Sea Green

Ephemera etc.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Ever the realist, he built his table for one

I guess it could be worse. I could live here - in the elementary school where all the children have died. Or with the egg couple.

Thanks Miss Snapdragon for bringing joy to my inbox.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

House, housed, housing

Argh moving bloody sucks.
(I think/ I remember/ I worry)

Here's the deal: my housemates are breaking up and therefore both moving out and to their separate ways* and we are all waiting until one of them gets work before we move, so no-one is left penniless and on the streets (/back with their parents).

And meanwhile we live here, acting like a major upheaval is not just about to take place.

And meanwhile I wig out about when I will have to move, and to where, and with whom, and when on earth I will get around to packing boxes. And whether it will cost an arm and a leg and I'll somehow get stuck between the cracks of housemates out housemates in and have to pay double rent for an eternity. I worry that my moving crunch time will happen in a deadline fortnight and I'll be weepy and tired and running client workshops with odd socks and rumpled clothes because I've somehow packed the other sock in a box with cds and the iron accidentally got put in with my button collection and I haven't found it yet. Not that I worry too much or anything.

And being relatively new in a relationship of course a teensy teensy part of me goes 'hmm, well, we could live together' - not that I want to (yet. yet?) but it raises it sooner as an idea than it would otherwise. (It's not on the cards, too soon, I'm just saying, it crosses your mind).

And being in my early (well technically early to mid) thirties a largish part of me thinks 'well why are you still renting? Who looks for a share house at 34?'. So moving reminds me that I''m not buying a house and for a bunch of reasons related to budget, income, low confidence in my ability to continue having a steady income, perhaps my general financial flakiness and inability to see myself as an actual grown up, am not actually in a position to do anything other than rent.

Maybe this is a wake up call to get a plan, start saving like crazy and get my financial shit together. Anything to avoid packing boxes for a few years. And actually I'd quite like to tile a bathroom in sea greens and paint an orange and red animal mural on a spare bedroom - is that enough reason to buy property?


* Note - not widely public knowledge yet, please don't mention to other folks if you happen to know them (I've kept mum for over 6 months, but figure I can mention it now that it's affecting my living arrangements)

Well

Well I did something big today. I emailed a magazine* with some jpgs of illustrations I'd done, along with an 'artists' statement' and asked them to take them to the next design team meeting. By way of back story, I first emailed then A YEAR AGO, and the guy said 'yeah sure send something through we love hearing from new illustrators', so what did I do? promptly filed the email and chickened out and pretended I'd never asked. Naturally. Anyway, I got the bottle up and decided, fuck it, to send them something.
It felt really good actually, like I was being brave and also really honest. the artists statement came out quickly and painlessly and was a coherent story that mentioned my day job and linked it to the work. A friend who works in the arts edited it for me, and helped with some rearranging, but essentially we kept the words I'd used. It felt quite spontaneous, easy and 'right'.
I feel like whether they respond or not, give feedback or not, want to include something I've done or not kind of doesn't matter - I mean I'd like them to say 'woo hoo you rock, send us more, here's a truckload of cash', obviously - but compared to the experience of feeling confident enough to throw my hat in the ring, and not cringe, not be apologetic, to feel happy with some pieces and like I authentically represented myself, it doesn't matter a jot. Just to refer to my work and not mentally put inverted comas around the word. Just to have done it and not feel like a kid running up to someone's buzzer on a practical joke and running away again fast. To feel like it is possible, fine, normal, do-able - that is the prize.
It's funny this thing of self image and what invisible boundaries it imposes on what you do - as it extends, what you feel you can do, and what you actually do extends, like a breath out, like an expansion. Colonizing new territory. claiming new parts of yourself.

*Totally earthy quite deep green magazine that has quite a few illustrations and photos through it

Your favourite toilet

I was at work the other day (yes, I went back, yes, I'm still there, yes it's actually fine - more to follow), and went to the toilet. As you do. As I was coming out of the cubicle someone was on the other side of the door about to push it. We laughed. She apologised. Then she said, kind of accusingly, 'you're in my favourite toilet!' I laughed and left, and told the girl I was about to have lunch with about the exchange, remarking that in fact the strange thing was that that very same cubicle was my favourite toilet. Rather than look at me strangely and ask what the hell I was talking about (after all, who has a favourite toilet) she said' oh mine is the one up the other end.'
'But mine has the funny little angled door - it's cosy, and its close to the windows, nice light' I say.
She says 'oh no, claustrophobic, and those windows are so cold in winter'
We muse together on the way down in the lifts on whether everyone out there actually has a favourite toilet, and whether there's some kind of pattern to who chooses which one. Your favourite toilet - the new management personality profiling tool (no pun intended) perhaps?

Monday, January 11, 2010

resume normal programing

Ok ok so I obviously needed to have a giant vent on Friday. Sorry for tortured memoir infused woe-dump. If it's any consolation it made me feel heaps better, and freed up my brain to have a gentle wander around the library, rest day with less feeling stuck.

I think I feel better now after having had a few days to get used to the moving out / replacing housemates options, and actually looking to see what is out there in or close to what I'm willing to pay for rent. I think also a few more conversations with my mum makes me think she's at least thinking through the gritty details of what a change in her living arrangements would entail, and she's catching up with old friends who would be a support network if she went through a big move. Work I haven't been back to yet, but will tomorrow. My churning stomach has abated and I sometimes think just engaging with the 'I could actually leave this if I wanted to' idea is a powerful antidote to the strong feelings of 'but I'm needed there, I couldn't possibly leave'.

I think being further away from my family does help me find space to operate on a more even keel / more supported and positive emotional space. I'd love to be able to be around them and not as affected, and maybe that is happening incrementally, but for now it is much easier from a distance. (Interesting that the family therapy texts differ so markedly in their advice on this - some talk about the danger of 'returning to the poisoned well' - seriously dramatic, eh - others talk about the importance of going back and doing old things in a new way).

And although my lingering protestant work ethic and general desire to be a professional person who does what they say they'll do is strong, I think it's probably a good sign that my little stress heap triggers much earlier action than it once did. ie probably healthier in the long run to have a wig out, feel sick and not go in for a few days, and give space to sort through things and reenter calm and emotionally more resilient, than to battle on for weeks or months with repressed emotional stuff unresolved in the background, until the pile is huge and topples over leaving me stuck with legs poking out the bottom, and takes weeks to get out from. In a less long winded way - probably good that I am noticing my feelings and acting on them sooner rather than later like I have in the past with work-life stress stuff.

And having people to talk to helps so much don't you think? In blogosphere and in real life, to voice things takes some of their power out, and diffuses the voice inside that says 'you can't possibly be thinking that, that's lame/awful/whatev just get on with it.' You voice it and the sky doesn't fall in. You voice it and just feel like a goose, but not a terrible person.

Onwards and upwards eh groovers?

Friday, January 08, 2010

Relief

I sit in the quiet room of a large old public building that is now a city library. A reading room and computer roonm, and the cool of the chair leg against my ankle, the wide dark shine of the bench tops soothes me.

And today I needed soothing.

It shouldn't surprise me I supose, when I think to the past, that quiet spaces in public feel like a home coming. I knew that when, standing in the local shopping centre eating handfuls of salty impulse cashews like the stressed monkey I am, feeling mind blank at the prospect of going home, at the prospect of going to work, at the prospect of maybe calling my counsellor ('hi bob, yes it's been 18 months, do you have a space available today?'), at the prospect of confessing to my patient boyfriend who came around for emergency hug and moral support last night and pep talk and gee up to get to work this morning that I didn't after all make it to the office, all these things whirling in my head, all these mind blank, short circuits, all these entangled threads, and the entagled threads behind them too, and the thing I think of is the cool, and the quiet, the reverence, and the anonymity of this old building with books in it. And a keyboard. And maybe writing and writing until it all comes out and I feel clean, and balanced, and unentangled.

I wonder on the bus on the way in (almost calm then, a decision made, some of the options closed off momentarily) whether it is the case that I am someone who can endre a lot of stress in one direction but when it comes in multiple directions and from areas that feel connected but seperate then I wig out, fall in a heap. I wonder this because I seem to remember the idea that I can handle a lot of stress. I must be able to. I've put myself in situations that are stressful several times. I seem to like it, or at least not mind. Quitting my job on impulse to travel overseas and work and have nothing to come back to not even a plan! Leaving to move to Sydney on a whim in the New Year with a boot full of stuff and barely an idea of where my new job is or what I'll be doing! Studying two subjects while working 12 hour days in a new job in a new country and living in a tiny room with a family and no space to myself! So, a willingness to take risks, at least at some points in my life. And then there's the endurance of stress. Weathering shitty situations stoically. Surely I've done that too? Handled periods of responsibility and work stress. Handled family dramas ad nauseum and managed to keep myself sane - for the most part. Supported other people through tough times and been supportive and up beat. Haven't I? Or at least this is the vision I have of myself. Strong. Stoic. Able to weather discomfort without complaint. Able to adapt to the vissicitudes of life, stormy seas, chopping and changing direction. Adaptable. A make do-er, a stubborn little plant with roots dug in deep to thin soil in a small pot left up the back of an old lady's house long after she's left the house to her niece and the garden has ceased to be watered.

So today, this week, yesterday I think 'am I'? Or am I actually a dithering wreck?
How is it that sometimes a few characteristics of circumstance are able to wind me with a thump to the guts, take the wind from my sails and leave me gasping, panicking for air? And the bizarre thing is that I have these moments in time delay mode, revealed layer by layer - no one large temper tantrum fuelled teary meltdown that announces itself out loud in full colour, but a niggle, a dread, a mounting sense of disengagement which little by little opens up the door for other feelings and other 'symptoms' until looking at myself I think 'oh - I'm upset'. I look at myself like a cold cliched movie style disengaged professor father peering up from an entomology tray and say 'oh, there are tears - you must be sad. You feel sick in the stomach, you must be worried. Oh, I see you are not going to school today for the third day in a row - do you not like it? Oh, you seem to be trying to attract my atttention, did you want to let me know something?'. It is strange to be so removed from your own feelings that they seem a puzzle to you. And it is like the Professor father archetype ghosting in my self plans my days, very logical, healthful, useful, good for you life plans, and the mute child lives them out and feels them.

So of course I'm not naiive or simple enough to overlook the patterns of the past happening here. The experience of growing up in an emotionally volatile household where parents unresolved family and life issues took centre stage meant that I always felt my own emotional response to life was a liability. When my father was mentioned, at all, any context I would cry quietly, tears coming without me being able to stop them, out of shame and hurt and sense of loss about not seeing my father, and my mother would get angry and tell me that some people's fathers beat them, or lived with them but then died, so really, I wasn't as bad off as them and I should be grateful for my good fortune in avoiding either of those fates. When my childhood cat died, was put down at the vet, my mother cried in hysterics and me and my best friend who lived next door and had come along too comforted her, in the dark on the steps of the vet and I felt a familar coldness and distance as I went through the motions of comforting her. I grew up trying to be 'good' and self reliant. I read a lot. I made friends easily. I was a good listener. I rarely complained about things or demanded things or asserted my preferences (well, until my teens, and when I started to disagree, and assert my own preferences it felt like my mother acted like I had single handedly betrayed her and broken her heart). Unsurprisingly, feelings felt (and continue to feel) very dangerous. Me being sad or angry or dissatisfied and wanting something meant that I wasn't holding it together enough to keep everything (her) on an even keel, and often resulted in me being told I was selfish, or overdramatic or something else that I equated with being 'a bad person' (I'm not saying this was the intent, it just became the shortcut meaning for me, in my child's brain). I eventually left, my emotional distance taking physical form in an effort to keep myself safe from these inherited emotional badlands (which my poor mum inherited herself, a contaminated site bequeathed to her from her parents), to try to establish some kind of boundary by geography where I had never learnt to create one in my heart. So I create huge distances to save myself from situations where I think I am in threat of being subsumed by another's will or needs of me.

And here I am, feeling like I want to run from my job, a job that is very good on paper but I secretly detest much of the time, but feel pangs of guilt and panic when I think of leaving it. I mostly ignore my feelings about it and tell myself all sorts of good sensible reasons why I should stay there except in bursts, when in a rush, my feelings come out and I wail and want out. And in those moments of intense feeling it is as if I must act NOW, right in the very moment, or I will never get out. There is no sense of the value in taking some time to plan, look at options, work towards something, make provisions for myself, there is only 'out, right now'. And in those moments (such as the one I am in the tail end of, which grew from a tiny seed of discontent mid this week)my overdeveloped sense of responsibility which lumbers around yoked to me the rest of the time, is replaced with a fundamental disregard entirely for the needs and wishes of the other. I suddenly don't care at all that there is a deadline, nor that people are waiting for me, nor that it will look bad, nor that bailing manifests me as a flake, exactly the sort of fucked up child of dysfunctional family that I have always tried so hard not to be. I suddenly care way less about the financial realities of having no income, I feel the need to throw myself seed like on the winds of fate, whereas just a week ago the slightest gust of the cold winds of desperation would have frightened me away from even considering leaving.

And in all this I feel like part of it is the search for 'my people'. Not in a religious or ethnic labelled tribe sense, but in a vague 'I'm not sure they're them' kind of way. The people I currently work with are bright and shiny, happy, smart folk with easy going natures and if a rock hard core of ambition then this is politely dusted over with organic sweetness and light. They are Together. They have their Shit Together. And sometimes I feel like the combined good fortune and comfortable ease with which they move in the world leaves me no room for expressing honestly what is really happening for me. So this week I have struggled with going in dragging my post Christmas reality with me, to that collegiate, politely interested tea room chat space - where polite questions and polite answers about hip happenings and quirky observations are palatable, but sincere ruminations about anything not squeaky clean and shiny are not.

The correct answer to "how were your holidays?" is "oh it was lovely, so nice to see family, and get away". Not "well, I thought it was OK because I borderline kept it together while gone but seem to have fallen in a a bit of a heap when I got back. You see my grandma's depressed and not getting out of bed, another one has been depressed for years since her husband died and apparently couldn't muster up any joy without him, and I guess I feel sad and guilty and worried that it's catching when I see them, and kind of helpless that I'm far awar and can't do anything. Then there's my mum, who I think might be leaving her partner, and moving interstate with my little brother, but the whole relationship is fraught and littered with considerations of exes and other children and access isues. And now, my housemates are seperating and moving out, so I have to move house early this year at roughly exactly the same time that uni starts (which I have enrolled in after a 4 year hiatus and was feeling a bit nervous about anyway), and at the same time I've come down with raging career doubt and strange fantasies of a quiet life illustrating children's books over a cup of tea in a quiet little room in a quiet little house somewhere, so coming back here is particularly difficult..."

So instead I came to the library.

Saturday, January 02, 2010

revelations, the rapture, radelaide

Back in Sydders now after week in radelaide/ fabelaide/ oh-I'm-glad-adelaide... (etc). Random things that I chrystallised in that visit (metaphorically, natch, I was not in a biker speed lab):
- I heart Lily Allen - revealed as a main stream pop lamo for once and for all, me.
- I flounder around in the aftermath backwash of the giant waves of other people's fraught relationships when I'm around my family. It's much more peaceful when I'm not. Despite that there are some small pleasures in being there. It gets easier, I feel somehow more resillient each subsequent visit - the longer I am away perhaps? the older I get? the more they each deal with their pasts?
- My Grandparents are all getting on, and my Grandmas in particular are now the Queens of the blunt comment. 'You've lost weight - you'd be a size X now?' one says. The others says' how old are you? So, you're not having children then?'. My gradfather says 'so you have a boyfriend I hear. That's nice. Because it was so long really, wasn't it? Like really quite a long time'. Sheesh guys.
- I am somehow Switzerland, the confidente. 'I'm going to confide in you something' one Aunty says. The other one says 'I wouldn't tell anyone else this, but this morning I heard..'. In response I start to feel like being a simpleton and saying what I think and hear: 'Um, everyone says you're drinking too much and being mean to --. Is that true?' or 'So, I hear you owe thousands in school fees and that's why you moved - is that true?' or '-- says you swear too much around the kids and should tone it down.' I figure that would be a surefire way to have people stop telling me things they don't want to get back to people. Maybe it would open up the doors of the family abode, let some fresh air in, help all the dark musty corners dry out and bleach pale in the sun.
- Ex partners haunt old towns. Even when you're well and truly over (over, over, over) and years (years and years and years) out of the relationship, it is a shock to hear they and their new partner and baby bumped into your Aunty in Coles shoppping for dinner. Well, maybe for better adjusted people it's not a shock, but it was for me. Kind of creepy. Everyone knows difficult exes are meant to gracefully fade away and out of your field of reference, right?


- - -

Today I was at a popular Suydney beach, sitting in the sun. SITTING IN THE SUN! Amost my least favourite thing to do in the whole world, because it is just too HOT, and I feel so BAKED, and everything is so bright and shiny. But actually on my old aqua borrowed towel, and in my pinching rouched aqua and purple granny bathers, and with my glasses off and my non prescription sun glasses rendering the world shady and blurry, the multitudes blending into dappled shade on the beach, I felt quite happy.

- - -

Saw an old friend, from many many years ago - maybe 10 or 15? And was dazzled by her bright blue eyes popping out of her brown face, and her animated converstaion, and her honesty, and the expanse of conversation, and slightly self aware (am I being in awe of her because she's in the entertainment industry? Am I acting different?), and almost was able to forget until straight after eating someone came up and gushed at her about her music. And I say 'is that normal.. Does that happen all the time?' and she kind of shrugs and and grimaces in a 'what can you do, life is wacky' kind of way, and I go 'wow that's really surreal', and we leave. And I have this tiny thread of connection to her life and its rhythms, and in what ways it's different to mine, and in what ways it's the same.