Not a Joke

Question: What did the penis say to the hairdresser?
Answer: Absolutely nothing.

It's the hair on heads we are talking about here, not genital hair, OK, so the presence or absence of a specific set of genitalia has nothing at all to do with haircuts. Right? Are you with me so far? Not too complex really. Here is another not-joke for you:

Customer: Can I have a haircut please?
Hairdresser: Have you got a penis?

See, I told you. Not funny. But a situation like this happened to my friend today, and I need to rant.

My friend has short hair, exists mostly wearing jeans and tshirts and is often covered, to a greater or lesser extent, in paint. In fact the paint is often the most memorable feature - I asked at a local cafe is they remembered my friend coming in for coffee and it was when I said "covered in paint" that their eyes lit with recognition and they said 'strong latte no sugar!' or some such. Because unsurprisingly the lovely staff at the cafe are more interested in what someone's regular coffee order is than what genitals they have.

Back to hairdresser. My friend is a woman. She doesn't like labels for herself, but the labels other people ascribe to her might include woman, girl, lesbian, queer, genderqueer, gay, gender non-binary, dyke butch, possibly boi and definitely the one she really hates, shorty (I think she is over five foot tall, but not by a whole lot). She occasionally gets mistaken for a young man. She has pretty short hair. Today she walked into a hairdresser that advertised $12 haircuts for men with very little money in her pocket and asked for a boys haircut. The hairdresser gave her a haircut but charged her for a 'ladies' haircut. She didn't have the money, was told to use her credit card, and to add insult to injury was told the business charged a $2 fee for credit card payment.

In whose world is this OK? In whose world is it OK to charge my brother with his handsome, long, curly, difficult hair (and penis) one price but my friend with her handsome, short, straight, neat  hair (and vagina) a higher price? It's not OK in my world!

The anti-discrimination board clearly states that:

Sex discrimination is against the law... ...when you get or try to get most types of goods or services – for example, from shops, banks, lawyers, government departments, the police, public transport, local councils, doctors, hospitals and other medical services, hotels, sporting venues and entertainment venues; 

from the Anti-discrimination Board of NSW sex-discrimination fact sheet 

So this behavior is not OK in NSW law, either.

(Here endeth my rant, but if this, or something like this, has happened to you and you want to make a complaint but need some not-a-lawyer support, let me know and I'll be so happy to help you out)

Loving The Crazy

This is not going to be a post about loving partners with mental health issues, just some of the ways it's nice/not so nice to be back home with the familiar crazy.

Spending a bit of time away it was easy to call lots of things 'crazy' - in Singapore the kiasu thing seems extreme and leads to behaviour that I would deem crazy (imagine driving along and trying use a roundabout or merge lanes where no one will accept being last). We also played 'spotto' with crazy fashions - there are plenty of 'what not to wear' exasmples. Everything from warm jackets and coats (which must be more than just snuggly on a 30C day with 90% humidity) through extreme short skirts and shorts, to cute little families all wearing matching outfits. Then there are the harajuku-esque sartorial weirdnesses that I'm impressed by, but can't hope to describe.

Back in Sydney we get opur fair share of fashion oddities (like the girl with the gold sparkle ugg boots and the little black dress I spotted on my way to work this morning) but our crazy dressing is generally weird in a different way. The warm jackets don't usually come out in summer, but as soon as the weather drops below about 20C you see people walking around with scarves and beanies on. If it's windy this might be only a short stretch from sensible, but it weirds me out totally when the people with the rugged up heads and necks are also wearing skirts and sandals.

The other type of Crazy, the one I really wanted to talk about, is the specific breed of crazy belonging to my workplace. It's not only the stories my colleague tells about his partner who is convinced she was abducted by aliens and buys countless boxes of cereal when it's cheap in case they ever run out (really!), it's more the weirdness actually IN my workplace. The mad push to get a project finished, only to hear, at final draft stage, that it won't be needed any more, or that it's being put back another year. We also have an 'emperor' who get's completely riled up at the length of people's coffee breaks, but instructs their assistant to spend hours, days even, scanning family photos and transfereing music from analogue to digital format. The people here who are most successfull look busy all the time, but don't really do much, because work that gets completed tends to get holes picked in it. It's a nice stable job, but I'm not sure how long I should stay here for....

The kindness, and otherwise, of strangers

Because I *still* don't have my drivers license I catch public transport with the kids a lot and I've noticed that little kids seems to bring out the best and the worst in public transport users. This morning I went into the city with Kiz to pick up a few Christmas gifts for the kids and as I was sitting on the train I noticed that the woman beside me was silently weeping, with tears dripping down her face. I didn't want to embarrass her, but I didn't want to ignore her distress either. I fished around in my bag and found a half used travel pack of tissues and put them on the seat between us. As I got off the train I gently touched her arm and pointed to the tissues. We smiled at each other and I got off the train. It made me feel so good to provide the kind of help that I would have liked had I been in her situation (and I have sat weeping on trains, wishing for a tissue).

On our way home we caught the bus. Kiz and I were both tired and hot and so he wanted to yell while I wanted to play mindless games of solitaire on my phone. The yelling toddler wasn't pleasant, but I had tried talking quietly to him, feeding him snacks and even, at one point, putting my hand over his mouth. Kiz kept yelling and I started to get angry glares from a guy at the front of the bus (his shorts were offending my eyes but did I give him dirty looks? No! I'm too polite). An elderly couple were sitting opposite me by this time and when the bus stopped they got up and moved. As the old man went passed me we had this little exchange:
Him (crankily): My wife's not well, can't you keep him quiet!
Me (apologetically): I wish I could but...
Him (even more angry): You could if you really wanted to!
Me (calm but bemused): How?
The old man then stomps further up the bus to sit with his wife, I tear up, mortified, and try singing very quietly to Kiz while imaging all the cruel or kind things I could have said.

...which, I guess, balances out all the people who wave, smile or play peekaboo with the baby or engage Asher in polite conversation, the woman on Tuesday who told me I had very well behaved children and the hundreds of people of all nationalities, ages, backgrounds, genders, etc who have offered to help me on or off buses, or given me a hand with the stroller on the stairs at train stations.

To all the helpers, I send out my heartfelt thanks, to the grumps: may you never need to rely on the kindness of strangers

Random Anecdote

My mother sends me a lot of funny emails of dubious humour value. They distract me and sometimes get a smile or a chuckle. One that arrived the other day reminded me so much of the possum who used to break into my flat when I lived in Annandale that I'm going to post it here. I hope I'm not breaking all sorts of copyright restrictions, but it was un-attributed in the email, and I'd be happy to attribute it if I knew where it came from.



If the kitchen window wasn’t properly latched he would come in, ignore the fruit in the fruit bowl and eat my dark chocolate Lindt balls. I always thought he probably wanted a cigarette and an espresso as well.

Harrumph! The cat actually *smokes* the cigarette in the GIF I have - why doesn't it do that here? Michael?