This week a friend who is not a fan of social media asked me: Why do cute pooches and pussy cats have more social media followers than most humans?
Why? Because we love them. Pooches believe in unconditional love. Aspirational humans do not. Cats have attitude and don’t give a shit. I love dogs of Instagram because dogs are pretty. Dogs on insta don’t have bad plastic surgery, fake boobs and plastic nails. They’re not going to take cheesy selfies with trout pouts at monasteries and mosques. Dogs don’t take photos of themselves doing cartwheels at sacred sites. Dogs don’t pretend to be social media experts, they’re not trying to improve our lives, help us reach unattainable goals, sell us products or help their owners train to be ultra fit marathon runners and brag about it. Dogs just are. I love dogs.
Cats aren’t trying to marry football players, flog baby clothes or inspire us to upgrade to a better lifestyle. Cats hiss and bite when they’re pissed off. Cats are cool.
But I do wish dog owners would post more photos of mutts with fleas, mange and weeping eyes. Cat owners could oblige by sharing their scratch and sniff cat pee in the corner of the living room snaps more often too.
I’ll keep this rant short, my cat needs to meet up with her personal trainer.
My oldest childhood friend is about to turn 50 and realising I have elderly friends has made me think about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Middle age can be about making time for personal growth and wondering what sort of human you want to become in the second half of your life. Once my kids have moved out of home, I want to inspire people, live well and have fun, so when I grow up, hopefully I’ll still be young enough to:
Care about my fellow humans like Sam Newman
Be open-hearted like Prune Macsween
Dance like Peter Garrett
Have the compassion of Miranda (Not Really) Devine
Pop pills like Ben Cousins
Manage my hair like Donald Trump
Lazy school holiday afternoon. Single mother folding washing, fruit rotting in the bowl, flies buzzing around the child’s cooking/slime experiment, cat eating the last of the bread, children glued to their screens.
“Zen, what are you watching?”
“Some highlights from the IT movie.”
“I don’t want you watching that movie, you’re too young, it will give you nightmares.”
As I prepare to be disappointed by New Year’s Eve celebrations and charge my teen’s phone so I can nag her home at some ungodly hour, I say good riddance to 2017. What a bastard of a year.
There were many lowlights of the numpty kind:
Nivea white purity ad campaign
Orange moron in the White House
Spaghetti donuts
Potato Dutton spending billions on locking asylum seekers up on Manus & Nauru
Text messages auto-correcting to duck
Vegetable yoghurts
Abetz, Bernardi, Blot, Abbott, Kenny, Not Devine, Credlin
Fine artists Mary Tyler Moore, Sam Shepard, Malcolm Young, David Cassidy, Chuck Berry, John Hurt and Tom Petty left our world
More white male shooters became killers in the US
Too many beautiful souls died of brain cancer
But there were also many heroes of 2017:
Magda Szubanski
Jacinda Ardern
Father Bob
Father Rod
Larissa Waters breast fed her baby in parliament
Victorians elected the first-ever female indigenous MP, Lidia Thorpe
Kon from the ASRC
Mums 4 Refugees
A people-powered movement stopped Adani’s $1Billion loan
Same Sex marriage finally became law
War on Waste campaign
Women’s Marches across the world
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ended; brave souls who’ve endured so much can hopefully begin to heal and churches will be forced to offer compensation
J.K. Rowling
Angela Merkel
Penny Wong
Lee Lin Chin
I graduated from primary school after 15 years
#MeToo ladies
Weinstein and other predators were named and shamed
Political leaders of the resistance
2018 is the year of the Earth Dog. According to Chinese astrologers, dogs sniff out the truth, corruption is exposed and the underdog is championed. Happy joyous New Year, may the dogs of 2018 pee on the legs of mansplainers, bring us a break from the political insanity, and bless us with more women in power, especially needed by those of us with a vagina.
As 2017 is ending it is compulsory to make a list of achievements, resolutions and groceries. As a word class highly qualified inspo fitspo marketing guru and on trend innovative disruptive full of it social media influencer professional product placement specialist, I also like to make predictions on what will be hip and cool next week.
The big trends of 2018 will be:
Teens discovering original songs which are better than cover versions recorded by No One With Original Talent contestants
All you can eat pickled onions with plastic cheese will feature on TV cooking shows
Footy socks with thongs will be huge in Paris and Engadine
Jail time for anyone using the hashtags disruptor, innovator or influencer
Fabulous LGBTQIA weddings
Smug coupled up parents will learn that single mothering helps kids learn to be independent
Women in power
Natural lips
Brady bunch families will thrive when property prices plummet
Wearing undies in summer will be abolished due to global warming
Footy teams taking performance-enhancing drugs may win a championship
It will be illegal for teenaged Katy Perry fans to wear 80s metal T-shirts
Americans will discover that guns kill a lot of people
Thia week Australia celebrated a victorious YES vote for marriage equality. After all the hate that was unleashed on the LGBTQIA community, it was beautiful to see my queer friends celebrating with their allies.
The religious hypocrites in the Anglican church spent $1million on an advertising campaign for the NO vote. ONE MILLION DOLLARS as homeless elderly people live under bridges and in cars.
I’m happy that most Australians stood up and fought for our friends so that we are all equal under the law. My gay friends have been bashed, spat at, ridiculed and put down by family and so-called friends and strangers. I’m writing this for all the times they’ve heard, “I don’t mind gays, but,” for all the times they’ve heard someone use the statement, “That’s so gay,” in a derogatory way. It breaks my heart to think of the pain they’ve experienced during this hateful campaign that could have been avoided if PM Turnbull had any courage.
All the gay parents I know have had to choose their path carefully, to consider what parenting really meant. I know happy, healthy kids who have two mums and two dads, and they’re thriving. My kids have one parent available to them 24/7 and they’ve had trying times. Heterosexual parenting is more likely to expose kids to harm.
These are the politicians who didn’t have the courage to vote yes or no. Remember their names at the next Federal election:
As Ellen de Generes said, “Here are the values I stand for: honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.”
Dear selfie kings and queens,
Here’s a revolutionary idea for you when posting to your millions of followers on Instagram: Your posts can be edited.
Call me old fashioned but if you profess to be an expert in your field, perhaps you could proudly display that you can grasp the basic idea of stringing a sentence together?
Maybe proclaiming that youre / your / ur a thought leader then displaying a smorgasbord of unedited grammar and spelling mistakes is not ideal for your brand. If you’re claiming to help people get millions of followers perhaps it would help if you were mildly literate.
It’s bad enough when Insta ‘celebratiez’ post photos of their ugly children, but recently, on her Insta feed, well-known personal trainer MB posted the words, All be it
I think the word she was looking for was albeit. Really. I’m going to start a heartfelt crowdfunding campaign for the poor lady, she obviously can’t afford to pay someone to proofread her life-changing posts.
Pert ladies and buff gents, you know that tweets can’t be edited (looking at you idiot President number 45) but all your other brilliant revolutionary thoughts on other social media channels can. How about you learn to use the delete button and maybe send a text to a friend who can spell so they can read your genius ideas before you pay to boost your inspo post?
I really love that your /ur / youre a lifestyle guru and new media-savvy social influencer. Honestly I do. But if you want to be a disruptor (gag) then maybe read your ‘next ‘level’ post before you hit the share button…
This morning I realised that it is very helpful to my fellow humans to list my grievances and post a selfie on the worldwide web. Online Whinge Day will surely change the world for the better, and as I am perfect, I’ve got a long list of complaints about human behaviour:
When suffering loved ones post, ‘remembering dear Fringle and her contribution to our lives, gone too soon,’ idiots ask of the dear departed’s family, ‘Oh, what happened to Fringle, I don’t know.’ Hello smartphone saviour, there’s a thing called Google, you can look it up. Also on Facebook there’s a wall where you can actually scroll down and look through past events, and spare the grieving person the effort of retelling the story because of your laziness. Sigh
When businesses have ‘heroes’ listed on their website, and what follows is a list of the person’s professional achievements. Client service in real estate is not heroic, saving lives is. Der.
The use of the word culture (the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively) to describe what is merely a money making scheme, is not an inspiring use of a person’s time.
Online parenting experts, who when looking at a photo of a messy teen’s bedroom or reading about a parenting fail on Farcebook, quickly type advice such as, Teach your teen to clean up, it’s good for them, or gems like, I think you should set a good example for your child. Really? I thought parents were supposed to let kids run riot and drink to excess. Thank you Captain Obvious
Sometimes I wonder if the whole world isn’t an idiot asylum for the castaways of happier planets – Malheureuse