So I met His Holiness the Dalia Lama. Much to say (stay tuned…I’ll be filing my Sunday Life column on here shortly). But for now, the evidence:

me + hh chatting head chatter

Anyone from Melbourne? Definitely try to get to his public lecture this Thursday. His message is very important right now as we find ourselves caught in a flurry of ETS debates, Liberal Party mayhem and a general feeling That Things Are Just Not Quite Right. I promise his message will help. He made me feel like It All Makes Sense.

i cheerfully watch this film every christmas, deliriously full of turkey.

This week I cheerfully lower the tone of Christmas.

When, in a few weeks, I arrive into my hometown after a sweaty four-hour crawl up the highway, I’ll be pulling over in a truck stop, breathing deeply and repeating the following mantra: I aim only for cheer. I will then calmly continue on to Mum and Dad’s and enter the Wilson Christmas Fray. Breathing.  Very. Deeply.

Christmas is hard. First, there’s the strobing, jingly, soul-deflating onslaught of crass consumerism from about August onwards. Which we then try to deflect by Focusing on What Really Matters – family, the joy of giving and so on. Which, in turn, serves only to create ridiculously high expectations that come crashing to earth in an argument over who left the skid marks in Dad’s gravel drive. All before Grandma’s first sherry’s poured.

I’m sure families aren’t designed for extended periods of intimacy. But every year, there we go again, piling on top of each other for 48 hours-plus and expecting born-of-a-virgin-like miracles.

…this year, it’s this clever little charity…streetsmart.org.

donate $2 with streetsmart

What do Stephen Fry and I have in common? I wish it was a lot more. For now it’s the fact we both support Streetsmartaustralia.org, a set-up that helps you help homeless people in your community…while eating out.

It works like this:

1. check out streetsmartaustralia.org to see restaurants taking part. Here’s a map with clicky bits…here! Hundreds are. Most of the big ones on my hit-list are. In Sydney: Longrain, Bills, etc In Melbourne: Cutler and Co….
2. when the bill comes you’ll be invited to kick in an extra $2
3. your two bucks will then be ferried off to a homeless project nearby. For details, see this
4. you will feel better about yourself and the collective. This is how life works.

This is also how life works: when we actively support anyone doing good stuff, good stuff spreads. My approach has always been that the biggest difference is made from the small things we do as individuals.

This video says it all in pictures.

These moments seem like flukes. But nothing is a coincidence, ever. If you’re meant to live, you will. Everything flows in that direction as if by magic. I’ve been saved from death a number of times, by millimetres. Most of us have. It’s just we don’t see the “hand of God” that swoops in to save us. Or we don’t reflect on it when the moment passes; we take it for granted that the bus changed lanes just at the right moment. Or whatever.

This week death is close to me. My beautiful Uncle Pete, who is also my godfather, has a brain tumor. He’s being operated on, on Friday and he has a 60 per cent chance of coming out of it unscathed. Then comes chemo.

This week I check in with my “inside people”

a happy shot by Uge

You can spend a lifetime reading books about how to get happy in 11 easy steps while not sweating small stuff. There are a lot out there, generally written by some of the most tortured souls around (in the same way neurotics often become psychiatrists and awkward nerds generally become models).

But I find the most powerful life-bettering lessons emerge from everyday people you meet in the street. Randoms, in the act of happiness.

On Monday I ran into Eugene, a surfer I’ve known from around my neighbourhood for a while, sitting in the sun having a coffee. I asked what he was doing because he wasn’t reading the paper or talking into a phone. He was just sitting. “Sez, I’m checking in with my inside people,” he said everyday-ishly, like he was posting a letter.

I found this new ad for a sustainable development company that invites us to rethink the way things are done. You can’t actually access the link via youtube, so click experiencere…

The visual effect of the youtube interface splitting at the seams is clever, technologically. But so is the symbolism. It got me thinking. Very little stays the same right now. And the mediums we get comfortable with are just vehicles that are entirely disposable and trashable. The fact youtube has allowed their interface to be tampered with, pulled apart, is telling.

In the end no one can be precious about how messages are conveyed any more. Journos can’t get up in arms about twitter – and  for a great rant on this, see Leigh Sales’ blog in The Punch today. Magazines can’t resent blogs that beat them to… the punch. The medium isn’t the point any more. It’s the content. And hoorah for that!!

I’m meant to be writing my Sunday Life column, due in two hours. But there’s a great survey published on The Punch today – blokes’ take on female body image. And it’s given me an inspired jolt.

On Thursday I drank wine and ate sushi with The  Punch editor Penbo (he gave me the gig writing an indulgent column in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph a year or so ago when he was editor) and he we were talking about the survey. He was getting responses on his blackberry from male readers as we ate. He made the startlingly obvious point that everything we (women) think we know about what men think about us is wrong. We kind of know this. But it’s another one of those things about men we just refuse to accept.

I like this observation from the survey, because it opened my eyes:

Interestingly, men think women are more turned on by a good physique than they are.

This week I plunge into mess

So tell me what you make of this pop-cultural collision? Californian fashion label Ed Hardy has launched a range of hand sanitisers. The tattoo-motifed label is best known for dressing trash-tastic celebs like Tara Reid and Tommy Lee in expensive, tough-nut versions of your aunt’s experiments with a BeDazzler gun in the early 80s. So this foray into handbag-sized disinfectant is a bit off-kilter, don’t you think? A bit like Mack trucks doing a diffusion line of tampons.

Anyway, hand sanitiser happens to nick an old wound of mine. I despair when I see more evidence of our desperate attempts to control life – be it the germs, dirt, traffic or noise.

An Australian idea! Beauty Swatch is an online resource that gives as-close-to-real-life colour swatches of the latest lipsticks. Nice. If you’re normal.

Sadly, the site is of little help to me.

This is a cute little idea from Melbourne – a podcast service that uploads aspiring writers’ works as audio. Do you write? Contact paperradio direct and see if they like your style.

They’re accepting prose, poetry, political rants, profiles…most things that are about pen to paper. Sadly they don’t do Venn diagrams. Yet.

The content must fall anywhere between 4 and 20 minutes. 160 written words translate to about a minute in speech.

Gosh, I wish it was invented when I started out writing. Would’ve been all over it. Instead, I wrote feminist rants for the ANU student paper. And poetry inspired by Jim Morrison. Imagine. I actually turned up to my first work experience gig at Good Taste magazine with it in my little CV folder. Bless you, Lisa Green, for taking me on!!