I Drew This

I must have been in about year nine, sitting in some history or Australian studies class one April, when the teacher (not sure I remember which one) started telling us about what happened on Anzac Day.

Sure, we all knew about it. As Australians, we’d been told about it since primary school: Gallipoli, the Ottomans, and about Simpson and his donkey.

The teacher gave a brief description of how the events of the Gallipoli landing unfolded, and how the campaign resulted in the loss of life of thousands of Allied troops, including many Australians.

A voice came from somewhere to my right. “Yep, we beat em.”

I looked at who’d said it—a kid called Ken—thinking “Rubbish, it was a slaughter.”

Then I realised. Ken was a first-generation Australian. Ken’s parents were Turkish.

And yet Ken wasn’t required at school the next day, Anzac Day, because it was a public holiday. A public holiday to commemorate Australian and allied soldiers who died in a specific battle in WWII.

For all I know, Ken’s family might have just sat at home quietly on Anzac Day, caught up on some washing, mown the lawn, maybe wash the car. But they might just have likely have packed a picnic lunch, gone down to the river and had a good time of it, or maybe, just maybe they may have even spared a thought for soldiers from their homeland who had died in that or other battles. I don’t know. And I can’t ask him. We were never that close.

Likewise, on Australia Day, Ken’s family got the day off. I took it from his “we beat ‘em” comment that his family still identified heavily with their Turkish background. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have been given days off for these holidays, in fact I’m rambling a bit, so I’ll get to the point.

For a lot of holidays we’re given the day off whether we like it or not. And this post is actually about Christmas.

We don’t say that the Kens of this world, or their families, should be denied a day off on Anzac Day or Australia Day because they identify with a different culture. There’s no real expectation on anyone to show up to dawn services or citizenship ceremonies. We don’t expect people who get a day off for the Melbourne Cup to care about horseracing. It’s just a day off.

The point: people don’t necessarily observe the true reason for a holiday.

Christmas is a funny one. Because people tend to observe Christmas whether or not they are really part of the Christian faith. We put up a tree, decorate the house, give gifts. We eat a hearty lunch/dinner and live off ham sandwiches for a week. Some organised people (who aren’t me) still send cards, and we may even sing carols, possibly at an organised carol-singing event.

But we don’t all go to church.

There are always cards or leaflets or posters that say we shouldn’t forget “the reason for the season”. That reason (they say) is Jesus.

And I say “bollocks”.

For my family, Christmas is a really special time. We do all the traditional things on Christmas day: getting together, gift giving, Christmas dinner, then lots of socialising and possibly napping. It has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with Family. My siblings and I are all grown up and we and our families are spread across two states but Christmas is the one event that, almost unfailingly, brings us all together. And that’s a good thing. I know other people can have issues with family but for us, it’s a pretty good time.

But Jesus is nowhere to be seen. Sure, we have been brought up in a typical community within a Western Christian culture; there was some private education thrown in the mix, which did some harm, some good, but none of us is really serious about religion.

So besides the fact that the Christian church appropriated whatever pagan midwinter festival was around at the time and supplanted it with their own meaning and traditions, regardless of that…

I think Christmas should be regarded as a secular holiday.

Even though some see it as a celebration of the birth of their mythical saviour, I think most of us just take the holiday and apply our own traditions to it. And for a lot of us, those traditions involve similar activities based around some notion of family.

So, despite this being a personal blog, I say bugger the directives of several government agencies who deem we’re only allowed to say non-specific things like ‘season’s greetings’, I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Enjoy your family and those close to you, even though I don’t believe in any gods and don’t regularly attend any place of religious worship (and when I do, it’s not for that purpose).

My sister showed me this video last year, which I think sums it up, and rhymes nicely too.

Has anyone out there had ankle surgery in the last 2-3 years?

I may have to go under the knife (hacksaw, hammer, drill) soon, but want to know what my options are. I’m looking for helpful comments on:

• Why you needed surgery
• What procedure you had done
• Which doctor did it (particularly if you’re in Adelaide)
• What other options were available, if any
• How your recovery went
• What life is like now.

Hit me.

On the weekend, Cadel Evans won the Tour de France. Early in the week, Mia Freedman appeared on the Today show and gave her honest opinion on what she felt about it.

I’m inclined to agree with her.

I just made a comment on Lehmo’s blog and it ended up being so long that I should just pass it off as a blog post in its own right.

Lehmo made an excellent point when he said:

“He’s not a hero, he’s a sportsperson”, they say. I’m happy to accept that in a broader sense athletes are not heroes. However, within the context of their sports they can put in heroic performances.

I think this really nails where the disconnect is happening in this whole debate.

Poor Mia Freedman copped a caning for what she said when she was asked her opinion, and gave it. I don’t think she was being disrespectful to Cadel; she just doesn’t get excited about sport. And a disinterested minority of us feel the same way.

Now, I’m not averse to sport. I’ve led a pretty active life and knocked various balls of different shapes and sizes around various playing surfaces with varying degrees of success. Participation in sport is, in my view, one of the defining qualities in Australian culture.

I can also enjoy watching sport at an elite level because those doing it know how to do it really well, and I can appreciate the skill it takes to be the best at something. Sure, watching golf leaves me pretty cold and seeing people swim from one end of a pool to another is as boring as, well, watching people swim laps of a pool (how CAN that be interesting?). But come the World Cup, I’ll get up at 4 to watch a good game, and if it’s a good game, I’ll enjoy it.

Where sport does confuse me is the level of emotional investment people have in supporting one team or one player over another. These days, team support is fairly arbitrary. It’s not like the starting 18 for Carlton all live in Carlton; they’re just a bunch of guys who are good at football that were offered a contract with Carlton. The days when you gave “the local team” a cheer at the weekend match are, at the elite level, well and truly over. Teams aren’t location based, players are contracted employees and where they live is irrelevant.

Now, I don’t know Cadel Evans. Never met him. I’m sure he’s a top guy and if he’s just won a big race, then good on him. That must be hard to do. I couldn’t do it; I wouldn’t want to. But I’m not going to jump up and down for him any more than I’m going to jump up and down for Sven Svensson from Svenssonland if he’d won it.

Cadel’s Australian. Great, so are 20 million other people. A common nationality is just no longer a big enough factor to make this person “familiar” to me.

I think that’s where we sport agnostics sit. There’s just not enough of a connection between us and any sporting great to make that kind of significant emotional investment into the result of something trivial.

And sport is trivial. Occasionally it may spill into the political arena (and sometimes spills into rioting and violence at the extreme level and anger and frustration at a personal level).

But most sport is played as it’s own reward and does very little outside the context of sport. Being the fastest person in the world only gets you a big coin on a ribbon; winning the grand final gets you another trophy for the pool room. And a year later, they give away another one.

It’s a lot like music. All Mia did the other day was the equivalent of telling an audience of pre-pubescent girls that she wasn’t a Bieber fan.

Pure heresy in context. To the rest of the world, meh, neither here nor there, really.

You wouldn’t have to have been under a rock, you’d have to have been buried under the crazy paving for a considerable amount of time not to know that today is the day Price William will marry Catherine (Kate) Middleton.

I shall be watching the wedding on my television receiver.

Not that I feel any need to explain my reasons for doing so, I will say that it’s one of those once-in-a-generation events that become part of our collective consciousness. Whether you’re pro- or anti-monarchy, it’s a cultural reference point.

Personally, I am largely ambivalent towards the royal family. I have pro-republican leanings these days but being of English descent, I have a certain nostalgia about all things British. For me, this event is more about the British character, community and history than it is about the monarchy. So, less about the event, more about how people come together to celebrate.

So I don’t buy every New Idea with a picture of Kate & Will on the cover, but my Nanna lived through the blitz and loved the royals so I may get out my Union Jack tshirt for the occasion because it would have made her happy. Yes, I know she’s dead, but there you go. We are what our histories have made us.

There’s also the reasons I mentioned here.

So tonight, we shall be drinking endless cups of tea, I may even have a pint of bitter. Our daughters will be encouraged to watch because if Englishness is part of my identity, it’s part of theirs too. I will enjoy the spectacle, though knowing myself, I will no doubt view it with a certain air of ironic detachment, as I would a Eurovision telecast.

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But a message to all those who are complaining about the hype, the media saturation, the drivel being spoken by the TV puppets.

Imagine if there were not one but ten royal weddings every weekend for six months of the year, with journalists and experts talking shit about them every day of the week, taking up half the news bulletins and entire sections of newspapers.

Imagine radio broadcasts commentating every exchange of vows, every ring-on-finger placement, every kissing of the bride, and your favorite Friday-night TV shows being pulled because of them.

Imagine people talking about them around the water cooler, taking bets en masse in organised pools on who’ll get the most presents.

Imagine people, on any given day, wearing loud scarves and jerseys in the colours of their favorite royal house.

Would it annoy you, that something so pointless and irrelevant to you was given blanket coverage and that everyone you knew was really, really into it?

Well, that’s how I feel about football.

Someone asked if I’d be offended if I were called a bogan.

It’s hard to say yes without sounding arrogant or elite, or at least something resembling classist. But here’s a list. Call me what you will.

• I don’t like football
• I don’t drink iced coffee (that’s important in South Australia)
• I don’t drive with my forearm hanging out the window of the car
• I put myself through university
• I don’t drink to get drunk
• If I do get drunk, I don’t get loud or violent
• I don’t really care about how cool my car does or doesn’t look
• That said, I don’t drive a Commodore or a Falcon
• I don’t find commerical radio hosts at all entertaining, let alone funny
• I don’t have farmeville, mafia wars, or any of that rubbish installed on facebook
• I’ve studied, and read books in, French (and the French are like the anti-bogans (except in popular music))
• I try not to stereotype groups in society (by sex, age, race, sexual orientation, religion… with the possible exception of baby boomers)
• I try to keep an open mind and I’ll admit when I’m wrong  (and sometimes it can be amazing to find out you were)
• I can’t stand anti-intellectualism
• I use words like “anti-intellectualism”
• I try not only to consume, use, buy, and watch, but to produce, create.
• I’m really good at grammar (which, alone should be enough).

So this morning, I was about to hop in the shower, and so, y’know, I was undressing (control yourselves, ladies).

I slipped off my tshirt and put it down, then I pulled down the briefs and let them fall to my feet.

Now, you know that trick you do, where you take one foot out but then you flick them up with the other foot and catch them? Yeah, well I did that.

Only it was first thing in the morning, and I must still have been a little tired, a little off balance.

So when I tried to flick them up with my foot, they flew up, but not far enough. They didn’t go up, so much as across the room.

Into the toilet.

Which my daughter had just used.

And she’s a bit lazy when it comes to flushing.

Fuck.

Can’t believe I’ve had this blog for howevermanythefuck years and I never invented a health category.

Anyway, the wisdom tooth is gone but the reminder of its departure still weighs heavy and the very real pain lingers, as though the tooth were a loved one that had been traumatically ripped out of my life.

I’m working from home again today. And I’ll be ringing the dentist back when they open in a little while maybe for a chat, maybe to come in for a checkup because it’s really getting a bit much.

It will be a week today since I had my lower left wisdom tooth pulled. They say it’s good to get them out sooner rather than later to prevent problems they may cause. It’s also easier (I’ve since found out) to have them out when you’re younger. So me, pushing— no, I can’t say it. So me, in my very late 30s, should have had the bugger out years ago. The older you get, the harder it is to get them out and the more traumatic it can be.

I’m having two basic problems. One, there’s this bad taste in my mouth. I’ve been doing some reading and apparently this can happen in two ways. One is when the clot becomes dislodged from the extraction site and you have what’s called dry socket. Bacteria builds up and that causes the bad taste. The other way is that bacteria just builds up anyway, around the site, around any stitching. Dry socket comes with pain around the hole. I don’t have the pain. Either way, the bad taste also translates to bad breath. This is one of the reasons I’m working from home again today: the swelling has pretty much gone, so despite the fact I can show my face in public again, I just don’t want to go breathing around people.

The second problem is just pretty much constant pain, just not where you’d expect it, ie. the hole the tooth came out of. I can’t open my mouth very far still, as there’s still some swelling making that difficult, so eating is an ordeal. Yesterday I had a toasted ham & cheese sandwich. I should have just had toast. It seems the width of two layers of bread together was too much. I had to have some painkillers and a lie down as dessert. So with the pain, I don’t know if it’s related to not being able to open my mouth very far, which is just hurting everywhere I’m swollen, or if it’s related to an older injury…

That older injury being a tripod fracture I received to my cheekbone in 1998. I now have metal plates inserted in my head, where they put things back (almost) in the right place. After I recovered from that, for a few years following (not so much anymore) when there was a change in the weather, my face used to hurt like fuck. Some of the pain I’m getting now is reminscent of that hurting like buggery, perhaps because things are moving around ever so slightly in there and the metal plates are like, ‘yeah, fuck off, we’re not moving’.

I have called the dentist. A checkup is on the cards this afternoon.

Well, the world of post wisdom-tooth extraction is both a painful and not so pleasurable one.

The procedure wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it might be. And it was actually over quite quickly. Not the hour of carving up the tooth and removing it bit by bit I had somehow been led to expect. I think that must have been a worst-case scenario.

I was due in at 4.30, and arrived pretty much on the dot. The dentist was in the waiting room as I sat down. He was expecting me, having already taken some other Drew into his chamber and luckily realising his mistake before applying the anaesthetic.

So I was in the room by, say, 4.32. They got me in the chair, gave me a bib and some glasses then proceeded with the anaesthesia. First, there’s the cotton swab to numb the place where they put that fucking awesome giant needle, then there’s that giant needle. Then, while they’re waiting for that to take effect, we stand around talking about Michael Bublé, Bryan Ferry. No TV screens mounted on the ceiling in this room; just bad FM radio.

By this time, I’m guessing it’s maybe 4.40 and he’s going in, making some noise, yanking things around. He’s leveraging the tooth this way and that, and after a few minutes he says to his assistant “I think I may be able to get a [insert fancy instrument name here] around that,” and she passes him one and he goes to town. It wasn’t quite Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors but it was pretty full on. He had his plier thingy in his right hand and he was grabbing my bottom jaw in his left, so hard that I think he split my lip against the teeth on that side. I could feel the skin of my top lip stretch till I thought it was going to split and I thought my jaw might break. But then there was a cracking sound and out it popped.

Then, they got some stitches in there, some gauze for me to bite down on to stop any bleeding, and I look up and it was only 4.50.

I spent the next half hour at the shopping centre nearby getting supplies of prescription and non-prescription painkillers. I now have about every combination of paracetamol, codeine and ibuprofen known to man.

Then, as the numbness wore off, the pain set it and ouch ouch ouch ouch OUCH!

I’m on my third day. I look like the elephant man. Actually, I look like a really fat person with—not a double chin—but one of those non-chins that’s just flesh between the tip of the chin and the adam’s apple.

The worst part is that I can’t eat solids. Two reasons: it hurts to move my jaw and it hurts to swallow. So I’ve been puréeing most foods the last few days. My favorite for breakfast is a banana and a small tub of diced peaches in syrup. Yum. Lunch has been mostly soup, maybe with some rice to bulk it up a bit. For dinner, I’ve puréed spag bol, and last night was chicken & veg. Spag was great. Chicken & veg, not so great. Needed gravy.

I haven’t had a coffee since Tuesday morning though. I might have to have an iced soy latte. And I think I’ll throw it in the blender with a Tim Tam.

I’m having a wisdom tooth extracted this afternoon.

A man (possibly two) is (possibly are) going to jack open my mouth and take to part of it with sharp rotating cutty things that will penetrate and cut up some of the really hard and well-stuck-in bits, which he (possibly they) will then extract with shiny stainless-steel pliers.

Normally, I don’t mind minor, outpatient procedures. I don’t even normally mind inpatient procedures because they usually afford you the courtesy of ensuring you’re unconscious for the most unpleasant parts.

But I’ll be awake for this. And it’s not some ankle adjustment or in-grown toenail removal. This is a wisdom tooth, buried deep in my head. My head is where I keep my brain and other really quite important things.

It is on the lower jaw though, so I’m trying to focus on the positives here.

I’m not sure I’ve had time to prepare emotionally for this. Though I’m not sure giving myself that time would be in any way beneficial.

You can over-think these things.

I have prepared myself though, thus:

• I have told my boss not to expect me in for a day (possibly two)
• I have procured ample supplies of paracetamol/codeine based painkillers
• I have reasonably well stocked cupboards and fridge
• I have six episodes of House that I have yet to watch, and I’ve been meaning to re-visit the animated series of Aeon Flux for a while now
• I have a laptop and an ipad at my disposal

So I’m not looking forward to the procedure (not least because it means I have to sit there for an hour with my mouth open and that’s just not natural).

But the recovery, while painful, could be the break I’ve been craving for a year or two but have never had.