A girl (probably in late teens / early twenties) jumped off the highwall of an excavated construction site next to my workplace today and died. Beforehand, a coworker saw her standing around near the fence, sensed something was not right and asked if she was ok. She told him she was fine and said she’d just called her dad to come and get her. The coworker came in and spoke with our receptionist thinking she seemed out of place but when they looked for her again she was gone. It seems like my coworker was the last person to speak to her before she ended her life. She told him she was ok, waiting for Dad, just a few minutes later she was dead.
He felt terribly guilty of course, as we watched the forensic police investigating the site, he told us that he thought he could have stopped her if only he’d known she was thinking of jumping. He could tell she was upset but he said she seemed so calm and in control, he didn’t think she was about to kill herself.
Coincidentally, I got back to my desk and noticed this little article on the front page of the ABC News website: Helping people at risk of suicide. The article talks about how the signs of impending suicide are so easy to miss and how we are not aware of them because suicide is such a taboo topic. The article states (and I’ve heard this advice before) that the best thing you can do if you think someone might be suicidal is to ask them if they are suicidal!
It seems obvious yet it is the most difficult question to ask “Are you thinking about suicide?”: embarrassing if the person you are asking is not suicidal and there is the fear that if they are suicidal, somehow talking to them will make them more likely to do it: this is absolute rubbish (unless you are planning on quoting Nietzsche at them perhaps). Put yourself in the other persons shoes: if you are depressed and someone shows an interest in how you’re feeling, then you want to talk about it. It helps to talk about it. If you’re not suicidal, you’ve probably considered it on some level so it’s not a ridiculous question, if you are suicidal, it’s a huge burden lifted to talk about it with someone who cares. As a friend it’s important to take the rest of the advice in the article, especially getting help for your friend from an agency that specialises in suicide prevention rather than trying to handle it yourself.
Getting back to my coworker: I categorically do not think he is to blame for the girls death, he had no idea of what she was going to do, she was just one of many disturbed people that you come across from time to time in public spaces. Also I can’t speculate on the girls history or situation: she may have had a mental illness complicating things or already have been in contact with an organisation that was helping her (or trying to). On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt for us to spend just a few minutes educating ourselves on the signs of impending suicide and how to talk about this issue with those closest to us.
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life, suicide
On the way home from work I loaded up some vintage U2 on the mp3 player and it tripped a memory from being back at uni, just newly arrived in the big city (Brisbane not Sydney) and cruising the back streets of Tarragindi in my friend’s mother’s light brown Mitsubishi Magna with the windows down and volume up. We were so damn cool. My friend used to stage mock interviews with Rolling Stone magazine: Oh you know, we’ve been working on the new album, Matt’s been experimenting with some new sounds, coming up with riffs and I’m just pulling in song ideas based around what comes out of that.
I think that might’ve been the day we blew a tire and realised neither of us knew how to change it. Sometime between then and now I grew up.
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life, memories, music
I just added a few paragraphs to my previous Going Postal post. I really wanted to write something that wasn’t about vomit last night but I think I was also suffering brain fuzz.
Brain fuzz might be a familiar thing for busy people who aren’t getting enough sleep. It’s when you feel like everything you do is somehow rushed between all the other things you need to do such that you can never really just enjoy what you’re doing or even give it your full attention. Whenever you try to have a break and do something to unwind, there seem to be a small crowd of voices clamouring for attention at the back of your brain.
Brain fuzz is really bad for creativity and effective problem solving: it’s a sign that something has to give, that maybe you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Hopefully in my case it’s just a few teething issues while I try to get into the rhythm of doing some part time study and being already behind from last weeks sickness. In any case, I feel like I’m starting to come out of it which is why I’d better go get some sleep and de-fuzz a bit more.
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life
Last night I had further occasion to reflect on vomit as Sol added his two cents to the conversation. At about 2am I awoke to panic and mayhem from Sol’s room. Rushing in I came upon the messy scene where Sol rather redundantly informed me that he had done a vomit. As I ran the tap on the Toy Story 3 doona cover, I asked Buzz and Woody how they managed to still smile in this situation and they told me that it was the prozac and I should just go back to bed.
Which reminds me of that time that Steph accidentally put the stilnox in the panadeine box. It was State of Origin night and I had a splitting migraine so as Steph went out to be social with friends, I downed a couple of pills (that’s twice the normal dose of stillnox) sat on the couch and flicked on the TV. The next thing I remember is lying on the bed with no shirt on, a pounding headache and Steph banging on the door begging me to wake up and let her in. We found my shirt in the bathroom where I’d managed, in my sleepwalking zombie state, to … well I’m kind of glad I can’t remember it and that I was still too zonked to be of any help cleaning it up.
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life, vomit
Sorry to be posting a followup on this subject but this blog has a life of its own and it wants me to write more about vomit today so this is what you get. It seems that not a week goes by in my life without hearing a coworker or someone in the public crowd referring nostalgically to alcohol induced vomiting in their youth (or on the most recent weekend in some cases).
I was talking about binge drinking with a coworker last week as we drove past a lady pulled over on the side of the road “checking the tyres” from the front seat. It seems like being so drunk you vomit is a right of passage in our society. There’s something about having the access to the alcohol and the space to be completely blotto that acts as a signifier of having reached adult independence thus proving that you are ready to take on the responsibilities of life in the grown-up world.
In my early twenties I used to get so bored with what seemed like endless conversations with friends about vomiting. The stories always have the same format, first you list the people you were with, who you dragged out of their house to go with you, which clubs you went to, various forms of alcohol consumed, a hazy listing as best can be recalled of how much was drunk and then all the fun places you vomited afterwards: in the friend’s parent’s car, in the friend’s parent’s fridge, in a pot plant, on a police officer etc…
Personally I find vomiting repulsive and have never felt particularly nostalgic about it. I’ve never been one to binge drink and when I have had enough that I start to feel woozy, it’s usually remembered as a bad night. For me alcohol is best when it gets you to that point of happy enjoyment of the people around you.
So thankfully I can end this post here without any nostalgic stories about vomiting: unless you really want to hear about the time Steph accidentally put the stillnox in the panadeine box and I didn’t realise.
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life, vomit
I’m not a confrontational person by nature but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get angry, hopping mad, furious, filled with the insatiable hell rage of a thousand angry demons on a Monday without coffee, etc… For example, the property manager of the house we’re currently renting treats us with such contempt and disdain that just the thought of her is making me want to smash something right now.
The first thing was signing the lease. She was in a very bad mood and told us she was not happy about giving us the lease and even less happy that the landlord had insisted on twelve months rather than six because she was hoping to kick us out after six months. We should have walked away then but we needed somewhere to live and that was the only property we’d found in the area so we stuck with it thinking we wouldn’t see her again.
However, the next time our rent was due, after paying it, we received three SMSs and two messages on the answering machine insisting that we had breached our lease contract and were in arrears blah blah for not paying. When we cleared up later that the rent had indeed been paid the day before, she blamed her coworker for not telling her even though the transaction was documented in their books. No apology was received for the harassment.
Again this week, we received SMSs and phone calls accusing us of breaching our contract on the day before the rent was due. The phone call with my wife did not end amicably and fearing a conflagration, I fronted the agent with the cheque and grunted at her lecture about how she doesn’t like phoning us but it’s what will happen if we’re late with the rent (all delivered in a bossy school headmaster tone). And I’m not expecting any acknowledgement of how she actually has the date wrong even though we have a signed lease document that tells us the date we need to pay.
So now we’re at the point where all correspondence is having to be written so that we have documentation of it all when we take our case to the RTA or whatever has to happen when this all inevitably disintegrates in the next few months. And I don’t know what will happen when we have an inspection but I’m not looking forward to it (I’m considering videoing it so we can have evidence of her demeanor)
We can only conclude that this woman is used to being able to bully and intimidate her tenants and probably didn’t want to rent the house to us because we don’t fit the demographic that she likes to lord it over and kick in the guts as much as she likes.
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life, renting
I left Oklahoma drivin’ in a Pontiac
Just about to lose my mind
I was goin’ to Arizona, maybe on to California
Where all the people live so fine – Danny Flowers, Tulsa Time
I’m not 100% sure what Tulsa Time means but in my understanding, it’s about drifting and being rootless. It’s also the first song on Eric Clapton’s legendary Just One Night live album which I think I can sing and hum every line and note.
Anyway, we can change the lyrics a bit and make it I left Sale drivin’ in a Mazda 3, Just about to lose my mind. I was goin’ to Melbourne, maybe on to Sydney where all the people live so fine but it loses its poetic and romantic vibe as the Mazda 3 doesn’t have any blues cred whatsoever and neither do Australian metropolitan cities. But it captures the feeling of adventure we had as we cleared out of Sale and headed back to the big smoke – maybe with our tails between our legs but also looking ahead.
So here I am in Hollywood, thinkin’ I’m doin’ good, talking on the telephone line and still not feeling settled but at least having taken care of a lot of the necessities of life like broadband and a gas bottle for the BBQ. Sol has settled into school (but I’ve got stories to tell about that), we’ve obtained a lease (and I’ve got a few tales to tell there), I’ve started my new job (which I have a policy of not discussing too much on the net because the wrong people might read it and decide to terminate my employment) and we’ve generally explored the lay of the land around North Ryde where I’m living and working.
It has been brought to my attention that The Adventures of Flossy and Sol is long overdue and I’ve decided not to finish the one about Easter as it’s well and truly past being topical by now and we didn’t finish filming it. I’m at a bit of a loss as to what I’m going to do with the next one so don’t hold your breath for that. Then again, maybe Sol will have some ideas – although his creative input tends towards wanting to hold up his toys in front of the camera which can only play for so long.
I haven’t got much else to say except that I’m loving Doctor Who right now and if you’re not reading the live blogging at Circulating Library then I pity your unenlightened existence. I have managed to read a couple of books in my busyness including Charles Stross The Revolution Business which is like reading a chapter in a much larger book but is still totally awesome and Isaac Asimov Foundation and Foundation and Empire which I hope to blog about sometime too. I also saw IRON MAN 2 which was good fun and still had some of the magic of the first one but not great. Finally, Podcastle has been doing lots of good stuff lately so if you find yourself sitting in traffic for part of the day, maybe that’s a good time to listen to some fiction.
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life
There’s been a new refrain echoing in the hallways of our house lately: “nana nana nana nana nana nana nana nana BATMAN!”. The popularity of this refrain is twofold, firstly Flossy can sing it and secondly it reminds us of Lego Batman for the Wii which we were forced to purchase after Sol had his first exposure to it at a friends house on holidays in Brisbane.
We brought Lego Batman home, put it on for Sol and as I was pretty busy I left him to it. He’s done pretty well with it, exploring the bat cave and working out a few of the levels. When he eventually got stuck, I sat down with him to try and work out a level and was struck by the difference between the two of us in the way we play the game.
At first I was frustrated by the way Sol plays: he goes backwards and forwards in a level and doesn’t seem interested in getting to the end of a level unless he’s become bored with the current bit. Sometimes he will quit a level half way through so he can start over and fight some particular bad guy or make something happen again. This just infuriated me until I realised something: Sol is actually playing this game because it’s fun for him. I was coming into the game with just one aim: to solve the game and get to the end where as Sol just loved playing it and could happily stay in one area just beating up the same regenerating bad guys all day.
Sol was able to tell me a lot about the way things worked in the game but he hadn’t worked out lots of important things like how to use the batarang and the special suits, however most of the time, as soon as I read the instructions on the screen to him, he knew what to do. But still his focus when playing is just making fun things happen.
I suppose the moral of this story is that life is more than just getting to the end or the next stage and we should always remember to stop and assemble a giant flushing toilet or a mechanical crocodile. Just for fun.
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fatherhood, life
I haven’t done my usual Easter message because I’ve been out and about in Brisbane visiting the family, visiting friends and being wiped out by a post-job-seeking-stress immune system melt down which felt like the aftermath of a three day outdoor summer music festival spent drinking and singing really loudly until my voice box exploded. I seem to have pulled through the worst of it and while I’ve had a few choice insights into the Easter message I’ll have to let them marinate for a day or two before I enlighten you all.
The flying trip to Brisbane has also meant a delay to The Adventures of Flossy and Sol which was to feature an original piece of Easter fiction timed for the Easter weekend so that will sadly come out after the fact as well.
The good news is that I have accepted a job offer from a company in Sydney which does stuff to do with computers and automation which I’m very happy about. The application process took a little longer than I would have liked because frankly we were getting pretty desperate for a concrete plan given that we’d put our house up for re-leasing and Steph had notified her workplace of our impending exit.
So I hope you all had a happy Easter and apologies to those we missed whilst visiting but be reassured that we are going to be a lot closer to Brisbane in just a few weeks which will hopefully translate to more visits whilst still maintaining our sense of having stepped out of our old patterns.
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easter, life
I had to leave the country
Though there were some nice folk there
And I don’t know where I’m going
All I know is I’ll hit the ground running – Smog, Hit the Ground Running
If you haven’t been following me on Twitter and haven’t managed to find me on Facebook, then you probably don’t know that a couple of weeks ago, the company I was working for ceased trading. The precipitant of this was that a few major customers pulled the plug on their contracts at more or less the same time – probably because of some shakeup in the industry that we were servicing. It was an emotional couple of days, not just because of my own situation but out of empathy for my coworkers and well mannered boss who I felt was making every effort to do good honest business and providing a decent workplace for his staff (including brewing beer for us to share at the end of the more intense afternoons).
Now those who follow me on Twitter and read each update with bated breath, carefully analysing the tweets for hidden subtext might have noticed that even before I became jobless, there were noises about things not working out here in sunny Sale. Some contributing factors were that Steph’s chosen career of social work doesn’t lend itself well to a small town – especially if you’re in a role where you might be participating in the statutory side of things like law enforcement in regards to mistreatment of children. To get the picture, just imagine that you’ve had a hand in maybe some guy being slapped with a protection order so he can’t have unsupervised contact with his kids and then you’re doing your shopping with your family and you see him in the breakfast cereal isle or you see his girlfriend dropping the kids off at school etc…
But there are other more generic things about country life which I could expand upon but I feel like it makes me seem like a judgemental intellectual snob so maybe I should just admit to that and be done with it. Having said that, we’ve found the culture hard to crack into. It’s hard to get people to show an interest in you and those who do show an interest have their own agendas. It seems like many people just socialise within their extended family and have a strong distrust of outsiders – more so than in the city I think.
Some of the other things we thought we might get from country life haven’t panned out either. For example, we thought we’d have greater access to the natural world like bushwalking and national parks. The reality is that instead of being surrounded by suburbia, we are surrounded by equally impenetrable farm land. We have to drive just as far as any city person if we want to get into the wild country and see some natural beauty. People do tend to enjoy the great outdoors here but it tends to take the form of water skiing, jet skiing, roo shooting and horse riding. Not really things we’re looking to get involved in.
So that is how I find myself interviewing for a job in Sydney (I applied for jobs in both Melbourne and Sydney) and humming that Smog tune as I wait for an outcome.
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country, life
