What Cheeses Me Off

There used to be a rather popular show in Australia when I was a little girl called "Hey, Hey It's Saturday".  The basic premise of the show was a man, Daryl Sommers, and his puppet Ostrich.  Sounds crap but it was very funny.  Anyway, years later it became more of an adult show on a Saturday night.  (For further research watch Australian film "The Castle" for an insight viewers demographic.)

Anywho.  There was a segment on the show called What Cheeses Me Off, and people would write in - literally as this was before email - with their grievances.  I mean this blog is really about that anyway.  And here is another one -

What really cheeses me off is single friends - and by single I mean without children yet, who bemoan their action-packed lives.  Young and carefree, without the constraints of time and dinner-cooking and unpacking and re-packing of lunch boxes (my whole life!).  These Facebook-looking, Twitter-participating, night-club dancing, iPod-listening, iPhone-texting singletons really get my goat.

But let me tell you why.  They will constantly tell you they have literally no time.  That is because they have filled it with all sorts of social media.  Including the time-poor posting of every single second of their lives.  Look a picture of me in my bedroom.  Look a picture of me putting make-up on. Look a picture of me on the loo.  Oops!

I recently went on a girl's holiday with English pal Emma B to Noosa.  She won't mind me telling you that we were both in hysterics over the fact that I was actually enjoying the palm trees, the balmy breeze, the pool, the cafe with the view and she was living it by posting all of it on the internet through various communications.  She was so busy tapping the keyboard, taking photos, sending endless texts that she forgot she was meant to be whale-spotting and missed the bloody whale.

Every week I get extremely short emails from singletons "I've got 2 minutes to say hello...".  Bullshit!  They have hours and hours of free time.  Only they don't know it yet.  Before I had children we didn't even have a TV.  We didn't have social media.  The internet had only just arrived - but I didn't know about YouTube in those days.  What did we do with our free time?  I remember a fair amount of drinking and parties and lying in the garden.  But we also bemoaned the fact that we had no time.