Gillian really rants - big apologies

I do wonder why Rudd's 2020 summit (advising on the future of the country, for non-Aussies reading) had to be held on erev and first day Pesach?

I know that the Jewish community has been invited to submit fifty applicants for a separate consultation. It's to be three hours long, from memory, but maybe I misremember and it's a full and generous half day in Sydney, with the names all agreed upon by the ECAJ, thus depriving Jewish representation of quite a bit of potential diversity and keeping alive that strange myth that all Aussie Jews speak with one voice. Why didn't they appoint the ECAJ to decide the thousand as well as the fifty? The decisions would have been consistent, after all. And the ECAJ people know how to read calendars, at that.

I have junked my invitation already. I don't like being treated as apart, simply because the planning people didn't look at a calendar (or did look and didn't care). I should not have junked it. I should have applied for consideration to meet with people I already know. Just think of the gossip potential!

Except that I won't waste public money that way. Having a separate meeting defeats the 2020 purpose of bringing Australians together from across all walks of life. Well, almost all walks of life: housewives are welcome as long as they don't keep kosher.

I'm starting to think that 2020 is probably a waste of public money, but as a waste of public money it should have included all of us. I highly doubt I would have been among the thousand finally selected. What's troubling is that there are a whole lot of names that should have been there, but that aren't simply because the people who own those names happen to be Jewish and respectful of their religion. If this event had been declared in, say, on first day Passover in 1931, the then Governor-General of Australia would have been unable to attend.

There are a very, very few Jewish Australians in the list of 1000 who are going to the big event and each and every one of them has to give up the equivalent of Christmas Day with their family to do so. The ones who are at all religious (who harbour even a whiff of religious thought or respect for traditions) - well, they can't be there after about 3 pm on the day before. It's a High Holy Day that begins as Sabbath ends - triply complicated even before you add in those who live in a multicultural society and still don't understand which dates ought to be avoided.

Once a week for the last month I've had to fend of comments about me not being fully Australian because I'm Jewish. I bet those comments just keep on coming. This is the perfect environment for them.

Yes, I'm snarky. In fact, considering the depth of snark in my soul, I'm very impressed with my restraint in public.

Two big icks in a week. If anyone has good news for me, I wouldn't mind hearing it around now.

(no subject)

I woke up this morning entirely determined to change my reality. I'm tired of being browned off and the only way of sorting it is changing my reality, you see.

If anyone wants fridge magnets, I'm giving them away on my other blog. I know it won't change Amazon or Rudd, but it will make me feel good. Anyone who enrols in a food history course gets one automatically (if they want one).

The other reality-changing thing I'm doing is having a lavender bath in the middle of Monday afternoon. I still have to do the same amount of work today, but I will feel better about it. Besides, the big analytical stuff is all happening in my brain and it will happen at the speed it happens at this stage. Some things can be forced, some things really can't and one of the advantages to my strange existence is that occasionally I can take off an hour on a Monday afternoon and taunt nine-to-fivers with bubble baths. Other people get more income - I get more bubble baths.

I think I'm borrowing Stargate from a student's daughter and I've put in an order for duck pate for Sunday week. All I need to do is think up a few good taunts for those whose actions made me grumpy and my reality will be more wholesome.

The other thing I'm doing this afternoon (since the write-up of the deadline stuff is processing) is write some novel. I've got two pages of notes and have actually worked out what I want to do with them (miracles do happen). In fact, all I have to do is translate the notes into stuff that actually belongs in the novel (right now they read like stuff that belongs in an academic treatise on supernatural beings) and place them in the correct parts of the manuscript. If I'm lucky I might reach the ten thousand word mark by tonight. If I run out of time, there will be the notes to reach ten thousand words, next time I can get my act together.

Next time might be a few days away, since my filing system did some interesting creaking last night and some even-more-interesting collapsing. The velcro holding it together decided to give way and all my papers are now scrunched in together. I need to go through each pocket and actually sort things out. Serves me right for accumulating so much paper in a canvas system.

What this means, though, is that a bunch of ideas will be back on the table. I won't be able to ignore them and just let them stay out of my way. While this isn't a bad thing, it makes the week a bit complicated. By Passover, though, my life might even be almost orderly. Win some, lose some - and it all seems possible and even friendly now I have the bath half run (the trouble with a small water tank is that baths take a while to sort out).

How does this fit into the changing of realities? Well, if you don't want a fridge magnet, I can give you random papers from my filing system. You could end up with anything from a blank exercise book to notes on the development of New Ceres (cos that's where they have all been kept, from the very beginnings of that universe) to stray notes for articles on rather arcane subjects. On second thoughts, I'd better keep the New Ceres notes. I need to adjust my reality, not disrupt it.

ETA: For good or ill, I have my ten thousand words.