Fly #9: First World Fighters - My Thoughts and Muses on the Pain Game

I want to write about pain. I am in pain a lot more these days than I use to be, although instead of this being unpleasant and a ticket to the imaginary violin show it is actually a great way of knowing what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I now know that if my back hurts, I should change something, and no amount of persisting through this pain will remove an injury or be rewarding. Pain does not have to be alarming or a prelude to disaster - it is the only phone your body has to your train of thought and decision-making processes. It’s a flaw of the English language that so many types of unpleasantness all fall under the umbrella term "pain". Some learn the hard way how to discriminate productive and harmful pain. Some will suffer the long-term and debilitating pain of emotional trauma or mental illness. I’ve felt sad and hopeless and tormented at times, as much as anyone departing adolescence, but for now my first-hand experience resides in pain from injuries, exercise and hard work.

Discomfort and awkwardness is inevitable in the pursuit of your Goals and Dreams. Feeling like shit on a run, or wanting to neck yourself finishing off assignments at 4am isn’t really pain, as you once decided (even if deluded) that the benefits of the end result would outweigh any transient relief you’d get by quitting. Some of this pain isn’t the physical fatigue from exercise, but the knee-jerk negative self-talk that typically surfaces either 5 mins before work or 10 min into it. The amount of times I have taught swimming to boys and girls of all ages and heard them say, “I can’t do it!” is shocking. Why would you add even more stress to an already demanding activity? You can’t change the feeling of lactic acid or unfamiliarity to a new activity, but you most certainly don’t have to say, “I can’t do it”, just because you aren’t beach whaling on the couch, or having mum and dad do it for you. The most confident children I have ever taught are those deemed as ‘badly behaved’, or whose first language isn’t English. The beginner prep class, which has many students from both of these groups often have no concern over the very real possibility of them drowning. This provides to be a thrilling experience for me, as 12 screaming five year-olds dump their heads in the water for just enough time to come up, cough, scream, then do it again. They will rarely listen to instructions on how to hold a kickboard so as not to plunge and die. The sheer excitement of learning something new, or having no concern for boundaries would do wonders to remove the hell everyone outside the beginner prep swimming class have in persisting through hard work.

In saying this, it’s fair to say that some exercise and work is far harder than working up a sweat. During a race, or a hard ergo session, the fine feeling like you are breathing through a straw and your legs hold mini washing machines of acid is quite heinous. This, however, is not pain, it is physical and mental fatigue whose benefits outweigh the cost of feeling like shit for less than an hour unless you are very odd and do threshold exercise for more than an hour. I now know that rowing isn’t meant to be painful for your back, which I still find very confusing, and I put this down once again to confusion on word choice to describe unpleasant feelings. Rowing can be a slog in a myriad of ways, but none of these ways should involve pain. My current impression of pain, relating to my minor injury (googling pictures of broken backs and herniated discs is a humbling exercise) is the rather singular sensation that someone has turned me into a live “Operation!” game, whereby this very evil individual places those little tweezers ever so delicately on a certain spot slightly off centre in the lower back, but threw the game out to sea, so that when waves come and go the buzzing comes ON and off and ON and off. If only my body could have communicated to me in words. It could have said, “you need to stop rowing now, my name is L4-5 disc, I am already quite frail from being smashed by an oar six months ago and I won’t be happy if you row again today. I want a rest and you need to give me a rest. Or else.” I now know that this pain is not okay, but washing machine and straws are fine, and that will pipe down when I fully emerge from my indolent life to row again.

This epiphany of pain vs. necessary stress will extend only as far as me and anyone else who decides not to row or lift or hunch over when their body sends pain signals. Unfortunately, there exists a pandemic of heady discourse surrounding pain, and the shame that exists in taking it seriously. “Pain is temporary, glory is forever”. “Pain is weakness leaving the body”. These teach a dangerous attitude to pain and stress for two reasons, the first being that it encourages irresponsible, self-loathing toward exercise, the second being that you must go through something you hate or wish to stop to get what you want. When your body is at 100%, why should any training or hard work be that unpleasant? Yes, we can go back to the washing machine and straws, but surely exercise-endorphins, doing an activity with friends, the feeling of accomplishment and contributing to your long-term health and fitness outweigh stresses that you know won’t actually hurt you the way real pain does.

This is where my issue with the term, “first-world problem” comes in. Laden with the stench of middle-class guilt, it assumes that these potentially painful problems aren’t worth fixing, because their tendency to occur around monetary wealth reduces their value. Placing your problems concerning broken iPhone screens and ugly cufflinks next to those of the North Korean single teen mother doesn’t make them any less. What’s more, if you really think you need perspective, misfortune doesn’t discriminate between culture and money. Why not stick to what you know, and compare your problems to your friends instead of faceless strangers? I met a walker on crutches at the Colour Run on Sunday, who shattered his L1 vertebrae. He had been in a wheelchair for 10 weeks, and hoped to return to rock climbing in 6 months. After fracturing two vertebrae, I was back to training at full capacity in 6 weeks. Instead of complicating my problems further with the secondary guilt of someone's problems in another country, I can immediately look to the person next to me and snap out of any self-pity just fine. Both of my parents have been through back surgery for herniated discs. When I taught a kindergarten and primary school in a distant Peruvian town, the young people there were a lot less messed up than here, and they would have cared if I were upset about something. 

Pain is a legitimate and important lifeline from your body to brain, or feedback on situations whose unpleasantness transcends long-term benefit. Take it seriously, and learn to discriminate between fatigue, injury and negative self-talk. Our problems and mountains are often relative, and it sometimes helps to see the other side, but actually see it in friends and family instead of assuming that it only exists when you aren’t living with money in Australia. I can’t row, but I can do many other things. This week I’ve got an unlimited pass to a yoga studio (Barre Body! Get on it!) and I’m aiming for 15 classes. Having limitations can make you bored and pissed off, but also creative. Stop bitching and work with what you can. As Christina Aguilera once said, “After all that you put me through, you think I'd despise you, but in the end I wanna thank you, 'cause you've made me that much stronger”. Booyah. Now stop reading, get your runners on and go for a run. Or walk if you have shin splints.

Fly #8: Dear Victorian Government, it's not sexual violation, it's rape, and italways will be.

With the Victorian Government’s overhaul of rape laws reopens the always fresh wound of rape and consent opinion within the public. Discussion of rape and consent whittles down all the way to everyday interactions as we doggedly try to work out who wants to have sex with who.

From unwanted texting to rape, every action without consent is always the entire fault of the offender. I am sick of hearing from my friends that they don’t want to directly confront unwanted attention, because it would embarrass the guy. Sorry girls, but that is part of the whole game. The guy is putting himself out there, because you have every right to politely decline his interest. If he is playing, “I’m just being friendly”, it doesn’t matter, his idea of platonic friendship is weird for you, and you aren’t interested so you should probably let him know. If he is offended, that’s his fault for assuming that he could have you, he should give up and use his time elsewhere. It’s your sex, and as an adult you have complete power for the rest of your life to say yes and no to whatever you want. If you joyously participated in a bukkake one day, then the next wasn’t too keen on a guy calling you “sweetheart” at work, that is your right and completely justified. Take some power back and enjoy having ownership over your actions.

This concept of knowing and celebrating your power to say yes and no extends all the way to rape, whereby as soon as the line of consent is crossed, it’s rape and you are traumatised, no matter what situation you had put yourself in. The offender must be blamed and charged with rape, not sexual violation as what has been suggested by the rape and consent law overhaul this week. While it seems that adding the charge, “sexual violation” is a fallback and provides some solace to victims when rape cannot be charged, this confirms the fear we have of charging someone with rape. As far as I’m concerned, if any sex has occurred without consent, or where the offender has the advantage due to lack of consent, it’s rape, rape, rape, and the offender should be charged with rape. Just because the victim was drunk, or has had plenty of consensual sex drunk in the past does not make it any less of a rape case. Adults have every right to get smashed, and it does not undermine their right to speak up if something happened while drunk.

I have been in countless situations, drunk and sober, where I would have been “at risk” of being raped. But I never have. When I was 19 at Falls Festival, I celebrated New Year’s Eve with vodka-filled water bottles, and woke up alone on a mattress of a stranger’s car, fully clothed, bag with phone and money intact. When I was 20, I travelled Europe largely alone for a month, and enjoyed wandering small towns and big cities alone, day and night. On one particular night after a pub crawl with male hostel friends met that night, I woke up on the floor of a random hotel room with a group of British tourists. No rape, nothing. I will, at least once a week, walk home in the city in the dark alone, and one of those times was once in the small hours wearing an Australian flag and bikini as appropriate attire for an Anything But Clothes party on Exhibition St. I hardly got a weird look, let alone unwanted sexual attention. I am entitled to walk wherever I like, wearing whatever I like, in whatever state I like. It is shameful, that we have accepted that the streets at night are unsafe. It is shameful, that some are too afraid to be alone at night in the city, and choose to go out of their way to avoid that situation. Why should we negotiate with terrorists? What’s more, why should we pin rape to the male psyche, and assume all men are capable, when it has nothing to do with “boys being boys” and everything to do with choice? Men are not by nature vicious ruthless sexual psychos, and the few that are have nothing to do with other men. And don’t even think the word, “testosterone”, people aren’t slaves to their hormones to the point that they rape someone - if they break this rule, they need to be locked up forever.

I am not lucky for avoiding rape in any of the above situations, plus quite a few more that I have been in. I did not expect anything to happen, because I don’t expect men to rape me, just like I don’t expect the girl on the tram to open fire. When these things do happen, it isn’t inevitable, it is horrific and is a bloodstain on a species that can and always will have the ability to choose. Not only is it a horrible insult to all men, to assume that they can’t control themselves, it also excuses such bad behaviour under that revolting archaic, boys will be boys slogan, traditionally attributed to schoolboys playing in the mud, also seemingly applicable to a college gang rape. There is no such thing as sexual violation, the victim will not be half-traumatised from a "half-rape”. It’s all the same thing, and once you cross the barrier of foregoing consent every single action is rape and you should be charged with doing so. Even if she was a prostitute. Even if she was wearing a bikini and Australian flag at 4am alone in the middle of the city.

If you rape someone, it is not because you are a man. It is because you are a rapist. You made the greatest error of judgment possible, short of actually murdering someone. Some, in fact, would prefer to die than be raped. Leave sexual violation and men out of it.

Fly #7: I take thee Google to be my lawful wedded Husband...for better forworse, to love, cherish and to obey till death do us part

I get a little bit excited when I have been talking on the phone about a fantasy holiday to Nepal, and an STA “fly to Nepal!” ad pops up on any page open on Google chrome. I am yet to decide whether such fervent attention on my every action is terrifying or incredibly flattering. I tend to side with the latter and conclude that Google, Facebook and YouTube all have a HUGE crush on me, as everything I say they seem to eagerly match. What else are you meant to think, when you gingerly open some Spanish study, and Facebook hurriedly invites you to apply for a LOTE teacher scholarship? Then, when on my royal office chair I deem one of their ads insufficient for my perusal, it is crushed, “why did you hide it? Uninteresting? Misleading? “Sexually explicit? WHY WHY WHY? LOVE ME! LOVE ME!”

This is what One Direction must feel like around their fans. Eat your heart out Harry Styles, I have Mark Zuckerburg at my feet, whose yearning for my approval grows upon every like button I hit, for every ad that I destroy via the evil “x” button. The Internet is obsessed with me, and any potential breach of privacy yadda yadda floats away when it seems that my interests in “25 words or less” competitions, ASOS sales and novelty exercise (aerial yoga anyone?) are the most fantastic in the universe.

Unfortunately this wave came to a crashing close when I realised that Facebook and Google seem to have a crush on every single person on the planet, with all of my friends having completely different ads, and their “liked” pages providing them with a totally different internet experience. So ads for Cleo subscriptions don’t show up on dude’s screen next to me at the library wearing a cape and deeply entrenched in a GTA game? It was all a lie. I thought you cared about me Facebook and Google. I thought my YouTube searches of beluga whales spurring an onslaught of Cruise and Aquarium ads were a sure thing that you were on my hook and you thought of nothing else but me.

Anyone with a computer and a profile on any website, who has ever “liked” any page or merely thought about something they liked while on said website will now be exposed almost exclusively these interests and nothing else. In the short term, this makes your time on the Internet much more personal and fulfilling. Facebook seems to suit me a lot more ever since ads and videos about Rugby League floated away. The newsfeed is integral to this phenomenon, as your preferences for what pages you like, and who you want to hear from the most can make your Facebook experience a repetition of the exact same thing every day. This is meant to be boring, but I still check my newsfeed quite often, even though I know it will just be a jumble of pejorative political cartoons, food porn and statuses from mates who I see every day anyway. Nothing has changed, and according to the Internet the only thing about me that will change in 20 years is my health insurance provider.

While I hear a lot about the death of privacy, how it should be alarming that giant corporations are spying on their consumers, I personally don’t care much that said giant corporation knows that I don’t like Rugby League. Good on them. I am a whimsical 21-year-old whose greatest use to them would be splashing out on a $500 coat thanks to my post-adolescent underdeveloped frontal cortex and Gen Y-esque penchant for Internet shopping while drunk. For me what is a concern, is the fact that I am no longer forced to think about the world outside my own, the one that has been mimicked for me in front of a screen via an algorithm. It goes even further than ads and liked pages on the internet – personalised technology means I can quickly skip past the business day section in the iPad version of the paper, instead of having to turn the pages and incidentally read a word or two about the apparently irrelevant economy. Foxtel IQ only records the TV shows I like, so I don’t have to watch the end of the Arabian News to see Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (guilty!). Without realising it, my list of interests has gotten smaller and smaller as I become less exposed to other realms.

Should I reverse this effect and force myself to read Business Day? Maybe I should have loud conversations about AFL and carpentry, facing the screen so my scum arsehole cheating Facebook and YouTube boyfriends can get the hint and teach me something new. Or I could just look away from the screen and strike up a conversation with the man in the cape next to me. Or not. Maybe I will just hit that Cleo subscription, and pretend to feel enlightened and educated when I have read an article about endangered tigers. Then after hitting up Instagram, I will feel drained from such repetitive drivel and be compelled to delete the whole bloody thing, put my foot through the screen and read a book outside. But I don’t. And neither will you.

Fly #6: Why I Don't Like Tony Abbott

Feeling proud to be Australian does not come naturally to me. I wasn’t born here, I only got an Australian passport when I was 15, and my parents and brother were not born in Australia either. However, I do feel a bit patriotic when I find myself announcing to anyone that will listen that I passionately hate Tony Abbott. Why do I hate Tony Abbott? Give us your real reasons. None of this, “I just think he’s sexist” or, “I just don’t like the look of him”. What policies do you not like? What about the Liberal Party do you not agree on?

Stupid questions. I don’t like him because he has a swagger and a smirk. And he exercises too much. And I don’t care that he wears pale blue and hangs out with his daughters, he’s sexist. No amount of calm undulating prose will change that. Yes Kevin Rudd is also a massive tool, but I see his shortcomings as being more of a smarmy Milhouse type than the thug-in-a-suit vibe Abbott wholeheartedly embraces.

Do I have much to back up these opinions? No. I could Google some dirt on Abbott and the Liberal policies to make it look like I am a couch expert, but I won’t. Pretend to be smart, Emma. Write about why Abbott actually sucks. I’m sure his refugee policies are racist, or he thinks gay people are bad or doesn’t do enough for the Children. Appear Informed and Enlightened, be a Gal Who Knows Things. But why should I when I don’t want to? After I finish this little spiel I plan on making some shortbread cookies (matcha flavoured!). Then I will maybe spin on my chair and watch some Youtube videos about man-eating butterflies. Or Yetis. I have no interest in scratching beneath the surface of Abbott’s slimy exterior, and my vote counts for just as much as the sorry arsehole who sweats in front of Q&A every day.

Those who are like me and almost feel pride in judging Rudd and Abbott’s credibility on their ear wax-eating capabilities might be confused as to why they are reading something that is innate. It was understood from the first day of that Australian Studies class in Year 10 conducted in the dank portable classrooms. Those who know the ins and outs of what the hell was going on when Rudd bounced into office one morning and Julia’s name was gone on the door might lament yet another infuriating apathetic voter. But Tony Abbott making friends at the Aged Care Home, the watered down, filtered policies and lies made up about both parties in the papers are more important than who Abbott and Rudd are or what they are doing. As our form of mass communication is now image and sound dominated, rather than of text from yesteryears, Tony Abbott's job is far less about the fine print and number crunching and far more about public relations and whoring himself out to the public. 21 million people will not look up if they see or hear about a bitching superannuation policy, but they will if a chick in the office has a mono brow, or if a Senator were caught snorting lines at a cabinet minister’s Easter BBQ. This could be a cue in for the stale rant on how stupid everyone is, but we live in a representative democracy where we elect someone to run the country for us, so if one is spending their time contributing to society elsewhere, they have the right to have no idea what goes on in Parliament. What’s more, intelligence is relative, and all those fools who only know Abbott for being a dirty boxer Rhodes Scholar who punches people against walls probably know a lot about something like brain surgery or tax fraud and can’t be bothered thinking about anything hard-core when they get home from work.

So next time you tut tut when someone hates on Julia Gillard for her ocker accent, just remember that unless you actually dig politics, in which case I salute you soldier, who you vote for has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the slick response on FM radio interviews, what breed of dog they have and how hot their girl on the side is. Unless of course, you are an undergraduate humanities student and must try with all your might to be part of an imaginary Left crusade that changes the world via Leftie whale saving Julian  Assange-supporting I don’t like Kate Middleton ways (I do, so now I am confused). To top it off and prove my point even more, I bet after you read about my cookies you were far more interested in knowing what matcha shortbread would look and taste like than what I was writing about. It looks terrible, but it tastes amazing. Nice to know that some things can be good without looking good.

And some yeti videos for you (couldn't find any on man-eating insects)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIIgGtpcG94