This is How it's Supposed to be

A seven-year-old boy I know said to me:

"This is how it's supposed to work: Men look after babies and women do all the cleaning. But in this house it's the other way round."

Me: "Well actually, some people say women should look after the babies AND do all the cleaning AND do all the cooking."

7-yr-old: "Eh? But that wouldn't be fair!"

Quite Striking

I was handed a book last night, and challenged to find a single paragraph that made explainable sense.

I tried, and I failed. But I did find this gem of a sentence, which I read out loud several times because it was so tongue-warmingly nonsensical:

"Liberal cultural studies' enthusiastic misrecognition of the media-marketing apparatus as the supplier of malleable symbolic material to an autonomous, creative plurality external to itself - a theoretical development that occurred at the same time as the countercultural icon of the 'cool individualist' was replacing the responsible collectivist - is quite striking."

It's the pay-off that I love the most. "- is quite striking!" We were all in agreement that something was most definitely striking, we just weren't sure what. Granted we were a little drunk on tequila, pomegranates, port and stilton. I expect we could have made some meagre sense out of it if we'd tried hard enough. But that would have spoilt the fun.

Musical

Like the great big sugar-coated fool that I am, I volunteered to "help out" with a local production of a musical, and suddenly find myself in charge of all the blimmin' music. Help!

It's called Ocean High and is a Grease-a-like with a soundtrack consisting entirely of 80s pop songs. They were all in the charts when I was a teenager, or in some cases even younger, and I am becoming awash with nostalgia. Material Girl, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Footloose, all get me gazing into the middle distance and remembering the excitement, the angst, the sheer giddy giggliness of being 13. And then the other day, preparing for a rehearsal, I clicked through to a YouTube recording of Video Killed the Radio Star, and found myself in tears. It's just such a great song, and I loved it so much when I was ten. And I'd just been (rather foolishly, I suspect) looking at a satellite pic of my grandparents' old house, which hosted so many happy childhood memories and has now been turned into a sock factory (a sock factory!).

I was ten!! It's so long ago. 30 years ago. THIRTY YEARS! And what really gets me is that when I was a kid, various pop songs from the 50s and 60s made comebacks, and they were great (all that Motown and Atlantic Soul) but very old. Very much part of the past - the kind of thing that old-fashioned people once listened to. And now there's a whole new generation thinking that way about me and my youth, and I just can't get my head round it. Partly because I was quite sniffy about the 80s when I lived through them and I still can't think of them as cool, not in the same way that the 50s and 60s seemed cool to me. How can shoulder pads, big hair and rara skirts compete with teddy boys, leather and psychedelia? But partly because... it's not old! It was only yesterday. Wasn't it?

Unkempt

There's a bunch of rather lovely and unkempt women over here on unkemptwomen.com being, well, unkempt.

I recommend.

Personally I am permanently unkempt, to the extent that my employer gave me a mild ticking off about it today. How I manage to get washed and dressed at all is a bit of a mystery. It's not unusual for me to drag myself up after four hours' sleep (and I'm a woman who needs her slumber). My baby son is teething, and I'm struggling to remember why the hell I'm putting myself through all this.

I think it's known as challenging. And it'll get even harder in the new year.

Being unchallenged is looking a lot more attractive than it did before. This is the hardest thing I've ever tried to do.

Suspicious Requests

"Hi,

I have a client for whom I'm looking to purchase advertising from quality websites. I've had a look at your site at http://beleagueredsquirrel.blogspot.com/ and think that it would be a good match for our client, whose target demographic is similar to your own.

We would be interested in purchasing advertising in the form of a text-based link on your site. To reduce unnecessary administrative costs we prefer to pay a fixed annual upfront fee for such advertisements. Once the ad has been placed, payment can be made quickly by PayPal or check.

Please let me know if the above is of any interest to you. Thanks in advance."

How odd to send a request like this without even hinting at what the product in question is. Surely nobody would say Yes without knowing what they were going to be advertising? And how likely would it be that, given that I currently have no advertising at all, I would want to have just one advert for this product? It would surely make it look as though my blog was a cover, whose real purpose was to advertise this thing (whatever it is), which would just make people suspicious and unwilling to read on?

People are funny. I won't be taking them up on their offer. Not that I even have a clue what it is.