In one you have to sell yourself, who you are, what you stand for and why they should want you. In the other you have to be charming, attractive and generally make a new friend. Ironically the first one is dating the second is the job interview.

But one thing is true in both circumstances:

Say one wrong thing and you’re gone.

During one phone call prior to a job interview I was asked if I had any questions. Trap number one. I stupidly said that I was interested to know if there would be other avenues in the company after the 12 month contract ended. I could hear the lead balloon land between us. “Well,” the woman on the other end retorted. “We do want someone who is actually interested in the advertised position”. Bugger.

They never did call about that interview.

Similarly, I was on a date once with this guy and he happened to mention he liked the Hilltop Hoods. Full respect to the band and their talent for their genre, but I can’t stand them or their genre. The bloke was gone that instant. “I’m not listening to the Hilltop Hoods for the rest of my life,” I declared internally. I don’t doubt I’ve been the victim of similar petty decisions. But some things are just deal breakers.

Funnily enough it’s always the job interviews that seem to go badly and the dates that are even worse that always bear fruit. I remember the interview for my current job. I teared up a bit when talking about my passion for the industry. I felt it was too corny and not what was expected of a tough journo. But hey it must have worked in my favour because I got the job. There are plenty of couples out there who spent their first date in the emergency department or broken down of the side of the road who made it through.

So when dating or job searching take heed: if one thing goes wrong, you’re done for. But if everything goes wrong, hey it’s just the beginning.

But then I thought about John Howard’s eyebrows. Remember how just after he got elected, he trimmed them and became a little bit more popular. In the 24-hour news cycle Julia Gillard’s glasses have become such a talking point, because it’s the one thing we’ve seen that’s different. She still rolls up at the same photo ops in high-vis and hard hats, drolls out the same talking points and gets asked about the polls.

The glasses bug me because it’s such a cynical move. Is she trying to appear more smart to the Australian public? Is it some kind of image make over to  improve her ratings in the polls? Doesn’t she realise it’s completely transparent to the Australian public? (Excuse the pun) “She’s trying to look smarter” I can hear nannas chirping in the lounge rooms around the country.

My flatmate reckons that even though we can explicitly see the image makeover, the glasses are also working at a subconscious level. While we can see the glasses, the message on a subconscious lebel is that she’s changed, she’s different. We are apparently seeing the real Julia.

The thing we have discussed in journalism circles about Julia Gillard is that she is one of those people who don’t come across well on television and are actually much nicer in person. The subject came up when we interviewed a national athlete with a real boy-next-door image. In the public eye, he is beloved. In person he was cold, perfunctory and really not that fun to meet. When my colleagues met Ms Gillard however they spoke of a really warm and lovely lady who you just couldn’t help but like. It’s perculiar to me that that is not what comes across on television.

To me she appears to be, on television, just another career politician. You know, those pollies who drank the Liberal or Labor kool-aid at a very young age. It becomes all about their party, their party is always right and the other party always totally wrong. It’s all very 1984. They are there just to get a seat in Parliament and once they’re there it is simply all about keeping their seat. Say anything the electorate want to hear, without committing to anything real, just to keep your seat. And keep your seat just to keep your party in power. Stick to the talking points because you don’t want to get anyone in a marginal seat offside. And whatever you do don’t dare actually vote with your conscience on anything, at all. Or say what you think.

I always imagined that if I went into politics it would have to be for a particular cause. Say for example, to improve accommodation services for the disabled. You get in, you do it, say over two terms and you get out and let someome else in to fix their bit.

I think the “career” politician is one of the things broken with Australian politics. We have this outdated system where the two main parties only represent one element of society – the working world. You’re either a worker or an entrepreneur and that’s it. There is very little, or at least disproportionate, representation of religion, recreation, families, educators, designers, creators etc etc

If you look at Ms Gillard’s policies it does appear that she stands for a very many things and wants to change them and really not a career politician very much at all. But whether you agree with her or not, having any real discussion of those policies seems to be eclipsed by a seven-second news grabs in high-vis vests and discussions of glasses-wearing.

At the end of the day she might just be wearing them because she’s run out of contacts.

“I think I’ll put up a poster of myself now,” she said.

With that one sentence Stephens encapsulated what it is to have a healthy self-esteem. She had along admired Williams and when all her hard work paid off and she, in an upset, beat Williams she gave herself the credit that was sorely due. Albeit a little tongue in cheek.

So many of us waste so much time and energy beating ourselves up, denying our achievements and trying be humble because we feel like we’re supposed to for religious or social reasons. But no one thought badly of Stephens yesterday because she had earned her victory.

The concept of self-esteem is one that has eluded me for many years. Oft told I didn’t have enough of it, it has been this intangible notion I have always sought to understand. The chase has been made all the more difficult because I have a lot of self-confidence, but as I have discovered it’s not the same as self-esteem.

The difference between self-confidence and self-esteem is the first and hardest lesson to learn. A person can be really brave, really loud and have a lot of faith in their abilities but it doesn’t mean they have self-esteem.  In fact sometimes I have probably been guilty of being over-confident, even arrogant, while at the same time harboring very low self-esteem. Self-confidence is something  a person projects outwards. Self-esteem comes from a deep belief within.

But why should self-esteem matter? Isn’t a little bit of humility a good thing? Blessed are the meek and all that. Well here’s a few of reasons why it has mattered. 1) I accepted less than I deserved in a relationship because I didn’t think I was worthy of more. 2) I have never been able to ask for a pay rise because I never believed I deserved it. 3) I’ve always had problems with getting and keeping friends because I just don’t feel good enough. 4) I don’t set enough boundaries in all sorts of interactions because, I have realised, deep down I believe I deserve to be treated that way. And finally, it’s hard to for a person to find a partner who loves them if they don’t believe they deserve to be loved. Instead people pick someone who doesn’t really love them and think the ones that do actually love them are just stupid. They don’t go after the person they really like because deep down they don’t believe they have a chance.

Men don’t seem to have the same issue that women have with self-esteem. I’m not sure why. If you look at advertising and marketing though “ordinary blokes” are often celebrated. They are hapless, clumsy, beer-gutty and almost lazy in most commercials. This is the world telling men they are just fine the way they are. I think the world i.e. parents, girlfriends etc tell men this a lot. I don’t need to get into a discussion of marketing to women. We all know it’s about making us feel less than we are, so we buy buy buy stuff to make us more. And maybe men just have an unwavering belief in self that we don’t have. Even the not-so-confident men seem to believe deep down they’re pretty s–t-hot.

A friend once explained to me that it’s all about self-esteem in and self-esteem out. So if a person has a bad day, are tired, have been working hard and looking after others – that’s self-esteem out. So they have to do things to take care of themselves to put it back in – have a bath, get a massage, get their nails done, play some sport, eat well etc. That makes sense because stress will make it harder to feel good about oneself and a person does have to do things to look after themselves.

Hippy-dippy self-help books suggest writing a list of all the things you like about yourself. I tried that but came up with a very trite list that included items such as: “I have nice ankles. They are not cankles”.

For so long I thought the answer to my self-esteem problems was fixing the things I thought were wrong with me. Getting my eyelids fixed, my bite fixed, my boobs done. If I was just a bit nicer to people more people would like me. Just work a bit harder and the boss will notice and give me a pay rise. But the problem with that is the list never ends.

The finally, the other day, I think I struck self-esteem paydirt. I wrote a letter to myself but as the man of my dreams. I wrote all the things I imagined in an ideal world he would love about me and all the qualities I wanted him to see in me. I thought about the qualities I wanted him as an individual to value. Big boobs were not on the list. Nor were small eyelids, a flat belly or a slightly more attractive bite. But there were things like my big, loud laugh, my compassion, my career and my organisational skills. In fact, there were two pages worth. Do you know what I realised? I am pretty damn loveable.

Maybe I’ll put a poster of me on my wall too.

So here was my list for 2012:

Write a book

UNTICK

Launch my blog

TICK

Write one blog a week

SEMI TICK (I’m up to like 47 posts, so from 52 weeks of the year that ain’t bad)

Get it to make money

UNTICK (but all donations welcomed)

Get one freelance article published

http://www.mamamia.com.au/style/i-think-theres-a-reason-i-have-three-black-singlets/

TICK

Sit the HSK exams, and pass

TICK

Get engaged

TICK (ohkay I also go un-engaged but technically it still counts)

Weigh 62kg

TICK (I was only 62kg for like a month post un-engagment but it also still counts)

Go to Vietnam

TICK

Have a great 30th

TICK

So barring the unwritten book this year I think I did okay. My year certainly didn’t turn out the way I thought it would so it’s interesting to me just how many things I did manage to achieve.  So I will I make goals for 2013? I think so, I’ll let you know how I went next year.

I wish you best of luck with your 2013 resolutions.

And so began my level one Mandarin HSK exam last weekend. The HSK exams are the official Chinese Government exams. After a couple of years of informal study my study mate and I decided it was time to formalise our hobby. Chris, a doctor, was a little ahead of me and sat the level two exams so it was just 30-year-old me and four nine-year-olds in the level one exam. For the record, I think I passed but I did have to ask one of my classmates if I could borrow her rubber a couple of times.

It has often been said that English is the hardest language in the world to learn. As someone who has mastered English let me tell you English is a bloody breeze compared to Mandarin. English is thought to be difficult to master because we have so many exceptions to the rule. That may be true but it is also a bendy language that has been so raped in the 21st century you can just about get away with anything. Even changing from first to second person mid-sentence.

Mandarin is difficult for a number of reasons. The first is tone. Anyone who has tried to crack a joke in a SMS can tell you that conveying tone is very important. In Mandarin every sound can be said in one of five different tones: some words go up at the end like a woman finishing a sentence, others are said at a constant high pitch and some are said like you are barking an order. Say the same sound in any one of the five different tones and you could be talking about things as disparate as your mother or a horse.

This use of tone means that if you do want to ask a question you can’t go up at the end of a sentence like in English or it will change the meanings of the words. The Chinese actually had to invent a preposition to indicate they are asking a question. So “Cup of tea mum?” becomes “Cup of tea mum ‘ma’?”. This brings me to prepositions. The Chinese don’t really seem to like prepositions so there aren’t that many and it’s an absolute stumbling block when trying to translate English sentences which are wound around prepositions like a tomato vine. My basic rule of thumb when translating English into Chinese is to first change your sentence to a Yoda sentence and then translate. So “Cup of tea mum, would you like?” well not quite, a direct translation is more like “Mum, you like to drink tea ‘ma’?”

Finally it’s important to note Chinese characters are not phonetic. So you can’t just sound stuff out. They are symbolic so reading Chinese is a lot like reading hieroglyphics. Good luck there.

But enough whingeing. As a result of my Mandarin study I have learned a couple of major things 1)  Don’t give migrants a hard time for struggling with English. If they’ve masted Mandarin they have my respect. 2) Don’t give migrants a hard time for struggling with English because learning any new language is really, really hard. I’ve been learning for four years and I still really suck. 3) If you’re going to learn a new language start young, because it’s way too embarrassing sitting entry level tests at age 30. 4) Once you can speak another language you can eaves drop on other people’s conversations without them realising. During recent trips to Sydney I overheard two different Mandarin conversations. Do you know what I realised? These people are not foreign or scary (not that I ever thought they were) but rather they are talking about the same inane shit we all talk about. The first conversation was a woman who couldn’t decide what to give her kids for tea because one liked this food and the other liked another food. The second was a woman in a nail parlour who couldn’t decide whether to keep dyeing her hair because it was too expensive.

So there you go. Be thankful if you don’t speak two languages because it just means you will be forced to overhear more stupid conversations on public transport than you already do.

This got me thinking do I feel discriminated, or have I ever been discriminated against, at work? The conclusion I came to sadly, was yes. I can summarise my experience in two words “good girl”. For some reason since the day I first became a journalist I have had this phrase said to me time and time again. For the record, yes, I probably am a good girl (most of the time). But never once have I heard a young male colleague called “good boy”. Do a good job on a story and someone rings me up and says “oh you’re a good girl”. Help someone out “good girl”. At first I thought it was because I was a young, green cadet. I’m thirty now with a decade of experience under my belt and still I get the phrase “good girl” thrown my way.  (Maybe this is because of my incredibly young sounding voice, but still).

I also get “love”, “pet”, “dahl”, “sweetie”, “lovie” and the list goes on, from some women too. Look I’m terrible with names too but why not just run with the ubiquitous “mate”.

The particular problem I have with “good girl” is it speaks to the oft-discussed madonna-whore syndrome. This is where men, and some women, can only view women in two roles. They are either a a slut, ie a bad girl, or a saint, ie a good girl. There’s no room for the spectrum of personalities and moods that lie in between. The fact it’s “good girl” and not “good woman” also points to an incredibly condescending and patronising tone to the phrase. Imagine if I was interviewing some returned World War II veteran and finished the interview with “nice old man”, it just wouldn’t be acceptable, yet this god-awful term remains.

I have subjects tell me I “sound young” on the phone, not something solely experienced by girls, but particularly acute to them. But that’s all dealing with the public and let’s face it we journos may like people, but we hate the public.

In the office it’s much more difficult to pinpoint. If, as a woman, you are overlooked for a job in favour of a man it’s very hard to tell whether it’s sexism or whether it’s just you. The tendency for women to believe that it’s us in all situations tends to make us lean towards it not being sexism. But perhaps our fervour at JG’s speech vocalised what we had all been thinking deep down, that maybe there is a bit of sexism, subconscious prejudice and even outright misogyny going on.

It has felt to me lately that misogyny has become rife in society. Apparently it’s okay to refer to women as anything and everything from “the ball and chain” to “gashes”. Women are becoming increasingly objectified both at their own hand and the hand of men.  Women are getting breast implants, dying their hair blonde, getting spray tans and acting dumb, or being dumb, all in the name of getting ahead. And succeeding. Reality TV is case in point. Some are just realists and accept the superficial nature of society and do what they have to survive. Others don’t seem to know better or just want male attention. This objectification seems to lead popular culture down an alley where it is increasingly accepted to make fun of women.

But where I start to get confused is show’s like Mrs Brown’s Boys. Why do men find it so funny to dress up like women? Think The Footy Show, sketch comedy in general and Priscilla. You hardly ever see women dressing up as men, unless pant suits count. Is it a case of imitation is the highest form of flattery? In that case does that mean men like us or want to be us? Or are they just trying to show us our foibles through satire.

I know women can make fun of men too. We joke about man-flu and we all love the MereMale-type stories that form the fodder of conversations over coffee. But , from my perspective at least, it is all light-hearted. But I don’t know, from men, the rhetoric seems so vitriolic. It makes me wonder what did we do to make them hate us so much. Do they resent the sexual power we have over them? In the modern era they have to get permission to have sex with us and maybe it’s all too much hard work. Do they resent our place in the workplace? We seized the opportunity history has afforded us and men, who take their place for granted and achieve mere mediocrity, feel emasculated in comparison to our own success. Maybe being a nice guy in modern Australian is just considered “gay”, to put it in their words.

I was recently given some relationship advice from a friend. She said “never be too competent”. What she meant was don’t be too on top of everything in a relationship. Leave some things for the man to do so he feels needed and useful.

What?

Why should I be punished with the loss of a partner because I am competent and organised.  And seriously, what do the logistics of life in a relationship matter. So I can cook and clean and still hold down a job, and ring a plumber to fix the toilet if needed.(For the record I have never  been particularly at any of those things). What has that got to do with the actual relationship? People say you should ask yourself what you bring to a relationship and what you get out of it. It shouldn’t matter whether you are capable of hanging a picture frame or not. What should matter are shared interests, mutual respect, the same values and supporting each other through life.

Which brings me back to misogyny. What hope does any relationship in this country have when we continue to engage in a dialogue that breeds mutual disrespect, even hatred, for the people in our lives we are supposed to love the most.

The first kind of magnet is the tomato sauce magnet. Apparel embedded with this magnet are almost always white or cream and the minute a person bites into a pie, sausage roll or steak sandwich it immediately attracts the tomato sauce in a drip-like pattern down the front and centre of the garment. The magnet is especially strong in the first half of the day to ensure wearers spend the second half of the day with an orange streak running down the centre of their clothes.

The next kind of magnet is the beetroot magnet. It knows whenever I have gained enough confidence to jab my dinner fork into a piece of sliced beetroot that has moved just past the point of being appropriately-sized for my fork. In the five seconds it takes to go from my fork to my mouth the beetroot will start shaking like a wobble board under the force of the magnet. Just as I open my mouth the attraction will be at its greatest and the beetroot will land right in the middle of my chest on the brand new item of clothing, leaving a perfectly round-shaped purple patch.

The next magnet is much more subversive than the first two. It waits until the garment in question has been washed and is mid-washing cycle, waiting to be ironed. When the ironer is about half-way through the washing basket the ironer will reach the garment that contains this magnet. The ironer will make no adjustments to the iron but just as they ironer places the iron on the particularly expensive garment the magnet will activate. It will attract all the rusty water from within the iron onto the front lapel. These magnets are always on the front side of the garment to ensure total destruction, every time.

Corporate function venues also seem to be plagued with magnetic carpet. This carpet seems to be unmistakably drawn to the cutlery of the venue. It ensures that just as I am about to dive into a chocolate praline dessert the table spoon is immediately drawn to the floor rendering it useless. (It would be a social sin to pick it up off the floor and use it). The carpet also seems to know when the opportunity of getting a replacement spoon is at its lowest. The only option is to then stare dumbly at the delectable dessert placed in front of me.

Sometimes my clothes magnets seem to work in harmony with the floor magnets. Working together they ensure that when a gravy-laden knife is summoned to the floor that it backflips between my shirt and skirt on its way there.

These seem to be the same magnets that make toast always land buttered-side down, pegs fall out of my hand, knives slip and attract my head to walls and doorways.

Now some people might say that the theory presented here has nothing to do with magnetic forces. Rather it’s related to ridiculous concepts like gravity, fine motor skills, focus and cutting up my dinner properly. But I dispute all of that. It’s the magnets, I swear.

If you were to literally “future-proof” your life you would be proofing against having a future. That is, trying not to have one. To literally future-proof, a person would technically commit suicide (and I do not recommend that).

Figuratively it’s also just as difficult to future proof. Anyone who has ever lost someone in an expected or unexplained tragedy and asked the question “why” knows that often in life there are things that simply cannot be predicted. You cannot insure yourself against pain in life no matter how many precautions you take, how many people you try to keep out of your heart or how many partners you ask not to hurt you.

You cannot future proof against corporate redundancies, car accidents and breast cancer. I’m sure no one ever considered the Pacific Highway at Somersby might simply give way in floods or that a coal ship might wash up on Nobbys Beach. Even the Newcastle Earthquake was a surprise. Nuclear energy was going to save the world before Chernobyl happened.

I recently interviewed a former chair of GPT, Boral and Centennial Coal. He told me that as part of corporate boards they often run “worst-case” scenarios for potential financial investments. He said even they, the top boards in Australia, were unable to predict the extent and reach of the global financial crisis. In essence, even they didn’t see it coming.

And if they didn’t see it coming then little old me who put an extra $20 a week into superannuation for my super co-contribution was definitely shocked when all that extra work turned to dust. The little nest-egg I had for “future Alison” halved when the global financial crisis hit.

So a television advertisement for a no-name superannuation company promising to be able to “future-proof” the retirement savings of people makes me laugh. But I don’t know who to laugh at more: the company making the promise or the retirees, now aged over 65, who still haven’t realised that there is not future-proofing against life.

What would you like to future-proof against?