Christmas

It's Christmas and I'm sick lying on the couch shivering with the flu. It's well over 30 degrees and with winter pyjamas and a jumper I've stopped shivering. I hate the flu. Maybe I just can't toughen up like everyone else. Cold and flu medication also fucks with my antidepressant medication. Now I'm under a blanket as well. Right now I hate myself and i'm crying a little. But I feel like I've had a small moment of clarity. I'm nervous about the prac I have to do for uni. I feel so under prepared it's insane. Often people have told me I could do anything I put my mind to. I'd actually feel better about myself if they told me I had very limited skills and abilities and I should see getting out of bed and make lunch for the kids as a great achievement. My moment of clarity? I think I need to do a shit job that I am brilliant at and not brilliant job that I am shit at.

Marriage

Every so often I'll see a slightly more thoughtful Christian post about Gay marriage and say something like... How about the church does marriages and then the state can do civil unions. That way everyone gets a civil union and then the church decides who gets married or not. There are two problems with this idea.

1. The horse has bolted. The church does not have a monopoly on marriage and people who are married and want to get married will not just give that up. No one is going to be saying "exciting news everybody I'm getting civil unioned!" Or "it was thirty years ago today that we got civil unioned". 

2. Churches will marry gay people. Maybe not your church but other churches will be happy to do so. Which will end up with people saying "yes you got married but was it a baptist marriage or a uniting church marriage?" With one being the real marriage and the other not. In the same way that people call some Christians "real Christians" or "biblical Christians" or what ever descriptor that means the same thing.

Dream

Last night I had a strange dream, I dreamt that I was a world champion, or maybe I was qualifying to compete in the world championships. The event you ask? Pushing matchbox (hot wheels) cars around a track that someone has drawn on the ground as fast as possible. I can't remember if anyone above the age of five was competing but I do remember winning.

Then dreamt I had a job interview I wasn't wearing a tie or six and shoes and abut half way through the interview I was asked to role play a scenario and I had no idea what to do. It was at that point I realised my pink shirt was completely unbuttoned.

I've been told that I "interview badly" by a friend who gave someone else a job over me once and that person didn't turn out so good. Anyway I feel like I'm achieving my milestones of a five year old really well. I could be a world champion five year old now. But an adult... A normally functioning working adult. I'm just failing to get started with a career let alone face all the other usual life challenges.

Bali

I have never been to Bali I have no desire to go either. I hear stories of rich westerners who tell me how some young kid has tried to sell them something they've spent hours making for only a few dollars. Not happy to get a huge bargain they then tell me how they spent twenty minutes bargaining them down a couple of dollars. For regular Bali visitors this is all just normal but to me this is what it sound like...

"Last weekend I met a young child living in poverty. They were so poor they couldn't even afford to go to school. He offered to sell me a t-shirt, something I was in need of at the time and well below market price. But I did not just buy it off them no I haggled him down. Now although I wouldn't get out of bed for less than $40 an hour I was quite happy to argue with a poverty stricken child for twenty minutes because one tenth the price I usually pay was not cheap enough. I then haggled him down enough to make sure he has almost no chance of ever getting himself out of poverty.

Confused

Honstly, I don't get it. I just never quite worked how you're supposed to make life work. When I was young I used to imagine that I was a Martian and came from another planet, now that I'm older I perhaps wonder if one of my parents were from another planet. It is like I missed out on a whole bunch of genetic programming that meant I just don't have the natural instincts that so many others seem to have.

 Money: I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. It was more of a nicely weighted quality stainless steel spoon. If you wanted a good start in life you really couldn't get much better than mine. No one expected that 5 years out of school I'd be unemployed and failed to complete any qualification.  It wouldn't be until I was thirty three that I'd finally have a full time job. That job ran it's course and with the prospect of me not only be increasingly unhappy at work but also working weekends and missing out almost entirely on seeing my school going daughter I looked for another job. After nearly a year of applying for different jobs and not getting any my wife went to work and I became Mr mum. My inability to earn enough money to pay our humble mortgage has locked my wife into an incredibly draining career and I hate myself for it.

Vocation: What do you want to do when you grow up? I so wish I had an answer to that question. I don't care what the answer is I just want it to be something. In the late 90's a film called "brassed off" was made it told the story of ex coal miners playing in a brass band after the mine was shut down. Anyway a team of people famously went on after the closure and helped people discover a new career or vocation. One of the people who headed up this team came to Australia and through some chance meetings I got to have several sessions with her to try and work my vocation, to find out what the colour of my parachute was. She was stumped, she said she had no ideas. Neither did I not only could I not tell what color my parachute was I felt like I was simply free falling to earth. Theology: For some reason, coincidence, fate or even the hand of God I became a Christian when I was about ten and started going to church. It's been great and it's been horrible. No matter how much I could see that my life would be better without church I hung on to it. I worked for the church even studied

Theology. The problem is there are rules about what you can and can't do and what you can and can't believe and how you're supposed to act. The problem is these rules are all implied and you kind of pick them up by osmosis if you are raised in a family in that particular Christian denomination. My problem is I wasn't raised like that I've moved from church group to church group evangelical, liberal, whatever and I've always been on the edge. And edge doesn't mean edgy and cool it means "this guy doesn't really get it" or this guy has too many unacceptable ideas

 Love: After being married and divorced you'd think I'd learn not to inflict myself on anyone. But I did and I'm married. I don't have a job so the wife works and my cooking and cleaning is mediocre at best. She works her arse off for very little reward and I feel trapped because I can't see a way to make it better. I deeply love her and our kids I just feel totally inadequate.

 Internet: Blogs, Facebook, Twitter. We live in an age where plenty of people are opiniated and really I'm fine with that. But, again there are these rules that I just didn't get told about where I have managed to offend family and friends just by expressing my opinion and not in a "if you disagree with me you're an idiot" kind of way. It was suggested I lost a job opportunity because of a blog I used to have so... Down it goes. Now my internet trail is pretty blank, Facebook has become as bland as all get get out and twitter is just a news feed.

 Somewhere there is a "Rules for life" book and I just didn't get it. By the time I'm eighty I might be able to produce a "how not to live life book".

Invitation

Today I bumped into someone I used to work with. We were both in the emergency ward of the hospital with injured kids. We worked together briefly, just a few months. We did disability care work and I knew he was a Christian then. He didn't have to say anything I just knew. Clean cut and happy to obey authority. The job was casual but for a year I had been employed for five days a week. New management had come in and I had been assigned to a particular client who would fit every couple of months. If he did fit he needed to have an injection administered or he would die. He was the only client like this I explained I wouldn't be comfortable doing this, but I'd be happy to get training to do this. My work dropped from five to four to three to two to one day a week. Then I had to quit. The guy I bumped into today, on the other hand said he'd be happy to take the client out. I know that he had never done disability care work before, I had introduced him to some aspects of the work and I had no reason to believe he had any more experience with give a needle to a fitting, strong, dying, grown man than I did. As my hours decreased his increased. I didn't hold it against him. Like me he probably was desperate for work and perhaps he genuinely believed that he could read the instructions on the needle and give it to the client if he was to fit. But it just felt like what ever the boss says I'll do it. Don't get me wrong I'll pretty much do anything for money and this job included wiping bums and washing when toileting doesn't happen near a toilet.

Anyway as we were about to leave the hospital and a nurse was asking for his attention he slipped in a invitation to a church carols service. My family is on the hunt for a church, after I was asked to leave our last church, yet I just don't want to go. I feel like I already know what it's going to be like. They're will be the pyramid scheme like talks about getting more people in, just without anyof the financial incentives that would come with an actual pyramid scheme. There's the really nice people who'd take ages to get to know, there's the shit boring music and sermons. Almost always the music team will be trying to sound like a Hillsong CD. The preacher will be trying to sound like a expert theologian. Neither of them are. Which is fine, the problem is that what they are trying to be and failing miserably. The kids club will be teaching my kids moralistic platitudes. All of which feels a million miles away from a homeless Jew who who hung on the cross for treason, betrayed by his own people. Of course I could be wrong but I'm not sure I'm up for going through all that.

Forty

At forty years of age I'd become an old man and in celebration I decided that I would not hold back on saying what I think. So I proceeded to express my utter disappointment in Australia's refugee policy, I blogged that I didn't think God doesn't answer prayers for car paring spaces, I was more vocal about my support for gay marriage. All pretty small stuff really.

So after complaints from a friend that I don't understand refugee policy, being told to go look for another church to attend (by the head pastor), having extended family members complain that I am always so negative and a closer family member wondering if I didn't get a job because of what I said in my blog, I'm wondering if I should just shut up and be quite again. I've removed all feeds from my (private) Facebook profile because that's just easier than unfriending people and I've closed my blog and I generally keep to myself about my opinions. It feels cold and isolated.