So This Is Christmas

It's been a bit dreary on this blog lately I know, and I'm afraid things aren't going to improve any time soon as far as I can tell.

I'm still not really having a good time with things. It's got to the point where my doctor has given me a medical certificate to present to Centrelink declaring that I am unfit for work for the next three months. She also advised me to take 3 weeks off immediately.

The certificate will give me some respite from having to look for 10 jobs a fortnight. I'll still look for work, I have to, but as working on just one application for the past two days has made me realise, I am genuinely not capable of one per day. That application utterly exhausted me. I wanted to sleep forever after I submitted it. And then I wanted to burst into tears.

The payment that I will eventually receive from Centrelink won't be enough to even pay my rent. I worked out that even with the bits of research work I might get I'll be able, perhaps, to have around $100 per fortnight left over.

Obviously I have to find someone to move into the room that is currently my study, so I can eke some more room into my budget. I'm not worried about giving up the room, but since my last disastrous attempt to share accommodation, I'm gun-shy about potential flatmates. Repeat to self: 'Your last flat mate was not representative of people in general'. I'll need to prepare a good list of questions for interviewing applicants. I'll need to remind myself not to dismiss my intuition when a passing comment indicates potential incompatibility.

***
On Christmas eve, I'm going to a friend's place for dinner. I'll enjoy that.

For Christmas, I'm spending the day with my sisters and niece. I'm looking forward to that.

Then between Christmas and New Year, I'm going to Coochiemudlo for a couple of nights to visit some friends. I am dying for that.

In the first week of the year I'm going to use the free tickets to a day session at the Brisbane International that someone I know from Twitter so very generously sent my way. That will be fun, as I've never been to a professional tennis match before.

So, things aren't wonderful--I am scarily broke--but there'll be a few lovely moments with some friends and family that, hopefully, will go some way to restoring me for the year ahead.

Merry Christmas.

Dreams and Fairytales

Last night I had a conversation with my niece, H, for over two hours.

I'd called her mother to discuss the last minute details of H's birthday party, which I'm hosting tomorrow, and she was impatient to talk to me, picking up the other extension and giggling cheekily over the line.

F & I had to tell her to wait for a bit because we had secret surprises to plan.

After we grown-ups had finished organising the Princess-themed party, the preparations for which I will blog about in another post, I settled in for a Friday evening of listening to H.

H will be 7 in a few days and her life has changed a great deal over the past year or so.

She started school and now she's reading. Over the phone, she read me six short books. They were a series of cookbooks that join together in a jigsaw. I learned recipes for, among other things, Easy-peasy Pizza and Strawberry Cups. When she didn't know a word she would spell it to me and I'd tell her what it was. She'd spell out '1-2-5-g-slash-going-to-the-right (I-know-my-right-and-left-now) 4-o-z'.

She noted that there was a 'dot-thing' between a couple of words. I clarified that it was a comma: a dot with a tail. She asked me what a comma was. I said it was part of what's known as punctuation. She asked me what punctuation was. I started to explain about full-stops and exclamation marks. She said that she knew about three of those kinds of marks: full-stops, exclamation marks ('a line with a dot') and question marks. Later in our conversation, she amended her knowledge to four, telling me she knew about hyphens too.

The other major change in H's life recently is that her parents have divorced after a separation of one year.

She told me about a bad dream she had. It was long and frightening.

The conversation came about because she asked me if there were crocodiles at my place. I said there probably was, because there's a gully in the back yard. She asked me what a gully was. I explained.

She told me she was afraid of water now because that's where eels lived. I asked if she'd ever seen an eel. And that's when she told me her dream.

Today as I was shopping for the party, I thought about H's dream, where she rescued her mother, sacrificing her own life, to keep her from being harmed by all manner of scary creatures. I recalled that on the phone H had said that she would do exactly the same for her mother if her dream happened in real life.

As I was waiting for the bus home after shopping, this Joni Mitchell song popped into my head:

Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air
And feather canons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun they rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

Dear John Hughes

I'm still unable to update Twitter from the main web page. Apparently there's a problem for some Firefox users, so I guess I'm one of them. I could use the Safari browser I suppose, but I've decided I quite like the idea of being prompted by the tweets of people I follow on Twitter to reflect in more depth (or perhaps just at greater length) about life, the universe, and everything.

The tweet that prompted my line of thought today:


Well, I have to admit that it made me tear up rather a lot and it got me thinking about my own experience of John Hughes. I didn't have any direct correspondence with him the way Alison did, but at least three of his films were very important to me in my senior years of high school. In 1985 I began Grade 11 and that was the year The Breakfast Club was released. I remember going to the cinema with my friends and we all identified with those characters, their insecurities and their dreams, their desire to be different.


The next year we went to see Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Watching Ferris Bueller, I suppose I just wished I'd had his chutzpah, his ingenuity, not only to wrangle a day off school, but to go all out and celebrate that day, dragging his girlfriend and his genuinely sick friend along for the adventure, and infuriating his sister along the way.


It was joyful celebration of youth, and just writing about it now, I've got a such a grin on my face that it's crinkling my eyes. The lengths Ferris goes to, to fool his teachers, prefigure Hughes's later Home Alone series, but I think the best moment is when Ferris suddenly appears atop a float in a street parade, writhing and lip-syncing to Twist and Shout. Ha! LOL!

Now I probably identify more with the teacher at the school: 'Anyone. Anyone'.


I wasn't as enamoured with Pretty in Pink as a film as I was with its soundtrack. I still think it's one of the best film soundtracks ever.



Not that I've had an ongoing knowledge of film soundtracks, but what's a blog for if not to indulge in a bit of hyperbole?

Anyway, I wanted to include a clip of Echo and the Bunnymen's Bring on the Dancing Horses, which was amongst my favourite songs on the soundtrack but I could only find a live version from years later where the lead singer was smoking while singing, which no doubt accounts for his completely shot voice.

There is a clip of the original video but in their continued fear of and confusion about YouTube, WMG has ordered the sound to be muted. (Is there any point in railing against this short-sighted practice? Is there any point in suggesting that no-one would make any money off the clip if the audio was available, and nor would it prevent WMG making money from the song? Who knows, perhaps by not infuriating people with corporate standover tactics and being generous enough to allow people to indulge in their nostalgia for the song, well, people might come over all warm and fuzzy and even go out and buy it again? Bah!)

Here's the closest I could get to it: a mashup of Bring on the Dancing Horses and Snow Patrol's Chocolate.




RIP John Hughes.

On Not Being A-Twitter

I woke up this morning and, as I usually do, I turned my computer on and made my way to the kitchen to brew my first coffee of the day. With the coffee pot sitting atop a flame, waiting to work its magic, I returned to the computer to open Firefox and then click on the bookmark I have for a direct connection to Twitter.

I sat before my Twitter feed, clicking the "more" button at the bottom of the page until it revealed all the tweets I had not read since the previous evening. The first thing I learned from Twitter this morning was, via @mashable, that Twitter had been subject to a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). I wasn't terribly sure what that was so I clicked through to have a read.

It didn't sound good and I was heartily pleased that it had passed Australia by while I was sleeping.

Then I read @Duddy's question, where she wondered what a DDoS was. Since I like to be helpful :-p I replied to her, offering the link to Mashable by way of explanation. The trouble began when I tried to send the update.

I've had glitches like this with Twitter before and sometimes all it takes is refreshing the page then attempting the tweet again. It's usually successful, but not this time.

Still, I was undeterred and kept on reading my feed. I came across a link posted by @deepwarren to Go Fug Yourself. She thought that the featured dress, designed by Armani and worn by Fergie of the Black-eyed Peas, resembled a bath towel. I was eager to give my opinion that it looked especially like a bath mat, not only because of the texture of the material, but because of the fringe around the hem.

I composed my thoughts in a concise 140 characters to @deepwarren and, again, the tweet failed to update.

Now I began to think that perhaps there was a problem with the reply function, so I tried out a straight-forward tweet, begging the indulgence of my followers for clogging their feeds with a test message. If only I had been able to.

I took a break from Twitter, for as long as I could stand--probably about as long as it took me to close down the browser and restart my computer--but to no avail. Twitter did not want to work for me today.

I had a look in their help section and it turns out that my problem was a known issue for some accounts. *sigh* I would have to wait it out.

I had a bit of a lament on Facebook, which garnered me instant sympathy (thank you Zoe!) And I did all the things I normally do in a working day but without participating in the conversations I've become used to as I work from my computer.

Oh, how I missed being able twitter away today, sharing a mood or expressing the gastronomical delights of my breakfast. I could eavesdrop and follow links, but it wasn't as enjoyable as starting a chocolate ear-worm and participating in the common experience of a shared craving, which is what happened yesterday:

It was just nice that this apparently silly conversation came after the annoyance of discovering I'd lost some work on my thesis.

And just now, if I could have responded to this:


I would have issued a hearty 'Hear! Hear!' And declared I'm having an LOL!

Three True Things I Have Recently Read

1. "Have you noticed how people talk about 'people', people do this, people do that,'without seeming to realise that they are a person too?" Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife, p 208

2. "Her disapproval about such things, about the lifeline I found for myself, hurts me. But it's her ignorance that's making me angry. ... 'How dare you judge me? You're just like everyone else, disapproving of the fact that I'm obsessive then disapproving of the way I tried to pull myself out of it. Everyone's a fucking expert. ... Sometimes there's nothing else you can do. Those drugs don't make you well--Jesus, they don't even make you feel better--but they turn off the static. The noise,the interference, the shit in your head that keeps you from understanding you are destroying yourself.'
'You're smart,' Ruby says, looking at me anxiously because she knows I'm upset but she wants to stand her ground. 'You would have figured things out.'
'If we are going to be friends I need you tounderstand this. I'm smart but I could not figure things out. Could not." Sophie Cunningham, Geography, p200

3. "'You have no idea how tedious and unremarkable madness can be.'" Sophie Cunningham, Geography, p201

Dear Neglected Blog

Dear Neglected Blog,

How are you? I wouldn't be surprised if you were upset with me. I can't believe it's nearly two months since I updated you. Of course, you know I have peeked in on you occasionally. I have two half-composed posts, one on Ally McBeal and the other on Michael Jackson. I hope to publish both of these sooner, rather than later.

I would offer excuses, but I'm not fond of abdicating responsibility. The truth is I've been caught up in other things: tutoring, marking, Twitter, Facebook, occasionally my thesis; and those things, combined with my apparent inability to write a quick blog post mean that you have been placed on the back burner. I'm sorry. I will try to visit more regularly, if for briefer periods.

Still, some of that off-line activity may well end up here in future blog posts. For example, the two subjects I tutored in this semester would provide plenty of fodder for a good rant about the working conditions of sessional academic staff. But, aside from being counterproductive, right now I think I'm probably too exhausted to compose something coherent on the subject. Or maybe I'm just over the whole fight, now that the semester has ended.

I could write something about how my thesis also made its way onto the back burner. That's been a bit disappointing, mostly in the sense that I'm disappointed in myself and my lack of priorities. Perhaps I'll take this opportunity to reaffirm my commitment to my thesis, to work on it first before I do work for other people--at least for the first hour of everyday, anyway. I do take heart that I still really love my thesis topic. It continues to be fascinating to me, so I know I'll finish my PhD rather than abandon it from lack of interest.

Dear Blog, I did buy a bike a week or so ago and, surely, as the source of many potential adventures, I will be blogging about my activities with it. I suppose one of the first questions to ask is whether a bike is an it, or a he or a she. Do people name their bikes in the way they do boats and cars? The friend with whom I bought the bike proposed the idea to me and quipped that her bike could be named Barbarella. She said this as a joke, but I insisted on making it stick. In the spirit of the moment I dubbed my bike Gigi, with a vague sense of a pun that she was, after all, a town bike, but I'm still not sure about the whole anthropomorphizing impulse. (Although clearly, since I'm addressing you as if you're a sentient being, I'm not that against the practice).

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this visit as much as I have.

Yours faithfully,

Kirsty

C'mon Let's Crawl...

I have spoken here recently about the social media naysayers: those who believe that online social networks are a waste of time, or whose only response is to do no more than fall into the moral panic default mode that has accompanied the emergence of every new media form since the dawn of time. But my intention today is not to pay any more heed to those who can do little but search for deficiencies of personality in those who use and enjoy social media, rather, my mission is to extend an invitation to a party I'm having this weekend over at Twitter.

I was inspired to have an online Twitter party, first of all because it's my birthday on Monday--I'll be 40--and, second, because I do feel a legitimate sense of connection and friendship with the people I've met through blogging and social media sites and I would like to celebrate this milestone with them/you.

I'm not sure if anyone's done this before. I suppose the nearest thing would be the live blogging or Twittering that goes on around television programs like Doctor Who, So You Think You Can Dance, and Masterchef Australia (to name some that I'm aware of or have participated in). My point is, I'm making this up.

I've created a hashtag: #kirsty40 and I'm adding that to all of my posts. Some people have joined in and used that tag, but others have replied to me directly, wishing me Happy Birthday and lining up for virtual cake. I'm not sure where to go from here exactly, but I'll be continuing to post birthday related things with that hashtag until Monday evening, 4th May.

Everyone who's following me on Twitter was invited and I thought I'd extend that invitation to people who read Galaxy, although the two are not mutually exclusive. This could be all the excuse you need to start your own Twitter account (*looks pointedly at Oanh*) or you can just hang out in the comments here if you'd prefer. You'll be like those people who loiter in the kitchen at parties. Actually that's where I usually am, so perhaps you're the group who's wandered outside to sit on the back steps. Wherever you decide to eventually linger , you can see if you want to join the party by having a quick look at my Twitter account which is here.

Update: This party needs music, so I'm setting up an account at Playlist.com

I've added one song so far, and will continue to build the list over the next two days. Feel free to make a request for your favourite party music.

It's Good Friday Morning

It's Good Friday morning and I'm sitting back on a lounge chair with my laptop. I've had my morning coffee and instead of making a proper breakfast, which I might still do, I've eaten three chocolates from a box I bought myself at the supermarket this week. 50 cents from the sale of the chocolates will go to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

I've already checked Twitter and Facebook, both of which seem to be my first port of call on the Internet these days. Some might think this explains my absence from this blog for nearly a month, more really, if you consider that my last post was really just a link to another blog, but I don't know. Maybe. I think it might be more the case that Twitter and Facebook fulfill a social need for me that blogging doesn't always do. It can be quite lonely when your carefully thought out words don't inspire any comments. Here I'm not admonishing anyone for not commenting, of course there are many who do. I suppose if blogging has taught me anything it's that I have the same difficulties (if that's the right word) with relationships online as I do offline. I suppose I get a bit more of an instant response via Twitter and Facebook than I do from blogging and so I find those platforms more gratifying, at the moment.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Part of it is that there're some days when, what with everything else going on, it's all I can do to look at the LOL Cats. I know when I look at them I'll laugh and get the rush that comes with laughter. Blogging takes time and effort, not only to write, but to foster and maintain relationships. I'm still a bit shy online. Many times I think that any comment I might make on someone else's post will just be repeating a comment already made, but that's how relationships build online, through comments. No one knows you're nodding in agreement or feeling as connected as the 23rd commenter if you don't tell them.

Hmmm. I suppose there are many that would see the shift to the 140 characters of Twitter as evidence of a society-wide diminishing of attention spans. The 'Like' option on Facebook is even more damning, if that's your view. For myself my attention span is being sucked up by trying to do my thesis between some rather heavy and stressful teaching commitments.

Argh! I didn't want to write an apology for not posting here. I long since came to the conclusion that there's nothing to apologise for. It's my blog and I'll not post if I want to. (How odd it seems that now blogging has attained some gravitas one feels the need to apologise for not putting the commitment into something that was once so derided as insubstantial). That said, I'm not impervious to the couple of requests I've received to write something here.

I'm not quite up to Mark's request to blog about cooking Asian food. When Zoe gets back online she's promised to write about the demystification of Asian ingredients talk she gave in Canberra, including posting some recipes. Otherwise Tseen and Oanh have the skinny on Chinese and Viet food (and fancy cakes!) respectively, as do some of the folks on their blog rolls. Myself, I haven't really cooked anything of particular interest lately. If anything I've not long become aware of how much my recent cooking has been drawing from the food my parents prepared for our family when I was a child, which was fairly standard Anglo-Australian fare. I've been mulling over posting something on that, because I've been slightly taken aback by the realisation and I want to reflect on what it all means. I'll probably give that one to Progressive Dinner Party but, of course, if you're not a regular reader of PDP, which you should be, I'll post a link here to take you over that way when I get it together.

The other request I had from someone to post something here was from a friend who was visiting from New Zealand, but formerly of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. My excuse to him was that I felt my blogging had regressed to whiney 'poor me, everyone is mean to me' posts. Well, actually, it may always have been about that, but since I'm taking my advice from Robert McCallister these days, I'm trying to realise that I'm an adult and I should 'get a filter'. It's a lot tougher than I thought.

One solution that has presented itself to help with my dilemma has arisen through what I call the 'serious' reading group. It's not necessarily serious because Polish beer has made an appearance during at least one meeting, but it's true that we're making our way through The Norton Anthology of World Literature. We're just moving onto the section 'Poetry and Thought in Early China'. The first reading is excerpts from Classic of Poetry aka Book of Songs. I was reading the introduction to the Classic of Poetry and learned that:

The power of the Classic of Poetry to 'stir people' probably refers to their frequent use in conversation and diplomacy. Citation of one of the poems was often used to clinch a point in an argument or, more subtly, to express an opinion that one would rather not say openly (Owen 812).

With this in mind, I decided I might've been better off post 'Boat of Cypress' to express my thoughts about my relationships with my brother and others:

XXVI. Boat of Cypress

That boat of cypress drifts along,
it drifts upon the stream.
Restless am I, I cannot sleep,
as though in torment and troubled.
Nor am I lacking wine
to ease my mind and let me roam.

This heart of mine is no mirror,
it cannot take in all.
Yes, I do have brothers,
but brothers will not be my stay.
I went and told them of my grief
and met only with their rage.

This heart of mine is no stone;
you cannot turn it where you will.
This heart of mine is no mat;
I cannot roll it up within.
I have behaved with dignity,
in this no man can fault me.

My heart is uneasy and restless,
I am reproached by little men.
Many are the woes I've met,
and taken slights more than a few.
I think on it in the quiet,
and waking pound my breast.

Oh Sun! and you Moon!
Why do you each grow dim in turn?
These troubles of the heart are like unwashed clothes.
I think on it in the quiet,
I cannot spread wings to fly away.

I haven't decided if it would be even more annoying for other people to have me sending or quoting poetry to them in order to make my point in a subtle way--some might call it passive aggressive. It might have worked in Early China, but contemporary Australian society is not so fond of people quoting book learning. More than half of me would expect to be dismissed as someone who couldn't come up with an argument for themselves and so had to resort to pretentious poetry. Still I like the efficiency of presenting a poem that could express the nuances of an argument while avoiding offence, simply because it's part of an acknowedged body of thought and diplomacy rather than entirely personal.

The other solution that has presented itself to me in response to the angst of my most recent posts, in particular the one on my feelings about the dismissal of social networking sites as an 'authentic' mode of social interaction, is that I'm now teaching in two subjects that are about new media and Web 2.0 applications. In retrospect I feel a bit silly that I was so readily drawn into the argument about whether online interaction was 'authentic' or not. In my defense I guess I had not yet theorised my experience of online environments to the extent that I could make a point about their value in an effective, less hostile, way. When I look at the body of academic work on digital communities, it's suddenly a no-brainer: new media is pervasive and becoming more so; if you ignore it, you do so at your own peril, because it has changed and continues to change the nature of human interaction at all levels of society from the social to the professional, through to the political process.

But I suppose even if I couldn't articulate it, then I knew it in an unreflective way. Here I want to say that I might have known it the way that Plato reports Socrates view of poets' wisdom:

Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in the same case, and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise. (Plato 784)

This quote probably undermines my hope that the Classic of Poetry might be the solution to any of my troubles, but I do think that by having the opportunity, through teaching, to further examine my lived experience, I have been able to reach a greater understanding of my rather emotional response to the dismissal of the worth of social networking sites and other digitally mediated experiences, including Wii (aka the 'fancy butt warmer' pictured above).

More than the recognition that Web 2.0 and social media just aren't going to go away, however, I think the Eureka! moment on this issue came for me during Ien Ang's public lecture which I posted about over at Sarsaparilla Lite. The key word used by Ang was that of 'empathy', specifically she noted a lack of empathy in those 'elite commentators' who dismissed the television programme Dallas because of its popularity. For herself she was interested in Dallas precisely because she wanted to understand why so many people enjoyed it. Rather than setting herself above the programme and dismissing its viewers as 'others', she sought to find the common ground between them, searching for the substance of the connections in this instance that otherwise serve more broadly to sustain human society. Here, I don't want to suggest that anyone who takes a position against digital and social media, and can't or won't imagine the pleasure that others derive from it, is uniformly lacking empathy across all aspects of their interactions with people, but I do want to suggest that any evidence of a critical mass around a given cultural object or experience might be better understood as the opportunity to explore the sociality between fellow human beings rather than an occasion for othering fellow human beings all for want of understanding and empathy.

And now it's Good Friday afternoon. Happy Easter.

In Which Your Author Becomes Irritated And Behaves Badly

I'm not sure why I'm writing this post. I'm suspicious of my motives.

I recently expressed an opinion quite strongly. I was not at all tactful. And while I still hold the opinion, I feel a sense of remorse about the way I said, amongst other things: 'You're talking out of your arse'.

I wish I hadn't said that. It's emotionally immature. But it was something I'd been holding in for quite some time.

Is that an excuse for inexcusable conduct? My reaction was explicable: I felt judged and belittled. On this topic I have often felt this way. My outburst was fuelled by innumerable conversations; my interpretation of the most minute facial expressions; my sensitivity to rejection; and so on.

I don't want to write a post that's self-serving. I've read those and despised them. I think I've always tried to be scrupulously honest with my least attractive traits. But I need to think of myself as better than my recent behaviour suggests.



Someone once said to me that they found all social networking sites other than Good Reads to be 'a complete waste of time'. It was expressed in such a quelling tone that I thought to profess my own enjoyment of Twitter and Facebook would be to risk a similar dismissal.

At the same time, I had previously been in social situations with this very person where I, and others, had openly discussed our participation in and enjoyment of Twitter and Facebook. I felt shocked that someone would know this and not even attempt to mitigate their words in the same company.

Perhaps the comments just weren't about me and my cultural choices.

Am I unnecessarily conflating the judgement of the cultural artefact with a judgement about the person, in this case myself?

Another person has always smirked, in what I have interpreted as a kind of contemptuous, pitying expression, when Twitter and Facebook are mentioned. It's an expression that the same person extends to discussions of blogging, Second Life, and more recently Wii.

She argues that they don't offer a real experience; that they are a poor substitute for talking to actual people, living life, and exercising. For her, such substitution is a widespread and contemporary pathology.

Here I will sound defensive when I write that I have formed very real friendships with people I've met through blogging. I'm friends with the same people on Facebook, and we follow each other on Twitter. I try to meet them in the flesh if I travel to their city, and they return the favour when they happen to be in Brisbane.

I have never been on Second Life, but another participant in these discussions is using it as a teaching tool and is fascinated by the legal precedents it presents.

I have explained my decision to purchase a Wii Fit and my subsequent enjoyment of what it allows me to do that walking up a hill in my suburb cannot.

I have a linguistics-cultural studies suspicion of any assertion of real, unmediated experience. I tried to argue that many of these activities were simply another means of mediation of particular experiences: some modes of interaction are enabled while others are not. I'd be careful about privileging one as any more real than any other, especially when it's clear that it's a matter of value or lack thereof being ascribed to a particular medium.

Somehow this elicited more mocking laughter about some apparently ridiculous scenario proposed by Lacan to illustrate his concepts of the Real and the Symbolic.

It might be better to quote another friend here who says all of these activities are not substitutions, but experiences in their own right. She is wise and more lucid, perhaps less invested in such activities than I am.

I am still suspicious of my reasons for posting this. I have explained the reasons for the extent of my reaction, but perhaps I should just learn to conduct myself more appropriately in company.

Happy New Year

I'm enjoying the last day of my self-appointed holidays before I make myself go back to work tomorrow. There's nothing so special in this timing, since it's the same schedule as the majority of the population, but that's the point I suppose, to find some sense of normality in this treacherous task of completing a PhD.

I say treacherous, because it's an insecure and self-disciplined way of existing. I'm not especially good at self-discipline and so I have rendered an insecure existence even more insecure by nearing the end of my scholarship with about an additional six months of work to do. This is not so unusual, many people of course take more than a further six months to complete their theses after their funding runs out. I could be one of those people, I suspect I will be, but for the moment I need to be hopeful that I won't be.

I think the trouble is that even with the funding I have remaining, I will need to get some work so I can pay my bills. I'm quite understandably a bit spooked that I don't have any confirmed prospects of work for the semester ahead. At the moment I'm living on my savings to pay bills and participate in holiday festivities and outings. Part of me thinks I shouldn't have spent $30 on two cocktails last night, but the other part of me believes I will get some research or teaching work before my next electricity bill arrives.

I'm a bit resentful that it now seems to be de riguer for rents to increase at the beginning of every 6 month lease. Time was when you could pay the same rent for two or three years running, but that's no longer the case. I wonder if I'm living above my means. I am, but I genuinely tried share accommodation and that ended in even more bills and, retrospectively, I can see, a bit of post-traumatic stress. I think it was only by August in the past year that I actually felt able to progress on my thesis after the experience of sharing with someone who completely violated any reasonable boundaries of communal living.

I suppose this is why I tend to think of 2008 as a fairly so-so year, even though I had moved out of the share situation by December 17, 2007. I wasn't able to go to the wedding I was invited to in Italy because I ended up ravaging my savings moving again, as well as effectively furnishing a house, which included buyingwhite goods. I am grateful that I had savings to be able to make my home liveable, but I suppose the whole scenario brought home a sense of my vulnerability as a single person on an irregular income: all the burdens are mine, financial and emotional. Right now, I would have little problem with being a kept woman if it meant I could stop worrying. If someone else would make me a cup of tea.

My sense that this past year was not the best year was exacerbated by a falling out I had with my brother at the end of 2007. It's an indication to me of how deeply I was affected by this event that I haven't really spoken about it to anyone. I won't go into details. What I have been able to identify is a repetition of patterns of relationships within my family that cast me in a particular role, which has been very difficult to fight against. I guess if there's one thing I'm proud of myself for recently, it's that I took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself to tell my mother that I could identify how that pattern had emerged. I hope by telling her she pulls up my siblings in their treatment of me. Of course I have to do that for myself too. I'm working up to it.

I managed to tell my mother my perspective while we were sitting on the edge of the river at South Bank, waiting for some recently met relatives who were visiting from the UK. The meeting of these relatives on my father's side is really the biggest news of this Christmas for me. I learned from my oldest sister that a cousin, who I'd never really heard of, had moved to the Sunshine Coast, just north of Brisbane, from the UK with her husband and children. Over Christmas, her parents, my aunt and uncle, were visiting and they had expressed a desire to meet us.

It's all very complicated. My father has a series of step-brothers and step-sisters, both older and younger than him. A few years ago, one of the younger brothers was determined to track my father down. He was very upset with another brother who had traced the oldest brother without telling the rest of the siblings. The younger brother got in contact with my mother's family. He found my mother, who was visiting her own brother in the UK at the time, and so his nieces and nephew: me and my siblings. He didn't find my father, because no-one in this mish-mashed family has had contact with my father since he departed without a word over 23 years ago.

On the 27th of December my mother, me and my two sisters trekked up to the Sunshine Coast and met this aunt, uncle, cousin and her husband and children. Then on the 30th, they trekked down to Brisbane to spend some time with us.

How are these things supposed to go? My mother and my uncle spoke about my father and the other siblings, as well as my paternal grandmother. I learned that my father's family knew him as 'Sandy', when in Australia everyone knew him as Alex. It was determined that the sister just older than me most resembled my paternal grandmother, and we all came away with a scanned copy of a photo of her at around the age of 18. I was reminded of the explicitly racist reasons as to why my father chose to take his family away from Birmingham to settle in Australia: my uncle expressed the same sense of working class siege and dispossession as that expressed by my father nearly 40 years ago towards the Asians ethnically of the Indian sub-continent. One of my sisters felt some pressure to explain why nobody had ever really bothered to search for my father. She took my uncle aside and apparently he responded that he had known my father was a 'hard man'.

I didn't really intend this post to be a litany of woe, but while I'm here let me just say that I hope not to endure another Christmas where a particular individual drinks all day to the point where he becomes even more boorish, relaxed to the point where it seems reasonable to express disgust at a close relative's weight and begin a diatribe against women who marry and don't adopt their husband's surname. I also hope never to have to listen to another expression of disgust about the realisation that all those years ago, George Michael was likely singing his heart out in Last Christmas to a man rather than the female depicted in the film clip.

If you've managed to read this far, thank you. The misery ends now. And, really, I mean it: Happy New Year!

Lush Life

This is the view from the kitchen door this morning:


That is all.

Fun and Exercise

The big news in my life this past week arises from the purchase of a Wii Fit and the necessary accompaniment, the Wii Console.

Between this and the new television I have almost thoroughly plundered my tax refund and so sealed the fate on any overseas travel plans that I had for a couple of months time. The truth is, I was finding the prospect of coming back to a completely empty bank account and the end of semester drop in income all a bit stressful anyway. This way I'll be able to stay at home in a more comfortably feathered nest while I take advantage of the extra time at my disposal and toil away at my thesis.

While I've been wishing for a new TV for quite a while now, the Wii package was a bit of an impulse purchase following a blood test and subsequent phone call from my doctor.

First of all I learned I needed to top up my thyroid medication. It's a strange kind of relief to get this direction, because it means that any slumpiness I've been feeling is not on account of any fault with myself in the sense of my personal attitude towards things, it's because my thyroxine levels are low. Or at least that's how I'll excuse any lack of motivation or low mood on my part.

The next piece of news was not unexpected either. I've had blood tests before that have revealed elevated cholesterol levels. It's a familial thing, although the only heart problems that I'm aware of in my family's history have been suffered by post-menopausal women. Either way, it's still not a good state of affairs for me personally and so I will embark on the doctor's advice, as I do every time, with a renewed sense of determination, as I also do every time, to keep up with the ingestion of fish oil and psyllium husks. This time I have actually gone out and bought one of those margarines that help lower cholesterol absorption. I haven't done this previously because I tend not to use butter or margarine as a spread; I go without, and any cooking is done with olive or canola oil, peanut oil or, yes, butter. Although I so rarely cook with butter--less than once a fortnight--that I figured it would have little effect. But obviously I'm getting the bad version of cholesterol from somewhere so anything that will help reduce its absorption must be embraced.

The other major factor in elevated cholesterol is, of course, the dreaded exercise. This is something my doctor also asks me about every time I see her. As with the dietary advice, I try and commit to doing more, but aside from a three year period in my mid-twenties, I've never been a natural athlete or exerciser. Courtesy of high-school PE classes I've always associated exercise with bullying, abject humiliation, and acute embarrassment. (If there's an obesity epidemic, then it's not just the purveyors of fast food who need to step up and take responsibility. Every PE teacher who's ever cultivated a fascist class environment is just as culpable).

Anyway, this is where the Wii Fit enters the equation. I saw it advertised and I can't tell you the intense feeling of relief that came over me. I almost feel tears thinking about it. Here was an opportunity to exercise without being harassed by men leaning out of cars while I walked up a hill near where I live. Here was an opportunity to exercise without being scolded for my lack of co-ordination. I wouldn't have to go out, or be pressured into gym memberships with direct deposit payment plans. I could exercise whatever the weather and wear the least flattering of clothes.

I've been using the Wii Fit for four days now. I did the intial body tests and received the bad, although, again, not unexpected, news. I've set goals, guided by the eminently sensible advice offered by the Wii Fit. I've exercised between 30 - 45 minutes every day, and that's not counting the time I've spent bowling, boxing, and playing tennis on the Wii Sport application that came with the Wii Console.

I've learned I'm not so bad at the Wii versions of bowling and boxing. Although I'm not so bad at bowling in real life either. I'm enjoying the tennis; I'm glad it's getting a little more difficult as I progress.

But back to the Wii Fit proper. I think what is so good about it is the emphasis it places on posture and core body strength as a mark of athleticism. It measures that according to your ability to maintain and control shifts in your balance in the various activities on offer. In this vein, I've been skiing and ski jumping and tightrope walking. A few times I've faltered and my Mii--the avatar you create of yourself--tumbled down a hill gathering snow in a tangle of skis and limbs. Twice I fell off the tight-rope while the watching crowd commiserated. While trying to hit a soccer ball with my head, I've been smacked in the face by stray football shoes more times than I care to recall.

There are muscle and yoga workouts too. From the muscle workouts I've learned I have pretty good deep muscle strength. It's encouraging to learn that. No-one's ever made that observation before. I've done meditation before and been told I'm a good breather (what a relief :-P), and that was confirmed by the yoga exercises. The beauty of the yoga program is that the Wii board senses the shifts in your balance, so can offer you advice on maintaining the proper posture in your poses. Very handily, throughout all of the exercises the Wii tracks your balance and allows you to correct yourself by making sure the tracker is always in the blue or yellow areas which are indicated on the screen.

Finally, the aerobic activities have also proved fun and beneficial too. I'm still trying to work out the running. I'm supposed to run at 60% capacity without overtaking the Mii in front of me. I can't quite figure out how to do that, I'm only managing 44% capacity at the moment. It's something to do with consistency of pace.

I'm glad I've just managed to unlock a boxing training game. I'm not sure why I like boxing so much, obviously it's something to do with my knockout success in the Wii Sports version, plus there's almost certainly a head game going on with it too.

I've had moderate success with the step programs. I really am not in possession of much in the way of rhythm. Something to work on.

That said, you should know that I am the hula-hoop queen. It's the one thing I've scored full marks for so far. Not saying I could keep a real one in motion for three minutes straight, but in the realm of Wii, I can maintain six in orbit while catching another two.

While I don't really want this blog to be a tool for the promotion of any product, Wii Fit has transformed my attitude towards daily exercise. For that alone it has been a revelation and, indeed, a revolution. It has more potential to improve my health than any other exercise activity I've tried; it has certainly been more effective and encouraging than any human purveyor of physical activity I've ever encountered.

Anxious

I've mentioned before on this blog how much I struggle with writing. I have always found it incredibly difficult.

I have memories of being utterly paralysed when writing essays in high school. How I ever made it to university the first time around is still a mystery to me, because I completely froze in the statewide tests we took which decided the final tertiary entrance scores.

Suffice to say my fears did me no good in that first attempt at an Arts degree. I think I spent most of my late teens and early twenties in a state of fear, not just about writing, but pretty much everything. It wasn't a happy time at all.

I ended up dropping out of university and working a series of casual and temporary unskilled jobs, before I decided to have another go at tertiary education. How I ever got through my second attempt at an Arts degree is somewhat less of a mystery, but effectively I credit one incredibly supportive lecturer who was prepared to offer me extension after extension throughout the course, and still say things as encouraging as that I had assisted her understanding of the works of Julia Kristeva.

It wasn't until this particular lecturer asked if I was going to go onto Honours that it even occurred to me that it was a possibility for the likes of me. I did go on, first to achieve a first class Honours, then a Master's for which I made the Dean's List for Outstanding Research Higher Degrees, and now I'm in receipt of a second scholarship and completing a Research PhD.

At this point, you think even I'd believe that I could write, but still, this annoying and crippling anxiety about writing persists. My anxieties held up the progress of my Master's and the whole process seems to be repeating itself with my PhD.

One of the things I'm most fearful of is that I won't be finished before my current scholarship runs out. Actually, I've pretty much accepted that will occur, but if I'm feeling anxious now, I know how much more anxious I'll feel when I don't have that $380 a week (OMG, my rent is $270/week and only likely to go up).

In an effort to minimise the time that I'll have to be writing my PhD while trying to look for alternative sources of income, I responded to an email inviting people to join a 15 minute writing group. The idea is that you spend at least 15 minutes per day writing and keep a diary noting the time spent writing, the word count, a brief description of the writing, and any comments about the process. Because it's a group rather than an individual activity, the idea is that the individual diaries are circulated amongst the group members.

I've found reading other people's diaries, learning about the things that they struggle with when getting words on paper/screen, incredibly helpful. I've been more productive, in a substantial way, on my thesis in the past two weeks than I have for a long time. Ultimately, the grand total of my words thus far has been 2000. This does not seem much when I compare myself to what I imagine other, more effective, people write, but when I compare this progress with that I made in the previous two weeks, then I have improved by 100%.

It's this last figure that has me feeling far happier, with a greater sense of achievement, than I have experienced for a long time. Now I don't beat myself up verbally when I haven't written 1000 words a day, but I note how I managed to untangle a particularly convoluted thought process in just one hour.

Here's this past week's diary for your perusal. Aside from my anxiety, you'll probably learn more about my thesis than I think I've ever mentioned on this blog*.

Sunday, July 27, 2008
time: 30 mins
length: 500 words
description: Teaching journal
comment: Anticipating first tutorial tomorrow.

Monday, July 28, 2008
time: 30 mins
length: 550 words
description: Teaching journal
comment: Reflected on first tutorial and meeting with A about my LEX feedback. Turns out my problem isn’t communication, it’s authority and conviction.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008
time: 1 hr
length: 220 words
description: Thesis. Explanation of the evolution of another content analysis variable: Occupation
comment: As I was writing I had a thought about another category that needed to be included. While I’ve come across plenty of examples in my coding of patient characters who are either criminals or hospitalised, I’d forgotten about other employment external to the usual understanding of labour markets such as students and people looking after families. Immediately I could think of characters for whom I’ll need this category: Claire Fisher, Carmella and Meadow Soprano, Bree Van De Kamp…

Wednesday, July 30, 2008
time: Not so good at the time keeping today, maybe 2 hrs in total, accrued in 10-20 min stretches.
length: 280 words
description: Thesis. More explanation of content analysis variables, this time in relation to mental health professionals.
comment: If only I could sit still for more that 10 minutes before feeling the need to jump up and hang out the washing or some other domestic chore. I do use that time as thinking/refining time, but I’m convinced more effective writers can sit and concentrate for long stretches at a time. There I go again comparing myself to others. Note to self: ‘Stop it! Just try and think about how you’re on track for another 1000 “excellent and polished”** words’ (fingers crossed).

Have somehow managed to make useful remarks about the various hypotheses the content analysis will be testing. Quite fascinating that even in compiling the variables and trying to come up with categories that are exhaustive I’m getting a sense of the discrepancies between representations in television drama and mental health research as it is manifest in things like the US Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health and the DSM-IV. Also getting a sense of developments in representations over the history of English-speaking television simply by have to explain and revise the categories.

Thursday, 31 July, 2008
time: Stuffed up the time keeping again. About an hour or so?
length: 230 words
description: Continuing with thesis.
comment: So much for the multi-tasking aspirations I started with. It’s all I can do to think about my thesis at the moment. It should be my priority anyway, the other two things are months away. Turns out I don’t have a meeting with my supervisor until next Friday, so I’ll have even more evidence of working, which can only be a good thing. Note: I’m on track for another 1000 words on my thesis this week. Also note: the Film Festival is starting and I couldn’t resist the incredibly discounted film student passes I was offered. Will be interested to see how I balance this extra-curricular activity with my writing goals.

Friday, 1 August 2008
time: 1 hr
length: 260 words
description: Thesis. Up to talking about ‘Site of Intervention/Treatment’
comment: Saw two films at BIFF today, but managed to get myself up to around the 1000 word mark for the working week before I went out. Progress is steady and in the right direction.

Aware that this diary is perhaps a little, nay, a lot, more wordy that everyone else’s. Trying to strike a balance between being overly confessional, yet making it meaningful for me as a tool of reflection.

* Don't pinch my ideas. Please. Although I don't suppose I can stop you.
** Direct quote from supervisor in feedback on previous 4000 words submitted

There Goes the Neighbours

It seems that my neighbours have, in real estate parlance, 'abandoned the premises'. This fact only dawned on me when I came home the other day and saw that their gates were open and so was a downstairs door. Until this point I had assumed they'd gone on an extended holiday, which, given the recent school break, was not too far fetched an assumption.

It's true they left on the Queen's Birthday weekend. On the same Friday afternoon that I waited for a friend, before we headed for the Bunya Mountains, I noticed from my kitchen window that my neighbours were also packing. A trailer was attached to their car and I guessed they were going on a camping trip.

When I returned after my long weekend away, I saw that they hadn't returned. In some ways this was a bit of a relief. When I had first seen them packing up, I had laughed to myself how typical it was that on the very weekend I was choosing to go away, my neighbours were going away too. I thought, rather churlishly, that if they were going away then I would like to have been at home to enjoy the peace and quiet in their absence. While they weren't the noisiest or most annoying neighbours I've ever had in my life, there were times when their music, blasted at odd intervals throughout the day, drove me to swearing at my ceiling.

Upon my return, I noted their continued absence and looked forward to some time to enjoy what I'd thought I would miss out on. At this point, I figured they'd taken an early start to the school holidays. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I thought this, except to say that there were school age children living there, even if they didn't observe school hours. It was the fact of there being children at the house during school hours that led me to conclude that my neighbours had indeed taken an early pass for the forthcoming school vacation. For some time, I also drew the conclusion that the lack of observation of school timetables, combined with the fluctuating numbers of children living next door--sometimes there were three or four children, other times just one--was evidence that my neighbours were foster parents.

This made sense to me on several levels: first I thought that if they were looking after children who had come from unstructured backgrounds then it wasn't that untoward; I also figured into my assumptions that my neighbours were Aboriginal and that fact probably accounted for a whole lot of things that, from my perspective, I couldn't know about.

Ah. Here I come face to face with a whole host of my assumptions, some of which I'm not sure aren't implicitly racist.

Exploring the foster care assumptions further, I guess, in addition to the indicators I outlined above, I was informed by one of my clearest memories of anyone I went to primary school with, an Aboriginal boy, GG. He was in foster care and we used to catch the bus at the same bus stop to go to school. There was a group of us who used to eat guavas from the trees while waiting for the bus, and G would often chase me, holding out before him one the exo-skeletons shed by cicadas that clung to the sides of the trees. I would run amongst the trees screaming as he threatened to attack me with it. I remember when I found out that he was a foster kid, how it moved me quite profoundly, because it seemed to be quite an awful thing. It made me feel ashamed that the worse thing you could do in the playground at school was wear green and so be accused of being a GG fan--he always had a running nose.

I went through a stage of wondering if my neighbours hadn't organised some alternative schooling arrangement. At this point, it didn't occur to me that the children simply weren't being schooled. I still don't know this; this is all the work of my vivid imagination arising from a few observations out of the kitchen window while washing up.

The parent figures didn't seem to work either. Again I only know this because I work from home. What's to say they didn't too? The man was often working on cars, so from that I decided he must make money from re-conditioning engines. Often times I would hear him listening to horse, maybe dog, racing on the car radio, urging his bet to cross the finish line first.

The woman would often sit outside in the mornings, on a chair set up near the cars. Together they would chat amicably. One day I came home and a raised garden bed had been built near where she sat, a round, stone-edged garden planted with aloe vera.

I was always returning footballs and tennis balls over the fence, sometimes without witness, sometimes with a wave of thanks and hello.

Often they would sit outside at night too. Their friends would visit in vehicles that looked as though they came from rural and regional areas, and they would sit around a barbecue, drinking and laughing, before they slept in the beds of their trucks with canopies beneath the stars.

As winter came around, my neighbours took to lighting a fire in an oil drum. Its smoke would come right in my kitchen window and I took to closing it because it made me feel sick.

It was these last few observations that allowed me to make sense of the loaded trailer and the extended absence as I did. I thought they had gone to visit their friends where it was warmer, to sit around other barbecues and drink and chat and sleep in their yards; to seek for the teenage boy in their care a different kind of education.

When I saw the open gates and downstairs door, I thought they had returned, but I couldn't see either them or their car. I strained to see if perhaps someone had broken in, but all I could see was upended furniture and litter through the downstairs door.

The next day I saw a van from the Public Works agency. This was followed by a succession of trucks and vans: two took away the contents of the house; then a glazier replaced missing and broken windows; a plumber and an electrician dropped by; and finally, a garden care service restored the yard. It was this last visit that puzzled me the most, not because they tidied up the yard, but because they went one step further and dug up the garden bed. I saw a man struggle with a pick axe to remove the carefully built stone edging with its squared, level surfaces; I heard the rocks thrown in the back of a truck and hauled away; and now I can see the flattened round expanse of dirt that remains like a smoothed over cicatrice.

It was this act that made my neighbours' disappearance final: the obliteration of the site into which they had expended a great deal of care and skill, around which they had routinely gathered and lived.

Domestic Goddess

Lately when I do my clothes washing, I feel as though I have some sense of what it might have been like for those women in the 50s, just after WWII, when all the fruits of aircraft engineering for wartime destruction were used to engineer time-saving domestic appliances.

Image and further reading from Modern Mechanix

For years washing was an unsatisfactory chore.  I lived in a old Queenslander house divided into seven flats out the back of which was a funny little fibro shack with a coin operated washing machine.  We only had to pay a dollar per wash, so it was much cheaper, and certainly more convenient, than going to a laundromat, but quite frankly it had all the subtlety of a B-52 Bomber.

It had one speed--turbo--that it applied to everything from stockings and underwire bras to denim skirts, corduroy jackets, and towels.  In order to ward off the premature demise of the more delicate items in my wardrobe, I would place them in a wash bag to protect them from the destructive force of the washing blades, but somehow I still managed to find bra wires lodged in the drainage holes in the sides of the inner drum, or else they were bound up in endless knots of stockings that by now were stretched to accommodate the legs of the 50 Foot Woman

Stain removal was made tedious by the absence of any hot water in the laundry at all.  Oxygen bleach, even that from the eco store, requires warm water at least for it to work. If I wanted to get any hot water into a bucket, I'd have to hold a bucket beneath the shower, high up so I didn't lose any water to the floor of the shower and so down the drain.  Usually I'd end up with water dribbling down into armpits, and that would cause me to get irritated and lose my balance, and very soon profanity would follow.

In the end, I pretty much gave up on nice clean clothes and would more often than not go out in stained and shabby outfits figuring nobody expected anything more of a student.  I learnt in one of my undergraduate French classes that jeans delevee were the standard student uniform, and if those doyens of fashion, the French, could make such a statement then I figured so could I.

Oh but how life has changed since I bought my first white goods. Perhaps one day I will wax lyrical about the fridge (which has brought about a similar revolution), but for now it's the washing machine's turn to shine.

One of the biggest novelties for me, still after 6 months, is that I can do my washing whenever I want to. While everyone may have wanted to do their washing on Saturday morning back at the old Queenslander, not everybody could.  And woe betide anyone who left their finished washing sitting in the machine while others were waiting to use it.

I made every effort not to leave my washing languishing when I was sharing a machine with other people, but I admit it's my natural tendency to forget about it or get caught up in doing something else and not want to be interrupted by hanging out the washing.

Enter the front loader.  It takes hours for a wash to complete, which is perfect for me.  But should I want a quicker wash then the machine I purchased has a time saver option which reduces it down to about 40 mins, and there's a Quick 30 minute wash cycle too.

Sometimes I just sit and watch the washing go around. I watch how gently the washing is spun around with no damaging blades to get caught on. I feel secure that my bras will emerge intact, that my stockings will still fit my short legs. I marvel at how the washing powder and bleach are flushed from the powder drawer and dissolved before coming into contact with the clothes.  I have come to embrace the smell and textures of my clothes and towels that have received the soft touch of fabric softener (channelling Milhouse here).  Ahh.

And I'm especially glad that I was able to get a washing machine with a four star energy rating; that just tops everything off.

Memories

I spoke to my niece yesterday. She told me how her ‘heart just broke’ when a black bug that she had tried to revive had died. She thought that it might have died because of the ‘moisture’ she had sprinkled on the leaves in the cardboard box in which she had housed it. She explained that the bug’s legs had been broken when she’d found it. She had found another bug as well, this one was orange, and although it was already dead when she discovered it, she was looking after it too. I told her about the spider outside my back door. She expressed concern that my spider might eat her orange bug.

She told me that another child at Kid’s Church had called her ‘pathetic’. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘That’s not very nice’. I asked her what she’d said in response. She hadn’t said anything. Later, she’d asked her mother what it meant. Before her mother had told her the meaning of ‘pathetic’, she’d made sure that Hannah knew it wasn’t true. I agreed. ‘You’re lovely’, I said.

I know all about her best friend, E, who cried when Hannah was away from prep for two days because she was sick. On the third day, E ran up to Hannah in the schoolyard and gave her a big hug, with tears in her eyes. E has a twin, J. Hannah said that J had ‘forced’ her to be her friend. She said she had agreed because she didn’t want J to be angry with her any more. Several play dates have ensued.

I learnt about the Ponty Pines, who are creatures on a television show called The Night Garden. The Ponty Pines make a sound a bit like that made when blowing raspberries. She sang me a song about a coffee percolator. Then I heard all about a fictional character called Bill who says nothing but ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’. And finally, she wanted to know what my favourite butterfly was from at least two years ago now, when butterflies had landed on us in the butterfly house at the Melbourne Zoo.

Book Club

Book club met today. We went to a cafe for breakfast and to discuss The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I was the only one who had read it, but that's okay, I didn't read the book for our last meeting, or the one before that, and maybe even the one before that.

We still managed to talk about the general themes. I might have dominated the conversation. Someone else had seen the Coen brothers' adaptation of No Country for Old Men, so we discussed that too.

I watched Oprah's interview with McCarthy on YouTube when I had not long finished reading The Road.



I was impressed by his quiet presence. I liked the way he held himself: laconic, refusing to be 'passionate', content to just like doing what he does.

There's not much that I can add to the plethora of reviews out there. Yes, it's harrowing.

Next, I planned to read something a bit less so. Shop Girl, maybe. I picked it up at a 2nd hand book store. And I watched the film on TV last night. But I've found myself picking up William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! I got that in the same haul at the 2nd hand bookshop.

I laughed when I read the first sentence. If McCarthy's prose is taciturn, then Faulkner's is not.

In the middle of reading The Road I stumbled into an arcade in the Valley and came across a photography exhibition by Simon Obarzanek, 80 Faces. I learned that he's a Melbourne-based photographer, but, still mired in the damaged vision of America, I imagined that these might be the faces that haunted McCarthy's wasted landscape.


The next book for this book club is Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. It's a book I've started before and not finished.

I'm meeting up with some other friends and we're going to have a Gothic-themed book club. The Monk by Mathew Lewis will be our first read. I've started that too.

80 Faces reminded me that I've wanted to write something about the art of portraiture for some time now. It was an impulse first prompted by seeing Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.




And I was reminded of it when Brisbane was treated to the recent Andy Warhol exhibition.



But I'm yet to get over my own navel-gazing inertia.

How Was Your Day?

Why, thank you for asking.

I was walking home from the local shops aka the 'lifestyle precinct' in real-estate-speak and I was having a conversation with myself about various things in which, I'm sure, you're all terribly interested.

My thoughts were prompted by the amount I'd just spent up at the lifestyle precinct. It was just a small shop at the green grocers and bottle shop, but I was aware that only two days before I had spent a similar sum, a bit more, just at the supermarket and, all together, it seemed rather a lot for one person to be spending on sundries for the week.

I got to thinking about the situation in metaphorical terms. Once I was telling my sister about the experience of sitting next to this woman at the cinema who seemed, every now and then, to breathe rather heavily. I wondered if something was wrong with her, but my sister informed me that the woman's breathing pattern was quite standard: apparently every fourth or fifth breath we take is deeper and longer than the preceding three or four. My sister explained the reasons for this to me, but I admit I forget. Something to do with oxygen and carbon dioxide exchanges no doubt.

As I was walking along with my cold bag, filled with wine and fruit and vegetables, hitched over my shoulder, I likened this week's rather large shop to that fourth or fifth breath; it was bigger than the preceding three or four shops but it was part of a necessary pattern. This week, if I didn't buy coffee, I would run out mid-week, and that's not a situation in which I like to find myself when I wake up. So, I guess I'd run out of various other staples at the same time--yes, wine is a staple--and they needed to be replenished. This week was the fifth breath.

These thoughts led me to others about spending money. I don't mean to sound materialistic or mercenary but these things tend to preoccupy you when your income isn't regular. You're always trying to make sure you have a buffer for the lean times, which for me tend to be between semesters. You tend to feel somewhat anxious if you believe you're spending money out of turn. The money you intend to get you through those times when no income or a reduced income is coming in cannot be spent while you're still receiving a fortnightly pay statement.

I've had this feeling quite a bit lately. The money I've been saving for those figurative rainy days has been needed with nerve-wracking frequency. Brisbane may still be in the midst of a drought, but I've been bailing out the boat all year:

I've had to buy lounge chairs, two coffee tables that serve as a television and stereo unit, a fridge, a washing machine, and a laptop computer. Today I bought a printer. I also picked up my new spectacles. They were not cheap. Not because I got some fancy frames, but because my eyesight is so appalling the lenses alone cost $510.

Goodness, I'm practically hyperventilating. You see why I need wine.

Ah, well I could go on. There's lots more I could say, but enough about me. Would you like a glass of wine?

How was your day?

Friday

Here at Chez Galaxy, Friday nights could not be more exciting. On the way home from work, I decided to forgo the still novel pleasure of taking the Great Circle Line bus home--have I told you about the incredible view as you go along Stuartholme Road?--and head for my old Friday night pit stop, the Queen Street Mall.

All day, it had been just me and the microfilm machine for company in the Fryer Library, so I think I was craving a bit of human interaction, the bustle of Friday night shoppers, the conversation of retail workers.

I found myself, as I often do, salivating over various gadgets and appliances in a kitchen ware shop. They're all so pretty and shiny. This time I actually decided to purchase something, a 20cm skillet pan that I've been contemplating for at least a year. I'm not much of an impulse buyer. Now I won't have to lug the big frying pan out for small jobs. I'm especially looking forward to those moments when making Indian and Chinese food where they call for toasting various seeds or creating a flavoured oil to pour over the final dish.

Speaking of cooking, here's a blurry photo of an okra and potato dish I made last week:


After leaving the kitchen shop, I used the magics of a phone with an internet connection to look up the location of the new city branch of my favourite eco shop. They'd sent me a catalogue by email and I quite liked the look of a few things, plus since I lost my Sigg water bottle at a gelati counter on Lygon Street in Melbourne, I've been buying and refilling various plastic water bottles, which I really prefer not to do.

I looked at the water bottles, but my aesthetic snobbery got in the way of me buying a replacement. That, and I really want it to fit in the side pocket of my backpack, so I can try to minimise the chances of losing it. Well, I can live in hope. I've always been a bit prone to losing things. I remember when I heard that song that went 'Dancing in the disco, bumper to bumper. Wait a minute, where's me jumper? Where's me jumper? ... And my mother will be so, so angry...' I decided that it was my personal theme song.

Having put off the water bottle until another time, I looked at the magnet picture hangers that seemed to promise hope for renters who like pictures on their walls but aren't allowed to put up hooks or use blu-tack. Unfortunately they still involved double sided tape, but gee, what strong magnets, they could definitely keep the Andy Warhol pictures I drooled over at the GoMA shop in place, without damaging them.

I ended up buying some dish washing liquid, and then, as if to completely mock my earlier proclamation that I'm not an impulse buyer, I decide to get a Bokashi All-Food Compost Kit.

I'd never heard of them before, but just talking to my sister now, she says she's seen them on television.


Anyway, it's this bin you put your food scraps in, between layers of a Bokashi mixture, that's some kind of bacteria. Effectively what happens is that the food scraps get pickled, and after a few weeks of tamping down the bin, getting rid of air pockets, and making sure you put the right ratio Bokashi to food scraps, you can dig a hole in your garden and leave it for about three weeks, upon which time it will have turned into humus, full of nutrients for your garden.



I was a bit excited when I saw it at the eco store because straight away I could see that it was something that a renter could do, and now that I have a small patch of dirt, I also saw that it could help along my fledgling herb garden, which, by the way, was one of my new year's resolutions to establish. Even if I end up with too much pickled garbage, the pamphlet suggests I can give it to my local community garden, and since moving to this new place, I have one that I walk past most days.

I almost made it home for an exciting evening of setting up the Bokashi Kit, but I got waylaid by the bottle shop across from the bus stop and gave in to more traditional Friday night pleasures, treating myself to a Wine Adventure Pack consisting of six small bottles of Margaret River Reds.

See? The adventure never stops here at Chez Galaxy, even the wine attests to the excitementt.

Cheese On Toast

The teenage girl who lives next door cried so hard just before. She wailed from a place inside her that had no voice.

Now everything is silent and I've made myself cheese on toast and a cup of tea for dinner.