Things your parents shouldn't have told you

Parenting wisdom is passed, like genetic propensity for disease, from generation to generation as we each,  in turn, try to set our kids up for a future we can't see and demands that we can't imagine ever being made. And we'll get it wrong because the special bag of free baby stuff we got at the hospital didn't include a crystal ball and, one day soon, someone is going to reveal us for the fakers we really are and take our children to be given to real parents who have been endowed with the first half of a clue.

In the meanwhile,  there are a few things that our parents told us that we can safely remove from the cannon of advice we give our kids:

"Don't make a song and dance about it". Absolutely guaranteed to make you a loser. There are no merit certificates in adulthood.  No one is noticing your careful and diligent work,  your righteously straight back and neat handwriting.  If you want to get noticed and maybe even promoted,  you are going to have to make a song and dance about it. In fact,  in today's increasingly competitive job market,  you are going to have to make a fully produced West End stage show about it with professionally written lyrics, an all star cast of post graduate qualifications and a website. You need catchy,  you need loud, you need costumes,  make-up and lights.  Teach your kids to be showmen.

"If everybody else jumped off a cliff,  you wouldn't do it,  would you?" Yes,  you would.  When is the last time a successful person at work looked at her fellow lemmings following an executive over the corporate precipice in some hare-brained scheme and said "Nope.  Not for me."? No matter how suicidal the stupid idea is, you're going over that cliff with the rest.  Better to be a dead team player than a live trouble maker. This has been true since the trenches of the first world war and the first ever game of rugby league. Teach your kids to jump if the team screams "geronimo!"

"Just sit quietly and concentrate". Another non life skill. Unless you take up solo round the world yachting,  you will never get a chance to use this.  You will never be alone and uninterrupted for long enough.  Concentration is like a stripper - it's all about the tease. Just when you think you're going to get some,  there will be the summons to a meeting from someone too insecure to make a decision about donut flavours on their own, or email from the boss demanding all your attention and none of your intellect. And you'll get more of that at home.  Three paragraphs into the rich fabric of the story in a good book, the clarion call for parental attention will sound forcing you to drop a mental stitch and adjudicate such ponderous matters as who had the truck first or who mouthed a naughty word at whom from under two sheets, a blanket and several layers of corrugated iron roofing. You'll be lucky to end up being able to follow the gist of a Minion meme.

"If you can't say anything nice,  don't say anything at all." Your kids will be mute for their entire adult lives. People can say nice things about each other - on Facebook. A quick "Love you hun" with a cute photo of you and your beloved is perfectly fine. Beyond that, you're an adult now! Start complaining! I have a very wise nephew who, when he was 8, asked me "why do adults always complain?" I nearly contradicted him but then found that I couldn't. in all honesty. Don't believe him? Check your next conversation and tell me how much of it involves complaining, gossiping, maligning or just getting stuff off your chest. People over eighteen who say only nice things are a bit twp. The sane and intelligent amongst us know that Hanrahan was right.

"Good things come to those who wait". I don't even have to write anything here. You're laughing already.

Good luck with that parenting gig! I know I need it.

Notes:

"twp" - pronounced something like "toop" (take the 'oo' from 'look') is a south Welsh word meaning stupid or daft. Used, I gather, to describe someone who is a bit simple.

Hanrahan is the protagonist in this poem http://users.tpg.com.au/dandsc/job/job01.htm

Save the Australian Electoral Commission

Morale at the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has hit rock bottom following recent ructions in the nation's capital which saw Australia join the likes of Italy and Japan in the league of Disposable Paper Cup Prime Ministers - no refills, no second chances.

The AEC has spent years trying to force people to vote, having early given up on the notion that people will get off their plump posteriors and tick a few boxes once every three years simply on the basis that they might like to have some say over who governs them. Apparently the chance to decide how much we pay in tax, what the laws regarding marriage are, what kind of environment we live in and what kind of schools our kids go to is just not motivation enough. The only reason people vote is that they want to avoid a fine.

Even then, there's an increasing percentage of people who scrawl juvenile obscenities on the ballot paper in the hope that someone other than an underpaid, casual returning officer's assistant will take notice of their political manifesto and call a double dissolution election based on the voter's expressed sentiment that "You're all f@$kin d*!kheads"

The sense of joie de vivre at the AEC, never very high, has taken a further dive in recent years as it has become evident that people are quite happy to pay to vote for people on restaurant, home renovation or singing shows - people who if they win will never affect the lives of the voter ever again - but can't be bothered to vote for free for someone who could make their lives miserable for the next three to six years.

A recent proposal to turn Australian elections into a reality TV style program was unfortunately blocked in the Senate.

On the surface of it, the proposal seemed to have some merit. Prime Ministerial candidates would be selected at the start of the electoral season and set to making cupcakes, cooking bbqs, kissing babies, making stump speeches and competing in contests in which they try to make the viewing audience believe the most preposterous and audacious bullshit. Australians could vote one candidate off every week and the last person standing at the end could get a record deal and the office of Prime Minister for the year - which, on current form, is about as long as anyone is going to get to stay in that job anyway.

On current reality show trends, the proposal would have been self funding and then some because people will happily pay 55c a go to vote on these things and there's no need for all that mess with little cardboard booths, strange people with disapproving frowns asking you if you've already voted in this election and the very real chance of dying of asphyxiation under the torrent of "how to vote" slips that are rained on you as you enter the school yard.

It is widely believed that the proposal was voted down by some of the uglier, unhandy politicians who could neither sing for their supper nor manage baked beans on toast if they had to make it themselves. However, recent leaks from sources close to the Prime Minister (whoever he may be) have suggested that it was really kyboshed by political strategists who knew that they could never get their guy elected if the public were allowed to scrutinize them and their apparent intelligence for longer than a 30 second sound bite per night.

However, it's clearly all irrelevant now that the people's choice of prime minister appears to be about as binding as cheap band-aids after a bath. Dissatisfaction with performance, poor polling numbers or just the ennui of being a member of the Australian legislature seem to be reason enough to given the current incumbent some free time to write his narky memoirs and a new guy a chance to experience something to be narky about.

The AEC has asked me to finish this post with a reminder to all that there are good jobs going there - particularly in their PR department - the occupants of which resigned en masse last Wednesday.