Sarah Wilson

Four things I like:

* songs in a minor key

* songs about life’s inevitabilites

* new Australian bands (that aren’t force-fed to me by Triple J)

* beautiful, whimsical film clip.

The colours are so pretty. They remind me of my grandmother’s tea cups.

The Middle East is a collective of whimsical kids from Townsville who don’t seem to be trying too hard to prove themselves.

Oh, I really don’t like it when I have to heave my weary self back on my old, pious person horse and declare something a sad indictment on where our vanity has taken us. But this deserves a saddle-up: MAKEUP CLASSES AT HIGH SCHOOLS, SPONSORED BY A COSMETIC BRAND!!!

We debate the role of magazines and models and TV in making young women feel insecure about their looks, but we allow this.

32 all-girl schools around the country have signed up to this branded content. What next? Quadradic equations brought to you by some iphone app?

What’s the issue, you might ask. Young women access this kind of content daily. Makeup tips – rather innocuous, no? Actually, no. Guising this as learning in the school environment normalises the imperative to improve our looks. When information like this is laid on in a forum reserved for learning that’s compulsory we confuse things. Actually, no, we make it quite clear: that enlarging your eyes with a dot of white in the corners of one’s eyes, and emphasising one’s cheekbones with rouge applied below one’s apples is something we should be doing.

Am I ranting for no reason? What do we think?

This week I declutter my background reading

read it now

I can get disproportionately excited about new online devices. Like, a while back, I was frothing about Instapaper, a 2.0 equivalent of the Post It note.

It works like this. You’re wasting time online and stumble upon an interesting blog post or New York Times article. You can’t read it now; you’re meant to be finalising a spreadsheet or something. Printing it out is just wrong. After all, you have one of those Please Consider the Environment email signatures. And you offset your Virgin flights.  Perhaps you could email it to yourself and flag it.  But that seems way too clunky and cluttery.

What to do? Glad you asked. Once you’ve installed Instapaper (three easy online steps, or thereabouts), you simply click a “Read Later” button on your Bookmarks menu and your article is filed in a special folder in cyberspace. For perusal at a more languid juncture.

Is it just the Capricorn in me, or is that really nifty?

200 actors pull off a cute stunt for some video camera brand. The use of Ben Lee’s Catch My Disease is nice. Ben’s a Bondi boy.

And while on the subject (stunts) and in the ‘hood (Bondi beach)… pretty much spot on two years ago I hauled together 1100 women in pink bikinis on Bondi to promote some women’s magazine I used to edit. A grand day! Three dolphins were playing in the waves behind us. See if you can see them…

Nothing like humanity brought together in close proximity. We love it. It makes us smile.

1100 women in bikinis...just because

As a follow-up to the Sunday Life post below in which I ponder why I have a Ken doll displayed amongst religious iconography on an antique toy ironing board in my hallway …Liz the feng shui consultant just posted this:

Ken, it's time to go.

Hi Sarah, It was interesting as I was thinking of you yesterday and that Ken doll!! Ken = perfect man. Is there such a thing?

A very good point. Either I deface Ken. Or Ken goes.

As anyone who follows my column in Sunday Life knows, each week I test a theory or technique for making life better. And as anyone who knows me, I’m taking the quest very seriously. Which means not leaving a perfect Ken doll in my reputation corner, unless I want to be known as someone seeking the impossible. Like a princess, the one with that pea under all those mattresses.

This week I feng shui’d my flat. (And for everyone wanting to know more on this… I had Liz Wiggins of Feng Shui Living, Sydney, come in and give me the rundown. She provides a full report and sends salt cleansers to put in rooms that need some extra help.)

my little corner of clutter. NB: dried roses must go!

So there we were – it was about a year ago – Dad and I, standing by the side of the road hugging a tree. I don’t know if you’ve ever got your inherently skeptical, raised-by-Catholic-nuns father to do this. It’s some feat. Admittedly mine will give most things a shot. In a fug of boredom once I asked to shave his head and he just handed me a razor. And when we were kids he would always let me and my brothers do jumps over him on our BMXs. He loved it.

I’ve always found it easier to do something when boundaries are relaxed. Even if you don’t always take up the hall pass, it’s good to know I have the choice. 

In the last little bit I’ve been steering my eating toward organic options as much as possible. It’s not easy. And it’s blooody expensive. At times I’ve thought, is this worth it? I mean, I live in a big, polluted city, my mobile is pressed to my ear much of the day and I eat my bacon carcinogenic-crisp (yeah, yeah, I know). Do the chemical savings earnt from a $7 cabbage negate this toxic baseline?

So I liked this list posted by integrative medicine font Dr Andrew Weil: 12 foods You Don’t Have To Buy Organic. It gives me room to move.

• Broccoli
• Eggplant
• Cabbage
• Banana