Tanjerine O Orange Dream

I had a dream once too

2012-02-15T22:02:00.000+11:00

It has come to my attention, via some of the work I have been doing with my psychologist, that I have trouble with my feelings and emotions.

By that I mean, I grew up in a family where some feelings or emotions were not ‘permissible’ and I therefore learned to repress those feelings and emotions rather than learning how to deal with them constructively.

The consequence of that is anxiety because what is permissible on the surface and what is going on underneath is like continent plates rubbing against each other. Causing earth quakes and tsunamis.

So a situation comes up that I seek to control because I fear my underlying incapacity to handle my own emotions, so rather than listening or watching the situation develop, then assessing and responding, I become captive to the anxiety that my feelings trigger. Which eventually triggers an adrenalin spike and fight or flight response, and when I choose fight (which is often), that results in ‘fighting with’, rather than ‘problem solving with’.

The feelings are subconscious so don’t translate into specific thoughts like “I am worried I will fail at this” or “I am worried that we won’t have enough money and will get kicked out”. They are just nebulous fields of anxiety and “boom”: trigger.

Only as I’m becoming aware of these subconscious feelings I am now also becoming aware that I have been triggered. At that point, I can say to myself ‘hold on, you just got triggered, just hold for a moment, listen and watch, you don’t need to prepare a response now, which will be based on anticipating a worst case scenario that will probably never happen’. And so, adrenalin does not spike, fight or flight is not triggered, I concentrate on breathing and that whatever will happen I can trust myself to respond to appropriately. So that when the moment for interaction comes, I can problem solve and work with people, rather than fighting with them because I got triggered.

There were a lot of emotions in my family that I/we were not allowed ‘to have’, much less express when I was growing up. To list them all could take an essay in and of itself. A key one however relates to existential type anxiety ie money/safety worries. My parents argued and stressed over money, but we children were not allowed to have input, feel or express our concerns, for example, if dad decided to switch jobs again. We weren’t allowed to express anything that might have sounded like criticism of our father - which could include anger, sadness or worry at him or about him. This ‘rule’ came from mum as much as dad, even though mum was also the constant underminer of that rule, which probably only made the anxiety worse.

My parents constantly worried about money, bills, ‘badness’ of having debts (anything other than a house mortgage was irresponsible), credit ratings and pride associated with being able to manage all of the above (for example, in my family we went without something if it meant a bill had to get paid on time, a reminder notice was considered a sin). Alternative views or emotions were ‘forbidden’.

We were also a sexually conservative household, and television, books and music were censored accordingly, and feelings and emotions in relation to this topic were strictly controlled, censored, monitored and ‘punished’. For example, my father would rant about degeneracy if we happened to catch a free to air movie with a sex scene or language that he felt went beyond his views of appropriate conduct. This could include a passionate kiss. We were often lectured about the moral degeneracy of pornography and my father would refer to men who viewed such material as weak or ‘less’ or not ‘proper’ men somehow. The concept that women might view such material never came up.

To this day I can’t watch an even sedate love scene in a movie with someone else in the room without squirming or behaving like a child (covering my eyes, making silly noises), all of which is aimed at covering up my embarrassment not about what is happening on screen but my worry that someone in the room with me might be monitoring my response, and therefore I cover up any genuine reaction ranging from fascination to arousal to indifference.

I know this is specifically a conditioning problem because I don’t have those problems when I’m alone. ‘Unmonitored’, I’m shocked and embarrassed by surprisingly little.

Masturbation was never discussed and I didn’t believe that people actually did it until I was 15 (I thought mags like Cosmo, Cleo and Dolly that were aimed at teenage girls were making things up or exaggerating).

On the other hand, once I got older and became sexually active, my mother undermined my father’s strict regime and asked me for inappropriately explicit information, citing curiosity arising from having married her first boyfriend and never having had any other experience herself. However, this digging for explicit facts was soon coupled with a shame/guilt response that got acted out on me. I was both the opportunity for my mother to live vicariously through me, and the scapegoat or ‘whipping girl’ for ‘the family, with my behaviour and emotions judged and pilloried. I became the ‘slut’ in the family who had traded free sexual expression for a more appropriate capacity to ‘attract and keep the right kind of man’. It became okay for my mum, dad and sister to say just about anything to me in their attempts to shame me and get me back under control.

Dad told me he didn’t want to meet or hear about any man I was involved with until I’d met the one I was going to marry. Which also meant I was never able to seek his advice or counsel about relationships because any that I might be having that I could not guarantee would lead to marriage were not valid.

Mum would pump me for information and then would chide me, saying things like “you don’t always have to sleep with them you know.”

My sister, who is 6 years younger than me, told me that she was deliberately keeping her boyfriends away from me. She was 16 when she had her first boyfriend, and he was also 16, and I was 22. At that age, I was not interested in any male under the age of 25, much less under 20.

The idea of ever having tried for an honest discussion with either of my parents about my feelings, worries or concerns about sexuality and relationships in order to receive advice or guidance seems ridiculous to me. It was just something I was supposed to figure out how to do, based on them as role models, even though I think the above explains that they weren’t good ones.

So I floundered with trial and error.

Homesickness and family relationships were other taboo emotional subjects. There were specific do’s and don’ts, and contradictions weren’t reconciled. For example, my parents desired and enforced a family love, loyalty and obedience system within their nuclear family that was at distinct odds with the behaviours they themselves exhibited towards their own families.

I realise that the upshot is that I have a whole bunch of forbidden emotions inside of me that I have trouble expressing, that I repress and even worse, that shape an unwritten and often illogical behaviour ‘code’ (subconscious beliefs and values) that I then impose on myself and on others. Everyone from my husband to my sister to my boss to my ‘clients’. However, when issues arise that create emotional ‘arousal’, my first instinctive reaction is to fear this, because I’ve been taught that those emotions are ‘bad’ and forbidden, and therefore I never got taught to bring them up and handle them appropriately. This causes adrenalin to spike, fight or flight response, and because I am a) afraid but b) also angry (that this is happening to me), I will stand and fight to win to deflect from what is really going on in me so that I can maintain my facade of competency and being in control. Including in situations where anyone with half a brain would flee.

But after I ‘fight’ and ‘win’, I feel guilty, so that is then followed by appeasing and self-sacrificing behaviour. I actually really just want people to like me, I didn’t mean to set up a ‘win/lose’ situation, so now I need to make amends so that they’ll like me again and won’t hold my winning against me.

But if I ‘fight’ and ‘lose’, meaning I wasn’t right and I was less than perfect, then I feel shame. Because I always have to be perfect. Perfectly in control, perfectly pleasing, and my role, my place in the world, if I can’t maintain that, is in question.

So. There are no easy answers and I have a feeling that there is still a long journey ahead for me to re-rear myself. But here are some things that I feel. Some emotions I have. And only by acknowledging them, bringing them into the light of day, will I ever be able to deal with them like a reasonable adult.

I’m not going to explain to what situations those emotions pertain, that is my own business. But... I do feel these.

I am scared.

I actually am quite jealous. I hate that I am, but I am.

I am regretful. I hate that too, because a more useless emotion I can’t imagine, but I feel regret none the less.

I am sad. And I mourn and grieve.

I am really, really angry.

And they’re just feelings.

And feelings in the bright light of day are not the same as facts.

I can learn to handle them.

Yes when she glows in the dark and I'm struck by the sight

2012-02-11T17:15:00.003+11:00

I feel restless
I am obsessed with
The voice that I hear to be gone

That comes from a poem I wrote, I don't know, some 10 to 20 years ago.

It can still hold true.

It can still feel like that to me.

How can I be so different and still so much the same?

How can the same thoughts colour me, come back to haunt me?

I was reminiscing this morning, just letting my mind drift as I was waking up, enjoying that it was a weekend day with no alarm clock and no schedule, about an A-ha song that I'd identified with so strongly as a teenager.

It's called "The Swing of Things" and it came from their second album released late 1986 or early 1987.

The lines that haunted me, that I identified with so much go:
Oh there's a world full out there
Of people I fear
But given time I'll get into
The swing of things

This was written and being performed by guys in their twenties and I was in my teens and I'd only gotten as far as "There's a world full out there of people I fear", but it gave me hope that this bunch of insightful guys from Norway could, in their twenties, foresee a time or an ability to get into 'the swing of things'. So maybe I could, I would, too someday.

It happened a little the same way for me. I got out into the world in my twenties and probably started getting 'into the swing of things' in my very late 20's and early 30's.

It's no longer a world full of people I fear, rather the world full of stuff that is in me is what always feels like it's holding me back.

I started reflecting a little bit about that fact that I am still, despite increased levels of comfort with a world full of people out there, a fairly reserved person. And how much I have railed against that and hated that for much of my life, rather than accepting that this is who I am. It's not like I don't admire, value or like people for being other than me. Hey, I am the epitome of 'opposites attract' in so many ways, particularly in this way. But one of the ways I do digest 'difference' is to judge 'you - better', 'me - worse'. Even if it doesn't look like it, even if I come off aggressive, superior, condescending, untouchable, dismissive etc, that is what is going on inside of my head. Stuff about how I am wrong and ought to be able to force myself to change.

I was thinking back through some blog posts that I'd written, particularly over the past 18 months or so where I've chronicled my belated discovery of and growing fandom of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There was one blog where I think I mentioned how much I envied Anthony Kiedis' ability to throw himself into life physically and emotionally.

And I know I've written about where I was in my late teens and early twenties when RHCP first came to mainstream attention, and how I was not set up in any way, shape or form to appreciate them then. In fact, they straight out intimidated me at that age, not that I would have admitted that. I would have hidden behind condescendingly writing them off.

And so I was reflecting that a lot of the actual grunge hard core stuff of the Gen X glory days of the early 90's left me untouched and behind because I don't enjoy being in mosh pits, being ground up against others, being hot and sweaty and stinky and dirty, being uncomfortable, being off my face and acting up and out.

I was much more of a club/dance queen in the early to mid 90's, preferring nightclubs and dance music to open air festivals and mosh pits. Air conditioned venues, coat check rooms, bars with well dressed men and expensive drinks.

And I was always an average dancer, too reserved to cut lose, too uncoordinated and maybe also a little too self conscious to really find rhythm.

I got by because I was a young, tall, striking looking girl with short cropped bleached hair and a sassy attitude (way more front than substance) and I could do just enough stuff, pick up my feet and wiggle my butt, to get by, plus, I could handle my booze.

Boozing is all I ever did. Drugs were way too scary for me. The concept of letting go and losing control is never one that has appealed to me. The idea of taking a little boost to feel good also never appealed because for me it was always about hiding in plain sight, not about cutting extatically loose. I saw too many people high on drugs acting like douche bags and everyone could see it except them (only some others didn't care because they were equally off their faces) for that to be appealing to me. I was working too hard to control my image and my self to ever risk cutting lose or making a fool of myself.

When I reflected a little more, I worked out that in fact I had done most of my night clubbing in my twenties in the winter months. Summer here usually just gets too damn hot and I hate feeling all sweaty and yucky and being pressed close to people when it's like that. Of course that's why I always sick in my twenties, because I went clubbing all winter long and either didn't take jackets or took jackets that were too thin and as soon as you left the club it was rainy or windy or cold....

Summers in my twenties were for the most part about nursing broken hearts. I'd meet some guy in the autumn and winter months, we'd flirt, we'd date for a while and by the time that summer came, it was over again and I'd nurse my broken heart going to the movies alone (at least the theatre was air conditioned).

I remember meeting one guy in January and agreeing to go on a beach date with him. He was a navy deep sea diver and we went to Bronte beach for our second date where I proceeded to nearly drown trying to keep up with him and got hideously sun burned to add insult to injury. There was no third date.

I did better in winter, where I could cultivate my starved, nordic pallor (yes, I was one of those dumb girls who didn't eat - I was too logical but also too poor to do bulimia, if I was actually going to fork out money for food I sure as hell wasn't going to throw it all up again), and you know, if you're thin and tall enough and knock back a few bourbons you end up swaying, and since everyone else in that scene was all about being cool (and were off their faces) that probably passed as dancing.

Shoot to the future (where I am no longer starved or pallid) and I remember when Green Day toured in 2009, I was all excited that we had tickets. And then one day at the gym I saw some footage from one of those festivals from 1994 or 1995 where they got into a mud throwing contest with their fans and I nearly had a heart attack and asked Lucas if I would be up to this?

I imagined having to hide at the back of the audience while the front mosh pit rocked out and people crowd surfed etc. In the end, it was 2009 after all, not 1994, and their fans had aged every bit as much as Green Day had, and even though there was a little bit of carefully supervised crowd surfing by those who volunteered, I was perfectly okay being 10m from the stage (I got splashed by Billy Joe's sweat at one point) without feeling at all early 1990's 'grunged'. I did feel rather 'gah!' though. (Billy Joe Armstrong is just 'that' cool.)

And I thought about what it might be like going to a RHCP concert, and it occurred to me that it would probably be a bit like the Green Day concert. It is 2012 after all, not 1991 or 1994, and the fans have gotten older too, as has the band. And it is always open to me to stand or sit at the back, and let the wild antics go on in the front.

But I am not, at this stage of the game, going to find my rhythm, climb on some guy's shoulders and take my top off, dance like it's 1984, get high, get outgoing, start digging something that I have never once dug in my life. I am not a party animal. I am not a great dancer. I don't 'got the moves'. Not on the dance floor anyway. And I am too self conscious and reserved to cut loose in public.

Private is another matter. For me, always is. :)

But that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy bands or live music, and I've managed to get through several Cat Empire gigs and a Green Day gig without coming unhinged, did manage to enjoy myself even though I didn't 'change my stripes'. About the most I'm going to do is sway my hips a little and sing along and grin, and I might drink a beer, but that's about all.

I'm so envious of people who can dance well, who can express themselves that way, or even people who can't dance all that well but just enjoy doing it anyway and aren't afraid to. Who are publicly, physical, gregarious.

Envious, but not jealous. I love to watch them having a good time.

I just work differently so maybe it doesn't look the same, but that doesn't mean I'm not having a good time. And it's interesting. In my life long fascination with and capacity to be struck by others who are different from me, it's never once occurred to me that those others might also be struck by how I am, even if I am different. I have not trusted others to do that or get that. I've always assumed that they needed me to be as they are, otherwise I just won't be accepted or considered good enough.

So on that note, the full verse goes:

"Oh there's a world full out there
Of people I fear
But given time I'll get into the
Swing of Things

Yes when she glows in the dark
And I'm struck by the sight
I know that I'll need this
For the rest of my life."

I'm blonde, and I'm always going to be relatively pale. So I definitely glow in the dark. :)

PS Lucas does not agree that I am pale. Pfft!

Nocturnal magical mystery tour

2012-02-07T17:52:00.001+11:00

When I went to bed last night I resolutely told myself “no more dreams about babies!”

Compliant little subconscious mind that I have – it complied.

Instead, I dreamed one of my long standing reoccurring old favourites; going for a visit back to Germany.

Those dreams are old hat, I’ve been having them a few times a year ever since we arrived here when I was 7 and since Lucas has been around, they often involve me taking him back with me.

This particular dream was a variation on a theme, as we specifically went to visit my aunt Marianne (obviously brought on by my blogging about her yesterday) in her lovely, orderly, sleepy little middle class village about 15 minutes from Schwaebisch Hall (not too far from Stuttgart for those who are not so good with German geography).

We arrived at night in a rental car and it was summer because it was lovely and warm. At first there was no one about, and then suddenly there was Marianne, as she must have been about 10 or 15 years ago and the house looked familiar, as it really is in real life. And then suddenly it didn’t. Rather than having just one set of stairs down to a basement it seemed to have multiple floors and rickety stairways and the hallways along the stairs were covered with her cross stitch tapestries (which she does do).

But in this dream house it was like her cross stitch pieces were records of both local and family/personal history – bit like the Bayeux tapestry, only hokier. 

I was traipsing down the stairs and heard some people noise, there were people around all of a sudden in this familiar and yet strange house, and I noted that a few of the cross stitch tapestries were of a cat my aunt used to have in the 1980’s, a very fat, over-fed cat called Muschi who probably died from over nurtured obesity related illnesses (my aunt actually fed her 5 times a day!!). And I thought “awwwhhhh” and called to Lucas to come look, and all of a sudden the figures in the pictures started moving, and it wasn’t fat cat anymore, it was sleek, svelte killer cat who was going after rabbits and other smaller cats with extended killer claws that made her look like Wolverine from X-men. *Snick* indeed!

I was pretty taken aback and as Lucas came bounding along I put my back to the feral moving picture tapestries and muttered ‘never mind’ as I guided him on and down the stairs, past the display of killer cat and her claws of vengeance.

Disturbing, much?!

The house was full of young folks, couples, ageing hippies, some making out, some needing a bath (bit pongy), some with dreads, some smoking, some drinking. What the?! My aunt was always a sociable person but there were a few ‘types’ about that would have met my aunt’s vernacular ‘dregs of society’ concept.

But hey, whatever.

As we were leaving, because apparently we weren’t staying with her but at a hotel, the sleepy, sedate, middle class little village had been turned into social town! Theatres and bars everywhere, and as we were leaving I realised it was just pre-dawn, apparently we’d been having a very good time in the little house of kitty horrors, and drove past this beautiful theatre building with brightly coloured panels in red and yellow and purple between the thick dark wooden beams, and every window was open and out of every window a sleekly handsome, pale, dark male was scanning the street with oddly sinuous movements.

OMG vampires flashed into my head. The theatre has vampires. And it’s the end of night. What have those fellows been doing in there all night?! Each vamp, each one of them more beautiful than the next, did one final safety scan of the street and then, as the first rays of the sun came up, they were all mysteriously and immediately sucked down into the house, windows slamming solidly shut behind them, like a plume of pure black smoke down a vacuum cleaner shoot.

And I thought about going in there to check for survivors and maybe stake a few of the vamps, but then I thought about what kind of powers creatures who could do what I’d just seen had, and it all seemed so maddeningly *fun*! Clearly the windows of the theatre had been flung wide all night, there had been comings and goings, obviously willingly, and they were so beautiful, *SO* beautiful like nothing real I’d seen since forever, that Lucas and I just looked at each other and shrugged and laughed, like 2 kids in a movie driving a convertible car do when the sun comes up and everything is bright and chases the shadows of the night away, and said to each other “wow, cool kind of town!”

And then I woke up.

And feel a little sad and disappointed that my dream was just a dream and none of that would actually be there if we went to see. No magic tapestries, no house full of hung over hippies, no strangely quasi medieval slash pop art theatres with louche sinuous vampires lounging about.

All things being equal; that is a huge improvement on baby dreams!

Stepping back, not fading, into the forest

2012-02-06T21:30:00.000+11:00

Rightiho.

Webernet being douche baggy, so here I go typing in doc first and then a bit of cut & paste.

Always fun.

I find myself thinking things to tweet all day that will be too long for a tweet. Too short for a blog (well, not for normal people it wouldn’t be, perhaps), but too long for a tweet.

One thing I found myself thinking today went like this:

“I get why some people don’t like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I really really do.

Because I used to be one of them.

Of course, then I realised I was wrong.

So. When will you? :)”

Yeah I know. Purile. Infantile stuff.

On another topic, my sister had her baby last Wednesday. Henry Rupert, in case anyone missed my twitter bombardment.

I’ve been speaking to her most every day since, just to see how she’s going, give her the chance to vent, share joy, feel normal etc.

I finally figured out that it really, truly is different when it’s family. I love this little guy already.

It’s a little narcissistic really, in’it? :)

Lucas pointed out some cute babies over the weekend and I rained on his parade by pointing out that other peoples’ kids are still only other peoples’ kids. I am by no definition a clucky person. I don’t melt in a puddle on the floor over kids in general. Babies.

Just don’t.

But it’s all bringing to a head for me hat I can’t seem to have kids. As each year goes by that door clangs shut a little more resoundingly.

And I’m not in the mood for a self-pity fest so I’ll just stick with ‘it su-u-u-cks!!!’

I’m doing stupid things like feeling defensive again. I’m all “don’t you dare pity me!”

But then, when people don’t ask about me at all, then I’m all “I’m always last, no one ever checks to see how I’m feeling.”

That’s right good people of this planet, you can’t win!

My parents drove down to Melbourne today to spend some time with their first grandkid.

I thought about maybe calling them yesterday, but then I left it and then the phone rang after 8pm, and I figured it’d be them, and then I didn’t feel like talking anymore.

It was dad (he left a message), which was kind of a bummer, because I know he never keeps me on the phone long. So I could have taken the call and been over and done with in 5 minutes.

But then I got all bristly and didn’t call back (doing the whole ‘pretending we were out and came back too late to call back’ thing). Because I didn’t want to be asked if I had any messages to pass on, because fuck, I’ve been speaking to Susie myself. And I didn’t want to hear him crow about his happiness about being a granddad because yeah yeah I fucking get it, so you’re happy already, and my kid sister could do something that I couldn’t. Something perfectly normal like fall pregnant and have a baby that I, stupid, futile human being that I am, can’t. I couldn’t, wouldn’t and now seems can’t give you a grandchild.

Yeah yeah tell someone who wants to hear it.

Or maybe he’ll complain and bore me with minutiae about the car trip. Don’t care man, fly down like every other sensible human being does.

Or maybe I’m just mind reading because I’m damn uncomfortable about the whole thing and I don’t want to deal with it.

I can talk to my sister because she’s so caught up in the moment of what she’s experiencing that she’s not even thinking about me. And that’s best. Because I hate that pause in the conversation when I can tell that second and third thoughts are happening and then people are adjusting and they are managing me. Trying to be gentle or considerate or clever or manipulative and I hate it hate it hate all of it.

Goddamnit!

I hate being managed.

Managing is something I do to other people.

And ain’t that just the truth and a half of it.

You have no idea how damn unfeminine it feels not to be able to have children. Not choosing to for the first 35 years of my life was one thing.

But not being able to?

Feels like one almighty kick in the guts.

So what for do I have all this feminine misery for? The irregular periods, the debilitating cramping, the aches and pulling pains in my thighs and breasts every month.

In the end, it feels like I’m neither a woman nor a man.

I’m just something that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

I don’t know. I’m not even reaching what I mean to say. I don’t mean that I’m worthless or....

I just feel like I'm not quite feminine.

My aunt Marianne tried to call last night. Not even 5 minutes after dad called so again I didn’t answer the phone because I thought it was just dad calling back.

Anyway, that was dumb but by that time I was just over it. I suppose she wanted to talk to me about Susie’s little boy too.

And that made me feel defensive too.

And then I realised that was stupid, because out of anyone, Marianne is the last person on this planet who would ever fish for news about my personal situation.

That’s because Marianne never had children either.

She’s my dad’s older sister.

There was a lot of gossip when I was young. Apparently she was pregnant once, but then suddenly lost the baby. Ostensibly she was in a minor car accident and subsequently miscarried. Only my mother also told me that she often doubted that this was true and thought that Marianne might have gone to Hungary to have an abortion. Her explanation for this was that my uncle was an unreliable sort of man and my aunt at the last minute decided that having children with him was not a good idea. That her husband was half a child himself and needed her constant supervision.

I think that is tosh. No one actually thinks like that. Or makes decisions like that.

Maybe she thought about it afterwards, after the accident, and decided that maybe it was best not to have children, or maybe she found out she couldn’t and didn’t see the need to justify or explain that to my mother (and boy I can see why!) or any myriad of reasons why that were her own personal reasons.

But she must have known that she was a subject of gossip because of it. Because married women of her generation just didn’t remain childless.

And in thinking about the way my parents talked about her, I realise that is how I came to form the view that a childless woman is somehow unfeminine.

Because she was ‘the man’ in the relationship with my uncle, because she wore ‘the pants’. She was the butt of masculine jokes in the family, too blunt, tactless, unfeminine, not ‘soft’ enough to have children. She was tall, and chatty, and decisive, and liked to drive, and could hold her drink and liked to eat properly (refusing to pick at salads for example), and could dominate a conversation about just about anything....

She also happens to be my godmother, and because she’s dad’s sister and I take after dad’s side of the family, there was always a physical resemblance between us.

Maybe of all people she’s the one I should be talking with, but it takes me 15 minutes just to warm up my German enough, and even then. Even then... how do you say after all those years “I don’t know how you put up with all of that smug bullshit - all the innuendo and superiority crap from people like my mother.”

I remember how incensed my mother used to get when she told this story about being pregnant with me and how Marianne had said to her once that ‘any cow can push out off spring’.

Yes, that is like Marianne. She can be blunt and tactless.

But I never asked mum what she said or did to make Marianne say that. Because that’s generally not the sort of remark you make to a pregnant woman without some provocation. Not even Marianne.

And my mother is quite good at subtly - and not so subtly - provoking people.

And she did a good enough job of it - with the innuendo and the slurs - that I’ve internalised that a woman who doesn’t or can’t have kids is by definition an ‘unwoman’.

Even though, intellectually, you know, I do know that any brood mare can squeeze out off spring. :)

Ah, you see how easily that can happen?!

Anyway, all that aside, I’ve been dreaming several nights in a row that Susie has left me babysitting Henry and that somehow I stuff it all up. Bring bottles of formula for him, but not the bottle sterilizer. Or I leave him in the car seat in the car (the car that I don’t have).

Sigh.

On another note, a completely different one, Anthony Kiedis is apparently dating current Brit Indie scene It girl Beth Jeans Houghton. Which is oddly not surprising and sort of fits him, and probably her too a bit.

He’s 49 and she’s 21, but who can blame her. Who can blame him.

She seems like a pretty cool together sort of person for a girl that young and that alone tells me that he’s a way marker for her and not the way. Because with a girl that young, with talent and her head screwed on right, a guy that age, no matter how hot and no matter all that he’s been, it is never going to be more. Because eventually there will be a guy like her, young and with talent and his head screwed on right who is hot and has all that he will be still in front of him like she does. And they’ll be able to take the journey together.

And I kind of feel a bit sad for him because while I don’t think for a moment that he could have avoided this or looked the other way or walked away, he’s still not looking in the right places.

There. I didn’t want to write about that, even though I kind of did because it was playing around my head and setting it down is the best way to get it out, but I didn’t want to come off as some sort of deranged.... fangirl, wannabe groupie, something. Of course, I don’t wanna be a groupie. Or an option or an alternative, because I’m not, can’t be, wouldn’t be.

It’s just my nasty little habit of obsessing and meddling and always wanting to be right, and psycho-analysing other people too much.

For example, the other day, I was reading a book about the Titanic and the author referred to a mid 30’s bachelor and his Ganymede, and while I had a suspicion, I wasn’t quite sure what a Ganymede was, so I got onto Safari on my i-phone and looked it up on Wikipedia, and then I got very interested, so I scrolled through all the Wiki stubs, until I realised I was reading up about Greek boy love and erastes and eromenos on my work phone, at which point I had a little heart attack and quickly shut it down. (And I’m in HR - natch.)

And then I spent a day or two ruminating in my head about the differences between the sexes, in particular how older men relate to younger men (taking the sexual element out of it for a moment) in comparison to how older women relate to younger women, and how there are probably biological imperatives behind that behaviour far more, or at least as much as, socialised ones. And I was thinking of using the Snow White fairytale, in particular the character of the wicked step-mother Queen who can’t bear to be overtaken in beauty by her teenaged step daughter, to illustrate my point.

Had a whole blog post in my head, but then I lost interest.

Only, I get on very well with older women and have quite a few friends who are older than me, and I also think I’ve avoided becoming a bitter jealous old hag towards younger women.

Which is nice.

But it’s not culturally the norm. Or at least, it’s a ‘norm’ that we don’t challenge enough. Women are not renowned for older women mentoring younger ones.

Anyway, that blog in my head has been and gone, but I keep being fascinated by the dynamics of and between the sexes, the interplay of age and gender, and somehow that gets tied up with archetypes, and modern representations of ancient ones. And I think I’ve written before how Anthony Kiedis is a bit of a mythical archetype for me, a Dionysus figure, so I guess it sort of makes sense for my mind to turn the way it does and settle not on the green eyes monster aspect, but ponders from the angle of... wishing that even a modern archetype might step out of the mould and get to live life for real, finally, away from the scene and the screen.

And my final thought, as we were watching a Cure video at Kelly’s on Saturday night (yes, how tragic is that, for oh so many reasons), as I wondered what had happened to the members of the Cure, a strange and illuminating thought struck me. I loved the idea of a band like the Cure having made a bomb of money, having bought a grand country estate and maybe a Caribbean island and... having retired. I don’t want to pick up a magazine and see that they’ve gotten together for yet another reunion tour. Or are cutting album number 15 because they think they’re ‘still relevant’. It’s not that music is a young man’s, or woman’s, game. Johnny Cash alone proved that this is not necessarily true.

But to me, that is the genuine mark of success. Was famous, was successful, got slavered over by every pop magazine and teenage groupie world wide, inspired a fashion craze or two, took some drugs, bonked some models, groupies and random slatterns, made a bomb of money and then sailed away into the sunset at the age of 40 never to be heard of again, except for some vague notion that I am having a very good time and have found some depths in life.

I am not a fan of bands touring and touring and touring. Into and beyond their sunset years. Rolling Stones. Lay down that guitar and snare, Jagger, lock your hips away. Duran Duran, go yachting and live disgracefully in southern France, Red Hot Chili Peppers... stop. Just stop. Flea, teach the children at your school, Anthony, do something surprising, turn up in another modeling campaign for Gap or start directing surf movies with a Richard Attenborough-esque element to them... but, stop. Not because you’re not still good, not because you can’t but because.... success used to mean you could stop while you were still young enough to enjoy the rest of your life and not care what anyone else thinks, or about any external measure of success. Meet a good woman or a good man. Dig your fingers in the earth and grow your own grapes or your own herbs. Sail the word or surf it or ski it, learn to cook and entertain people in a way that means inviting them into your home and listening to their stories rather than telling and retelling your own. Enjoy the view. Of the sea and of the mountains, all you’ve sailed and all you’ve climbed and know you came down the other side of the mountain by choice and you’re not looking to chase another now.

Would I be able to do it?

I don’t know.

But I realise in this age of information, of Wikipedia and twitter and bands touring for 50 years and having careers that span eras that were once unimaginable, their lives accessible and followable and digestible and available, a little mystery, a little bit of disappearing again into the unknown where I am not, will never be, invited to follow, the potential of that, makes me feel far far more satisfied than any other alternative.

Rambling through the forest

2012-01-21T19:25:00.004+11:00

Hmmm. What should I muse about. So many random things pop into my head during the week. I often mean to write them down, but struggle to find the time at that particular moment so then...

I write big, serious long blog posts instead.

I did find myself thinking the other day: right, week 3 down, only 49 to go.

And then thought: hang on a second! That is no way to look at or treat time!

I have conversely also been complaining that the first 3 years of my 30's appeared to pass quite slowly, while these past 6 have raced, passing in less time than the first 3. Just perception, I'm sure. The first 3 were so crucial as well. Such upheaval, and so much work to do just getting by. Lucas arriving, on a holiday visa (because his stupid dad told him he wouldn't need a working holiday visa, I know it's ancient history and Lucas will roll his eyes when he sees this, but still.... grrr!), then having to get him to apply for a student visa, then a partnership sponsorship permanent residency visa. Me always looking for a higher paying job, a more secure situation.

Trying to make a relationship work that I suspect a lot of people expected to be doomed from the start because of the age difference alone. Never mind the fact that Lucas showed up on my doorstep 3 months after I left my previous husband.

It all seemed so fraught at times, and yet I remember those as happy years. Romantic years. Lots of cuddling and holding hands and going off on (cheap) adventures because we had so little money. We walked all over Sydney, cataloguing pubs that did steak sandwiches with chips for under $10. Shouting ourselves one beer once a week and savouring it because we had each other and not to would have been foolish. Just looking a gift horse in the mouth.

I am not at all tempted to go back to those years. What there is now has been hard fought for and won and I won't look a work horse in the mouth either! But it's worth remembering that adage about simple things and getting pleasure from them.

Lucas and I are coming up to our 9th anniversary on the 4th of February. However, I might end up having to fly to Melbourne that particular weekend as my sister gives birth to her first child, so we've booked our anniversary dinner at Lucio's in Paddington for next weekend, Saturday the 28th January, instead. Just so that we don't miss out in all the hubbub.

A bit different from a steak sandwich with chips for under $10 I guess.

We had dinner there quite a few years ago, it might have been for my birthday in late September, and were seated one table away from (ex 1970's Prime Minister) Gough Witlam and his wife Margaret, quaffing a couple of bottles of rather fine Pinot, and what might have been their sons, friends or minders, I'm not quite sure.

I nearly had a joygasm while Lucas wondered what the hell his bloody (then) girlfriend was going on about now! Since he had next to no idea about Australian politics at that stage.

Since then we've seen Keating the Musical live twice and countless times on DVD so I suspect if that experience were ever to be repeated, he might just join me with the vapours.

I'm hoping for a quiet evening actually. Just us, reflecting on the joys of the past 9 years and looking forward to the next.

Of course, I will not be held accountable for my actions if Keating himself happens to be seated at an adjoining table. If that happens, all bets are off!

I have my next follow up appointment with the endocrinologist next Tuesday, to do the next round of tests to see if I am still cancer free. Once again, I am going in armed with more knowledge and experience and ready to be argumentative. For one thing, I am not going to be taken off thyroxine for 5 weeks again. That was just bloody nuts and totally unnecessary. I can't afford to be taken out of commission for that period of time with all that's going on at the moment

And bloody hell, even if I could 'afford it', I wouldn't do that to me again.

Still, bit nervous. Bloody doctors. Looking down their haughty noses at anyone who isn't one.

So yes, Susie is going to have a C-section sometime in the next 8 to 10 days, and I'll be going to Melbourne to see her for four days either the first or second weekend in Feb.

I will have to have my follow up test towards the end of Feb/early March. Keeping fingers crossed for clear prognosis, I don't want to have another radioactive iodine ablution. Every time I have one of those, my risk factor for developing leukaemia some time in the next 20 years or so rises.

My mother is about to start another round of chemotherapy and is being prepared for stem cell transplants because the major cyst she had when she was diagnosed with non hodgkins lymphoma 3 years ago, that never quite went away but has remained dormant these past 3 years, is now growing again. She's not sick yet like she was last time (she was diagnosed at Stage 4), but the downside of that is that she doesn't take the necessity of doing this quite as seriously as she ought.

It's very hard on my sister who wants a grandmother for her little boy for at least a few years.

And on my dad.

And on me.

Anyway. We will just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

In April, just after Easter, Lucas and I will be going to Byron Bay for 10 days. The thought of which, frankly, is what is keeping me sane right now.

Something to look forward to!

Lazing on the beach. Walking, hiking, reading, far from phones and e-mail.

It's our treat to ourselves for enduring the family holiday.

Enough about that.

And what about beyond April?

I have no idea.

I know Lucas is not happy in his job, so perhaps he'll start job hunting more seriously for something different when we come back.

I may have some opportunities for a promotion in the first half of this year.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

If I know one thing, it's that in the University sector, nothing is ever carved in stone. I don't know why more people haven't figured that out. For all its slowness, its inability to adapt well to change, it is still the most volatile and reactive workplace I have ever worked in.

But I deal well with ambiguity. Go figure. So I not only survive, but thrive, in environments that would probably be the death of some others.

I'm writing again, which is fun. Making some progress on the project I mentioned in my previous entry.

Trying to be mindful that I don't want to produce a brick of a book. Letting my mind be imbued with characters as they develop and sprout in my mind, heading down paths I haven't even begun to contemplate yet.

I've finally started swimming again too, which I've missed so much! I swam all summer the season from the end of 2009 to the beginning of 2010. Started in October 09 and swam until May 10. Then the summer season of 10/11 was so abysmal that I literally managed to squeeze in only about 8 or 9 swims from November 10 to February 11. The weather was simply too cool, too appalling to swim regularly.

Spring 2011 was nothing to write home about either, but finally there is enough of a summer in January that so far I've been able to get 2 lunchtime swims per week in.

I've missed going to the gym this past week however because my new iPod nano that I'd only purchased in December decided to be stupid (the voiceover function continuously reads down my entire iPod playlist over the music, which it semi mutes, even though the function is not even turned on!). I'd bought to replace my previous 4th generation nano not because it was quite dead yet, but because I could see the signs that it was on its last legs. Well, when I needed to resurrect it for emergency service this week, that died on me too.

Have an appointment at my local Apple store tomorrow to get the new nano replaced (used their online service centre, who talked me through the problem and all the troubleshooting I had done to try to fix it, which included a Restore which did not fix the problem, and then gave me a store replacement recommendation, yay!).

Hmm, actually, before the Byron Bay holiday there is Luc's 30th birthday to plan for the end of March. Should probably get our heads around that in the next couple of weeks. Invitations, bookings, etc.

My 40th birthday isn't until the end of September. I have no idea what I want to do yet party/function/dinner wise (if anything at all), but I think I'd like to do a Sydney Harbour Bridge climb as a treat to myself. In part because I'm a little scared of heights and I tend to try not to care overly much about things that frighten me. And I want to do something different. Something that the 20 year old or 30 year old Tanja wouldn't have done.

It's fair to say that a harbour bridge climb meets that criteria. :)

And oh bugger, I decided to take a risk and do a load of washing even though it rained earlier today, and the weather forecast is for more rain.

Bugger, bugger, bugger.

Well, what's life without a bit of washing on the line when it threatens rain.

We hope for the sun.

Changing up what I do

2012-01-18T21:53:00.000+11:00

Following the ethos of: if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting.

Well, Monday marked the 3 month anniversary since I submitted my first novel, a chick-lit/romancy sort of thing, to a publisher and an agent.

The agent kindly doused the flame of my expectations before Christmas and I haven’t heard a peep from the publisher. Not even a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ via e-mail.

I s’pose it was unsolicited (even if I was given a contact name).

I have quietly been wondering though if the name was the second under cleaner and the whole thing was an internal warning system that triggers the ‘bin it’ motion. (You know, like the boys in Supernatural using ‘funkytown’ in a phone conversation to let the other know they are speaking under duress, since neither of them would otherwise use such an uncool expression.)

Anyway. There is a part of me defiantly hanging on to the belief that my novel wasn’t actually bad. Not character wise, not plot wise and not story wise, though I do suspect I might have benefited from some professional editorial assistance in respect of plot pacing and layout.

I still like the characters because, even though the story I told wasn’t mine and none of those characters were definably ‘me’, there were echoes of me through the whole story.

As there will always be. My way of looking at the world. My summations and musings and ponderings. A little part of my soul is forever in those pages.

Lately I’ve decided to try something new. In some ways, much closer to home than the story I wrote before, and not chick lit or romance, but ‘general fiction’. Maybe even ‘literature’ (God help me).

I’ve decided to write about growing up in the outer western suburbs of Sydney in the 1980’s, drawing on the experiences and people I met, including some of the ‘colourful background characters’ (of which there were a few).

I’m planning a fictionalised account of 3 separate childhoods that dissect as three girls (one of them based on, if not actually faithfully, me) become friends in their middle teens, only to part ways again as they leave high school and embark on their very separate paths, only to cross paths again in their late 30’s. But the experiences of their childhood, of course, marks them all. Informs their trajectories. Their relationships, their ambition (or lack thereof), their choices. The one thing they have in common is the desire to leave the place of their childhood as far behind them as possible.

One of them, ‘me’, is a German migrant, but with an altered family history, as well as altered appearance and, to some extent, personality and interests. Her name is Kerstin, and she is little and dark haired, dark eyed and olive skinned as a lot of Bavarians and southern Germans actually are. She is wiry and good at sport, still thoughtful and likes to read like I do, but taciturn rather than chatty. She doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. Or rather, she is not an ‘entertainer’ the way I occasionally (annoyingly) like to be. She won’t try to cadge a laugh out of a whole room and she’s never been the class clown to save her life, both of which I have been known to (annoyingly) do.

Through various pathways, she enters the field of anthropology and becomes a researcher in public health with a specific focus on aboriginal communities in Australia.

Definitely not me then.  But something I know a bit about thanks to the work I have done over the past 6 years. And definitely something that interests me.

What I like about her character is that she starts the book by stating that she has been in Australia now for 7 or 8 years and has never actually spoken to an Aboriginal person (or at least thinks she hasn’t, mainly because in the outer western suburbs of Sydney in the 1980’s a lot of people with Aboriginal backgrounds who could pass as white chose not to identify as Aboriginal, so as not to expose themselves to discrimination), and ends up in adult life working in the field of aboriginal health and education and also in a relationship with an aboriginal man, who happens to be head of her research unit. And all of the issues that throws up for him as well because not only does the Aboriginal community have high expectations of their elite, white people do too.

Aboriginal people who are high achievers have almost superhuman demands and expectations put upon them to be community leaders, to use their position to make things better for other Aboriginal people, but still prove to white people that their achievements are based on white ideals of meritocracy, and as a result assuage white guilt for past injustices. And are therefore often denied the capacity to fail like normal people do and are also occasionally unnaturally propped up to succeed at things they may not even want to succeed at because white folks need to feel good about themselves and can’t evince what it says about them if this person fails.

Almost anyone will eventually break from such unrealistically high expectations. For talented aboriginal people, that tumble is all the more deadly because of the politics involved. They are not allowed to be individual people, but must serve as symbols for the aspirations, wants and desires of others.

And I want to, above all, write a book about individuals. Fuck the politics. Or more to the point, this is how the policies of the collective, well intentioned as they may be, affect, drill down to, the individual. No individual can actually live as a symbol; as a manifestation of the collective desires and aspirations of a whole community.

I think we will only finally have left discrimination behind us the day we can celebrate an Aboriginal person not only succeeding, but can also live with them failing once in a while, and see it simply as human, in the ordinary way of things, not as some negatively stereo-typed confirmation of their ethnicity or their cultural heritage (and our prejudices about them). In the meantime, those Aboriginal folks who are bright and in the leadership elite need to be given permission and space to be human, to occasionally fail, or to make a mistake.

Just as I can’t imagine what it must be like to live with so much discrimination on the basis of the colour of your skin or shape of your features, I also can’t imagine what it must be like to live in that constant pressure cooker of needing to continue to succeed and be perfect, should you happen to defy the odds and climb out of the morass created by a social history you were not an active participant in shaping.

Anyway. Yes. Kerstin is going to walk some very different paths to me.

The other 2 stories are amalgamations of a few people I knew, then forging ahead into a future that I have completely made up.

One, Deborah, is a runaway who lived on the streets of Kings Cross and became a heroine addict for a while, before returning home and to school 2 years later. Her back story is in part defined by a Maori stepfather (her mum is also a New Zealander, but part white and her biological father was white) who arrives in her life at an age where she knows he’s not her father and who forces a definition of family on her that, while usual for Polynesian people, is too intrusive for her. She is a rebellious, earthy but also very bright, calculating, creative, occasionally vindictive and clever person. And having come close to the abyss once, she is very determined about the path ahead of her now and what sort of a future she wants. She ends up a film producer living in the United States with her wealthy property developer husband and her 2 step children. Uneasily brought back to Australia in her late thirties when her step-dad dies and her mother can’t cope.

The other, Cathy, has a violent, abusive father and doormat mother. She tells her friends, but like most teenagers, they don’t understand the extent of the abuse she is exposed to, looking at it only from within the sphere of their own experiences, and so it comes as a shock to her friends when family services gets involved and she is placed with a foster family. Who are evangelical Baptists. Cathy soon becomes a convert, which causes the final fracture between her and her younger brother, who says he is angry with her for exposing their family but is actually angry because his big sister has abandoned him to that situation (he won’t help himself by admitting that their father is violent). Cathy marries a man she meets in the Church and moves to the central coast about 2 hours north of Sydney where she becomes a mother to 3 children and a homemaker, and, of course a devout (read: brainwashed) Baptist. She loses all contact with her family and leads a religiously conservative existence. She does hear that her younger brother has married a woman from Argentina, Sandra, and is later contacted when Sandra leaves the brother and takes their children because he has also become a violent, abusive man who hits out at others when he is feeling emotional distress and pain. Cathy returns to Sydney against her husband’s wished to try to get her brother to face his problems, and join the church, thus enabling Sandra to go back to him. But is surprised when Sandra, who has had the space to rediscover and assert herself, and now has the backing of her own very strong and vocally supportive (Catholic) family, makes it very clear that Cathy’s idea of a solution does not appeal to her and she will instead move back to Argentina to raise her children amidst her own family. Making it clear that while she tried to be a good wife and make a go of the marriage based on the values she was raised with, she is not a victim, thereby opening up other possibilities for Cathy that she’d never considered, having become subsumed into the offered solution by her foster family at an impressionable age.

The three women meet up again at a 20 year school reunion that coincides with them all happening to be back in Sydney for their disparate reason, which they attend more as a lark.

There are fireworks between Deborah and Cathy especially, because Deborah is an atheist and can’t abide with what she perceives to be Cathy’s sanctimonious, judgmental and plainly wrong minded fundamental religiousness.

Deborah, however, has to find her own reconciliation with her mother, family and a past she has been estranged from for so many years and that she has hidden from her husband, believing she wants a whole different style of life in which her emotional needs are safeguarded mostly by being covered up with achievements and success and the outward appearance of these things.

Kerstin is in a relationship with a man who won’t publicly acknowledge the relationship (because he believes his community will condemn him for having a relationship with a white woman), who has some anger management (just anger, not violence) and anxiety issues to deal with arising, no doubt, out of the unrealistic expectations he and others put onto him, and has to make some decisions about her future, rather than continuing to just tread water where she is. The reason she is at the reunion is because her boyfriend, as part of a tactic to change a conversation that had gotten uncomfortable for him, has taunted her with being a poor anthropologist if she can’t even face where she has come from in the ‘westie’ part of Sydney.

And Cathy needs to work through the confrontation to her beliefs and values since her history has re-surfaced, and decide if what she is living is an authentic and free life in which she is allowed to express and be herself, or if she is sleep walking. And if she decides that she is in fact in a prescriptive lifestyle, will she still have a marriage and family if she decides to leave? And is that something she can live with? I guess the point I’m trying to make with that character is that a lot of evangelical and fundamentalist religious sects prey on damaged people knowing that they can more easily be recruited in a vulnerable state, where they then engage in a cover up of any of the unpleasant aspects of life, so the person goes into a sort of denial based trance where they live a defined, obedient and unquestioning life. Because all of life’s hard choices are made for them and there is no moral ambiguity – their path is all set out by their church (or cult) and they just have to follow. I guess there is peace in that sort of existence. As long as you always stay within the prescribed lines and don’t question or want to do something differently.

I believe there is no genuine healing in that sort of a life. It doesn’t even try to look inside the person to heal them, it’s just all external ‘trust in god’, ‘put your faith in god’ etc, all will be taken care of, all will be revealed. It is inherently superficial. And superstitious. If a practical solution is possible and is ignored, with an invocation to put your faith in god to solve the problem and do nothing else, then.... in those instances, religion is dangerous. Faith is fine, if you’ve got it, but, as my grandfather used to say “God helps those who help themselves.”

It’s why the AA movement is hokum. It promotes the erroneous belief that addiction to alcohol or drugs is a disease, but one that is visited upon people that they are then powerless against by themselves, and so exhorts them to put their faith in god or a “higher power” and take the 12 steps through the process to heal. First of all, substance abuse is not a disease. It is a behaviour pattern; a personality or behavioural disorder. There is choice in those, even if that ‘choice’ is subconscious, programmed in during childhood. But it is not a disease like cancer or kidney stones or diabetes. And, turning its own internal logic back against it: if it is a disease, why not cure it like any other disease through medical treatment? You don’t treat cancer or diabetes through a faith healing process. Martin Seligman and other respectable psychologists and psychiatrists have written on this subject.

Any procedure that advocates that you are powerless (absolving you of blame for your past actions, which might feel good for a while, but also leaves you without the tools to counteract your misaligned instincts should they rear themselves again) will result in a lack of ownership for both cause and cure. This is not actually helpful. After all, if you don’t have any personal responsibility because it is a disease, against which you are also powerless to act so you must put your trust in a higher power to cure you, and then you do relapse... that can only make the problem worse, creating a renewed sense of abandonment by that which you trusted in to help. Addictive behaviour tends to stem from perceived or actual abandonment and/or inappropriate parental role modelling experienced as a child. Addiction acts as a control mechanism. A destructive one, but it is a way of forcing a dependency into existence, one that can then perceivably be controlled as a crutch. Hence Anthony Kiedis’ “I can’t go on stage unless I have a little something...” Which has become ginseng tea rather than cocaine over the years, so that’s a positive. But the underlying behaviour is still the same, even if the substance has changed.

As a thinking person, I am not prepared to hand ‘my power’ or responsibility over to a ‘higher power’, thus removing any responsibility I might have for taking real action to change things. I would rather understand, learn to challenge and change my schemas and thus my behaviour, and get better. My health, my behaviour, my responsibility. So for me, reading practitioners like Seligman who debunk the whole AA movement, helped me make sense of a whole treatment ethos that had somehow always ‘felt’ wrong to me but for which I didn’t have the words or the framework to challenge. Recent studies, btw, are finally producing some hard, statistical data illustrating that the AA movement is not very successful in ‘curing’ substance addiction (by cure I mean stopping and altering behaviour for 10 years or more without backsliding).

Anyway, all of that and more informs Cathy, and Deborah and Kerstin as well.

At the moment, I am working with a couple of Moleskin notebooks (wanker that I am), jotting down ideas whenever I get them, writing snippets from various characters’ POV, occasionally when sitting on a park bench in the sun during my lunch break.

We’ll see if I can somehow manage to get all of these ‘ideas’ into a readable, connected story that has something to say without trying too hard, and that meanders through the Australia of the last 20 years, warts and turquoise beaches both, that others might connect with.

And so we begin 2012

2012-01-09T19:51:00.000+11:00

Here's a combined recap/evaluation.

As my last blog of 2011 indicated, Luc's mum plus 'friend Tom' were here for 2 weeks over New Years, departing again on Saturday 7th Jan.

It was a 2 weeks that stretched my patience not because either Elizabeth or Tom are such objectionable people (they really aren't), but because I just don't do well seeing anybody for a straight 2 weeks with only a day's break except my husband. And we know each other well enough to respect each other's space a little. We can happily withdraw to opposite ends of the house (or even be in the same room together) and pursue our own interests for a while.

I have to conclude once and for all that while I am all for family visits, I am not one for family holidays. Different beast all together. Unfortunately when I communicated this to Luc's mum on her last day here after she kept goading the conversation in the direction of "right, now that we've broken the ice and had this family holiday, lets plan the next one which should involve you either meeting us at least half way or coming all of the way to Canada", things ended in tears (hers, not mine).

Essentially, I tried to gently say that Lucas and I have lots of travel plans in the future and would love to travel, but those interests and plans include Europe, USA, the interesting parts of Canada (Montreal, Vancouver etc) and so, if we are to get what we want out of the time and money invested, we would envisage that might include a family catch up for 3 or 4 days.

Elizabeth proceeded to reinterpret what I was saying and suggested (a little snarkily) that since we seemed to be so miserly, perhaps Luc's sister, her current partner and her 2 kids would simply have to cough up to come and see us for 2 weeks here.

After smoothing down the dander that had risen in horror on the back of my neck (I've just done a 2 week family guided tour of duty, I am not signing up for another with Luc's high maintenance sis and her current squeeze plus her current squeeze's 2 teenagers any time soon) I gently communicated that we might be misunderstanding each other. I don't expect anyone to 'meet us all the way over here', what I'm trying to say is that while we wish to travel and incorporate seeing family into part of that, we will never come for just a 2 week holiday with Elizabeth in Winnipeg.

Which resulted in a throwing up of hands, vehement head shaking, tears and a rushing away to collect herself.

After said collection of self was completed, we got another vehement nod, pursed lips and a "good to know".

I suspect, however, that a further conversation will be required to ensure no weasel gaps are left. I tried to explain to Elizabeth earlier in the day that I know that Australia is a long way away from 'everything' and that it's a big undertaking to come here - time wise and money wise. And since Australia is large, meaning its natural bounty is not always easy to access and involves further internal travelling (which is not cheap) and the culture is fairly homogeneous, you have to really want to come here since it's such a commitment. It's not Europe with its patchwork of cultures, landscapes, languages, climates, cuisines.

If Luc's sister, or anyone in his family, wants to come here to have a holiday, fine, come here and have a holiday. Book yourself into a resort in far north Queensland, or do a tour of the wine districts in WA, SA, Victoria, Tasmania and NSW, and check in with us if we're free for 2 or 3 days over a long weekend in Sydney, 'cause we'd be happy to do that and spend a bit of time with you catching up. But that's all. I acquiesced to just this recent 2 week scenario because it was a) Luc's mum and b) a once off, once in a lifetime thing. I have not and am not prepared to sign up to a lifetime commitment of family holidays going forward.

I don't do family holidays with my family either. And if we were to relocate to Canada for whatever reason, while we'd probably see Luc's family more regularly for short bursts, I still wouldn't be booking my precious holiday time to go on 2 week camping trips with the fam. It would be a lunch or a dinner here or there, and 2 or 3 days together maybe once every few years.

I get that to Luc's mum the idea of family means making regular concerted effort to spend lots of time together, and to her, having divorced her husband and split up the family 22 years ago, evidence that she is none the less still a good mother means eliciting a commitment from others to spend holiday time 'as a family'. But to me quality trumps quantity. I want quality family time, not quantity. I feel that we had quality time with Luc's mum for maybe 4 days in sum. The rest was not quality, it was just 'turn up and do your duty' time. It was building up teeth gritting, gotta get through it attitude in me. A much shorter, sharper, concise trip would have endeared Luc's family to me much more than the 2 weeks did.

So in conclusion, yes, the 2 weeks was an imposition for me. It just was. I committed to it of my own free will as a once off. Because we've said no to so many proposed family holidays over the past 9 years. But I will not let myself be guilted into any more of this. This was perfect evidence of what works and what doesn't work for me. And I do, after all, have an equal role and equal say in what a) constitutes family for me and b) how I get to spend my free time.

So anyway, I do expect fall out from this in the shape of abusive/confronting/yelling emails and phone calls from Luc's sister and possibly Luc's dad telling us what terrible people we/I am to hurt Luc's mother like this. All she wants is to be a good mother, to have a family that cares about her etc.

But... I maintain my point. Why is the definition of 'family' and 'caring' only hers to decide? Because she is the parent?

But Lucas is not a child. He's an adult off spring. Plus me, his adult partner, to whom he's been married for 3 years and living with for 9 (not dating for 1 year as in his sister's case). Don't we get to decide too what constitutes a definition of 'family' that we can also live with???

Anyhoo.

In reflecting on all of this, when I was trying to sympathise about the quandary of being so far away in Australia and what an investment it is, homogenous culture etc, I found myself reflecting further that I wish I'd have the chance to have that part of the conversation over again. Because while acknowledging this to people from the norther hemisphere, I don't for one minute want to come off as deriding how wonderful it is to live here. After having spent 2 weeks playing tourist guide in my own city, and driving south, north, west and east to show off how spectacular it all is, I have to say that, setting aside the usual cynical Sydney sider 'culture cringe' attitude: this is a fucking awesome place to live.

Yes, cost of living is high, yes we have bogans, yes, we have a million and one definitions of what it means to be Australian, for all that it's homogenous. Old Australian, new Australian, white Australian, black Australian, Aboriginal Australian, chardonnay socialist Australian, intelligentsia hipster Australian, goth Australian, suburbanite Australian, outback Australian, and god help us, Alan Jones listening Australian.

But we are free.

Free to be any of those things. To change or stay the same. To argue and debate. Far freer, despite the price of occasional chaos that we pay (from a German view point, because believe me, the laissez fairness that imbues Australian life can strike a good German as chaotic, or at least too nonchalant) than I think my German cousins are. Freer under wider open skies and open spaces. Freer from tradition and constraint and custom and the neighbours.

It hurts sometimes to be confronted with the failure of democracy in Germany during the Weimar period and the (almost inevitable) decline into authoritarian dictatorship following that. I've arched up against the definition of pre WWII German culture as one that was not inherently democratic. Gotten defensive. But... I've read some interesting stuff recently about the construction of the traditional German family (at least up until WWII); its hallmarks of patriarchy and authoritarianism and obedience above all else that requires identification with the parental authority figure over and above ones own individual, democratic freedom.

And I can finally bring myself to admit that it is in fact so. Was so, and in many instances probably still is. German society, following its construction down into the micro organism of the family and the local community, is not inherently democratic. It is obedient and self censoring and authority respecting. Able to be incarnated as a great fellowship, but also equally open to great abuse.

I look at the amazing, gravity defying roads that were built here, out west, north and south, cut into stone and rock by indentured slaves deported 200 years ago for having fallen afoul of what came to be considered lawful living due to the disenfranchisement as a result of the industrial revolution in Great Britain as it stripped the itinerant country day workers of their living. Of the Catholic Irish dissidents fighting for their own national freedom and self determination who were transported here in their many thousands, to this strange, strange land that doesn't obey any of the laws and rules of the northern hemisphere. Strange stars, strange skies, strange flora and fauna, unruly weather patterns from exhaustive heat to hail and frosty winter storms, to sharks and mantises and stinging jelly fish, to salt water and thousands of miles from anywhere that looks and feels and smells like home. To strange people who don't, to paraphrase Midnight Oil, know their customs or speak their tongue, whose gestures and behaviours and social hierarchies contradict their own so entirely and completely to lead to the deadliest of misunderstandings for over 200 years.

Despite all of that, great freedoms were carved out of rock and stone. Out of bay and stream and water. Great endurance and great commitment and, I can't help but feel, in the end, great love, happened. Because you've got to love something so strange, so wild, so wide open and free in the end. Middle class white sunburnt Australian families might want to hide that great love under thick carpets, old fashioned mahogany furniture and vestiges of Rule Brittania, but you don't have to scratch very far to find that there's a wild heart beat under there. That great unruly love that everyone from Patrick White to Kate Grenville to Brett Whitely to Judith Wright to John Birmingham have at various points in time captured.

Who else but an Australian would write a book like Leviathan (John Birmingham's warts and all bio of Sydney) or The Secret River (Kate Grenville's painfully, poignantly honest yet hauntingly beautiful novelisation of her convict ancestor Solomon Wiseman). Who else in this day and age can still layer the relationship between decay and rebirth, carpe diem and momento mori, hope and despair, dark and light so starkly, so truly, so humanely, as an Australian?

I have had the most surprising people tell me that they have read The Secret River and felt it changed their relationship with this land and their own history in it (and the consequential relationship and troubled history between white and black in this country). That a novel nominated for the high falutin' Man Booker prize can do that to 'ordinary Australians' and start this conversation with them, one they are willing to continue of their own accord, is bloody fantastic.

I can't help but think that these conversations, secret and hidden, mystical and spiritual, yet also open, transparent and public have been occurring in this land for 50,000 years with all of its people, past and present.

And I have to cast aside my own dispersions, longings, adopted 'cultural cringe' cynicisms and self conscious downplayed dismissals of country and culture and finally own: this is my home and I have, for better or worse, and very much despite myself, developed a deep and great and abiding love for this country.

Flaws and all. Fly riddled suburbanites and Alan Jones listeners alike (okay, I reserve the right to terminate a conversation with one of the latter).

There's a lot of obvious beauty, but it's not even that.

It's the freedom. Even in the servitude, as our convict history describes. I look at what people like Solomon Wiseman and Francis Greenway wrought and think to myself, those were people who knew how to grasp the greatest freedom ever that was on offer. At first, the lack of familiarity in the landscape, the seasons, even the constellations, must have been frightening. Who knew what lurked out in the jungles and deserts and salty rivers and canyons? But even fear becomes knowable. Explorable. And once there were no barriers, no boundaries, no fences, no traditions and constraints... once that realisation sank in....

These were not people who changed the world as we know it. They didn't write pithy plays about easy virtues that tickled the current cultural gliteratti pink or painted majestic matadors (in cubist styles), they did not sail the oceans or overthrow great cultures rich in gold (or at least pepper). They didn't invent writing or the wheel.

But they changed their own lives. They changed themselves. They allowed the landscape to alter them and build something out of nothing in them, and they threw away the cages in the undertaking.

There's a lot of courage and determination here. And a lot of respect. For freedom. For your own and for that of others. Sometimes that gets misinterpreted as laissez fair. But I think that would be wrong.

What I am, where I come from, what I have brought here with me, informs me and has shaped me just as we all are shaped in some respects by what we came from. But it does not determine my future. It's just a vantage point to stat from.

And as I look over at my German brethren in the northern hemisphere, I feel unease. There are things I will miss about my birth country for the rest of my life. My family. But I don't miss the lack of freedom. Wide open skies. The lack of one dominant tradition that seeks to enfold and own me.

I've discovered I don't like being under any one person's or idea's thumb. That alone means I have more in common with the spirit of this nation than the one I came from. I value my freedom more highly than the right for you to have your quiet, regulated, peaceful existence. My freedom should not come as the price for that.

I have been watching the German role in the global financial crisis with trepidation for some time now. Not quite able to put my finger on it, but I think I can now. I've been making jokes about the Greek debt crisis and about the German good fiscal management etc for a while now ('anyone want to buy an island?'). But it disguises a darker, more ambivalent, pulse.

The Germans are good, responsible, orderly, organised, actually mostly quite humble and selfless people when left to their own devices (and when not falling prey to evil influences). Who judge others mercilessly for falling short of those high standards (i.e. do not recognise that others might choose different standards, it is always interpreted as 'falling short').

My view for the past few months has quite strongly been that the Euro and the current structure of the EU should be disbanded. Not to punish countries like Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, not to leave them stranded, but to spare them from becoming too beholden to an all powerful Germany, and to save Germany herself from the role she plays best: self righteous parent. Because a self righteous parent, even when they think they are being benevolent and doing it 'for your own good' don't get to, shouldn't get to, decide what is good for their grown up child. For Germany's own good, it should not be left to determine the behaviours and freedoms of other people. They should be allowed to self determine. For better or worse. Which includes taking the medicine and paying the price when things go wrong.

But better pay that self inflicted price now in one short, sharp burst, than to pay the price set by another endlessly. Because that loss of freedom chafes. And other people have a different culture and a different interoperation of how life should be lived. For one thing, the Germans always have a 'should' in there, for themselves and for others. And that doesn't sit well with everyone.

It doesn't sit well with me. I understand that now, and therefore I can see how others could also feel that way.

I've had my Galadriel moment, and no matter how benevolent of a dictator I believe I would be, how orderly and kind and how much better I could organise others lives than they themselves could, I decline that honour. Remain myself, stay free and leave you free.

I wonder as Germany's Galadriel moment unfolds, if they will also find the collective strength to decline that particular ring. That will eventually also rule them, diminish them, every bit as much as through at first simply making things more orderly they would eventually seek to rule and diminish others.

There is a German expression my father likes to use: Besser Ende mit Schrecken, als Schrecken ohne Ende.

Better a horrifying end than a horror that never ends.

That is what the EU needs now, no matter how uncomfortable it would be in the short term. Not to harm 'the less responsible countries', but to save them, and their unique identity. And, alas, to save Germany from itself. I still wish that too.

What a strange way to conclude finally that I do, after all, choose here. Love this place, this home, here. Irrationally and occasionally antagonistically and dualistic as it seems. Will hold my ground here. Commit, persist and defend to the utmost and to the final breath this ragtag team of cutthroats, ditherers, beach bums, bogans, suburbanites, small time iconoclastic bombasts because... this is still big sky country. All that uncertainty, ambiguity, fluidity, is something I can live with far more easily than the alternative. In showing my home to others I've realised that I don't want to live in the northern hemisphere. Not Canada, not Germany, not the UK, not the USA. I don't want the 'everything' that exists there. The price for it is too high.

We'll come and visit one day but.... this unlikely home here has been too hard fought for. Too knit now into heart and soul and bones after all.

Maybe I came from just the right mix of 'German' to make that possible, and maybe I have been far away for long enough to be able to look down both ends of the telescope at last. And decide.

Home (The Lines Between)

I looked across the lake

And saw a swan

Sailing in the purple dusk

And I cried, because I must

Always leave when the vision

Is clear

Ah, home

I once held you dear

Forests, deep and dark

By the foot of the moon

My Ursus clan, I can feel the breeze

Shifting restlessly through the trees

And the stars in this crisp night

I could reach to hold

But, ah,

I have to go

CHORUS (next 4 sets):

I am never coming home

I’ve so long been far away

If you look for me you’ll see

I’m written in the lines between

I am never coming home

I’ve been lost so far away

If you look for me you’ll see

The clues are in the lines between

Where the blue sky meets the sea

Where the blue sea meets the shore

If you look for me you’ll see

That I have never been so free

Where the blue sky meets the sea

Where the blue sea meets the shore

If you look for me you’ll see

In the lines between

I have learned to be free

* * *

Ancient hills of granite

Quartz and amethyst

We were made of sterner stuff

We who could endure this rough

Unyielding soil

Beauty, oh

The russets, gold

The autumn leaves, the dying breeze

The chapel covered in snow

Far off the beaten track

Where God despairs of faith we lack

But we know

At home

The sacred is close

Children paddle across the lake

Childhood days like mine

Where nothing changed

And all my pain’s

A while deceived

Ah, home

What webs you weave

But...

Repeat Chorus

Last blog of 2011

2011-12-30T22:19:00.004+11:00

And this will be my 70th blog!

That is the most I have ever blogged in one year.

It's been a very busy week. Lucas' mother plus boyfriend in town, and they are very small town Canadian folks and it can be interesting/awkward/annoying having to translate/neutralise big city stuff.

Lucas' mum is also a Christian minister and of all places they are staying in Kings Cross just before New Year's Eve. Kings Cross is party central, a back packers hub and is also scummy/gritty in places (aka hookers and drug dealers walking the streets). Right next door to some very ritzy areas as well.

So far we've squeezed in a few day road trips, which is exhausting because I'm not a regular driver. We went down to the south coast, past Wollongong to Kiama then inland to Berri, then back north again via Kangaroo Valley and Mittagong. Today we went north to Brooklyn/Mooney Mooney, then headed back into Sydney town to Palm Beach, which was very lovely.

In a budget travel kind of way. Lucas' mum is very much on a budget and has a very assertive way of communicating that to her environment, so even if we could afford stuff (and would be happy to pay their way), it's as if the very idea of suggesting that is rude, and so... I think it comes down to narrowness of experience. Her experience is X, that's how she imagines the world, she can't even envisage Y, therefore she strongly asserts X and wow, the world keeps delivering X.

But, because she is also Lucas' mum, she (very nicely) occasionally feels it's her job to pay for stuff, but then the prices always seem to catch her off guard and we end up with awkward moments where she will ask for an itemised bill in a cafe so that she can go through it with a fine tooth comb before paying because golly gosh, that came to $12 more than she anticipated and then she'll talk about it for half an hour after.

Really, honestly? If $12 is going to break the bank, don't offer, particularly if we've already tried to nicely decline your assistance. I don't want to be responsible for that worry line creasing your forehead for the next half hour. Then we have to say thank you for half an hour, to ensure that she feels suitably compensated for the sacrifice. One that we didn't need or ask for.

Sigh.

And.... aggressively vegetarian. "I am a better person than you because I'm vegetarian" vegetarian. Today when we went to lunch, the first place we looked at didn't really have much in the way of veg options (pretty much fish and chips on the water, and seafood variations on that theme). We decided to look around for a more balanced, inclusive option. But no, they insisted they could find something there.

Aggressive exchange occurred with waitress after food was ordered. Waitress was a bit frazzled and was trying to check if that was all they were ordering (i.e. checking nicely, and probably a bit puzzled because, after all, you're at a seafood place at the marina by your choice) , and Luc's mum threw at her "well, yes, because that's all you've got that's vegetarian you know!"

Funny thing is, that's not how she told me the story. She came to the table looking cheesed off and told me that the waitress had seemed to feel offended that this was all they were ordering so she felt she had to volunteer that she was vegetarian by way of explaining. Lucas came back a few minutes later looking green and later on when we wandered off by ourselves for a moment (as he tried to calm down) he told me another version, far more defensive/aggressive, and sounding as if that reaction hadn't really been provoked.

Sigh.

I pointed out to Lucas over dinner tonight that, while I am not vegetarian, I will often choose a vegetarian (or meat free) meal when we're out and about. Just because I like that option. I have never once felt compelled to point out to all and sundry in the cafe or restaurant "look, I am taking a vegetarian option, bow down before me, for I am morally superior to you". And sometimes, just so people don't mistake me for a smug-o, I will lean over and steal a bit of bacon or chicken or whatever from Lucas' plate. Just to make it clear that I do eat meat, but sometimes choose a meal that happens not to have meat in it because I enjoy variety and I don't have to have meat in every meal.

And I suppose because I am not 'genuinely vegetarian' I don't feel compelled to interrogate the staff when I do order a meat free option because it will not kill me if the stock, broth, sauce or lettuce leaf contains or touched something that came from an animal.

Which Lucas' mum does.

Sigh.

Anyway. Tom is a very nice guy, very quiet, and all that stuff aside, they thank us profusely for every little thing we do, to the point where we can't tell what they're really enjoying and what they're just soooo nicely Canadianly politely thanking us for. I've decided I wouldn't want to be the Christian God if this is the shit I had to put up with every day. "Dear Lord, thank you for our daily bread." "Dear Lord, thank you for this day." "Dear Lord, we praise you..." Fucking enough already! If you douche's don't start being honest and don't stop thanking me for every little thing, I'm going to send a plague of pestilence....

And there you go. Mystery solved. Folks, stop praying and thanking for every little thing so much. It gets tired real fast.

We're starting to interpret various bits of body language and piecing stuff together, so we know they really did enjoy the afternoon at Palm Beach - that got some epic exuberance in the waves.

And see, that's all we really want to know. What do you want more of, what could you do with less of. I'm happy to hike it to the beach all day and just chillax. Don't have to hike all over the bloody countryside burning ethanol.

Tomorrow morning the folks are checking out of their Kings Cross abode and we are heading to my parents place for 2 days over New Years Eve and New Years Day. This is because Sydney hotels triple their price over New Years and that was not in the budget. So 2 more days in the mountains, which my folks are good natured about, being frugal sorts themselves (though not THIS frugal, believe me) and then back into the city for another 5 days of this.

Sigh.

We do take the car back on the 3rd though, so after that it's per pedes, no more chauffeur duty, no more lengthy road trips. Just buses and trains and ferries, probably to Manly and Bondi and just the local area.

I think they fly out on the 7th or 8th.

Is not so bad.

I couldn't help the grin on my face though when Tom mentioned at the outset that this was their 'trip of a lifetime', because, you know, they weren't ever going to come here again as it was 'so far away'.

Okay. So this will never happen again.

Of course, next year, the pressure to start visiting them in Canada will start again big time. Apparently 'so far away' doesn't work in reverse. Australia is far away, but Canada isn't.

It's not that I don't want to see Canada. Just not Christian small town Canada. The 'visiting every second cousin on the maternal side, thanking them, moist eyed, for over dry beef roasts and instant coffee' tour.

Yes, I am a snob.

Or, perhaps more cogently, I know who I am, I know what I like, I know what I work for and what I want in my life and from my life.

And what I don't want in my life is Christian small town guilt of the sort that says you must spend your holidays visiting great aunt Bertha who drools a bit and lump legged second cousin Stacey with the petrol head boyfriend because that's what small town folk do eh.

I ain't small town folk.

And I ain't Christian.

And I've swallowed enough guilt to last me a life time, so maybe I'm not all that nice when or just because I'm 'supposed' to be, but only when that's the right thing for me, based on my wants, needs and values.

Family is important, but when the 'whole' constantly tries to subjugate the needs of the individual, you should stop and ask who is actually dictating the terms of the 'whole'. The 'whole' should be the democratic sum of its parts, in the here and now, not the guilty 'should be's' established in a long past its due by date patriarchal authority model. Good manners are nice. Give and take is required. Compromise is occasionally necessary. Obedience above all, however, is not those things.

So yeah.

I think the trick is to find a way to be true to yourself without being nasty, but without sacrificing yourself all of the time either. My mantra to Lucas this week has been "we are not responsible for them". We are not responsible for how they register their experiences, we are not responsible for controlling their environment. We are doing our best to be considerate, well mannered and communicative, including checking in with them about what they'd like to do, but we're allowed to be ourselves and we're allowed to let the flow be the flow. If someone else says or does something that sets them off, not our fault or problem. Conversely, if they upset someone with 'their foreign ways', eh, I can live with it. Every cafe owner or petrol station attendant in Australia does not need to love me/us. And if we need a morning of time out to sleep in or go to the gym, then so be it. And so, all the venting above aside (and really, in the scheme of things, it's really not that bad is it), it's kinda all okay. We're getting on with things.

As for 2012, I think our travel plans will have to remain local, and perhaps we can finally get to do some major travelling in 2013. I really want to spend some time in Europe again, and we may or may not be able to squeeze in a week in Canada at the end of that.

We shall see.

As for now. Now 2011 is drawing to a close. It's my last year in my thirties. I have dug my toes in sand and salt water today, the first time this new summer season, and that's always an amazing experience. I think I need to lose some weight in the new year, but I'm okay with me being me all the same, even with some pounds to spare. I have great hair and I need to keep my chest out of the sun a bit more as I'm starting to get creases, and I can see the first fine lines starting around my eyes.

I look in the mirror and I can see the next forty years starting to take shape, looking back at me, and that's an amazing, accepting experience, because I've never been one for the long view.

I'm married to the man I love, and I've known him now for more than 10 years, 9 years in the flesh, and we've been married for 3 years. All the 'Alltag' (ordinary, everyday) issues that can cloud life aside, it still feels like romantic love after all this time. He can still make me feel like my heart's overflowing inside. Happy. Contented. Home.

And occasionally he includes me on his food blog (check out episode 7): Right here.

I have an odd feeling about 2012. It feels like something's on the cusp. Quoting Kate Bush "I just know that something good is going to happen".

I'll be here. It'll all be here.

A year in review

2011-12-20T16:42:00.001+11:00

Yeah, why the hell not. Let's do one of these.

This has been a big year.

I completely and entirely finished a full first novel. While writing for over 20 years, this was the first time I finished something and then polished it within an inch of its life. Technically I 'finished' it in June last year, but then spent a further 9 months editing and re-writing until I don't think I can change another word on it (or am not prepared to anyway). That is not to say that I wouldn't rewrite specific sections if a publisher agreed to take it but specified a number of edits and rewrites. But they'd have to be specified - I can't look at it anymore otherwise.

After sitting on it for many months I also submitted. Just twice - once to an agent and once to a publisher. I've been turned down by the agent, and haven't heard from the publisher. I've received some advice from friends who suggest Amazon's self publishing service. I am currently considering that.

In the background, I am also working on at least 2 other stories. One of which I could finish 'easily' if I committed myself, and another which I'd like to work on if I could see some weeks of sunny free time opening up ahead of me, but no such luck.

And in the back of my mind, I am toying with the idea of writing something far more 'real' than I have attempted to date. I don't know if that's where my strength lies though and I have no real plot in my head.

I also graduated with a Master of Labour Law and Relations. I took my last class last year, but graduated in May this year. It's nice having that under my belt, and that's contributed to giving me a sense of self confidence in my professional life that I know I was lacking before.

While I've enjoyed having my free time to myself again, I am also starting to feel restless again in terms of 'what next'?

Speaking of what next, I struggled making some health adjustments this year. Because I don't have a thyroid anymore, I need to take metabolism hormone replacement, and because I had thyroid cancer, I have to have follow up check ups for 3 years and that means coming off the metabolism hormone each time. That knocked me around physically and mentally which means for a little while I wasn't doing - 'achieving' - anything much other than going to work and mooching around home, eating, sleeping and... mooching. Which led to a therapist's office and forced reengagement with the concept that I am a little addicted to 'achieving' and, let's not overlook this part, being in motion. I am very capable of sitting still and even being still, however, my life, overall, has to feel like it has some sort of forward momentum. Like I'm 'going somewhere'. I do have real trouble with 'just being'.

So I'm trying to practice some more of that. And I'm trying to be good to myself in a number of ways, including making time for regular exercise. But letting go of the idea that I have to exercise like a machine with the aim of turning into supermodel self.

On a related topic, this is the last year of my thirties. I will be turning 40 next year. I will never be 21 again and I will never again have the option of a career as a supermodel. It's okay to be healthy and to look good for my age, and that is good enough. As Lucas pointed out recently, my 'ordinary' is most other peoples' 'fucking awesome' anyway. If we all age into the face we've earned ourselves, then I have obviously been pretty bloody good (most of the time). Now, where's that bottle of chardonnay, time for another glass. :)

While I joined Twitter in 2008 (well, Lucas joined me up then) I never used it until work got me an i-phone this year, and suddenly twitter made sense (I only had a crappy little mobile phone on the cheapest plan possible before then and it was a miracle that it supported text messaging). So as per usual, I went from zero to one hundred. Well, I went from 5 tweets to about 1550 in under a year. I am currently following 76 people and am followed by 56, though I expect that to drop back to 54 shortly. That seems to be about the comfortable number for me.

Twitter has been yet another Tanjerine enabler, in that I do so enjoy a little bit of one-upmanship. Not only do I follow Stephen Fry, John Birmingham, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Wil Weaton, Wil Anderson, Adam Hills, and Sam DeBrito (who is currently having a colonoscopy and I wish he'd stop tweeting about it), amongst others, Stephen Fry (!!!!) and John Birmingham (!!!!) actually follow me back.

Shaddap. Hey. Stephen Fry! Suck on that and see (Arctic Monkeys reference). (Okay, not really, but they do have an album of a similar name, and it seemed an apt reference to chuck in to show how cool I am).

The really cool thing though is that I follow and am followed back by a whole bunch of people I 'met' for the first time more than ten years ago on a little thang called the WD (Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan forum).

I can't believe that was all so long ago now and that the channel is still open. Fine blue line indeed.

The most annoying tweetie (TM) I follow has to be Amanda Palmer. Random capitalisation's (hasn't anyone ever told her that this is the online equivalent of SHOUTING!?), random obscenities, strange references, scatter gun multiple tweets. After the first few days active on twitter (after Lucas had told me to follow her) I unfollowed her again because it was annoying me so much.

But I was still following Neil Gaiman, and suddenly half of his stuff wasn't making any sense anymore. So with a huff, I decided to bite the bickie and follow Amanda again. Now, let me just add that I 'approve' of Amanda Palmer. I think she's an awesome woman, I agree with her politics, I know she's a fabulous performer, I always loved her on "Spicks and Specks". But her approach to using twitter gets on my nerves. But what can you do. My love of the Gaiman outweighs my grrr towards the (twitter persona) Palmer, so this is the price we pay.

One of my favourites tweeters is Wil Weaton. I love it when he says something 'controversial', that anyone with an iota of common sense can figure out was meant ironically or in a 'throw away' sense, and then he gets flooded with 'hate tweets' and as he rightly points out, peeps who can't handle a sense of humour (even with care), should click 'unfollow'. I also love his very wise blog entries, particularly about people who get him confused with his once upon a time TV character, Wesley Crusher (or, according to TanjerineOrange after one too many glasses of chardonnay, "Lesley" Crusher) on Star Trek. The one with Jean Luc Piccard. I can never keep all the different Start Trek serieseseses apart. It's a thing I suffer from. I think it's called "I'm too cool for this shit publicly while secretly having watched every episode and Data is my favourite character whatcha gonna do about it huh?"

After much cajoling, I also got an Instagram account, but that is really more Lucas' medium than mine. I'm really on there more to see what everyone else (with far more talent than me) is doing.

Thanks to twitter and instagram I'm also 'talking' to (and have even met) a whole bunch of new interesting Aussies, some of whom Lucas (and that reprobate Craig who I know is just dying to vomit on my pot plants again!) have known for years through this Tikki forum thingie, and other avenues.

Through one of those instagram follows, Lucas and I took part in a local photographer's journey to document 100 couples in the private sphere of their bedrooms, not a space we usually invite photographers into (unless you've rented a ranch and a cheap film crew in one of the LA canyons for a weekend, but that's a different type of 'picture' you're making then). I was very nervous because, lets face it, I don't 'unclench' easily with new people, and yes, that was an on purpose metaphor. There was at least one couple Ellendisaster photographed who were prepared to go into somewhat sensual terrain from the shot history I saw, but I sat fully dressed on the bed with a pillow on my lap talking up a storm and eyeing Lucas suspiciously in case he pulled any move that could be construed as 'intimate in public'. Even though we were in our bedroom. But someone was taking photographs of us in our bedroom, so suddenly it was public space.

I just had a quiet ponder, as I was writing this, of what room I would have felt most comfortable in, would have 'clenched up' in least, and I realised it's the kitchen. Many, many years ago my ex husband and I used to give somewhat formal dinner parties for all of his hoity toity private school graduate friends (they weren't actually all that hoity toity at all, in fact, I think one of them still holds the world record for farting unashamedly in public) but I felt intimidated and probably a little excluded by their camaraderie and so I hid in the space where I knew I was Master of my Domain. The kitchen.

One by one, all of my ex's friends used to visit me in the kitchen while I turned out gourmet dish after dish, to tell me what a delight it was to meet a woman who could cook because alas, their wives could not. This did not endear me to their wives...

Anyway, the kitchen is a room I feel comfortable showing myself in. My bedroom, not so much. My bedroom is the place I withdraw into, where I build figurative blanket forts to hide from the world when I need to. Only Lucas is allowed into the fort with me.

So I'm probably going to look pretty stiff in those photos, but that's okay. I guess part of the purpose of doing a shoot like that is to show people and the range of their reactions in their inner sanctums. I'm not ashamed of having given a real response, of having shown my real face in that circumstance. Awkward, ill at ease, a little intimidated, fearful. But doing it anyway. That's the part that counts. Oui. C'est moi.

This was the year that my sister got pregnant. First child in our immediate family. And this is the year that I started coming to terms with the idea that I will most likely never have children. We've been trying since May 2008 and I turned 39 recently. That coming to terms involves acknowledging that there is a gap in my life that I always expected children would fill. But sometimes we don't get a choice in these things. So we have to figure out what next. In the first instance, that means becoming an aunt and uncle in 2012 to little Foo, which is an adventure I'm looking forward to.

This is the year that I became an Apple convert. I always expected I could if only I tried. My previous PC notebook was on its last legs and so, after many months of investigating, I decided to go with a MacBook Air. And I'm never going back. Lucas is now so impressed with the ease of the product, and with my constant raving about it, that he's talking making our next big upgrade a Macintosh switch over. Particularly as he also purchased an iPad earlier this year and has owned an iPhone since last year anyway so has some personal experience. Since he's started running a food blog and needs to edit lots of film footage, which even a good PC has trouble chugging through, it's becoming more and more logical. Only, the Apple Macintosh equipment he wants costs about $7,500 in Australia.

Holy moly. My baby don't do cheap. Or entry level.

My Red Hot Chili Peppers obsession continues unabated this year, having commenced around October or November last year. Even though I accessed this obsession via Anthony Kieidis' memoir "Scar Tissue", I am becoming more and more ambivalent about him and that memoir in particular, if not the music of the band (at least up until 2006). I mean, it's fascinating stuff, and he's a fascinating person, but in the end, we live as part of a community. Of friends, of families. With whom we share memories, confidences, experiences, some of which probably ought never to be put into writing. So how much do you reveal?

This is a pertinent question for someone like me.

At first I applauded him for his unwillingness, or even incapacity, to self censor. But as time goes by and as you sense the rifts and ensuing hurts, I begin to wonder if that 'gift' is all it's cracked up to be.

I am, after all, a Libran. Balance is what I seek.

The life of my iPod has become richer as not just the entire back catalogue of the Chili Peppers but a whole bunch of 'new food' has found its way onto my playlist. I love all my old things. Every bit as much, but not more than, discovering new things.

So thanks to my RHCP adventures everything from tracks by The Clash to the Butthole Surfers now graces my latest little nano.

But while RHCP tickled awake my interest in new musical adventures, Lucas is the one who keeps on building my capacity, and it's through cruising his playlists that I, contrary to what the Stones will tell you, find satisfaction.

Oh those metaphors.

This is the year that I started going to Rum Club. It would probably shock Rick and James (take out the 'and' and you get...., never mind - but isn't it cool?!) and Erin if I told them that I still don't really like spirits all that much. Well. I get the point of using them as mixers, even though mixers are not my favourite drink (I'd rather have a glass of wine than a scotch and coke, and god that takes me back to the Colyton Hotel!). And I get the point of them in cocktails. Even though most of the time, you guessed it, I'd rather drink a glass of wine than a cocktail. The ones at Bloodwood excepted. And I get the point of shots. That's what you do when you just feel like drinking. But for shots, I really prefer tequila or vodka. Or schnapps. I am German after all. And yes, Jaegermeister. But Jaeger is pretty easy going.

Thing is, I don't like doing shots most of the time. On account of not really enjoying getting drunk most of the time. I'd really rather have a couple of glasses of wine....

Bad rum is good for mixers, good rum is good for cocktails and excellent rum is wasted on either. I've tasted some excellent rum this year, but I'm still unlikely to ever pour myself some and just sip it. The way I would a glass of wine.... (!)

I don't drink whisky, cognac or any other spirit style sipping liquor either. Even though, because I am a smart arse and a pain in the arse, whenever someone tells me they like cognac I always ask them if they've tried armagnac. If they look puzzled, they don't actually really like cognac. They're just being pretentious nobs and think it will sound impressive if they say they like cognac. Armagnac, for those who don't know but are dying to, is the same thing as cognac, just with a regional difference. It comes from Gascony, and the reason I say I prefer Armagnac is because The Three Musketeers is one of my favourite books ever and D'Artagnan is one of my favourite characters ever. And he is a Gascon. There. That's as good a reason as any to have a booze preference.

I have a theory, btw, that D'Artagnan is actually gay. Since he remains a bachelor through all the serieseseses (read the follow up, "Twenty Years Later", for example). It actually explains a lot.

But anyway. I have tasted some amazingly good rums this year, and once, after a rum tasting that involved also imbibing two cocktails, actually had a subtle hangover for 4 days after (not so subtle the first day).

So why do I do it, if I don't actually really like hard liquor and have no real interest in taking it up (again)? Because life should take you through doors other than the ones you'd pick for yourself left to your own devices. The world we live in, the western world, the first world, caters to our preferences, to our wants and likes, the way I don't think any other era ever has before. We could live inside a bubble of our own preferences, likes, wants, what and who affirms us, only. And be less for it.

I make many choices that involve levels of discomfort and even dislike. Just as I make many choices based on nothing more than pleasing myself.

I enjoy people watching, and I enjoy hanging out with folks and having interesting or funny or silly conversations, and I enjoy new experiences, even being (subtly) hungover for 4 days after. That's a story I can dine out on! I even mentioned it to my boss one day (albeit 4 weeks after, so he could no longer hang me for it). But eh, I turned up to work every day and did my 8 plus hours. Just slightly hungover.

I am 39 years old and I go to Rum Club where I taste superior rums that I would never choose to buy (because they are very expensive) but still enjoy in the moment and drink cocktails and tweet and instagram silly things, especially about 5 years olds and 12 year olds (which always leads me to contemplating Jon Snow in Game of Thrones) and it's a thing I'm glad I've been invited along to do. I learn more about what I like, and what I don't, and what's out there, even though if you let me revert to comfort, I'll go for Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc every time. Or Shiraz or Tempranilo.

This year we also went on a road trip to Canberra, Lucas' first trip to our nation's capital. We went mostly because my friend Margaret relocated there earlier in the year. I enjoyed it. I have fond and warm memories of that trip and I suspect we're going to be doing it again one long weekend in 2012. Margaret and I have an unlikely friendship, for one thing because she's a year older than my dad. But, as anybody who knows me by now should know, I don't set much store by chronological age or numbers.

A couple of years ago, Margaret and I went out for lunch one Saturday and I came home at 10pm. The literal three sheets to the wind because we drank 4 bottles of wine over the afternoon and early evening. I have very hazy memories of going into the Apple Store on George Street about 3 days after it first opened very, very drunk. It was a bit much. I went back a few weeks later sober, and it wasn't really any different. In fact, alcohol took a bit of the edge off. This is why I order Apple products on line and get them home delivered. :)

So. That's at least some parts of this year in summary.

I wonder what 2012 will bring?

I am still like a kid in many ways, still hoping to 'be discovered'. While maybe life's greatest pleasure, for me, lies in being the one to do the discovering. I have a lot of 'masculine' traits for a woman, this I know. And I don't do 'passive' well, and when I investigate the evidence rather than get hung up on a dream, well, then I am an adventurer discovering. Not being discovered. Perhaps that's an answer to the riddle of what I am writing wrong.

Well. Prost. Salute. To this year. 2011, that is drawing to a close.

Which reminds me. Best film I saw this year was the documentary on Ayrton Senna. Get it. Watch it. It's awesome.

Now. Time to stride into what comes next. Because I can't help it. I won't keep still. I will be in motion. I will stride.

While I'm at it, winding down, pondering friendship... and memories best left behind

2011-12-16T20:25:00.002+11:00

I woke up very early this morning (it was still dark, so before 5am) and I had an odd memory in my head, I’m not sure if it was the remnant of a dream, or why otherwise it popped into my head.

Maybe it’s because it’s Christmas and the strongest memories I actually associate with Christmas in Australia are my years working in retail, mostly as a casual while an undergrad, and then for a stint in my early 30’s. I never felt more Christmasy than when I was exposed to carols and decorations and great swathes of crowds for one whole bloody month. There’s a real hype to Christmas in retail, and while there is much to dread about working retail over Christmas, I used to always sort of secretly look forward to it as well. There was a real energy. It was busy. If only they’d let you have 3 days off in a row over the public holidays at the end of it all. But anyway.

Anyway, I woke up remembering this man I used to work with many years ago while an undergrad in my early twenties. He was a very well educated, very dapper, very well expressed older gentleman (think 1960’s news broadcaster) and I don’t know why he was working full time in a bookshop. I wasn’t very good at asking personal questions in those days and I didn’t want to pry. I don’t know quite old he was, but probably late 40’s. He always wore tailored suits and his literary knowledge was profound.

There were a few people like him to be found in book retailing in Australia in the early 90’s, Not career retail management drones, not part-time uni students just jobbing until they grow up and get a ‘real’ job, but genuinely dedicated, knowledgable book folks. I worked with an awful lot of them in that one store.

It took a while for me to be accepted by the core crew. I was young and blonde and slim and quite pretty and very ‘of the time’ (and the time was 1991 to 1994). I didn’t think I was ‘of the time’ at the time as I wasn’t particularly a Courtney Love-esque grunge queen, more reincarnated 1950’s bombshell. Think Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, heck, even Ingrid Bergman. And a little bit of Isabella Rossalini. With super short Roxette/Brigitte Nielson hair, peroxide blonde of course.

But of course, in its own way, that look was very ‘of the time’ for girls. Mat coffee coloured lipstick, porcelain skin, super short skirts or maxi’s, velvets and suede and witch boots. Anyway, paraphrasing “Some Like It Hot”, I’m sure a lot of my colleagues at first pegged me as ‘just dumb’.

And then, after a while, realised I wasn’t. So we became friends. With heterosexual men, no matter how femme a female you are, that involves a little bit of ‘becoming one of the boys’. And becoming one of the boys involves a lot of constant low level hazing. In the Aussie terminology we ‘paid each other out’ a lot. Played pranks, set each other up, one up’d each other, exchanged crude jokes etc.

I remember one time I’d put a phone customer on hold to search for a book (no logistics databases in those days giving stock levels and even shelf location, you just had to go and look) and when I returned, one of the guys had clambered up the station and had hooked the phone receiver up about 3 meters on the support column. I was wearing a mini skirt of course, so of course the guys got their shits and giggles watching me having to clamber up and maneuver it down again. Then take the call without a hint of breathlessness.

Another time, my respectable newscaster friend (lets refer to him as M) went in search of a particular book. I don’t remember the exact title, but it was about the female orgasm, it was an absolute best seller (I know it’s difficult to believe now, but in the early 90’s the clitoris, the g spot and the female orgasm were still up their with a polar expedition, apparently no one knew they existed because no one had come back down the mountain alive, or at least refused to talk about it if they did) and it had a very huge “O” in the title and on the cover.

We were constantly selling out of this tome, so when this female customer rang up, M had to go look for a copy, which was cause for much amusement amongst his male peers and, well, me, because I was ‘one of the boys’. He returned, said yes we still had one in stock, would she like us to put it on hold for her, yes, okay, she must have thanked him, he responded “the pleasure was all mine,” hung up the phone and added, deadpan, “as it should be.”

Ah yes, shits and giggles indeed.

Well, M and I became friends. "Just" friends. But remember, me about 21, 22, him late 40’s or early 50’s, single (divorced, his ex wife became a nun, really, I’m not kidding), hetero, with a bit of a problem with alcohol (for real, I’m not just saying). I was dating a range of unsuitable males at the time, and I couldn’t speak to my parents about any of the experiences I was having in an attempt to try to articulate for myself what I might have been looking for (in the hope that I might get better at finding it), because that only ever resulted in hand wringing (my dad once strictly forbade me to introduce him to any male other than the one I intended to marry - a directive I took to heart). So there was lots of Catholic guilt, and there was lots of stuff I was busy doing to feel guilty about, because hey, a good Catholic never lets a bit of guilt actually get in the way.

M and I developed this habit of going to dinner every 3 months or so. Just this impromptu thing, usually involving steak and red wine. It was nice to talk to someone. Someone adult, educated, erudite. A friend.

So eventually, this one time, after a couple of years of this tradition, M and I went for dinner and M got dreadfully drunk, I was trying to get him safely into a cab to send him home when he made a pass at me. A monstrously huge, slobbering and falling all over me pass. When I instantly shrank back and resisted, he got more insistent, and it was only because he was so drunk that I managed to get him off me and into a cab.

I pretended afterwards that it didn’t bother me, but that’s not true. It was a massive betrayal of trust, and it hurt. I had never flirted with M because that would have felt weird and wrong, since I was ‘one of the boys’. Even in those days, I easily tended to shyness, despite some of the more obvious evidence to the contrary. I’ve always been good with ‘front’, but I was shy and I have always intrinsically been very conscious of roles, formal and informal, and M’s role to me, and mine to him, was ‘friend’.

I didn’t have very many of those either in those days and as such the few I had were very precious to me. I think a part of me was stunned that anyone I valued as a friend would even want to make a move into this other arena with me. Of all people, my friends should have known how tenuous that was for me. I wasn’t any good at relationships in those days. I wasn’t very good at handling the intimacy required, and not just at the physical level. I lacked good role models to know how to handle myself, much less anyone else.

Maybe he thought he was saving me. From myself and others. You know, ‘if only she’d look at me, she’d realise I’d treat her so well.” Yeah. Except, 30 year age gap.

And I was not attracted to him. Not in the slightest. And man, that is a strong motivator for fighting back.

I laughed it off after, pretended it didn’t matter, probably even pretended I was too drunk to remember myself, but after that, things got awkward between us. As I guess they ought to have. I didn’t articulate how upset I was about that. I just tried to cover it up.

Not long after that, I left uni and got full time employment. I staid clear of the old crowd. Then, eventually, I met the man who was going to be my first husband. We got engaged, and I raced into the book store. I was looking for M. I wanted to flash my ring. And I guess I hoped that now that I was safe in a relationship (that worked) I would be clearly off limits ‘in that way’ and we could be friends again.

But I hadn’t articulated any of that. Years had passed during which I hadn’t called by very often. I hadn’t kept in touch. I hadn’t explained why even to myself. But when I was happy and I had something to share, I thought of my old friends. And I thought we could be friends again, put all of that behind us.

But M stared straight ahead as I held out my hand to show him my ring, and with his broadcaster demeanor said “I’m sure you can see we’re very busy. Nice to see you again.” And then he looked away.

And I didn’t know whether to sputter, or laugh, or get angry. But of course I don’t do anger at other people. So I shrugged and pretended it didn’t matter (again) and quietly left. And felt embarrassed for years after even thinking about it.

I never saw M again. I stopped dropping in all together.

I started thinking about this and that thought led to pondering that I don’t allow myself to have close friendships with heterosexual men anymore. After all, I have learnt that there is too much opportunity for miscommunication or misunderstanding.

I am happily married, but even explaining that doesn’t necessarily provide a shield. Maybe some men ponder (hope?) that I could be in an open marriage. Or be prepared to take a side step. I am not in an open marriage and I don’t cheat and I don’t do side steps.

I have gotten better over the years with having emotionally intimate and rich relationships with others. And I have those sorts of friendships now with some women, and with some gay men, and with my husband (on top of having a physical and romantically intimate relationship with him). But I do not allow myself to have emotionally intimate friendships with heterosexual men. There are maybe 2 or 3 hetero or possibly bi men I know with whom I am on the verge of having some emotional intimacy. But I always pull back because I don’t trust them not to misconstrue (and subsequently misbehave). It is not an issue that comes up with my women of male gay friends, who know that this emotional intimacy has nothing to do with a desire for any other sort of intimacy. Who know that me looking into their eyes and laughing, and touching them on the arm, and asking them something personal about themselves or sharing something personal and honest about myself does not translate into a further desire to be intimate with them in other ways.

And this reticence with heterosexual men has nothing to do with me having tickets on myself. All things being equal (relative to my age for example) I know I am still an attractive woman, but certainly no supermodel. I don’t think for one moment that men are dropping in the aisle for me. Maybe it’s just that men really are more opportunistic, and maybe a lot of men don’t learn to distinguish emotional intimacy and friendship from other relationships. Or learn to separate those desires (or even acknowledge that they have them, after all ‘mates’ and ‘sheilas’ covers it, right?). And since a lot of the men I meet are at work, I really feel that I can’t afford to get it wrong. I don’t ever want to have another M incident.

Plus, you know, married. Love Lucas.

I don’t know why all of that popped into my mind today as I was waking up, but there it is.

Maybe I thought of all that today, half asleep, in acknowledgment and celebration of how far I have come.

And maybe I needed to remember that not everything about the 90’s was hunky dory. After all, female orgasm was still more myth and fable than reality. And people actually thought there might be this mystical thing called a ‘g spot’. Now we know that a clitoris is genuinely a female equivalent of a mini penis, and that it is the sole origin of the female orgasm - the ‘g spot’ is actually the deep internal nerve endings of the clitoris inside the vagina, which can get stimulated in the right position or by a sufficiently large penis (sorry, size does matter, so suck it up fellas, we’ve had to deal with body image issues for eons, a little bit of your turn now). And furthermore, while for a little while research peeps puzzled over the apparent ‘fact’ that the sole purpose of this little button seemed to be to bring sexual pleasure to the female of our species (which obviously confounded the religiously minded of them), there is now a school of thought that female orgasm aids conception ie if a fella is clever enough and good enough to get his partner over the edge just before or just as he himself ejaculates, the pulses of the female orgasm actually help carry the sperm. It’s a sort of super highway to the ovaries.

Nature, huh? It all seems so obvious once we know it all for sure.

But barely anyone bothered researching the female pleasure anatomy before the 1980’s and 90’s (reproductive, yes, pleasure, no), so... There is a lot of good in leaving those years behind.

An addendum of sorts

2011-12-15T19:15:00.001+11:00

After I had made my mad dash through the landscape on Saturday night, from suburban heartland stupor back to my smug inner-city intelligentsia comfort zone, I, as previously noted, stopped in at Adrian and Tommy's place.

"Stopped in" is a misnomer as I had to walk past my place and walk another kilometre or so. But bear with me.

I stopped in on Adrian and Tommy.

And we got to talking about the rejection of my novel by said bastard Canadian agent (it probably was a nice rejection precisely because he is Canadian, but eh, in the end, rejection is rejection and window dressing is just window dressing).

And in talking, while I noted that it was a fairly 'nice' rejection, I said that it did sort of bother me that he referred to the backstory of my two key characters as being 'sordid'.

Now first of all, in the world of chick lit, it is a conventional trope that the heroine in particular often does have to overcome a hiccup, a misstep, a mistake or a misalliance of some sort in her own past, before things go right again and you get to have a happy ending. So yeah, for want of a better word, sometimes that could be something a little 'sordid' in nature i.e. life is not a clear cut path and we are not all Mother Theresa, we make mistakes, they can come back to bite us and haunt us, but rarely do we do ourselves out of the redemptive opportunity to try again or to fix things.

His use of that particular word and a few other aspects made me think that this is a genre he's probably never worked in, so no harm no foul that he wasn't interested in this novel, just wish he'd said something rather than pretending he'd even consider representing it. Because if he thought my novel had a sordid backstory, then boy he clearly hasn't read half the stuff that's in print.

Also, considering that I know he's picked up true crime stuff in the past, it made me think of that common criticism that gets chucked at American censorship laws/sensibilities: it's fine to show a woman's breast being cut off, not fine to show a woman's breast being touched in a sensual or sexual way.

So yeah, fine to sell true crime stuff where the protagonist goes deep undercover and cheats on his wife in the process and shoots people because that's in the name of god and country, but not okay for someone (in a fictional setting) to discover that the path to true love and personal contentment is strewn with a mistake or two (which they then rectify). Cough: &*% hypocrite.

But... that's not my point.

In explaining the agent's use of the word 'sordid' and my annoyance over it, I thought it was worthwhile to give Tommy and Adrian an overview of my plot.

So I explained that the 'sordid backstory' was that my heroine, Emma, spent some time in her early twenties working as a 'hostess', a sort of non sexual services escort. I got a real kick out of inventing (a completely make believe) 'The Agency'.

Adrian's mind immediately jumped to 'oh what, you mean massages and stuff...' (implied 'without the happy ending') and while I'm already vehemently shaking my head, Tommy jumps in with 'oh no' and perfectly explains exactly what Emma does in the book. Provides hostess companionship services to social functions etc - from a pure 'polished company' perspective, hosting dinner parties etc, but with no sexual services rendered.

I was agog. Apparently it is a 'thing'. I mean, I kind of thought it had to be, after all, that's what some modelling agencies provide whenever a rock band or some old crooner flies into town, but still. But still. I thought I had potentially invented something for which there could very possible be no demand in "RL".

Anyway, long story short, Emma falls for one of her clients and he falls for her, he is married, against her better judgment they have an affair but eventually, he decides to go back to his wife permanently (there are reasons for this).

Almost ten years pass, Emma has a failed marriage behind her... and they meet again, Sebastian now too having divorced his wife.

So the sordid part was the way they met and that they had an affair.

Pretty tame stuff in the scheme of things (i.e. fiction, chick lit genre).

The thing is, what gave me the idea in the first place was two conversations I had with my mother, about 15 years apart. When I was in my very early twenties, mum had read this article about attractive young university students turning to high class escort work to foot the bills as it paid way above the minimum wage that retail or hospitality did.

And I stood on my feet all day on weekends in a bookstore to support myself throughout uni.

So mum was having one of her hand wringing moments, wondering if a smart, attractive young thing like me might be 'drawn into that'.

I remember scoffing at the suggestion, but also privately thinking 'Hah! If only!' If I only knew how to get an introduction to a place like that. So what if it meant having to see 5 or 6 or 7 regular clients per year and having sex with them. I'd get paid well, get some experience and at least not have my heart broken by the regular brigade of too cool for school grunge hipsters for whom you ended up putting out without getting anything back at all (usually not even a guarantee that they'd call you again if they'd decided they 'couldn't do commitment right now'). I figured that I always found out too late that I was sleeping with someone who didn't care about me anyway, so why not collect some dosh for my troubles along the way and be quite clear that it's not really a relationship.

Of course I never articulated that and never did anything like that, and yes, I was in a pretty dark place at that time, which is of course what my mother picked up on. She was doing the maths too and figuring that a somewhat sophisticated older man who was prepared to shower me with attention and good manners and gifts had to be looking a helluva lot more attractive than the usual bump n'grind in sheep skin collared denim jackets on offer at Kinselas. Ahh, the early 90's.

I never found one of those in any guise, I might add. For all the (in those days) obvious attractions (both ways) I've just never been able to do 'gold digger' and hence never did sugar daddies. I did definitely have a preference for older dudes in my early twenties (once shocking my dad by dating a guy 2 years younger than him, but this dude was definitely not rich, and not sophisticated either). But that of course famously shifted the other way once I turned thirty and from then until now, I find that my preference does veer towards younger guys. Lucas is 29, turning 30 next year, and that about suits me. Even though I look at him most days and can't believe that my gorgeous baby faced honey is turning 30 next year. No way!!!

But I digress...

That comment of my mother's did stick with me for years and then, a few years ago, she brought it up again, sort of in a retrospective way aka "I used to really worry that you'd..."

Yeah mum thanks, you worried that I'd earned a living as a high class hooker. Great. Thanks. Well, given my financial situation for those first few years after I left uni, that should have been evidence enough that I was not, in fact, a high class anything, certainly not a prostitute.

But I was bored one afternoon, and I'd recently read one of those salacious 'true memoirs' of some chick who had rented herself out as an escort, and it all rang so patently false with me that I found myself thinking: how would a real life person actually deal with a past like that? I mean, lets accept for a moment that most of us do still get brought up in the Judaeo-Christian social tradition, even if not in overtly Christian households (at least not in Australia), and therefore we do grow up within a certain moral framework, and those frameworks are actually quite resilient. Many of us accept morals not just because they are socially convenient, but because we 'buy in' to them.

Then, as the story developed, because I wanted the opportunity for my characters to reunite, I realised that I couldn't have the escort agency be a sex work escort agency. Maybe it would have been a grittier story if Emma had been a sex worker in her student days and had eventually married a man who had been one of her clients back in those days (and therefore had his own overcoming and accepting to do), but that just felt like too much to overcome (particularly for an inexperienced writer like me). And... oooh, I just didn't like it. I just didn't want to write that book.

So instead, I had it be a 'hostess' escort business and the line crossing happened via Emma having an affair with a married man as a result of meeting him in that line of work. I frankly thought that was enough to have to overcome for a well brought up, middle class girl with a good moral framework. So a lot of the tension in the story is her grappling with that. I frankly thought that she had convinced herself that it was far more 'sordid' than it actually was.

A big part of the plot is that she never told anyone that she'd done that sort of work as a student. Not her parents, not anyone.

Now that's one big difference between Emma and me.

If I'd done that sort of non sexual hostess escort work, everyone would have known about it. Heck, it would be on my frigging resume.

But then, the character of Emma is a well brought up, middle class, slightly conservative (at least initially) Australian girl, and a law student with law firm partnership or judiciary career aspirations, so she knows that she has to live a life that will stand up to scrutiny.

While I was a working class migrant brat who completed an Arts degree without a clue what she wanted to do, but certainly not a career that would require my life being able to stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

So yeah, anyway, apparently what I've invented is a 'thing'. Or could be a 'thing', enough for people to think, 'yeah, that could be a thing'.

And I still don't really think it was all that sordid.

*huff*

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow....

2011-12-14T20:29:00.000+11:00

I genuinely can't remember when I last had a cold. I'm pretty sure it was before I had surgery, so about May last year.

Way to go immune system.

Only, bit of a bugger that I had to start getting sick literally 3 days before the uni's shutdown. I have 3 weeks off and I don't really want to be sick for half of it.

Looks like we're in for one hell of a wet, cold Christmas as it is. We had a few really hot days in November, but December so far is a bust. I don't think we've gone above 30 degrees at all, and above 25 degrees only once or twice. Weather forecast is for a rainy, cold Christmas.

Might as well be home. In the snow. But eh.

I spoke to my aunt Marianne on Sunday night and she said Germany has had the driest autumn on record EVER. No rain. Well, sunshine, I know where that went. We've been getting it all!

The river levels fell so low that there were sections of the Rhine you could cross on foot and old WWII mines kept getting uncovered. I recall reading a few weeks ago that 2 million people had to be evacuated from Koblenz, where the Moselle meets the Rhine, so they could safely discharge an old British mine.

It's all topsy-turvy.

Work is busy, but it always is this time of the year. I'm trying to apply lessons learned. It's a real shame that it's just too damned cold to start swimming regularly. I haven't been once yet this year and a few lunchtime sessions in the pool would, I think, be a treat from both a physical and mental health perspective.

Sigh. But these are things you can't control.

I ate scones today. Well, one, with a bit of butter and jam. I was invited to attend a meeting and then asked to stay for an impromptu morning tea. I genuinely love some of the people I work with as I get to know them better. So welcoming and open hearted. Interesting and passionate about what they do. I'm really very fortunate to work where I work, with the people that it attracts. No corporate drones there.

There could be worse things in life. I often forget. Am often not thankful enough for all I have, including all of the amazing, wonderful people I've gotten to know.

Maybe the latest lesson I had to learn involves genuine thankfulness and a little bit of humility. It's easy to let ambition divert you down the path of hubris.

So there. Yesterday I realised I do not want to be a rockstar. Today, I am happy with what I have and with my lot.

Thank you universe.

(And tomorrow, I'll be back as the Virgin Mary incarnate, I'm feeling so very bloody virtuous right now! - There, that'll convince everyone this is still me after all.)

:)

I can finally categorically say I do not wish to be a rockstar

2011-12-13T21:38:00.002+11:00

What triggered this realisation?

Why, nothing more than a semi-bored surf on the internet a couple of nights ago, checking the news about my favourite rock band du jour.

Aaaaannnndddd... Anthony Kiedis has a torn calf muscle and a broken toe. But ain't no never-mind, he just tapes 'em up and hops right back on stage.

That man is going to arrive for his post-life inventory check and get tagged with a 'do not recycle' sticker, because that body has been fully used. Is there any part of him that has not been smashed, broken, torn, gouged, perforated etc?

His comment? This is what he can see himself doing for the next few years. Making more records, now that they've discovered life beyond John with Josh, and more touring.

And I thought about that being life...in your 50's.

Nah.

That kind of intense touring, that is a young man's game. And there is something about the Chili Peppers touring that isn't quite the same as Rod Stewart at another gala evening at one of the premium wineries in the Hunter Valley, doing a couple of luxe appearances a couple of times a year.

This is hard working rock band touring. Maybe not Anthony Kiedis in his late twenties/early thirties touring (with nary a sober moment and body stretched thin between abuses), but still.

In the end, it's just work, in'it? I can't imagine doing anything worse. Sound check after sound check. Night after night. Days blending into weeks and months and cities into cities, all circling around this over and over again performance. Voice getting hoarse, vocal chords getting nodules, never resting properly, ankles sprained, toes broken, muscles torn. Sure, they take some breaks between sets and actually see something of the world, so it's not just the inside of indistinguishable hotel rooms the world over.

Still, I get exhausted just thinking about it.

And how do you maintain, or build or find, a relationship like that?

AK's historically been most active on the dating front when touring, so maybe that whole thing sets of a sequence of events for him, literally turning him to 'on'.... but it's just.... yeah.

And there is a child in the mix now too (as there are for Flea and Chad). So how do you do that when the sprog/s gets old enough to have to stay in school?

Clearly it's gotta be something you simply come to love doing.

Otherwise you wouldn't do it, because it just sounds like bloody hard work.

I would not want to be a rockstar.

But, on the other hand, I am also coming down with a cold, so doing anything other than curling up in my PJ's in bed with a cup of ginger and chamomile tea and a soppy novel with a happy ending right now just seems.... too hard.

But lets cross that one firmly off the list once and for all shall we? Tanja does not wish to be a rockstar.

And you know, I'll go out on a limb here and draw the next sensible conclusion: I also wouldn't want to be dating one. I know that's a non starter anyway because I'm married, but let's just put that out there that if I theoretically happened to find myself on the market again one day, rock stars need not apply. Not touring ones.

And the ones under 35 are all touring ones. And the ones over 50.... even if they are not touring anymore, are all over 50. So, no. And while Anthony Kiedis might be my one exception to my rule about the attractiveness of men over the age of 50, he is a touring rock star. See above for what I think of that.

On the other hand, I can quite happily imagine taking a year off of life and sailing a yacht around the world. Not in a storm racing facing sort of way, more in a luxury liner sipping champagne and slurping caviar kind of way. Perpetually sun tanned, manicured, pedicured and perfectly coiffed. A la St Tropez 1950's style.

Ah well. We live per chance to dream.

Reborn (without finding religion)

2011-12-11T20:20:00.001+11:00

So yeah, apparently I don't deal with rejection so well.

Even though, to my own credit, I've been dealing with it rather better than expected. The timing was both unfortunate and fortuitous, in the sense that I was perhaps quite well prepared to conduct a little experiment on myself from a managing my own schemas perspective.

Even while a part of me stamped my foot and sulked, another part of me took a step back ad examined what was going on here.

As it happened, I'd had a pretty major breakthrough in terms of my schemas a few weeks ago. I've know what my schemas are - unrelenting standards, emotional inhibition, self sacrifice and (perceived) social isolation - for a number of years now. And it's only because of the outcomes of those schemas - constant excessive worrying and anxiety (which I internalise to the extent that a lot of people don't even pick up on them) and occasional depression when the constant anxiety burns me out, that I bothered to seek help. I thought I'd figured out what the root causes of those schemas were and that I was starting to deal with overcoming those schemas by working on my automatic thoughts and ensuing behaviours.

I was wrong. I was only part of the way there to figuring out the root causes. What triggered the full spectrum realisation was my increasing annoyance with myself at not being able to move on. Yes, the root cause is my family and my upbringing. In a really crass nutshell, my parents were the damaged offspring of much more damaged parents. They repeated a lot of behaviour patterns and beliefs, were trapped in them themselves, and they certainly never did any of the things they did 'on purpose'. Were they model parents? No. Were they good parents? Also, no, not really. Were they dreadful parents? No. Well, maybe, some of the time. If the low water mark is sexual abuse, then no, I wasn't sexually abused. If another minimum standard is provision of food, clothes and shelter, then I was certainly adequately provided for. Was I given access to education and opportunities? Yes, I was. Was I in constant fear for my physical safety?

But if you allow for a spectrum of necessary factors that make up good parenting, each of them equally important, each of them equally necessary to form a healthy whole, if you imagine those necessary factors as pie pieces, then I was missing at least one whole pie piece, and the mice had taken some nibbles of a few others. In other words, not a whole healthy pie there.

But, as I'd reached the conclusion that occasionally we're all just muddling through, right?, and that's what my parents had done, then why couldn't I just leave the past in the past, get over it and work on having the sort of relationship I actually want to have with my family. Certainly one they seemed to be reaching for. But no, a number of years ago I started holding my family at arm's length, and nothing seemed to be moving me to an inclination to change that. Part of the problem, of course, is that I have never openly acknowledged to my parents that there is a problem.

I'd made up my mind a long time ago that giving any indication to my parents that I thought there were problems that had left some lasting damage was only going to result in defensiveness, excuses, recriminations and.... So I've been avoiding.

I've been doing a lot of avoiding. When I left off therapy last, I think it was the point of realisation I'd reached. I'd ID'd my issues, and I'd ID'd my triggers, so then my coping mechanism became avoidance rather than neutralisation. I doubted my own resilience to face and work through anything that I found confronting, challenging etc. Eventually you get backed into a corner and can't avoid anymore, and because I hadn't learned actual strategies for working things through....

This therapist challenged me, specifically about why I felt I couldn't talk any of these things through with my parents. So I started to imagine the sort of conversation that I might have with my mother specifically. How I might shape a conversation so that it's mindful of her feelings as well. And I started to think in terms of not only the mistakes they had made, but how perhaps I had been difficult as well.

I was apparently quite difficult as a teenager, not because I 'acted out', but quite the opposite. I became withdrawn and secretive. I wasn't doing anything that parents would generally worry about (boyfriends, drugs, alcohol for e.g.) so there wasn't any 'activity' I was secretive about, but I simply became emotionally withdrawn. Secretive about my inner life. And I have enough empathy as an adult to concede how difficult that must be for a parent. So yeah, I was difficult.

So there I was, feeling pleased with myself that I was able to make this concession (after all, I'm really not perfect either and never was) when.... everything fell into place.

I don't want to go into everything. I don't have the energy, I really don't. But I do want to be quite clear that no child withdraws without a reason. This should not be rocket science. The most obvious reason is that a child learns to withdraw reactively. As a reaction to behaviour from a parent. I started to withdraw about 5 years after my mother had emotionally withdrawn from me. Over the next few years, she tried to re-establish that connection, because for some reason it had become desirable to her again, and I guess unknowingly I rejected her attempts. By the time I'd turned 14, my mother's frustration over this state of play turned to physical violence. My mother was very angry around this time for a lot of reasons, probably because her own reflection on her hopes and dreams, her marriage, her past and what her life had actually delivered to date left her feeling frustrated, and I was just one small part of that. Because genuine self reflection is not a skill either of my parents ever developed, her reaction to my withdrawal from her ended in violence. She literally hit out at me every time I frustrated her. Which was a lot. On average, I got hit (usually consisted of an open handed slap in the face) on average once a week from the age of 14 to 17. I was an easy outlet for all the frustrations. And obvious living testament to everything that was wrong with her life.

To cut a long story short, I began to realise that my schemas all more or less sprang from my mother's emotional withdrawal that I experienced as a child of about 7. After I'd had to serve as my mother's best friend, confidante, ersatz for every adult relationship that she lacked in her life, for the first 7. Neither period was healthy. Not the first 7 years where I was not allowed to be a child and she never assumed the appropriate mother role, not the next 5 when she withdrew, as a result of not only finally having her needs met elsewhere but also then associating me with a shameful period of her life that she preferred to forget (that I reminded her of), not the next 8 or so years where I rejected her advances to balance things out again, and then, finally an adult myself without a clue what I was actually carrying with me.

And what I was actually carrying with me was a constant anxiety about my role in life. My even being here. There are 7 billion people on this planet and all have a right to be here. Except for me. That is; if I want to be here, I have to fight to do something special, perform constant extra duties to justify my existence. My right to be here.

Shorthand: if everyone else is expected to do 90-100%, I have to deliver 150% just to be considered equal with them. And when I get criticised, rejected or am made to feel as if I fall short in some way, I feel like I'm much worse than anyone else, that falling short (even after 150% of effort) results in something unacceptable like 50%.

In other words, I always have to bring something extra to the party to justify my place at the table. So when I'm in a social setting, I have to entertain everyone to prove not to them, but to me, how much fun I am to be around (and that I deserve to be there). That 'performance' of course usually has the opposite effect, but ....

It's easy for me to become a workaholic. All anyone at work needs to do to get me over delivering is to a) just let me know how much they need me (because that automatically justifies my reason for being here - someone else who has a right to be here needs me) or b) criticise me in some way because that triggers all the shame and guilt that I find unbearable and has me working overtime to overcome those feelings again and prove to you, but most of all to me, that I have some worth.

When my mother withdrew from me, my place within the family was put in jeopardy. Since then I have developed the role of problem solver, trouble shooter, helper, carer, decision maker to justify my place in the family. I face every Christmas with so much anxiety because all of the family dynamics, the old conflicts, come to the surface, between my parents, between my parents and my sister, but it's funny, I've removed myself from those conflicts (they are never with me) but I have inserted myself into their conflicts by taking on the role of mediator, solver, smoother. I hate the role and get sick with anxiety anticipating it, but it's even more unthinkable for me to withdraw from that role, because if I do - I have no more reason for being there. I know that makes no rational sense, but... I spent years fighting to be noticed, fighting for my place. What I learned is to accept any role that others want to give to me and then to do it so well that they'll always need me back.

My place in the world on a larger scale, however, can only be justified by delivering something greater. A best selling novel, for example. It's a genuine compulsion with me to be proved talented. Game changing talented.

If I'm not, the fear that envelopes me is almost overwhelming. What am I here for then?

The conversation that sent me to the therapist for the first time in 2009 happened between me and Lucas over lunch one day. Without really thinking about what I was saying, I said that if I didn't do something very extra special with my life, didn't prove to be uncommonly talented at something and then deliver, then there was no point in continuing to be here, then I might as well... end myself. Because without that, I don't actually deserve to be at all.

I frightened Lucas sufficiently with that that he implored me to seek help. I don't think I even got for the longest time why he found what I said so frightening.

I really didn't understand.

So I've been thinking about this for a few weeks, and I had an inkling what would happen if and when I got a rejection from an agent or publisher, and yep, I did spiral, but I caught myself quite quickly.

I'm not actually rock bottom destroyed about this, I don't actually feel hopeless or talentless and I'm not going to get one quite nicely worded rejection deter me. After all, some people get rejections that are not very nice, along the lines of 'don't quit your day job'. Once you actually know why you are the way you are, once you can name it all rationally, you can fight back against it.

The problem up until now is that I didn't know, didn't realise fully, even after having ID'd my schemas. I just didn't get how it all hinged together. Now I do. Now I know how I'm programmed and how programmable I am, and that is the equivalent to putting the mother board back in my hands (no pun intended). I can issue counter-commands. I can rationally say that Neil Gaiman has his first rejection pinned to a notice board somewhere and the Beatles had Decca.

And Mrs so and so down the street always wanted to be a famous actress but never made it, and look, she still has the right to be here and enjoy her life. And I bet she's found other ways to lead a fulfilling life. To be happy with what she's got.

You don't have to let yourself get eaten up by perceptions of 'failure'. Failure is wanting to be the next Cameron Diaz or Julia Roberts and then starring in a string of porn movies instead (having convinced yourself that you've reached your goal). Failure is not wanting to be the next Cameron Diaz or Julia Roberts but ending up working in real estate instead, happily married with a house of boisterous kids.

I really can choose to change the conversation, now that I understand what it really is.

The shock for me came in talking this all through out loud with my therapist yesterday.

For the first time, controlled, self censoring, emotionally inhibited Tanja allowed herself to be really angry.

And it actually felt really good to have that right to feel angry and to express anger confirmed.

Simple words can make a hell of a difference.

It was my therapist who said to me several months ago: "you are not your illness". You can know these things in your head, but words spoken out loud have a different sort of power.

That same therapist nodding slowly and saying, very calmly and matter of factly "you're very angry" and me, without even stopping to think, nodding vehemently and saying "yes! I am" just knocked the crap out of me afterwards.

Someone who doesn't have a right to be here doesn't usually allow themselves to get angry at other people (who do have a right to be here).

When other people do things or say things that hurt me I internalise it a number of ways. I find a reason for why they are right or how I deserve the hurt they've caused me. I rationalise how they are being cruel to be kind, or are acting in their own self interest, which people are allowed to do and I'm just a casualty of that because I accidentally got in the way. It's not personal. In other words, because they matter and I don't, I don't actually defend myself. I find a way to turn it into something I have to improve about me.

I must be about the most improved person on the planet, considering how long this has been going on.

So yesterday was an exhausting day for me, because it's the beginning of me taking the tools to change everything.

I came home absolutely exhausted, just wiped empty and ended up napping yesterday afternoon.

Then Lucas and I went out to a birthday party last night and I shouldn't have done it. I should have spoken up and said that I just wasn't fit enough to be in company last night. Not a large group, including new people I don't know, having to navigate banter and alcohol etc. It probably sounds wanky, but I literally felt as if I'd been stripped of my skin yesterday, got pushed fresh into the world with a a new skin growing in place. And I suspect this one is going to be more durable, better fitted to my shape, stronger for me, but yesterday it was whisper thin and new and I...

Found myself amidst a house full of people and suddenly realised I couldn't speak anymore, I couldn't interact and I couldn't be there. I just felt... wiped out. And in that moment, I just needed to take care of myself for a change.

So I quietly picked up my handbag and left the house. And didn't tell my husband until I was already on a train home.

No, not a good night, and not a nice thing of me to do (and certainly involving no malice against anyone else), but by the time I got home (via a stop off at Adrian's and Tommy's who kindly opened their door at 10:30pm at night without a second thought and where, over a few shared, quiet glasses of wine, I slowly started putting myself together again) Lucas was also home, and while he was angry and upset, I guess the fact that I was genuinely shook up (and genuinely did not want to fight) showed, and I was able to, eventually, with a few mis-starts, able to explain what had happened and we went to sleep snuggled around each other.

I guess this has been long but I still skated over an awful lot. It doesn't matter, I know what it's all been and why. But what I need to focus on now is knowing I have a long road ahead of me to make some real, substantial changes, intrinsic changes to how I handle and approach life, other people, but most of all, how I handle me (including being kind to myself), and I thank you all for bearing with me as I will literally try to re-rear myself from scratch. I don't doubt for a moment that I can do it.

With a little help from my friends.

It's not the rejection that bothers me... it's the confirmation

2011-12-07T21:50:00.000+11:00

Okay. So the not exactly unexpected or unsurprising happened today. Well, technically yesterday but I didn’t check my e-mail until today.

I got my first novel submission rejection from an agent

Which I had 98% expected and was stealing myself for, but it still not fun when it happens.

Lucas thinks it was a gently, nicely worded rejection, but it’s still ‘no thanks’. The gist was that the agent didn’t ‘connect strongly enough’ with the story to feel he could represent me or the novel and I got the impression from the way he summarised the plot that he didn’t think it was a) a very believable story and characters and b) the connection part indicates that he didn’t care very much for them either.

Which sucks a whole ton because of course I did care about them. But obviously did ‘them’ no favours with the way I wrote.

Since I wasted so much of his time reading (this piece of obvious junk) I don’t feel I can ask him for some more specific feedback. And I guess that’s not his job either. I probably need to use one of those professional editorial services if I want that (for which you have to pay).

Or I need to join a writers group and actually get some feedback during the creative process.

Anyway, I can’t help but feel that this will engender schadenfreude amongst those who know me and knew what I was trying for, an expectation that probably says more about my relationship with myself than what anyone else actually really thinks of me. When I take a spill, I’m always sure everyone else is enjoying it and laughing. Doesn’t matter how much my rational brain tries to challenge that, it’s just....that’s where my brain goes to. No one actually wants you to succeed. People think you’re arrogant or annoying or a keener or ‘too good to be true’ and can’t wait to see you stuff up and take a fall.

I don’t actually deserve a place here. Out of all the 7 billion people on this planet... I don’t. Certainly not the place I dream of for myself.

I wish I was the kind of person who could get feedback like this or a rejection and react with “fuck you! I know I’m awesome! I know this is awesome! You’re the loser, you’re going to regret this!”

But I’m not. All the voices of self doubt, of self criticism, of suspicion that it really wasn’t ‘all that’ and I secretly knew it, that I have no actual talent for dramatic or character development, for plot pacing, for building a connection between my writing and the reader, all of that comes home to roost and tells me: don’t even try.

You’re just some migrant kid from a working class family who got ahead of herself. Too big for her boots. Go back to where you belong and don’t try to run with the big kids. Other people having dreams and ambition is cool. You having dreams and ambition is arrogant and ridiculous. You have no talent, nothing worthwhile to say, no one wants to hear from you or make space for you or wants to be bothered with you.

That’s your place there. Keep to it this time, will you? And try to find something useful to do.

It seems disingenuous to ask where those echoes come from (because I know where they come from) and it seems unfair to simply blame my parents for these echoing messages, since they were doing a mixture of unknowingly repeating what they had themselves been exposed to as children, genuinely trying to do what they thought was right (raising children into pragmatic adults who do not big note themselves but are modest), reacting to their own circumstances (mostly unknowingly again) and relying on what they knew and their own experiences (which is not a wide circle, but again, not their fault).

The upshot of all of this is that no matter how bad I feel right now, the worst thing is that I am fighting an inclination to e-mail the guy back and profusely apolgise for wasting his time in the first place. Because I am so embarrassed and feel so foolish because obviously it was such rubbish.

And that’s how easy it is to cut me right back down to size.

To nothing.

Who gave me c_c_c_caffeine?!

2011-11-29T20:01:00.003+11:00

Had a meeting today with a certain group of middle aged male Directors, with whom I have learned to project myself as confident and direct (read: I have learned that I need to take charge of certain situations, I can't wait for them to create space for me, because they never will and also, this is a group that has real trouble with coming to the point and deciding anything, and that drives me batty!).

I was having a very 'take charge' moment and a certain Director started asking a question, I assessed it as falling within my sphere, started to answer it, when he added the CFO's name to the end of the question.

A split second of silence followed by my rather clear and precise "Whoops!" from me.

There just wasn't any other way of saving the moment, and I figured I'd rather create a 'funny' moment where everyone gets the chance to have a bit of a giggle at my expense, but we're laughing together, rather than sitting there in embarrassed silence which just creates awkwardness and a perfect op for everyone to bitch and laugh 'at me' after.

So anyway. Yes. Awkward.

I really, really hate indecisiveness. And I hate that certain male ego that resides in senior positions that seems to have blind spots about what they don't know. Even if they don't get it, particularly when they don't get it, they'll spend an awful lot of time not getting it and getting themselves in dreadful amounts of trouble because of it (or close to trouble - because my job then turns into emergency catchers mitt before the end). I'd rather plan, prepare and prevent and move things in the direction we want them to go the whole way through, than not plan, rush and spend months and months and months digging back out of the hole. But what these sorts of folks seem to learn from such an experience is not 'wow, that was awful! What can I learn from this and do better next time?' but rather 'wow! That worked! I got what I wanted in the end.'

I often wonder if the reason that so many poor planners (and implementers) make it to top positions is because along with their lack of planning skills they have a sunny rose coloured optimism that allows them to glibly glide over even the worst experiences and remember only that they got an outcome somewhat close to what they wanted in the end. Hey presto! Selling point on the resume!

While my point is always: yes, we got to from A to B. Next time, can we buy a road map, plan the trip, work out how long it will take and take enough provisions, then set out on a relatively smooth road in which we are prepared for the curves. Rather than getting a cart, stacking it on top and going for a roller coaster ride through hell and back, with no idea where we are going or will end up and it's only through sheer bloody gripping on and luck that we got tipped out somewhere close to the right location at the end.

I seriously sometimes wonder if most men in leadership positions still secretly really just want to be in their 20s and in a rock band, preferably between the 1970's and 1990's. They certainly behave that way.

Thing is, even those rock band guys outgrow that (those that survive anyway)

So then I got home, made myself mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and scrambled eggs on toast for dinner (because Lucas is working an early evening shift, so I don't need to cook 'properly'), and absentmindedly after dinner went to pop the salt shaker back in... the fridge.

Clearly I shouldn't have had that iced coffee at 11am this morning (with skim milk and without ice-cream or cream - it was bloody awful I don't recommend it). I was jittery as hell until 4pm and clearly I'm still feeling the after-effects now. I just don't 'do' caffeine.

And I hate having coffee breath.

It's one of the things that really stands out for me in Nora Roberts novels. She writes contemporary American romance novels that are not highly original but not too bad either, but one point in common across all her novels is that her characters drink endless, and I mean endless, cups of coffee. I know it's the piss weak American shit, but!

Characters run intro trouble, need to have a pow-wow, it's 6pm in the afternoon, I know! I'll put on a pot of coffee. And then we'll drink it. Even if it is piss weak, drinking 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 cups of the stuff has got to be detrimental.

Caffeine is a diuretic so it's not a substitute for getting the actual fluid that the body needs to stay hydrated (and lets face it, if you're drinking 8 cups of coffee a day, you're probably not drinking 8 cups of water as well, you're probably not even drinking 4 cups of water).

And caffeine is a stimulant. How do these people ever sleep?

And coffee makes you need to poop (there, I don't know the fancy word for that, I'm all out!) so... hmm, well, I guess that's a selling point for some... potential link to keeping you regular and slim.

And last, but not least, coffee breath. Heavy coffee drinkers have the most disgusting breath all day long. Which gets ten times worse if they also smoke. Frankly, for me I might as well be talking to their arsehole. Smell couldn't be any worse.

So when Nora has them brewing up their umpteenth pot of coffee for the day and then they lean in for the thrill I find myself going "eewwhh! eewwhhh! eewwhhh!"

And when Kate on "Castle " (Nathan Fillion's latest TV gig) drinks one of those half litre (disposable - VERY un-eco friendly) cups of coffee (which I know is weak American coffee and is probably still just one shot of espresso and 490ml of milk - which reminds me, why isn't she the size of a heifer after drinking four of those a day???) I swear I can almost smell her coffee breath seeping into the room. No, scratch n'sniff TV would never work for me.

Just imagine having to smell the Dothraki.... (Game of Thrones reference, yep, I'm all over the shop today). Rather than just mooning a tiny little bit over Jason Momoa's muscles.... (mmmmmhhhhh..... still prefer Jon Snow though...)

Anyway, it's interesting that American culture has developed such a fetish for something that they can only handle in a watered down form. Most are just drinking flavoured, sugared water or milk.

I do like one real coffee per day with breakfast. Single shot diffused long black style with about 200ml of water and about 20ml of full cream milk and one teaspoon of sugar.

But that's all. Any more than that and 'this' is what you get.

Sorry Lucas, you are getting elbow and knees in ribs tonight methinks!

New ideas, old stories

2011-11-28T22:37:00.002+11:00

Lately I have been playing with the idea of crossing over into new genres.

I've often toyed with trying to develop an account of my family's history, given that it traverses such key historical terrain and some of the stories is shit you'd barely believe. I'd approach it from blending the present day, my life, my story, my journey, where I have ended up, searching back, trying to reconcile it all, the life of the migrant with these rich backstories, the myths, the legends, and somewhere, the facts. Dad's family's genesis in the old Transylvanian kingdom, crossing the Carpathians almost 400 years ago and coming west. What they must have seen, what might have driven them, stories that are still preserved within the family's oral traditions. Their actions and consequences during and between WWI and WII and post.

Mum's family, fleeing the Czech republic in 1945, what little I know of what came before, who they were, the war years, what they fled and what they couldn't, the stories we still tell in the family, and all the ones that have been lost. How all of that shaped my identity and how much I have often struggled with the simplistic ethnic heritage I have been forced to wear in Australia where I am, have simply been forced to be, West German. When the truth is not that simple.

There are 2 principle issues I have with trying to complete this kind of work:
- research
- narrative drive/pay off

I think, even if I use family stories as a guide, that I would still have to do extensive research of some quite specific periods of history and that these could range far afield and into quite specialist areas that will be difficult to research properly in Australia. I'm trying to think of it from a practical perspective, and I suppose I could map out the key stories I wanted to tell and then map out what support reading I need to do, at least to get me started. The bit I would struggle with the most, I suspect, will be the disparate history of ethnic Germans in the Czech Republic. These people are usually swept into the general moniker of "Sudeten Germans" in the English language, even though many ethnic Germans were NOT Sudeten Germans, which actually refers to a migration/resettlement deal done between Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresia of Austria (Marie Antoinette's mum) affecting mostly ethnic Germans that populated Silesia in present day Poland and who were relocated south-west.

My mother's family were not Sudeten Germans. They were not 18th century Silesian migrants.

In German, the ethnic Germans/Austrians/Bavarians were generally referred to as Bohemians, since most of the settled in this western region of the then Czechoslovakia.

Anyway, that alone will be a little complex.

From a narrative perspective, I also thought a valuable component would be if I could actually travel back and verify some of the past details. In this arena, the money shot is me standing in a graveyard somewhere deep in the Czech republic over the headstone of a great great grandmother or some such that I have rediscovered after an extensive hunt. Or finding long lost family members somewhere east of the Carpathians.

I am not realistically going to be able to do/fund any of that.

So if I want to write anything like this, it's going to have to be strictly armchair travelling. Which leaves me slightly 'meh' about the whole thing.

Even though I do see the contrast with the modern, of my story as a migrant from a former 'enemy' nation as a key element. I want to be able to record all of the things I am usually too polite to talk about. The fact that I was bullied mercilessly and excluded as a child for being German in this country, which proved the strongest incentive possible to work on losing my accent quickly.

BUT I don't want it to turn into a sob-fest. A self-pity party. I'd rather balance it out with some reflections based on that nexus of both belonging to and being an outsider to two cultures. German born but not quite European anymore looking back at the old world, Australia reared but never really Australian, looking at this place.

Anyway, some more thinking required.

And to be honest, one of the reasons I am thinking about it is because my sister goes on with such vitriol about how much attention German WWII history still attracts. She complains of history conferences and seminars being overrun by the topic and how, if she'd chosen to specialise in this period of history, she'd walk into academic jobs left right and centre. People still have a slightly sick fascination with all things Nazi.

I decided frankly why shouldn't I be a bit (self) exploitative and write something publishers might actually pounce on and feel they could sell.

Or who knows, I might even develop the idea into a thesis and go back to Uni one more time and get my own PhD. Even though I think historians like Simon Schama have already done a lot of this stuff at the academic level with books like "Landscape and Memory" - which I highly recommend.

Another idea I have, complete switcheroo, is a crime/thriller novel based on various ideas I have floating around my head. Key idea would be around a crime involving foul play resulting in a missing person, where the family don't know for years or maybe not ever what's happened to their loved one. I was thinking of approaching it like a psychological thriller. Those first inklings that something is wrong, that first day, the sheer adrenalin fuelled terror when I'm sure in that situation you'd just want to do everything, leave no rock unturned to search, to hunt. Then the weeks, the months, numbness, then the years. In other words, I am interested in the people that are left behind. What it would feel like to lose someone you love to a violent crime and never get a resolution, never get closure. It could either be adult lovers, where one loses their partner, or alternatively it could involve the disappearance of a child and would potentially go into the arena of a sex crime. And might involve delving into the psychology of the perpetrator.

If I decided to go with the latter version I know I wouldn't be able to talk to Lucas about it because of the deep discomfort and disgust he feels about the subject. And if I'm going to write from the villain's perspective that means I have to be able to think like them for a little while. And I'm okay with that, I'm clear about my moral centre and don't worry about what it would do to me, but it would bother me a little if Lucas felt that there was something horrible about me that I could 'live' in that world for a little while and cooly analyse enough to develop a plot and make choices on the basis of needing to progress the plot. So yeah.

I realise I don't have any experience writing a psychological thriller and this genre has its own 'paces' etc but then... I do love a challenge.

I'll think about it a little longer. In between everything else. :)

Flirting with spambots and google searches

2011-11-15T21:17:00.004+11:00

This is the first blog post I am making on my brand spanking new MacBook Air. Well, okay it's a week and a half old now, but I've been busy.

I've realised that the MacBook brings out entirely the opposite feelings that my Sony Vaio did. I always handled the Vaio with kid gloves as if it were so fragile.

This thing is entirely utilitarian. Sturdy casing of aluminium, quick to load, you can pick it up and heave it around and at a third of the price of the Vaio.

I can honestly say I doubt I will ever go back (to the PC environment). I like this. I like something sturdy and low maintenance that does the job it's supposed to do with minimum of fuss. It's kinda like me!

Oh btw, I am occasionally compelled to check the stats history to see what sort of blog posts are being looked at by strangers (it's an interesting way to get a potted backstory of your own backstory) and I am often embarrassed to rediscover things that, in my then wisdom, I decided to blog about.

There's always that fear/hope in the back of my mind that I might end up a semi-famous (okay, very famous) published author one day and this blog might actually attract (sigh) something equivalent to Neil Gaiman's blog readership, and if that were to be the case, I'd have to seriously delete some stuff on here. It's one thing to use this as a genuine thoughts journal and be read by some random strangers once in a while (and I'm noticing the occasional readers from Germany who must be googling words like 'Bavaria' or 'Nazi' or 'Sudeten German' - hey, welcome to this post, sorry it probably isn't what you were expecting!) who doesn't really know me from Adam (or Eve), another to be 'known' and have this standing record of all the crazy thoughts and ruminations I've had over the years.

Plus, always the chance that family could find this (my family or Luc's) and that would not be cool. I'm the first to admit that family in this sphere would totally cramp my style. I'd constantly feel as if I had to mentally self censor in case I said anything that could be perceived as hurtful, misconstrued, worrying to them etc.

I find it so weird, for example, that adult children would have their parents 'befriend' them on Facebook. I don't keep a Facebook account on account of a) having no real interest (Blogger and Twitter serves whatever needs I have) b) not really wanting to reconnect with a bunch of people 'from my past' (and that includes high school compatriots as well as ex husband and his family and friends and c) I would have to mortally offend Luc's family (who are his Facebook 'friends') and decline their 'friend' requests on the basis that I think of genuine 'friends' as something different from 'family' and I don't really want my half a world away in-laws trying to weigh into the middle of the wackiness that tends to flow between me and ma peeps. Just too weird. What on earth is wrong with some boundaries, after all.

I also wouldn't want work people on my Facebook, just as I don't have them on my Twitter. Work. Friends. Family. Separate spheres. The only one who traverses all three spaces is my husband, and even he's limited in respect of my job, for practical reasons. Even though he knows all about the 2 Marks, Dominic the wanker and evil Harry who is not actually evil but really rather cool.

Someone I work with recently mentioned that she has a Facebook account but really literally only has 5 or 6 friends on it because she uses it to keep in touch with friends who were overseas. So her boss searched her and sent her a befriending request and it turned into this whole sitcom episode when Kate declined her request. They ended up having to have a sit down during which Kate explained the precise purpose of her Facebook account and how having her boss there as her 'friend' was breaching her sense of where the boundaries lie. Not that she is likely to use her Facebook account to defame her workplace or any work relationships, but its just.... separate. Boundaries.

I found myself agreeing whole heartedly. I could think of nothing creepier than my boss stalking my tweets. It's the sort of activity that is more than likely to trigger a series of 'my boss is a douchebag' tweets, just to scare him away.

I know it's not fashionable anymore to have 'boundaries' and we are supposed to have all of our selves blending neatly into the one, but I like having a sense of separateness. Perhaps precisely because, unlike the men of the 1960's, I don't derive my entire sense of self from my paid occupation, and unlike Gen Y and Z, I don't expect my workplace to affirm my 'entire' sense of self. It serves a purpose just as I serve a purpose for my employer, and that's it. My job is not my vocation, and my employer's identity and mine have not merged into a symbiotic whole that would leave me bereft, shattered and broken should it ever seek to sever the relationship (redundancies, anyone? they are everywhere!) unless of course one day I wake up and decide, nah, they're a bunch of wankers who don't affirm me anymore, I've had jack of their shit, I'm going somewhere else. And then we break up.

Sigh.

I love Gen Y. Or at least how the media talks about Gen Y. When push comes to shove, I'm still not actually sure how much 'people' have actually changed. All the crap being said about Y and Z now was said long ago about X, and even longer ago about Boomers. It's all relative and apparently we all grow into our cranky pants the older we get and are forced to pass the baton to the next generation.

Anyway, the most fabulously popular post I have ever made was the one that has the whole bunch of swear words in the title (including the 'c***' word) which was actually about me discovering, after a break in (while we were at home) that my very first ever iPod nano had been pinched.

I still find it hilarious that it must be the profanity of the subject line that draws random google searchers, just as I am sure that my defiant mentioning of the words MAC BOOK AIR and SONY VAIO will draw the spambots and searchers like nobody's business.

Am I messing with you?

Probably.

Don't do stupid searches. Read something important or relevant or fun. Dare to have a think when something makes you feel something, even if it's one of my stupid old blog entries. Search beyond the soundbite and the 15 second visual infomercial.

And forgive me, when I make a post, sometime in 2005 or 2006, at a time when I had clearly been sleep deprived for several weeks and was therefore the equivalent of drunk, where I referred to a human being as being 'hung' as opposed to 'hanged'.

Shocking grammer!

But that's okay. In e-mailing a submission to an agent recently I spelled onslaught 'onslought' and did not pick it up.

How embarrassment......

A little Schmidty for the way

2011-10-27T20:10:00.000+11:00

Sometimes the darndest things pop into your memory.

As per usual, I put off a loo stop to the last possible moment (because I’m busy), so then was in a hurry, and realised I was doing this rather elastic, long-legged stride to get there in a hurry, realised it looked ridiculous and started humming this song under my breath.

I was already grinning to myself before my fully conscious memory had kicked it : it was one of those ‘joke songs’ German culture has always been fond of, dating back to the 1960’s or 1970’s. It was called “Schmidtchen Schleicher” (‘sneaky Smithy) and I remember it because it was something my dad used to sing to crack up/freak out my mother.

Translated roughly, it goes:

“Sneaky Smithy with the elastic legs

Who can go so nice and soft in the knees
He sneaks up behind the ladies and they start to cry...”

WTF? Those crazy-ass German. Think it’s funny dedicating an entire song to some creepy sexual harassment guy? Frankly, well, yes. German comic songs have a strong tradition of lampooning thick-headed male pursuit of clever, attractive women and being foiled in the attempt. Time honoured tradition, that, covering everything from the traditional Bavarian “fensterln” (the art of propping ladder against heart’s desire’s bedroom window in middle of the night hoping the Papa won’t notice, and that she won’t just tell you to ‘push off’ by pushing you off...) to strategic forgetting of own keys in the hope she’ll allow you to crash (oh the 80’s!) to ill-conceived sex tours of Thailand in the mid 1990’s (hey, it’s a risqué form).

The premise, I think, behind the Sneaky Smith song is that every crowd of nice, attractive, reasonably well socialised group of males is going to have one creepy friend who the girlfriends/wives wish would just piss off/feel sorry for/feel creeped out by.

I thought that over and you know, yeah, I think that’s probably (still) true. Even in these days of highly granular sub cultures where even ‘not cool’ finds its expression of cool.

I say this because I’ve been pondering the whole expression of indie/alt culture, particularly as the Australian rock press has been eating itself up over memories of 20 years of Nirvana (and therefore not putting the Chili Peppers on the cover where they oughta be!). Apparently 1991 is that watershed year that changed everything, driving ‘indie/alt’ to new heights of super cooldem, and then exploding inwards, fragmenting further down, further down into a granularity inconceivable prior to those years.

Before that, it seems there was Top 40, and then there was one alternative stream that drove ‘alt culture’ (ie read ‘youth’ culture). Punk in the late 1970’s. New Wave in the early 1980’s. Then grunge happened, and now there’s indie within indie, and sub genres of sub genres. And not just within music.

Even just ten years ago admitting you were a Trekkie was social suicide (just look at Noel’s character on Frasier). Now? Man, you are so retro cool. It’s not enough to be a Trekkie either. Which spin off? Are you a Kirk man, or Jean Luc Piccard? Or that other dude who’s name I don’t remember? Or that chick?

Now, while you can choose to live your life in the mainstream, there are so many other streams for your choosing. And still not touch on 80% of what’s out there – even though I’ve noticed that people swap streams every few years. From emo to full on goth, to hipster, and if you realise that is not a happy place to live long, to hippy 70’s softie and then.... whatever is your fancy.

I’ve been reading a particular SMH blogger/novelist’s Twitter for a little while now, and he recently tweeted about a) liking “A Game of Thrones” (the book) and b) how this must surely mean he’ll never have sex again.

Which is of course why he’s broadly speaking a bogan Aussie male, despite being a well read one. Because to me the most effective definition of ‘bogan’ is not Juicy Couture sweat pants, bling and a beefed up v8 Ford or Holden, it is ‘mainstream’ without a sub culture that helps express your sense of community, what you’re interested in and that is so pervasive and available now, if you just pulled your head out of your arse for a moment.

It is so bogan to think “gee, I read sci fi/fantasy, I must be turning into one of those sad losers who will never get laid again.”

That is so pre 1991. Even though I suppose hindsight is 20/20 and while we can recognise now that it all began in 1991, maybe it wasn’t always so crystal. So let’s allow ten years for people other than the early adopters to get it. Maybe you lived large in the 1990’s from the Cross to Oxford St, but the movement of the era, the spirit of the age, still passed you by. Allowing for all of that, dude, where have you been since 2001???

Have you been to Galaxy on York St? Comics on King? Minotaur in Melbourne? Have you taken an even cursory glance at the attendance of Comicon or any other such festival or event?

There is somebody for everybody, more so now than ever before. And frankly, every genre and sub genre has its hotties, which you may interpret as ‘someone that appeals to you’. This includes people with the social competence to have interesting conversations that allow them to connect with others and show interest in them, to flirt, to joke, to dissect “Master Chef” (if that’s what floats your boat), to be turned on, to dance, to laugh, to hold down ‘proper jobs’ and/or in other ways lead interesting and full lives.

But, going full circle back to my starting point, even allowing all of that, even with sub cultures and sub genres, even with all that diversity, indie and alt spirit, even if your interpretation of “crowd of nice, attractive, reasonably well socialised group of males” includes tats, piercings and other unusual stylings, there will still always be a Sneaky Smithy amongst them.

World changes, world stays the same. It remains recognisable, because it’s made up of people. Folks like us.

Australia used to have a fairly robust ‘joke’ culture once too. One of the first books that Dad bought when we got to Australia was “They’re a Weird Mob” written by a second generation Italian migrant.

All the diversity and self expression and love and affection you need in the world is encompassed in that title. We’re a weird mob, all of us, together, individually, in groups, in genres, in subcultures, in newbies and recent arrivals, in 5^th generationalists, in our indigenous people, in our bogans, in our Gen Xers and Y’s and Boomers, in our Goths and hipsters and sci fi nerds, in our aficionados and even in our Red Hot Chili Peppers lovers J.

A little Henry Lawson never goes astray

2011-10-22T15:49:00.001+11:00

I quoted the following in only the 2nd blog entry I ever made back in 2005 (when I was concerned about the impact WorkChoices would have on Australian society). I've since commented on the increasingly hour glass shaped nature of our society (increasing wealth at the top, increasing poverty at the bottom, genuine middle class a thin wedge in the middle) and that we are hurtling towards a state not too dissimilar to that of Tsarist Russia (and we all know how that ended).

Here's to your wise, if perhaps naively optimistic, words, Heny; a scholar and a gentleman:

"They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My window sill is level with the faces in the street -
Drifting past, drifting past,
To the beat of weary feet -
While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair,
To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care;
I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet
In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street -
Drifting on, drifting on
To the scrape of restless feet;
I can sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.

I wonder would the apathy of wealthy men endure
Were all their windows level with the faces of the poor?"

Henry Lawson, 1888

Because we know now, of course, that the wealthy don't mind at all when they are brought face to face with the destitution caused by their greed, much less the plight of the homeless, those with disabilities, those who have been long term unemployed, assylum seekers, those stuck in dead end, down skilled, low paying jobs without a hope of ever fully participating in the richness that we know abounds in our society that all could participate in if only the dsitribution was a little more equal.

I'm not sure that the mob at #OccupySydney are doing anyone any favours, but in principle I support this world wide movement that began at #OccupyWallStreet.

Now, if we could deal with the1% versus 99% wealth distribution disparity in the first world, we might next turn our attentions to the disparity that exists between what even the bottom of our hour glass affords in comparison to the rest of our planet.

Our planet. Of which we are all its people. And in the end, when we finally realise that we share one 'fate' (I use the word lightly, since I don't believe in 'destiny' in that sense), we might begin to share one goal.

Hey blame Henry Lawson, I got all idealistic and shit for a moment.

I'm (not) waiting for the night to fall....

2011-10-19T19:28:00.001+11:00

As anyone who follows me on twitter knows, today I had 2 wisdom teeth out. I was pretty frightened about this, mainly because I knew I’d have to be awake for it.

It was easier than I expected but, as with everything, so much depends on your individual circumstances. My wisdom teeth are fully out and grew straight, so it was a pretty straightforward extraction as opposed to surgery. I have one more to go in 2 weeks and I get to keep my 4^th one because there’s nothing wrong with it and it’s not causing damage to my other teeth.

I get a few days off work for my efforts to recover, so yay, no arguing with that.

On another health related front, I started up at the gym properly again 3 weeks ago, after about 6 months off the wagon. I don’t know if this more or less coincides with my decision to seek help from a clinical psychologist as well – I do find that mental will is all. Sure, sometimes a number of circumstances in life have to align, but you have to mentally make a choice.

I started those appointments in early September, I’ve now been to four. The decision to seek help came at an extreme low point and I got a referral from my GP in June or July already, but then sat on it for another 6 weeks or so. When you are at a low point, you don’t want to reach out for anything that might cure what ails you. It’s not that you don’t want to get better, it’s that you can’t imagine it. I use the word ‘imagine’ advisedly, for all that it can invoke, particularly for someone like me, a writer, for whom imagination is all.

Picture it like this. For me, when I am normal, life is filled with full spectrum colour. When I slip, colour leeches from the world. It’s not that it goes grey and white, it’s more as if everything fades, like trying to look at a colour photograph in the last minutes of twilight before full night descends. And I don’t know where the light switch is. And I’m scared of leaving the spot I’m in, because moving might make it worse. I might knock my knee, or fall over, or get lost entirely. So... you stay still. Waiting for the night to end.

The thing is, it doesn’t. Somewhere something inside me shifts and decides that this fear isn’t something I’m willing to tolerate anymore. That dawn won’t come unaided. And so I take a step after all. Even if I knock my knee a little (it’s actually not that bad).

By the time I called the psych, I was already moving again. Still night, but believing that dawn exists. Through that I started examining some of my beliefs, as you are supposed to. The physical stuff, thyroid surgery last year, cancer, the ongoing monitoring over a three year period, has added a little something to my mental make up that wasn’t there before. The obvious thing is mistrust in your own body, because it’s failed you. But that wasn’t the killer for me. For me, the specificity of my situation is that I must take metabolism hormones for the rest of my life. In order to conduct monitoring tests, I need to come off those for a few weeks every 9 months or so for the next few years.

Having no metabolism is a frightening experience. Normal human beings who are not in any sort of deprived state, have access to food and water, rest and exercise regularly, usually have reserves upon reserves of energy. It takes a lot to burn out our batteries, particularly if we replenish regularly with food, water, rest etc. Having no metabolism is a little like putting your foot down in the car only to realise there is no petrol left in the tank. It gives one last sputter and then dies. You can put your foot through the goddamn floor and it won’t make any difference. You have to put petrol back in the tank. Having no metabolism is like that. Only food, water, rest are not enough ‘fuel’ to recharge your tank. I was needing 12-14 hours of sleep just to get out of bed again. I couldn’t even think of trying to do anything strenuous. My mind (to which I am wed) started to float away. My body clock burned out at 2pm or 3pm and there was nothing I could to bring it back to a modicum of functionality except sleep another 12 hours. No caffeine, no fruit or sugar hit. Nothing. I tried to push myself and it felt like I was putting my foot through the floor without a reaction.

But it’s what happened next that’s (kind of) interesting (now, with hindsight). And I have to examine it so I won’t let it happen again. When I went back on hormone replacement, my body clock wound back up to full speed within four days. But my mind did not follow as quickly. My mind responded by going into defence mode. What was defence mode?

Cotton wool. Me. Wrapped in it. I didn’t push myself with anything. Except that I let my paid day job eat away at my ‘worry line’ – and by that I mean, because there were stressful and busy times a lot of the time, it took over because obviously I’d come to the belief that I could only cope with that one thing. I let it harry me more and more until it became just about insurmountably important and inescapable. I did not push myself physically, socially, or with anything else that was meaningful to me. My novel started pining in a drawer. I could not imagine working up the courage to try to submit to an agent or publisher. I lacked the resilience. I lacked the faith in myself.

So when I started stepping out in the dark again I started reaching out socially again, booked some holidays, made an appointment with a psych, and then when the above became clearer to me in the first couple of sessions, I realised I needed to go back to the gym again. I had a moment last week, week 2 going regularly (3 or more times a week) again, that I had that moment where you push your body to the brink of exertion and that’s when you, of course, hit that sweet spot, break through and find this amazing place of physical exhilaration. It was after coming off of that adrenalin/dopamine high that I realised the cotton wool analogy completely. I had not pushed myself that hard for 6 months. Had been afraid to in case there’s no fuel in the tank. But I enjoyed it - I'm slowly getting back to enjoying physical exertion for its own sake again. Just because it feels good, not just because I 'ought to'.

How stupid you would think - to conclude that even when everything is back to normal you should still wrap yourself in cotton wool. Intellectually I know this is stupid. But the things we conclude in our subconsciousness... Hardest thing to dig up and face.

So anyway, when you’re on a roll, things tend to keep rolling. Luc’s dad gets in touch and suddenly has some publishing and agency names and suddenly, despite the ups and downs of that situation, I find the get up and go to pull out my novel and prepare a submission after all. I know that I’m highly likely to end up with a rejection, and I guess I’ll frame it when it comes, because I won’t stop. Everyone remembers the Beatles and Decca. Everyone has to have their Decca. I will not stop. Now that I know how to do this. Now that there is a will again.

I had my fourth session last weekend, and since I’ve started going in early September I haven’t hit a low patch again. I think the psych is almost disappointed. Maybe I need to show her this and explain how this works for me. That I never expected her to be my one and only solution, only part of the journey and ultimately, I have to be in charge of that journey for myself.

We did some schema work and I did the 220 odd question test and the results broadly speaking did not surprise me. I took this questionnaire for the first time about 2 years ago, and there’s been a bit of a shift. First time I scored quite high on both self sacrifice and unrelenting standards (that are generally aimed at one self). Anything that rates at above 40% is considered to be a schema that is probably negatively affecting you. I hit about 75% for both of these the first time. I guess I did a fair bit of work on the self sacrifice aspect in particular, that’s down to about 50% now. There were 2 new aspects that I think came to the fore a little because of recent experiences and my reaction to those (which included isolating myself again), but what really shocked me is that the unrelenting standards shot up to about 90%.

That kind of flummoxed me a little, because I thought I’d been dealing with that too. But then it dawned on me that I hadn’t been. One of the strongest hallmarks of this schema, also known as ‘perfectionism’ is procrastination – as the fear of not being able to meet your own standards begins to overwhelm you. And that’s exactly what I was doing with my book. There’s so much sense of identity wrapped up in that. Calling myself a writer. Owning that. Far more than my day job. My day job occupies me, frustrates me, eats away at me, but in part because I reject it as a core part of my identity so much. I literally am not what I do. At least not in that sphere. But in the writing sphere? Totally vocational. Totally wrapped up in it - me, my identity. I feel like a super hero in disguise (a pretty crappy one). Like what you see during the day, that's not all. There's this other side, but it's stayed hidden, it's a secret identity I protect. Can't let anyone know about. Too dangerous. Too exposed. But it's always been there, since my teens. But denying, god, not just that side of myself, but what I view as such an integral part of myself, that's a whole different ball game of mentally fucked up.

And finishing the novel and then not submitting it only made that worse. I can see now that this is/was a big part of the problem.

But there’s another truth. I fear giving up my perfectionism. My hunt for achievement, pursuit of my high standards. Because that, more than anything, is who I think I am. If I stop aiming so high, if I settle for less, if I stop doing things exactly to the standard that I think they need... I cease being who I am.

I don’t want to be a hack. I don’t want to do simple. I don’t want to be Michael Crichton, interesting story concept but geez the writing is ordinary bordering on bad. I don’t want a little bit. I want a lot. I want to be Dan Brown (in sales numbers, I can do without the schlock fiction), JK Rowlings, GR Martin... you get the picture.

And I don’t think you get to be those people by accepting ordinary. However, as any decent psych will tell you, those people probably got to where they did out of love of what they do, as opposed to having lofty unrelenting standards. Aiming for perfection rarely gets you there. Trying to be a genius.... backfires. I think.

Or do I? I don’t know. My mantra has always been: aim for the stars. That way, even if you fall short, you’ll still get the moon. But you might not even get that unless you aim for those stars.

Am I the sort of personality who is going to give up the unrelenting standards because I can see this is ‘bad for me’? The short answer to that is: no. I am not convinced that for me happiness lies in allowing myself to shoot for mediocrity. I think there has to be some acceptance of self in all of this. I think there are things I can do to mitigate my unrelenting standards. I can focus more on living a balanced life, of having other things that matter to me. Of ensuring I allow myself the capacity to chillax every once in a while doing nothing.

I find it incredibly hard ‘doing nothing’. Every moment does not have to count. Every moment does not have to be spent in pursuit. But.... there have to be people on this planet who do have high standards, who do pursue, who do shoot for the stars. I believe that if we all settled for what the mental health profession thought was ‘healthy’ for us, we’d still be living in caves. Happy and contented little hunter gatherers, but where would be the art, the striving, yes, even the warfare, the exhilaration, the passion of the human condition if not for that trait in us? And we can't have it without a little pain, and some of us get a little more of that than others. Are willing to pay a little more of it to get that other.

So I’m going to have to find a way to explain to her that I am not looking for a ‘cure’ for this trait. I am looking for a way to keep it in balance, to ensure that I look out for and after other things that matter to me in life. Including the people who have to put up with me. And to ensure that I defeat the demons that the physical health issues have thrown into the mix, because those are not insubstantial.

But... I feel like I’m back baby. Still a little skittish and nervous, still terrified that another relapse might be just around the corner, another night starting to fall without a light switch. I just have to keep reminding myself how good it feels being ‘right here’. And a knocked knee to find the light switch is not the end of the world. Hell, I can even survive a trip to the dentist.

Finally, my final review of RHCP's I'm With You

2011-10-14T22:23:00.003+11:00

I‘ve been meaning to get around to that full Red Hot Chili Peppers I’m With You review. I think this is going to be it, in my own inimitable style. I did an amazing amount of work cataloguing and rating the tracks of most prior albums (it’s not as bad as it sounds, I actually got a real kick out of doing it), a couple of months ago, particularly after I’d made the statement that I didn’t think much of Stadium Arcadium. Well, hold your horses, turns out I only don’t like the first album “Jupiter” (except for a very few tracks) and because I didn’t like it, never moved on. Turns out I seriously love the second album “Mars”. It has several of my favourite Chili Peppers songs ever on it.

I'm also going to have to revisit all, and I mean all, of my original ratings. It seems my appreciation is still shifting and... growing. One year later, who'd have thunk it.

I’ve been revisiting older albums and then doing a listen back to I’m With You. I conclude that I’m With You is a highly listenable album and I really dig a number of songs on it, but I’m finding that these songs do lack the complexity and multi-faceted aspect that RHCP were capable of with, well, yes, as everyone else has been saying, John Frusciante’s input.

I’ve been spending some time with Californication, another album that I’d deemed ‘less’ than the high-water mark (for me) that is By The Way. Songs like “Road Trippin’” and “Parallel Universe” just hit me smack in the pleasure centre. I mean 'smack'.

In the meantime, Lucas has decided to be a sweety and complete my collection by getting me their first three albums for my birthday (The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Freaky Styley and The Uplift Mo-Fo Party Plan) which I admit I have yet to listen to and I am approaching with some trepidation.

I’ve read a few interviews with Anthony in the meantime where he is very keen to establish that this is not, and is not meant to be, the ‘same’ RHCP. The departure of John and the arrival of Josh does change the dynamics and he does not feel that they have ever had a core ‘sound’ as a band that they need to defend and always adhere to.

As I’ve been giving their back catalogue such an intense listen over the past few months I feel qualified to agree with that. In principle. And I get where he's coming from. The old should not cancel out the new, or the capacity for change, for reinvention. They have certainly never had just the one distinctive sound or style, rather some distinctive (and highly recognisable) components (Anthony’s voice and lyrical style, Flea’s passionate bass lines which are more than ‘supporting rhythm section aka Bill Wyman’, John’s virtuoso-ness and Chad’s power, humour, grace and ‘ultimate rock god drummer prowess’) that they are able to apply across styles traversing funk, punk, hard rock, soft rock, alt rock and whatever else fits in.

Josh Klinghoffer plays a solid guitar and these are some good songs on this album. Songs that get under my skin, make me cry (“Brendan’s Death Song” is amazing), and move me. The lyrical styling that I connect with so strongly is still there, and the musicianship is there and the final result is that these are polished numbers.

But... but one of the key components that was the Chili Peppers (all questions of genre aside) is gone. The point is that John was above and beyond genres and styles – he’s one of those musicians who could make anything his own, just as Rick Rubin is one of those producers who can touch anything and it turns to gold. Flea’s an amazing musician and Chad for me is the drummer of his generation but... but... John is.... something else. Something in the stratosphere. And the funny thing is, he didn’t need extra polish to get there. Sometimes, in fact, stripped back, raw worked best and they used to let it stand as such.

I think what niggles at me with I’m With You is in fact that extra layer of polish. There is not a gritty moment on this to speak of, except for possibly Anthony’s intense declamation on “Even You Brutus” – a song whose lyrical content and delivery style must punch a little too close to home for the amazing Mr Kiedis, which is why I suspect it’s consistently being left off their touring set list.

I suspect this is going to be one of those numbers we are rarely, possibly even never, going to hear live because of his too personal association with it, But I think it’s worth going into why this is such an awesome example of a song where the delivery style mirrors, even catapults, the intentions behind the emotions, just like they used to.

As I said, the lyrics start off with this punchy declamation style in which you can damn well near hear the wonder and the joy. It’s like a man standing on a mountain shouting out “it must have been fate!” that I met this girl and we fell in love.

The chorus, addessing the Brutuses and Judases who had trouble accepting his joy and wonder at this relationship because of their discomfit about the age difference (Kiedis at 42 starts dating an 18 year old), is sung with what I have come to refer to as his ‘sneering funk voice’ in my head.

So by the time the second stanza of declamation starts, and you know what the end is going to be because the chorus tells you, the declamation has this layer of pain in it like a guy who’s had his throat cut but is still punching it out. It’s quite literally a Swan Song (no pun intended for those who get it).

I love the song but/because it is an intensely uncomfortable experience listening to it because frankly,it is just so raw my heart goes out to the guy.

It makes it part of a dying breed, songs I don't think they're going to be able to develop and deliver in a believable way anymore. Let's face it, would we buy a song like "Get on Top" from them today? Maybe in 1999 when they were still a very young, still rascally mid to late 30's, but not now, approaching 50. Such is life.

I remember years ago writing a really bad poem with a really bad line in it (grammatically a nightmare), but it still captures a truth for me, which is why I remember it: “you who don’t know, how can you preach so?” Basically: why meddle in others’ business, when the truth is, unless you’re living in their skin, you can’t really know.

I don’t actually know this dude and sometimes I don’t know at all why he brings out such a protective reaction in me. Such a personal reaction.

Wait, maybe I do know: it’s because he is someone who puts himself out there, on the line, throws himself into it without any protective barriers, without fear or holding anything back, peels back all those protective layers most of us build up, to get down to the pulse. I think he’s crazy to do that on the one hand, but on the other, I also admire the hell out of him for having that courage, hence.... yeah. This is something I constantly struggle to do myself. This whole fearless self-expression, feeling the moment thing. Laughing in the face of emoitional cowardice. I actually do wish I was more like him. And I'm afraid I'm not.

But... bringing it back to the album, I think this is the one and only song on the album where this genuinely happens. There are a number of amazing and moving and beautiful songs on this album. I like or love all except 2 songs on this album (my absolute favourite is “Did I Let You Know”, and I still think it sounds like Bebel Gilberto in terms of the musical arrangement). Any other band would and should be proud as hell of this album. But for me, it lacks the virtuosity, the intensity, the complexity, the rawness of their prior material. Even Stadium Arcadium had it. The level of occasionally discomfiting, but always passionate, raw, powerful honesty and truth that connects right into your central nervous system – that isn’t there.

I hesitate to attribute this entirely to the fact that they are getting older, though maybe it is a natural inclination of age to like things a little smoother, particularly if you’ve figured out how. I also hesitate to attribute all of it just to John’s departure and Josh’s arrival.

But there it is. I’ve gone full circle and can now not only deal with but actually like the raw, the risky, the damaged, the questioning, the pain-filled, awe-inspiring, joyful, hell for leather putting it all out there Red Hots.

Yet I want to be clear, I do like this new album. As an album, as a piece of musical work, it’s good.

However, while Kiedis is often pre-occupied with ‘perfection’, I’m not a seeker of perfection. Or perhaps not the way he visualises it. Love and passion doesn’t just live with rawness and flaws, it positively seeks them out and loves not despite, but because of. To me, the Red Hots, flawed, rough and raw and all, were occasionally perfect to me.

So.. . I’m not really convinced that it is a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. But... as I’m not wed to any concept of perfection, I’m still here feeling some love. And sharing it.

There. That is hardly what any serious music aficianado would be looking for, but I blow a gigantic raspberry at that. My world, my terms.

Another probably bloody boring update

2011-10-14T21:55:00.000+11:00

I finally sent my novel submission off today (to Pan Mac). Wish me luck.

It consisted of: a cover letter about 2/3’s of a page, a further page consisting of a one paragraph summary of the novel and then a synopsis of the plot, and an abridged CV which was 2/3’s of a page. Very short dot points only, very different to what I sham-wish-fulfilment wrote up here.

I opted for bare bone facts in the end because I figured the less they know about ‘me’ at this point, the better, let them decide based on my work, not a mental image of me.

I submitted the first 5 chapters for logisticial reasons, which is ‘outside of the rules’ (only mean to submit 3). My novel is mainly in the third person, but there are 4 chapters interspersed in the first person, and the first one of those happens at chapter 5. But chapter 5 makes no sense without also having chapters 3 & 4, so... in order to show full potential/range – I decided on 5 chapters.

They can always do what lecturers threaten to do if you go over the word count. Just stop reading.

Of course, I want them to get hooked and ask me for more...

They indicate that their turnaround time for a response is 10-12 weeks, which I take it means that’s how long it takes them to get you a declinature if they are not interested.

I think for me this is now a matter of momentum. Getting a submission polished to this level was another learning curve and something that had me flummoxed for a good 6 months or so (given how long I’ve actually had this book finished and then sat on it in fear-filled procrastination), but... I think I should use the next 6 weeks or so to research and prepare some more submissions.

Because no one gets accepted on their first submission.

No one.

(You realise I will be impossible to live with if I prove the exception to the rule.)

So I think I prep for some more submission around mid November but stop further such activity as of 25^th November. I can’t imagine any serious ‘new’ work happens once the silly season kicks in, all focus will be on marketing and back-stocking Christmas best sellers to ensure those lists sell. Then pick up again mid to end January 2012.

God, I’m getting boring. At least in terms of this blog. Will be quickly followed by next post.

I may never get to use this, so just in case....

2011-09-26T20:56:00.001+10:00

In order to submit a novel to an agent or publisher you need a one para summary, a 1-2 page synopsis, a covering letter and a profile/bio/CV. I've done the summary, synopsis and covering letter no nonense and as per style guides, but this is what I came up with for my profile. It may not cut the mustard, I may have to change it, trim it, make it more 'business', but if I got the chance to say it my way, this is how I'd like to say it:

Profile – Tanja Brown

Born 29 September 1972 in Stuttgart, West Germany:

- Father comes from one of the largest still operating family farming concerns in Bavaria (stretching back to the 17^th century), mother is the daughter of Sudeten German refugees who were forced to flee the Czech Republic in 1945.

- Migrated to Australia in 1980, with mother, father and 1 year old sister. Spent first year in Cronulla, a beach side suburb, before relocating to the outer western suburbs, a ‘wrong side of the tracks’ kind of place.

- Fluent German speaker and (somewhat) writer

I was quiet, studious, bespectacled and predictably un-athletic (writes itself, doesn’t it?), and despite the high school career counsellor’s prediction of “children from this town don’t make it to University, much less have choices about what courses to take there”, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney and majored in English Lit and Ancient History, which did wonders for preparing me for working life. For one thing, I learned how to think, analyse, argue and write clearly and cogently about what I was thinking and why.

Throughout my undergrad studies I worked for one of (then) Australia’s premier book chains, Angus & Robertson, to support myself. Colleen McCullough dropped in regularly, arms loaded up with books as she was researching her First Man in Rome series. Jeffrey Archer, Wilbur Smith, Joan Collins, Kathy Lette and Tony Curtis, amongst others, all had book signings. A still relatively vague desire to make a living out of writing firmed up in those days. This led to a short-lived career, first thing out of University, as a sales rep for a very small publisher of Catholic catechisms who was trying to expand into the New Age market, only to discover that the east coast of Australia was perhaps not the target market for Native American wisdom.

Following that redundancy during the Australian recession of the mid 90’s, I got a sales support job in a direct marketing/mailing house and spent the next few years parking my dreams in favour of steady employment and working may way up the corporate ladder. I toyed peripherally with my desire to write and worked on anything people would give me: quotation templates, PR brochures, marketing copy. Inexplicably, accidentally, I discovered a skill set in managing people well, and wound up in HR with a lot of practical know-how but no formal qualifications. I also got to run the company Newsletter as part of that deal.

So the career trajectory was up, but some travelling (Europe) and a marriage bust up later I found myself 30, out of a marriage, out of a job (by choice this time) and excited about the chance to do a re-set. Serendipitously I wound up back in my (sort of) employment field of choice, working for Borders Books & Music Australia Pty Ltd. I was writing madly by this stage, but without a road map and without a clue.

I met and fell in love with a much younger (9.5 years, to be precise) Canadian on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer web forum, and he moved to Australia (for me!). I was still trying to write, but the management job in book retailing was too full on to leave much energy for anything else. I did get to meet two of my literary heroes (I have many, and they are diverse), Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, during these years, but was too nervous to pipe up, even in the tiniest of voices “I’m a writer too”, in the hope of receiving some pointers. So I made a move into HR at the University of >bleep<, thinking that some work/life balance allowing a little more focus on my writing was in order. In that qualifications rich environment my qualifications poverty caught up with me (at least in my own mind) and I enrolled in and completed a Master of Labour Law.

That experience taught me things I could apply to writing fiction that I’d previously not figured out. It helps to know what the last few paragraphs will be before you write the first ones. Research, planning and structure aren’t just for business papers and essays. Who knew? That and the law is full of interesting, exciting characters (okay, maybe not tax law). I was off on my next adventure, which included working with some of the sharpest legal minds in the Australian employment law terrain, meeting some of the most fascinating local and international students with a range of experiences and exposures (including from Switzerland) and getting married to my hot younger guy.

Then I got diagnosed with thyroid cancer and everything went to hell in a hand cart for a little while. But everything adds up to experience and no experience is ever wasted. I expect I’ll write a medical thriller one day. Or an expose of some of the juicy stuff that goes on inside Universities that most people wouldn’t have a clue about (that also won’t get me sued!). Or I might write about what it was like coming of age not so quietly and studiously in the early to mid 90’s, escaping the wrong side of the tracks life, discovering JJJ radio station, drinking in bars with some famous folks before they were famous and nearly bowling over Mel Gibson on George Street during the Braveheart premiere.

I’ve been and become and done many things kind of by accident in my life. Everything from coming to be in Australia in the first place, to a law degree, to finding my husband, to just about every job I’ve ever had.

But this isn’t an accident. This is where I’ve been going, quietly, working at it in the background perhaps, but unwaveringly, from when I was 17 years old. I know that wanting something doesn’t make you good at it. And being good at something doesn’t always open doors. But hard work and lots of practice do make you good.

Now if you’d just be so good, my arms are a little full, oh, there you go... (/door opens a crack).

Uhm, I think you’ll find that’s my boot (/blink, blink).

No, not my book, my boot. But speaking of...

If you’ll just take this from my arms for a moment... there... thank you.

PS. I have a tattoo of an ankh on my left upper arm (in case that makes me more interesting) and Lucas and I have a very fat cat called Magrat (after a Terry Pratchett character), and no kids.

When the helper needs some help

2011-09-13T19:10:00.000+10:00

So anyway. I am seeing a psychologist. On account of some of them there mood swings I’ve been having (well, more mood, less swing, ‘cause swinging implies a come back). There’s a strong correlation between the thyroid dosage I’m on and anxiety and yeah... the cancer team only wants to deal with the physical aspect. Whatever that does to my mental well being be damned. (/bitter)

And after my low point episode where I started contemplating playing with knives, I did kind of realise that maybe it was time to start dealing.

I didn’t talk that much, which is good. Was about equal. When outlining family history I mentioned that I had a grandmother “who was schizophrenic.”

“You had a grandmother who had schizophrenia,” she corrects.

I blush. “Oh right, yes, you’re right to call me up on that of course. She isn’t her illness.”

"No, and neither are you.”

Logically you know these things of course but.... Felt good having someone say it to me.

I also said a few things that made me realise that I’d absolved myself of responsibility for dealing with my health issues. Mostly the mental health stuff, but also in some respects the physical stuff. ‘Cause this is all stuff that was done to me. I didn’t do anything to cause it, I didn’t ask for it, it’s not my fault, and it’s out of my control. And there’s stuff that’s going to keep happening, ever 9 months where I go off the T4 replacement to undergo check up tests for the next three years, and that’s going to be physically debilitating and mentally challenging, and I’m just a helpless participant in that, a completely ‘done to’ object. The slide on effect is that I’ve absolved myself of responsibility for not just cause, but effect as well. Somewhere along the line I guess I became a victim.

It’s always interesting when someone challenges you to take charge again. There is always a choice.

I’ll leave the overly grandiose statements for now, but... no knees, I think. It’s just not really ‘me’ to stay living on them.

Okay, this one I'll explain

2011-09-09T15:45:00.001+10:00

Yesterday Lucas 'accused' me of adapting/absorbing a style that he sees as a Red Hot Chili Peppers/Anthony Kiedis style of writing.

While I do absorb stuff around me all the time and work that out in not just what I write but how I write, ultimately it all meshes into my own particular 'cant'.

But you know, mimickry is a great way of teaching yourself, so I thought, okay, I'm going to deliberately mimic Anthony Kiedis' style of writing and apply that in a slightly unique way (I hope).

What I've written below reflects a sequence of events/relationships in my workplace over a 3 year period up to today, that I've then collapsed and mirrored through some events that happened in a meeting one particular day, interwoven with some loosely fantastical elements and of course a whole bunch of layered metaphors ranging from the spiritual to the religious, informed in part by a dream I had last night that I already tweeted about earlier today.

There are 3 characters in this. There's me, there's the annoying up and coming 'boy' (with the cracked crown), and there's the experienced, mature, not very nice and yet a little bit sympathetic 'double agent' (still looking for his promised land).

Hard core smack down

Silly little boy with your cracked crown
Got no reason got no purpose
Going to the shindig with your head in circles

Giving advice but you’re standing alone

The forest is closing while you’re on your phone
You’re missing the concept, Mr Double Agent
Is gunning for you but that dude’s too cagey

I’d throw you a rope but what’s the point

Cutting my way out, blow this joint
The Double Agent’s at my back
Mournful face, but his head’s full of crack

I’m watching his hands as I keep on climbing

This shit was something we’re supposed to die in
The thorns he’s grabbing make him slowly bleeding
Fashioned a crown for him, and put my steel in

I’m cutting you lose, do you understand

Find yourself that promised land
Turn your badges in, start anew
This old growth forest is killing you

“You!” he says and I think he means it

Still doesn’t get what the weave is weaving
Still sees forest while I’ve caught my wave
Cute but stupid and not that brave

Here is the word, there is the way

The boy with the cracked crown wins the day
“How could you let it happen”, he calls to me
Hey Mr Double Agent, what webs we weave

No explanation necessary

2011-09-08T21:22:00.000+10:00

Redemption - written today for 1993

I am what I am

Have you heard that before

A slap on your ass
A knock on the door

Let me in oh let me in so let me in

I want this sin
I want it deep I want it hard
I want you crude I want you smart
Want it coming want it going
Gotta getcha get it knowing
Got it knowing
Love you hard so David Bowie
In your chameleon skin
Just look what mess you’ve left me in

Breathing hard, I’m breathing hard

I’ve got no way to make a start
Got no thread on which to pull
I feel so empty when I’m full
And if you’ll roll begin again
I think I’ll sink I will not swim
I will go under, under you
Shit, what is a girl to do

Huh

Lighting up this cigarette

I feel so cool, so vinaigrette
So hustle, street, it turns you on
I don’t know when I’m coming home
I take a moment, gotta think
Take a drag , I’m figuring
By the time I reach the door
You won’t figure it at all
But if I stay, stay here some more
You’ll see the fake seep from my pores

So stub my cigarette out on you

A scream a moan oh give me more
While your eyes are closed and you
Toss back your hair and arch on cue
One last glance, high heels in hand
Stumble heart-sore from your land

The sun is bright, I’m that cliché

Walk of shame in light of day
Racoon eyed, hungry, wafer thin
Oh god please let me back in
But that door is closed I must
Bury deep, get on that bus
No number, forwarding address
It’s for the best

A half-arsed, half-baked, half-done review of the RHCP's "You're With Me"

2011-08-31T18:54:00.003+10:00

Chili Peppers “I’m with you” – high level impressions, as I’m having 2^nd and 3^rd listens. I hope to eventually fashion this into a proper review after a few more spins. But for now:

- 70’s disco inspired funk (still funk, but read through Sly & Family Stone-esque filter), particularly on Factory of Faith, but also replicated on some later tracks (and thank you Kiedis, you fucker, I had that “factually, I...” riff stuck in my head for a full 24 hours and I don’t even like that part much). I do love the funky beat of this song though, it just leaves me with a grin. Definitely a keeper.

- Elements of Peter Frampton in the second half of Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie courtesy of the Josh. Not my favourite track by a long shot, but I kept discovering things in the guitar work particularly once you hit the half way mark of this song that had me grinning. Yeah. Frampton.

- Bebel Gilbert in Did I Let you Know. !!! For totally real! Cafe del Mar-esque Bebel. Kinda cool. I really like this song too.

- Even You Brutus and Meet Me at the Corner – wow, elements of A-ha (the opening riff of the A-ha track “Cold as Stone” in particular, but also just a general feel I got from their albums Minor Earth Major Sky and Analogue). As I said to Lucas just now – holy smoke! Red Hots meets A-ha, I think I just wet my pants! Anyway (blush) I really like these two songs as well, and I think it's the atmospheric piano work that creates the analogy for me between these two very different bands. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Even You Brutus is at least in part inspired by Heather Christie even though I wouldn’t have a hope (and wouldn’t dare) of hazarding a guess who the Brutus and Judas figures are supposed to be. And Meet Me at the Corner is possibly the most tender song I’ve ever heard Kiedis sing. Maybe I just didn’t listen well to some of their past slow tracks, but this one is really growing on me. I swear I positively get a shiver a few times.

The album, the style and delivery of the lyrics worked in with the music, creates a very different impression to just reading the lyrics from the info booklet cold. Nowhere near as depressing, actually quite uplifting and, dare I say, funky. A reminder, I guess, never to access any part of the Red Hots in isolation, but only as a whole, as per their intention.

I already like this album a whole lot better than Stadium Arcadium, which I somehow found indigestible as a whole, even though it contains a few of my favourite tracks (Dani California and Tell Me Baby). I do find their records as a whole difficult to digest, and find I’ll often listen to half, or create a playlist with a bit here and a bit there, and then switch to something else before I come back again.

But yeah. Lets see how this particular journey pans out. You're with me? Hell no, I'm with you.

Let there be some honour in it

2011-08-29T14:04:00.000+10:00

I get the distinct feeling that my laptop is on its last legs now. It’s a Sony Vaio TZ series, just shy of 4 years old. It was top of the line when I bought it, 11 inches, superlight. It cost a bomb and most of it was vanity, since I use a laptop for word processing and a bit of web surfing. For all its power, it’s proved to be a touchy prima donna and needed its mother board replaced about 2 years ago, thankfully under warranty. It’s starting to do all the same things again now, another 2 years later. Lots of sitting there ‘thinking’ with a black screen and the cursor hovering, unresponsive.

This is a good reminder to me to back up my work regularly, since last time my unpreparedness on that front caused me a few burst blood vessels.

I have no emotional investment now, having gotten 4 years out of it. It saw me through a Law degree (albeit it died on me halfway through an intensive and I lost all that day’s notes) so now I’m just trying to squeeze out another month or two while I think about what to do next. I’m seriously thinking of switching teams to a Macbook Air, but again, I think it’s mostly vanity. Well, not entirely. I keep getting told by people who are less tech savvy than I am (and I’m not very tech savvy) that Apples are easier to navigate and I do love the idea of a platform that is virus free. Only problem is that our entire home network is built around PC.

Either way, I’m not going to spend what I spent last time. I’m seriously looking at Samsung or even another Sony again, now that they are more stable, or maybe Aesus. Dell is trying to target the women’s market with lots of glossy ads in Vogue, but... too many people who know this stuff better than I do keep grinning and saying ‘no’.

Thank Christ my period cramps have stopped. As per usual, I start to get period pain about a week before my periods start and then I have a week worth of periods and between the mood swings and the physical pain, there’s 2 weeks in every 5 (my cycle could give a fuck about 28 days) where I frankly wonder if a hysterectomy might not be worth considering, particularly as my reproductive organs don’t do what the instruction booklet said they’d do anyway, and that shit came with no warranty, no exchange, no rebuild.

Still, considering I spent most of yesterday in a kind of vacuum packed lack of feeling that led me to contemplating what a sharp knife might feel like buried in a major artery, I figured a bit of physical pain today was a good thing, taking me out of that kind of mind funk, so didn’t take any of my period pain tablets. That seemed fine for a little while and I thought “pain, yay, it’s real, whatever doesn’t work about you, fuck it, pain is real, you’re real, you’re alive, you gotta right to be so....”

Yeah, that seemed noble for a while until I realised I couldn’t sit, stand or lie straight because the pain’s so intense. So I’ve given in and taken 2 naprogesics and that cat’s finally deemed me someone safe to come close to again.

Earlier, while the meds were kicking in, I finally sat down at our i-tunes mothership in the spare bedroom and loaded some of the gunk off of my i-pod. Yeah, those 5 albums of Nine Inch Nails seemed like a good idea a year ago, but I have to be honest, I haven’t listened to a single track. And now I have The Bravery, a new Arctic Monkeys and a new Chili Peppers to add and it wasn’t going to fit. I never, ever once thought that I’d fill the 16 gigs of my nano, but now it barely seems enough. So anyway, we listened to about half of the new RHCP album yesterday, but turned down low as Lucas was ‘creating’ in the kitchen and feeling a bit stressy, so it turned into a bit of a Kiedis-5 note range whine and I just gave up. I had a quick work through the lyrics and came away with my general impression, let that sink in a bit then had another look this morning while I was doing my nano spring clean.

I don’t know if he thinks this is happy stuff, but I’m not seeing the happy. I’m seeing a 48 year old guy who has climbed the heights, done it all, had it all, can have it all and he’s STILL NOT HAPPY. I see the kind of stocktaking of life that I’m doing with mine and I’m thinking ‘what the fuck’? I mean, there’s a little bit of old, a nod to Mr Psycho Sexy and the dude who once laid down Funky Monks and I see a few attempts to reproduce the terrain of By the Way (the song, not the album), and there’s a few breakaways trying to do new stuff, like Ethiopia, but frankly, Cabrone was break away. And Don’t Forget Me was maybe where both Funky Monks and The Bridge were ultimately going to lead to (ie the man who sang the latter was eventually going to develop the former).

I’m not seeing that sort of new terrain here. I’m seeing ‘regrets, I’ve had a few’. And STILL NOT THERE. Wherever it is where you want to be. And loads of ‘still doing the same old shit, making the same mistakes, and still let down’. Of course, if you believe that love is the answer and you just can’t find it...

I took Lucas to see the Ayrton Senna documentary last night after I saw it earlier in the week and LOVED it and the moment I love most is where Senna is interviewed towards the end of his life and he talks about how he has to keep learning. If his learning curve plateaus, then he’s not happy in that situation. And he feels he still has more to learn as a man than as a racing car driver, cause as a driver, he has maybe only a few more years to go, but as a man, well, he’s probably only half way through his life, he still has half to go (little did he know), and is he satisfied, has he reached satisfaction? No. He said he is not yet whole. I interpreted that as him being both a man who is searching for his purpose, but perhaps also looking for that partnership, for love. Sure, he’d been married once and he was dating hot Brazilian models, but that was not the look or the face of a man who had arrived ‘home’. To me it begs the question whether he ever would have found that sort of ‘home’, anywhere, anyhow, with or in anybody. I see Ayrton Senna as a man who is defined, more than anything, by the need to search.

I see Anthony Kiedis in the same way, but you see the line at different junctures. Ayrton Senna cut down in his prime. Kiedis living beyond his. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully, just... I feel, I sense this struggle, this ‘what’s it all about?’ And that there still isn’t an answer. Maybe Senna, who believed in God, felt his answer when his last breath left him. Maybe he really did go to his god that day and I am just in awe of the potential of that idea. Even if I just can’t find that sort of faith in myself.

But I get that searching. And I see it, unfulfilled potential that I represent (as opposed to both Senna and Kiedis whose potential was/is definitely fulfilled) that for some people, the search is what it’s all about. What drives them, defines them., more than anything else, even if they don’t know it. Why do I say that?

Because I’m in love. I have love in my life. I love my husband. I love Lucas. He is my home and he is always my other half, has been since the moment he came into my life. And that sort of relationship, that sort of connection and contentedness, is something neither Senna nor Kiedis achieved. And maybe that ought to give me a sense of satisfaction, that I have something that these two larger than life figures couldn’t/can’t get.

If I was that sort of person who gets a thrill out of having something others want but can’t have. But I’m not. Frankly, it’s all about me too much for that. I don’t give a shit about the other guy, what he has or hasn’t or where I sit in relation to him. It’s about ME. How it looks from my viewpoint only. And that’s both a good and a bad thing because that makes me the only person I’m running a race against and of course ME is the chick I can’t ever beat. It’s not possible.

In my darkest moments I have to own I am the sort of person for whom another’s love is not enough. I am defined by this search for MY purpose. And I don’t know what mine is, or what potential I ever had (and wasted, burned, ignored, buried) or what I might still have. Or never did? I don’t know. But... while love is wonderful (to receive and to give) it can’t provide all the answers or fill every aspect of my life.

I don’t expect Lucas to save me. And I hate it that every once in a while maybe he thinks that ‘he’ ought to be enough. But of course he isn’t. And nor am I ‘everything’ to him, nor could I hope to be. It’s a silly romantic fantasy that one magical person will come along and make everything alright. I don’t actually expect that. You can still have a crappy job and hate your boss and fight with your friends and roll your eyes at your parents and not get on with your siblings. Love, when it’s new and fresh, can sugar coat that, but in the end, while it’s maybe a nice part of your life, it’s not a cure for all the things that can ail you with life.

And that only makes me feel even worse. Guilty, because I am so ungrateful, and nothing is ever enough. That in comparison to many on this planet, I lead a charmed life. What do I know of genuine hardship, of genuine terror? So democracy, with its incapacity to grow genuine leaders over time, out of fearfulness of what such a beast brings with it (and with examples in our past of what wreckage ‘charismatic leaders’ can create) begins to eat itself, but we’re not there yet, at its total end. And there is no real alternative that I can think of or desire. Certainly not monarchy, dictatorship or oligarchy (even though oligarchy is probably more realistically what we have), because we see what such regimes breed in southern America, in the Middle East, in Asia. What they do their many in order that their few prosper. We see the disregard for the sanctity much less the dignity of human life.

And I’ve never known that. My life is pampered and privileged in comparison. Maybe not as privileged as some. But I, who am in the top 5% in terms of safety, comfort, wealth, ease on this planet, I compare myself to the top 1%. And I know that’s just crazy. Hubris.

So I shouldn’t belly ache. I shouldn’t complain. I shouldn’t contemplate playing with sharp knives because the resume of my life does not read the way I want it to read.

I remember being impressed, many years ago, at the pragmatic view that Romans had of suicide. Stripping the bullshit Christian morality from it, it was a question of exquisite control. When a man (or woman) lost control over their lives, in this matter they still had options, a choice. Suicide was considered a redemptive act. A respectable one. Made a bunch of bad decisions and exposed your family to ridicule? Suicide showed a willingness to accept responsibility, to restore honour. Very different from our modern view, where we see it as running away, trying to escape our problems and our responsibilities. From a personal perspective it was also occasionally seen as empowering. “I have done this badly, I have let this become a shambles, I’ve behaved dishonourably here, I have let this run to seed, I have lost control of myself and my honour. I make this decision here to end it, and take back some of that control and restore my sense of honour. I am, at the end, decisive.”

That is not a popular view these days as it doesn’t sit with our Christian world view. And I’m certainly not advocating it as a solution for the young, where it is never anything but tragic. Because by definition the young have too much to live for, too many choices still ahead, time still to learn and rectify and try. Opportunity for chances and for change.

But I’m not young. And I’m not responsible for young lives. And if I were, maybe everything would be different.

So I find myself contemplating such a path, even as another part of me steps back and mocks me for my hubris. You don’t even know what it’s like to have to fight, it says. You don’t even know what hardship is. And of course those are the voices of my parents, from long ago. Eat your dinner because there are children starving in Africa. There were always things that I was supposed to do. But no one ever answered the gravest question I had. Why?

Why must I do these things? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do with myself? What purpose do I serve?

Lucas says: be happy with your day to day. Revel in the small things. I badger him about his goals and plans and he tells me has none while quietly he’s built a frame in his life that shows me, tells me, what he’s interested in if only I look. His electronic toys, his magic tricks, his cooking, his tripods, his ipad his flick camera. He photographs and films and edits and serves himself up as performance art, for criticism and viewing and interaction, and he’s widely interested in comics and comedians and magicians and showmen and charlatans and TV chefs and... that’s a whole world he’s trying to interact with. Trying to have something to say and a platform on which to say it, just like me.

So while I keep trying to define the problem, he goes out there and does the living.

While I hang back in fear and analyse and plan, he says ‘no plan’ and quietly sets his camera up in the kitchen and sweats bullets because he’s on a timer.

I don’t know what my answer is. But asking questions doesn’t seem to have ever helped me. Now isn’t that something to ponder.

So today I laugh and put the knives away, spinning them in the air because they’re just ordinary again. Not today, we say. And not tomorrow either. And if the day after, if there is no other way, then we’ll think like Romans and calmly say there is always a choice.

How (not) to yoink the (wee little) dragon's tail

2011-08-22T19:03:00.001+10:00

As I occasionally blog, I have a rather rich dream life (I dream a lot, in full spectrum HD colour, and the most outrageous stuff) and this latest one had me first confused and then chuckling because it’s just so damn... wry.

And yes, I really, really did dream this last night. I am still thudding my head against the table to myself going “WTF”?

It begins, long story short, there was an apocalyptic event in Australia, and, post apocalyptic fall out (man, I’ve wanted to use that phrase), a bunch of survivors, of whom I was one, were shipped out for the US of A. Don’t know why, but hey, I’m all for the change of scenery.

My family (mum and dad, sister and husband, Lucas) all survived but we got separated during the evac exercise. This did not particularly panic me. Everything was happening kind of slow-mo so I think I was still in shock.

Arrived in the US of A and were put into these wooden ship-like holding pens (nice ones, with ‘facilities’ if you take my meaning). I was wandering around, not forlornly, more a little bit moseying semi-purposefully, looking for family members amidst the great stream of people, when the rumour circulated that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were going to make an appearance. Fundraising/solidarity kind of thing I guess.

I was mildly interested but also mildly bemused by this, but hey, RHCP appearing live, in the flesh, in the compound I’m in, who am I to complain?

So anyway, the buzz spreads that they’ve arrived and I decide I should really try to get a bit closer, for once let my inner fan girl free even in these weird (post apocalyptic) circumstances, so I (gently, this is me after all) fight my way through the crowd and get a look. My first reaction is shock, because dream Anthony Kiedis is a slight and tiny dude, and a bit fey after all these years of super stardom, topping no more than 5’6” which disappoints me no end (I believe his actual height is about 5’8”). It’s heart-breaking how disappointed I, who am not slight at 5’9”, am. (I have to, btw, attribute the dream impression to a just released Word magazine interview with AK which described him as ‘quietly spoken and a little bit camp’ – but to be fair you have to read that within the context of the whole interview, which was actually very positive).

A thought grabs me. You’ve just been through apocalyptic hell. Many didn’t survive, but you did. Your life is going to be about clawing back some dignity, rebuilding from scratch. No big dreams, no grandiose aspirations, no Maslowe-inspired self-actualisation, just basics. But hey, you lived, that’s something. You’re alive! So get in their faces. Get in Anthony Kiedis’ face. You’ll never get this chance again, will never meet again, you mean nothing to him or his life in the scheme of things, and nor should you (enjoying the music and having it mean something to me does not create automatic access entitlement or a real world relationship with the people behind it), and beyond 30 seconds he won’t remember you. But today, cross his path and make him look at your face, into your eyes. And see the whites of his. And then move on again.

So suddenly I am totally determined to make eye contact with Anthony Kiedis. Just for a second. No word, no touch, no exchange, no hope or dream for anything more. Just a split second, maybe just to reaffirm for myself that I am still real and still matter.

And from there it all goes (humorously and horribly) wrong.

I push to the front of the crowd, hard to do when you’re a polite sort of woman, trying not to step on anyone, trying not to elbow them. But of course there’s a crush. Everyone wants to get to the front, to get a look, an autograph, maybe shake hands or grab hold or touch in some way. Normally I’m too polite for this, but today, post-apocalyptic me is determined, so I push on through. At the very last moment, as I am at the very front of the crowd, just an arm’s length away, someone moves unexpectedly and I trip and start to fall.

My arms fly out, and I can see security guards start to move towards me, and a slow-motion dream “no-o-o-o” rips from my lips because damnit, I am still trying to get eye contact, and my arms are flailing and, and this could only happen in a dream, my fingers curl and grab hold and yes! My fingers have found purchase, and tugged... at that ridiculous moustache Anthony’s been sporting for a few years now.

Oh my god, you were falling and you just grabbed his moustache! He yelps and gives me a horrified look! (as you would, I’m sure that would really hurt!), and even as I’m still falling, and letting go again in a real hurry, my soul-self is curling into a ball of huge, mega sized embarrassment, what have you done! For god’s sake, way to go, you just grabbed (and yanked!) at his moustache! (Clearly I want that sucker gone!)

Somewhere in the back of my mind, conscious ‘me’ realises the subtext (I really hate that 70’s porn star/sugar daddy/Village people looking mo) and is pissing herself laughing. Even as dream ‘me’ sputters apologies and tries to curl into a foetal ball of embarrassed denial.

Bless dream Anthony’s little cotton socks, and I know this was just a dream, but once he recovered a little from the shock and the pain (he had the most incredibly wounded ‘what did you do that for!” look on his face for a few seconds), once he realised that it had been an accident and that I was mortified, he actually came over, gave me his hand, helped me up and checked if I was okay. I looked down at him from my chocolate box blonde Teutonic height, pint sized, slight little mega star that he was and I just wasn’t sure what to make of him in that moment. Is he still larger than life, or is he just this little guy with a camp moustache and weirdly slick hairdo and softly spoken voice who somehow, in the right circumstances, adds up to more than the sum of his parts? And then I think: hadn’t expected him to be this human, this kind, to baby elephant me in such a stupid moment. Followed by slight wave of stupid disappointment because (and this is despite my own less than spectacular reaction) he didn’t look particularly smitten with me. As if my value, and the value of this all too human interaction, only lies in that one facet.

Chad is in the background doubled over and howling with laughter (which I suspect would be completely in character), and Flea looks nonplussed like he doesn’t quite know what’s just happened but is starting to giggle (also possible), and I don’t see Josh because dream me can’t hold on to his image, he’s not familiar to me yet, but even dream me knows that John is gone, And then it’s all over, Kiedis moves back in amidst his buddies and... they’re gone.

And I snap out of it and go in search of Lucas and my family again. Wow do I have a story to tell! See what happens when you leave me alone for just a few hours (or days, I’m not quite clear about dreamscape timeframes)! And hey, I just made an enormous fool of myself again. But you know, survived apocalyptic fall out, got shipped to the USA, met the Chili Peppers, tried to yank out Anthony Kiedis’ mo – not bad as far as the month goes.

Sometimes pictures, even dream pictures, really tell a thousand words better than a thousand words ever could (or over a thousand). Sometimes the projection of those images, of all those complex motivations, feelings, relationships, say it all. About self, about others we encounter, how we feel, how resilient we are and how we adapt, and what matters to us. And what we’d like to change.

And hey, if the real Anthony Kiedis is out there... please, please... that moustache. Sigh. Really deep sigh. Can’t it go? Please? I’m all for irony, and for self-reinvention but... you don’t mess with the classics when the classic was perfect.

(On another level, wonder if I dreamed so hard that for a moment the real live version felt a little sharp tug of pain around the mo region.... one can only, well, dream.)

It's "this" kind of douche baggery I'm talking about

2011-08-22T18:37:00.002+10:00

Okay, this is the one I have to quickly get out of the way before I jump to lighter terrain.

A story about (some) Australian attitudes about boat people assylum seekers.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/allout-assault-over-issue-of-boat-people-20110821-1j4sg.html

I know I shouldn't be shocked anymore, but I am still shocked that there are people out there living in sunny, well fed, self satisfaction who lack the empathy or imagination to understand how someone might end up taking such a huge risk as to seek to flee to Australia illegally.

And it is a huge risk, powered, I imagine by immense fear of persecution, hardship, lack of other options.

And there's just so much arrogance in this attitude that Australia is so great that everyone must want to flood its border to come here. How about: for some people it's just one option, or even the option of last resort?

Take it from someone who came here (via legally migrating parents - my father came in via the skilled migration program) who really, really didn't want to come here and didn't want to be here at all for many, many years. Why? Because Australia, especially back then, just didn't compare to what I felt I was leaving behind in West Germany. From my perspective, this was a colonial backwater caught in a time warp and the beach and the sun did not begin to make up for everything I felt I was missing out on. The most important aspect of that was: missing my family and my home.

Coming here was hard, and I don't think anyone takes a step like that, to leave home, or to flee from home, lightly. It takes such a level of unencumbered, non hardship experiencing sense of entitlement to lack the empathy to begin to picture what it must take for people to leave everything that is familiar to them behind. Their family, the land that's in their blood and bones. Their home. Those things are at the heart of who we are!

So I despair for a nation, for politicians, so bereft of compassion, so devoid of a basic shared understanding of humanity to voice such beliefs, to enact such policies.

Are there people who probably are queue jumpers? Possibly. Maybe even one in ten. I don't care, for the sake of those others who genuinely need our help, and we can actually afford to give it. To give assylum to those for whom there is no other option (unlike pampered Western European me).

But I happen to take a basic justice approach to questions like this, the one that actually informs our legal system (not that many people get that or support it). And that is: It is better to let ten guilty people go free than to incarcarate one innocent one.

And if you think that's skewed, imagine you're the innocent one.

Shoe boxes of old selves

2011-08-21T22:24:00.001+10:00

Did a ‘boxes in the cupboard’ spring clean today, something I have wanted to do again for a long time. We moved into this house in January 2007 and had all this lovely room in the built ins in the spare bedrooms, where I basically chucked all of the ‘memorabilia’ of my previous existence/s. Photos, keepsakes, post cards, travel diaries, old cassettes, uni essays and god forbid even some of my high school ones, handwritten short stories and scribbling from before I ever owned a computer (yes, that old!) and the legacy of my cross stitch obsession, long since departed.

When I was a kid, my father built me this huge desk with a lock up door to one side with really deep shelves. I used to stash my stuff in there and take it all out once a year, do a clean through, trash bag at the ready, but it was also a lovely way of reconnecting, picking up the snippets, the little treasures, the sribblings, that mattered enough to keep.

I’ve always been a hoarder in that sense, particularly of things I’ve written. Maybe an overinflated sense of what it might all add up to one day.

Sometimes, in the past few years, as I’ve been getting older, I’ve occasionally felt a little ‘thinner’ in terms of my sense of identity and then pushed that thought away again, hid behind a newly realised, defensive sort of self sufficiency. I am finally old enough to know who I am, I don’t need reminders. I don’t need to be swept into the past.

So today I tackled the cupboards, into which I’ve tossed the keepsakes of my past identities, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t done so since January 2007 and that even before then, I’ve touched on ‘this stuff’ very little in the past 9-10 years. Since I ended my previous marriage, ran away from my life the way it was then, met Lucas and since then... I’ve made a fairly concerted effort to focus on here and future, with very little looking back. There’s been so much more to achieve, though lately... I find myself wondering... wondering what it is that I’ve actually achieved? What, as I approach my 39^th birthday, do I have to ‘show for it all?’ I remember a line I wrote in a poem in my twenties. “I am older, still not wise.” I don’t have an answer to that, so don’t read to the end of this lengthy diatribe if that’s all you’re waiting for.

It occurred to me today as I started unpacking those treasures of my past, that I’ve denied myself that tactile Catholic comfort of my rosary beads, so to speak. I like to look and touch and to remember, letting the familiar shapes warm under my fingers. But I haven’t touched those objects now in more than 4 years, always focused on building new things. Since that time I’ve finished a Master of Law degree. I threw the last of those study notes out today. It’s been done. Knowledge and experience acquired, degree certificate duly framed. The notes are of no further use to me now.

The first thing I did was collect all the cross stitch things. I collected 5 or 6 books and a few cross stitch packets that I’d never started. I’m hoping to find some likely person to donate them to. I don’t know why I feel so sure, but I do feel very sure that this part of my life is over. I’m not drawn to it anymore. There was one piece I’d started, more than 15 years ago, which Lucas rightly deemed tacky and that I threw away. What remains is a very beautiful and labour intensive Santa boot kit that I bought more than 10 years ago, and started when I met Lucas and is 95% finished. I held off finishing it because one of the last things remaining on it was the name caption. I was going to finish it once we had a child and I knew what we’d named it. I’ve sorted the threads and maybe as the spring arrives and the evenings stay light longer I will finally finish it. With my husband’s name, since a chance for the other is dwindling as the months and years tick by.

Not surprisingly, I found various shoe boxes, folder and containers with postcards, maps, calendars and photo collections from various trips to Europe, to Germany and Switzerland specifically, dating back not only to 1987, which is the first time I ‘went back’ after we migrated, but all the way into the 1970’s when I was a child growing up there. I collected all the pieces into one place.

There was a tattered old photo of me, taken when I was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, rowing on one of the Bavarian lakes not far from Fuessen, wearing the traditional Dirndl (Bavarian folk costume), which, reinterpreted a la 1970’s, sported a jaunty white blouse, a little short green skirt and an orangey-red apron, that caused a rather surprising outburst of tears. My father had carried that picture in his wallet for ten years, which is why it was so tatty, finally replaced it with some photo taken in my high school years I suppose. I filched it, like I filched a lot of things while I was a teenager, to ensure that they were kept. Treasured.

I also found the death notices for two of my grandparents – paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather. I knew I had them of course, these little Catholic business card sized prints that are produced for funerals in Germany, just didn’t know where anymore, and I was surprised to realise that my grandmother Anna died in March 1989. Lately I had gotten it into my head that she’d died some time in 1988. She was born in 1911, so she was 78 when she died, the youngest death of my four grandparents. My grandfather Fritz, who was born in 1906, died October 1992. I remember the death of all of my grandparents. Where I was when I heard, the conversations that followed. These two were the first, followed by my paternal grandfather in November 1995 and my maternal grandmother in November 1998. The shock lessened with each one, as time and memories passed...

There are various photo albums. I still don’t know what to do with the one of my first wedding, to my first, now ex, husband, in 1998. I know that eventually I will throw it out. Not because I want to deny that part of my life, I can’t and wouldn’t try to, but simply because... these are not memories I celebrate. I have a chronological ‘family’ album in which I have a few of those wedding photos anyway, and I am comfortable letting those stay. There are also a few photos from my early twenties that happen to include former boyfriends, including from my 21^st birthday party. I’m not going to ‘delete’ those photos or those memories from my life just because they aren’t part of my present or future anymore. But the dedicated wedding album.... I put it into the back of the cupboard this one last time, but I suspect that the next time, it will be time to go.

The written stuff was interesting. I found a comment my high school English teacher had left on my “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” essay. He gave me 19 out of 20 but then remarked that I had written an ‘exhaustive and thorough’ essay and could I perhaps be a little more economical next time (ie keep to the word limit). I roared with laughter. Same at 16 as I am at 38.

I also kept a folder full of short stories I had written when I must have been, I guess, in my teens and early twenties, either hand written or type written, from before I had a computer (I got my first home computer in late 1996 when I was 24). When I first did get a computer I spent some time transcribing the stuff that I thought was any good, so this was, by definition, the stuff that was not. Still, I had been too soft hearted to part with it and had faithfully transferred it from place to place over the years. I can be honest with myself now as well and admit a little bit of it was utter (hopeful) self aggrandisement. Maybe one day I was going to be a successful author and then this ‘early development’ stuff might be of interest to some scholar some day. I still had a very 19^th century literary view of being a writer in those days. I had studied and the only path I saw for myself was in turn to become one of those writers worthy of study one day. That was the only genuine path to true appreciation that I could picture for myself.

I took a passing glance through some of the stuff and did the literary academics of the future (and the future executors of my estate) a huge favour and finally trashed them. Part of the thought process was dismay at how callow and awful some of the stuff was. How thinly disguised some of the auto-biographical content was. And some of it was heart breaking. Over and over again I grappled with the history of my forced migration. My loss of family and home. I retold stories of my German childhood in sepia rose tinted shaded. Trying to reconcile, come to terms with, a sense of loss I had been powerless to prevent.

A few early stories tried to grapple with the childhood I was subsequently thrown into in the outer western suburbs of Sydney. Years during which I was ostracised, picked on, (my accent, my height, my family’s weird non-Anglo habits). None of those stories are unique I suppose in a country of migrants, and many an Asian boat person might wonder what on earth I’m complaining about since my skin colour has never set me apart. However, the outer western suburb I was thrown into in the very early 1980’s was such ocker Aussie Anglo-Celtic heartland that my ‘difference’ stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. I didn’t need a different skin colour to make it more obvious. And in fact, unlike subsequent waves of refugees with different skin colours, I had no extended tribe of my own to give me comfort, amidst which I could hide. I stood out, and I was alone, and I had to learn to assimilate quickly and to hide in plain sight.

One story I’d started to write probably aged 19 or 20 started off by saying that one day I was probably going to be able to write about my high school experiences in the wild, wild west with a degree of equanimity. But I couldn’t do it yet. Couldn’t approach those years with anything close to a sense of calm. And then I showed a level of insight that, for that age, stunned me. I spoke about happiness living within a framework, and that it would be unfair for me to claim that I had passed a childhood in Australia, once we got here in 1980, during which I was never once happy. That is patently untrue. However, scales, frameworks, adjust, so that even a POW might find some days more passable, or at least benign, than others. I concluded that within the context of what was possible, I had occasional happy moments, happy days. But given that I had a different context, a different framework of comparison, it was like a pale shadow in comparison to what I knew possible, and what I desired.

It was a little confronting reading that, because I have got the requisite distance now from those years, and I realise that the years haven’t made me feel more kindly disposed to that era of my life, eve as my life has become more ‘gentrified’. I have reinvented myself over and over again until here I am today. New and different person? Imposter? Shadow? I don’t know. I’ve had occasional savage outburst, usually disguised with a brush of gallows humour, when I’ve been reminded of something from those days. Come out with tales occasionally that leave people slightly discomfited. I’ve adopted a sort of camp, suave, hip inner west ‘lefty’ humour to cover that up... but it wasn’t the spotlight moments, the brushes with nasty, brutish events and people that made it so terrible. It was the monotony. The banality. The lowest common denominator single notedness of that existence.

I still feel an echo of that in Sydney to this day. Australia, for all its incorporation now of the flavours and textures of other cultures via more recent arrivals is still in many ways a homogonous culture. And a brutish one. It’s not looked upon favourably to say so, but it’s not my ‘inner west intelligentisa’ tendencies that force me to say it, it’s the fact that I spend 10 years living in a ‘wrong side of the tracks’ part of Sydney that I still feel to this day is actually more of the ‘real Australia’ than the one presented in the artsy boutiques, wine bars and coffee shops of eastern and inner west Sydney. As if this life I’m living here now, in a part of Sydney I have chosen for myself, at long last, is really just a veneer for the same old rot and rubbish underneath that has always been there.

Lucas tells me all the time of bogan Aussies he gets who instantly escalate to a supervisor (him) if they get someone with an Indian or Asian accent. “Gimme a real Aussie” they growl, because as customers (even those who are in debt and have defaulted on it) they are allowed to be racist cunts. They never, ever complain when they get Lucas with his still strongly marked Canadian accent. But I suppose they are too stupid to realise the irony of that. For me, I suppose this will always be the true face of Australia. There are many, many more of ‘them’ out there in this ‘great sunburnt land’ of ours than there are of ‘us, in here’. Racist, bigoted, homophobic, anti-intellectual with chips on their shoulders. Maybe that’s the real damage that those years from 1980 to 1991 wrought in me. Maybe this is the prejudice that I, in turn, will never be able to overcome.

I can see that I grappled with it throughout my teens and twenties. And looking at the years mazed by more recent miles, I know it haunts me yet. Haunts me still.

I wrote stories about what I lost and what I found myself in then, and I still write them now. I’ve gotten more polished, but I usually wind up abandoning the project after 10 or 15 pages because... I don’t know what the ending is. And I don’t know what I’m trying to say. What I want.

I think the truth is that I have never quite reconciled myself to being ‘Australian’. I wrote one story that grappled with how tough it is to own a German identify, an alien ‘enemy’ identity, when your parents migrated to an Allied nation. Because that only deepened the rift in my own identity. Looking at my German heritage through Australian eyes wasn’t an easy thing to absorb, and all throughout high school even after I had lost my accent, all of the kids knew of my heritage of course, and so it was hell sitting through history classes dealing with WWI and WWII. It’s hard to maintain any sense of self throughout all of that. Everyone, from kids to parents to teachers, seemed to need to hear avowals of abjuration. Confirmation that ‘we’ were being raised to understand that the Nazis had been EVIL (in capital letters). Not only to understand it, but were appropriately chastened and self loathing for ‘what they had done’. (I was born in 1972 and as my father, who was himself born in 1950, used to declare angrily, had in fact done nothing!) It shocks me now sometimes when I think back to some of the treatment I got even from teachers. I once spoke to a school friend about it and asked her, in a moment of ‘don’t care about the consequences anymore, just tell me what it is!’ stupidity, why the vitriol was still so strong? Most Australians hadn’t even come into direct contact with German forces during WWII, but mostly Japanese. “Ah,” she said with sage (and honest) wisdom beyond her years “but if it hadn’t been for you Germans, people like my granddad would never have had to face those Japanese.”

I can see so clearly today where my inner conflict comes from. Maintaining any sense of pride in my German identity seemed not only counterproductive, I was moral and sensitive enough to understand that it had to be a fraught identity, and simple national, ethnic or cultural pride, the way that Greeks and Italians felt it, for example, was, well, not so simple. But on the other hand, to simply ‘lose myself’ in an Australian identity, to abjure my German identity entirely, seemed like the weakling’s path. A liar’s path. And I had enough of a chip on my shoulder, enough ‘anti’ sentiment, not to give in to that either. The result? No forward, and no back.

Not something I have resolved yet, even now.

I can see why, given that I am drawn to revisit these themes over and over again, I eventually turned to light and fluffy chick lit in an attempt to leave my own past (and my obsession with self?) out of the creative space and just hone my writing. Even here, in this less than stellar space (hardly worthy of scholarly attention) my character falls in love with a Swiss man and leaves Sydney forever for a life shacked up with her self confident, cultured Swiss guy in Basel. Because of course being Swiss (German speaking) he can reconcile his Germanic identity without any sense of compromise or self loathing or shame. She gets to do what I never can. It’s ultimate wish fulfilment. A part of me will always wish for the chance to ‘go home’. The practical part of me realises that this is no longer possible. Maybe here I will never be fully Australian (in part because I resist it) but I suspect that in Europe, in Germany, life, the world, has moved on so far that I could never catch up to it again. I had trouble building myself an Australian identity arriving here as a 7 year old. I realised in my 20’s already that the capacity to lose the Anglified parts of my identity was now also impossible. I don’t think I could reintegrate into a normal life in Germany anymore either.

Sucks for me, doesn’t it?

In the end, I kept a few short stories, some that showed some glimmer of insight, something mildly interesting that I might one day want to revisit. I found that even then I had been interested in the Germanic epic tales, the Niebelungen Lied in particular (stuff that informed the heart of Wagner’s Ring cycle), and made a not half bad attempt at something, very different to the approach that I am taking now, but interesting.

To finish it all off (after taking out several bags of rubbish) I found a book review journal I had started to keep in 2002/2003. I wrote reviews of about 10 books I had read, and was stunned at the language I’d been using. I go through phases of feeling smarter and dumber, more articulate and less so. I usually feel dumb ‘right now’, wherever I am right now, and occasionally find older stuff where I think ‘wow, I did that?’ Of course, some of the stuff I threw out today was terrible and it made me grapple with the idea that, well, maybe I am? Maybe even my best stuff is just ordinary, and maybe the stuff I am obsessed with is just navel gazing and never will or can hold anyone else’s interest.

Anyway, conclusion. My life, who I am right now, is all around me. Who I was, almost 30 years worth, is crammed into a few small boxes. It’s only a few small boxes because it’s not all that different to who I still am now. It’s a few small boxes because I’ve made a concerted effort over the past 9 years, since Lucas has been part of my life, to live for the now and for the future, and not in the past. I think this is a wise thing to do. However, I am a little bored with life right now. We haven’t had much in the way of a holiday in the past 3 years and I know that has been mostly due to my mother getting sick and then me. We haven’t travelled overseas at all together. Last time I went to Europe was in 2001. And I miss it. And I need to go back, I can feel that growing. And that’s kinda selfish because Lucas is Canadian and he left his home as an adult, not as a child like I did, and he’d have more right to expect that part of his heritage to be a still active part of his life than perhaps I do. I know his family still expect it to be and I don’t think I’d hear the end of it if we took a trip to Europe and didn’t stop off in Canada.

I’ve worked in the same place for 6 years now, and it’s one of those ‘pregnant with expectation’ places where you think in a few months it just might be possible that everything changes and yet... somehow everything winds up staying the same.

I get ideas about stuff I want to write about, and then I procrastinate, or just can’t find the words I’m looking for. Occasionally I think: maybe I’m still not ready. But I’m turning 39 next month and that’s just defeatist thinking; a trick of the mind. If not now, when then? And it’s not just the writing part, but the networking and selling your work part, all stuff I suck at. Lately it feels like very second person in Sydney is either a writer or a wannabe writer. That little voice in my head keeps telling me “you’re not special princess’....

I’m in a bit of a rut, and the winter hasn’t helped things. I need to get myself out of it. Out of the ‘same old, same old’ I feel a bit drowned in at the moment. I feel like I’m waiting to discover a burst of energy, and it’s just around the next corner. Or the next one. I’m looking for it, waiting with open arms.

Our next door neighbour is nuts

2011-08-18T20:57:00.001+10:00

Absolutely stark, raving bonkers.

He often stomps and storms around his house, in which he lives alone, screaming, swearing, thumping things. This can happen once in a blue moon, or it can happen three or four times a week.

Occasionally I've wondered if he's talking on the phone to someone, a boyfriend that's pissed him off or something, but no, most of the time he is totally and utterly alone in the house.

Ranting and raving at himself and thumping things.

A steady stream of this if often followed by him flying out of his house, slamming the door shut (and I mean slam!) behind him and getting into his car and driving off.

The first time he did this many years ago I was actually quite worried because I thought he had worked himself up into such a state that he might not be safe to drive.

But no, he always comes home safe and sound. The odd thing is that this can happen at any hour of the day or night. Sometimes he'll come crashing home and out again several times between 7pm and 3am. It is all very strange and I have reached the conclusion that he is actually quite raving mad and utterly bonkers.

During the last State election he had a big posture of the Labor Party candidate up in his front yard, and I did wonder then if perhaps he was some kind of union delegate or apparatchik. It was a close call in our burrough, or whatever it is they call us, and during that period he seemed more agitated than usual. On reflection, sadly, I discovered that I did not feel that frothing at the mouth madness and being a unionist were mutually exclusive.

There isn't a single union I've had dealings with over the years who haven't prided themselves on retaining at least one 'screamer' on their books.

And I've often wondered if, like a lot of unionists, he takes his politics so seriously that whenever some storm in a teacup happens in the back engine room, he... lets it all out when he comes home.

So anyway. Maybe that's an unfair designation process.

But yes, He's quite mad. We've gotten so used to it that these days it's mostly entertaining.

His taste in music is another thing. One night: Madonna in her classic 80's and early 90's era (mmmmhhhhmmmmm, my baby's got a secret), the next, whale song weirdness.

Even the cat stops, quite arrested at times, and just stares at the wall. Then looks at us: 'what is he doing!?'

Don't know baby, don't let him upset you. Just keep doing what you're doing.

Next door front door SLAMS! Magrat jumps a foot.

Is cool darlin', he'll be back in half an hour. For more crazy fun.

I'd be tempted to ask him what it's all about, only I'm scared he'll go completely schizo. The old lady who lives at the other side of him has told us on many occasion that he is quite utterly mad. She hates him with an old witch on a broomstick passion.

Again. All the crazy fun of living in our street.

There is no lesson in this....

2011-08-17T20:13:00.001+10:00

I had an extremely erudite blog entry composed in my head this morning. About western democracy and the dynamics of its interaction with, and increasing reliance on, free market economics to determine social outcomes. As if our leaders (and citizens) can’t quite comprehend that ‘allowing the market to determine itself’ (and sort out everything else along the way) is really ‘law of the jungle/survival of the fittest’.

No wonder there are so many inequities arising, as government and society absolves itself of all responsibilities to intervene while the folks and blokes with the power stack the decks in their favour and bleat on about ‘big government over-regulation, nanny-stateism, leftist bleeding heartism etc. There is a growing realisation now that we are hurtling towards an hour glass shaped society with a stable middle class eroded away. What we are heading for is pre revolution Tsarist Russia with a sizeable elite and a massive poverty class and only a sliver of a middle class in the middle. Which is where most of us actually aspire to live. With some security, comfort, stability. Some sense of reliable, answerable power embedded in a structure of accountable self-rule. I knew all that study of the medieval Hansa league was going to stand me in good stead. Fuck the Italians, for a decent city-state that really worked, look north of the Rhine and Danube.

Anyway, I had many elegant words and wisdoms all set out in my head, and now I’ve forgotten most of it and I’m too tired to concentrate and reboot my internal memory bank.

Instead, I’ll ruminate about the other things currently crowding my head.

Had a fun time today explaining to our dickhead CFO (via his dickhead lackey) that he can’t just unilaterally slash contractual salary components for staff just because he needs to ‘realise some budget savings’. In the end, I had to explain it in relation to his own contract. Which then filtered through. The funniest thing about it is that a number of the slashes he wanted to make were pursuant to contractual arrangement he himself entered into in order to secure the ‘right person’ at the time (either without my advice or specifically against it).

He’s a bit like a boy with the latest toy. When he wants the latest, he’ll spend anything, sign anything. But when the honeymoon’s over and the toy has becomes integrated into the boring old existing stable, then buyer’s remorse sets in. Particularly as the statements with the interest charges start rolling in.

Sigh. I just don’t understand how you can get to such a senior position and be so fucking lacking in broader business sense and experience. Okay, I have HR/labour law/contract law expertise, and that expertise goes deeper than what any general manager will have, that’s what I’m employed for, but really, how do you get to be in an executive general management position (and a CFO in my view has to be a ‘general manager’ within the broader business, they can’t or shouldn’t just be chief bookkeeper) and still not have a basic fucking clue? I thought those sorts of rookie mistakes were knocked out of most corporate ladder climbers at the Team Leader stage? You make that embarrassing suggestion your first year in the job, thinking you’re the only smart one who can see an ‘obvious solution’, and everyone around the table with a bit more experience groans, knocks their elbow in your rib and tells you “grasshopper, smarten the fuck up”.

Maybe accountants don’t travel that path. In my experience they avoid working with people whenever they can, even when they have responsibilities for managing large teams of them.

I’m feeling unfairly bitter today. I’ve actually met one accountant who is good at managing people. One. Out of 240.

Anyway. That sort of thing just pisses me off.

The other thing that pisses me off, and I made a quick tweet about it, is when people abuse my good nature and hit the forward button to send me all the crap that they really can and should just be able to figure out for themselves. My life is to be at the constant beck and call of others who are too lazy to pick up a phone, scroll down a policy document, surf an intranet or remember what they did last time. I am generally helpful by nature and occasionally do myself a disservice by finding it easier and quicker to just help, do it, whatever, than ‘coaching’ them through doing it themselves.

The upshot of that, however, is that I’m always out of time to dedicate to the more critical or rewarding work, the stuff where I have to have a deep think, map out, engage with others over a longer period of time to genuinely problem solve a longer term strategy or solution (not just a ‘once off’). It’s really easy to become a ‘service junkie’ and just put out fires all of the time. It takes real self discipline to push yourself into strategy, preventative, pro-active engagement mode, particularly in a work culture that rewards knee-jerk reactive, ‘save the day’ kind of heroics (as long as the knee-jerk does save the day). But honestly, doesn’t every work place culture? I have yet to work for an employer that genuinely values their thinkers, planners and strategists over their ‘can-do’ fire fighters. Everyone loves a hero. Everyone loves the ‘fire-ies’. It doesn’t matter what the organisation says in their branding exercise, in their PR literature, in their value statements. In truth, everyone loves the hero who rushes in, saves the damsel in distress, goes back for the kitten or the puppy and makes a neat headline and photo op the next day.

I am also getting heartily sick of people who disguise their unwillingness to comply with certain business rules they damn well know they have to comply with (for legislative reasons or industry regulatory reasons) as ‘you’re there to provide a service to me, fix this for me, do me a work around.’ I called one particular woman manager on this today and named the elephant in the room: “My job is not to help you find a work around for a rule we have that you know we can’t break but that you don’t wish to comply with because it doesn’t suit you right now, my job is to help you achieve the outcomes you want within the rules.”

The problem I find is that people usually get snippy when they’ve let something slide, suddenly they’re out of time and doing things the right way takes time, and so now they want help from someone else to cover up their incompetence/slackness and so chuck a ‘just fix it for me’ hissy fit.

It doesn’t help that this manager is also a repeat offender who has openly bragged to others that she does lots of things ‘against the rules’ because she wants to ‘run her business’ (ie her department, she does not ‘run a business’) ‘her way’, without ‘the bureaucrats’ telling her what she should and shouldn’t do because of pesky old legislation and risks she’s creating. Yeah? Well, fucking go work somewhere else. Open your own business. Absorb your own risks. Shovel out your own messes. I hate that braggadocio attitude in the ‘low personal risk environment’ that a huge operation provides its managers. It’s all hot air, no personal accountability.

And to add insult to injury? She gets sarcastic and passive aggressive in her e-mails. When she e-mailed me with her ‘flick-pass’ she finished with “I await your response with baited breath”.

Then, when she got her response well before she would have gone blue in the face if she had in fact been holding her breath, which included advice about next steps she needed to take to do things properly, she contacted the next person in the chain that she needed to contact (poor petal, I didn’t do it for her, for one, because I don’t have the authority to initiate her processes) with a cc to me, with a hissy fit of an e-mail full of passive aggressive shit like: “well, I’m doing this now because that’s the ‘expert advice’ I was given, even though given that I need to achieve x,y,z...”

Stupid fucking cow.

At the beginning of this year I was (only) cc’d in on an e-mail another passive aggressive dick of a senior exec wrote to my boss where he used the expression ‘your expert advice’ about four times, each time putting inverted commas around the words ‘expert advice’ (aka “of course I bow to your ‘expert advice’ in this matter”) all because he of course didn’t like the expert advice he was getting and didn’t want to follow it.

It was one of the few times I had my boss on the phone to me in an absolute fuming apoplectic mess. It passed again quickly of course, strong emotion about anything other than his annual ski trip to Aspen is not something Mr Teflon retains for any length of time, but it was fucking hilarious when it happened. The e-mail was just so over the top, it was hard to take any of it seriously. The vitriol was just so Warner Brothers cartoon. A touch of Yosemite Sam, a smattering of the Tasmanian Devil and more than a dash of Wile E Coyote. Also, I was only ‘in the backseat’, not a target of the vitriol, even though in all fairness it should have been targeted at me, because it actually was all my ‘expert advice’. I managed to tee it up with my boss that when he got called in he’d toe the party line. When it comes to ‘devil in the detail’ even my boss acknowledges that if I’ve looked into something and say ‘this is so’, then you better bet your cart and your horses on that and all he has to say, a la Jean-Luc Piccard is: ‘make it so’. But still, ultimately he was the one who did say “it truly is so” to this senior exec and so his ego didn’t like that particular battering at all.

I don’t understand passive aggressive. I really don’t. And sarcasm in e-mails to people whose help you are going to continue to need.... is just Darwin awards material. Really? Really? You thought that was a smart move? Guess where your e-mails go in the future? Bottom of the pile. But you know what? Prove it.

Hah. Now that’s passive aggressive.

Beyond the vile, the snide, the glib, at last there is...

2011-07-31T13:28:00.000+10:00

This:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/heartbroken-for-the-broken-20110730-1i57a.html

Not the first time that I have linked to Charles Waterstreet, and assuredly not the last.

I keep discovering again and again that some of the greatest human hearts and souls have taken a journey through the law. Seeking something a little like justice, and balance, for the whole through the granularity of the singular.

I never discover the same via accountancy though. That too is a journey through the eye of a needle, but in the opposite direction. It ends there, finding comfort in myopia.

My stupid (yet also wise) subconscious mind

2011-07-27T21:17:00.000+10:00

My stupid and weird dreams continue.

On Sunday night to Monday morning I dreamed about an old job of mine, a company where I spent six years pretty much straight out of Uni. I started in an entry level role and worked my way up into senior management.

To this day, it was probably the most demanding workplace I’ve ever been in and these were the most demanding and senior jobs I’ve ever held. I haven’t quite scaled those heights again. In the end I left because being part of the senior management team exposed me to how bereft of ethics the senior leaders in this organisation were and in the end this wore me down. I’m talking about defrauding the Australian Tax Office and various other government service departments, not to mention cheating and lying to clients (way beyond a little bit of ‘fluffing up’ of the bill) and lying in court (including dummying up evidence) in order to win breach of contract cases. Even though I was on the MBA Managing Director/CEO track, in the end I assessed the sort of person I was and realised I had to walk away.

Before the very end, I learned an awful lot there but of course, being so very young, made my fair share of mistakes too. In the light of day, I realise that learning via your mistakes is just as legitimate as learning via positive role modelling from others, or via theory and textbooks, particularly when you’re young and inexperienced, and particularly if you do learn from them ie you don’t repeat the same ones over and over.

None the less, the dream I had on Sunday night focussed on one particular dumb mistake I made and it was so intense I woke up and felt completely debilitated all of Monday. I fought all day to remind myself that I wasn’t the same person as then anymore, and I don’t make that mistake any longer. It involved a small abuse of my position of power and some unprofessional behaviour. Basically, one of the things I used to do was run a week long induction program for new starters, and at a particular point, when I was having some significant problems with my now ex-mother-in-law, if we got done a bit early in the afternoons and everyone was bored, I’d hold forth and over-share a little too much. I thought I was being funny and humorous, but of course it was just unprofessional and those poor young ‘uns had no choice but to sit there and listen to me vent.

It is something I’m hugely embarrassed about now, the closest I ever got to a ‘David Brent from The Office pulling out his guitar in a staff training session’ moment, and not something I’ve ever repeated again. These days, my biggest issue is that I don’t genuinely open up to anyone much anymore, to the point where I realise I have a bit of an issue with intimacy (in a friendship way) in all other relationships except my marriage. But that’s another story.

Anyway, this dream that triggered this memory really got under my skin and I’ve been worrying over it all week in the back of my mind, wondering what it meant, and picking over the debris of the jobs I held at that company, wondering what the lesson for me is.

One thing I’ve been a bit loathe to admit but think I have to examine honestly is the fact that I reached the pinnacle of my career to date there, before I was 30, but quit for what I consider ethical reasons but others in the ‘hard world of business’ might interpret as me ‘not being able to cut it’.

I did make very concerted efforts after I finally did re-enter the workplace (after a year of travelling and fuffing about with further study that didn’t lead to anything) to only do work that I was passionate about or in industries I felt were about more than making a profit. I wanted to do something where I could be of service to the world and help make it a better place.

Since I left my late twenties behind I have deepened my skills base extensively, but not necessarily broadened it.

And I haven’t gotten any better at strategically managing my own career.

I tend to take a ‘without fear or favour’ approach to identifying issues that I think need fixed. I’m not rude about it, and I always try to be constructive by also having solutions ready to go (don’t just ID the problem), but I work in a HR department where the senior management approach is ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broke’ and if I say ‘but it is broke!” the preferred response is to change the subject or divert down the garden path or ignore the solutions I’m offering in a number of insidious ways that suggest I am a trouble-maker and aimed at undermining my self-confidence (I have come out of meetings with my boss honestly believing that I am nuts, only to check with a colleague or a peer in another organisation who confirms that nope, I’m actually on the money). My boss in particular has a reputation for being “Teflon man” (ie everything just washes over and off him) and likes to surround himself with ‘yes’ people who tell him how great he is. He is partly responsible (to blame?) for much of the current structure and system we have, so of course he has a personal investment in making it seem all hunky-dory, and does not want to invest time and effort in changing anything. He enjoys sunning himself in adulation and is subsequently excellent at managing ‘up’ to guarantee continuation of all that he enjoys. I’m not his favourite person because my ‘continuous improvement’ focus threatens to create work for him and undermines his theory that anything he’s done, even 5 years ago, is good for all time. I’m at least not his least favourite person because the client groups I work for a) rave about me and b) the way I work never creates any ‘step in’ work for him because I deal with it all.

As he said to me today, I have a real talent for sizing up a situation early and preventing it from ever escalating. I never shy away from getting hands on and managing, and for that reason, I don’t have things turn into disputes that go to court or to Fair Work Australia for resolution.

My only problem is that this gives him the leverage to sneakily praise me for how strong I am operationally, “but..... and oh gee, so sorry, but I just see you as an operational person, not as a strategist. So... hmmm..., you don’t really have any place to go here. I just don’t see you in a strategic HR management position.”

No, because what I do clearly involves no strategy at all....

I am wise enough to realise that the reason he doesn’t want to see me promoted is because he’s not going to be dumb enough to give me the leverage to have a voice. At the moment, my escalation path is through him, and anything he doesn’t want to do or follow up, he can just cut off. He’s made it very clear that if I ever try to go over his head, he will consider this a very career limiting move. If I get a little bit more position power, his comfortable life will become decidedly uncomfortable as I start to force through some ‘strategies’ for fixing things that will make the institution a better place for everyone else.

After all these years, I am still stunned that so many people I come across in leadership positions are simply driven by personal benefit motivation and narcissism. There is absolutely no altruism there. No ‘for the greater good’. It’s all about him, and he’s the second most powerful person in the department position wide, and some would have it possibly the most powerful (the power behind the throne) because our actual HR Director is little more than a smiley placard.

The person he’s been lauding to me as ‘promotable’ is a colleague of mine who point blank admitted to me a year ago that she considers her sole and only responsibility as ‘pleasing the boss’, ie our boss. It’s all she concentrates on, and she lets everything else slide off her.

I know this, because she looked after some of my clients when I had to go to hospital last year. I got nothing but complaints when I came back. Things not done, some things never started, others not properly finished. I came back to a chorus of “thank god your back!” and had some clients go so far as to pick up the phone to our boss and tell him precisely what they thought about my colleague and how excellent they thought I was.

What did my boss do? Wrote it off as my colleague being ‘more strategic’ than I am. I’m the people pleaser, he tells me. She simply prioritised her workload and the stuff these managers wanted obviously simply weren’t so important.

So... today he informed me that I was never getting a promotion in our HR department, so I could think about leaving HR and doing something else in the organisation (more suited to my ‘operational management skills’), or I could leave the organisation. He did intimate that this colleague of mine was going to get ‘an opportunity’ in the next little while (the one that I’d made it clear I wanted).

So he’s going to promote the ‘yes woman’. The person who will back him in everything he says and won’t make waves, hold him to account or make him do any more work than he wants to.

I’ve always said that smart managers surround themselves with people who will make them look good. By this I meant recognising what skills they lacked and surrounding themselves with ‘complementary’ people who had skills they perhaps didn’t. I never thought of it from the perspective that some managers might interpret ‘making them look good’ as surrounding themselves with people who simply affirm them and parrot everything they say.

How naive am I.

I really did think if I kept the wellbeing of the overall organisation as my focus, identified things honestly and diligently that needed to be improved, worked on constructive ideas for solutions and sensible, cost effective methodologies to implement them, my work would speak for itself.

Of course my boss has been watching me through narrowed eyes the whole time thinking how dangerous I am. Why, his work will never end if I’m let loose!

A part of me (the Catholic reared part) is tempted to be a good little shrinking violet and accept his prognosis of me and my ability and my ‘place’ in the world.

Except.

Except. That I have any number of peers in other sections of HR who tell me if they want sensible advice, something done properly or resolved or need help managing my boss (who is considered as someone who needs to be worked around because he’s lazy and superficial but has power) they come to me because I’ll find a way (and I do, I always work harder for other people than I ever do for myself).

I have people outside of the organisation who confirm for me every once in a while that the ideas I am suggesting are not crazy, negative, utopic, fuzzy or waffly (my boss has a 30 second attention span, anything more than that is waffle to him), they are basic good HR and good business management. Some are even strategic.

Anyway, that stupid dream I had has had me thinking about my flaws, ambitions, things I’ve learned etc. The dream was effectively about a time when I failed to manage myself well. It seems, from this most recent ‘career’ conversation, that perhaps at a subconscious level I was sending myself a signal of something I already knew before today: I am still failing to manage myself well, because I failed to realise what the real name of the game was. I failed to take seriously what the real things were going to be that my boss was watching out for.

I should have been more Teflon coated and helped him to protect his.

So.... I spent some time brushing up my resume this afternoon.

Swoon

2011-07-22T16:40:00.002+10:00

My guy is so clever:

http://lokified.blogspot.com/

Really, the world has no idea how brilliant my husband is. I don’t brag about him often enough.

I get a range of reactions from people when they discover that I am 9.5 years older than Lucas. Women stop to absorb for a bit and will come back at me about 5 mins later with a ‘go the sisterhood’ air punch. Younger and youngish men are generally cool with it and range from generally supportive to slightly intrigued, but older (than me) men (who would otherwise consider themselves in the running for someone like me, that is, if they haven’t rejected me outright for already being ‘too old’, because apparently even 55 year old men think they can aim for dating a 29 year old woman) often go through the gamut of horrified through to discomfited, which is quickly followed up with the sort of ‘x-ray vision’ assessment that implies that they’ve:

a) mentally stripped me down to my knickers; and

b) have drawn the conclusion that I must be one bit of alright in the sack.

Which always leaves me feeling in want of a shower and a hard scrubbing brush. Either men really do just get simpler as they get older, or it’s just the current crop hovering around the young end of baby-boomerism. Hung-over 60’s and 70’s influenced wanna-be Keith Richards – only assessing how ‘shagadelic’ a ‘babe’ is.

All of those superficial reactions aside, I think that people who then actually meet Lucas must wonder what on earth special-super-what-the-hell sort of thing do I have to get this cute, talented, special, sweet, kind, generous young guy. I mean, what on earth have I got going on that this guy forsakes (at least the opportunity of) all others for, and comes home to me every day, (mostly) with a smile.

And hey, I am not always a bundle of laughs. It’s true that I’m certainly not ‘high maintenance’, and while I suffer from an average amount of vanity and pride, my ego is not excessive and I’m no narcissist. I’m smart, and I’m attractive, even if my weight, like my exercise regime, yo-yo’s, but, I’m not getting any younger, the mirror shows me that every day. And the journey with me has included supporting a mother-in-law through near fatal cancer and a wife (me) through a very non fatal cancer diagnosis, all before he even hit 29. Many men have crumbled under lesser stuff, but he’s been more than just ‘there’. He’s been there.

He still doesn’t see, a lot of the time, how magnificent he truly is. Self-doubt nags at him. He wants to be liked. He needs to feel welcomed and included. He needs to feel that he can always let a little bit of the joker and trickster that he is (of the most benevolent kind) show in his eyes. A glitter. A skulk. Just a tiny bit. I’d move mountains and kill lions to give him that space, to let that shine.

I’ve tried to think, recently, about trying to describe how I finally realised that he was ‘the one’, particularly after having been through a failed marriage with a man who most definitely wasn’t. All the usual things you could think of (attraction, chemistry, things in common, sense of humour) are there, but I realise it came down to one crucial thing. When all is said and done, I think he is a slightly better person than I am.

I’m a good person. Moral, and I can be kind and thoughtful in a slightly aloof sort of way, but I’m also judgmental and I have a cynical, defensive streak. I was raised by ‘you and me against the world’ sort of parents. Idealists who were often let down by others (as idealists invariably are) and so there was perhaps a sort of optimism missing in my childhood. I am eternally hopeful but also wary (and occasionally a little scared) of people, and I am quick to judge, sort, discriminate. Lucas has more breadth of kindness, and a genuinely good heart. He is often not as ‘moral’ as I am (I can be the ‘stick in the mud’ kind), but he’s more humane for it.

I know that I need a fairly equal relationship with a man. I don’t want or need traditional gender roles. But what I do need is respect for my partner and since I care so little for traditional gender roles in which some traditional forms of respect are embedded, what I needed most from a partner was that blissful feeling, every once in a while, when I check in for a diagnostic assessment, that he has something to teach me about being human. About being a better human being than I currently am.

You come across people once in a while whose generosity and greatness of soul strikes you. I feel like that about authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Their great humanity, their kindness, their good humoured love and acceptance of people of all sorts, quirks and all, shines through in their writing. I always admired that trait most, but could never put it into words, knew that I was lacking it a little in myself, and didn’t even know I was looking for it until I found it. Now of course I see it clearly and can’t stop pinching myself that I found Lucas.

The list of people that I respect and admire has (thankfully) grown as I’ve come to inhabit and shape my own life more, but at the very top of that list is always, always my husband, Lucas.

Vignettes

2011-07-12T20:32:00.000+10:00

Lunch time online news reading, found an article about ‘late bloomers’, which my mother always told me I was, and I am really beginning to hope I am, because I sure wasn’t a prodigy. This following excerpt struck me in particular, because it is a conclusion I have also come to over the past 18 months:

In The Consolations of Philosophy, de Botton reminds us that "the most fulfilling human projects [often] appear inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys [often lie] awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains". To reiterate the importance of hard work, de Botton cites an interesting theory about genius by Friedrich Nietzsche. "Don't talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted," wrote Nietzsche. "They acquired greatness, became 'geniuses' through ... [the] diligent seriousness of a craftsman."

To conclude, I have spent my life battling variations of writer’s block, the principle one being never knowing how to end a story, and therefore never finishing one. Now I have had a novel finished for one year (though I have re-edited it extensively several times, which resulted in cutting about 50 pages from it, in that time), but I never thought I’d have ‘selling block’.

The lack of confidence I have been exhibiting in myself is something that is really bugging me, to the extent that I have had 2 dreams in the last week which I can only interpret as kicks in the butt from my subconscious.

The first one involved Lucas and me travelling through a small country town in the north-western USA (a place I have never been) in the middle of a big old pine forest, mountains etc, old style industries like lumber yards and wood related business (making furniture) everywhere. It felt cosy and familiar, very like the West Germany I knew as a kid. We arrived at a huge house, and it appeared that we were in the market for buying it (dream me was very surprised by this, what on earth are we doing north of Seattle trying to buy a house?). At first the house just seemed big, but also old and run down and dark. The bedrooms were awful, windowless, dank, small. The house had old timber floors, was open plan in some areas but divided into small rooms in other. The previous owners had carpeted the rooms (which was old and tatty) but had left the open plan areas uncarpeted, which added to my feeling of preferring the open plan. The walls were wall papered, hideous small flower prints, and my first thought was ‘that’s got to come down’. Suddenly the house opened up to a massive triangular study at one end of it and lo and behold, this opened to a massive wrap around veranda, enclosed in portions overlooking... the most beautiful cove leading to the open ocean, and dotted around the cove were gorgeous little houses including a cafe and restaurant strip along the bay. The surf was crashing in, the sky was that purple grey heralding a late afternoon summer storm, surfers were in the water, people were promenading along the promenade. It looked just like Byron Bay when you stand on the hillside at Belongil and look down at the curve of the bay. So in an instant I fell in love with that house, resolving to buy it, rip out the carpet, pull down the wall paper, open up the closed rooms where necessary, relocating the master bedroom to this study overlooking the bay....

I woke up enthusing to Lucas how this dream had managed to hit all of my sweet spots. Mountains, forest, small town life, old style industries with old fashioned jobs, but also ocean, beach life, cinemas, restaurants, galleries, people who are open to art and culture....

And Lucas smacked me on the back of the head.

Somehow that dream has stayed in my mind for the past few days, has added buoyancy to my steps for some reason. Maybe a place like that is in my future?

So last night I had another dream, this time obviously me reacting to my own complaining about how cold this winter is (I wrote an e-mail to my sister yesterday). Winter started in April here this year, it feels like it’s been cold for an age, and I hate the cold. My central European genes betrayed me a long time ago, I love it hot and tropical. So in this dream, I was feeling cold and complaining, then found myself looking out a window, realised that the sun was out and that the temperature must have gone up because people were walking around in shorts and t-shirts. My mind wanted to get up, go out and join them. But I couldn’t. I just sat there, feeling lonely and isolated, my legs unwilling to get up, something like a hand on my chest pushing me back, down, keeping me in place. So I stayed inside and froze, while people were outside and warming themselves and I couldn’t join them. I woke up with a voice in my head telling me ‘that was always your problem, you have trouble participating. It’s always you on the periphery, hanging back, scared to join in, just watching, thinking it’s enough that you’re observing, but you know it’s not. You can’t wish for the rewards of participating if you keep hanging back. What are you afraid of?’

Oh, there’s a world of rejection that I’m afraid of. It’s easier not asking to be allowed to participate so you don’t have to deal with the embarrassment of rejection. Which of course is another problem right there: even just the way I expressed that. Don’t ‘ask to be allowed’ to participate, just do it! But I approach so cautiously that often I get rejected before I’ve even worked up the courage to walk all the way through the door.

So then I thought back to the dream about the house, and realised it was not my ideal ‘best of both worlds’ location at all. It represented the two me’s. The one is the place I came from, the past, where I feel comfortable and comforted. Mountains and forests, small town living, old style crafts and industries, simple desires and simple lives. I felt comfortable, but also uneasy travelling through that part of town making the approach to the house. Like a part of me recognised that this isn’t where I live anymore. I didn’t feel joy, I didn’t feel alive, until I looked out over that boat-like decking (even the room was triangular like the huge prow of a ship) and saw the ocean, the cove, the summer storm in the sky and tropical vegetation, saw the evidence of culture and the ‘polish’ that I associate with the present, and the future. Only in seeing this aspect did I feel like I could live here. I could draw the conclusion that this dream was trying to tell me that I need to integrate the two sides of myself. The past and the present/future. The mountains and forest and the old world, and the sea and the tropics and the new world. Or, I can recognise the emotional content of the dream and acknowledge that I didn’t feel joy until I saw the ocean and the seaside town, and in that instant I forgot the mountains and forests and small town vibe. So maybe it’s not two me’s, but one me who has travelled very, very far from home. Sometimes the old, the familiar pulls, but really, even contemplating giving in to the pull of ‘returning’ fills me with dissatisfaction, with unease.

So the kick in the butt for me arising out Dream 1 and Dream 2 read together is: you do know where you want to, where you need to, go. If you want to get there, you are going to have to participate. Get up from your window seat, disarm the hand pushing against your chest, pushing you down, and step out.

I’ve been quietly and discontentedly asking myself why this is so hard for me.

Well, it just is. I can go back to when I was a very small child and see that I’ve always been fearful of ‘pushing myself on others’. I always waited to be invited to participate, rather than pushing forward, which many people actually misread as arrogance or stand offishness. Nope, just shyness. Almost debilitating shyness, and anyone who’s ever actually met me would probably be quite surprised by that. I’ve adopted a lot of habits over the years to disguise this (including a false ‘bluntness’, which is really just me giving myself a shove along when I get fearful), but at the heart of it, there it is: shyness, a desire of not wishing to encroach. I think I need to stop asking ‘why’ I am (or became) like this, because in the end, who cares ‘why’, the why isn’t going to solve it. This is just simply something that I am, have had in my past, so it’s something I need to work on. Work against. And step out and join in.

Tanjerine O Orange Dream

I had a dream once too

Yes when she glows in the dark and I'm struck by the sight

Nocturnal magical mystery tour

Stepping back, not fading, into the forest

Rambling through the forest

Changing up what I do

And so we begin 2012

Last blog of 2011

A year in review

While I'm at it, winding down, pondering friendship... and memories best left behind

An addendum of sorts

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow....

I can finally categorically say I do not wish to be a rockstar

Reborn (without finding religion)

It's not the rejection that bothers me... it's the confirmation

Who gave me c_c_c_caffeine?!

New ideas, old stories

Flirting with spambots and google searches

A little Schmidty for the way

A little Henry Lawson never goes astray

I'm (not) waiting for the night to fall....

Finally, my final review of RHCP's I'm With You

Another probably bloody boring update

I may never get to use this, so just in case....

When the helper needs some help

Okay, this one I'll explain

No explanation necessary

A half-arsed, half-baked, half-done review of the RHCP's "You're With Me"

Let there be some honour in it

How (not) to yoink the (wee little) dragon's tail

It's "this" kind of douche baggery I'm talking about

Shoe boxes of old selves

Our next door neighbour is nuts

There is no lesson in this....

Beyond the vile, the snide, the glib, at last there is...

My stupid (yet also wise) subconscious mind

*Swoon*

Vignettes

Swoon