Sunday, February 28, 2010

My Totally Sweet Badge Collection

I have been collecting badges for some years now and my collection is fairly impressive. It would be more impressive but what with badges being small and flimsy, I lose them all the time. I shed them. If you wander around my house at any given time you are more than likely to see little badge deposits scattered in various positions about the house.

I'm not sure why I started collecting them. I think I just kept finding badges I liked and then when I had more than fifty I decided I might as well call it a collection. I know most people aren't interested in collections. They seem to be associated closely with being both boring and crazy, an unlikely and unfortunate combination. But my badge collection is one that people always seem to take to with interest. I wear a good amount of them on the strap of my shoulder bag and people always comment on them. There have been a few cafes I have frequented where I have been known simply as 'The Badge Girl'. Just this afternoon I was picking up a few winners* in the op-shop down the road and the woman said with a grin that she would keep an eye out for more badges for me.

I think people take to them because they can cover a variety of areas. Nostalgia, humour, music, there are no shortages of designs. Also, my collection is that excellent. Here are a few of my favourites that are currently in circulation:

  • 'Obama Pug' and 'Iguanas for Obama'. Looks like a joke, but these came from a serious website. Apparently this woman actually thinks pets should express political opinions.
  • "Go fork yourself" with a picture of a fork.
  • A cartoon of a Panda that says "Wanted dead or alive! This is a bad panda"
  • "Satan Was A Lesbian" and all the others in that set. It was a set of all kinds of retro cult movie posters. Other winners included "She Learned The Hard Way", "Nautipuss" and many others.
  • "WWSJD?" This is actually a Dr Who badge but my name is also Sarah Jane so yes.
  • Andrew McLelland's Finishing School badge. One of the main reasons I would move to Melbourne.
  • Assortment of indie band badges. I found this website once that had all these badges for obscure bands, TV shows and even authors that were all a dollar, with free international shipping. I have no idea why in the name of hell I did not bookmark this site. I think it might have been like the internet equivalent of the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter.
  • "Hitler was a Nazi"
  • "NO PIPELINE COMMUNIST THIEVES" I have no idea what this even means, but there is also a skull and crossbones on it?
  • "The Comedy Of Errors by Shakespeare Motor Cycle Club" One of my favourites. This is from around 1974. The Shakespeare Motor Cycle Club where a group of motorbike enthusiasts who used to have rallies named after Shakespeare's plays. This was one of their official badges.
  • "Hello! My friend" with a picture of some kind of child devil.
  • I have about six badges that are all weird comments about gnomes, usually puns. None that I can find right now though.
  • A roadsign that says "You Shall Not Pass", picture of an approximation of Gandalf
  • "No Woman No Chai"
So yeah, that's the part of my collection that is "currently on display". As you can see, my badge collection is the best. And it makes me really easy to buy presents for. If anyone wants to get me on side, all they pretty much have to do is lay down five bucks on some sweet badges.

-Smackie Onassis





*The badges I bought today: a Healthy Harold badge, a picture of a racecar that says "flossing is for winners", a circa 1985 african american teen named 'Zack'. I don't know who he is, but he sure has 'tude, a cow's face that says moo a few times and has some bubbles and stripes. All these were in the 20c box which made me feel like I was doing excellent shopping.

"Irrational" fears

Vegatrain has this thing where he loves startling me. See, when I'm startled I make this noise that Vegatrain seems to think is funny, although Meattrain thinks it is the single most annoying sound in the entire world. I would describe it as a cross between Chewbacca and a bad Louis Armstrong impersonation, only louder and more gutteral. It is half involuntary stress reaction and half hammed up for comic effect. But that noise is not the point of this entry. This is more about Vegatrain's efforts to stress me out. Usually these efforts consist of running up to me suddenly making some kind of horrifying sound (good lord our neighbours must love us).

Last night he did something very similar, only wearing sunglasses we have dubbed "The Douchebag Glasses". You know the types. Orange frames, kinda wraparound style. Dr Cox wears a pair exactly like them in Scrubs at some stage. Anyway, Vegatrain jumped out at me from behind a door wearing those glasses. I found myself reacting by covering my face and screaming the following:

"Oh my god you look like Bono!"

Conclusion: I am afraid of Bono.

That brings my sum total of fears up to two: Bono, and birds. And I am aware that most people would probably view the former as the more rational of the two.

When I tell people that I am afraid of birds, they usually respond with one of the following:

  1. "Haha, no seriously."
  2. "Isn't that a tattoo of a bird on your leg there?"
Yes, I am serious. And also the tattoo is SYMBOLISM YOU GUYS. I will not be afraid of it until the day it flies off my leg and starts flapping all in my face in which case I will be terrified and it won't just be because of the bird thing.

But my fear of birds is not as irrational as most people would guess. I didn't always* have this fear, until the birds near my high school decided to go a little bit insane, Hitchcock-style. The magpies in the surrounding area had always been fairly awful. I remember one swooping me when I was just going for a walk. I tried to run away but it actually chased me down the streets, even around corners and down side streets. It was awful.

But when I was in year 12, the birds at my school went extra hotsauce crazy. During my HSC exams, the quad was roped off due to "bird hazard" as the surrounding signs proclaimed. Apparently something had gone down in the bird world, and as a result they were attacking students at random. One girl got her eye pecked and had to be rushed to hospital. I swear to god, I am not making this up.

After awhile, the "bird hazard" resolved itself. The birds went back to their business as usual. But I have since had something of a fear of the creatures. If they are chillin' in cages I am ok with them, but the minute they start flapping their wings, coming towards me in any way I basically duck and cover. Don't even get me started on geese and swans.

-Smackie Onassis




*While I am writing this Vegatrain is watching the Big Bang Theory and Sheldon just started talking about his fear of birds. MAN.

What's In My Bookmarks Bar: An Update

  • Official website of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
  • This video
  • A store in Brisbane selling flying v ukuleles (I have not intentionally been searching for ukulele related websites. Coincidence?)
  • "Piano chords made easy" for when I am writing/playing a song and I forget a really embarrassingly basic chord.
  • A gif of a skeleton playing the banjo (fantastic)
  • Richard von Krafft-Ebing's wikipedia page, still

Role Models, or, A Possible Explanation of Why I Am Such A Spacecase

I often refer to myself as an "absurd human being". I will admit that I do practice a form of rational insanity in everything I do. I will tell you that for free. I have tried a few times in my life to act like a normal person, but it inevitably ends up leaving me feeling empty and depressed. I have a lot more fun being absurd. But I have been thinking and I have noticed that this could well be because I have had a great deal of role models in my life who have been nothing short of totally batshit insane.

For example, at the last job I had before moving to Adelaide, my boss was this crazy Czechoslovakian guy. He had the same name as a very famous surrealist painter so I am going to call him Breton. He was absolutely insane. A usual day working with Breton would consist of him storming in, waving his arms around wildly, yelling incoherantly and then running off again. Needless to say, he wasn't the best boss I've ever had. I also got the impression that at work we were getting the LESS crazy side of him. Apparently he had a cannon in his front yard. An actual, working cannon. In his front yard. The police told him many times to remove it, but he did not listen. How did I hear about this? From the boss I had before him, who apparently knew him because Newcastle is like that.

Before the job with Breton, I worked in a small independant fashion retailer. I was only being paid $10 an hour which I knew was well below minimum wage but I didn't care. It was the best job I had ever had. I got the job in a strange way. The shop was around the corner from my house and I wandered in one day and started talking to the owner. This is how the hiring process went:

(inane chatting)
Boss: You know what, I like your style. You're hired.
Me: But I didn't apply-
Boss: You start Monday.
Me: Sure thing boss.

For a while, I was the sole employee. They had another shop over the road and when I was hired the owner took the chance to spend his time in the other one. I would scoot in every morning on my little razor scooter. They would give me the keys and I would open the shop, "work" and then bring over the takings at the end of the day. I was alone in the shop, free to do my own thing. One of my favourite things to do would be to make mixtapes to play while I was working. I do recall a woman once making a rude comment about the song currently playing and I took way too much offence. I was very proud of my mixtapes. I remember this way too vividly. The song was "Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying" by Belle & Sebastian and an old woman said "Well! I wish he would hurry up and die already!" I didn't kick her out of the shop on the basis that I wanted to make money off her, but when she turned around she got the dirty look of a lifetime, let me tell you that much. 

The shop itself was fantastic. I got some of my favourite items of clothing from there, including my metallic silver boots and candy pink trench coat. I seem to remember once selling a pair of barramundi skin boots, which I thought was fairly random. My boss was exactly the kind of person you would expect to sell that kind of item. I seem to remember him once telling me about his Christmas party. Apparently he had honed this recipe for a punch that was extremely alcoholic, but didn't taste it at all. So, at his party he had two bowls set out: one was the obviously alcoholic eggnog, the other the seemingly innocent punch. Apparently, he got way too much of a buzz out of people who weren't planning on drinking supping on the punch thinking it was non-alcoholic and then driving home. He laughed maniacally when he told me this story. I laughed too but my laugh was not so much maniacal as it was awkwardly humouring him so he wouldn't drug my coffee. I'm sure there are a bundle of other stories about how insane he was, but there is already too much material for this entry for me to drag those out of my memory. I do remember that I ran into him a year or so after I stopped working there and was duly informed that he didn't have a facebook, but his goldfish did.*

As for other insane role models, you need look no further than the educators I have had over the years. In high school I had an abundance of crazy teachers, but I would rather save that for it's own entry. Let's talk about uni for a moment. The first lecture I went to was taught by one of the most openly insane people who has ever attempted to teach me anything. He walked to the front of the hall with his eyes much wider than anyone who is not a serial killer is physically capable of. I don't know, they have some kind of gene. He spent the lecture gesturing wildly and stroking his big bushy beard. If I recall correctly my notes from this lecture looked something like this:

  • A dog / A not a dog
  • What is this man talking about
  • What am I supposed to be writing down
  • What is even going on
I thought maybe this was just the first lecture, and that things would improve from there, but no. There was no discernible point made in any of his lectures.

Now, those are only three of my "role models" and of course I had a lot that were completely sane. What I'm saying is, they were in the minority.


-Smackie Onassis


*This fish did not accept my friend request. Apparently even goldfish think they are better than me now.