Automechanics for girls

Recently a man drove my car and pointed out the brakes were overheating and the hand brake was not disengaging properly.

Thehand brake light had been showing for months. Occasionally people would point it out to me, and i would say yes, i know, thehand brake light isn't working.

It never occurred to me that the hand brake light was working perfectly, but the brake wasn't.

My mechanic gently pointed out to me that the light actually indicates several things - lack of brake fluid and overheating brakes being the most likely - and the least likely being a non-workinghand brake light. As it was, the brake pads were wokn through and the brake fluid needed topping up. i was lucky not to do more damage.

i suppose one step further in silliness would be to put a smiley face sticker over the brake light so that nobody else would notice it was on and bother me about it.

Well, it was a very girly approach to the whole incident, and based on a faulty suppositon on my part, but i don't think it was only ignorance on my part. For me it makes sense to say that if the brake light isn't working properly it shows the brake light isn't working properly. i don't ask what else it might mean. Why not?

i can live and drive happily with my brake light showing and as long as the car performs normally i figure i am OK. i don't want to go to the mechanic with trivia - that seems even more girly. i pride myself that every time i hear a knock in the engine or have some sort of intermittant fault it does make sense and can be found by someone else. i don't make stuff up.

i think that many men like facts and like to know facts. Male conversation builds edifices of facts. Men compete about facts - look at my great big fact. When i was a teenager i was amazed at the stuff the guys knew - all about cars and stereos and martial arts and guns and alcohol and politics. They used the facts to marshal arguments about what was the best car, gun etc. it was usually pretty hypothetical because they never actually had access to any of it - but you were to know darn well that if they ever did get to own a car, gun, stereo or whatever it would be the best darn one because they just knew all that stuff. And when i briefly owned a motorbike, they were all sudden experts, and endlessly, clownishly helpful.

Recently a young woman who avowed she knew nothing about cars got a job in an auto parts store. Her rival for the job, an older man who is a qualified mechanic, lost out to her, seemingly because she was cute, and men would like to buy things from her and women would relate to her better. But wouldn't men want to buy auto parts from a man who had real expertise? No - because men already have all the expertise they need! Men do not go into an auto parts store and say - uh - i want a thingie, you know, the beige one. Men go into the auto parts store and enter into a spirited debate about the merits of the beige thingie they have already decided on. (And i have never known a man say beige. Men do do colours, but only if they are painting or if they are professionals.)

So it was superficially a winning situation for the auto parts shop. Men got to come in and see a cute girl.And maybe show off bit. Women got to have a laugh and do a little bonding over their purchase and maybe feel more comfortable in the store. The losers would be people like me - i don't need cute but i do need sensible advice that puts facts together. So thank you to the men in my life who provide it.

Voodoo, cemeteries and earthquakes

i walk a bit in my local cemeteries. Near my neighbourhood is an area that consists of mostly cemeteries and car wreckers. i walk my little dog Tigger there. They are peaceful places and provide good short walks for my aging doglet.

i have got to know the graves a little. There is a grave for Mrs Tiny Mite, a famous circus midget who toured the world and who died being run over by a car here in Christchurch. There is the Jewish quarter, the graves having been moved from their orginal location in the CBD. There is a group grave for nuns from a local convent. There is a small section for children and babies, more recent than the rest, and they mix the gaudy and the sad with their plastic flowers and windmills and soggy teddy bears spilling onto the pathway. There is not much that is sadder than a soggy teddy bear.

The inscriptions have changed over time of course, becoming more secular and more personalised. i liked one that simply exclaimed: Mary Jane Dawson: Everybody loved her. My friend and i looked at each other, flung our arms wide and both at once we shouted ' I LOVE Mary Jane Dawson!!' And our arms widened and our smiles widened and at that minute we really did love Mary Jane Dawson, some random dead chick we'd never met, but who had made us briefly happy.

The earthquakes damaged the cemeteries of course, and many of the graves have fallen over. It took a lot of force to knock the columns off their plinths and crash the wrought iron fences. Liquefaction sits in some of the coffin spaces. Cracks have formed in the concrete, opening up the graves to the elements. Some have been cordoned off.

i had a recent voodoo moment in the cemetery, walking my little dog Tigger. A small aftershock took hold and i missed my footing in a grave as i was stepping over it. when i regained myself, Tigger was gone. i called for him, but he never answered, so i went looking in the fartherest reaches of the cemetery, where i didn't usually go. Walking and calling i came across the photo above. A little weathered statue on a stalk, clearly marking the grave of a loved pet. Called - Tigger.

Well, i found my Tigger, half hidden in foliage, eating something he shouldn't. He was unrepentant. i was strangely moved.

No Mayan calendar shit here

Welcome to 2012.

2011 was not an easy year. Our points of reference for it here in Christchurch are 'the February EQ' 'the June EQ' and now 'the EQ on the 23rd of December'.

The 5.9 and 6.0 quakes on 23 Dec were demoralising. They wrote off some already-damaged houses and made others more fragile. A man i know walked home and shed tears, just grieving for the city, just grieving. Children who had seemed bulletproof throughout caved in on 23 Dec, scared to sleep, crying in the aftershocks. There was a sense of oh no, not again. Just when we were getting to a new normal.

This was the first big EQ i expereinced when i was outside walking. My vision shimmered and i sat down. People were clinging to a telegraph pole. The ground just shuddered. i had no sense of scale at all.

i suspect there have been a lot of earthquake related deaths. What happens when you live with consistently elevated levels of cortisol and adrenalin is you wear out and get sick. Your body writes cheques your brain can't cash. Your heart gives out. You can no longer fight the cancer cells.

People also talk about mental stress. People say how they are quicker to anger than they used to be. And there is more to get angry about - the war of attrition fought with the bureacracies in charge of zoning and fixing and detroying and compensating. Probably most Christchurch homeowners are embroiled in such a war, and it takes its toll. Some go bust, financially and mentally. Some take the money and leave. It is a leaner meaner city now.

i know that our years are human made things. A more natural time to start the year might be on the solstice, 1 January doesn't really mean much and calling this year 2012 won't stop the earthquakes. But i am glad to see the back of 2011.

The best i can say is that it has been a huge test of our mettle as individuals and as a community. We all have learned something about how we cope in a crisis, even if (for some of us) it is that we don't cope. The workers who did emergency psychiatric triage got some training from an overseas expert. They asked, who should we be worried about. The answer was, the people you are always worried about. Yeah, most likely, but i did notice that some of us who are not usually so robust found some inner heroism and dug silt and baked cakes and fixed walls. i think a sense of purpose galvanised some people and they found some skills. i suspect that those who do best are those who can be psychologically flexible, who can deal with uncertainty, and who can live in the moment. Helpful traits for anyone, i would think.

To the elves

On this Christmas day i would like to thank all of the people who made this celebration possible.

i know none of them and probably never will. They made the clothes i wear, the computer i type this on, and most of the things i give and take as gifts.

It is astonishing to think i owe them so much of my life.

They are the people who took over from us in making and storing and transporting things. There was a time when we did that ourselves. Even fifty years ago there was manufacturing in this country.

Now, the makers and storers and movers are from China and the Phillipines and India and wherever labour is cheapest. The mega-companies that employ them know no national boundaries. i hear terrible things about the conditions they work in, but i don't know for sure. i do know that without them the consumer culture we have now would probably not exist.

So thank you to the real elves, who made the iPhone and the X-Box Kinect and the tinsel and the socks and the crockery we used, and the real reindeer who brought it to us and took it away again, and i wish all of you rest, and silence, and friendship, and justice.

My Occupy poem

Recently i organised a poetry reading and barbecue at the local Occupy corner. i feel strongly at times that our society is deprived of the arts. And that we can occasionally hark back to an age when art was communal and we did not rely on 'big art' to sustain us.

The poetry bit didn't really come off, but the barbecue did.

However, i did write a poem for Occupy. There is some good poetry out there, on Occupywriters.com with contributions from famous people such as Lemony Snicket and Ursula Le Guin. There are great poems about tear gas and Tahrir Square and the activism of ages.

Mine turned out to be this:

A GUIDE TO PROTEST FOR THE OLDER WOMAN

If you've lived to my age you probably have a history of protest,
one way or another,
you were there for it.

Small spirit sparks
light lives
measured out in days and days and days
and the days present themselves to us,
and we live them.

And you know

In the deepest ocean trenches
tiny bright scarlet creatures
live and move in darkness

And you know

Under the loamy earth, in rhe blank rock
the shimmering labradorite
iridesces in darkness

Yes

A small spirit spark of it.

Protest is easy by the time you get to my age.
It's just saying yes in the darkness.

i want to thank my husband for not noticing my weight loss

Seriously, my husband did not notice the first 14 kilos. He put it down to seeing me every day. My work mates noticed the first six. Even prior to my operation for the lap band i had dropped a dress size. But the Archduke only noticed once i got to about 60 kilos.

i want to put in a good word for the open blindness of marriage. He didn't notice my weight loss but then again he may not have noticed my greying hair and the random whiskers i keep pulling out of my chin, or my fashion mis-steps. And i in return have not (much) noticed his weight gain or the hair slippage. We age and change together and apart. It's the frog in the pot story, what therapists call 'news of difference'. One day you wake up and discover you are living with a stranger. That is news of difference. If you're smart, and of course provided your marriage is not abusive or destructive, you never receive the news.

These days, i have lost 17 kilos. I hover around 58 kilos. I have lost 17 cm off my waist. i am a size 12-14 depending on what garment it is. i still make some food mistakes but mostly i am comfortable. i have conquered the chain stores, which is suprisingly if superficially liberating.

i got fit enough to consider running. Here is a good guide to running for absolute beginners who have only ever run for buses and then arrive on the bus wheezing and gasping and needing to be helped into seats.

Start slower than you think you should. You will have tried running in the past and what happens is you start off at full noise and then collapse early and feel a failure. Start with a sort of fast shuffle, which is technically running because both feet are off the ground, but has a really short shuffly style. It is not elegant and it is barely faster than walking, but it doesn't exhaust you and you discover after a while you can just hit a speed that suits you and you can keep moving. Building on success, you can shuffle round the block and then speed up with your leftover energy at the end. so you arrive through the gate really running and feeling you have achieved something. After further time of this you can go faster and for longer. You realise you can just keep on and on. And now you are running.

Nada 2 ways

Thousands of words are written about God and they all fall short. But that doesn't stop our attempts to step onto the pages where 'the ink leaves only a blot'.

Here is that most refined of mystics, St John of the Cross:

nada nada nada nada nada
nada y au en el Monte nada

The best of this language points away from language. It deflects itself, tricks us with an allusion of a riddle inside a joke. It folds its arms and points both ways and says 'He went thataway!' It subverts the very moment of reading it.

You'd think i would know better, but of course i don't, so here is what i wrote, as a sort of joke really:

God is all there is
God is all there
God is all
God is
God

and here it is again, all in a rush, an exhalation, un petit mort.

Hah. Actually i need to confess. This form of it was not discovered in some deep meditative state. This is what it looks like when you tweet it, because Twitter doesn't do lines or paragraphs. It was a fortunate discovery however.

God is all there is God is all there God is all God is God