I suppose I owe my twitter and facebook friends an explanation for my random, generalised anti-Christian exclamations of late. I won’t go into it all too much as I’ve got to take responsibility for some things. I understand that churches usually have a large body of people who are comfortable and busy and just aren’t able to give the bare minimum of the time of day to newcomers – some of them are even so snowed under that all they can manage is a grunt when you’re introduced to them or try to strike up a conversation. I get that. I understand that people come to church with many different needs and can be pretty high maintenance to talk to: mental illness, intellectual disability, child protection issues – it makes sense that you should kind of ghettoise these people all together up the back with the new people who have arrived with young kids. That way you can ignore everyone at once. What really hurts is when people try to solve you like you’re a problem, when people try to “minister” to you, when people discuss you in a committee to try and decide what should be done about you. What really hurts is when people talk down to you and give you helpful advice on how to raise your kids and how to make friends. What really hurts is when those people then try to sign you up to the music and sunday school roster.
And they wonder why the pews seem to get a little emptier every year.
You know how I sometimes go on in this blog about how I want Sol to mix with a diversity of people and not be locked into the mindset of valuing wealth above all things and being a snob? Well recently we’ve had a few social engagement that have really challenged that whole notion. It’s not just yesterdays morning tea during which our guests disclosed to us that they’ve had court orders against them from the state child protection system, who claim that the whole thing was a bungle and they’re totally innocent even while their children display some telltale signs of exposure to violent parenting, it’s not just that.
It’s not the way Sol made a friend at the park who I pushed on the swing and we later found out he was on a contact visit with his Mum after being removed by DHS because his parents are druggies.
Maybe the clincher is the kid who adopted Sol today and came over to play with him. As we ate lunch, he told us all about the day his Dad was made to go away because he was an al-caw-holic and he got really mad at mum and his sisters so she got a stick and poked him in the balls. Holy crap, we couldn’t change the subject fast enough!
Our impression of country Victoria after just a couple of weeks is that it’s the place where all the druggies, pedophiles and wife beaters come to get away from it all.
Maybe we’ll make some nice friends at school tomorrow – but at this rate I think I’ll be doing mandatory police checks before any after school play dates are entered into.
It’s Australia Day eve and the kids are asleep, Steph is watching The Mentalist just because it’s on and I’ve just uploaded the second episode of The Adventures of Flossy and Sol in which we discuss the town of Sale, Victoria.
Music is by You Am I: The Applecross Wing Commander from the Hi Fi Way album.
This episode marks my first use of iMovie 9’s greenscreen effect for the title stop motion sequence in which we make some little paper roulettes fly by. I used a small green sheet and some green cardboard which was a slightly different shade and you can see it pretty easily. I also had trouble wrestling a freeze frame of the green screened clip so ended up importing a still which iMovie rendered as a different colour blue. In short, while you can do greenscreen in iMovie 9, you have very little control and it turns out greenscreen needs very careful lighting to avoid shadows and also I probably should have used paint and used the exact same colour on everything.
Last year we bought a harddisk video camera and looking at footage from it here, it looks very blurry and over compressed. I’m not sure if it’s a fault with the camera, the Mac or if it’s just that the camera has always been poor quality – I think it is the latter. It is a pretty low end camera but I was expecting better – my iPhone gives better quality video!
