Quitting a shameful habit.

I used to smoke. I was addicted. Sometimes I binge-smoked. Suppose you'd call it chain smoking. When I was 14, during a weekend hanging out with a girlfriend with more permissive parents than my own - who both smoked, BTW - I could easily puff my way through a packet of 20 Alpine. Loved smoking in those days, before we knew the health risks, before I'd developed my own smoker's cough. Years later, driving home from a day's teaching, or when I got home, I'd light up; have a few each night. Aged 23,  over several months I screwed up and turfed many half-full packets of cigarettes; threw them away in self-disgust. I went cold turkey and quit. No nicotine patches or telephone counselling back then. Had to rely on one's mettle. Helped a bit that I'd fallen in love with a non-smoker. I considered smoking disgusting. Unhealthy. Made me cough. Exacerbated my sinusitis. Stank.  I've never smoked since. Never looked back - except that  I do all the time, for example, writing this.

Well, I've just quit another dirty addiction. It's been difficult, lasting as it has for many years in various forms. Now it's over. Finally. Think I can safely say that I will never indulge again.

Have you read or seen The Hunger Games? To control the population in this SF series, the Capitol, the ruling zone, selects 'tributes' - young people - from amongst other defeated working classes, to fight to the death in the Hunger Games. In the novels, the games are sensational, barbaric, cynical and for the Capitol, hugely watchable.

My addiction reminds me of The Hunger Games. Okay, nobody dies, but I've decided it's equally cynical. And I've been buying into this garbage for years. What passes for entertainment simply feeds the insatiable appetites of idiots like me who can't get enough. Of course I'm talking about reality television. This year's contenders, MKR and MAFS .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married_at_First_Sight_(Australian_TV_series)- My Kitchen Rules and Married at First Sight.  I'm so familiar with them that I refer to them by their social media tags. I've even followed along on Twitter to see who's writing what about whom. Sad. Sad. When I was teaching, I could justify this guilty pleasure by saying it helped me connect with my students. No excuses now.

Didn't mind the cooking aspect of MKR but this is secondary by far to the people-watching. The contestants are filmed slow-motion walking into each 'instant restaurant', eager to sample and critique each other's food. Inside around the table, breasts, often augmented, are almost served on plates. The costumes, sorry clothes, are often reminiscent of the outfits of citizens of the Capitol in The Hunger Games. Over-the-top hair, threatened into position, theatrical makeup, waxed brows and lots of filled, pouting deformed lips. (What do these people see when they look in the mirror?) Contestants are selected, presumably, for their enthusiasm and varying cooking abilities. But their backstory, and their potential to mouth off or stuff up and battle with their partners or other contestants is apparently vastly more important.

This year features a duo of self-proclaimed 'Christian brothers': home-schooled by Christian missionary parents. Christian? These brothers are like a couple of demons! I know it's death by editing, but sheesh. Cooking aside, these two delight in shit-stirring - is that cooking? - their sole aim, evidently, to relentlessly, shamelessly provoke other diners. The nastiness, the savage criticism, the arrogant mimicry of other contestants. And me glued to it in fascinated horror.

I tried to justify my addiction to watching MAFS by suggesting it was some sort of interesting study of human behaviour. Nah. Nuh-uh. Unless we're studying the network marketers' seducing the viewing public by giving it what it wants. The more extreme the better: people who'd sacrifice everything to get their plumped face on national television and thousands of 'Insta' followers.

This year, on MAFS, a few of the 'newly-weds' finished me off. Just the impetus I needed to kick the habit for good. This was the worst, and again I acknowledge the manipulative editing. A '29 year old virgin' - so what? - was served up for our viewing entertainment. His demeanour and excessive blinking suggested a timid, clean-cut naive man with a bit of an anxiety disorder. The alleged psychologists selected as his match a 28 year old woman, who'd 'need to take the lead'. After a honeymoon romantic bathtub scenario where our virgin got up terrifyingly close and personal with his bride's painted toe-nailed feet, so overwhelmed by panic was he that he had to be taken to hospital, still virgo intacta. Happily, the drama 'brought them closer' and whatever his name was was duly deflowered, announcing it proudly on national television. And then, and then...a couple of episodes later, the blushing bride reveals that she 'used to be a lesbian' - huh? - wanted 'more' and was into swinging and threesomes. Had this propensity been revealed in her bio? Seemed it was all a cynical set-up and this young fellow is potentially ruined for life, as if things hadn't been hard enough already. And how do either of them return to their normal lives?

I watched my final recordings of MAFS and MKR quickly, fast-forwarding through commercials, repetitious reminders of what had happened before the commercial break, narcissistic posturing and bitching. There was very little left worth watching. 

Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes - a review

One of the indulgences of my new gainfully unemployed life has been to read what I want. During one of my sleepless nights I caught the end of Marian Keyes being interviewed in Brisbane in October 2017. This prompted me to read some of her work.

Well, I've just read my eighth of Marian Keyes' books and what a treat. (Yeah, hello. I'm obsessive.)

The literati, the cognoscenti, whoever, are perhaps dismissive of humorous fiction about female protagonists. Keyes' work is categorised as 'chick-lit'; 'light' easy fiction. This irritates me. Seems to me it takes great skill to write a highly absorbing entertaining page turner while at the same time deeply exploring aspects of the human condition, albeit as it applies to young female protagonists.

Rachel's Holiday, published in 1997, is the story of an addict, Rachel Walsh. A woman in her late twenties, she has left her home in Ireland to try to make a living in New York. The story begins with Rachel's 'accidental' overdose. "I was offended by the drug-addict allegation because I was nothing like one" says Rachel. She treats her life as a joke; that in her case, God's having a laugh. "...I felt as if I was on Cosmic Candid Camera. My life was prone to veering out of control...God...was more like a celestial Jeremy Beadle, and my life was the showcase he used to amuse the other Gods." She claims her overdose was just an unfortunate accident. She hadn't intended to kill herself. Her concerned family intervene and return her to Ireland where she takes her 'holiday' at 'The Cloisters', a drug rehabilitation facility. Rachel, desperately searching for positives, thought at least she'd meet rock stars and be treated to massages and saunas. She was in for a shock.

Keyes, with what seems to me to be amazing insight, engagingly explores Rachel's life at The Cloisters. She takes us intimately through Rachel's rehabilitation and through that of other characters; other residents with a range of addictions to drugs, alcohol and food. At the same time the narrative explores Rachel's back story and along with Rachel, we come to understand why she is an addict.

The story is both compassionate and humorous. Rachel is an extremely appealing person, despite how frustrated I was by her denial of her addiction. She sees it in others but it takes a long time for her to join the dots in her own case. A novel is working for me when I really care for the characters, as if they are real. With my own somewhat addictive traits and growing up in the middle of sisters I found loads to identify with in Rachel's Holiday. Rachel is hypersensitive, very susceptible to the cavalier bullying of her sisters and ignorant remarks made by parents who didn't know any better. (Other Walsh sisters tell their own stories in some of Keyes' other novels.}

I loved Keyes' writing style which abounds in hilarious figurative language. Here's just one example: Rachel says "They say the path of true love never runs smooth. Well, Luke and my true love's path didn't run at all, it limped along in new boots that were chafing at its heels. Blistered and cut, red and raw, every hopping, lopsided step, a little slice of agony...The night Luke stormed out of my kitchen - oh yes, even though he'd done it with cold control, he'd stormed nevertheless - the course of our true love stopped running at all and actually came to a complete standstill. It spent over two weeks doing nothing but loitering on a street corner, waiting for dole day, half-heartedly whistling at local girls coming home from their shifts at the factory."

Keyes writes about the lives of women around the thirty age mark. She writes with intelligence, sensitivity, compassion and delicious humour. Her characters are credible. I particularly enjoy Keyes' political incorrectness. She often writes the stuff you might think but would avoid saying. Or maybe that's just me.