Wednesday, June 24, 2009

I should have broken a cup

Three women and a man enter a country art gallery. The man is wearing a cast and holding a crying, burbling baby. He jiggles the baby with the cast arm and walks around to settle the child while the women he is with examine the local artworks.

Enter Middle-Aged Curator: Oh! How adorable! With Dad! How old?
Cast man: He's three and a half months. He is gorgeous, isn't he?
M.A.C.: Oh, what's all that racket, eh?
Cast man (over baby's fading wails): He's tired.
M.A.C.: Lovely! What a lot of noise! Darling little fellow!

Middle-Aged Curator bustles off to sell sell sell her prize-winning pottery to the other three woman and the baby, now free of overhead chit-chat and possessed of a manly chest clad in a soft coat to snuggle against, falls instantly and deeply asleep.

Some half an hour later, Cast Man's cast arm has long since fallen asleep and the other arm is swiftly following it after single-armedly cradling a five and half kilo dead weight for thirty minutes. He relents and hands the baby to one of the three women, the baby's mother. Middle-Aged Curator appears from behind a large painting of an emu.

M.A.C.: There we are! He'll go to sleep just fine with his mum!

Cast Man has to be quietly man-handled out the gallery's front door, a feat made possible only by his weakened arms.

Later that night, as Cast Man is walking his son to sleep around a restaurant, another young father cuffs his 18 month old son over the head in front of the three women. This is the same young father who absolutely would not return Cast Man's comradely nod at the start of the evening; opting instead for the blank 1000-yard stare.

8 comments:

  1. Oh god. I'm so sick of the presumption that men spending time with their babies are doing something novel and a bit cute. Look! Dad's pretending to be mum!

    Eff.

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  2. Keep fighting the good fight franzy

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  3. Ah, you're slowly becoming one of us, Franzy - er sorry, Cast Man.....

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  4. Audrey - The best example I've heard is a friend of mine on a day out shopping with his her daughter being asked if he was "babysitting".

    Jono - Can it still be considered a "good" fight if you break prize-winning crockery?

    Kath - What - a parental blogger? Just you wait til I get my arm back, Limpin' Lockett.

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  5. No, not a parental blogger (or at least, not 100% of the time), just a parent who gets pissed off at parental things.

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  6. You can't really be offended at the M.A.C. since she wasn't watching when C fell asleep in your arms.

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  7. Kath - May we bitch long and fruitfully.

    River - Bah. She was a condescending old witch. She saw me walking around with a sleeping angel in my arms for half an hour and didn't even register.

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  8. Nice blog.

    Good luck with being a good modern dad. I guess people will judge you based on their own experience of fathers, regardless of your personal values or actions.

    ReplyDelete

An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test

Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

Champions of Guess The Header

  • What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
  • Nai - 1
  • Lion Kinsman - 2
  • Will - 2
  • Brocky - 2
  • Andy Pants - 2
  • The 327th Male - 3
  • Mad Cat Lady - 3
  • Miles McClagen - 4
  • Myninjacockle - 4
  • Asheligh - 5
  • Neil - 5
  • Third Cat - 5
  • Adam Y - 6
  • Squib - 6
  • Mele - 6
  • Moifey - 7
  • Jono - 8
  • The Other, other Sam - 14
  • Kath Lockett - 15
  • Shippy - 19
  • River - 32