In which I complain.

Dear Herald Sun,

You suck.

I realise this isn’t a surprise.

However, you even suck at the things you should be good at. Being a tabloid-y, let’s-gawp-at-celebrities and have-a-lifestyle newspaper, you should at LEAST be good at the lifestyle parts.

Fail.

Massive fail.

Catherine Lambert, you’re not style police. Street smart? Give it a rest. You don’t even reach the bar of looking-moderately-put-together in any way, shape or form. I could have found you fifty people on Friday night in Northcote who looked better (for ANY given value of ‘better’) than Ilesha H. Hell, I could have found fifty people in Frankston who had some kind of ‘look’ pulled together tighter than the ruffly-in-all-the-wrong places red dress on Ms. H.

Stripper shoes might be fun, but not when you match “expensive items with less expensive items” because there is nothing that can be called matching going on here. Sweetheart, your shoes make your (white, fluffy, cropped-sleeve) jacket look like your pimp bought it. A blind pimp with tactile issues and really short arms.

And when you wear your little red dress with your really little white fluffy jacket and your stripper heels with contrasting silver peep-toes AND weird glittery ankle straps (lesson one in elongating legs: ankle straps are FAIL) refrain from bling.

Hang on. Refrain? Oh, that means do it again, right? Wrong. Teaming a clutch hewn out of Priscilla gunmetal-grey sequins with all this is disaster. However, why stop there? When you’ve gone this far, the only sensible option is to load on all the jewellery in your possession. (Possibly so innocent bystanders have time to run and hide.)

I can count (yes, even with one hand awkwardly-on-back-of-hip and partially concealed by the small Samoyed savaging Ms.H’s torso) a watch with a beaded bracelet with another beaded bracelet (big, chunky silver beads) WITH a heart dangling from said beads. Ok. Look, it’s been a confusing season for everyone, but why then mish a gold phoenix necklace to this mash?

If the phoenix was TRULY bringing you “spiritual guidance” it would have set fire to half the contents of your wardrobe (the stripper half) and we’d be left with an attractive brunette. Maybe not SO suitable for publication, since all she’d be wearing was a lovely phoenix necklace, but what a classy necklace.

I think the expert (Sesil Arzadian, of Anton Jewellery) said it best: “Certainly, this look has a lot happening.”

What the expert forgot to say: Catherine Lambert, you’re a knucklehead. Get some new glasses and a subscription to a magazine. Any magazine.

In which I think. Try not to fall over.

I’ve been reading. And thinking (dangerous combination, I know). Book that sparked the thoughts? Lionel Shriver’s So much for that.

If you’ve not read it, I’ll try not to spoil the ending; I started to get the shape of it in my head before it arrived, but it wasn’t so saccharine as it might have been. It has made me question the dollar value that, increasingly, western society places on life. I’d like to believe that life actually unto itself has no value; it is, after all, what we each make of it.

I can’t sell you days of my life for you to have and enjoy, I can’t buy more days for myself, but increasingly this seems to be the perception of our immortality-obsessed culture. Death has become something to be put off, an inconvenient appointment rather than an inevitable endstep in the process of living. All the platitudes of loss (how careless!) and passing (because we really, REALLY don’t like that D-word) and expressions of regret…

Yes. People die. It’s sad. It’s not, actually, a tragedy. It’s not the thing to fight and avoid. Certainly, it’s sometimes not fair, but then what in life is?

Lying on the couch last night, juggling my bony spine across my husband’s knees and picking up the pug so she could trek across us with her usual land-rover determination (hey, two people on a couch are rocky terrain when you have no legs to speak of), I announced, “So, I’m hearing all these ads about organ donation, and I just need you to know that if I’m hit by a car tomorrow and wind up braindead, my organs go places.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Sorry, I was thinking about the tournament. Your organs what?”

“If I get hit by a bus,” (obviously he needed a more dramatic picture) “My organs. Go. To other people. You know. They get my bits. Because you’re my husband, so you’d have to make the decision.”

“That’s a bit dangerous. You’re always braindead in the morning. Can I have your bits?”

(I didn’t point out that he’s the one who sinks back into a coma at the first available opportunity, starting awake again with “Wha-?” nine minutes later, while I grumble and threaten to kick him should he do it again.)

“No!”

“What if I need them?”

“You’re not even the same blood type as me. What blood type ARE you?” (Clearly idiotic, in light of what came next)

“Don’t know. What blood type are you?”

“Hm. Don’t know.” (See? I’m BRILLIANT. I should know, but I’ve forgotten.) “So, organs. You?”

“Yep. Other people can have your bits. I guess other people can have mine too. Yeah, take ‘em.”

“Buried or cremated?”

“I don’t care? What do I care? I’m gone! Whatever’s best for the environment.”

“So, you want tea?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Awesome. It’s so nice to know the really tough decisions can be made in about three minutes between Thai takeaway and Earl Gray.