Thank God For Facebook

I’m sorry that this will probably offend 98% of the population between the ages of 2 and 75 but I’m saying it anyway: I don’t like Facebook. It’s a little side hobby of mine to collect reasons for why I don’t want to join up. I’ll let you in on a secret: I think it’s boring and that’s the real reason behind my reticence to join but that wears thin after the 58th time you’ve explained it to someone.

My latest reason (newly usurping the one that was because a man killed his estranged wife because she changed her status to ‘single’) came to me as I was trying to go to sleep last night. I am remotely acquainted with a young man studying to enter the priesthood. His name is Eugene, which I think is a pretty disgusting name so I won’t bother making up a pseudonym for him because if I did it would probably be ‘Eugene’ anyway.

Much like spam about penis enlargement (although thankfully less frequent), Eugene occasionally favours everyone whose email address he has ever had cause to obtain with a group email telling all and sundry about his latest shenanigans. To give you a bit of background, I knew Eugene in the days when he was - according to his mother - the most promising and gifted musician in the whole wide city of Adelaide. I knew Eugene when he discovered girls and hormones (although probably not in precisely that order). I saw Eugene being physically restrained from going up to a group of English girls and asking them that most romantic of questions: “do you have any Australian in you?” followed, poetically, by “Do you want some?”.

After the musician thing did not result in a multi million dollar recording contract with Sony Classical, he flirted with the idea of becoming the world’s most brilliant and charismatic actor. I know, because I got the emails you see. This lasted a couple of years but when he did not become the Catholic Tom Cruise he had to try something different. So 6 months after the email telling me that he had been someone or other in Fiddler On The Roof another email arrived telling me that he had decided to train for the priesthood. Like previous emails, this one was long and somewhat self-involved. A nice new touch was his request for my prayers. Every now and then he is let out of the seminary and goes on tours on religious sites and other exciting, chaste adventures. He sends emails all about it.

So this thought that occurred to me as I was trying to get to sleep was that if Eugene and I were Facebook Friends I would hear about his life EVERY DAY.

Drinking Your Own Urine

I don’t get it.

Obviously it is a disgusting concept, taste wise, but so are many other things: Neil Diamond for example. While I myself am not a fan of Neil Diamond I (grudgingly) respect other people’s right to be. The thing I don’t get about drinking your own urine is that it is supposed to be a health thing. How can something that is the waste product of your body be worth putting back into your body? And on the question of taste – I wonder how people manage to swallow the stuff. Somehow I don’t think a slice of lemon would cut it. Do they add a huge dash of Cottee’s raspberry cordial? That would probably cover the taste but all that sugar would also defeat the purpose of the health benefit thing… unless you used diet cordial.

In other news, I got out of jury duty today. I had a pretty good excuse, considering one of my co-workers has several broken ribs and stitches in his head, but just in case I decided to look as much like a bleeding heart leftie hippie as possible so that I would be challenged by one of the lawyers and asked to leave. I also wore the necklace my dad gave me that we found out (after I had been wearing it for a year) says "Allah" in Arabic, so that one of the other lawyers might challenge me and I would be asked to leave...

Oh and I broke resolution number whatever it was and bought a book yesterday. But it was Obama's speech so I figure since it was like a part of history and shit it's ok to break a promise to myself.

But back to the urine thing: I just don't get it. And would the raspberry cordial make it look orange? And is it something you only do once, or do you keep drinking and emitting the same few mils of liquid? Because I really don't see the point of that.

Food for Thought #3

What is it about social justice that makes people so goddamn vague and hopelessly inefficient? Seriously, just because you have dreadlocks and a virtuous demeanour shouldn’t mean that you cannot perform simple tasks. Patchouli doesn’t decrease brain function, does it? I live near the Fair Trade Café in Glebe and it’s all “helping poor people” this and “sustainable mumbo jumbo” that, but do you think they can take a drinks order and deliver it? The short answer is “no” and the long answer is “They are so hopeless that I perceive about a 50% success rate of ordered food and drinks actually being delivered to the table. 50% may be a pass in the university grading system – hell, 45% is a pass in some instances – but writing an essay takes a lot longer than brewing a coffee. And the point of that pass grade is to acknowledge all the steps that go into the researching and writing of an essay. Most people can at least manage a discussion of the topic that reaches the word limit. It might not make a lot of sense, and they might be hopeless spellers but you can laugh to yourself when you point out to them that ‘wether’ was not picked up by their spell check because it is a kind of sheep. The coffee making equivalent of this would be a shit tasting coffee that arrived after a rather long wait. The Fair Trade norm is no coffee arriving at all, so we don’t even know if it is shit tasting or not. That is pretty bad. The only occasion that I have ever been there and they didn’t fuck it up was when I only ordered one thing. I used to think Lavender Blue was the worst and most vague service I had ever come across in a café and special forces stormed through the windows there to arrest people the other day so I wonder what is in store for the Fair Trade. Maybe through their own incompetence they will accidentally send themselves to Uganda as foreign aid… which would be a pity for the Ugandans who would probably do much better without them”.

Now that makes me think maybe the reason there is so much poverty in the world is because the poor people are being ‘helped’ by a bunch of hippie do-gooders who couldn’t organise to pour water from a boot if there were instructions on the heel. Food for thought indeed.