Beautiful Kane

15 August 1998 - 4 September 2012

I miss you so much already, little Kaney. When I'm ready I'm going
to blog about you so I never forget exactly how amazing you were.

Face Deactivation

Today I temporarily deactivated my Facebook account.  There are a couple of reasons why I logged off.  The first reason is that I was ever so slightly addicted to the daily bombardment of mindless, self-absorbed drivel every five damn seconds from some people.  Yes, we all have morning tea, but it's really not interesting enough for public consumption, so to speak.

I would never suppose that anyone would be vaguely interested in what I had for morning tea, or what I was doing at 2pm every damn day.  Yes, that's a real thing apparently.  WHAT THEY ARE DOING AT 2PM EVERY DAY.  I'm not saying their drivel is unimportant, but I have better things to do with my time than trawl through it.  And whenever I logged on I was there for a while, doing nothing in particular for the most part.  Facebook can be a massive time consumer, if you let it.   

I still use email to keep in contact with people - yes, totally ol' fashioned - but the rest I don't need to know about all the time.  Although, while it is snuggly ensconced in the land of social media, I can't imagine ever deactivating my little blog - it's just me, my words and my own little world. I heart it.

The other reason for cutting off bits of social media is because I want to start writing my e-book, so I'll need all the spare time I can get my hands on.  Yes, I want to start writing a fictional psychological thriller e-book. I do. What's wrong with that? It's so not above my means. Being successful at it (for example: finishing it) is very possibly above my means, but w'ever. I'm sort of mostly convinced that I can do it. What I do know is that you can't achieve anything if you don't give it a shot. 

I recently read an article about Australian action thriller uberauthor, Matthew Reilly, who offered advice to budding writers such as, 'if you want to be a writer, then call yourself a writer'. Makes perfect sense I suppose.

Write 'writer' on your tax return.  Tell Homeland Security you're a writer when they interrogate you over your supposedly dodgy fingerprints. Reilly didn't mention that one; the thought of important paperwork just reminded me of one of the more poignant moments of my recent trip to the United States of Crazy. Homeland Security; that's what holidays are made of (my apologies to Van Halen).

I'm also a bit put off by the phenomena of social media at the moment following the Tom Daley and Charlotte Dawson Twitter incidents.  Both Daley, a U.K. Olympic diver, and Dawson, an Australian TV personality, were viciously bullied by so-called Twitters 'trolls'.

Can it only be a matter of time before Facebook descends into the same vexatious, provocative and often downright ugly death roll as Twitter?  Truly horrible what those with troubled minds and/or a lack of any morals or values are capable of when they are able to anonymously spew hate.

Whether the Weather be Cold

I've been regularly monitoring the BOM (Australian Bureau of Meteorology) website for weather updates for the past half hour, because apparently I have nothing better to do on this frickin' freezing winter's night.  Evidently Canberra has not received the memo stating that it will be spring in one and a half hours.  But I suppose there is never really a good reason to monitor a weather website.  Oh well, you'll just have to find a way to deal with it all.

In the past half hour Canberra was -2.6, then -3.5, then -2.3, then -1.9, with no discernible abnormal wind gusts.  Does anyone on planet earth understand meteorology? Can anyone say meteorology 10 times really fast? It's probably to do with boring air pressure or isobars or whatever.  I'm going to create my own weather website that's less confusing, where the temperature doesn't go up and down every five damn seconds.

The Curse of the Mandarin

Since I've returned from my holiday to the United States of Crazy, I've stupidly begun a healthy eating diet, which people tell me means I need to eat health food or I fail.  Well that's got recipe for disaster written all over it then, doesn't it?

So I've been eating a lot of healthy food lately, and lots of fruit, which isn't much different to usual.  But the word on the street is that fruit is healthier for you than chocolate.  Wha...??  While I find this so-called 'fact' fairly difficult to stomach, I'm going to give health food (italics used to denote derision) a shot in the name of eating-options-that-are-brain-debilitatingly-boring.

Now, bananas.  I've always been a big banana fan. They are delicious, zero drama and easy to consume.  No mess, no fuss; just a completely psychologically balanced fruit that appears to have no discernible personality disorders.  My type of fruit. I hate crazy fruit.

Citrus fruit, on the other hand, make me fairly angry. Take mandarins. They have an obstructionist manner that I just cannot tolerate. There are simply too many steps involved in eating a mandarin. I ate a mandarin today. This is what happened to me - I'm sure you've had a similar experience. Step one is always choosing one that doesn't smell like it has been invaded by a herd of marauding worms.

Step two involves peeling the damn thing; like I have nothing better to do with my time.  Mandarins need to take a banana leaf out of the famous yellow fruit's book and learn how to be peel friendly. No-one will ever love you if you continue to be a narcissistic, passive aggressive ball of hard to peel, orange annoyingness.

Step three brings you to the eating stage, but that doesn't mean you can rest on your laurels. There is still much work to be done. The eating stage involves monitoring the fruit for pips, of which there are usually about 500 of the damn things in every segment of mandarin.  And the final stage is mandarin juice.  Everywhere!  This fruit is so annoying.  

Mangoes are one of my favourite summer snacks, but they can also be quite frustrating, given that one can only eat about 30% of the fruit, and it is so slippery and slimy you need to take a shower after you've dealt with it.

I've only just started noticing avocados, after a life filled with fear and terror of putting the green slime in my mouth. They have rapidly become one of my favourite snacks, even though they come with a big pointless stone in their centre.  I think that's about it.

RIP First Moon Man

I get goose bumps whenever I hear Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldren talk about their mission to the moon; arguably one of the most famous days in history.   Armstrong has just passed away at 82 - much to the devastation of me.

He was a great, humble man, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time recently viewing the extensive tribute to him, his fellow astronauts and all the space missions at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

NASA have long stopped caring about the conspiracy theorists and the wacky accusations the space agency faked the moon landing in an elaborate U.S. Government publicity stunt.

The so-called evidence base for the nonsensical conspiracy claims were dubious mood lighting, dodgy radiation level readings, the silky, softness of the moon's surface, and impeccable camera angles and footage, all of which have been credibly explained through evidence of the technical variety that lovers of secret plots get all cranky about. 

All but the most passionate conspiracy theorists seem to have put the fake moon landing old wives' tale to bed, what with the fact that it would be practically impossible to cover up and Soviet Russia would have sniffed out a scam a long time ago.

Although in 1982 NASA hired a space writer to definitively debunk the hare-brained rumours but decided against it, because clearly they had better things to do.  Why indeed give the clueless conspiracy nutters any more air time? 

On my recent trip to NASA I noted some compelling evidence indicating an actual moon landing in the grainy footage of all the rocket scientists and engineers at Houston Mission Control, as they tried to hide their complete horror and devastation when communication was lost with Apollo 11 moments before the 1969 landing.

Obviously NASA have a fabulous central casting unit and hired the best actors and extras of their generation for the moon landing because the raw emotion with tears, hair-raising stress and then sheer joy and exhilaration is fairly difficult to fake even if you are a talented actor like Snooki.

Armstrong was instrumental in landing the lunar module without any really useful assistance from Mission Control.  The spot that Houston had programmed in for the landing turned out to be replete with massive craters, gigantic speed bumps and deep potholes.  Obviously the local council just couldn't be arsed fixing the area up.  I guess that's a whole of solar system thing.  Plus it was the middle of the night and there were no street lights or, um, moonlight so he couldn't see very well.

So Armstrong decided to travel a bit further to find a place where he could parallel park without falling into a ditch or being carjacked by E.T.  By the time he landed, there was only about 30 seconds of gas left in the tank, so there was that too.  There isn't a petrol station close to you when you run out of gas on earth so good luck with that on a lunar space mission.  On top of that there was the whole first-man-on-the-moon expectation, so no pressure there.

RIP Mr Armstrong.

The Tart Adventures of Harry & Julian

Oh, Prince Harry.  I imagine one's grandmother is not terribly amused at one's tawdry shenanigans in the skank capital of the entire solar system with a bunch of trashy American hookers or their classy equivalent.  

Seriously, who knew there were so many cheap and tacky trashbags in the world, prepared to whip their clothes off for the international media due to their incessant need for attention?  Oh wait, we did know that.  These women are everywhere, in many shapes and sizes of Kardashian.

I imagine the latest bunch of promiscuous ladettes are employed in professions involving poles and the ensuing dancing around of or else they wouldn't be too comfortable parading themselves so overwhelmingly underdressed in a global public forum in what appears to be a bit of a honey trap. 

And I think we all know what Harry's Scotland Yard detail were doing during the naked hotel room polo match romp or whatever it was.  I imagine the attention to detail was there, but it probably wasn't focused on handing out fines for unladylike behaviour under The Police Act 1827.  I imagine what those boys want right now is an Invisibility Cloak.

In other media tart-related news, embattled Wikileaker Julian 'Sausaage' Assange is still stuck in the middle of a war-torn nation state that is not a signatory to the Geneva Convention.  Or else he's still glamprisoned in posh war-torn Knightsbridge in Ecuadorian Britain on his blow-up camp bed.  I keep getting those two confused.

Assange's Wikileaks reminds me of the wind-up jewellery box I had as a kid, which opens to the sound of ballerina music - with a magnetised ballerina flippin' around like a drunken lout on the mirrored centre stage.

Although when you pry open the Wiki box, you get a garbled lecture from Assange on blah, blah, blah, I'm going to humiliate the United States of Crazy by exposing their secrets, blah, blah, blah.  But much to the chagrin of the wannabe Bond, the United States weren't humiliated; they were just plainly and understandably rightly pissed off.

I agree that Assange should be able to release anything he wants on his Wikileaks files, but I also think he needs to accept that there are consequences to those actions.  He hasn't got his head around that yet.  Probably never will.

Of course nation states have secrets.  There's nothing wrong with government secrets when you are dealing with sociopathic middle eastern nations.  We wouldn't have the freedoms we do if governments didn't have secrets.  Oh the irony of it all, Julian.  Secrets are how countries negotiate their way through the brutal and bloody minefield that is global politics.
 
Like a game of poker, you keep your game face on, your cards close to your chest and you hedge your bets, hoping the guy on your left who is winning is from the West and not the Middle East.  But you never, ever show your hand, Julian.  It goes a little something like that.

And then along comes the progressive leftwinger windbag who decides to open the damn pandora's jewellery box in the name of open governance.  No such thing as open governance in global political affairs; people couldn't handle the truth anyway, my 'pinion. 

Kindling on the Beach

I have no idea who invented personal e-book readers, but when Amazon rubbed a bunch of twigs together to create their little Kindle, they lit a fire under armchair reading enthusiasts all over the world, which turned into a bonfire that would consume unsuspecting publishing houses around the globe. 

And, fortunately, these little electronic spot fires would allow booklovers to stop tearing their hair out when planning and packing their carry-on luggage for an international holiday. 

It meant that we no longer had to drag around a bunch of dog-earred airport novels from one country to the next, but it also means preeminent authors like hotel room heiress Paris Hilton probably no longer have an avenue to air their distinguished works.  Which is a tragedy.  Bonfire of the vanities, indeed.

Even if you weren't a big reader back in those pre-e days, everyone travelled with books, just in case your airline of choice decided to make you wait five hours in a deserted airport in Narita, Japan with nothing to entertain yourself but a completed cryptic crossword, sans eraser!  Because that never happens anymore. 

But thank god for the dichotomy of travelling with books, says Random House.  They possibly didn't say that at all, but you just know that's what they're thinking. 

Bookworms love the convenience and comfort of travelling light with an e-reader, but if you are going to a beach in a land far, far away, then you need to take an actual printed book, because Kindles don't do sand. 

Whoever invented e-book readers wasn't much of a beach bum.  Thank god for beaches too, says Random House.  I bet they did say that.

While electronic gadgets are superb for the international traveller, they are not terribly useful for international beachbummers on Waikiki Beach, where cheesy paperback, soft porn airport novels rule supreme, due to their ability to more often that not survive a random salt water attack of any magnitude.

Back in the Box

Today was my first day back at work following a month long vacay to the United States of Crazy.  Despite the fact that I couldn't go for a swim in Waikiki at 11:00, I somehow, miraculously, survived the day and ended with the same chill-Mahalo-Hawaiian attitude that gripped me in Oahu.  Brilliant.

It might have something to do with my habit of keeping my expectations low so the worst that can happen to me is that I occasionally get a bit surprised.  But attending a seminar on the Budget Life Cycle didn't help matters at all and possibly shortened my own life cycle.

After you have had a break from your life for a while, it seems that you need to relearn a lot of basic things that previously were completed in an automatic fashion, like walking on the right side of the footpath, and how much is the pentagon shaped coin worth, and, you know, the way to work and where to park.   

So I'm going to try and put myself back in the box and stop thinking about Hawaii for 24 hours a day, because I really don't think that'll fit in with my Canberra lifestyle, unfortunately.  Reality is a cruel mistress.  The conservative Canberra public servant box feels more like a coffin that is being lowered into the ground while I'm kicking and screaming, "I'm still alive!  Let me out!" 

Airline Seat Reclining Charge

I used to love travelling on a plane when I was in my twenties. The thrill of venturing somewhere new and exploring one random dirty, germ-ridden foreign city after another. The excitement when the air hostess brought around the food trolley so you could spend the next 30 minutes trying to open your teensy weensy plastic cutlery bag.

The cramped spaces didn't inconvenience me at all, the detestable passengers weren't on my radar, the waiting around and queues didn't trouble me that much, the seats were comparatively larger (in my mind only, apparently), and I'm sure that the flight attendants were far more affable than the current crop..

I've just returned from a luxurious and often draining month-long holiday to the United States, leaving a trail of seven domestic and international plane flights, numerous shuttles, many bus trips, a few taxi rides and a couple of ferry rides in my wake.

These days I'm rarely a happy long haul traveller. The most recent flight, from Hawaii to Sydney, was particularly frustrating. Flying Law dictates that the dick sitting in front of you will always thrust back their seat in an attempt to be horizontal, thus rendering your limbs useless for a period of around ten hours. If you are especially blessed, they will leave it that way during meal time.

I have found that these passengers are generally the same self-absorbed, whining, whinging morons who demand the air hostess pays attention to their pathetic little requests on an hourly basis. I'm not really sure how flying economy creates a sense of entitlement, but anyway.

On my recent flight home I had a middle-aged Australian women - let's her call her Princess Bitchface - who thought she was in first class and wound back her seat to a completely unacceptable level.  When I politely asked her - through gritted teeth - to put her seat forward at meal time she argued with me that the seat in front was back and she had no room. I stared at it and then told her it wasn't. So she begrudgingly put it forward.

For the rest of the flight I was enormously tempted to remove my scarf, lean over the chair, and put myself out of my misery. But I deemed the plane too cold, so that plan was put on the backburner until it got a bit warmer.

I could have pulled out the old mile high insanity plea at my arraignment. Or just get a couple of fellow considerate travellers on my jury. I'm pretty sure this is the reason they don't allow weapons on planes; because the sky would be a bloodbath.

Jetstar may be a subsidiary of Qantas but they charge you for everything you do, which is the direction most airlines are moving in. Ka-ching, ka-ching. Blankets cost money, water will incur a charge on your credit card and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I tell you, I don't mind paying more for a non-budget airline ticket if it creates the illusion of customer service. Frequent Flyers paid for this trip, but I ain't flying Jetstar again internationally.

Qantas have said that their reclining seats are here to stay, so I think it is time that they start to impose a seat reclining charge system. Perhaps an electric shock for customers when they push their seat beyond a reasonable level, or a timing system, or a $500 charge on their credit card when they keep it back during dinner time. Welcome to Australia! I friggin' love this idea.