Feeding the Homeless - Well Thinking About It, At Least

The other night I caught the end of a program about homelessness on the streets of Sydney. (It turns out it was a part of ‘A Current Affair’ – if I’d known that I’d have switched off immediately; I mean, I am university educated). So anyway, it was kind of sad and made me thing about the plight of the homeless. I have thought about it before, of course, but like the melting polar ice caps and those bears whose glands they drain in order to get some drug from (am I making that up?) and the human slave trade, it’s not generally at the forefront of my mind.*

But I was thinking how I ought to be more giving to the homeless (starting from zero, ‘more’ wouldn’t be too difficult, would it?) They’re not my top cause ever, but seriously, how hard could it be to make a small effort to make someone’s life a bit better? I don’t think I’ll ever be homeless myself (on account of how I’m so educated, sexy, have a vibrant personality, am loveable etc) but I can imagine – almost – how scary and lonely it would be to have nothing and be hungry, and to have people walk past you not caring.

I very rarely give money to the homeless. Because you know, I reckon they’ll probably spend it on drugs, etc, etc. I mean I do generally believe that it's a high likelihood, and I don’t want to be subsidizing that. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t give in kind, rather than in money form.

On the documentary (OK, it was A Current Affair, but let’s pretend it was a documentary by serious, intelligent people) someone gave a homeless man a bag of breakfast in the morning. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Sometimes in the past when I’ve bought myself a pie on the way while I'm on the run I have thought of buying two, one for me and one to give away, but chances are I wouldn’t see a homeless person and then I’d be stuck carrying around a spare pie which would be a bloody nuisance.

The whole food giving thing takes some planning, but I think it would be a good idea. I suggested to the Man that I could combine my new role as Nice Giving Person with one of my favourite hobbies, making banana bread. There’s a soup kitchen for the homeless near our suburb, so we could pop down there one night and make a donation. The Man was pretty excited as his dream for me is to achieve world domination through selling banana muffins. Well one of his dreams for me, along with the one where I become one of Sydney’s popular local musicians and he manages my band. I did suggest that the pathway to riches wasn’t from selling muffins to the homeless, but he said I could practice on them. I guess that way any accidental food poisoning deaths won’t be so noticeable.** I think making muffins for the homeless would be so nice, and one day I will do it.

The program had a good point, but was also just the kind of preachy crap you’d expect A Current Affair to peddle. So as well as making me want to be a nicer person, it also makes me want to have a shower to wash the slime off me. Just so you know. I’d hate for you to think I can watch A Current Affair without feeling icky.


*though I did have a dream last night that I was one of a group of girls who’d been sold into sex slavery, and it was the night before we were supposed to be pimped out, and I was secretly sending texts to loads of people to try and get them to rescue me! Thanks, Other Man. This nightmare was YOUR work.

**Sorry, tasteless joke.

AND...In Other News:

• I am insulted in a team meeting!
  
  In a team meeting today for one of the teams I support, we had birthday cake for the boss. One of the sales people, we’ll call her Jane, told me last week that she was organising it. Since I support very many people besides this team - two large, national teams (because I’m so extraordinarily competent) - and since I was off sick a couple of days last week and didn’t feel like taking on any MORE work, and since I don’t recall any specific items in my job description that say I have to organise birthday cakes, I thought sure, let her do it. I mean, it’s not such a big deal, surely? But she unveiled it at the meeting saying “Since I’m an ADMIN PERSON NOW and do ADMIN THINGS, I’ve organised this cake”. I should point out I was the only admin person at this meeting and incidentally, the only female besides her. So when she said that – instant humiliation! I surreptiously looked round to see if anyone was looking at me. They weren’t, but I’m sure they’d have all picked up on the implied insults that a) I should have organised the cake but didn’t bother, and/or b) being an admin person is infinitely beneath her and hence her comment was amusing.
  
  Maybe she didn’t mean it in either of those ways, but if not, it’s hard to imagine what she did mean. Possibly it had nothing to do with me, and she was trying to impress upon the other guys that just because she’s a girl and organised a cake doesn’t mean she will be fetching them coffees next; she is kind of hardcore that way. I hope so. But I feel so humiliated that she obviously doesn't consider me in her league of womanly achievement. Maybe I should explain to her that as someone who considered very bright at school (I’m pretty sure I would have wiped the floor academically speaking with most of my sales team, had we gone to school together), I have a massive inferiority complex about the fact that I’ve washed up as the person who takes minutes and books meeting rooms, and I don’t appreciate having it rubbed in. I feel like enough of a failure as it is.

AND...

• And I find solo aerobics vastly amusing In our gym at work there’s a room where the classes are held, and at all other times gym members can use it for weights, stretching and whatever else they want some space for. When I went in there this afternoon there was a woman doing an aerobics routine all by herself, complete with loud music pumping on the room’s stereo system. Is it just me, or is that weird? I must say I had trouble suppressing a smirk as she buzzed frantically around the room, earnestly doing those mystifying, jerky movements that aerobics people do. By herself. Ha ha ha!