Moved

I know I'm only new on this blog, but already I've moved.

You can find me here.

Thanks for reading.

Mowing the heart

Mistresses around the country were peeved that Valentines Day was a Sunday this year.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, men are more likely to send flowers to their mistress than their wife but of course they can't send them to their home. So, as Valentines was a Sunday, florists had a quiet Valentines this year.

Well we had a quiet one too. I don't have a lover on the side so it made no difference to me, besides I work from home so even if it had been a weekday and I did have a lover, I couldn't have received flowers.

I mowed a love heart in the snake friendly grass for Simon.


He said he had thought of mowing I Love You in the grass for me but then I beat him to it so he had no way of honouring our love. That's ok.

I spent the first few years of our relationship being romantic and resenting him for not. Then I became listless, still resenting him for being unromantic.

Now I've decided I'm just going to be romantic in my own way and do it because I want to and try to resent nothing at all. Because at the end of the day I love him and he loves me and he's lovely, so things could be a lot worse. Better to do it without creating dramas.

He's just a head on his shoulders kind of man.

Who's making a feature film later this year.

Which happens to be a romantic comedy.

Fake Friending

Apparently 50% of British employers reject job applicants because of what they've said on facebook. These employers employ people to become facebook friends with us and report back what we've been up to.

According to The Telegraph, a UK employer survey showed that 38% of employers had turned applicants away when their facebook page showed different experience to their cv. Other reasons included when someone was racist on facebook (13%) or referred to drugs (10%).

Excuse me for being very 1990's about this, but isn't this dodgy? I mean to google a name and check out a blog is one thing, but to pay someone to fake friend me and check out if I've talked about drugs on facebook? I don't think I'd want to be employed by someone who did that.

The way I see it, web 2.0 is many things. It's a career resource and an information source but it's also about socialising ie social media. People sit at home and skype or upload photos to facebook while watching tv rather than going to the pub.

Some of what we put on the net is inherently public, but the point of facebook is that it's personal - thus the word friend. To do this is like employing a private detective to follow me to the pub and then report back on how I behaved. Do employers do that too?

When I've been on selection panels, we had to declare any personal interest and disregard anything anyone had said outside the interview. We were meant to treat all applicants at face value, not be influenced by small town gossip. Not easy in a small town.

Web 2.0 ethics need to be addressed here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6968320/Half-of-employers-reject-potential-worker-after-look-at-Facebook-page.html

My School

I wasn't suprised when my children's school didn't receive good results in the ACARA stats.

There are lovely things about the school: we started a school garden a couple of years ago, which is now flourishing; there's a chess club once a week; the school spirit at yesterday's swimming carnival was inspirational.

Also many of the teachers are close to retirement and burn out and there are a reasonable amount of "difficult kids". I know this because I volunteer in the school garden every week.

The school is in Urunga, which is a disadvantaged area. There's high unemployment, a lot of parents who left school well before the end of Year 10 and not much hope.

Yet we don't receive Priority School Funding, where disadvantaged schools receive extra money. This is because PSFP funding is determined by a survey that asks education levels of parents, and while there are many who left early, there are also a fair amount of new sea change parents who went to uni.

Unfortunately few of these new sea changing parents with University degrees are active in the school. And I would hazard a guess that this survey was one of the factors that was used in determining which schools were pitted against each other in the My Schools stats. This means that we were pitted against schools from areas with less disadvantage.

And so it becomes a quandary. Do I pull my kids out of a school with so much against it to give them a better chance in a more exclusive, and religious, private school? Or do I keep doing what I can to improve the school they're at because it's helping the whole community? Knowing all the time that in reality no school is perfect.

Kids Being Well

When we hear about children in the news they've often been badly treated or they're a feel good agent (where some cause has used a child's face to get good coverage in the media).

The NSW Commission for Children and Young People has decided to be radical and ask kids what they need to be happy, rather than working from the back end where we try to minimise what makes them unhappy.

It's an interesting study - they interviewed 126 children aged between eight and 15 years.

According to the kids, the nine factors that most influence their happiness are:

Agency (so having a say or independence)
Security
A positive sense of self
Activities
Adversity
Material and economic resources
Physical environments
Physical health
Social responsibility and moral agency

How interesting as a parent to see how low physical health sits, or material and economic resources. Don't kids just need a Nintendo DS or Wii to be happy? That's how they live life.

This study shows so much about the ways children consider life and priorities. Similar to adults, strangely enough, they live life for gratification day to day, but when asked to consider what matters they do care about themselves and their decisions.

http://kids.nsw.gov.au/

Youth Justice Conferencing

I just got back from an inevitable non-meeting.

30 minutes of driving on life risking highway to meet with someone I knew wouldn't be there. The joys of convening a youth justice conference.

I'm not really sure why I still do them. I do believe wholeheartedly in the process on so many levels but I'm sure someone else could do it.

It pushes my comfort zone which is always a good thing. All the kids I have worked with are images of a devastating cliche. So unsupported, illiterate, drug fucked, lost. Very much living a life with no expectations. It is shocking to see and pretty disheartening. A few can be affected by the conferences. They often come back. Recidivism rates are much better than for court, but still it is not like you can fix a lifetime and a community and a family and a habit and a lack of education in a couple of hours.

And the youth services that we end up referring the kids to are struggling to support them while scrounging for funding each year to keep a door open and to cover their petrol costs to drive everywhere to see the kids who aren't home.

And then I come home to my kids who are at school with these kids at a school that rates in the red on the My Schools website. And encourage them to go to a piano lesson.

Breaking Up

Half the couples I know living around me have separated. Apparently this is unusual.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies released a paper last month evaluating the 2006 family law changes. I was trawling through it, looking at stats like the fact that half of the couples who broke up had children under 3 years old, and "The education levels were lower than those found among parents who were together" as were the employment rates.

Interesting stats, somewhat predictable in a few ways - people with less life choices and fewer advantages are more likely to separate.

My separated friends fit in some of the median stats - children under 3. But not all - many of them have completed Degrees and most are employed in some way or another. So why are break up rates so high here?

I have a couple of theories. Couples do tend to spend more time together. This could be a hazard because we tire of each other more easily and also because we can't hide so much. Perhaps our city cousins can hide their affairs from their partners more easily.

On the other hand there are a few couples I know where one person travels regularly for work - like three days a week away. This could have the opposite damaging effect of both people living like they're single.

Also we can get bored up here in the sticks, that is a dangerous phenomenon.

One friend's theory is that we have a need to hinder the paradise in which we live. It's so ideal up here with a low cost of living, adorable surroundings. We feel a need to make life hard to make it interesting.

I'm just glad my youngest child is turning 10 this year, 2 years off being in the 7% bracket for likelihood to break up.

http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/pubs/fle/index.html

City Work

Well I'm now officially applying for jobs.

A lot of my friends work a proportion of the time here and fly to a city (Melbourne or Sydney) for the rest of the time. It seems I am now considering this option, or perhaps have finished considering.

Pretty good option in so many ways. Big decisions sometimes take a long time to brew and a short time to enact.

Creatively Bored

Have you heard of Richard Florida and his Creative Class?

In short, he wrote a book in 2003 which "describes the emergence of a new social class" This new class is made up of people who use creativity as a key factor in their work. He says this class makes up 30% of the workforce.

Not insubstantial.

My partner and I are Creative Classers. We live on next to nothing so we can do what we enjoy and live in paradise in order to afford it. We don't lounge in the sun with a book. We have the work ethic thing to contend with. And a drive to succeed eventually. And of course there are the three bumpkins to feed, clothe and supervise.

But we do it in a great setting and we do get to hang out with the kids a bit and there's no traffic and we only do jobs we want to do.

I am finding though as I can start the steps towards 40 that I am gazing away from my class of lifestyle and wondering how green that turf in the other class really is. Is money worth all the rest? I mean how can it be? But so many people choose it with such fervor and with such utter disregard for any other desire or rights to pleasure.

Perhaps we missed something in the middle class gene.

I've been quietly, mostly, pondering the reason for life over the last few years. Quietly because it sounds so drab, what's the meaning of life? But it feels so raw and like something is just beyond my fingertips.

Perhaps the solution is partly to create the reason myself, to do things in life that feel worthy and worthwhile. If I'm lucky enough to have a moment to ponder what has been when I die a long time from now, I think it will make more sense if I feel pride about my choices.

But then am I desiring to do good purely for selfish reasons and does that matter?

I'm reading AS Byatt's "The Children's Book" at the moment, enjoying it too. And there's a moment early on where two adult brothers are arguing over altruism and greed. A boy who the liberal minded man has recently saved from poverty is listening and is more offended by the liberal minded brother's touting of equality than he is by the straight talking of the entrepreneurial brother who has done some shady deals.

And sometimes I feel like that, like I'm the liberal man with all the politically correct friends - wanting to feel good about myself and perhaps being a little dishonest about it in the process.

So what is the answer. Stuff it all and do what you want?

Be honest about your motives?

Just earn shit loads of money and ignore the inequities in life?

Life for the sea changer is good. The beaches are practically deserted, the friends are adorable and more diverse than they'd be in the city, the lifestyle is cheap and the kids are free living. But in the 8 years we've been living beach rural, we've gradually become a little less idealistic about the drugs, boredom, schools and transport. And we are the mynah birds. House prices are shoving the locals west while we enjoy the breezes and mutter about the mozzies while sipping on Pinot Gris.