Bowling Is Meant To Be Fun

On the weekend, Katy and I took our nephew out bowling. We were about halfway through the game when a boy (maybe 14yo) came up to our lane and picked up the bowling ball I had been using off our rack. At first I thought he was being silly, but when he turned to walk away with my bowling ball, I stopped him and said that I was still using it.

As he put it back down, I heard his mother (or who I assume was his mother) whisper angrily at him “Over there” and point at the wall behind us where all the spare bowling balls were.

I was a bit put off by the mother’s reaction, so I watched him as he picked his ball and went back to his lane and immediately start bowling. By himself. And I don’t just mean that he was the only one bowling (which is true as well), but it was as if his mother wasn’t even in the same room. The whole time she sat virtually unmoving except for her fingers on her mobile phone, either playing some inane game (that didn’t seem to bring any pleasure to her judging from her facial expression) or sending messages to people more important than her son standing in front of her.

You've got to fight for the one you love

I used to watch coverage of awards shows and always be amazed that some of the actors/musicians had been in long-term relationships, whereas most of them seemed to only be able to have fairly short ones. I actually felt that the celebrities that did stick and work on their relationships had more integrity. And in a way, I still think that.

Romantic relationships are a funny thing. Although there are plenty of arguments on how love changes and advances or whether there is only one “the one” for each of us, the fact remains that relationships go through difficult times. Even the best relationships go through difficult times. And if you’re in that difficult time in a relationship, you are faced with a simple decision - do you work on the problems and try and get out of that difficult time, or do you end the relationship. Simply (and evolutionarily) put: fight or flight.

Haiti

There is something extremely distressing about natural disasters, especially when they end the lives of large numbers of people. Although I haven’t been entirely tuned into everything about the earthquake in Haiti, it has really affected me. I cried when I watched one of the news reports mainly because of the pleading screams of people stuck in the rubble, desperate for help and escape.

The last catastrophe of this magnitude was the tsunami in 2004 that resulted in approximately 200,000 dying.

I don’t know if it is because Haiti is a lot further away from us than Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and all the other countries affected by that tsunami, but this tragedy in Haiti doesn’t seem to be entering into the public Australian conscience nearly as much. And I feel kind of guilty that I haven’t really paid all that much attention to it.

There are varying estimates of how many people have died in the earthquake (30,000 to 200,000), but they have reported that 3 million people have been directly affected by it. That is almost completely unfathomable. Its like if everyone that attended the grand finals of both the AFL and NRL died in one major event.

I’m not really writing this to make any deep points or extol anyone that happens to read it to donate money to the cause. I’m just upset about it and need to write something.