Imagine heat clawing your face as your custom-made home burns to the ground. You want to close your eyes against the sting of smoke coming from the house-shaped hole, but horror locks them wide...
I’ve been medically prescribed blog-writing. I’m not even kidding. A statement like that probably needs backstory. So here’s a story, because stories are fun—and in this case, kind of meta: Once upon a time, there was a little blue robot. He was a fanciful fellow, his head always in...
I might quit blogging. It might be a good thing. A healthy thing. There have been a variety of reasons for my blogging, across the timeline, but right now there’s no other reason than this: I’ve published a blog post every week since June last year. That’s not even a...
Most people understand that when a real-estate advertisement promotes a property as ‘ideal for first-home owners’, they mean ‘nobody would live here if they could afford somewhere else’. And when those ads label a house a ‘DIY dream’, they mean ‘the roof is currently held on by duct tape’....
The grass, apparently, is always greener wherever we’re not. I haven’t lived in Queensland, Australia, for almost 10 years now. But I remember it fondly. Especially when winter hits, and in New Zealand everybody stops ageing for several months. Unfortunately, memories often lie, and if I wasn’t such an...
I have many skills. I know how to dance the chorus choreography to 5ive’s ‘Baby, When the Lights Go Out’. I know how to take a blood sample from a Rhodesian Ridgeback. I know how to burp on command. But I can’t cook. I’ve blogged about this frustration before....
I finally did one of the things I’d scheduled for the elusive ‘One Day’: I went to a New Zealand Sign Language class. A real one. With a real live teacher and real live people. People who looked just as fidgety and unsure as I did. I’d already concluded...
I can parse linguistic etymologies, but apparently I can’t teach the alphabet. It’s a tough reality for me to face. I don’t know how to enable information to reach my 3-year-old, Daniel. He doesn’t think how I think. How can I make myself think like I don’t think? I...
I hate cooking. I hate that I have to do it every day. I hate that it takes much longer to cook it than it does to eat it. I hate that by the time I have it on plates in front of my family, I’m so sour about...
Taste is a fickle thing. It makes critics of us all. I knew a guy who’d make fun of me for talking about the different flavours I could detect across a range of coffee beans. He thought I was making it all up. But the same guy would then...
The fascination with werewolves, it seems to me, has overtaken that of vampires in modern popular culture. Werewolves are the new and exciting subject of sexual allure. (Or possibly the old and repeating one, but with a long enough reprieve behind it to push it out of living memory.)...
If you say you have a surprise for me, but you don’t say what it is, clearly you have no idea how human psychology works, and the nature of desire. If you remember only one thing from this post, let it be this: Don’t tell someone you have a...
Is a person counted as noble, or not, if they hand in a wallet they find…but after relieving it of its cash? I’m glad to have my wallet back, with all its cards. It’s a hassle having to call places, cancel things, and wait for new things. The success...
Taking the Mensa admissions test had seemed like a good idea at the time. With the high-IQ society offering the test free for a promotional period, in recognition of World Intelligence Day, taking advantage of the opportunity had seemed like a no-brainer. (Ironic, that.) It wouldn’t cost me anything....
I’ve been seeing a lot of article headings like this, online: ’7 Things you need to be successful’, or ‘5 Things you must do to be successful’, or ‘Lists you need to keep to be successful’. At what? Successful at what? When I read the lists, they don’t tell...
There are two languages that I believe would be immensely helpful for the typical English-speaking New Zealander to know: indigenous (te reo Māori), and sign language (NZSL). I know neither. And thus, I feel like a tourist in my own country. As is the social typicality for an individual,...
This week, what started with a cut on Timmy’s lip ended with his having a midnight surgery in Acutes theatre, staffed by seven sets of blue scrubs. For no serious medical reason. It was just the result of a social tendency I’ve noticed; a near-consistent psychological algorithm: If a...
I like to think I’ve changed since I was a teenager. Safely ensconced in my 30s, I’ve never looked back at the maturity and mentality of my teenage years and thought, “I wish that was still me.” I don’t know any grownup who does. We look back on our...
The proverbial ‘they’ say that the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging you have one. I don’t even know if I’ve made that first step, because I can’t decide whether this thing is a problem or a gift. If I figure out a way to make it...
[Edit, 2020: I’m leaving this post here, as it was written, because no matter how my circumstances or learning have changed since its writing, it remains an accurate representation of what I had thought at the time—and to revise history according to current opinion only compromises the authenticity of...
I’m not irritated by much. Well, there’s the reasonable stuff. Indecisive people, overattentive people, clingy people, leechy people, snooty people, wishy-washy people, emotional people, fickle people, obtuse people, naive people, people who expect an answer to a rhetorical question, and Jodie Foster. And pleonasm. And other things. Maybe I...
Teaching a child to write is like nailing jelly to tree. It’s one of the first lessons of home schooling that I’m learning. Hot on the heels of that, is the realisation that this is going to be as big a growth exercise for me as for them. Maybe...
I’ve moved house 16 times. It seems I’m rather commitment-phobic regarding addresses, rarely staying in one place for more than two years. Not necessarily by design—things just happened, as things do. And I’m about to do it again. It’s commonly touted that moving house is one of life biggest...
I can make a high-stakes choice easily enough. Which country to live in. Which career track to pursue. Dramatic differences in variables make it simple calculation. But I’m terrified of ice cream parlours. I go into them in the first place because I’d like an ice cream. Then I...
Being told I have the rarest personality type among females is said like some sort of congratulations. As if I’m supposed to feel good about being more rare, more special, more whatever-distracting-adjective-they-use. Well, I’m not distracted. I know what they’re doing: trying to spin it so I won’t realise...
