Busy times, my friends

Am reading the DT Max David Foster Wallace biography and it is brilliant and fascinating and I am learning a lot about writing and processes and things like realism and modernism and postmodernism in ways I never thought about them before. It's an inspiring book too in many ways, despite the known ending for this intelligent, struggling, unusual man.

And then I am doing one last go-through before sending my ms to the agent overseas. Trying to keep a lid on that. Plus fielding calls and emails for the business, Term 4 is traditionally the time when many schools realise 'ooops we haven't done sex ed yet, let's get to it'.

It's all happening at once but this is how I like it.

And THEN, in a situation that is part schadenfreude deliciousness mixed in a vitamiser with the ongoing sombre reality of sometimes depressing/other times uplifting gender and social political struggle, we have this:

One dickhead:

plus one PM who is letting the whole world know what she will and won't stand for.

I love it:

Is Tony going down?

It's not often I do politics on here. I used to a bit, when it got me riled, before I got jaded and old. Before I realised what a time waster it is. It's like people going on about trolls. Time wasting. People who leave comments on the online newspapers - time wasting. People who get into back and forth and arguments with trolls in the comments on online newspapers - time wasting.

It's taken me ages to realise that when people talk about Mr Rabbit they are talking about Tony Abbott. This is how far I've taken myself out of political thinking/discussions. My poor mother, when she tries to talk about Julia, I cut her off saying 'Meh, I'm not into politics any more. So boring.'

But a couple of things lately have caught my interest. First, Anne Summers wrote and delivered a speech entitled 'Gillard: Her Rights at Work' about the sexism/misogynism that the PM's been dealing with - it's worth a read. There's the R-rated version and the vanilla version, as well as today's response on The Drum, answering people who have said 'yeah, but it's no worse than anything male politicians have had to put up with, Larry Pickering's been drawing dicks on pollies for yonks.' [Anne Summers' website]


Then there's the current 'Tony threw a punch' story which is delighting me - that old schadenfreude tinged with very real hope that it will fuck him up so much he just fucks off, right out of the picture and takes his abortion/contraception views with him, along with his attitudes towards women.

I'll never forget what his daughter said about him:

Well, what would you know dad? You're just a lame, gay, churchy loser.

To be fair, these could be the words of any teen or young adult child about their parent and while there is something refreshing about it, the use of 'gay' in it to emphasise the 'loser' qualities of Tony Abbott is something I don't tolerate or support. Apart from this though, this is a testimonial about someone who wants to become PM by someone who knows him well. The church bit is probably what worries me most as an atheist who fervently believes church and state should always be kept separate. ALWAYS. But it was funny and it still is.

So now he's accused of slamming his fist into a wall either side of a woman's head back in uni in 1977. He's accused of being intimidating and violent. Someone else has come forward and backed up the woman's story. The response from the coalition is predictable: he has no memory of this; it's incorrect; it's an ALP set-up.

I really really hope he goes down: