RACHEL'S COLUMNS

These articles appeared in Rachel's column every Friday in the A3 section of The Age

Hey, dude, is this a fist or a hand?
26th March 2004

I’ve been using a tar shampoo the last few days so the smell of bitumen lingers for hours wherever I’ve been.  I’m too scared to walk down the street in case some guy in overalls tries to paint a white line down the front of my body.  It’s a disgusting smell but it’s the only thing that stops me scratching my scalp like a crazy monkey.  Being stinky suits my current mood.  I make sure I visit people with whom I no longer want to be friends and one sniff of me outside their front door guarantees I’ll never be invited back.

My head is a sizzling stir-fry of information; I toss in my sleep and scratch my scalp when I’m awake.  I like to scratch to music – specifically Hip-Hop, because I can really get a rhythm going with my fingers.  But I’ve created a kind of moonscape on my scalp; bald craters surrounded by strange tufted sprigs of hair.  That’s why I need to smell like bitumen for a while so I don’t look like Phillip Ruddock’s twin sister.

I’m in this mess because I’m confused by the events of these last couple of weeks.  Everything that was out is suddenly in again.  I dribbled uncontrollably as the government mucked around with the sex discrimination legislation to help create “gender balance in teaching” – excuuuuuuuse me!  There’s that sound again, the sound of thousands of women slapping their foreheads and screaming, “Didn’t we do that affirmative action workshop already?”  Helping a man, woman or salmon, get a job based on anything but merit doesn’t create equality – it creates a wasteland of nail-biting, nose-picking neurotics.  The problem seems to be that the pay is lousy and that’s why men are leaving teaching.  Wouldn’t it be more practical and more honest (call me cynical) to improve wages and conditions for all teachers?

More honest – what does that mean this Friday?  Speaking is what I do for a living, language is my equipment and yet, I don’t understand what people are saying anymore.  A friend pulled me up the other day for saying can not may.  Can I have a drink indicates that your knuckles are probably scraping the floor and centuries of education have been wasted on you.  I held up an open hand to my friend and said, “This is a hand, but it can also be a fist, see?  May I ram it down your throat and can you rack off!”  Right and wrong in language create a class code, an us and them, so some people feel they’re better than others are and may I say, I hate that!

My experience of people that have received English properly, because you don’t learn it, you receive it, is that they’re real good (I know, I know) at holding onto their stuffy illusion of civil behaviour but they don’t actually say what they mean.  When Mark Latham calls Mr. Downer “a rotten lousy disgrace” there’s no doubt in our minds what he means or, how he’s feeling – cranky!

English is my second language. I wrote a novel a couple of years ago, my editor was Chinese-Malay, so English is probably her second or third language.  Together we made a book.  That’s what Australia is; a bouillabaisse of different cultures thrown together in a deep white bowl.  We’re famous for our straight talking but there hasn’t been much from Canberra lately.

These days when I think about our federal politicians I get the same feeling as when I’m being made love to by a man, especially the part where he says, “Sorry this doesn’t usually happen”.

When the Prime Minister tells us why he’s against gay marriage – because he says every child needs a mother and a father.  Well, technically we do, sort of like we need water to get wet, but its not always a perfect arrangement either.

Words only genuinely have meaning in context.  If I say love, it means nothing, if I say I love you, your endorphins start whizzing around and I begin feeling co-dependent.  Forget the rules of language and tell it like it is.  A preposition shouldn’t end a sentence, now that’s a rule – as if!