Too much to handle

For me, it was too much to handle. If you never have to catch a train, you are very lucky. If you do catch it, and the shit like happened today happens on your ride, well I hope you don't feel like me!

Today I planned on going into SLQ for some (free) presentations on the last day of Brisbane Writer's Festival. This morning I could have arrived at 10am for Sarah Ridout. Le Chateau, or Rajith Savanadasa, Runis, or got there at 11.30 for Science and Belonging with Dr Maggie Hardy, Dr Maree Kimberley, Prof Tamara Davis and Ellen van Neervan. Later, after lunch, I could maybe make it to the 1pm Colonial Stories by Larissa Behrendt, Lucy Treloar and Jay Kristoff, and get to the 2.30pm Illuminae, a 'heart-stopping trilogy about truth, courage and zombies' by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. There was one I wanted to see at 4pm: First Nations Poetry with Shaner Rhodes, Gregory O'Brien and Ellen van Neervan. And my favourite was the finale, Philosophers-in-Residence, the closing address with Antonia Case and Prof Frederick d'Agnostino.

I decided to go to the 11.30 first. I made the train by 9.45am, on time, and a lady sitting at the station beside me mentioned that she was going to Altandi which was before Banoon, where the train would stop. I'd never heard about that, and when the train arrived still showing its normal destination, Ferny Grove, I'd thought the mention of Banoon was not right.

Still, we hopped on, I put my music on through my earphones, and ignored the stations we stopped at. Until we were stopped at Banoon, I hadn't seen anyone else get off and very soon a QR staff person tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I knew I had to get off. What?? She said I should catch a XX bus. Bugger!!

Out to the buses on the roadside and no XX. There was an AA and an AR, but the other QR people said the XX would be about 20 minutes. That would make me late for the 11.30 presentation I intended to go to. I found a sign by the gate, lying on it's side, not hung up, but it told me that I should get onto the AA or the AR. Had those dudes been having me? I got a good woman driver who said I could get onto AR which was express, unlike (thankfully) the AA.

We made it to the Park Road station quite quickly. I got onto another train which took me on to South Brisbane station. Five minutes walk to SLQ and I was early!

The Science and Belonging went very well, with the whole audience split into four groups with 10 minutes with each different presenter. My favourite subjects were Prof Tamara Davis talking about black holes in the universe and what we know about them, and Dr Maggie Hardy talking about spiders - growing, biting, bubbling, colour, venom... far too much for me, but Maggie was a very good talker! All four of these women have written books either in sci-fi fiction or from their education. I wish I could be a Dr!

I went out to look around the cafes by the SLQ, but they were too full (and too expensive) so I went upstairs above the museum to a cafe called Collector's Cafe and found a wonderful chicken and bacon pizza - large piece, cheap price! I forgot to get a coffee! With more than an hour before Illuminae, I went out for a walk. I headed down Melbourne St to the IGA just past the BCAC, and got a chocolate bar... instead of a coffee, which I forgot again! I think I was getting tired!

Headed back up Melbourne St towards the SLQ, but halfway there I knew I was tired, so turned around and simply headed back to the train station and went through the whole stuff I'd put up with on the way in: train back to Park Rd, bus back to Banoon, train back to Bethania. I didn't get home until 3.30, when all I'd done in SLQ was a one hour presentation and a short lunch!

I never paid the fee for going to every presentations at BWF, but in the last two days I've seen three things I wanted to... well, that should have been five but I'm not disappointed with the three. The cheap transport, even l-o-n-g travel today, made this weekend very cheap for me. Even my lunch at Collector's Cafe was only $6.50.

I would like to thank BWF for what they put on. They've spent a lot of their own time moderating presentations, doing introductions which they've become very good at, and never ignoring the audiences. The authors and any other person who presented for audiences were well-written about in the BWF "UpLit" program. Your team is full of individuals who have helped. I wish I lived a lot closer and could go to anything I wanted to.

Perhaps next year...
 

Brisbane Writer's Festival

BWF started earlier this week, on 5^th September. I couldn’t have gone into the festival in CBD, but this morning I went to two author’s presentations: Chris Cleave at north Logan library at Underwood, and Kate Pullinger at the library at the Hyperdome. Very different authors, but both very good. 

Chris Cleave presented his latest book Everyone Brave is Forgiven. That talked about how young adults in WWII wrote to each other. He had received a wicker full of love letters written on soft, thin blue paper from his mother. The letters were between his grandparents. It got me thinking.

Knowledge or agreement will never happen if it started with people. Rape, Indigenous, disabled, unemployed: every person I have ever met has different thoughts about anything they’ve heard about. For instance, gay marriage is now to be put forward by government for a plebiscite, but I think it should be included in the law. The government doesn’t like a suggestion of a treaty, but does not spend any serious time on Indigenous people (NZ has a treaty with Maori which works very well). Sexual violence has only, in the last decade, come forward and Catholic church people are now being taken through court – but universities are far behind. Disabled and unemployed people are simply dumped into poverty, and very few people would ever know about poverty let alone fight against it (I wonder how many people actually know the increased number of unemployed and the decreased number of available jobs).

I liked the book title Everyone Brave is Forgiven, because if the government listened to where they go – which they should, because they are supposed to represent people – then many more people like Rosie Batty, Hetty Johnston and Adam Goodes would be forgiven for behaving brave. And they should be supported!

As I wrote this, I looked into a website called Australian Bravery Association to see who gets those sort of awards. I remembered an accident that my friend Anne and I drove past earlier last year. A car had gone completely off the road and landed in a tree, off the ground which was a downhill ditch. We pulled over, put my hazard indicators on and, alongside one other vehicle, got the child out of the car in the tree, kept the driver covered and called the fire department. In my orange safety vest I cut the rest of the traffic to one lane and slowed them down until the fire department arrived. I didn’t feel this was ‘bravery’, but it might have been… if we had deserved any simple ‘thank you’.

Cleave’s books include Little Bee, The Other Hand, Incendiary and Gold. I handed in one of my own first books, First Person Singular, and Kylie, the hostess, told me that she would pass it on to be entered into the library. 

Kate Pullinger, a Canadian who has lived in UK, gave a short reading from one of her latest books, Landing Gear, which was written 2 years ago. She also has Mistress of Nothing, 2009, which was set in Luxor in 1863; and Letter to an Unknown Soldier, edited by Pullinger and Neil Bartlett.

Pullinger writes in different genres, not just the same that a publisher might ask for, and her website shows much of that. Her writing was included in short stories books. At the meeting today she showed us an introduction on the screen for Inanimate Alice, a digital project for schools which was started in 2005 and Flight Paths, a networked novel.

I asked her how she was moving forward online and she talked about ePub3, the latest app. She said that Amazon and Kindle haven’t moved forward in the last 5 years, and have been taken over by apps like ePub which can be used to make a publication available on the latest smart-phones. I had a quick look at the website which talked about this – and I need to read much more! I certainly hope that I can change my Kindle to ePub 3.0.1 because it sounds a lot better.

I handed another of my first book First Person Singular there as well.

The last day, tomorrow/Sunday, has a number of free authors presenting at QAG, GOMA, the SLQ auditoriums and elsewhere there. It also includes a “philosophical bang” show to end the festival.

Philosophers-in-Residence: Closing Address Philosophers-in-Residence, Antonia Case and Professor Frederick d’Agostino, will close the show with a philosophical bang! Presented by the University of Queensland

Sunday 11 September, Maiwar Green, SLQ, 5.30pm–6.30pm, Free

If you live in Brisbane it might be very good for you to go to any of the free stuff. Have a great weekend!

Wednesday Without Words

Do you know what aphasia is?

I had known for two and a half years that I had a stroke with language problems. Healthline provided some history about stroke on their website: “apoplexy”, the original Greek name for a stroke which meant “struck down by violence”, was found 2,400 years ago by Hippocrates. Not until the mid-1600s was it really looked into: Jacob Wepfer had discovered the bleeding in the brain, and found that blockage in the brain could cause apoplexy. The name wasn’t changed to stroke until 1928, but even today it still deserves much scientific research.

After my stroke – when I had finally found out about it - I was told I was suffering from aphasia. Over the last two years I had looked up website information, and I thought I knew a little about it. It took me two and a half years to look up any talk about deficit within aphasia, and I found it mentioned in Wikiversity and Wikipaedia: this time telling me about the anomia aphasia. The word “aphasia” had come from the Greek word “aphatos”, meaning speechless, and according to the Wikiversity there are seven types of aphasia. They mention anomia aphasia. Over to Wikipaedia, and I found that the definition of anomia aphasia is: “… a deficit of expressive language. The most pervasive deficit in the aphasias is anomia. Some level of anomia is seen in all of the aphasias.”

There are three types of anomia:

“Word selection”, in which the sufferer (patient) can identify an object but can’t name it;

“Semantic anomia”, which causes sufferers to “lose” words for objects; and

“Disconnection anomia”, which identifies loss of connection between sensory and language cortices.

I can count myself in word selection anomia. My conversation will seem to progress easily, but far too often I forget a word – usually a noun or a verb. I’ve lost my fluency, and sometimes I feel extremely irked. I have seen people, with aphasia like me, who lose their words and then eventually just stop talking. More than two years ago that was me, too. I could listen to anyone talking and I understood what they were saying, but if I tried to respond I couldn’t find my own language.

More than a year in speech pathology after my stroke didn’t really fix me. Aphasia had been an innate inheritance from stroke but, even though aphasia had been mentioned to me, I didn’t even know anything real about it until I went out to an aphasia group coffee morning at North Lake. I met quite a few people whose language was very similar to mine, but some, with carers, did nothing more than smile and nod. I believed they understood what was said, it was related to how they responded.

Throughout the months at the aphasia group coffees I wore a name badge, which I had printed with the logo of Australian Aphasia Association. One of the members, Paul, whose wife after her stroke has aphasia, handed out aphasia badges, and I still wear it often. Very recently I have thought I need to be more involved with AAA. I need to talk to people about what aphasia has done to me.

Next week, 12-18 September, is the National Stroke Week. AAA posted an event on their Facebook page, advertising Wednesday 14^th as Wednesday Without Words. They said “Wednesday Without Words is our National Aphasia Day which occurs every year in the middle of National Stroke Week. On Wednesday Without Words, you are challenged to raise awareness for aphasia, a loss of language commonly as a result of stroke.” They made a few suggestions, and this one got to me: “… even try and go for a whole day without words (as the name suggests) and walk in the shoes of some people with aphasia.”

That will be very interesting for me – every Wednesday I have a social morning tea in the village and then a two-hour trivia in Logan (I allow myself a feeling of being able to move around: it’s good for me). Some weeks I can feel lost, and don’t say anything throughout the trivia game. Other weeks I can chat, and offer my suggested answers to questions. So next week I can’t talk when I am there on Wednesday Without Words. Perhaps I need to design a handout which can tell people what aphasia is! I’m pretty sure that very – v-e-r-y – few people know about aphasia or even understand it, especially since it’s living inside of me.

Before Wednesday Without Words, find out what you need to know about aphasia. And, one day, talk to me – I’ll talk back!

http://www.healthline.com/health/stroke/history-of-stroke

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Aphasia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomic_aphasia

https://aphasia.org.au/

https://strokefoundation.com.au/how-you-can-help/stroke-week

https://www.facebook.com/AustralianAphasiaAssociation/?fref=ts

 

Our tale

In 2011 I read a book by Margaret Atwood titled The Handmaid’s Tale. It was hard for me, even though it was a futuristic tale of the Gileadean regime. Atwood’s book told the tale of a woman who was one of the “breeders” in Gilead before 2195 (possibly 150 years prior to 2195, which might have put it around 2045).

Many of the books in my shelves were written in some place out of our own time, and many could be classed as sci-fi or similar. According to Wikipaedia, sci-fi is “a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life.” Atwood’s novel could, for me, be described as dystopia: “…characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society.”

Dystopia describes what our world is becoming. Dehumanization is for real for so many people who are not rich – don’t have their own money; they are killed by hundreds of thousands by war-like governments who don’t care about them; they are shut up within a “civilised” country when they have tried to escape war in their own country; rape and violence is far too often. Religion is looked on as “good” when none prove they are – too many wars are in the name of religion; men take control in most countries; climate change is flicked off; trade agreements with other governments take over - and people who are dehumanized have no involvement. Yes, dystopia.

Who are you thinking about? Syria? Israel? Afghanistan? Try Australia, China, USA. Think of everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph and see if you can place it in Australia, China or USA. Or any other country which might seem a “good” country. Work out if that country has poverty. See if they have refugees. Look into recent history and find out if they’ve been at war anywhere in the world. And think if there is any “dehumanization” within your own country.

Recently the LNP “won” the election, lost three government votes this week when some of their politicians went home when they had no need to, and yet argues against Labour and opposition politicians who do what they should be doing. They argue about the Chinese donations when LNP also received them. They turn their backs on the climate change when the majority of the population agreed with it. They ignore poverty and try to move Newstart even lower when unemployed people never asked to be there. They reduce tax on multi-million profit companies who should pay more. They have responsibilities they ignore, such as the purchase of building products with asbestos from China. They have cut the funds from many charities which provide help to needie people or sick people or victims of rape and violence. And so much more which is spreading the gap in this country.

Many unemployed never chose unemployment, but have found out that 11:1 applications for work would be what they face. Many DSP people never chose DSP, but applied for work and have found out that they will be ignored because they are not really fit for work – except something like cleaning. Many can’t get past this, can’t find work, decent work. Government contractors take them on but can’t really help them. In fact, many contractors have shown that they are there to make money on the applicants when the applicants have no choice. Perhaps if the government got rid of these contractors there should be a lot more money for unemployed or DSP people.

The Conversation, FactCheck QandA, in May 2016 had been been told that Newstart hadn’t increased since 1996. They wrote that their checks proved that. Newstart only went up with CPI and “rates of Newstart have not increased substantially in real terms since 1996.”

Roy Morgan found that “[n]ow a high 11.0% of the workforce, 1,422,000 people, are unemployed – up 54,000 since March 2015 with the unemployment rate up 0.2% in a year while 1,011,000 Australians are under-employed – working part-time and looking for more hours.” It’s a real pity that these figures are ignored by LNP, and unemployed are blamed for their unemployment.

So why are politicians getting paid so high? Why are CEOs of any large company in Australia paid in the millions? Why does tax-avoidance happen by companies which pay part of their profit to their shareholders instead of paying the ATO? Why are house prices far too high? Why is rent too high for many Australians? Who owns too many properties but don’t care about who they rent to?

Have you, an employee still wonderfully employed, received a decent salary increase in the last year, two years, five years? Have you invested in your home, paid for your overseas holiday, eaten out evenings, private-schooled your kids, owned more than one family car? Can you pay to get your hair cut, your nails painted, new clothes, new shoes? Who is spending tens of thousands more dollars than any unemployed or DSP person or any other beneficiary can spend? Who cares about the rich-poor difference? 

I wonder how many people are aware of what happens within the whole world, or especially within Australia. I wonder how many people care about any of this. I wonder how many people can relate anything in any alleged fiction to reality.

Gilead?

Should it be?

“I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilised. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.”

The Handmaid’s Tale, Chapter 41

“…to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.”

Historical Notes on Handmaid’s Tale from the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, 26 June 2195

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia

http://theconversation.com/election-factcheck-qanda-is-it-true-australias-unemployment-payment-level-hasnt-increased-in-over-20-years-59250

http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/6739-roy-morgan-unemployment-estimate-march-2016-201604070750

Last day...

A month ago I started a Pozible project for my book Aneurysms with Aphorisms. It took me two days to get it set up, add in a video and some quote pics and information, and posted it. I posted pics, sometimes from the project or other times from elsewhere, every day, until about 15 days I got frustrated with it. I got serious again on it with only 12 days to go. I started to add the project website onto whatever news I posted on BASA. I went into National Stroke Foundation, Synapse, Lions, Rotary and a lot of other charity places around my area, and posted it on some of the FB pages I follow. I never had any response.

Now, with only one day to go and only 5 people showing up to support this, I’m almost in tears.

Why can’t I get through to BASA when I’m posting pretty much every day on there?

Why couldn’t I get any indication from any other place where I posted it or emailed it that yes, they saw it and passed it on?

Why was there only 3 BASA people of the 5 who supported me?

Why would there have been more than 2,000 viewers on a recent BASA post but none who would look through the project and help me?

Why don’t so many people on BASA – or elsewhere - care?

I know what leads BASA followers on – cuppas which Maya, the page owner, posts and pins up to the top. National BA week where Maya has posted some stuff that she’s selling to raise funds for Brain Foundation – hand sanitiser, pens, bracelets, ribbons. So many responded today to pay for that, yet none of them have supported me!

I’d been the administrator of BASA since December 2014. I designed the logo which is on the page and which Maya has used on the stuff she sells. I wrote my book about brain aneurysms. Yes, it was about me, but has heaps of information for people who have suffered from brain aneurysms, for people who have cared for their friends/family/partner who suffered from brain aneurysms, for anyone who wants that information.

I am very grateful to the BASA 3 people who supported my book project. Your money will stay in your own pocket if it doesn’t get up to target in the last ONE day. Thank you for your help, I love you people.

I will be in tears tomorrow.

https://pozible.com/project/aneurysms-with-aphorisms