“Ex-teacher resentenced to prison for raping teen”

So another teacher/student relationship is making the rounds of the news. And of course the word rape is being used liberally.

This has to stop.

From the story: “The two had sex for three months in late 2007”. The girl was 14. She wanted to have sex with the teacher, but 14 is too young to be making that call.

It’s a bad thing. Agreed.

The teacher should be punished. Agreed.

But there are heaps of combinations of letters. I think we have the scope to come up with a new word to describe this sort of thing. Because ‘rape’ already has a meaning in the minds of us English-speaking humans. And that is to fuck someone when the other person doesn’t want to be fucked. It’s a powerful word. Rough and bold and reprehensible.

So when you take a word like ‘rape’ and say, oh well actually it can also mean sex where one of the people was under x years old, then suddenly all rapes are potentially a beautiful love story where the two lovers are at opposite ends of high school.

Do we want to dilute rape like that? Do we want to water it down and make it not that bad?

But nothing will change. What sane journalist is going to take RAPE out of their headline because they think maybe the reader will have a different definition of the word to the meaning in the context of their story.

Ladies, oh ladies. You’re not going to like this one.

There is, it would seem, an itty-bitty gap between what the average male earns and what the average female earns. It’s easy enough to believe that this is because chicks are undervalued, and/or that men are jerks and under-paying broads to assert their jerkiness.

But I care to differ. I think what has happened is that the labour market has become efficient (the first sentence is about 80% of the gist of it).

Read it? Good. So the market ‘knows’ the value of a company and reflects that in the share price. Pretty amazing when you think about it. People yelling and screaming, buying and selling, building faster and faster machines to trade shares in milliseconds, but the market doesn’t care. The share price will be what it wants it to be. A share price can’t be wrong, right?

And so the gender salary gap adjusts itself accordingly. But what is the extra information that the market has its grubby little hands on? Why has the market decided that girls should get less money? What could there be that makes a woman worth less?

Nothing. You idiot. That’s the wrong question. Who let you in here, anyway?

The average woman isn’t worth less. She needs less. (Yes, Jim Jeffries got my mind a wanderin’ down this track.)

It’s the men that are paying for dinner, buying the big cars, buying you dresses so you stop wearing that awful $12 thing you got in Thailand that reminds you of ‘when we used to have fun’.

Let’s do some sums. Average salary: $60k? I’ve got no idea. Average wage gap? Let’s call it 18%. So the ladies be takin’ home somewhere around $6k less after tax per year. End result $120 a week less to the fairer sex. $60 per labia.

Hmm, $120 you say… That sounds suspiciously similar to half the cost of dinner and a movie with a few drinks and a cab ride home.

Are you ready, it’s about to get magical…*

Let us all, together, think of the last 10 dates we went on. Not ‘date night’, don’t be lame. I’m talking about with someone that you don’t share toilet paper with. Now make a mental note of how much you spent on those 10 dates compared to the total cost. You see where I’m going with this? You probably don’t.

This is the extra information that the market has. It has notihng to do with gender. Oh happy days! No, the gap in salary is tied to the gap in paying for things. The market adjusts. I’m gonna copy paste: It has notihng to do with gender.**

When I was fresh out of highschool, there were fellas that didn’t like to get their wallet out when it was their turn to go to the bar. Zero-or-more decades later and guess who’s earning more? Nuffin’ to do with gender.

Show me a woman that sees no reason why the man should pay any more and you’ve got the kind of lady that’s earnin’ like the boys.

Find yourself a lady that believes the man is expected to pay and you’ll find a woman whining about glass ceilings while drinking the glass of wine you just bought her.

If you know a man that thinks it’s the role of the woman to pay well, I’m not even sure what that poor misguided twit could do for a living. Is loneliness a job?

So you see, the market knows. We don’t know how it knows, but it does.

* Oh my god, there really is a need for a question comma

** I even left the typo in so you knew I’d copy pasted.

As I walked from my bus to work one frosty morn’, I passed a homeless man reading a book, and thought to myself “oh, I wish I had more time to read”*

That’s right, I lamented my lack of leisure time. I didn’t notice that he was soaked from the rain, had no shoes, or that the book was upside down. I think that makes me an awful person. How does one go about finding out if they’re an awful person.

Also, where are all the homeless women? My efforts to find a homeless Asian was a bust, but I kind of get why. All Asians are good at math, and really, if you do the sums, being homeless is a pretty bad idea. So maybe you just don’t see the homeless women because they’re, like, stay at homeless mums. CEO of their home(less). Yeah, I don’t know.

I saw my favourite homeless guy on the weekend coming out of a 7-Eleven with two litres of milk. Milk, you may have noticed, is one of those substances that cannot be consumed on it’s own. By all means, pour yourself a tall glass of milk. Sit at your weird wooden table that’s kind of in the kitchen but not really, and sip sip sip until the glass is empty. On your own. With, like, no music playing or anything. You’ll be collecting butterflies and taking photos of people watching TV from behind a camellia in their backyard in no time. Fucking weirdo.

This leads me to believe that the homeless man had something for the milk to go with. But what! Cornflakes? That, in turn, needs a bowl (I’ve tried, cornflakes and milk really needs a bowl). This man doesn’t have a bowl. Coffee? How much milk does he have with his coffee? Even if he’s having lattes, that’s still many many litres of coffee. And WHERE IS THE COFFEE MACHINE! Maybe it’s to feed the ducks and he thought they’d had enough bread. But WHERE ARE THE DUCKS! Maybe he showers in it and just grossly misunderstands some things that are obvious to you and I.

Oh my it’s all such a mystery. I just hope that the milk didn’t go to waste. No word of a lie, when I walked out of the 7-Eleven behind him with my 600ml of milk, I felt a little milk envy.

* “Thought to myself”. Who the fuck else would I be thinking to?

I was in the shower; soaping myself up. I’d finished, and was putting the bar of soap back in its container. This made me laugh. The shape of the soap – rectangular with rounded corners – in the soap holder – rectangular with rounded corners. The insanity of everything came into focus. That nothing fits together, that everything fits together. Maybe a sane thought sprung to mind. If it did, I didn’t notice at the time. But oh my, I laughed.

And then I cried. And fuck me did I cry. So deep. I thought, until I was cold and the pain came, about the word deep. So often are there no words to describe how I feel. There’s something nice about that. I can’t be bound by language! I’m a complex human fucking being! But no. Today, ‘deep’ did it for me. Deep was the sorrow that I felt. Deep was the joy, at nothing. That depth of sorrow and joy, it’s uncomfortable; it’s not right. Not at the same time. Not today.

I have no right to be this happy, crying on the floor in my bathroom. The blood tastes nice and I know this is wrong. I shouldn’t like this. But fuck it’s good. I love it. My skin is tingling at the thought of it.

I bit harder to see if I could. Something cracked. It’s nice, the pain. I lift it up and let my head drop to the tiles. The world stutters, like it isn’t sure. It’s nice.

I don’t know, I can’t articulate … the lack of connection to it all. Is that what I mean? The thought that I’m so different to the rest of you that I can’t possibly matter. This thought seemed magical.

I know, these words don’t work. But it was magical.

I can taste metal. Like a watch. I can taste time, I remember thinking. Then I don’t remember for a while.

I’m shivering, it’s broad daylight, the pain isn’t good any more.

I stand up and it’s the worst moment of my life. I won’t even try to make it words.

The soap in the dish. So without meaning. The fact that the soap is a rectangle with rounded corners, the soap dish is a rectangle with rounded corners, and the fact that I exist.

That you exist.

It all seems like there’s some connection. That there’s some reason. But there isn’t. It’s all just a mistake, we’re all a mistake. A star exploded and we met; any meaning is imagined.

The soap dish doesn’t need the soap, and this world doesn’t need me.

You don’t need me.