towards superspecimenhood et al
The stepometer (I’ll call it a pedo from now on, it’s sexier) has failed me. After such a good opening burst my reading for the day was a mere 5524, well under the 10000 daily requirement for superspecimenhood. True, yesterday the full day’s stepping wasn’t measured, but the latter half of the day was too much taken up with sitting at a computer and at meetings – working hard mind you. Need a handometer. Also a speechometer to measure how many words spoken daily (I’d be even more down in that department). So I’ve decided to cut down my reading quota, and when I’ve caught up I’ll cut down my writing quota too, to better balance the body-mind equation.
Sexwise, I did talk to my favourite La Luna female person (apart from Sarah of course, who took the night off) last night. A slim young woman with the most sublime dark tangle of hair. During the break, I asked about her weeding (I saw her back on Thursday night at the Maintenance Committee meeting, where she informed us jestingly that her social life consisted of voluntary weeding on weekends. She’s doing an environmental and parks management course).
She’s not the slightest bit interested in me sexually I might add. I’m just trying to move onto the edge of her radar screen. So apparently her weekend activity didn’t consist of weeding but wild orchid hunting up in the lower reaches of the Flinders Ranges. Awesome, she found it. This word I only find complete torture when it comes from English literature students (sorry Kirsten). So she rapturously described the cute little specimens and the veteran knowledgeable types who collect and monitor them. Followed by a brief discussion of her course, her future, her garden, her bantams and the co-op. Lots of mental snapshots of her fascinatingly expressive pale black-eyed elfin face.
That’s all I have to report on sexual personal liberation and progress. The meeting did go into interesting stuff on energy audits, and how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently our state government has a push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in poorer households like ours by the end of the year. We were shown a meter for monitoring and converting energy outputs, which was part of a kit including door-stops, lagging, fancy thermometers and the like. One of our houses is going to be monitored using this kit, and hopefully the rest will too eventually. Quite interested in this, especially as, for the time being at least, I’m going to be paying my own energy bills. Also useful for Sarah.
With my pedo strapped on, went for a walk this morning. Fortunately I got a bit lost, so I did a good 3000 steps, around Edwardstown and Clovelly Park, up to a Sacred Heart College (Catholic in the Marist tradition), until I found a bus stop with a map. Walking’s great for getting to really know a neighbourhood. As everywhere, there’s a lot of new construction going on, and it must be said that even the new flats in less classy suburbs are a vast improvement on seventies functional design. La Luna’s own new homes, more or less typical of on-the-cheap construction for the low-income end, are much more appealing environmentally and design-wise than earlier stuff, and Edwardstown’s new medium-density constructions appear to be diversifying from the awful Macmansions of the nineties, the stuff going up in Mile End and Thebarton when we lived there.
Walking also brings you up close to people’s gardens and the effort put into them, inspired or otherwise, it bulks out individuals, you can’t be quite so scathing, in that Nietzschean sense, about petty virtues and little people. Suddenly you find yourself here and there impressed, even dazzled, at colourful displays and imaginative combinations. I wonder if they have veggies growing out the back, Nat says you couldn’t do it here because the soil’s probably poisoned, but he would say that, he’s a bit of a slacker, I really should buy a pedo for him, give him the shock of his life, by the way mine says currently 5489, so should improve slightly on yesterdays’s effort, the dating system’s still all wrong but I’m getting closer.
Worried about the lad’s isolation, thankfully we’ll be having a review meeting on Friday, sort a few things out, he’s back on his playstation now, but it has been a more successful day than usual. After my walk this morning, during which he at last did his household chore, cleaning up the wet areas, we sat down and planned a couple of dinners for him to cook – tacos and apricot chicken. Then, after for me a quick trip back home (Exeter Terrace) to collect my wallet, we went to Coles at Castleplazaland and shopped for ingredients and other extras. Back home, we organized which film to see at Marion megaplex. He was happy to see anything, he said, but I encouraged him to choose. Unfortunately, for he picked a thing called Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.
The film was an early one, beginning at 5pm, so we quickly got stuck into making tacos, something I’ve never done before, and they turned out very well. We used soft burritos (I think that’s what they were) rather than hard taco shells, which was good. So, mince with onions in a chili sauce, with tomatoes, cheese, and avocado (at last, a teenager who likes avocados – and he even says he likes mushrooms). And then, the movie.
Harold and Kumar go to White Castle is a truly awful piece of yank teen schlock, sloppily directed, lazy, fatuous, typical, predictable. Directed at a late teen audience, perhaps of engineering students, it trots out all the issues of late teen life; getting laid, eating the best junk food in the world, and getting laid. It features shitting competitions (particularly cringy), freakshow godbotherers, the possibilities of group sex, unfunny wackyweed merchants, the workshy dilemma, the general shyness dilemma, big dick jokes, corny special effects, very frequent use of the word awesome, and of course Winning Out Over Your Enemies By Standing Up For Yourself In The Good Old American Way, in predictably cathartic fashion of course. Nat got quite a few laughs out of it, and I felt suitably martyred. It’s a genre thing, but we didn’t have films like this targeted specifically for us when I was a teen. In fact, I feel an important reflection about this coming on.
My pedo showed 5538 by the end of the day yesterday, a very slight improvement, and it’s clear now that to get myself up to 10000 will require considerable effort. Furthermore, there’s little scientific about it. Yesterday morning, following Sarah’s suggestion, I walked for 100 counted steps then checked the pedo reading. It came in at 95, which was excellent, but late last night in a bid to get my figure up I did a hundred steps on the spot in my tiny bedroom. The pedo reading was zero. This morning, pedo, connected, I padded round the kitchen for a while, preparing breakfast. The pedo recorded only six steps, which was way under what I did. I’ll continue to monitor and report.
About teen movies and teen activities. Now when ah were a lad, there were, for a start, no cinemas for many miles around. Of course there were no videos either, and no computer games and playstations. By the time I was sixteen I think I’d been to the cinema about twice. At fourteen or fifteen I went with my older brother and his friends to see Barbarella, a most memorable turn-on. Later, I saw The Hireling, based on an L P Hartley novel, starring Robert Shaw and Sarah Miles, also memorable. That’s all I can recall. We did occasionally go to the drive-in. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was one I saw there I think.
Of course there were no mobile phones, and no walkmans. We hung around the shopping centres and mooched about, talking, smoking and drinking coke (I didn’t do any talking though), and in the other life of my double life I read books (there was also TV, but in my later childhood that would mean spending time in the same room as my parents, a big ask. Having a TV in the bedroom, or two TVs in the house, was inconceivable). There was a library a hundred yards down the road.
I never read ‘teen’ books either, I hardly knew such things existed, if in fact they did. Sure I read bits of Noel Streatfield and Anna Sewell, but I didn’t categorise them, except that I wanted to read ‘real’ adult stuff – by which I mean Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Hardy, not the naughties.
I compare all this with kids today who are so targeted, by the book market, the movie market, the video game market. Who, before having reached double figures agewise might’ve watched the same video thirty times over, after which they’re ripe for interactive gaming which will absorb so much time that might’ve been taken up, in an earlier era, by reading and contemplating the imaginative power of language. I really don’t know what to make of all this. Nat has told me that ‘he really likes reading’, and his reasoning is excellent – books, he says, allow you the freedom to picture the scene almost any way you like, they give much freer play to the imagination. Fine, but he has spent a thousand times more time on his playstation and watching TV than he has spent reading.
Sexwise, I did talk to my favourite La Luna female person (apart from Sarah of course, who took the night off) last night. A slim young woman with the most sublime dark tangle of hair. During the break, I asked about her weeding (I saw her back on Thursday night at the Maintenance Committee meeting, where she informed us jestingly that her social life consisted of voluntary weeding on weekends. She’s doing an environmental and parks management course).
She’s not the slightest bit interested in me sexually I might add. I’m just trying to move onto the edge of her radar screen. So apparently her weekend activity didn’t consist of weeding but wild orchid hunting up in the lower reaches of the Flinders Ranges. Awesome, she found it. This word I only find complete torture when it comes from English literature students (sorry Kirsten). So she rapturously described the cute little specimens and the veteran knowledgeable types who collect and monitor them. Followed by a brief discussion of her course, her future, her garden, her bantams and the co-op. Lots of mental snapshots of her fascinatingly expressive pale black-eyed elfin face.
That’s all I have to report on sexual personal liberation and progress. The meeting did go into interesting stuff on energy audits, and how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently our state government has a push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in poorer households like ours by the end of the year. We were shown a meter for monitoring and converting energy outputs, which was part of a kit including door-stops, lagging, fancy thermometers and the like. One of our houses is going to be monitored using this kit, and hopefully the rest will too eventually. Quite interested in this, especially as, for the time being at least, I’m going to be paying my own energy bills. Also useful for Sarah.
With my pedo strapped on, went for a walk this morning. Fortunately I got a bit lost, so I did a good 3000 steps, around Edwardstown and Clovelly Park, up to a Sacred Heart College (Catholic in the Marist tradition), until I found a bus stop with a map. Walking’s great for getting to really know a neighbourhood. As everywhere, there’s a lot of new construction going on, and it must be said that even the new flats in less classy suburbs are a vast improvement on seventies functional design. La Luna’s own new homes, more or less typical of on-the-cheap construction for the low-income end, are much more appealing environmentally and design-wise than earlier stuff, and Edwardstown’s new medium-density constructions appear to be diversifying from the awful Macmansions of the nineties, the stuff going up in Mile End and Thebarton when we lived there.
Walking also brings you up close to people’s gardens and the effort put into them, inspired or otherwise, it bulks out individuals, you can’t be quite so scathing, in that Nietzschean sense, about petty virtues and little people. Suddenly you find yourself here and there impressed, even dazzled, at colourful displays and imaginative combinations. I wonder if they have veggies growing out the back, Nat says you couldn’t do it here because the soil’s probably poisoned, but he would say that, he’s a bit of a slacker, I really should buy a pedo for him, give him the shock of his life, by the way mine says currently 5489, so should improve slightly on yesterdays’s effort, the dating system’s still all wrong but I’m getting closer.
Worried about the lad’s isolation, thankfully we’ll be having a review meeting on Friday, sort a few things out, he’s back on his playstation now, but it has been a more successful day than usual. After my walk this morning, during which he at last did his household chore, cleaning up the wet areas, we sat down and planned a couple of dinners for him to cook – tacos and apricot chicken. Then, after for me a quick trip back home (Exeter Terrace) to collect my wallet, we went to Coles at Castleplazaland and shopped for ingredients and other extras. Back home, we organized which film to see at Marion megaplex. He was happy to see anything, he said, but I encouraged him to choose. Unfortunately, for he picked a thing called Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.
The film was an early one, beginning at 5pm, so we quickly got stuck into making tacos, something I’ve never done before, and they turned out very well. We used soft burritos (I think that’s what they were) rather than hard taco shells, which was good. So, mince with onions in a chili sauce, with tomatoes, cheese, and avocado (at last, a teenager who likes avocados – and he even says he likes mushrooms). And then, the movie.
Harold and Kumar go to White Castle is a truly awful piece of yank teen schlock, sloppily directed, lazy, fatuous, typical, predictable. Directed at a late teen audience, perhaps of engineering students, it trots out all the issues of late teen life; getting laid, eating the best junk food in the world, and getting laid. It features shitting competitions (particularly cringy), freakshow godbotherers, the possibilities of group sex, unfunny wackyweed merchants, the workshy dilemma, the general shyness dilemma, big dick jokes, corny special effects, very frequent use of the word awesome, and of course Winning Out Over Your Enemies By Standing Up For Yourself In The Good Old American Way, in predictably cathartic fashion of course. Nat got quite a few laughs out of it, and I felt suitably martyred. It’s a genre thing, but we didn’t have films like this targeted specifically for us when I was a teen. In fact, I feel an important reflection about this coming on.
My pedo showed 5538 by the end of the day yesterday, a very slight improvement, and it’s clear now that to get myself up to 10000 will require considerable effort. Furthermore, there’s little scientific about it. Yesterday morning, following Sarah’s suggestion, I walked for 100 counted steps then checked the pedo reading. It came in at 95, which was excellent, but late last night in a bid to get my figure up I did a hundred steps on the spot in my tiny bedroom. The pedo reading was zero. This morning, pedo, connected, I padded round the kitchen for a while, preparing breakfast. The pedo recorded only six steps, which was way under what I did. I’ll continue to monitor and report.
About teen movies and teen activities. Now when ah were a lad, there were, for a start, no cinemas for many miles around. Of course there were no videos either, and no computer games and playstations. By the time I was sixteen I think I’d been to the cinema about twice. At fourteen or fifteen I went with my older brother and his friends to see Barbarella, a most memorable turn-on. Later, I saw The Hireling, based on an L P Hartley novel, starring Robert Shaw and Sarah Miles, also memorable. That’s all I can recall. We did occasionally go to the drive-in. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was one I saw there I think.
Of course there were no mobile phones, and no walkmans. We hung around the shopping centres and mooched about, talking, smoking and drinking coke (I didn’t do any talking though), and in the other life of my double life I read books (there was also TV, but in my later childhood that would mean spending time in the same room as my parents, a big ask. Having a TV in the bedroom, or two TVs in the house, was inconceivable). There was a library a hundred yards down the road.
I never read ‘teen’ books either, I hardly knew such things existed, if in fact they did. Sure I read bits of Noel Streatfield and Anna Sewell, but I didn’t categorise them, except that I wanted to read ‘real’ adult stuff – by which I mean Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Hardy, not the naughties.
I compare all this with kids today who are so targeted, by the book market, the movie market, the video game market. Who, before having reached double figures agewise might’ve watched the same video thirty times over, after which they’re ripe for interactive gaming which will absorb so much time that might’ve been taken up, in an earlier era, by reading and contemplating the imaginative power of language. I really don’t know what to make of all this. Nat has told me that ‘he really likes reading’, and his reasoning is excellent – books, he says, allow you the freedom to picture the scene almost any way you like, they give much freer play to the imagination. Fine, but he has spent a thousand times more time on his playstation and watching TV than he has spent reading.
posted by Stewart at 2:25 pm
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