Im learning a lot at the moment. I am losing excess baggage and losing excess weight too.

I learned quite a while ago that I have trouble recognising the difference between being hungry and being thirsty. I often think I am hungry, and look around for a snack to eat, but actually I havent drunk any water all day and and what I am really feeling is thirst. I know this in my head, but it is still really difficult to translate it into action. I find it quite surprising and a bit scary that I cannot recognise my own needs correctly, and that I make rather bad choices in my attempts to fill the wrong one.

Oh well. I will just keep trying I guess!

I feel like I just woke up from a very, very long sleep.

I feel very deeply ashamed and embarrassed, but also very relieved to finally be awake.

I feel very grateful for my friends.

And now its time to do the dishes…

I learned a good lesson today. A customer from our shop felt that she had been cheated, but when I checked up on the legal side I found that she actually hadn’t been cheated. But the shop also made a mistake in how they dealt with things and so we were willing to meet her halfway in what she wanted. I called the customer to explain but as soon as she realised that she wasn’t going to get exactly what she wanted she hung up on me, without giving me a chance to meet her halfway.

I think she hung up on me because she felt powerless and hanging up was one way of regaining some kind of power. It’s also pretty rude, and I guess she felt justified in her rudeness because it was only equal to our rudeness. Perhaps she didn’t want to get angry and become verbally abusive so she cut herself off before it came to that. Perhaps she was so caught up in blaming that it all had to be someone’s Fault, and if the law said it wasn’t our Fault then it must be her Fault and she didn’t want to hear about that.

I could have dealt with it better too. I could have gotten her on-side by starting with the sweetener, pointing out where we went wrong first and then where she went wrong afterwards.

But it made me think about how we limit ourselves with our expectations, and our expectations of others, and how we can sometimes cut people off once we hear or don’t hear what we were waiting for. It was a good lesson.

My new mum neighbour isn’t home from hospital yet. I keep going over to visit her but she isn’t home yet. I heard from her boyfriend that the child and youth protection team may not let her take her baby home with her. I’m not sure quite what is going on there, but I’m not entirely surprised either. I wonder how thats going to go.

A few hours later her boyfriend calls me and he is so drunk he can only barely make sentences. He is trying to call a number at the hospital and it isn’t working. He’s really distressed and I manage to persuade him to leave it for the morning when there will be staff around. He calms down and we say goodnight.

My other neighbour comes to the door during that call. “Come over when you are finished, i have some things i have to tell you about” she says. I haven’t seen her for a few days, so i decide to indulge her for a few minutes. I go to her place and she fills my ears with vitriol directed at her mother. She is angry that her mother broke into her house and stole some of her things (ie came in and cleaned up while this neighbour was in hospital). She is particularly angry about an antique mop bucket from the nineteenth century (ordinary metal mop bucket with the squeezy mop thingy) that her dear friend who died (the previous tenant of my apartment - he used to padlock the gate to prevent chats such as these and the constant requests to “borrow” this and that) gave her (actually I loaned it to her), which she could have sold on eBay for $2 million (hehehehe), that her mother threw away. She is considering suing her mother. She is also angry that her mother dares to ask her to repay the money she “borrows” and wont feed her anymore. I feel for her mother.

This neighbour craves company but, as you can imagine, she finds it hard to keep friends. She meets an endless string of young men and women with similar problems to herself, but things usually don’t end well. This neighbour is fortunate in that she has stable accommodation, something the people she meets often don’t have. They sometimes try to move in with her. She tells me a short story about some difficulties she had with a young man who tried to move in earlier this year, and finishes the story with an offhand comment along the lines of “Of course, he didn’t rape me, no-one ever rapes me. Anyway....” and my heart sinks a bit. I had suspected that such things happened. I already knew about the levels of denial she is capable of. An opportunity arises and I manage to extricate myself from her monologue and apartment.

As I close her gate I look back around the green space and there is an Irish wolfhound standing between the trees, watching me. My heart falls again. His owner recently tried to move in with this neighbour, and more recently with new mum neighbour. His owner is currently staying in a backpackers nearby while the dog sleeps outside in our park. He cries at night, kinda loudly and very sadly. I wish he had a good owner to take care of him. I wish he didnt keep me awake.

I’m saving up my money, saving up a deposit for that house in the ‘burbs. Oh how lucky i am to live in my little apartment, and oh how hard I’m saving. 

I am currently sleeping under 7 blankets worth of feathers and down, and I am finally warm enough to sleep comfortably. It’s been a cold winter and my bedroom is so cold and damp. But finally, I am WARM at night!

And my neighbour had a little girl yesterday and they are both well. The baby girl is a bit underweight, and mum kept trying to go for cigarette breaks during labour… I will go visit them after the doctor tonight.

I took my neighbour to hospital this morning before work, she is going in to have a baby! I felt honoured to be taking her. It was all foggy in town, which is quite rare, and driving was hard, as was seeing thru the fogged-up windscreen… but we made it in the end. Shes going to have a girl today, another little girl in the world. Cant wait to meet her!

The Winter solstice was yesterday, and the shortest day of the year is now past. Even tho its still going to be cold for a while yet, the days will now start to get longer and longer, and gradually things will warm up and soon it will be Summer again! I know I shouldn’t live for Summer, and I’ve been good at keeping warm so far this Winter, but I really cant wait to get back out into the sun again!

Prisons.
We want them to have self-worth,
so we destroy their self-worth.
We want them to be responsible,
so we take away all responsibilities.
We want them to be positive and constructive,
so we degrade them and make them useless.
We want them to be non-violent,
so we put them where there is violence all around them.
We want them to be kind and loving people,
so we subject them to hatred and cruelty.
We want them to quit being the tough guy,
so we put them where the tough guy is respected.
We want them to quit hanging around losers,
so we put all the ‘losers’ under one roof.
We want them to quit exploiting us,
so we put them where they exploit each other.
We want them to take control of their lives, own their problems and quit being a ‘parasite’,
so we make them totally dependent on us.

This is a poem from an article I read recently. I forgot to include the writer’s name but will put it up when i find the article again. Its not quite how i would have phrased it, personally, but it covers all the bases pretty well.

When you put someone in prison what are they actually learning? What lesson does pain really teach - cos there is a lot more to prison than just ‘losing freedom’? Ive got to say, its a pretty blunt instrument… Sure in some cases pain and suffering does indeed teach some people ‘not to do it again’, but in many other cases it teaches people to be more careful about getting caught. And to what extend does it teach people the person with the most power wins, therefore you always need to be the one with the most power?

And when your time is served, are we really all square then? Does one person’s pain and suffering cancel out another person’s pain and suffering? Does the victim stop hurting in relation to the pain visited on the offender? And if we really are all square, then why is it so hard for someone who has served their time to get a job, or a house? And what kind of a life do you have when its really hard to get a job or a house?

Teach them a lesson so they don’t do it again. Isn’t that the objective? So then why is the recidivism rate so high? Here in South Australia 50% of prisoners are back in prison within 2 years, 80% are back within 5 years. Surely, if you were serious about teaching, and that was your failure rate, wouldn’t you look at your methods a little more closely?

Lets unpack it just a little: ‘teach them a lesson’: what does that mean? Does it mean the behaviour was wrong and you want to find some way of stopping the person from doing that again? And you think the fear of prison will do that? Well, it seems like in about 20% of the prisoner population, it works! But for the rest of that population, it doesnt work. And lets face it, that 80%, they go back to prison for (perhaps one of) two reasons: reasons related to not being able to find housing or work; they get caught for one of a number of crimes they committed after prison. Prison either had no impact on their ability to stop the behaviour, or it exacerbated the factors underlying the behaviour.

Im all for getting tough on crime, but im not sure what the Government means when it says ‘tough’. I think it would be great for offenders to learn some lessons that stop them from killing, hurting, bashing, attacking, stealing from, raping, defrauding, lying, endangering, drugging, bullying other people, its just that prison doesnt seem to be very effective at doing that. Whats more, a lot of that stuff seems to happen to people who are already in prison, so its ability to teach people not to do those things seems very compromised. How do you bully people into not bullying anymore? How do you bash the bashing out of them? What do people really learn when they go to prison? What do we want people who break the law to learn?

Of course I dont want people who rape or kill or use violence wandering around freely! But how does prison teach a person the empathy, the problem-solving skills, the respect for other people’s autonomy, the ability to calm down to the point where one can think about consequences, the sense of responsibility and the self-restraint/self-discipline necessary to prevent that abuse of power? Cos in the end, 99.9% of prisoners are released…

I think the Government pushes the “tough on crime” line hard and loud just so that we won’t think about possible alternatives along the lines of “effective on crime” or “reducing crime”, and so that we will get the impression that something is being done. Just like the ‘crims’ have discovered, its easy to be tough when you cant find ways of being effective.

Friday night: We are having a few logistical problems getting garage sailing sorted for the next morning. I havent been for a few weeks so im dying to go this week, but i dont have any way of getting to Dads place at 6.45am, (no, im not gonna ride there! Not quite that desperate!) and Dad has a house full of guests so I cant stay over like I usually do. Im about to give up, but then Dad phones me to say that our fellow sailor and driver Grant will come and pick me up at 6.35am, and i need to be out waiting on the other side of the road, out the front of my place. So that means i need to set the alarm for 6.20am.

So its Saturday morning and I’m fast asleep, dreaming quite vividly about being out in town, doing stuff with people near my house, and then suddenly the dream cuts to me standing outside my place, on the other side of the road. (Actually, i was just wondering, you know how when you watch tv or theatre, and some stuff happens and then the scene changes and new stuff is happening and somehow you know that certain things took place away from your eyes, that this new scene is a logical progression, you just skipped a few boring bits of the sequence? Well, does that happen in your dreams too? I reckon it does. Do we learn that from theatre/tv or do we use it in theatre/tv cos we dream that way? Anyway, back to the story....) Its cold and the sun is just beginning to rise, but i can see well enough. A car is coming towards me, Grants car! It does a U-turn at some speed and pulls up right in front of me. The driver - not Grant - leans over and winds the window down. He says “You have to wake up now.” And I do. Instantly. And immediately the alarm goes off.

I often wake up just before the alarm, especially when i intentionally decide to, but that was a bit freaky!

I opened my first $1000 term deposit today. Im gonna start putting them away. Now that the tokyo trip is all paid for, I’m gonna try and stash away $10 000 over the course of the rest of the year. This was one of my goals at the start of the year.

I feel so grown up!!!!