aharrrr me hearties

Quick blog from the deep depths of my messy desk and pre event jitters to refer you on to Cat and Girl comic today - as it is amusingly pirate themed. As an aside I'd like to mention that I am wearing my fave green tree dress today over 3/4 pants - the sk'pant summer style - and a swimmingly elegant matching scarfe thing. I felt alll drab and tired and slightly hungover after dinner with the stove-cleaning-coffee-making-ex-housemate and miss Fabulisity who wis heavily pregnant hence could not avail herself of the nice shiraz cab lurking at our table. Hence tired. Hence needing a cheery outfit.

who'sbringingthecameraandwhereismyrunningsheet????

Have no time to blog properly now as am in crazy pre-event organizing mode. We have a large participatory workshop type event over the weekend and it's now or never time in terms of organising!! I feel strangely elated and chirpy though (- some might say manic?). My days have been a flurry of the very big picture and very practical details (what exactly will this process do?? What is the economic theory?? What colour will my sticky dots be??). I wont bore you with more tedious examples, you can imagine.

Other than that all is well here in newly moved to the city world. Weekend was very allliterative - bed shopping, babies, buddies, boulevarde walking, bicycle riding, beer drinking, barbequeing and bollywood film watching. Strange strange experience of film-subtitle mismatch with the movie..took almost 20 minutes before we firmly decided that the subtitles must be not only out of synch with the action, but actually belonged to an entrely different movie. We went on to another movie after that - a strange boy meets girl, boy gets girl, girl loses boy, girl gets boy, boy turns into strange kashmiri terrorist and kills everyone, girl shoots boy in the head. And I thought I was embarking on a light musical romance!

Anyway, must stop this naughtly little diversion and get back to ticking things off lists. I could really do with a GnT.

Oh and I have a new bed coming sooon - very exciting. I have grand plans for exciting new bed linen to match. All very fresh start clean slateish bed buying...

Thorpedo is all right by me

Ok so I am not reallly Ms Current-Affairs 2006, and I rarely post about news items, because I'm scared if I started I would never stop - and you would be stuck for days reading my catatonic heartfelt weepy responses to Darfur, polar bears drowning, child abuse, materialism and the world of advertising, deforestation, and crappy crappy self-interested media folk.

But I have a pseudo news item to comment on. Here goes. Ahem..

Thorpe retires from swimming
Tuesday November 21, 2006

Australia's greatest-ever swimmer Ian Thorpe has quit, announcing in a press conference his intention to withdraw from professional competition.

In a prepared statement to the packed conference, Thorpe said his battle with sickness and the revelation that there was more to life than swimming had led to his decision.

'Although the 24-year-old said he felt intense pressure to continue swimming, that pressure was coming from others, not from himself.

"It would be dishonest to myself, and to everyone else, if I were to continue on that basis," he said. "I've reached all the dizzy heights of this sport — for all of that I'm extremely appreciative."'

---
For those who have no idea what that was about, this guy is a swimmer, won squilions of medals at olympics and so on for Australia, been doing it since he was a wee lad, and has been the clean-cut, wholesome darling of the Australian celeb sportsperson following public. Recently there have been all these 'ohmygolly is that thorpy eating a hamburger??' articles in hideous trash mags, and people speculating about whether he's about to retire. And today he did.

And what's my point? Such that it is my point is this:
- I think Ian Thorpe seems like a nice guy, and I think recent photos of him show quite clearly that he hasn't been happy or well (check his eyes recently compared to pics from a few years ago)
- I think it's bizarre how a public can feel like they own someone just because they have been in the public eye (imagine if you had to announce at a press conference every time you felt like throwing in the towel and moving on to another job..)
- I think at 24 it's fantastic that he's got to the stage where he can identify the pressures from outside versus the quiet voice of preference from within - fantastic for anyone at any age!

I also think it's cool when people who happen to become famous try to do things for other people while they're there, and dig that he made this:
http://www.ianthorpesfountainforyouth.com.au/
which is especially interesting to me because supporting programs for indigenous Australians is not quite as vote-winning in white bread middle Australia as supporting kids with cancer or heart disease*, ie almost gauranteed to get no good press, such is the cringe worthy state of race relations in our lovely home, so strikes me as something that was generated by
a real sense of 'what needs doing' and not 'how can I add to my lovely public persona and make people like me more' which one sometimes has a niggling suspicion that some celebrity charity involvement is driven by**.

So I say 'good on ya thorpy, and good luck with whatever comes next.' Maybe we can make some room in the lotto house for him to come and hang out and plan his next stage along with the rest of us hey Betty Sue and Aunty B? (I would link to the blog there but am on a computer that is very gruff and wont let me make nice neat hyperlinks..). Maybe he can give swiming lessons to us down at the ocean, in return for room and board, when we are all tired from blogging and loungeroom dancing and need some sun and sand.

*not that I am suggesting for a second that kids with cancer isn't a horrible thing that should get lots of supoprt and care and is a worthy cause for well meaninged celebs, I'm just talking about what is more common here, what causes are seen as squeaky clean and celeb-worthy and good PR
** Or is that just me being a cynical bitch?

work gaff #374

Note to self: ‘I like it with the light on I just forget to turn on the switch’ might be a funny thing for a workmate to say, but it is not not not ok to snort at your desk, when they say it in all earnestness to someone who walks past commenting on how dark it’s become in the office now that the day has reached evening and the natural light is fading. It is not a good look because you reveal yourself to be a) sporting a sense-of-humour-age of 7, and b) far too ready to think about that workmate in an inapropriately sexual way.

It is also not such a great look to go out to lunch half an hour before your only scheduled meeting for the day because you forgot about it and then rush back frazzled with crumbs stuck to your lippy. Possibly.

Nor is it fabulous to leave a meeting saying 'oh, ok so I've got no follow up actions?? Great!!' thus revealing yourself as both rather lazy and quite happpy to be not involved in the start of the project.

In my defense it was a new moon today, and terribly hot. Maybe some combo of new moon out with the old in with the new vibe, and the growing exitement of a tropical summer was at play.

Fun? Define fun?

I just can’t imagine why I’m still single.

“30-ish gal likes to work 45 hours and then fall in heap Friday night in front of BBC mystery drama, with beer and pizza and maybe a little self-amusing blogging. Seeks same. Must have good soh, nice hands, passion for bathroom cleaning using bicarb and vinegar and penchant for giving shiatsu massage and reciting sufi or romantic poets. Tall is good.”

Café oh yah

So this morning I am stopped to have coffee. Right now in fact this tiny strange little café which is essentially a deli but that serves coffee. There is this strange little table decopaged with the best worst pictures from the 80’s. Sonny and cher, early Streisand, Duran Duran. And me, perched, like a snake eating itself I sit here writing about siting here. Do we ever do anything for itself anymore or just for the telling? Will our memories atrophy because there is no need to save for the retelling, we just let our moments wash through our fingers and phones and laptops as they happen? I am typing now because it’s a little window before the bus (bus today, rainy and cold) and before work. A little bit of preemptive blogging, an offering at the alter of the temple of strange anonymous intercontinental cyber honesty. The coffee is good, but the cold wind sweeps under the door and runs its icy fingers down my back. In the background to my thoughts I hear people talking about groceries – 'ooh ginger bread for the Christmas tree, oh hibiscus flowers for champagne, have you tried the soft cell crabs, I never liked champagne till I had it with that, sugar in your coffee?, you can have it with ice cream, in lemonade… ' School girls in socks and little black flat soled shoes like ballet slippers order flat white coffee, take away and I wonder at how old they are – old enough to drink coffee? And they wander away with their little raised nosed profiles and pulled up top lips and scuffling walk, and hair hanging from a ponytail, and bag dragging off their shoulders. Little conversations of local relationships around me and people taking pride in using each others names, a community of shop keepers talking weather and business.

Here now

Yep, so here I am, moved in. Moved in to the new suburb, miles away from where home was before. My life is dotted with cardboard boxes still, as is normal with moving. I think one unpacks asymptopically - ie all in a rush to start with and then graduallly lessening out until there is the residual level of unpackedness which gets lower and lower but never reaches zero. Or maybe that's just me.

I think I am a little tipsy after a bath and glass (or two) of red wine. Finished my book in the bath, which is always nice. About to turn in.

Did I mention that I can walk to work now? First day i arrived just past 8. Felt very pleased. Next day 8.30. Today 9.30. But note - the eating of breakfast, doing of washing, reading of book, writing in diary, writing of postcards, all before work. Tres productive.

Today I noticed two seperate temptations that lurk all very red riding hood like on the trail through the forest to grandma's house. Oh hang on, the wolf wasn't a temptation was he? just a threat. Well maybe the analogy is a crap one. Let's move on. On the way to work there are about a trillion bokshops. Open early. With cafes. And second hand books. Old Orange penguin Virginia Wolfs for under $5. I found myself in one of these bookshelves this morning, like a sleepwalker, I kind of drifted in, without really deciding to be there. Caressing books I realistically wont have time to read before now and?? Next month? Next year? My 'to read' pile is already long. I had to haul my sorry city ass out of the shop, away from the handmade cards, the cushioned window-seat, the smell of freshly ground coffee from their coffee machine, away from the staggering bunch of oriental lillies perched in glass vase on top of book case, away from everything I wanted to smelll and touch and taste and read, and continue my way to the brown towering office building instead. To be well behaved and productive. Poor little red riding hood.

On the way home I face a very different temptation. It is the zillion cheap takeaway shops that tempt me to stop and eat greasy samosas or sad dry sushi rolls, even as I lug my shoulder bag of organic groceries and dinner plans homewards. especially if I stay too late at work and it is legitimately dinner time and my very cells are crying out for sustenance as they carry me home, propellling me forwards. I almost lost my nerve right at the end today and stood in a hideous tiny grocery store no bigger than a small service station shop, having bought emergency 'oops I forgot' cat food and then become mesmerised by the tiny little containers of gelato in the stand up fridge. My brain went 'hungry.' and another bit of my brain went 'yes I know you're hungry, come on, time to go home, cook this organic rye linguini with basil, yum yum.' 'coffee gelato, mmmm.' 'Uhhuh, I'm sure it's nice but it's not exactly dinner is it, come on, time to go...' 'or mango. Mmmmm mango'. 'Oh for fucksakejustgowillyou getawayfromthatfridgeandgetgoing???!!' My internal food pyramid fan won, and snack desires went unfulfilled. I'm thinking some good mid-arvo snacks at the desk are in order.. Nuts and fruit? A yoghurt perhaps? Something to tide me over.

See? And you thought city life would make me all cosmopolitan and interesting. Huh! How wrong you were...

Life intimidates art, art intimidates life

What does one do about requests for blog addresses from people in RL? Mermaidgrrl had this happen, someone who she’d written about requested the address and she politely ignored the request, hoping they’d get the hint and not ask again. After all, as she said, it’s like a diary, and you shouldn’t have to go back and edit it just so someone can come and browse. I kind of agree. Someone recently asked for mine, and I have a dim memory of having posted a not so veiled references to the person. Now these were posted ages ago, and full of enthusiasm, but really, it is a little bit high school to find out how someone feels about you by reading about yourself isn’t it? It’s like intercepting some fragment of a note passed around the classroom and trying to figure out whether it’s really about you, and not knowing who it was being passed to, who else has read it. Even if you’re secretly chuffed at what was said, you must think it’s strange to have been discussed in a public forum without being invited. The other option is to go back and edit, delete posts, but I am kind of wedded to the strange selective honesty I enjoy in this forum and think it’s artificial to go back and erase some of that story. If I did, would I then only write very bland and safe things in future just in case someone reads it? Not share some key aspect just because there could be someone who might want to read it that might then know something a bit revealing? It kind of seems to undermine the whole process of gradually feeling safe throwing open more and more doors, revealing the interior and letting the breeze come through. So no. No retrospective editing. But still too chicken to give the address to some people…

Got here!

This is a tired little post delivered through my weary fingers from my somewhat satisfied but bed-ready head, from a very messy but nonethless lovely and tree house-like new upstairs attic bedroom. It is a post of having arrived somewhere new, of adapting and of dealing with every little item you own and finding it a place to go. yesterdaty i arrived at my new house in the city, leaving the mountains behind, arriving in the next chapter of my life (or at least somewhere on the blank page waiting for the next chapter to be written).

The last week was a bit of a marathon, eek moving is hellish. Yesterday I arrived at the new place feeling tired, hot and sweaty, bruised and scratched, and like my batteries had seriously run flat. But like child birth I suspect some magic hormones kick in to mask the lingering mermory of the pain so that you go ahead and move again sometime in the future. Moving house involves deep well-fulls of denial (I have extra specially deep reserve of denial, so I am welll adapted for this) such as 'no no it'll be fine the truck comes tomorrow at 9, I'm sure I can pack these last few...room fulls before then'. Errrm, think again sunshine. It involves staring at little corners of paperclips, rubber bands, bobby pins and ten cent pieces and wanting nothing more than to turf them in the nearest bin but feeling obliged to stash them somewhere, maybe in your pocket?, because you know, they'll be useful somewhere. It involves a transition from deep nostalgia to complete indifference to objects, a transition that takes place the more boxes you have packed and the more scrappy the items left to pack become. Where you face off objects you don't and have never liked but that were gifts from some relative and you have so far felt obliged to keep, but now nudge closer and closer to the giveaway pile.

It involves having to get up close and personal with your every material foible - it is like the day of reckoning decorated with masking tape and to do lists; where you are forced to acknowledge the material evidence that suggests you are a hopeless romantic old letters and postcard keeping, novelty clothes loving, jacket-hoarding, old teddy-bear owning, booklugging, vase accumulating, alcoholic glassware collecting type. Yeah whatever. Common wisdom may sugggest that 20 plus jackets is too many, but I beg to differ, even after having to haiul them from one end of the earth to the other.

It is also a time of experiencing extraordinary generosity and acts of whimsical kindness from those around. Giving you little prompts of helpful kindness along the way., And sometimes big ones! See the post below that I wrote last weeek but never quite got to post - and add to it since then the many lovely going away dinners arranged and attended by mountains friends such as the divine mountainspice, the packing wizardry of Miss Cornflower who had my ornaments packed before I could say 'was that milk in your tea?' one saturday night. Giant oh my goodness pinch me I think I might cry thanks to Aunty B who came up all impromptu like one night last week and gave me a morale boost, helped me pack till midnight and then up again the next morning 6ish for more packing and car filling and driving me and carfull of stuff to new house behind the truck. Thanks to Mango Mitzu for amazingly being at my doorstep at 10am yesterday to help with the final odds and sods removal from the old house, cat hiding and then driving me and cat and stuff to the new house. Sorrry to all folk who I failed to see / email/ call/ attend events of in the last week or maybe even the last year of commuting.

First impressions of new suburb, new house, living with other people again, how exactly I will fit my jackets in my room, what bed I end up buying, how the cat is settling in, and how I'm going with unpacking those pesky boxes will all have to wait. I'm off to get some sleep ready for my first exciting morning of being able to walk to work! Yihah.

The little things can be so big

Just a very quick reflection on how the little things that can be so lovely. This week, a few nice gestures have been like little rays of sunshine through the gloomy clouds of scary unsettling house move. Sunday night at drinks at the pub (kind of goodbye to mountain friends part 2) some recently made friends came with their 2 full-of-energy wonderful kids, who gave me a little chocolate they’d bought at the vegan expo they’d been at in Sydney. I was surprised it had made it all the way up the hill without being eaten, and tickled that they gave it to me and told me all about how yummy they were and how if I was tired I could just nibble a bit of it and it would wake me up. Made me think of Alice in Wonderland and I’ve had it in my jacket pocket these last 3 days like a little emergency power pill.

Then there was the person at the supermarket who saw me approaching the nest of carry baskets with towering armfuls of slippery scattery little things (like cat food and masking tape rolls and bicarb) and lifted one out for me with a smile, waiting until I got close enough to pour them all in, and stood there holding it while it caught them all. A nice smile too like ‘hmm, I think you need a basket!’

Then Aunty B surprised me at work with a small bundle of brand spanking new underwear of the socks and knickers variety to replace some that I apparently had lent her in the past when she’d stayed over, but I don’t really remember it, and as far as I’m concerned she just morphed into the angel of providing clean underwear when all your clothes are in the washing basket or packed. Gotta love a friend who knows both how big your arse is and what size socks you wear.

Thank you all for every little kind gesture you’ve made to me, or other friends, or to complete strangers – it all helps make this a nicer place to be.

PS My horse for the Melbourne Cup office sweep came lucky last today. It meant that I got $2.30 back for my $2. Woo hoo.

Got here!

This is a tired little post delivered through my weary fingers from my somewhat satisfied but bed-ready head, from a very messy but nonethless lovely and tree house-like new upstairs attic bedroom. It is a post of having arrived somewhere new, of adapting and of dealing with every little item you own and finding it a place to go. yesterdaty i arrived at my new house in the city, leaving the mountains behind, arriving in the next chapter of my life (or at least somewhere on the blank page waiting for the next chapter to be written).

The last week was a bit of a marathon, eek moving is hellish. Yesterday I arrived at the new place feeling tired, hot and sweaty, bruised and scratched, and like my batteries had seriously run flat. But like child birth I suspect some magic hormones kick in to mask the lingering mermory of the pain so that you go ahead and move again sometime in the future. Moving house involves deep well-fulls of denial (I have extra specially deep reserve of denial, so I am welll adapted for this) such as 'no no it'll be fine the truck comes tomorrow at 9, I'm sure I can pack these last few...room fulls before then'. Errrm, think again sunshine. It involves staring at little corners of paperclips, rubber bands, bobby pins and ten cent pieces and wanting nothing more than to turf them in the nearest bin but feeling obliged to stash them somewhere, maybe in your pocket?, because you know, they'll be useful somewhere. It involves a transition from deep nostalgia to complete indifference to objects, a transition that takes place the more boxes you have packed and the more scrappy the items left to pack become. Where you face off objects you don't and have never liked but that were gifts from some relative and you have so far felt obliged to keep, but now nudge closer and closer to the giveaway pile.

It involves having to get up close and personal with your every material foible - it is like the day of reckoning decorated with masking tape and to do lists; where you are forced to acknowledge the material evidence that suggests you are a hopeless romantic old letters and postcard keeping, novelty clothes loving, jacket-hoarding, old teddy-bear owning, booklugging, vase accumulating, alcoholic glassware collecting type. Yeah whatever. Common wisdom may sugggest that 20 plus jackets is too many, but I beg to differ, even after having to haiul them from one end of the earth to the other.

It is also a time of experiencing extraordinary generosity and acts of whimsical kindness from those around. Giving you little prompts of helpful kindness along the way., And sometimes big ones! See the post below that I wrote last weeek but never quite got to post - and add to it since then the many lovely going away dinners arranged and attended by mountains friends such as the divine mountainspice, the packing wizardry of Miss Cornflower who had my ornaments packed before I could say 'was that milk in your tea?' one saturday night. Giant oh my goodness pinch me I think I might cry thanks to Aunty B who came up all impromptu like one night last week and gave me a morale boost, helped me pack till midnight and then up again the next morning 6ish for more packing and car filling and driving me and carfull of stuff to new house behind the truck. Thanks to Mango Mitzu for amazingly being at my doorstep at 10am yesterday to help with the final odds and sods removal from the old house, cat hiding and then driving me and cat and stuff to the new house. Sorrry to all folk who I failed to see / email/ call/ attend events of in the last week or maybe even the last year of commuting.

First impressions of new suburb, new house, living with other people again, how exactly I will fit my jackets in my room, what bed I end up buying, how the cat is settling in, and how I'm going with unpacking those pesky boxes will all have to wait. I'm off to get some sleep ready for my first exciting morning of being able to walk to work! Yihah.

Moving is very well, moving

Feeling all displaced and messy as one does when the stuff of daily life is uprooted and either packed or scattered around the loungeroom. On Sunday skulking around the house trying to pack I would have wailed but I don’t exactly know how. Just a low gutteral groan would have done, and was what was rising up out of my gut. Like putting pain into sound. Hyoaaaaaah. EWrrrrgh. Mngggggggggg. Mild level discomfort and low level continuous to-do-list-itis. I don’t like it. I don’t mind high level stress, you know, sheer face of emerging deadline and a zillion things to do swiftly – I quite like the exhileration of the spur of the moment response when your brain cells have to get firing swifty, or your hands have to quickly do a series of tasks and juggle things in the material world. But this extended smouldering stress of 2 weeks of house related logistics, involving complex negotiations of dates, and payments and form signings, and needing to be packing, and orgasnising things in advance, and canceling things and going through things and taking stuff to op shop bins and last social events with various mountain folks and work deadlines woven all amongst it so not letting me take proper days off and then dropping egg cartons to the co-op and sorting out my fucking spice cupboard, and doing it all alone, without a housemate or partner handily on hand to process with – to be honest, it’s quite crap. I sound off hand and grumpy but this morning I felt quite fragile, and yesterday quite melancholic, like that sadness that comes premenstrual before the cramps or anything else, when you just feel wistful and nostalgic and prone to tears (that is, I do). Hmm. But not long now, the wheels are turning, the point of no return has been reached in this birth process* between one phase and another. No going back now, I am partly slipping down to the bright lights and expectant faces of the city.

*Do babies feel this, dying people feel this? ‘Oh, not yet, I wasn’t quite done, I had all these things I had thought I would do here and you know, I’ve grown quite accustomed to this little cosy corner of the world, and the company was good, and I like being me here and I’m not sure what is waiting for me and whether I’m ready to move on and anyway what will it be like? I’m scared, what if it’s not nice, what if I’m not ready?’.

Actually I had a personality lift – see here, the line behind my ears?

So it’s almost 10.30 at night and I’m on my way home, it’s dark, obviously, and I’m heading to the late open supermarket to get something for work lunches the next few days – and fruit, have a sudden hankering for mangoes. Walking through the car park, skip bins on my right, concrete lined garden bed on my left. There is a shadowy figure walking towards me. Literally, in shadows from shrubs and bin and me slightly blinded by the burning effigy of supermarket in front of me.

We pass and as we’re passing a voice says ‘Hi (my name)’. I turn and say ‘oh hi (his name). Sorry I didn’t recognize you, the light was in my eyes’. A guy I first met at a coffee shop table when I stopped to talk to someone else I knew. We’ve bumped into each other in supermarkets and laundry mats just by virtue of often being in town on a weekend and now have remembered each others’ names for polite and brief passing hellos. I’ve met his girlfriend too, she seems outspoken and a good counterweight to his slightly flimsy presence. He is holding a little blue bat. I say ‘oh – how was your table tennis? Good game?’ He is holding the bat up at shoulder height and kind of angling his body, like a kid might twist in an uncomfortable pose when confessing something they don’t really want to let out. He pauses and says ‘Oh yeah, I really enjoy the game…’ He is lined and dry looking and his eyes always make me cautious – they are somehow too pale, and maybe the pupils are too small, they look wild, and stunned from staring too wide into the sun. He is thin in a way that suggests that his skin would like some fatty acids, that maybe he is a little worn down from not enough sustenance, that he has been wetted, wrung out and dried, and the crinkles have remained. He pauses. He says ‘You know, I find you really attractive’ in the tone of revelation, with the emphasis on the really. I’m not scared, I’m surprised, and I say ‘Oh thank you, that’s sweet’ (do I really say that? How patronizing. I’m trying to be gracious and accept what I figure is meant as a compliment, and to treat it as just a compliment, not a loaded and provocative statement that is essentially a proposition). He laughs like we are now sharing marvel in some mystery, and says with some degree of wonder ‘you must take charisma pills’. And I say quite straightforwardly, earnestly, ‘No. I don’t’, as if he’s just asked whether I happen to dye my eyebrows. He says ‘you’re a pisces aren’t you?’. I say yes, nodding and continuing to move slightly in the direction I was going. I’m not phased by this, I told him this once before – he asked, and it is a very common question in the mountains, like ‘where do you live’ is a Sydney standard. He says pisces dragon? This I don’t think I’ve told him, he seems to be deducing, asking. I say yes, I’m a dragon, a fire dragon. He says ‘pisces fire dragon!’ and I say nothing. I realise that it might be polite to ask him his star sign now, but I can’t bear to – because it might give the impression I am interested in finding out more about him – which I’m not – and might open up the door for him to tell me something hideous about how compatible he thinks we are. So instead I just back away, as I had started earlier edging towards the supermarket, and say ‘I’ve gotta go!’ while my arms do something to indicate the supermarket and the lateness of the night and my need for work lunches and mangoes. And how tired I am. So I turn and go.

(And to track my internal responses my this exchange honestly I have to recognize that I felt an initial flush of feeling pleased at being complimented, surprised and flattered ‘someone thinks I’m attractive!’, and then a swift feeling of concern as I wonder whether he is creepy and I should now be worried about him ‘oh crap please don’t let him still be outside the supermarket when I come out – thank the Goddess he doesn’t know where I live’, and finally some strange analytical observation about men externalizing the experience of unexpected desire – he asked whether I take charisma pills, in another era he probably would have suggested that I had made a pact with the devil and maliciously applied my supernatural powers of seduction upon him just to wreak havoc on his life, and burnt me at a stake.)

Oh woe is me. What? Sorry, no I wasn’t talking to you. um yeah. Just a vegie pad thai thanks.

There is something intrinsically humbling and shoe scuffing about the long haul commuterlife. I eat alone at tiny Japanese restaurants or get takeaway (mmm vegie and rice $4 specials) and eat on the train, or, even more glamorous, eat something I assemble at work. This is because I have given up on the idea of eating really really late when I get home. See? Not glam. If I miss a train I slouch around, do more work, clean my desk, walk the long way round, buy dinnner. Sounds leisurely I know, but feels kind of like looking busy. I have these (occasional, I promise, occasional) moments of sheer despair where I see myself looking tired and eating at some overlit Thai takeaway, by myself, too tired to read, to tired to think much of anything nice, with bad frizzy hair and also noticing that I’m so shallow I’m worried about frizzy hair and I think ‘oh dear, what was my life all about again?’ because I’ve forgotten, but seem to remember that this wasn’t quite how I planned to furnish it and have a niggling feeling that there were important, and um, like fun, things that I had planned to do with it. And maybe in places other than bed, work, the train or the thai takeaway. Not long till moving now – funny how once you’ve decided to change a situation enduring the last little bit of it can suddenly seem extra excruciating.

Rock-off

Went to a trivia night, which a girl from work organized as a fundraiser. At the end of the night two teams had reached a draw. Neither of them was my team, but hey, that 2/10 round on cartoons really set us back. And who was to know all those wacky river questions?

Anyway, the compare – who was truly scary, really truly quite gobsmacking in his flat backed, crew-cutted, easily inflamed, dum as guts with scared piggy eyes and no sense of humour unless it was coming from him and directed at putting someone back in their box – said that each team had to send someone up to the front for a ‘rock off’. I was so excited, I thought it was maybe like some kind of dance-off, maybe an air guitar competition, or head banging to bad glam rock – I don’t know, something exciting and rock esteidford-esque, a ROCK OFF! Turns out it wasn’t, it was just a game of ‘scissors, paper, rock’ which as you can imagine was rather disappointing, and hardly very rock and roll at all. Seemed very metaphoric. For something. Leaving me wondering why it is that I often expect a gala spectacular on rollerskates with coiffed hair and backing music and life delivers a scissor paper rock game.

Or how about

'Samsung Australia has released its E530 handset, hoping to corner the female market. The pink phone can count calories, measure body fat and store the weekly shopping list. It can even be programmed to tell a woman when she is ovulating. And yes, it has a camera and MP3 music player.'’*
Or how about a phone that tells you when marketers are making yet another piece of crap that you don’t really need and pandering to your gender stereotype to get you to buy it? Huh? It could beep really loud or cough the words ‘Bullshit! Bullshit alert’.

What about a phone for women that has GIS, a map of public toilets and baby change areas, capsicum spray for dark stations at night, photos of the arctic icecaps melting to remind you why you are catching the train to start with, all of Proust and Wolfe’s works and a searchable database of the romantic poets, a scientific calculator, a flashlight, a lie detector, a breath tester (in both senses of the word), an instant translator, an emergency spring-forth umbrella and raincoat, a tape recording of yourself last time you had a really bad hangover imploring your future self not to have a round of tequila shots. And a camera and MP3 player.

*As reported in The Age, 6 January, 2006 in an article on new model mobile phones. As cited on the Victorian Women’s Trust website.