The View from Elsewhere

you need counselling?!

The Young Feller told me today about a couple of surveys they'd had to fill in lately in their workplace (I remember being sent similar ones when I was a public servant about being a GenXer).  A woman told him that a week or so after doing these, she received a phone call at work from a doctor.  The doctor said that her results indicated that she was suffering from depression, and that if she didn't do something about it, this state might lead to permanent changes in her brain.

I said to the Young Feller, 'I don't know whether I think that's a massive invasion of her privacy.'

I presume it's part of some Territory or nationwide strategy for combatting the epidemic of depression and that she probably gleefully ticked some privacy-invading clause at the beginning.  This incident suggests to me how prevalent and maybe also how weird the discourse on depression is becoming.

The woman said to the doctor who rang that she didn't want to do anything about her 'depression', thank you very much.  She explained that she was going through a painful divorce, that she expected times immediately ahead to be rough sailing, but that ultimately she'd pull through without any inalterable changes to her brain.

As I said to the Young Feller, 'I seem to remember a time when you were allowed to be depressed, particularly when things went wrong.  Nowadays, if you aren't happy, people are ready to cart you off to therapy or to dose you up to the eyeballs with the latest designer drug.'

The Young Feller, perhaps with his own brand of boyish, stoical ex-Catholicism, suggested that depression was on the rise because people were simply 'too self-absorbed these days.'

I recently read Gail Bell's quarterly essay, The Worried Well, on the contemporary depression culture (then gave it to someone else to read, so I wont be able to quote directly here). I quite enjoy Bell's writing; she's a chemist and pharmacist who's written about poisons (The Poison Principle) and PTSD (Shot).  Her suggestion is that there's a cross-section of people (loosely described as 'mildly to moderately' depressed) who are possibly being prescribed anti-depressants when they don't really need them, as distinguished from a genuinely defined serious depression.  She relates this to a collusion between doctors, drug companies/pharmacists and patients, and suggests that all these parties need to examine their motives in feeding the demand for anti-depressants. She suggests the increasing dependency on anti-depressants often stems from some expectation or sense of entitlement about how life should be (I think I made this point much earlier in this blog in a post titled 'the value of gloom' that I can't be bothered to find now, re: utilitarian social assumptions) and that we would do well to take on board some of the 'string-saving' stoical ethos of our grandparents.  Bell also details the ill effects of anti-depressants, the tendency of brain chemistries to adapt even inalterably to them, and so forth.

There have been some interesting articles in the New Yorker this year (I think by Malcolm Gladwell) about the value of stoicism and how stoicism and even denial should be viewed as valuable defences, I think with some eg's of previous generation's use of stoicism to deal with PTSD, the possible overuse of modern trauma counselling and so forth...scab-picking and rumination are not to be encouraged!  'Stoicism' I guess could be re-packaged as a brand of 'resilience', given the latter's popularity these days.  I'm a bit divided about this stuff (as I think Bell is also), as the 'string savers' certainly had their excesses too. One distinction she retrieves is that rang bells for me (with my past history of reading much psychobabel in my late teens and early twenties) is that of 'exogenous' and 'endogenous' depression -- that depression could have internal and external sources.  Following from this, you were considered to be properly depressed and in need of help when you were in a 'morbid state' -- i.e. when the depression had run on for too long and you were stuck. Which to me seems to be a commonsense distinction, recognised by the woman in the anecdote at the beginning of this post, who thought the bad stuff was external and would ultimately run its course.

I guess the CBT-ites might have a problem with all that; I seem to remember that in the CBT book  by David Burns I read (recommended by a therapy junkie friend), even mild states of depression are disavowed.  Burns warns that people who are often 'mildly depressed' (which could included 'natural pessimists' such as myself) can be harder to change than people in states of severe depression.  But is this such a worry, particularly if they're not endangering their health?  I think there's a place for natural Ee-yore's such as myself -- pleasures may be short-lived and tarnished, but you're never surprised when things go wrong! And being gloomy can be a valuable and productive time for taking stock -- perhaps that's the origin of the phrase 'having some downtime'.

Anyway, I've probably said enough about this subject already, and I'm a bit wary of deliberating on in some way that might be insensitive and discouraging to depressed people...so go and read Gail Bell's The Worried Well if you're interested.  Much of what she says is speculative and anecdotal (and she'd probably agree with me on that), but the essay is interesting and insightful and not without useful possibilities.

P.S. The all-pervasiveness of the depression discourse was evidenced recently in this blog when the alacrity of the blogger in suggesting to the vets that her cats might need cat-prozac because they were stressed was described.  In a subsequent conversation with a vet yesterday, he explained there was no more evidence that cat-prozac was effective in stopping over-grooming and other anxious behaviours than the anti-biotics that were previously given (they now believe there are no bacteria implicated in feline idiopathic cystitis).  But Leonard was a star at the vet yesterday; I took him to have his teeth scaled under anasthetic and when I went to retrieve him later in the afternoon, the girl at reception was raving about what a 'beautiful' and 'gorgeous' cat he was, and how she had been 'sneaking pats' with him all day.  Who knows what kind of sluttish behaviours he exhibited once the anaesthetic started wearing of!

Pseudo drought counselling

Whoever it was who made the comment that time spent with Freudian psychotherapists was no more useful than half an hour with a sympathetic hairdresser has turned out to be slightly prophetic: Hairdressers are to be trained as pseudo drought counsellors in rural Victoria (I think it's the counselling, not the drought, that's meant to be pseudo.)

Which to my mind raises another possibility: should we train counsellors or even psychiatrists as hairdressers? Because (from my admittedly fleeting experiences of the former), I reckon there's much that counsellors have a lot to learn from hairdressers. Like listening without doing that all reflective listening stuff (repeating what you just said back to you so you know that they've HEARD what you've said, producing a strange vortex-like cone-of-silence effect), not saying 'hmmm' all the time, offering earthy commonsense advice rather than drugs or a diagnostic categorisation from the DSM-IV, laughing loudly and irreverently in response to your anecdotes about things you shouldn't really have done, bitching about SJP and Nicole Kidman, and ... yes, and so much more, like those strong-fingered head massages they give when your head's under the tap. (But maybe not the recommendations about 'product'. We could do without that.) And, hairdressers might be cheaper, even in Sydney!

Other news: Cathy and Joel.  Well, that's sad.  Just when she'd found someone to go out with who wasn't a seedy old sports trainer.

And blogs are flavour of the month.  These are rather lack lustre articles, but here you go: Bloggers take the world by storm on the ABC website (my computer's shite at the moment, so I couldn't listen to the audio bit; it might be more interesting), and Spotlight on bloggers in the SMH.  I thought there was just the faintest tinge of ressentiment in the latter article, with its emphasis on the loss of blogging's 'naive charm' and its supposed increasing appropriation by business and advertising interests.  With a few notable exceptions, I think journalists, especially Australian ones, are empty vessels with nothing much to say ... fleas hopping between campdogs, so to speak.  Well may they be jealous of the blogger's comparative freedoms, (though mind you, I've only had about 6000 hits since the inception of this blog, so that's hardly great circulation).

Some oddments

Just been writing a wowser letter from Wowsers United, congratulating Ab organisation on holding successful grog-free event (see 9 October in this blog). This kind of activity makes me feel like a reformed alcoholic. Just as well I've spent enough time round PC govt agencies (yes, there are -- er, were -- some) to be able to churn out a page or so of parsimonious prose in 20 or 30 minutes. Actually I think that letter-writing (& media release writing) is great preparation for blog-posting, as you have to keep a short narrative moving through both (well, I aspire to this sometimes) and they're a similar length. More annals of public service life: friend from another organisation rang re: a data request today, to tell me she couldn't process it or do any other work, as their system was down for at least a week. Why don't you go home and work from there while the server's down? I asked.  Oh no, she couldn't do that; they're meant to be working in a team...Hmm, why is it that news of 'working in a team' or worse, 'team-building exercises', always tends to be bad news?

There are some new people working on the floor in a related area, so I've ended up instructing them on the various Machiavellian intricacies of the place, etc.  I kinda enjoy this (it appeals to my ego, natch), tho feel a bit odd about doing it they're really meant to be my seniors (e.g. their positions are real and permanent, unlike mine).  Which makes me think, perhaps I should have gone for one of their positions; sometimes I under-rate myself.  One of these people particularly appeals to me: she's a cute, mousy woman, about 50 odd, with fraying grey hair and an intense, fox-like face (a bit like my catminder).  She's worked for the Public Service for about 6 months before; apart from that, she seems to have spent most of her life just being a feminist in the desert, setting up women's centres for remote communities.  I'm rather intrigued by the thought that someone can have survived in the desert just by being a feminist (more of the Olive Pink factor).  The official title for this activity seems to be 'project work' and she keeps on telling me that she's a 'networker'. She's endearingly pained by the possible prospect of betraying some of her principles by working for the Public Service.  She also tried working as an anthropologist without a proper qualification (something I could see myself attempting) although she discovered that anthropology wasn't for her, as it was very 'secretive' and she's a 'networker'...

Update on the Woman with an Interesting Teapot: I noticed that her office had been in darkness for several days so I asked if she'd gone on leave.  But no; she'd disappeared permanently: she'd gone and taken early retirement.  In fact, the Woman with an Interesting Teapot turned out to be one of the lonely exiles of the Public Service. One she had been one of the mighty, occupying a relatively high-up position in local administration until it seems she'd done something to piss off a politician.  After that she was exiled to Siberia: i.e. sent to work on a project 'offline.'  While the idea of 'working offline' might sound inviting to people like me who don't want to hear about 'working in a team', this is in actuality a Public Service euphemism for being put out to pasture.  It's quite hard to fire permanent staff in the Public Service, so they just wear down people they don't want with passive aggression, silent wars off attrition and so forth, until people feel so demoralised they take their super or long-service leave and go. 

This all made me feel kinda mean about not being (even) more cordial to the Woman with an Interesting Teapot. But still, I guess that in a medieval court, she would have been beheaded long ago.

More on the Strange Stepping Man: on Monday, two teenage girls in tiny pale blue terry-towelling shorts and brief black lacy tops came to step.  One of them put her step on the far right end of the front row -- i.e. the Strange Stepping Man's spot.  'Land rights!' the aerobics instructor cried, swooping down on the girl's step. 'You can't go there, that's Trevor's spot.'  Much evil amusement on my behalf at the sight of terry-towelling teenagers trying to follow odd stiff strutting moves of Strange Stepping Man who is always slightly out-of-time.  (But they still looked superb, of course.)

Last night I watched Through My Eyes, a docu-drama from Lindy Chamberlain's perspective, as I did my income tax return. As well as wanting a suitable backdrop to overdue tax-return form filling-in, I was interested because it's about the Centre, and also because I wondered if there'd be anyone I knew in it.  There was -- one of the ATSIC Regional Councillors was playing the main tracker, so that was fairly entertaining for me.  Overall, this production seems rather laboured, as I suspect they tried to narrativise a lot of factual material from John Bryson's Evil Angels. Miranda Otto makes a reasonable Lindy Chamberlain, and is to be commended for managing to deliver the line 'A dingo's got my baby' convincingly. She also does youth and vulnerability well; from memory, Meryl didn't bring these to her performance in A Cry in the Night (a rather odd little film, which I saw in Manchester in 1990.) Miranda's wig is scary though: it stays still while she moves.  But the guy who plays her husband is crap, especially after Sam Neill's spookily real Michael Chamberlain. I can't be bothered to watch this show again tonight (too laboured); I've probably heard the in's and out's of it 1000x too many.  Have always felt that if I had been in Lindy Chamberlain's position that everyone would have thought that I was guilty too, because I am kind of reserved and forthright at the same time like her, and suspect I come across as odd to many 'normal' people.

Other oddments: baby bloggers.  Sorry to any parents out there, but this opening sentence from a recent article in the New Yorker is scary: 'When Jean-Marie Maier, of Sunrise, Florida, suspected that she was pregnant with her first child, she and her husband, Ken, did what many modern parents do: they bought a home pregnancy test, and, after celebrating the positive result, started a blog.'  (Caitlin Flanagan, 'Bringing Up Baby', NY, Nov 15, 2004.)

I enjoyed an extract from an essay, 'No time for the blues', by Robert Reynolds in Spectrum on the weekend (to be published fully in the next edition of Meanjin).  He expressed very well something that I've been trying to say in some of my psychobabel ravings about the contemporary pressure to 'process' rather than to savour sadness (and to have it processed by professionals).  He also makes (or re-mobilises) useful distinctions between depression and sadness, and mourning and melancholia.  For example, 'I tend to think of depression as a sadness that has gone unattended, and by this I mean a sadness that is no longer companionable.' 

I actually graduated at the same ceremony as Bob Reynolds at Melbourne Uni (I think he was the only other humanities PhD there) and tho I don't have any memory of ever speaking to Bob, I have very strong visual memories of him walking through the Union Building with Scott Barry.  Which oddly is a memory linked to sadness as the very cute and clever Scott Barry, one-time president of GaySoc, committed suicide when he was 25.  I was teaching on a course with Scott at the time, and when we came back from the Easter break we found out that he'd died on Easter Monday.  When Eileen, one of the harpies in the departmental office told me, I remember bursting into tears and blurting out (as you do in shock) something like: 'Why did one of the good people have to die?  Why couldn't it have been one of the awful ones?'  (and there were lots of them in the English dept).  So reading this article by Bob, I was inevitably reminded of Scott Barry, and I tried to work out how long it is since he died, and I reckon it must be at least 10 years now.  Somehow, it's rather galling to think that so much time can have passed and in some ways, so little seems to have happened since then.

I also felt a little sad to hear earlier this week that Janine Haines had died at a relatively young an age, but is it only me who's ever thought that she often looked like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie in photographs?

Extreme psychology

I was talking to a woman on the weekend who works in the counselling area. She told me of how, when she was still fairly fresh out of Uni, she started working in the area of 'extreme psychology' for an emergency unit in the Parramatta/Blacktown area. One of her first cases was a 24 year old man who claimed never to have had a feeling. He reported that he had never had any emotional life whatsoever and that he'd learned to relate to other people by observing and imitating their facial expressions. He was successfully employed as a bankteller (!) When he went home in the evenings, he sat down and did absolutely nothing. He'd come to counselling because he thought maybe there was something he was missing out on...

The young counsellor was totally freaked. What to do? It would be like trying to explain colours to a blind man. So she passed his case on to her supervisor. The young man lasted a few months in counselling then disappeared.

Now, that sounds like a genuine Aspie to me. I liked the filmic quality of this story, the young counsellor confronted with the human automaton. I'm not quite sure which film it reminds me of, maybe Being There ... She had other stories too like the man who was brought up in a chook pen -- a bit Bad Boy Bubby.

The other night A, the socialworker, was onto the subject again about the prevalence of Asperger's syndrome in M's family, including elements within M himself: "They all have this incredible intense focus on certain subjects. You should see them at dinner together -- they zone in on things like fighter pilots. They're incapable of social chitchat.' M sat there benignly and agreed in the way of long-suffering spouses. I made a faint, foolishly humanist plea for not categorising people with potentially negative labels. And what's wrong with a bit of focussed discipline and dinner-table debate? A laughed and said, 'Oh I can just see you with them, Elsewhere: "These people all seem totally normal!"'

But probably any social interactions after my experience of Melb Uni English Dept would seem normal.

So, anyway, fooling about on the net while I was meant to be catching up on boring correspondence for work I today came across an 'AQ' -- Asperger's test from Baron-Cohen, the man who invented the male-female test. It was a pretty similar test.

But no luck again: I came up with a fairly average, non-Aspie adult score. My own capacity to concentrate on subjects for long periods of time and to research something exhaustively then discard it as an interest area would seem to be my main claim to Asperger's. Along perhaps with obsessive blogging, the desire to fill out internet questionnaires & intense interest about the subject of Asperger's.

I think maybe I might suffer from Janet Frame syndrome: the desire to believe that you suffer from complex and interesting syndromes, with potential for disastrous consequences if you engage with health professionals (who are wont to believe in syndromes with the slightest provocation).

On the nose

For some reason, I keep on hearing reports of speed dating, in the media and from friends. One of the first reports I heard was of young Nat, a 25 yo colleague from a former workplace, who went speed dating and hooked up with a guy afterwards, only to knock him back because he wore shoes with buckles to lunch. Oh, the mercilessness of the young! I know what she means about buckles (they suggest a slighly preppy personality perhaps) but once you become a woman of a certain age, you would never dare do anything more than speculate about the possibility of buying him a new pair of shoes somewhere off in the distant romantic future. (Admittedly Nat had a shoe fetish -- over 200 pairs which she catalogued by attaching a photo to each shoe box for easy reference.)

About other stories I'll remain mum. I doubt there's much speed dating going on here in Alice, except maybe some speed shagging down at the backpackers. A couple of weeks ago Catalyst used speed dating as the basis for an investigation of human attraction. Great stuff. Particularly liked Indian sex therapist woman complete with sari on the sidelines making loud pronouncements: 'You see, these women are OVULATING!!!! That is why they are exposing so much flesh.' And so forth.

I love science (I guess I mean pop science given I bombed out on this one at school) as it all seems so batty. Love Dr Karl and the fact he seems so defeated by the workings of the brain. Love science docos like the Catalyst one on the chemical basis of human relations. What everything boiled down to was the sense of smell -- of course! Apparently we are attracted by our snouts to lovers with an immune system different to ours, you know to perpetuate the resilience of the species.

So...Jane Austen and Marx got it totally wrong. It's not a matter of economies of, well, the economic but of the olafactory. I guess this throws all those 'women who love too much' and 'smart women foolish choices' theories into absolute chaos, too. Not to mention Cleo columnists. I heard Robyn Williams intoning the thing about smell again on the Science Show so it must be true. (Must admit I have thought on at least one occasion 'I don't think I could ever be attracted to so-and-so because of their BO.')

Back to speed dating: speed's probably not a major issue if it's all about what's on the nose. So I've come up with an alternative for those frustrated with the hectic pace of modern living: 'slow dating', a concept derived from the fiction of Jane Austen. You get a small group of individuals but feed them with slightly inaccurate information about others in the party ('Tom is a green-hating lumberjack from the Huon Valley' and so forth). This should help them develop misconceptions about each other which can only be reversed through conversation and with the passing of time. You then get them to engage in fairly sex-segregated activities (to give the gays a head start) such as an Australian BBQ; in fact, just about any Australian social occasion will do. The group can only come together once a month; in the interim, they have to communicate by letter (at least 1,5000 wds in length). That's as far as I've got with this wonderful new commercial idea. It doesn't necessarily have to involve fancy dress, as in a Regency house party, but you can go down that path if you like.

(I actually wrote this post last Saturday but decided to hold it over for publication now, as there was already enough posting for that day and I knew I'd be en vacance. Typepad's pretty clever that way).

Tricksy testing

For all aficionados of personality questionnaires, there is a very interesting article in the 20 Sept issue of the New Yorker on the fickle nature of such tests and the limitations of what they can actually reveal. It has a special focus on the MBTI, no doubt because there’s an MBTI Nazi in every workplace. Indeed the article was written by a diagnosed INTJ, the MBTI type I’m often accused of being – but of course, who else would write a critique of the MBTI but some cynical, skeptical INTJ?

Since being on the net at home, I must admit I’ve dabbled in quite a few personality tests. I’ve been told that I’m a visionary philosopher, that I have a highly female and lowly male brain, that I have a right-hemisphere dominance, that I remember people’s faces but not their names and am better at geometry than algebra (strangely true, that one), and that my cat Jessie would be likely to star in an arthouse movie with Johnny Depp and Scarlett Johanssen. (Yes, there is a feline star quality personality questionnaire out there.)

The common theme of all these tests, however, is that in order to learn how to synthesise your skills you need to pay a certain sum of $US to receive your full report over the net. Additional enticement to pay up: these tests have been ‘developed by PhDs’. Ha!

I once schooled a friend in how to do the personality assessment part of the APS entry exams. She was shocked that I was actually suggesting that one would not be bone honest, but would manipulate the test to one’s advantage. (I guess that means she’s probably not an INTJ or something.)

‘But of course! This is all part of the test,’ I told her.

And indeed, I still stand by my original opinion, given that tricksy as opposed to frank and fearless people are favoured in the Public Service these days.

P.S. Can anyone explain the ordering of typepad's calendar archives? Looks like a question from an intelligence test in itself...

The Will Kit

During the week, I bought a Will Kit from the Post Office. I’d been thinking about the whole will thing for a while, as I’d just become a first-time home owner and also because I’d seen what can happen when someone intestate and at a distance.

I was reminded of the need to prepare my will at a dinner recently where people had been describing their own colourful plans for the disposal of their remains (scattering ashes from an old gurney can jogging along off the tow bar of a 4WD on a desert track, and so forth). I asked Ruth how much it cost to do your will with a solicitor.

‘Oh, it’s very cheap – only $500 or $600!’

Ha, a solicitor’s perspective (conveyencing cost me about $900.)

‘There is a will kit you can get…’ she conceded.

So, I went for the No Frills, D-I-Y option ($29.50 at Australia Post). It’s been lying on my desk, along with the ABN kit, (I flunked the online registration). I’ve hardly touched either. Ruth said, 'Why are you procrastinating? Do one -- which do you think is more important?' "Um, the Will because it's to do with mortality?' I said. 'No, the ABN, stupid, because it'll only take you five minutes and you'll get paid for some of the work you’ve been doing.'). But I hate how the older one gets, the more one’s personal life seems to become full of administration. It’s bad enough to be doing it at work, without coming home to more.

There was an element of romanticism surrounding the making of my first will that’s made it seem marginally more attractive than applying for an ABN. I think this element harks back to childhood and the making of secret scrolls with scorched edges, dripped candlewax and runic messages. The Will Kit panders to this kind of romanticism, providing a long, tastefully grey marbled foldout parchment (in Times New Roman…hmmm) which you can detach from the back of the instruction booklet. Public administration doesn’t come without psychobabel, of course, in this era of the pathologisation of everything. My grandmother had a box of tiny scrolls on her dressing table, from which you could pick out an aphorism for the day with a hairpin. The Will Kit is kind of similar, except on a much smaller scale. You can flip open to almost any page, and read an italicised banality in a blue box. It’s like having a potted celebrant at your elbow. I thought I’d share some of these with you:

- ‘Where there’s a Will, There’s a way, To protect what you have, For those you love.’
- ‘You should never look back except to learn’
- ‘If you look for the Worst in people, you’ll find it. If you look for the Best, you’ll find that instead.’
- ‘You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.’
- ‘You have achieved the ultimate if you have lived well, laughed often and love much.’
- ‘Regardless of what you have, you can always give comfort and encouragement.’
- ‘Look not for the flaws as you go through life, And even if you happen to find them [not v difficult for me!], It is wise to be kind and somewhat blind, And look for the virtues behind them.’

So, in future if ever I’m feeling a bit down or disturbed by the meaningless of existence, I’ll know I can always turn to the Will Kit to pick me up. I’m wondering whether Nation Wise Product Pty Ltd thought including these bon mots was responsible, tasteful or both.

I was rather disappointed that there is only one dotted line for funeral arrangements on the Will Form; I thought this might be the fun part. You see, I’d been pondering a sea burial, complete with a harbour cruise and cut lunch, to be followed with the building of a cairn on the beach afterwards.

Last year I had the opportunity to talk to a funeral director and run the possibility of a sea burial past him (though not in as much detail as this).

‘Well, I don’t often do them. Usually they’re for fishermen and the chaplain from the Mission to Seamen goes out with the ashes on a boat.’

He seemed to be enjoying having a captive audience (people like talking about what do with their lives after all). So I went on to ask him more: had he seen the 4 Corners doco on the funeral industry last year? What did he think of it?

‘Oh, everyone knows about some of the things that go on in certain parts of the industry. There’s been at least three more body mix-ups by the same people since that documentary was shown.’

He told me about a trucking company who were moonlighting as funeral directors.

‘I was at a funeral earlier this year and an old lady came up to me at the end of the service and said, “Thank goodness you were much better than the last lot we had here. They pulled the casket out of the hearse as though they were unloading a truck.” I asked her the name of the company, and sure enough, it was them: “That’s because they are truck drivers,” I told her.’

I said to him, ‘You must have had to develop a black sense of humour to deal with your job. You must have a few running jokes going, too.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Every time we get an Indian client, we have to organise a “viewing” at the crematorium. Except the Indians can’t pronounce their "v"s so we joke that we have to organise another “wooing”. They always want the cheapest coffin available too, as it’s going to be burnt.’

He added that the crematorium charged a fee of $100 plus for a 'wooing', which he thought was absurd, since they only have to open a door for the family at the side. (If you want more detail about what goes on behind the sliding curtains, the insatiable Helen Garner was curious enough to research a crematorium story for inclusion in her True Stories. I also saw giant yellow banners up when I last drove past Macquarie Park, advertising tours of the ‘most efficient crematorium in the southern hemisphere’ which from memory they’re due to open about now. It seemed a bit tasteless to me. I’m sure I read in the SMH about Sunday crem tours out there a couple of years ago – complete with tea, coffee and yes, cut sandwiches served in the memorial gardens afterwards. Even I’m not curious enough for that one.)

So, anyway … it seemed like funeral directing was a fairly in-house, yet competitive industry. The funeral director I spoke to was a former man of the cloth (he probably had to think of a way to build up some super).

The river’s tent indeed has probably broken since I last posted, as it’s been raining in desert land (for the first time seriously since May). I felt a few spots of rain in the air on Friday night and thought it must be more humid than I realised. Last night, it broke as I was at the bottle shop – the botllo and I were so excited we ran out into the rain. (I then got soaked cycling to dinner.)

I love the rain as it makes the landscape so moody here and brings out all the colours. Still no real water in the Todd though; the sand looks damp and that’s it.

Strange-smelling meat and the culture of complaint

A couple of months back, I decided it was one of those rare nights when I should have red meat for dinner, so I drove into town and picked up a steak from Woolworths. Once I got the steak home, I noticed that the underside was a strange brownish colour. I picked up the steak and smelt it: it definitely smelt weird and not as I remembered meat smelling. So, rather than chance food poisoning, I decided to hop back into my car and drive the 7 km or so into town back to Woolies.

The checkout chicks said yes, I could exchange it for a piece of meat of roughly the same price. When I took my selection back to the counter, I thought, just to be on the safe side, I'll peel back the plastic and have a look underneath. And lo and behold, it was brown ...

'What is this?' I said to the girl. 'Has the meat gone off during transportation?'

She told me to choose yet another steak and called the manager. When I returned with my latest steak, the manager stepped in and told me kindly but firmly that there was nothing wrong with any of the meat. The dead cows had all been sliced and diced on site in Alice; the meat is sprayed with some gas after it's cut to help with the sealing process and it oxidises underneath as a result. He had been a butcher in a former life and he knew. But if I liked, I could have a total refund (because the customer is always right, hey!)

In the end, I took the least brown piece of meat as I was still pretty keen about the idea of a steak. But I missed the 7.30 Report or whatever, from all this driving back and forward, and marching up and down supermarket aisles in the name of consumer rights. (Then again, if I hadn't done any of this, I would never have been inducted into the mysteries of Woolworths' packaging processes.)

I've gotten into complaining a fair bit lately. I complained about my DVD not working properly. I complained about my new car smelling of fumes. I complained about being chucked out of emergency with a pulmonary embolism (er, sorry 'discharged'). I've been contemplating making a complaint about my soon-to-be erstwhile employers. I'm sure I've returned other things to stores recently that I've forgotten about. I'm beginning to wonder if I've missed my vocation and I should have become a professional complainer (a litigator or something).

With the meat thing tho, I wondered, am I starting to go too far? Have I entered a vexatious mind-set? Should I just have stayed home, submitted to the possibility of food poisoning, kicked back and watched K O'B do his thing? On the other hand, I worry that if I'm too lax, I'll let things go by that I shouldn't have. (I don't know what this all says about my psyche, except that clearly I like living on the moral high ground -- and that ground is a pinnacle, for those who live on it.)

I also have a dim recollection of a lifestyle supplement article about 'manners' which claimed that one of the reasons why common courtesy was biting the dust was that young people were too aware of their rights and were always demanding their right to speak out, voice opinions, etc. Tho conversely it was also claimed that young people were developing better manners through working in afterschool customer-oriented industries such as Macca's ... the best of both worlds, maybe.

I find it interesting tho that blame should be laid at the feet of an increased awareness of rights, which is generally believed to accompany higher levels of education and affluence. In human rights law, rights are perceived as minimum standards rather entitlements or privileges. Individual rights invariably prevail where there are any conflicts between individual and collective rights. Yet at the same time the discourse on human rights is very idealised and it's still difficult to flesh these standards out in any productive way (e.g. to produce 'outcomes'; to do more than monitor or speak out against a situation). So what level of counterbalance or protection they can ultimately provide I'm still not sure.

In my experience, when you start pursuing any channels for complaint-making, you'll be asked pretty quickly what the outcomes are you hope to achieve and these (not surprisingly in an area of benchmarking and outcomes) really set the tone for whether the complaint is perceived to be of merit. This chafes with me a bit: I'm all for the principle of the thing (perhaps I'm something of a closet Kantian rather than a utilitarian.) And if you're likely to be out-manoeuvred by other legalities (e.g. status of non-ongoing contracts under current legislation) they'll warn you that your complaint will have buckley's getting anywhere.

In the two situations where I've felt I most legitimately had the right to make a complaint (the hospital and now the work situation), I've been snookered by other contingencies and it's been made clear to me from the outset that the best I can hope for is an apology from those involved (and in the hospital situation, that they would 'review protocols/procedures', tho you don't get anything beyond a verbal assurance that it's being done).

I can't really talk about the work situation so I'll continue with the hospital one: it was repeatedly impressed on me that I was lucky I'd been successful in getting my complaint received. Prior to lodging the complaint, I sat across the table from the erstwhile head of the HCCC at a dinner. I told her about my hospital saga (which she found most entertaining), my plans to lodge a complaint and she told me it would never get up: 'People walk out of hospitals all the time and go home and die from pe's.' (Because of course, the problems with NSW hospitals are 'systemic' and blame's not to be laid at any small portion of those systems; the cards are just to be kept shuffling on the table.)

When I went to the complaint pre-briefing, people were bending over backwards to tell me that the pe's from the form of thrombosis I had were unlikely to be fatal -- i.e. my complaint was less serious than I thought (altho that information had never been volunteered to me until I made a complaint -- certainly not within the hospital itself). And also: 'Poor Dr T! He's been most upset by this -- how about you say "x" or "y" to him in the meeting?' (i.e. to soften the blows; never mind the patient!) I didn't come away with a strong impression of the complaint organisation's transparency or that they weren't in bed with the health professionals.

A friend who's a doctor said to me that the problem is that patients have too many expectations of health professionals. I'm sure this is in part right, due to resourcing issues, and that some complaints are more properly sourced in political issues to do with funding. But I suspect it's also to do with people's perceptions of what medicine is able to achieve -- and until recently drs haven't been keen to market a view beyond that of providing miraculous & god-like solutions to people's problems.

Anyway, I'm getting off track here but the word 'expectations' can be used to suggest that people have an exaggerated view of their rights. And maybe they do, in some instances, but what interests me here again is the idea of being seen to 'ask too much' when, in my experience, the individual can only ask very little of the offending institutions and those in positions of power within them. I don't want to get into some One Flew Over the Cuckoo style romanticisation of the fight of the individual against 'the system' here. But it seems that rather than the rights discourse ensuring that individual rights exist or that they will be guaranteed in any absolute form, what it seeks to provide is some clemency from the beast, as it were: from where your subjectivity is more truly located within the vicissitudes of structures and institutions. In fact, I suspect rights are quite illusory and always will be.

So, anyway, I'm all too aware of the spectre of Alain and the possibility of producing Foucault-lite here... But I'm just musing -- I do think there are some things worth complaining about.

The Michelangelo Effect

And there's more on the pathologisation of genius & eccentricity: the big news of today is that experts at Trinity College, Dublin, are now claiming that Michelangelo suffered from Asperger's Syndrome.

So it's official -- if you wish to be perceived as an Egghead of Note and Promise, consider re-styling yourself as an aspie!

It seems that the above researchers are gainfully employed re-identifying significant historical figures -- President Eamon de Valera, and writer W.B. Yeats, Newton and Albert Einstein, Socrates, Charles Darwin and Andy Warhol and now Michelango -- as aspies.

There's even a book out on the subject by Prof Michael Fitzgerald: Autism and Creativity: Is There a Link Between Autism in Men and Exceptional Ability?

And for anyone stricken with this malady, you'll be glad to know there are native remedies available over the internet (as indeed there is for everything these days).

Just one extra thought on nerdery/aspie-ism: many of the qualities identified as characterising Asperger's syndrome align with the Enlightenment notion of a universal & impartial subject which is necessarily masculine, based in ideals of objectivity and reason and on the suppression of affect, emotion, matter, subjectivity, the feminine, etc. This notion of the subject underpins the modern idea of citizenship and also impartiality, objectivity and so forth as it operates in dominant institutions and professions (law, medicine, the academy etc).

Anyway, jumping to all sorts of conclusions here but perhaps this ties in with what I was musing about before re: the idea of stigmatising 'Asperger's' to foster the employment potential of those with certain attributes and a facility with manipulating symbolic information (though there is a counterdiscourse re: developing 'emotional intelligence' these days as well). Or with valorising a technocratic era.

Other news: the ALP have referred the amendments to the Titanic Act to a Senate Inquiry which is good news, but creates further interesting situation for Titanic employees as the govt did not make a budgetary allocation for said employees beyond 30 June 04.

The Aunt has sent Elsewhere a thank-you letter written, strangely enough, on new age dolphin notepaper. Among many other interesting comments made about MC-ing and the Book of Memories, Aunt writes in reference to Elsewhere's gift of coordinated dot painting design oven mit, apron and plastic bag dispenser that 'your touch of the aborigine is very attractive.'

Now off to hear Paul Kelly at the Memo's Club with eccentric rollicking grrrl lawyer from red meat nights -- more of that 'what you do in Alice' stuff. The last time I went to hear Paul Kelly was circa 1994 at St Kilda Beach (yes, obvious allusion)... oh well, it might help me mellow out a bit.

Reclaiming the Nerd

I’ve been inspired to write a post on nerdery after reading John’s rather wistful thoughts at his glob on whether he should position himself as an ‘aspie’. That is, someone suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, a cousin of autism in which its sufferers often have virtuous capacities for obsessive intellectual tasks, but are limited in their expression of affect and seemingly immune to the subtleties of social interaction, empathy and so forth. (If you want a contemporary example, apparently Barry Jones is an aspie.)

I’d been thinking about writing something about nerdery for some time, and Asperger’s is kinda like the pathologisation of the nerd. Aspie’s is also syndrome d’epoque, at present. Forgive me if I don’t have the order (or the French) quite right here, but a little while ago, ADD (or attention deficit disorder) was Top Syndrome when parents & teachers felt they could no longer ascribe hyperactivity to GI green cordial. Then it seemed that everyone was suffering not just from the plain old black dog of depression but bi-polar or manic-depressive order … now it seems that people are coming down with Asperger’s syndrome everywhere. I imagine streams of anxious parents, lining up with their egghead sprogs, begging psychiatrist to classify their one-and-only as an Aspie so they can get special treatment as a Gifted Yet Problematic Child. (I seem to remember that OCD and borderline personality disorder both also had brief surges of popularity.)

I’m sure there is some biochemical basis for this new tag. I can’t deny I’ve found it useful for describing certain people’s behaviour (like that of medical specialists) and I wish this tag had been in vogue ten years ago so I could have used it to joke about certain heads of academic departments. But at the same time, what is the real use value of labelling yourself or other people as an aspie? Is this kind of pathologisation really necessary to talk about what seems to be an extreme form of nerdism?

I don’t want to totally deny a biological dimension to people’s problems and the usefulness of interventions such as drug therapy at times. But sometimes I wonder if the current penchant for relating people’s quirks and issues to biological causes and disorders isn’t a reflection of the conservatism of our era. On the other hand, anti-essentialist notions of identity seem to be allied more with socially progressive, even utopic, ‘we can change things’ eras.

Personally, I don’t know that I could self-identify as some kind of aspie tho I’m a little fearful that some of my friends & colleagues might start suggesting it’s a label I should consider for myself. Like their classification of me as ‘definitely an NT’ or an ‘INTJ’, supposedly the worst type in the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, (as if being a Virgo born in the Year of the Snake wasn’t enough already). The thing I’ve come to think about personality typologies is: why not just go the whole hog and classify your friends and colleagues in terms of personality disorders in the DSM-IV? (And if you haven't been categorised in terms of the MBTI, then you haven't worked in a modern workplace.)

I would like to think that I’m not far-gone enough yet for Aspie status. But what I am in favour of is positive identification as a nerd. I’m a self-proclaimed nerd and girlyswot; I don’t resile from identifying with these categories. I even warn people on occasions that they’re dealing with a nerd.

However, it seems the nerd is still yet to gain social cache in much of popular discourse and contemporary living. A couple of examples: I was doing the agony aunt thing (not that I don’t enjoy it) for our media officer as he discussed the why’s and wherefore’s of his ex’s behaviour. I suggested that some of her behaviour was simply attributable to being a nerd.

‘The nerd overanalyses, yet the nerd takes things to heart,’ I told him. ‘The nerd falls hard.’

He was aghast: the petite, gamine (yet bespectacled) anaesthetist could never be described as a nerd.

‘Look, she’s an anaesthetist,’ I said to him. ‘She has to be a nerd at some level – only a nerd could get off on a specialty like that.’

I assured him I intended the epithet entirely as a compliment; in fact, I identified myself wholly as a swot and a nerd. ‘You’re not a nerd either!’ he retorted.

I thought it was self-evident. ‘Only a nerd reads medical journal articles and irrelevant reports from other agencies for fun,’ I proferred as evidence.

He seemed rather disturbed by this conversation, and came past my bay about ten minutes later, saying ‘You could never be a nerd!’ I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment. Perhaps his comments relate more to a fear of Being Seen to Consort with Nerds.

On another occasion recently, I caught up with an old schoolfriend at School Reunion time (yes, again – horrors). We were talking about our academic endeavours (useless in my case), I joked about how we had both been nerds and could now claim status as ‘queen of girlyswots’.

‘I wasn’t a nerd!’ she said in horror.

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘We were both nerds, we were nerds at a school for nerds’.

‘I was never a nerd. I was a wog!’ she corrected me.

But how could she be anything other than a nerd, after ten years or so of medical study into such subjects as sheep’s foetuses and sleep apnea, and was there a valuable nuance she was missing out on here? Is it possible that nerdery is on the verge of becoming the new chic, in a world networked by the sophistry of technies. Perhaps this is why Aspberger’s has become syndrome d’epoque and maybe also why anxious parents might be seeking classification of their genius sprog with this potentially profitable disorder?

Anyway, I’m all for making use of the current techno-psychological climate for rehabilitating the social status of the nerd.

I was discoursing with Rachel a couple of years ago on, y’know, the inevitable subject of A Decent Man is Hard to Find, when a happy thought struck me. What the charming and vivacious, about-to-embark-on-a-PhD Rachel needed was a nerd.

‘A nerd is for life, not just for Christmas!’ I told her. ‘A nerd will be grateful for love. They will never stray too far from the kennel you make for them, unless they achieve some kind of Stephen Hawking status.’

(It seems she’s since met someone, tho I’m not sure if he’s a nerd.)

I must admit, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for a man in glasses (tho tall, dark and handsome with glasses is even better). The only problem is, one wouldn’t want to go too far into the Stephen Hawking or the Beautiful Mind territory.

So, let’s hear it for the nerd and nerdery (self-proclaimed or otherwise). Actually, I think Alain de Botty (like him or loathe him) is doing much at present to popularise and create a respectable niche for the nerd. There’s also that wonderful autistic nerd in American Splendour (whose name I’ve promptly forgotten) who defiantly asserts his right to nerdery.

Perhaps Clark Kent needn’t have transformed himself into superman. And does anyone have any favourite nerds? Aspirations to reclaiming the nerd and nerdery? And – is there such a thing as a sexy nerd or is this a contradiction in terms? Does anyone have any examples of hot nerds? (Not sure that Alain de Botty qualifies.)