Freudian Slips

Palaver: idle talk; also, to talk idly.

SUPER NANNY HAS BEEN USING "PALAVER" THE WRONG WAY ALL THIS TIME.

I don't think I'm all that good at palaver, to be honest. I presume I have a well of life experiences stored away inside me somewhere, but it never seems to be accessible as I'm engaged in conversation with some new and therefore SCARY person. It runs dry in seconds, no matter how frantically I lower the metaphorical bucket to ensure I have something pertinent to say when the other person finishes their completely engaging tale about that time they had to spend a night sleeping in a park in Tokyo and all I end up with is how I quite like a bit of eel now and then.

This was meant to be some sort of free association writing thing where I get a word and then write about it to go off on some exciting tangent, but that didn't happen. Which just goes to show how bad at palaver I really am.

Looking-Down's complaint with the movie trailer for Surf's Up, a movie that let me hasten to remind you was about anthropomorphic surfing penguins, was that the chicken sidekick would be "unlikely to survive in an Arctic climate."

This complaint has recently been bettered by Little Miss Welfare. Upon seeing the trailer for Kung Fu Panda (anthropomorphic animals trained in an ancient form of Chinese martial arts), she stated that "I'd be more interested if they at least gave the animals Chinese accents.They need to do their research better."

In other news? Bambi was unlikely to have been able to talk, and the animals in Cinderella lacked the digits necessary for the fine beading clearly present in her finished ball gown. GEEZE.

My relationship with the IT guy at work is as complex and torturous as Dante's nine-layered Hell. For one reason or another, I find him completely objectionable on a vast number of levels, and so when he lumbers into my field of vision as I am tap-tap-tapping away at whatever my boss has decided to throw in my direction, I use nothing more than minimal encouragers ("uh-huh," "I see" etc.) with the express purpose of getting him to STOP talking to me rather than urging him to go on.

Of course, it never works because SOME PEOPLE JUST DON'T GET THE HINT.

A couple of days ago I was lucky enough to be catching the same train as him. I proved to be immune to his cunning questions designed to extract information from me (for example, "where are you going?" and "who with?") he got huffy and told me that I was too "guarded." I informed him that I was no such things, however I did have limits on what I told different people.

At this point, he tried to get me talking about subjects that make my flesh crawl when I think of him: "Have you ever considered all these ordinary-looking people on the train, and how they might be all sordid insatiable sex beasts in their private lives?"

I said that I had not, because I am as pure as the driven snow.

He said to me that he may not be a psychologist, but he was "able to tell when people were being condescending." At this point he raised his eyebrows in a way that seemed to see "oh yes, I have your number, you Sigmund Freud-wannabe."

"Oh really?" I said, and added that that was a very big word and would he like help writing it down? Hahaha!
"Oh really?" I said, and ended it there.

"Oh yes," said he, and raised his eyebrows again as if to say "and you go and think about THEM apples."

And now I'm not sure whether this guy is just able to tell the difference between condescension and downright unpleasantness or whether I really AM a terrible talk-down-toer. Damn him.

I was groped by a less-than-three year-old this afternoon. And he had a mohawk and pierced ear.

No, REALLY.

I was on the train and he decided that he liked the look of me, and so he just...attached himself to my leg. And his mother just looked at me and said "don't worry, he just thinks he knows everyone."

Even though he was the one who groped MY genitals, I feel very guilty.

Before I start this story, I would like to apologise if my account of the events that happened on the road make no sense. Remember, I am a pedestrian of the world and these things called "cars" and "overtaking" and "speed limits" baffle me a little.

So this morning I was sent to, at the risk of sounding predictable (and repetitive and BORING), another far-flung suburb of Sydney, and was hanging around out the front of the building to wait for my taxi. I was also eating a peanut butter sandwich, which probably tarnished my "classy corporate whore" image a little.

For reasons known only to themselves, the road was clogged with elderly drivers. Cruising down the highway at either 5 or 200 kilometres an hour, they appeared completely unaware of the aggrieved honks of other motorists as they performed rather doddery left turns into the driveway I was standing near. I noticed that all of them had their tongues poking out the corner of their mouths.

I continued to wait for my taxi/avoid being struck down by oldies behind the wheel. Without warning, a cab roared over the crest of the hill and made a sharp turn across double lines into the driveway, scattering drivers left and right. A little warily, I climbed into the cab and told the driver where I wanted to go. He took off without a word and we sat in awkward silence for five minutes or so before he flicked on the radio. I was listening quite intently to the interview that was going on (psychoanalyst rejects Freud because he consulted with an Ear Nose and Throat specialist who said that the shape of a girl's nose was determined by her sexuality and Freud accused a patient of masturbating and THEN got the specialist to operate on her and he accidentally left half a roll of gauze jammed up there OMG) when a rather large truck turned onto the road, taking up both lanes in our direction before moving over to the left.

The cabbie didn't take too kindly to this temporary reduction in speed, and made a move to overtake IN THE LANE OF ONCOMING TRAFFIC. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a car was coming towards us, and for one brief, crystalline moment I was convinced I was going to die. Squashed to death in a tin can of a car at the hands of a man whose spatial reasoning was really not up to scratch.

SOMEHOW we managed to avoid a major pile-up, and as I unballed my fists (which had gone bloodless in a surprisingly brief period of time) the tazi driver began screaming in rage. "BLOODY FUCKING ARSEHOLE" he shrieked, accelerating madly so he could draw level with the truckie and wave his middle finger wildly in his general direction. What the truckie did in response to this I don't know, but it apparently ENRAGED the cabbie to such an extent that he screamed "FUCK YOU BLOODY FUCKING DICKHEAD" and acclerated again, before throwing his only half-empty coffee cup out the window at the truck. The laws of physics being as they are, most of the coffee ended up down the side of the cab, but this primal act appeared to reactivate his frontal lobe and he slowed down slightly.

What does someone who work in the mental health profession do in a situation like this?

I chose to say nothing, and we drove in stony silence until I was finally released at my destination. As I was getting out of the cab, I was told "it was lucky you were in the car mate, otherwise I might have really lost it."

...

I dropped a business card on the floor before I ran away.

It's a good thing I'm doing an eight kilometre walk about three times a week, because I've recently taken to endlessly eating the ANZAC biscuits my office leaves out for clients. I'm getting very good at expressing disappointed surprise when they tell me that there aren't any left in the waiting room.

So last week I was sent, express-post, to another capital city in Australia for the purposes of delivering a one-hour talk to a whole bunch of embittered mental health workers.

Despite having spent longer on the journey down than I did actually talking to people, everything seemed to go well. I elaborated on bland PowerPoint slides with pithy, relevant-to-life examples, I waxed lyrical on how completely awesome psychologists were, and I even made a few lame-o jokes that they were kind enough to laugh at. They asked questions, which I answered with style and aplomb, and piled around me like desperate bridesmaids during the bouquet toss as I handed out my business cards.

With a debonair flick of my wrist, I announced that there was probably for one more question. Upon this announcement, the girl sitting up the back, who was dressed in fuzzy pink material from base to apex and had been pissing everyone off by whispering throughout the entire presentation, stuck her begloved hand in the air and said loudly "this isn't a question, but I WENT TO SCHOOL WITH YOU."

And my god, she was right.

Credibility = shattered.

S lives in a pretty crappy area of Sydney, notable only for its proximity to the uni he goes to. It is loud and grubby, full of equally loud and grubby teenagers and homeless people. Public transport is rubbish, and the fact that the bus terminal is swarming with security guards as soon as the sun goes down does not put me in a positive frame of mind.

S' home is spread over two levels, and located behind/on top of a shop. His bedroom is the size of my entire apartment, and as the weather gets colder it gets harder to heat - . There's a dance school across the road that is overly fond of Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music," which, while an awesome song, has gradually taken over the part of my brain that used to tell me how to cook toast and open cans. I'm now SLOWLY STARVING TO DEATH and it's all that dance school's fault.

Also, the supermarket near his place doesn't sell the type of tea I like.

This weekend, S broached the topic of moving in together. Rather than thinking about the practicalities of the matter (is nine months long enough? What about that whole permanent residency thing? Whose microwave would we keep?), is it so wrong that the first thought that went through my mind was "thank god I won't have to come to this fucking suburb every weekend"?

Did you know that the Chinese character for "delicious" is made up of the characters meaning "fish" and "lamb"?

Neither did I, but S brought this up as part of his "proof" that vegetarianism was not the way to live one's life. He also refused to try my not-bacon, but gladly took a piece of the "pressed pork" (bits that fell on the factory floor) from his flatmate. I expect a tapeworm will have found itself a very lovely area of his digestive system to call home.

This will be an uphill struggle, folks.

Oh lord I am SOO drunk right about now. I have just come back from dinner with friends from uni, and if nothing else it always teaches me that other psychologists are just as neurotic as I am.