Monday, November 14, 2011

Nobody's Business, Really?

I came out as poly to my Mum yesterday.

It went much better than I'm sure it goes for many of us, but worse than it did coming out to Mr Wrong's parents.

However, I've seen a theme in these "coming out" events that has bothered me a lot.

In both cases, we were told that this whole polyamory thing is a "private area" and "nobody's business" and "people don't need to know about your private lives".

I think this is complete bullshit. I could understand if it was a friend with benefits sort of arrangement, or if me and Mr Wrong were swingers - but we're not. Just because something makes someone uncomfortable, doesn't mean that they should be protected from ever encountering it.

If I was a monogamous lesbian and my mother told me that my sexuality is a "private area" and "nobody's business" and "people don't need to know about my private life", I think that notion would offend a lot of people - doubly so if she said she wasn't interested in meeting my girlfriend, or didn't think my Dad should know she existed, or even that I was a lesbian at all!

I mean, if I were single and began dating Mr Oldman, my parents could both be reasonably expected to meet him, to hear about the progress of our relationship (you know, "I went on a date with that new boy of mine today! He took me to the park and we fed the ducks!", nothing risque), to comfort me in the event of a heartbreak, and so on. The hardest thing about being poly was when I saw Mum the next morning after a particularly enjoyable date with Mr Oldman, and she asked me how I was going, and I wanted to tell her that I was seeing this new guy and he was very sweet and making me happy and all the rest of it, but instead I had to sheepishly reply "good".

I understand that in modern society, people aren't as open minded as we'd like and that, yes, there are many lesbians who have to keep it a secret from their parents, and I do agree that telling my Dad would be a bad idea. But that doesn't mean it's okay that we have to keep these parts of our lives secret.

In more personal news,  my Mum specifically said that if my new boyfriend  Mr Oldman were to be at my house for a party along with a bunch of other friends, it would be 'innapropriate' for me to hold his hand. That just pisses me off. She also called him a "friend with benefits", which amused me to no end given I already have one of those in Number 3 and it's a very different dynamic than the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. I didn't tell her of Number 3's existence, though, lest she think I've further sunk into the depths of depravity.

She also thinks that polyamory amounts to the first step in me and Mr Wrongs's inevitable breakup. But oh well, I guess I'm going to prove her wrong.

And to her credit, she said it would be OK to come out to Dad after I was in a more long-term secondary relationship - she put one year as her litmus test, and hey, I fully expect to have held down a secondary boy or girlfriend for that period of time at some point in the next five years.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

The Rosemount Hotel


Food Prices

How the hell does The Rosemount make any money charging what it does for its food? I'm a lady of discriminating tastes and spending less than $20 for a meal with a pint of coke makes me feel dirty.

The most expensive things on the menu were sharing platters, but I don't want to share with anybody.

I ended up ordering the  primavera pesto quiche ($15, can you believe it!), with "potato, onion, celery, carrot and olive quiche drizzled with pesto served with side salad & fresh chips".

Food Quality


Upon receiving this meal, I realised with horror that chips count as a vegetable, further exacerbating the vegetable-heavy problem this meal had.

I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised to find that this food, despite being cheap, excelled at being average. The quiche reminded me of those open top pies you get at petrol stations or - dare I say it - at the university cafes. It was in the same "Mrs Macs" style pie crust, filled with rather bland vegetables. I honestly wouldn't have thought anything of it if I saw something of this calibre in one of those locations for $4.50. I was really glad that I was served something so ordinary.

The meal was about 40% chips, 40% salad and 20% quiche.


I was pleased to find that the chips were not only over-salted but a little bit on the cold side when I got them. It's hard to screw up chips at a pub but The Rosemount did a reasonable job so I really do commend them on that.

However, the worst part of the evening was the side salad - it was a basic sort of lettucey affair (full of vegetables, ugh!) and it was actually very tasty. The dressing in particular was scrumptious. However, it's very disappointing that the worst thing I can say is about the side salad which was on all the plates, since it seems like everyone might have had to deal with eating something delicious.

To be honest, I didn't even BOTHER counting the vegetables - in the menu it lists 5 vegetables inside the quiche. Needless to say, there were too many of them.



Overall Rating
  • 1 point per menu item over $25 (max 6) - 0. I couldn't find a single item over $25, except for sharing platters meant for several people - even the surf and turf analog clocked in at $23. Desipicable.
  • -1 point per vegetable on my plate (max +3, min 0) - 0 again - I ate a vegetarian meal, so it was covered in vegetables, including chips.
  • Rating of how much I hated the meal (max 3) - 2 - At least this one had some awful food to make up for the lack of expensive options and the fact that my plate didn't have a scerrick of meat on it. Doesn't get the full 3/3 because the side salad had delicious dressing. 
Overall rating: 2/12 = 17%.

This evening was a huge let-down - the only saving grace was that the quiche was something that I would expect to get from a petrol station for $4.50.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Hyde Park Hotel

Hello friends! I have decided to expand the reach of the rambling extrovert into... FOOD REVIEWS! Yes you heard me.

There's something called "Pub Crawl" which I have started going to. It involves people eating regular food and having fun. It's more of a "food crawl", but the food is at pubs.

My goals at "Pub Crawl" are similar to the ones of the writer of http://weeklypubcrawl.blogspot.com/ , and I will enumerate them below:
  • Spend at least $25 (not including drinks)
  • Not make myself sick by eating anything with vegetables in it
  • Have a terrible evening
 I will score based on the following criteria:

  • 1 point per menu item over $25 (max 6)
  • -1 point per vegetable on my plate (max +3, min 0)
  • Rating of how much I hated the meal (max 3)
 So, with the business out of the way, on to the review of the pub!
------------------

Food Prices

Unfortunately, because this was my first pub crawl I had not yet realised I would suddenly grow to have a passion for food blogging; as a result, I'm not going to be able to rate this menu on the number of over $25 options. I know there were at least two or three; however I would like to point out that I don't particularly care for steak or seafood so spending over $25 while having a meal that I despise will not be so difficult so long as I order the prawns.

I ended up ordering, at the request of my beautiful and talented boyfriend N, a mole poblano pork belly for $26.50 - within my budget, fortunately! There was also a nice looking "asian taco" that reminded me of the iceberg stage of peking duck, but it was only $19.50 so was outside my budget.

EDIT: I actually found the menu after all, and it turns out they have 4 different items over $25 on the "steak and meat" menu, and the casserecce with prawns exceeds $25, and another 5 items (including two seafood) were also in that price range.

Food Quality


Unfortunately, the Pork Belly was really quite nice - it was on a bed of sweet potato (which I love), had red onion and lettuce. I've only had pork belly once before and that was at the famous Jackson's Restaurant, so I was not in much of a position to judge its quality but according to a fellow diner the pork belly was cooked well but did not have the crispy skin, which was comforting to know.  The balsamic was very nice as well, and there was this rather delicious spicy peanuty mexican sauce on the entire thing.

The number of vegetables on the plate (3) is already too much... but then you turn the plate around and you see this:



IT HAS SUNDRIED TOMATOES ON IT. That puts the number of vegetables up to 4 and would get negative marks if  that was possible!

All in all, I was very dissapointed to find the food delicious and fresh and well-cooked. The only saving grace of this meal was that the pork belly lacked the crispy skin.

Overall Rating

  • 1 point per menu item over $25 (max 6) - 6! There were about 10 items that exceeded $25.
  • -1 point per vegetable on my plate (max +3, min 0) - This gets a fat 0 because there were four vegetablse on my plate. The small amount of red onions was probably really only worth at -0.5, but that wouldn't make a difference.
  • Rating of how much I hated the meal (max 3) - This would have gotten a dismal 0 if it weren't for the saving grace of the meal - the lack of crispiness in the pork belly. I'm going to be generous and give it a 1.  
Overall rating: 7/12 = 58%.

There were too many vegetables and it was far too delicious. Fortunately, the menu had many expensive items - including prawns, steak, and other foods I despise - so if I went again I might be able to choose something that would get a high score.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Another Poly Rant

Much like my partner Mr Wrong did recently, I put a notice up on facebook outing myself as poly and explaining, roughly, what the idea was.

A good guy posted some very interesting comments. He's the sort of person who has a lot to say about things and doesn't quite understand what this whole romance thing is, and he always has a cool perspective.

He makes some good, interesting and probably quite valid points. In the spirit of examining the arguments, I want to go through what he's said and give rebuttals or something.  Yes, this blog should be renamed to "The Rambling Extrovert Defends Polyamory". I hope the guy who posts it never sees this, or if he does, doesn't take offense to it. 


It's hard enough with two people making sure that both people feel about the same level of attraction and commitment to the relationship and you don't get an imbalance of one person putting more in than another, but how much moreso if you're trying to mediate between three people and make sure that you don't get two people becoming too close to the exclusion of the third.

This relies on a couple of assumptions:
a) Every relationship you have must be equal

b) Mediation is a bad thing

Let's go through these assumptions...

Every relationship you have must be equal
Let's go through my entire relationship history in chronological order:
- A guy I went out on one very awkward date with in high school (we saw I, Robot)
- A guy I dated for a year but didn't fall in love with
- My current partner, Mr Wrong, who I've been dating nearly 4 years and love very much
- My new boyfriend, Mr Oldman, who I've been dating just over a month


Now, these relationships are clearly not equal - I'd leave it to the reader to rank them. 


Does it matter that some of them overlap chronologically, and some of them don't?


Mediation is a Bad Thing
The cornerstone of polyamory is about communicating to your partners what you're thinking and feeling - my friend implied a hypothetical situation in which, say, I started spending too much time with Mr Oldman and Mr Wrong started feeling left out. And that could happen - in fact, it did! 

I had to go away for a week, and I'd made plans to spend the day I got home with Mr Wrong and the following evening with  Mr Oldman. Mr Wrong told me he felt a bit uneasy that I wanted to see Mr Oldman on my second night back rather than him; but we discussed it and I explained that I missed both of them very much, and that I wanted to make the most of the New Relationship Energy that I was feeling when I was with Mr Oldman


Further discussions with P led me to be more careful about when I scheduled things - now I do my best to schedule my dates with Mr Oldman so that they happen on nights when Mr Wrong is out at concerts or otherwise busy - which also gives me the extra bonus of being able to use any concerts Mr Wrong is attending as an excuse to spend time with Mr Oldman, leading to me potentially seeing more of him than I otherwise would and Mr Wrong still being comfortable with it! Fuck yeah!


EDIT: The main thing I meant to include in this section, but for some reason forgot to, was that in a monogamous relationship a LOT of mediation is going on, or should be. For example, Mr Wrong was once a little annoyed I wanted to spend time alone rather than with him, and we discussed it and worked out an agreement. The same thing happens with the poly issues above, and it will likely get us more into the habit of discussing non-poly sources of conflict/rejection and improve our communication skills.
From a less mathematical objective perspective and from a more emotional personal perspective, to me I simply can't understand the idea, it seems to undermine the very point of having a relationship.
"The very point of having a relationship"? For me, the point of having a relationship is companionship, friendship, support, love, and (of course!) sex. Having multiple relationships will only increase the amount of those things you get. Fuck yeah!

I can only assume that you feel things like love, attachment and jealousy in a completely foreign way to me. I don't think there's anything morally *wrong* with what you're doing, of course, but I think that for most people it would be psychologically unhealthy. I know this sounds harsh, but the only conclusion I can come up with is that sex, love and relationships mean nothing to you. :/
What do we call that, when you can only imagine something happening one way so that must be the way it is? Argument from ignorance? And I do feel jealousy! But you need to identify it's there and think about your reasons for feeling it and then 'get over it', through thinking or just discussion with your partners.


And I hope I feel love the same way everyone else does, because it KICKS ARSE :)

Sunday, October 9, 2011

On being a slut

Let me get something out of the way: The Rambling Extrovert is a blog for ranting, and here comes a rant.
"If you have sex with too many people, it's no longer special."
 Somebody said that to me today, and with the most noble intentions.

To be honest, I think that sentence is a crock of shit. I don't think a single part of it is true. I kind of want to go through each individual word and say why it's bullshit, but there's not much I can say about the word "if". This is all going to be rather nit-picking, but that's the idea.

So I'll do a (mostly) piecewise attack on the sentence, and let me know if there's an assumption or point it makes that I haven't addressed or tackled or whatever.

So, in order:

"Have sex with"
What exactly does it mean to 'have sex'? The underlying assumption of the quote is the good old "penis in vagina" sort of biblically-sanctified husband-and-wife sort of thing, but that is not what sex truly is. Yes, we'll be splitting hairs about definitions but that's what I'm doing. To some extent, sex is everything you do with someone you are attracted to. From kissing, to holding hands, to threesomes, even to what you commonly think of as "sex" - it's all part of the same thing, the same wonderful part of life that involves you and another person exploring one another's body sexually. There are gay male couples who do not have anal sex but refer to their blowjob/jack-off/etc filled bedroom life as "sex". There's no reason to be attached to the penis/vagina interaction as something different from everything most people do to each other before that hole gets plugged.

"too many people"
I'm sorry, what? Too many people? What is too many people? If you asked a version of me from a past (catholic) life, I would have said "anyone other than my future husband". Other people might be able to give a number, but it varies depending on the person. And you know what? It's bullshit, too. Is there a limit on the number of people one can kiss in their lifetime? Hold hands with? Be friends with? Smile at?  I guess I could imagine having sex with "too many" people as having sex with so many people that one's vagina ends up being rubbed raw, but even that one could accomplish by having sex with one or two people enough times in quick succession... so I'm not sure.

"no longer special"
What the hell does 'special' mean? Is the penis-in-vagina sex that people have special, really? I would be the first to say that it's a lot of fun, and yes, sure, it gets you more connected to your sex partner, but I wouldn't say it was any more dramatic than any other of the multitude of sex or romance acts out there.

And besides, why SHOULD sex be 'special'? Do you have people not wanting to play soccer too much because it would no longer be 'special'? If you like having sex, it will be special. Geez.

BESIDES,
Having sex with more than one person has, in my (addmittedly limited) experience, made it more special as you can appreciate the differences in the sexual ouvres of each person and come to understand what it is about sex with a particular partner that is really worth it. It makes you realise the difference between having sex with someone you've met recently and enjoy spending time with and want to get to know better compared with having sex with someone you've been with for a number of years and love very much and already know super well. The contrast between the delight in finding out what turns a new partner on and the comfort and security in knowing you know exactly how to drive an old partner crazy. That's why I'm loving polyamory. That's why I love being a slut. That is why the sentence I quoted is a crock of shit.

But hell, to each their own, right? I just wanted to throw my opinion out there =D.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Starting a (skeptic/atheist) Club on Campus

I just found out that there's a brand new club in Western Australia for Atheist/Agnostic (and I suppose by extension skeptical?) students. It is so brand new, in fact, that it's just a facebook page for the moment - not that there's anything wrong with that!

In fact, WA now has three skeptic-spectrum clubs, two of which are confined to facebook pages just waiting to have live breathed into it. The ECU club's lack of activity is intentional - with the president not going to uni until 2012 he can be forgiven for not doing much - but I suspect the Murdoch club president is going to want to get his hands dirty. (And who can blame him?)

The UWA club has gone from strength to strength (of which I am well pleased), and I guess you could say I helped get it to the first strength while Ash Tyndall got it to the second (and much bigger!) strength. Are you following me? Good.

So, I'm going to write down in words how wonderful starting a new club is - how getting it off the ground can happen, dare I say it, organically. How you can do it without any guild funding - but you will have to invest time into it. But you wouldn't have started a club if you weren't willing to make that sacrifice, would you?

I've given this advice many times to many people, and I'm not sure how good it is or how effective it is, but here it is for the world to see.

Four Essential Rules for Starting a Good Club
1. You need to be dedicated.
2. You need a few dedicated committee members. These can be your best friend, boyfriend, sister, whatever. Call in some favours if you have to.
3. Your members need to make the club part of their weekly routine.
3a. (Corollary) You need to do something every single week.
4. You need to obtain freshers.

Let's go through this in order:

You need to be dedicated
You need to understand that you'll be putting time in. I went a little crazy when I took on the UASS; I ended up spending six hours a week on club activities (though most of it was sitting around and chatting with friends and thus great fun). You need at least two hours a week to dedicate to doing stuff for your club - that usually consists of being a butt on a seat to attend your events until you begin getting regular followers.

You need a few dedicated committee members
Very few people start a club on their own; if you were one of them, it's time to call in favours from your friends who share your values. None of what you're going to need to be doing is hard, just time consuming. You don't want your events to consist of you sitting there smiling hopefully at everyone who goes past; you want people to see you and your friends having fun, and want to become a part of that joyous experience.

Your members need to make the club a part of their weekly routine
We are creatures of habit, and if you know that Thursdays from 1pm-3pm are spent in the tav with your club members, eating lunch, having a chat, and enjoying a beer, you'll be doing it every week won't you?

But imagine if every three or four weeks there's some event that's on at a different day or at a different place and you're never quite sure when it's happening and then you log on to facebook and you find out that, oh wait, it was today and not next week that the barbeque was on.

Your events need to be consistent and frequent. Don't fall into the trap of wanting to have it at different times so people with inconvenient uni timetables will be able to attend sometimes; you'll lose more members to inconsistency than to these sort of logistical problems.

You need to do something every single week
This is to remind people that your club exists, to keep your members involved - you don't need to be protesting a screening of Expelled or having a lecture from Kylie Sturgess to have an event. You can sit around and discuss a topic plucked out of thin air (dinosaurs! the icarus story! what exactly does threat count mean!) or talk about what happened on the episode of House last night.

You need to obtain freshers
Okay, this is something I have to admit that we had a lot of trouble with particularly. And, to be honest, how could we have known?

You might not remember your first few weeks of uni, but I have come to realise that you get used to your routine. It’s in the first few weeks of uni that the formative stage happens where you decide what you’re going to get out of uni. Most people tend to realise that they can skip most of their lectures, reading the notes or watching it online instead of making the trip to uni every single day. Still others figure out they can go to the local city/shopping area during their longer breaks, or decide to go to uni, attend lectures, and then go home as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Others, like you and me, decide to get involved with the clubs on campus. But you don’t as often see someone in second or third year taking a break from their habit of years to go to one of your events. Don’t get me wrong - you’ll have people from all years attending your club when it first begins to start up, but many of them will be the club-goer type themselves. You need to turn freshers who are passionate about atheism, skepticism, etc into club goers. This sounds manipulative, and I guess it is - but they’ll thank you for it, honest.

How do I obtain freshers, anyway?
The most important thing you can do is learn from my mistakes - I started UASS on “Atheists in the Tav”, an 18+ event which by its very nature is impossible for almost all freshers to begin attending from the day they start uni.

So do NOT, under ANY circumstances, have your first or flagship event be inaccessible to freshers. It’s fine to have the tav as a venue as long as there’s other places the freshers can go EVERY SINGLE WEEK to build up the habit of attending and the rapport with your club.

In 2010 we realised that freshers weren’t able to get into the habit of UASS, and decided to amend that by starting “Atheists in the Caf”, located in one of the guild’s cafes that was far more fresher-friendly. But the damage had been done - starting in week 4 was poisonous. We only had one or two freshers attending, and they didn’t make a habit of it. They’d already worked out their routine and UASS wasn’t part of it.

In 2011, we fared better - we started Atheists in the Caf from the very first week and in that same week we had a mixer - an entirely social occasion where we provided free snack food and drinks (freshers love free food). We chatted and encouraged the freshers to attend our events every week - the cafe at its regular time, and the “Talktorials” that were at the same time and same place as the mixer. We stressed that the talktorials were short, not lectures, and became lively discussions at the end of the talk.

So what am I going to do?
You’re a lucky guy because I’m going to give you a standard plan you can follow to instantly give your club a bustling social calendar.

1. Start a weekly event.
You don’t need to book a room or anything difficult like that - find a cafe or table somewhere that all students know how to get to. Like somewhere you’d hang out with your friends.

NO, they are not going to go find the park bench you and your friends sit at at the place near uni. It needs to be a place that freshers either already know where it is, or they can find by asking any random they meet. Make sure you keep in mind that you’ll be doing this year in and year out so you want somewhere that’s good for both summer and winter.

I suggest you find the most recognisable cafe/lunch spot on campus (yes, I know how much your on campus food sucks, but freshers don't know where that really sweet cafe down the road is). Then sit there for two hours at the same time every week. Try to have the same table every week, too. Make a sign. Print out the name of your club in big letters and stick it to a cereal box (to give it height), and make sure they know to look for it. Sit near an entrance or somewhere where everyone who enters has a good chance at seeing you.

Then sit there with your friends and have a chat about whatever you and your friends normally chat about - make sure you look like you're having fun, don't you dare sit on your own and look pathetically around for other people to join your lonely existence. Nobody wants to sit with a stranger who looks bored out of their mind.

Every time you get someone sitting with you, welcome them, be nice to them, etc. Make sure when they leave they're aware of the start and finish times of this event and that it's on every single week. Encourage them to come next week.

but for the love of Dawkins, don't be creepy about it.

2. Advertise it.
People are going to need to know that this event is happening. Advertising is an important step. Look into these options:
  • email to all group members
  • facebook message/event
  • posters around campus

I would far and away recommend facebook. I know it's an evil empire but people seem to use it - we noticed a huge increase in attendence when we started posting our events on facebook. Plus facebook groups are easy to create and invite people into.

If clubs regularly advertise on posters around campus, figure out how to get some. We were lucky in that all posters on our campus are put up by the guild rather than by the clubs themselves, so to get posters all you need to do is print some off and leave them outside someone's office. If it requires effort, I'd still recommend you go to the effort at least at the beginning of semester so people are aware you exist.

3. Expand and diversify
You should begin to get a regular group of people (this can take a semester or two, so don't worry - the important thing is to stick with it and keep doing it so that way people know there's a regular thing they can go along to).

Once this begins to happen, you're in the clear. Start doing things more in line with your vision - if you want to conform to the rather standard "have lectures" mold, that's surprisingly easy to do. All you need to do is have a 20 minute talk every week about something interesting. I managed to find somebody else who was willing to give talks, along with myself, and together we gave talks every single week and this encouraged other members to do talks on their own subjects.

You just need to find a subject - ANYTHING, you don't have to be an expert - and spend an hour on wikipedia, make up some slides, and lead a discussion. I did a talk on the Barney and Betty Hill UFO abduction that was almost entirely wikipedia-sourced, one on Parasites I essentially lifted from a Cracked article, and one on Power Balance that I lifted from a video by TV's Richard Saunders and some newspaper articles. You don't have to have a unique talk when most people who are attending might not have heard about this - just research something, learn something, and tell everyone. Remember to be humble and accept that other people might have done more research than you or actually know something about what you're talking about and let them talk if they want to.

4. Other strategies
One thing you can do - which can be kind of risky - is to try and elect new faces into high positions in your committee. If you elect a fresher as president, vice president, or treasurer, they're going to feel invested in your club and want to come along to events (and of course help out). Just make sure you have back ups (your friends from before!) who will be willing to take over the duties if one (or more) of your new committee members goes missing.

A good way to convince people to be on your committee is to say it looks good on a resume.

Closing
So, now I've told you all this, what you need to do is start having events. At first, they'll be kind of lackluster and you'll wonder if it will ever kick off, but you're investing time in creating a community that people will want to come back to, so stay at it. I have done that for two different clubs and the investment comes back tenfold in the end.

We went from being a club only in name to being the most active freethought university club in Australia in the space of two years.

It's not as hard as you'd think, as long as you're willing to invest your precious time.

And goodness gracious me, I have made my best friends thanks to this club.

And, what's more, I offer you - dear reader - my friendship and support and advice should you need it. My skype is madgech, or you can reach me at madge@madgech.com or madge@uass.asn.au - I'm always happy to help you out if you have any questions or anything.