And so it continues...

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Eras are funny things - defined by a win, a loss, a death, a departure or a new beginning.

There's an era in my life which is soon to become sharply defined. Part of what it's been about has been obsessively stored in a red lunch box so I never forget what I've seen. 

Behold, my homage to the privilege of working in the arts in New Zealand. Appearing three times a week for a few weeks to come.

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Potentially a premature post on the second most exciting thing to happen today (the first was the installation of a new coffee machine at the office) but I just changed my Twitter bio and this post seems to fit with my new brand. Feel free to bookmark this and when we're all saying ‘He's in my Orienteers who like to yodel circle on Google +’, you can throw rocks at me. I am sure far more technomologically and socially savvy people than I are expressing qualified opinions all over the interwebs about Google + right now, but I am also sure eighty five percent of my Facebook friends don’t even know anything about it.

That’s because eighty five percent of my friends on Facebook know Google only as www.google.com, the address they type into their Internet Exporer browser bar to find out how to make creme brulee, or where to stay in London. Most of them have no idea that Google is anything other than that. Most don’t go to Google Maps to find a place, they ‘Google’ the address and a map comes up like magic. They might have a Gmail address but for them, it's an email address and nothing else. Even those with smart arse Android phones will probably still be using them to check their Facebook pages, with no idea that the platform is powered by Google.

Most don’t know there are other browsers, and on all the sites I run analytics on, those using Chrome as their browser, account for between five and ten percent of all visitors.

Most have never heard of Google Docs or know that you can choose to search for stuff within blogs. Most have no idea that it’s an entire suite of stuff, a way of life, a pledge of allegiance and preference.  

A quick look round Google + suggests it has some good features and addresses some of the stuff we love to hate about Facebook. It is also tied to, well Google, which undoubtedly represents a powerful and impressive collision of social and search. I’m sure those of us who jump on board will be tutu-ing around on it for a while and maybe we'll like it and use it a lot and it will awesome and super cool. But and this is the big BUT, I just don’t see it attracting the critical mass it requires to seriously rival or usurp Facebook.

Because most people are happy uploading pictures of their kids on Facebook and they'll be happy to continue doing this. Because Facebook was there first. I would run a Facebook poll to verify my assumptions, but most of my friends don’t even know what the frickin’ frack a Facebook poll is - or why you would bother answering one. I’m going to strike early and say it’s highly likely they will think the same thing about Google +. 

So Google +, I predict you will forever remain second to the arrival of the office coffee machine. A nice to have, an interesting foray and a potentially powerful idea but not permanently plumbed in or essential to my daily life.

So yeah, but nah. Sorry.

Dear Alasdair,

I’d like you to meet my Aunt Flo. She comes to visit me once a month without fail. She brings me crampy pains, a sore lower back and a bit of a messy week during which I bleed from my vagina. Eww yucky. She’s a member of the family known as the Menstrual Cycles. Most women are related to her but you might know her better as ‘once a month sick problems’. 

I’d also like you to meet my Mum and other people’s mums, daughters, cousins, grandmothers, aunts, wives, fiancés, lovers and friends. Most of them have at some stage bled from their vaginas too. Double Yucky. Some of them are also saddled with a rather crippling condition called endometriosis which causes no end of unbearable pain especially round the time Aunt Flo arrives. Touch my Fallopian Tubes, I’m not afflicted but nonetheless, I’m not always happy to see Flo. You might be surprised to learn that I don’t dance round the house shouting ‘Woo Aunty Flo’s here’ at the top of my lungs, joyously swinging my tampons round my head like poi’s and plotting my next day off work.

Yes she’s annoying, but dearest Alasdair, she’s a fairly basic and arbitrary part of lady biology and there isn’t actually a lot I, or other women, can do about her. I can load up on Evening Primose Oil and Panadol, lie on the couch at night with a hottie to try and ease the pain of my achey uterus but when it comes to work, I usually saddle up, solider on and take Flo with me to the office. 

You see Alasdair most of us girls do that and we do what we can to manage varying amounts of pain and hide that yucky bleedy vagina from the world. We stuff wads of cotton up there and line our knickers with ‘pads’ (the kind you can’t play angry birds on). For years we were subjected to TV ads that showed us how absorbent these magic little devices were by watching people tip blue liquid over them. I for one was a bit confused to find that what come out of me was actually red! We’re also still meant to get excited by the giant leaps and bounds in tampon technology like tying the string together at the bottom of it and shell out eight bucks for the privilege.

Our feminist fore-mothers fought pretty hard to overcome the 'menstrual taboo' so we could at least talk about what happens down there in our lady parts so that girls all over the world could be safe in the knowledge that when they did start menstruating, it wasn't going to be blue. Their primary argument was that menstruation was normal and that it didn’t prevent us from doing thing like going to work. Nor did we need to leave the village and sit in a hut for five to seven days each month. 

So Alasdair, I really don’t appreciate you taking us back to the Stone Ages by referring to it as ‘once a month sick problems’ within the context of a discussion on pay equity. It doesn't need to be euphemised by you or anyone else and I find your entire argument really bloody offensive.

Perhaps you could find a cotton pony of your own to saddle up and mosey on out of this discussion. I’d really appreciate it. I'm sure other women would too.

Yours Sincerely,

Anna Connell

Proud member of the Bleeding Vagina Society since 1992.

The distant media rumbling that I picked up somewhere along the line today about the 1987 World Cup winning All Blacks made me all nostalgic about the last rugby team I paid attention to and reminded me I USED TO LIKE RUGBY.  

I liked that team so much I could recite the names of every single person in the squad. I can still do eleven of them without prompting. You know what I can name now: an undie brand, a heat pump, some kind of water, a hockey playing fiancé and maybe three actual rugby players. In case you need reminding of who was in THE GREATEST RUGBY TEAM EVER, they were these dudes:

Albert Anderson, Zinzan Brooke, Mark Brooke-Cowden, John Drake, Andy Earl, Sean Fitzpatrick, Michael Jones, Richard Loe, Steve McDowell, Murray Pierce, Buck Shelford, Alan Whetton, Gary Whetton, Kieran Crowley, Grant Fox, John Gallagher, Craig Green, David Kirk, John Kirwan, Bernie McCahill, Joe Stanley, Warwick Taylor and Terry Wright. I LIKED THESE GUYS AND I LIKED RUGBY.

I know you’re all choking on your tea about now but once upon a time I was a patriotic kiwi gal that followed Otago and got out of bed to watch big games. My Mum’s family are proper rugby fans; her brothers, good Southern Men. It was in my blood.  I followed Otago and then, when Waikato brought home the Log o' Wood in 1993, switched allegiances. I went down to the stadium and saw the boys bring it home. I had Speights posters, collected autographs, bought a rugby magazine (once),  wore coloured garb and face paint and went to Carisbrook. I LIKED RUGBY.

I am not the first person to bemoan the death of grass roots rugby and I’ve listened to enough Deaker to know that lots of people have lots of opinions about it. I really don’t care or know enough to explore it further or talk about it anymore.  I just wanted to let you know that the woman who will be verbally flipping the bird at the event that shall not be named (basically because I can’t work out whether they can sue me for doing so) used TO LIKE RUGBY. Why do I hate it so much now?

A nasty virus is doing the rounds. It appears to have recently mutated and even those of us with strong resistance to earlier strains are succumbing to this new, more aggressive variety. 

The mutation seems to have occurred yesterday following the publication of a column by Michael Laws that I won’t link to for fear of further contamination. Known transmitters include newsprint and broadband of comparatively average speed. 

Symptoms include: nausea, uncontrollable rage, howling ‘Where is the human kindness?’ at colleagues, families and friends and prolonged contemplation of devolution (the biological, not statutory variety).  

No official public health warnings have been issued but it is curable. Recovery can be a slow process and often follows the implementation of multi-step plan. Steps include:

1. Write a blog
2. Comment on some other blogs
3. Tweet or Facebook your outrage and disgust at his comments
4. RT tweets or share Facebook posts expressing disgust and outrage at his comments
5. Post funny pictures of Michael – there are a lot to choose from: Michael wearing what looks suspiciously like eyeliner, Michael in his funny costumes on Dancing with the Stars, Michael with his heart cut out, Michael as the Devil. If you’re feeling creative, make your own.
6. Cut out his column in the paper, put it in the bin and mail your copy of said paper back to the publisher. You can keep the rolled up little balls of bigotry if you like, particularly if you have a fireplace. 
7. Repeat number 6 but hang onto your copy of the paper and enjoy sans Laws (and whatever was on the other side). No matter how foul and fiendish the columnist might be, the Sunday papers make useful toast crumb catchers in bed. And let’s face it, a lot of us only read the Magazine and Gossip sections anyway.
8. Go for a walk, read a book or sing a song about your favourite things like schnitzel with noodles or pictures of Michael with mascaraed up lashes.
9. If you choose to do none of the above, then at the very least, do this: IGNORE HIM. He is a bully, a toxic bully. This is a free country which means he is regretfully entitled to his regrettable opinion but you are also entitled to yours – so share it and then filter him out using snips, your desk top Twitter client or your discretion. 

I live in hope that if I just stop reading what he says and paying any attention to him what so ever, I will be cured. You too can fight the good fight and live a life free from the Laws Effect.

For worky reasons I was looking up the play by John Guare (I work for a theatre company in case that seems odd).

I remembered how much I loved Paul's monologue about imagination. I have now rediscovered it, printed it and stuck on my wall. Then @stevevoisey asked for a link. 

I once read a bit of it at an end of year function for a rather bureaucratic crowd who were purportedly… sort of… in charge of err… a cities creativity and culture. I was leaving. Probably best really. 

Here it is:

The imagination has been so debased that imagination, being imaginative rather than being the lynch pin of our existence now stands for a synonym for something outside ourselves. Like science fiction or some new use for tangerine slices on raw pork chops. What an imaginative summer recipe. And Star Wars, so imaginative. And Star Trek, so imaginative. And Lord of the Rings, all those dwarves, so imaginative. The imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, I mean our most personal link with our inner lives. The world outside that world, this world we share. What is schizophrenia but a horrifying state where what’s in here doesn’t match up with what’s out there. Why has imagination become a synonym for style? I believe the imagination is the passport that we create to help take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is merely another phrase for what is most uniquely us. Jung says, “The greatest sin is to be unconscious.” Holden says, “What scares me most is the other guy’s face. It wouldn’t be so bad if you both could be blindfolded.” Most of the time the faces that we face are not the other guy’s but our own faces. And it is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you would put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself. To face ourselves, that’s the hard thing. The imagination, that’s God’s gift. To make the act of self examination, bearable.

Paul, Six Degrees of Separation

Hat tip EB for first shoving it under my nose xx