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Current status: "You must be this tall to ride the emotional rollercoaster."
Mission: "Do the Best Things, Katy."
I was recently invited to take part in a study. The person doing the studying was studying people who live in apartments, and their relation to food, or their attitudes to food, or summat.
The upshot is that I've been taking a photo or three every day, to document what I do with food. Not so much the eating of it, but more the sourcing and preparing of the foody substances.
Rather than just allow such vital information to moulder away in the dusty halls of academe, I though I should also share it with the wider world. So here we go. Strap yourselves in, cats and kittens.
I'm currently looking for part-time or casual work; initially a day or two a week, rising to (optionally) anywhere up to four out of the customary seven over the coming months.
The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, I have conducted an audit of the Katy coffers, and found some buttons, a 1956 ha-penny, a self-signed IOU, and a startled moth. Secondly, since bowing out of my last triumphant engagement, I have gained an average of a kilogram of weight per month. If I must go up a size, the required op-shopping will only further strain the fiscal situation. No, I'm afraid there is nothing else for it but to become once more a productive member of society.
One night last year I was sitting at my computer here in my tiny flat, and heard amplified fiddle playing in the near distance. I couldn't make out the tune, but the optimist in me thought that maybe it was an Irish folk band, and that I should go out and investigate. It was getting dark, and I was knackered, so I didn't want to change into my baggy old fat man clothes to do so, and I did what I had never done before: I went outside dressed as me.
Now "me" is an old lady in high-waist mum jeans, t-shirt, and cardigan, so this isn't all that scandalous. But it was the first time I'd ever gone outside without making an effort to look vaguely like a man. As I rounded the corner into Lygon Street, I started feeling a bit exposed. I also couldn't hear the music any more. This made no sense. It's Carlton; where else but Lygon Street is music going to come from?
I'm often amused when I see schoolchildren here in the Far Future. It's the uniforms with floppy broad-brimmed hats and light, loose, long sleeves, and faces shimmering with youth and multiple coats of SPF 50+.
Cory Doctorow recently cited this article which talks about how insurance is a terrible instrument for mitigating climate risk. The standard neoliberal patter on this runs that insurance will send a price signal that steers investment away from environmentally damaging activity and towards adaptive responses.
One problem with this is that the people doing the damage are not necessarily (or even likely to be) the people who will experience the worst of its' effects, so this will do little to prevent investment in — for instance — fossil fuel extraction. In fact, you'll likely see investment flowing away from the uncertain business of keeping populations alive and secure, and directed towards digging up minerals and sludge.