family

I've spent alot of time with my family lately. My mum and my aunt came to visit for 2 months and it was great to see them - we've been apart for 3 years - but just like Christmas, you always hope it will be different but it never is.

My family seems compelled to generate a constant level chatter and faff, a running commentary on things like their quest to find their glasses they put down 5 minutes ago and other gems of inane minutiae.

I could spend an hour in a room with my mother and be exhausted simply because she's used up all the air in the room with these perambulations while I haven't said a word. I love her but I just don't understand.

Is it a generational thing? Do old people just faff about? Will it be my fate also? Why can't they just sit still and relax for one hour? Is it a retiree crime to have nothing to do, even when you are on holiday? Why do they make you feel guilty for answering "no" when they ask if they can help?

Entwined in all of this was a generational code of conduct to which my mother opened my eyes to this visit. Things like: waiting to be asked about things instead of doing them when they wanted. e.g. I was expected to enquire "Would you like a cuddle with the baby?" or "Would you like to here stay a few more days" when all the while I had had assumed the stance - ironically taught to me by my mother - of you're all family and you don't need to ask permission. You are the grandmother, cuddle your grandchild when you want. You are my mother, of course you can stay.

So things became complicated for a variety of reasons but not helped by this invisible stalemate of they are waiting to be asked, but I don't know I need to ask them and although I learned some things, the inevitable happened: a family spat. Well, it started as spat then became the proverbial mountain from a molehill, I forgot to say my family also have a penchant for the dramatic.

An example of this is that my mother once didn't speak to another family member for seven years. It took the death of my father to eventually get them to talk again.

Every family holiday I can remember had a spat of some sort, sooner or later, unfortunately I can't remember what came next, how things were resolved or how we went forward when we were all trapped on holiday together - I was too young or too selfish to care.

So, I don't know how this leaves things as the rest of their last week was spent in monasterial silence, despite my many attempts to resolve things and in the last hours I discovered my mother had done one of the most spiteful and bloody minded things I've ever known her to do. Frankly I'm stunned by her hurtful flourish and really feel that something has been broken beyond repair.

From afar, she continues to communicate her frame of mind but cutting her name off address labels and getting other people to write the address on things she sends me. Its all so childish.

I've have only spoken to her once since and our conversation of the everyday topics was awkward and heavy with the elephant in the corner syndrome.

doom and gloom

I heard on the radio yesterday that "unemployment is up, over and above previous forecasts". In the paper last week was a "downturn on the way" headline and there's not a day goes by that there is a report of the continuing "housing slump."

The fact was that unemployment was indeed up to 3.7% when predictions forcecasted 3.6%. A difference of 0.1% and hardly a significant deviation for that sort of headline. The downturn was in fact a projected downturn and the housing "slump" was actually just a levelling off a housing prices and sales - which means the media finally had to stop bleating about the housing market being a runaway train.

My point is that nothing much happens here in New Zealand (thats how we like it) which makes it hard for journalists to win positions on the front pages. Consequently there seems to be a blanket practice of extrapolating the most shocking and scare-mongering of headlines from even the most trivial facts.

When reading the headlines you think to yourself "Shit, that sounds serious" but tucked away in paragraph 6 is the bare truth without the "wannabe ladder-climbing journo spin". From then on you think "Well, in context thats not as bad as they made out." Its probably then that I stop reading. Its ruining the media's own credibilty.

Some things are true. Fuel is expensive, dairy products have climbed in price. There was/is a drought in Australia. Biofuel is using corn. But the graphic I saw in the Herald that showed all these things linked as symptoms to every other ailment of the economy was just bullshit. Most people who saw that would have come way with "Well, thats it then: we're officially fucked!"

Come on, you media tossers. Don't you see that the more airtime or column inches you devote to peddling doom and gloom the greater the pessimism of Joe Public and actually, ITS NOT THAT FUCKING BAD.