Jessica “big smarty pants” Irvine has written another blog post on Mumsnet again this week.
This time she’s woman-splaining to us all about three topics; how financially astute she is, how she can lose weight by the magical discovery of eating fewer calories than she burns and how she likes a good stationery order from Office Works.
No, seriously; without a hint of irony, The Sydney Morning Herald has published an article under “economics” where this type of self-indulgent guff is written:
…..I was completing my daily paper-tracking sheet for my food consumption and energy expenditure.
At the end of the day, after I’ve finished eating and calculated my daily calorie deficit, I get to enjoy the immense satisfaction of emblazoning the day’s tracker with a depressible ink stamp that says “ENTERED”.
It continues in the style of a low IQ Jordan Peterson self-help guru:
The desk contains six wooden pigeon holes that house my stamp, my highlighters, my paper receipts for the month and my three paper-based journals.
They are an appointments diary, a gratitude journal and a thoughts journal, into which I periodically spill all my deepest, darkest thoughts. Exposed to the crisp, white pages, these thoughts lose their power. Having identified the thoughts – and the resulting emotions – I journal new, more helpful thoughts to hold.
She also reminds us that she is considerably more intelligent than you and I:
I don’t know about you, but my brain definitely runs faster than my ability to write. By committing to writing things down by hand, therefore, you force your distracted monkey brain to sit.
Hands up who else suspects her lips still move when she reads, though?
The thing is, her Mumsnet post is just a rehash of this self-indulgent shite from two years ago. The only difference is the admission of a love of a tidy desk and coloured pencils.
That’s fair enough, I suppose, the SMH can publish whatever guff they want, but it does seem somewhat tin-eared to print Jessica’s verbosity about her ability to save money during a once in multiple generations recession while there are a record number of Australians registered as unemployed and many more about to join them. Saving money must seem a luxurious memory for those souls.
Not to worry though, we can amuse ourselves with the knowledge that Jessica is stuck inside a shitty two bedroom apartment that she bought at the very top of the property market and is now staring down the barrel of that most depressing of financial situations, negative equity. She hasn’t realised that, if she loses her job now, she’s homeless.
Bill’s Opinion
We’ve learned a lot of things during these months of Kung Flu. In addition to the incompetence of experts and the cowardice of politicians, we can also finally put to rest the notion that anyone employed in the media understands graphs and statistics.
That’s probably why Jessica is writing about crayons and coloured paper, like some teenage girl in a bedroom full of cuddly toys and posters of ponies.
We can’t blame Jessica for not wishing to write about economic reality though, as this updated chart is what it looks like before the government wage subsidies taper off and the unemployment figures start to more accurately reflect what’s been going on since March:
Don’t look down, Jessica.