THE EVOLUTION OF BARBIE.

The Evolution of Woman to Barbie then to Techno-Barbie.

If girls were like boys, Barbie's little cars could be taken apart.  Their tyres would be inflatable, changeable and come with lock nuts, and their mufflers could be taken off and replaced.  Barbie would also be able buy accessories such as spoilers, chrome exhausts and mag wheels.

Mrs Barbie, her mother, would own a shed in which Barbie could store assorted car bits and pieces such as three spare engines, a couple of car doors, a bonnet, a spare windscreen, numerous tyres stacked in a pile that harbour a range of deadly spiders, various thinners and enamels, an engine lifter and bits and pieces whose use even Barbie has forgotten, if she had a brain that is.

When I was a young girl, I never had the slightest desire to take anything apart.  That was my father's forte.  He managed to turn a bicycle he thought I had stopped riding (well I was at boarding school, how could I ride it?) into a boat trailer.  He turned my two working toy phones connected by a wire into an alarm bell for my grandfather who lived in a granny flat on the property (also while I was conveniently at school).  He was clever at that sort of thing but failed to ask my permission and made me feel bad for suggesting that he should have.

It was no use complaining because somehow I always ended up feeling that I was being selfish.  There was also the fear they would find a boarding school even further away to which to send their one and only child.

When my son was little, as soon as one of his toys broke he wouldn't play with it anymore.  Then something happened at around the age of ten.  He took his bicycle apart.  Thankfully it was not reincarnated as a boat trailer.  After all, we didn't have a boat.  Miraculously it became a bike again.  He was just teaching himself its mechanics.

Then came the Volkswagen Beetle and my version of Mrs. Barbie's shed.  That strange instinct peculiar, it seems, to the male of the species, gestated in him.  He began to take engines apart and put them back together, and they worked.  Men have a strange affinity with things mechanical.  There are some women who do, but mostly we just like our cars to keep working and ignore their protestations.

I often wonder how man the hunter became man the mechanic.  Men no longer have to hunt leaving the women behind with the babies, as happened centuries ago.  How did the hunter become the fixer?  How does the pursuit and kill of a warm blooded animal compare to tinkering with a basically metallic object that, while it can 'run' in a sense, doesn't require you to chase after it unless you forget to put the handbrake on when it's on a slope.  Nor can you eat it, which was the aim of the hunt, after all.

There is only one possibility that I can think of and it is the tool.  Hunting tools came first. They required making, sharpening and maintenance.  I can just see the hunter coming home and, when everyone is fed, his woman asks him to help with the children.  Oh, no, so sorry, the hunting tools need some work; can't have them getting blunt and all.  It followed that when farming took over, those tools came next; ploughs, carts and threshers.

I believe men decided to find anything to do to avoid helping with the baby.  They became so good at it that it eventually found its way into their genes.

This masculine trait has merits of course.  For example one day my car was side-swiped by an old fellow who took off without leaving his name.  A witness said that he thought the car was a Ford sedan.  It had left a piece of tail light behind.  I showed it to my son and told him the witness had said it had come from a Ford.  No, he stated with authority, it had come from a such and such year model Toyota Corolla.

I was, as you can imagine, fairly gobsmacked.  He was not training to be a mechanic but a Veterinary Surgeon.  He was right.  With the aid of the police we tracked down the poor old fellow who had hit my car.

If anyone thinks the genders are the same, they need brain surgery.  We may have equal rights, at last, but we are different.  It would be very sad if we were not.  "Vive la difference", as the French say; those lovely, perverse people who have genders for every noun.

My parents did one or two things right.  One of them, as I was an only child, was not to fashion me according to my gender.  In truth I don't think my mother cared all that much and dad was always at work.

However, as a girl my passion was for dolls.  I also loved comic books much to my mother's chagrin.  If she hadn't thrown them all away, along with my teddy bear, I might now be worth something given the value of old comics.  She read books.  I waited until I was twelve and forced myself to read one.  It didn't, after all, have pictures.

The better part of my first ten years was spent up a tree where I made castles in the air.  I was a real tomboy but I still loved dolls.

But never did I get the urge to take apart my bike or my car when I had one, or my dolls.  Nor did I know any girl or woman who did.  My future husband, father of my mechanically minded son, worked on his Volkswagen every weekend to fix things that were broken or didn't sound right.  His friends did the same to their cars and so I decided this was a guy thing.

My son's old Volkswagen now resides under his house.  His actual shed, amazingly, is pristine and you wouldn't find his car bits in there.  The under croft of his house is for that.  I sense his son will inherit the VW and by then it may really be worth something.  But cars, like everything, are changing.  You need to be an electrician to fix one and I think the only thing the Volkswagen will be good for is as a collector's item.  There'll be no point in tinkering with a car that is purely mechanical and can't teach you anything about fixing a next generation model. 

I feel we need our natural gender outlets in this world to reinforce our identities but soon we will not able to take things apart let alone allowed to climb trees.  What then?  How will we channel our masculine and feminine traits?

In the future dolls will probably talk back to you, do their own hair and choose their own wardrobe.  Heaven forbid, they might even demand an allowance.  They will probably have computer chips embedded in them that imitate brains, so they may even take you to court if you infringe on their freedom of choice or store them in a box.

Imagine this: "Barbie doll takes owner to court for stereotyping her as a female fantasy figure."  I should be so lucky!  But if the gender lines do start to blur in the future and she starts asking for a bicycle and a tool kit, watch out and get her a matching shed or she'll use yours.

END.

NOT NEW YEAR ALREADY!

2013 Suggests 2014 Back Off

My doctor has told me I have suffered a bad case of 2013.  She has advised me to avoid 2014 altogether.  I asked her how I can possibly do this without Dr. Who's Tardis and she really has no idea.

When you think about it, the older you get, one year becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your life.  For example, when you are a one-year-old, a year makes up 100% of your life.  When you are five, one year is 20% of your life.  No wonder it seems so long for Christmas to come around.

Then when you're thirty, one year is 3.3% of your life.  Spins round a lot faster, doesn't it? Barely time to make money to pay the bills and buy your children their long-awaited Christmas presents.

OK for those of us fifty and over one year has plummeted to 2% and decreasing, of one's lifespan. How to solve this predicament?  The various states may go in for daylight saving, but I don't think anybody is going to approve of relative year lengths according to age. Therefore, if you are fifty, say, no one is going to make one year equal to ten for fifty-year olds so that you feel the same excitement on reaching Christmas as you did when you were five. No one would be capable of correlating the various calendars for the corresponding years anyway.

It's as mind boggling a thought as Einstein's Theory of Relativity.  In fact, it's about relativity and so there is no way it's going to catch on.

No, the sad thing is that the older you get the shorter the years become.  Compounding this is the fact that your time is growing shorter and at an exponential rate of progression.  It will seem like you'll be dead and in the ground by the end of the week even if you live another thirty years after turning sixty.

We all want to reach old age save the rock star who sang "I hope I die before I get old".  The problem with this is, you don't stay young.  Wouldn't it be great to live to eighty years and not age a bit over twenty?  This would lead to some problems, like the man of twenty who brings the hot chick of eighty home to meet his parents.  Their only succour would be that she'd be dead before the wedding took place.

Then, of course, what would kill us?  Would we just drop dead at a certain age?  A bit too much of a let down if you still feel and look twenty.  I suppose this is the only thing that makes old age viable.  We're winding down to the inevitable.

I am beginning to resent the speed at which the years are passing but I'm also turning into one of those people who is glad to have been born when I was.  I don't much care for the way the world is going and the speed with which things are changing with no one, apparently, in charge of what changes we can and can't accept.

I worry that people have too many children without thinking of the consequences and then the poor darlings are turned into worker drones to support the macrocosm the world and technology has become.

Another thing that bothers me is how confident the youth are, how little they respect experience and yet, how they don't seem to think about where they're heading and what it's all about.  Never fear, when their percentages start to drop they too may have an epiphany.

By the time they are forty they probably think they'll have access to 3D printed kidneys and other organs; they may even have access to 3D printed offspring if they miss their fertility window.  Why have in-vitro fertilisation when you can print out a little darling according to specs?  Well that's a little far ahead, but it may happen.

What are Baby Boomers, who just want a mobile that's a phone without the Internet attached, going to think of 3D grandchildren?  Not much, I can assure you.  What youth forget is that the Boomers are called that for a number of reasons.  We were there at the start of the technology boom.  That's why we're sick of it.  We can take all the new technology in, we just don't want to anymore.  It doesn't have to get smaller and smaller and faster and faster for us to appreciate it.

Some things are worthy in themselves.  When I had a dinosaur of a computer, my stepson said it was slow and out of date.  I said that if a cave man saw it, he'd be pretty impressed. It's all relative you see.  You can keep pushing down the pedal of a car's accelerator until you reach exorbitant speeds, but what's the point?  You are only human after all.  That too may change, sadly, but until then, let's just enjoy the good things we have.  The tortoise won over the hare after all and he probably stopped along the way to smell the roses.

END

CHRISTMAS STUFFING.

Santa After Christmas Stuffing

Why do we wish each other "Happy Christmas" as if there is some doubt it will happen;  a fifty percent chance of it going awry?

Chances are it will.  There is so much expectation surrounding the enjoyment of the day; so much negotiation between couples as to whose family to visit when and for which meal.  There are definite odds of a stomach ache following a self-induced stuffing that would, were the turkey still alive, make it feel a lot better about what's been done to it.

I haven't put up a Christmas tree since my son moved into his own home.  For many years now the thought of Christmas approaching has filled me with a foreboding much akin to someone facing execution.  When the Christmas trees go up in shops two months ahead of December I begin to get aggro.

This year I am mending my ways and attempting good cheer.  I decided I was only making myself miserable.  There may be a reason for my attitude.  I have the rare honour of having been being born on Christmas Eve.  As a child I felt, and still do, rather special.  No one forgets my birthday.  When I was very young other children envied me because I had presents to open the day before they did.  Then I had more to open on Christmas Day.

I do remember the sheer joy Christmas arouses in every child.  As adults it is our duty to give our own children that thrill, even though it has passed for many of us.  I rather admire adults who still approach Christmas with that thrill intact.  I don't know what's wrong with them, but I wish I had some.

It must be lovely to be in a cold country at Christmas.  Down Under we insist on eating a hot Christmas lunch when we are hotter than the food.  Kitchens reach Hades-like temperatures as hams are glazed, turkeys and chickens roasted, oven vegetables turned and browned, gravy simmered on the stove, plum pudding warmed over a steamer and custard in a Bain Marie.  The sheer logistics of this exercise rivals an army's preparations to invade an enemy country.

When finally we sit to eat we take time to view the overladen table and realise, with sinking hearts and perspiration dripping from our foreheads, that it is our duty to force feed ourselves, even if moving on to another family feast for dinner.  It is as if we a geese being force fed in preparation for our livers being harvested for foie gras.

There is something exhausting about eating a meal with numerous relatives and friends.  There are too many people to serve the food on plates in the kitchen so everything is placed on the table and the dishes passed around as people fill their plates.  Christmas bonbons must also be pulled apart and toasts made.  The food may have been hot when it left the kitchen but is now cooling just to the point of encouraging salmonella.

Christmas Day in Australia is quite often a heatwave no matter in which capital city you live.  I grew up in Sydney and a Christmas heatwave always finished with a Southerly Buster.  At around four p.m. ominous black clouds would blow in from the south accompanied by torrential rain, lightening and thunder.  The temperature would plummet to a delicious cool.

One of the things that brings on a Christmassy feeling in me is the sound of cicadas.  Their song fills the air in the month leading up to Christmas, their throbbing chorus pulsating  in air that vibrates with heat. They are The Little Drummer Boys of an Australian Christmas.

I blame the British for the way we celebrate Christmas in Australia.  At the peak of their power I'm sure they deliberately set out to colonise every hot, inhospitable place on earth just to escape the cold and damp of home.  I damn them for this as I have purely Anglo-Saxon ancestors who all conspired to come to Australia and, over time, combined to make me.  They must have liked the heat and isolation.  I do not.  I am a post-penal prisoner of this country.  Had I had a choice, I would have been born in the south of France or even Italy.

But here I am stuck when others still come voluntarily; immigrants and refugees from Abidjan to Zaire come to this wide, open and hot country.  They have brought with them their cuisines.  The Australian palate has changed so much in forty years it is now truly international.  Except at Christmas when it reverts, like a recessive gene, to traditional British fare.  It is as if the Union Jack is stuck in our gullet, which is much the way we feel on Boxing Day.

I miss a Christmas full of people; the ones I had as a child.  I married and moved with my husband to where work took him.  Our son grew up only occasionally knowing the kind of big family Christmases his parents had enjoyed.  When my husband and I divorced, our son's Christmases became smaller still.

I feel I've let him down but now he is married to a girl with a large family and they are making their own happy Christmases.  I must say they do it with a vengeance.  Now with a baby son, they deluge each other and the family in gifts.  I feel like an outsider, but I'm happy he has an extended family now.  He missed it for so long.

The worst Christmas of all is the lonely one.  There are so many who would give anything to be a part of the chaos of a family Christmas.  I've had my share of these.  Such people aren't alone in being alone.  They are a kind of family in their own right.  For the rest of the year, the lonely can cope with it but on that particular day it becomes so much harder.

So enjoy your 'stuffed to the gunnels' Christmas.  Revel at the aches in your stomachs and heads.  You have done Christmas proud and those aches are much better than the pangs of loneliness.  I guess that's what Christmas is all about, and a lot of stuffing.

END

THE BUYING OF SHOES FOR FEET THAT DON'T MATCH.

OK. Straight down to business.  As a female I love shoes.
What is it about women and shoes?
Well, this is my theory. Feet aren't like the rest of our body.  They don't really get fat.  No matter what perfectly shaped, or misshapen form they carry aloft, feet are fairly free from obesity.
Yes, the uppers can get pudgy, but I bet you'll never see feet that have grown fat sideways.  Well, I haven't, yet.
And so a girl can treat her feet to shoes that even a super-model could wear.  Until she gets a bunion.

As a teen and well into my twenties I could comfortably teeter around on a pair of four-inch heels all day.  This caused my mother to proffer dire warnings that I'd ruin my feet. The fact is, they deteriorate anyway, and I decided that I'd wear high heels as long was able to.  I would walk uphill and down all day on the University campus where I was studying.  I remember a particularly gorgeous pair of pale yellow high-heeled sandals with platform soles.  Thirty-years later I still remember those shoes fondly.

Back on the home front, and much earlier than my teen years, my mother would often look at my feet, tut-tut and tell me that a doctor once told her that she had the most perfect feet he had ever seen. (I swear she would repeat this story at least once a year.)  She would also state with confidence that I would get bunions.  She was wrong.  I only got one.

I am now, at fifty-something and finding it a push to last in three-inch heels all day.  But, and this is a big but, it's not because of the bunion; my feet as a whole just complain. The bunion doesn't hurt at all; not one bit.

No, the problem with the blasted bunion is that it's ugly.  I love high-heel sandals but these days as I look down at my right foot from aloft, the mighty protrusion sticks out from the side of a strappy shoe as if it is a State trying to secede from a nation; as if to break off to become an island or peninsula.  On top of this ignominy, the big toe above it is turning sideways as if to wave it good-bye.

Basically the bunion is starting to deform the big toe and the other toes are following suit.  In order to fix a bunion, a surgeon must break the bone, or bones or whatever makes up a bunion, remove the calcification and reset what's left.  Then the foot is encased in a cast for six weeks.

Apparently it is painful for both the foot and the person to whom it is attached.  It also means not being able to work.  This would be a plus is I had money.  But even if I did, I could scarcely use the time to sashay around Europe or the Greek Isles.  Also if I was to go by plane I'd probably have to pay for the cast as excess baggage: "I'm sorry, you can't take that foot on board with you, it will have to go in the luggage hold."

I am not in a rush to have this operation for the sake of vanity; not yet.  Until that time I am not prepared to inflict the sight of my pedal prominence on the world, and so I must now buy shoes that are more enclosed.  This brings with it a whole other problem in that the bunion attempts to force its way out of the casing.  After two months, the shoe will appear considerably wider than its opposite on the other foot.  The bunion will then victoriously break free, splitting the side of the shoe open, not at the seam, but by tearing through the leather or whatever material stands in its way.

The bunion does not just grow sideways.  It bulges downwards too.  The bottom of the tragic shoe will also wear through.  I was walking one day in the rain only to find water seeping into my shoe through the bottom.  I hadn't noticed there was a hole in the sole.  It's a bit like being the Titanic, only the iceberg strikes from within.

This leads me to shoe buying.  This should be a happy occasion but, as we women know, you may set out with heart aflutter and with visions ecstatic.  We may lust at the sight of row upon row of artfully laid out leather, patent and polymer temptation, all under spotlights that make colours luscious and shines shinier.  Then, having been as vigilant and patient as a hunter, having lassoed, harpooned or netted one of those rare and hard to find, almost extinct creatures - a salesperson - the fun starts.

You send him or her off with three or more samples of shoes to try on, having stated your size and colour preference.  Some time passes (often as long as it would take you to do your yearly tax return) and the salesperson returns with variations on your theme:  "The brand you have chosen in this one is quite a small make and rather narrow and the colour you want is not available in a larger size."  You are told that your next choice is a brand that is a generous fit: "No we don't have a smaller size, perhaps you could wear an insert to pad it out."  What about the last shoe?  "Well this is the last one, unfortunately no one can find its partner; we think it may have been stolen."

One day I hit pay dirt.  There they were, a lovely pair of shoes on sale and I mean cheap.  Why?  Because the last box contained two shoes of different sizes: one was an 8, the other 8 1/2.  The right shoe was the bigger shoe.  They fitted me perfectly.  Somewhere out there is my opposite.  If only I could find her: a woman with a bunion on her left foot; a woman with the same taste as me.  Think what we could achieve together!

Oh how I would love to shop for shoes on-line: so many shoes, so many choices.  Alas, until I find my alter-bunion-ego, I cannot.  Mostly I return from a shoe shopping exercise shoeless apart from the ones I was wearing when I left the house.  Once home I head straight for the fridge and try out a bottle of wine for size.

END

UPDATE: This post was written almost ten years ago.  I now have two bunions and have mostly resorted to flat shoes.  I still refuse to have an operation as I'm not in pain.