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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
Services are stretched. My son was discharged from services due to the loss of staff in the public system. Success with applications can come down to what a doctor emphasises in their report. At eight, he could reach out and place a piece of bread in a toaster, so the doctor ticked the 'prepare a basic meal' box.
As the credits came up, my companion looked at me and said, 'Scary.' I turned from the screen and shook my head. My voice wouldn't quite come. 'Life,' I said. It was the character of Joyce Byers who most captivated me. I, too, have been so anxious that I forgot how I looked to other people.
On the day of their departure I covered their faces with kisses. A dark cloud seemed to settle. For the last ten years I'd been a mother. What was I without them? My first impulse was to get busy filling my social calendar. But something stopped me. Somehow I knew I was just trying to stave off the inevitable: having to spend time with myself.
'I am being charged for items I did not buy and have never heard of. The cost of these 'purchases' was added to my normal Telstra phone bill. When I protested, Telstra said it was not involved, it simply administered the charges ... Entirely innocent from the start, I lose - no matter what happens.' On 23 August I wrote these words to Telstra for reasons that will soon become apparent.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said that 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' From the roots of ISIS to Russiagate to North Korea to border control in Australia, current trends both international and at home bear this out.
Being both gay and Catholic leads to a somewhat fraught existence. On one hand, we have our Catholic peers who, frequently, have trouble empathising with what it means to be 'intrinsically disordered'. On the other, we have our queer friends who are, understandably, sceptical of our allegiance to an organisation that has a deep history of discrimination towards people like us. This existence is further complicated for those of us who choose to partake in ministry that sees us employed by the Church.
Lots of words have already been said and typed about the subject of same sex marriage. Too many, frankly. But it seems that the marriage equality debate will not go away nor be resolved easily, though LGBTI advocates have said that the homophobic anti-same sex marriage campaign will be damaging to the mental health of LGBTI people. Of course, the very idea that civil rights should be put to a public vote is demoralising.
How much fear do we want? Enough of it preserves our lives. Too much of it diminishes our lives. Currently, the balance is skewed by an overload of fear. Anxiety, its clinical name, is in epidemic proportions.
I read the obituaries every Sunday. Maybe as a writer I enjoy the stories people leave behind. I think too, that in this age of fake news, angry politics and incessant streams of information, the obits offer a slice of realism. One small headshot and a two inch long bio. That is all that remains of us in the end. You might think that perusing the obituaries would be depressing. But for me, it's invigorating. It's energising. It renews my faith in humanity.
I am, of course, a spider: my obstinacy, a viola; my gossamer back-and-forthing, woven ruminations of a violin. Watch me, busy always to continue a spider's life. All things love the little kingdom they inherit. This is home, intricate with fetched fidget, this scratchy bow-flight is a busy cello urging me to tracery, all tossed about in winds of orchestra.
World Refugee Day is a time for remembering. We remember we live in a world of millions of refugees, and that many of our fellow citizens arrived as or are the children of refugees. We may remember refugees, but in their own lives they are dismembered. The tiles we take for granted in the mosaic of our ordinary lives have been hacked out of refugees' lives. Many people lost parents, siblings and children in the persecution and terrors they endured. With each loss part of themselves also died.
As adults we deal with KPIs every day at work, targets defined apparently for one's benefit so we all know what needs to be achieved if our jobs are to be secured. Sadly, they also determine what, how and where we focus our efforts as these targets are internalised over time. If there is to be a future for work, it is to be found in such disobedience, a rejection of the primacy of paid labour for work as 'pleasure in the exercise of our energies'.
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