The pansy post

one of my pansies

My blogging guru Penelope Trunk says you should not blog about things outside your area - like if your area is dogs, don't suddenly start talking about pansies because people are coming to your blog to read about dogs, not pansies. She says you can be lateral - like if you can think of a way to make pansies relate to dogs, so that dogs is still the main topic, that's ok. My problem is I don't know what my topic is. I don't have a topic. But today my topic is pansies.

I love pansies. I love everything about them - they are cheap to buy, easy to grow, they flower for ages, and you can even eat them. They look beautiful in salads and as cake decorations. I don't have any pictures to show you of my pansy salads and cake decorations as I have never used them for that - I just like knowing that I can. I like thinking about using them for those purposes.

Guess what I just realised? I am often writing about the topic of class - in my previous blog (no longer active) I wrote a lot of posts about it. And I know how pansies relate to class. Flowers say a lot about class. Pansies used to mean you were probably lower class - because they are cheap, easy to grow and they flower for ages. If you were lower class, you would not eat them though, because only middle-upper class people eat flowers. Poor people feel poor if they eat weeds and flowers, but rich people feel even richer when they can eat weeds and flowers and not feel poor. It's a novelty, it's not about survival. I think because you can eat pansies and use them as pretty cake decorations, they have become a middle-upper class flower. Isn't it nice to know that flowers can transcend class? Begonias have done this also. Begonias used to be suburban, lower class flowers because they were cheap, easy to grow and flowered for ages. They were also, small, stubby and ugly. Now there are so many fancy types of begonias like these and you see them in rich people's gardens. But now I am confusing wealth with class. I think you know the difference so I am not going to insult you by explaining. I think only upper-middle class people read my blog, because that is what I am. You won't believe how many flowers I had to go through to finally realise that.

Goo food

I didn't just forget the 'd' on the title of this blog. There are people drinking nutritional goo instead of eating normal food. It seems to be a movement. I understand that buying food, storing it, preparing it, eating it and then cleaning up can be time consuming; an interruption to doing things you prefer to do... I'm often frustrated by it. But not so much that I would resort to drinking goo, or Soylent, as its inventor Rob Rhinehart has called it, apparently a "self deprecating" reference to 1970s film Soylent Green where a miracle food turns out to be made of human beings.

Are we entering a post-food society, or have some people just eaten too many nut bars? It seems the creator of this goo never ate food to start with - he consumed cheap fuel - $1 burritos, $5 pizzas and McDonalds. So maybe for him goo is barely a step down? Possibly even a step up.

Apparently there are covens of goo enthusiasts, gleefully concocting and glugging their own variations, mixed to suit their various intolerances and specific "tastes". What I don't get is that people who ostensibly don't want to spend time thinking about food are thinking about it an awful lot - well, it's not food - it's goo.
It seems incredibly... juvenile, this goo mixing; like kids. And the goo itself - like baby formula. Will we evolve to no longer need teeth? For the goo enthusiasts, food (real food) is no longer fuel, but a leisure activity - you only eat as a social thing. The inventor envisions drones dropping goo mix on starving communities - I can't help but hear the ghost of Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat goo" while Rob Rhinehart declares he has the solution to world hunger.

Is this our post-food future? If we are what we eat, then we're on the path to becoming tasteless, colourless sludge. Without teeth.

Seeking a Creative Title

I've been hearing a lot of this lately: We don’t know what jobs will exist in the future! We have to be prepared! But how do we prepare?!? We need CREATIVE people! This is the answer. We need people who can think creatively, lead, make connections, blah blah blah. Do we? Do we really? Or do we just want people who LOOK creative? You need to look the part, right? Well, it’s easy to tell if someone looks creative (they've got THOSE glasses and they won't be wearing a suit), but how do we tell if they are REALLY creative? I KNOW! Ask them some really wacky curve ball questions in an interview! Like “If you were a pizza delivery man, how would you benefit from scissors?” That will really sort the wheat from the chaff. The creative thinkers just float to the top when you ask stuff like that, then you just skim them off. Easy peasy. TOO easy! I love easy shit like that.

I don’t think we should worry so much about how to be prepared for the jobs that don’t exist yet – I think we should worry about the jobs that SHOULDN’T EXIST. Like jobs where you need to LOOK creative and where giving an answer to the question "What is the square root of a banana peel?" gets you a job.

But if you REALLY ARE CREATIVE and you're worried you don't LOOK creative, there is something that will help you. TECHNOLOGY. This program will give you "a stunning personal website in minutes". Just don't use the Product Developer guy's site as an example because he has a typo in his JOB TITLE and a stupid picture of a jetty that seems to have NO relationship to what he does - it seems its only purpose is to make me want to JUMP OFF IT RIGHT NOW!

But who am I to talk? I'm just one of those think-y, talk-y people. Really – I should just shut up, stop criticising, get off my arse and DO something. Like get a job. So that’s what I am doing. I’m open to offers – but only offers that don’t come in writing – I will only consider offers that come to me in a form I don’t even know exists yet. You get points for creativity.  

Book gestation

In our household, there are a few children’s series by contemporary writers that are popular. We wait and wait and wait for the next one to come out. “Mummy, why do we have to wait so long?” I love replying to this. “Because the WRITER is WRITING the next book. It takes time to write a book. It can take a long time. Sometimes it can take a year. Sometimes ten years, or even more.” My kids are disappointed, but don’t say anything more. We all go on waiting.

In my head, my answer to the question, “Why does it take so long to write a book?” goes more like this: Because the WRITER is WRITING the book! They don’t go to the toilet and collect what they have done in a specimen jar and then give it to this cool COMPUTER, this unreal TECHNOLOGY, this brilliant APP that makes excrement into AMAZING life-changing, thought provoking, or even just well written and entertaining BOOKS! It just DOES NOT HAPPEN THAT WAY. No. It’s usually not FAST and EASY and AVAILABLE just when you want it – at the touch of a button, and the flick of a switch, at lightning speed, in an instant, voila, no probs, too easy, there you go. NO!

So we keep waiting, and when we see or hear that the next book in the series is out, we can get all excited and go to the bookshop and buy it! Bookshop? Yeah! There’s one left! We go there and buy it. Buy it? Yeah! We hand over cold hard cash or our credit card and we think we are getting A REALLY GOOD DEAL.

And then we read the book. Sometimes we’ll read it more than once while we WAIT for the next one to come out. Sometimes there is not even a TV adaptation of the series that we can watch while we wait. Sometimes there is nothing in the APP store vaguely related to the book! Nothing! We just have to WAIT. God it’s hard.