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Moata's Blog Idle

Moata Tamaira is a librarian with a black-belt in sarcasm who's been meaning to get one in procrastination too but always ends up watching TV instead. Her blog is an unholy mash-up of whimsy, cynicism and wry observation.

It takes a village, people

08:50am 17 Mar 2010

54 comments

Today I need to talk to you about a very important issue. It's something that I have been concerned about for a number of years, actually, but have never said anything about in a public forum before because I just wasn't sure that people were ready to talk about it, that we might not have the maturity as a society to take a step back, look at ourselves and say "This cannot be allowed to continue. Something MUST be done." It's the tremendously important issue of "people who can't do the YMCA dance".

Village People I know, I know what you're thinking, "I'd really like a piece of lolly-cake right now", and that's fair enough, I really want lolly-cake too. In addition to wanting lolly-cake you may also be questioning whether the issue of "people who can't do the YMCA dance" is a serious one. Because, surely, in this day and age with modern technology such as YouTube and um...YouTube, everybody knows how to do this...don't they?

Well you could be forgiven for thinking that, but in fact I've done extensive research on this topic (aka bus trips) and my empirically gathered data tells me that as much as 70 per cent of revellers fail in basic YMCA dance execution. Even more shocking, there seems to be no correlation between level of drunkenness and YMCA-fail. Granted, most of the people attempting YMCA arm semaphore are drunk (because honestly, why would you otherwise?) but those sober disco-demons who succumb to dancefloor peer pressure have no greater success with the simple four-letter routine than those who are so drunk they can't understand why that cute girl in the corner never gets up to dance. Yeah, it's because she's a pokey machine. (That's not a euphemism, by the way - ole Drunky McDrunkard has actually been making eyes at Aztec's Treasure.)

So where are we going wrong and what can be done? Well, the problem is an easy one to identify and it has to do with symmetry. It's entirely possible that YOU have even been incompetently performing the YMCA dance for many years without knowing it, so please, please pay close attention to this next bit. It's not the Y that's causing the grief. It's not the M. And it definitely isn't the A. It's the C. That pesky, unsymmetrical, curving-to-one-side C.

The problem is that when people go to make the C they imagine the letter as they might see it on a page in front of them. They then form the letter C with their arms leaning to the right. This means that the letter they have formed only looks like a C from behind them. Anyone viewing this formation from the front will see a banana, a croissant or a crescent moon but not a C. The correct way to form the YMCA C is to make that crescent shape with your arms extended to the left.

I don't wanna talk about it

09:10am 16 Mar 2010

30 comments

Having a conversation with a perfect stranger about your sputum is really not one of life's bright, shining moments. Really, having a conversation with anyone about sputum is best avoided where possible.

Given the choice, there are innumerable things that I'd much rather engage in chitchat about, including but not limited to - the weird purple dinosaur in those Switched On Gardener ads (aka Budzilla), pear recipes, the miracle of someone called Meat Loaf having a successful career in anything let alone the entertainment industry, and of course, the weather. But sometimes circumstances bring you to a pharmacy with a distractingly bad cough and there you are answering questions about the nature of your phlegm. Life is funny like that sometimes.

To be honest I was quite happy that I was offered assistance by the pharmacy lady. When it comes to cough medicine there really is a dizzying array of them on offer. I stood in front of the display sending out psychic vibes of the "I have no idea where to start with this" variety. When it comes to retail, this is a very ineffective way of getting staff attention most of the time but this woman was the Sue Nicholson of pharmacists. She was "sensing confusion" and she was right.

And that's how I ended up having a conversation that involved the word sputum. It's also how I ended up with a bottle of cough mixture that in colour and viscosity looks exactly the same as the brand of dishwashing liquid that I favour. Having taken another look at the bottle though, I've realised that at $18 for a 200ml bottle it costs about the same as absinthe or chartreuse, both of which are similarly hued and are also not to be consumed before operating heavy machinery.

The realisation of how expensive my cough syrup is makes me think that I should be sipping a snifter of it in a genteel manner with some crudites rather than slurping it unceremoniously out of a measuring spoon. Either that or setting it on fire and slamming shots of it. Quite possibly I could have shopped around and found a similar product for cheaper but who wants to do that when they're sick? Having a single sputum conversation is bad enough, having multiple in one day would be intolerable.

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Monday - the weekend's grumpy neighbour

11:00am 15 Mar 2010

49 comments

Monday. For some reason, I am always mildly surprised when it turns up at the beginning of the week. I somehow feel that after the heady hedonism of the weekend, Monday, with its sensible, responsible demeanour, might just pop its head around the door of Sunday night, take a look at the carnage, decide that now's not the time for a visit and that maybe it would be better to check back in once everyone's managed to pull themselves together a bit more, or at least make it out of pyjamas and into proper clothes. That's what a good neighbour would do.

But no, here comes Monday thundering down the footpath and knocking on the door to get its casserole dish back at the crack of dawn, all the while making unnecessarily snarky remarks about your bed-hair. Oh Monday, you are a miserable git. If Saturday and Sunday are the cool, hip couple who always invite you to their BBQ, then Monday is the annoying neighbour who mows their lawns before breakfast and has Crazy Frog on high rotation on their stereo.

It's a little like how I feel about the passing of summer into autumn. It hasn't really started to happen yet. Usually, it's when I see my first fallen leaf, right around the time I start making sure to have a cardigan with me, the end of daylight savings time, the end of "cider season".

If the arrival of Monday is a weekly disappointment then the arrival of autumn is the annual version. Even though everything I know about how the world works tells me that summer is a temporary state, I manage to trick myself every year into believing that the long summer days will continue. The rest of the year is an aberration and summer is just a return to the norm of how things should rightly be and will therefore remain. And then there is a chill in the air, a slight rising in power consumption as the heat pump works harder to maintain a comfortable ambient temperature in my grossly under-insulated rental home, and the footpaths will soon be littered with the kinds of horse chestnuts that you shouldn't eat (why are there so many of those "useless" trees and so few of the edible fruit-producing ones?)

This year I am making the attempt to prepare myself beforehand so it's not so much of a shock to have to say sayonara to summer. After all, there are some things that are good about the change of season and cooler temperatures, not the least of which is "snuggliness". And of course there is always the A-pear-calypse, as fruit trees everywhere go freakin' mental.

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Pleurisy deniability

08:54am 12 Mar 2010

41 comments

It started with nothing. A speck, a miniscule irritation. I drank some water. I drank some more water. But still, there it was, this annoying little something stuck in my throat. Like that little bit of corn kernel after you've been eating popcorn that somehow comes loose, sticks where it shouldn't and then can't be dislodged. Like an earworm, or the name "Bingle" which until this week, I swear I had never heard before but now can't get away from.

But still, just a little something in my throat. It'll shift in good time. I am certainly not sick. I don't have time to be sick therefore, ipso facto, quod est demonstratum, ergo and any number of other random latin phrases that sound impressive, I cannot, in fact, be sick.

So yeah, I'm totally sick.

There are two very obvious and undeniable things that tell me that I am sick. First, I kept being awoken the other night by my lungs which were being rejected by the rest of my body, which was doing its best to expel them via my throat.

Which is fun, especially when you suddenly realise that there are muscles in your abdomen that you never use and are only aware of when they're spasming out of control. I wonder if having a really bad cough can give you a six-pack? Could a hacking cough be the new Zumba? All you'd have to do is go to one class with an infected instructor and the rest of the programme you can do anywhere, anytime, even while you watch TV!

Being a good sport

09:09am 10 Mar 2010

55 comments

Shoes, cheesecake, tall blood-sucking Swedes - all things worth getting obsessed about in my world. All Black

Obviously not everybody's cup of tea but all things that I have a strong interest in, it's fair to say. But once upon a time I had strong interest in other things - scrums, Achilles injuries other than my own, sometimes even the state of the batting order. All things I couldn't give a monkey's about these days.

Sports. Where did you and I go astray? When did we lose the love?

My childhood was awash with rugby in the wintertime and cricket in the summer. As kids we leapt up in the air at the end of the haka and couldn't understand very much of what followed but everybody else was into it so we lay on the loungeroom floor and watched it (and also back in those days games were begun and finished before bedtime).

In the summertime the stamina required to watch a test or one-dayer was beyond us and we were banished outside since the TV was off-limits all day.In my mother's opinion cutting off the end of the cricket just so the news could be broadcast on time was an example of a TV network with its priorities all wrong, and as far as I know she still does.

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