The View from Elsewhere

stalling

Today I have to:

• drive to airport to pick up express post document that didn't arrive in time for my trip to Melbourne (where I was meant to have a visa interview, among other things)
• finish writing 'craft paper' and send to supervisor in US
• finish the first year marking
• have a massage
• go to Vinnie's and see if I accidentally offloaded favourite jacket in garbage bag of stuff I recently dumped there
• pay bills on work's only supposedly secure terminal
• work out what the f88k I'm going to teach up north next week and assemble resources accordingly
• pack up my office before I go 'up north' so that new person can move in forthwith
• boil up some spaghetti to use as proxy maggots for comedy review based on life of friend-imminently-leaving-town in which I am performing tonight
• buy food for party tonight and maybe for dinner tomorrow night
• perform in aforementioned comedy review

I have already:

• spoken on phone to new boss to organise next stage of life
• had hand-over meeting with next incumbent of present job

To top it off, every morning of this week since I've come back from Melbourne, I've woken up thinking, 'I'm sick, 'I'm sick, I should stay in bed today, but I've got too much to do.'  And every evening, I've been somehow bumper to bumper with activities.

These are the reasons why I'm procrastinating.  As you can see, not all of the above is going to happen today... And it's more of why I'm so glad to be going to another position.

fries with that

In which our heroine finds herself seated at dinner between a 'firey' (i.e. fireman) and a man from Angl#care in Adelaide sent to work at Angl#care in Alice, and the former tries to find her a mail order bridegroom from Venezuela:

Firey: That's how I met my fiancee. Sparksey said, All you have to do is enter the details you want -- age, height, weight, size.  Whether or not you want to breed.

Me: But what if you entered "five foot five, fifty-five kilograms, size ten" and true happiness was to be found with "five foot seven, sixty-one kilograms, size twelve"  How would you know you were entering the right details?

F [patiently, stolidly]: You enter what you want.  It's like...Sparksey jokes..."do you want fries with that?"

Me: So why Venezuela?

F: You can get the prettiest girls from Venezuela.  There's been more Miss Universes from Venezuela than from anywhere else. Those Venezuelan girls are best.  Not like Russians.  I looked into Russians, but they've got that dead white skin.

Me: I don't mind a dead white skin myself.  But why not go to sites like RSVP? They're pretty specific.

F [cagily]: They're not the same.

Me: So what would I do if I wanted to order?

F: If you wanted to order a girl...

Me: No.  A man.  Though mightn't I get a trannie, all the same?  Like in The Crying Game.

F: I think that's only in Brazil.

Me: I'm sure they have trannies everywhere.

Angl#care: Whoa!  I don't think our friend here realises...

Me: Does it matter?  This is investigative journalism.  [To F] What I wanted a man, and I went to one of these sites.  Could I get one?

ageing gracelessly

What does it mean when (another of these)...you meet some friends you're going with to a party a little later, and one of them looks you up and down slowly.  You say, 'What was that for?' And he says, 'I'm just checking out your outfit.'

And you gradually realise, from some comments and other people's attire, that you've been invited to an eighties party.  And that while other people have made a deliberate attempt to dress retro, you did so naturally and heedlessly.  So much so that they presumed you were in costume.

The only good part of all this was the comment: 'You're dressed like Claudia Karvan in The Big Steal.'  That has to be the best compliment ever.

and there was blue sky over the ranges...

What does it mean when you find yourself continually tired?  When you wake up feeling like a bus has run over you every morning even up till Monday, Tuesday of the week following your teaching rounds? When the problems that almost led you to resign from your job last year still haven't been resolved and flare up in more virulent forms?  When you feel like your life has become one tedious continuum of responding to other people's demands?  When you find you don't have much time to blog any more and you hardly ever take any photos? When you're so fatigued, you keep on writing Spoonerisms and homonyms? When the cats stop recognising you because you've been away so often?

It means you're doing too much, and in my case, that the job has to go.

Last week, after much vacillation and procrastination and worrying about whether I would put other people out (in the way of one with a martyr complex), I finally sent in my resignation. Although I'd known I would reach this point weeks ago, it made an immediate difference.  I'd made the psychological break.  There was a feeling of lightness.  Suddenly there was blue sky over the ranges again.  I was free to walk.

Fortuituously, I have something else to go to in another five weeks' time...so fortuituously that it does indeed seem like a gift from the universe, the workings of synchronicity and all that.  I can't say what it is just yet, and some of you may wonder why I would want to take up such a position, but I think it will be more focused, less demanding and more conducive to doing the writing I need to do.

It's not a teaching job; more of a writing job, really. I do hope to teach CW again, but it's time to draw back now and reflect.  I wonder whether it's possible to teach CW continuously, without taking occasional breaks. Teaching CW is intense in the way that I suspect group therapy is intense: you have to be 'in the zone' with your students. (It tends to attract high maintenance personalities; this is all without the layer of race being factored into the brew.)  I also have problems with the week or fortnight-long workshop approach our Institute promotes.  I don't believe I function best as a teacher in this format, though I don't know how successful it is, compared to other more regular, incremental approaches.  Anyway, that could all be the subject of another post about teaching CW.

Anyway, I'm hoping to shake off my scales like a snake over the next month or so, though it does worry me that I might spend the rest of my life hopping from one iceberg to the next, after a two or three-yearly surge of job disgruntlement.

memoirs of a Jane Campion wannabee

A sixty-five year old student complained to me: 'No one ever told me that writing would be such hard physical work.'

I don't want to admit that I'm an old crock just yet, but she's got a point there.  Hours lashed to the computer, or more particularly, the laptop, is draining and takes its toll on my neck in particular.  I recently finished a week-long writing marathon, which spanned several locations -- Alice, Batchelor, Darwin, then Alice again (including most of Easter Monday spent in bed with a computer and a cat). I was trying to finish the all-but forgotten screenplay I started a year earlier, as part of a course designed to get more scripts developed in the Territory (esp about Territorian life).

The reason for this sudden burst of activity was that the year-long deadline for submission of scripts for a free written assessment was almost up.  It's marvellous what a difference a deadline can make: I wrote 25 pages in a week, which is a lot, considered that writing for film is (meant to be) highly distilled.  During my marathon, I went through various peaks and troughs of exhaustion: the pattern was almost a day of inspiration followed by a day of despair.  I was buoyed along by kind friends, who told me it was just a pattern, and tomorrow would be another day. I threw myself across the finishing line last Tuesday, then checked on legal and other details over dinner with three lawyers and an engineer on Weds night, and sent the script off on Thursday morning.  (Some of these people have been constantly plumbed for details from their legal and professional lives: the script couldn't have been written without them.)

I was aiming to hit 90 pages, the length of an average feature film. I didn't quite make it, coming in at 85 pages, which I felt was enough for a first draft.  I suspect the result, with its rushed 'third act', was literally half-baked: underdeveloped and over-written.  One of the interesting thing about having a rough page length was that it seemed to impose a certain form on the content.  This is a principle I've observed before: ask students to write a 600 wd short, short story or a 14-line poem, and the piece automatically takes on a shape of its own, pushing you to develop it along certain lines. With the screenplay, I tried to follow the conventional three-act script formula, and to present a protagonist with clear desires and a quest of her own.  (I'm not totally sure about the other characters, but that's probably what the second draft is for.)  I didn't have any intention of writing something impressionistic or 'postmodern' that might 'break the mold' (McKee, if I remember rightly, classifies these options as spin-offs from the three-act formula, in any case - mini-plot and anti-plot), which would probably have degenerated into unmitigated waffle in my case.  I also tried to observe an action/reaction dynamic, to ensure there was a chain of emotional causality throughout the film.  Early in the workshopping process, we were asked to write a step-by-step outline of the script.  I had about twenty-two steps, which I used as a mud-map.  The fact is that you're never going to follow an outline in its entirety, that the characters have to develop organically and that you never know quite how they're going to end up.  But it helped, somehow, to have a game-plan for my characters' meanderings across 90 pages.

placebo non-effect

So I bought a sugar-free, low carb Darrell Lea chocolate bar to offset the fact that I was already drinking a chocolate milkshake...

Was it a good idea? 

No, I profoundly regret this decision now, as I'm five minutes' drive from any chocolate (the 40 C heat baked stuff in the vending machines here doesn't count).

the difference

...between the desert and tropics, I've decided, is that of the hair beautiful or the skin beautiful.

In the desert, you can blow-dry your hair straight and it will stay that way all day.  In tropics, it will curl up into a greasy mop ten minutes later.

In the desert, your skin is reduced to reptilian scaliness.  In the tropics, those vertical neck wattle things that seem to come with turning forty (on me, anyway) almost subside.

The only way to bridge this divide is quite possibly to live in a temperate zone.

dry town II

I sit for a while, enjoying the breeze, wondering when I can leave without seeming impolite. There are only two women left -- an old granny, skinny with a closed-in face and a paisley wrapped round her head, lying on her side, napping. Another woman whom I haven’t really taken in yet sits behind me. She calls out ‘hi’ softly and reaches her hand out towards me. I turn, and we exchange names. She is Tanika, and she comes from Mt L8*b*g. She sits cross-legged in half-lotus position. She wears a football jersey over long, baggy sports shorts. Her curly hair is cut in a rather masculine mullet with a few fronds of hair left at the back. She accompanies her words with soft, shy nodding.

‘Mt L8*b*g,’ I say. ‘That’s a beautiful place. I’ve been out there -- with Alison A. You know Alison?’

‘Yes. She’s my aunty, my aunty from P*p*ny&.’

‘And this woman here?’ I say, gesturing towards the granny. ‘She’s your aunty too?’

‘No, she’s my cousin.’

My estimates based on age are never a reliable indication of where someone fits in the Aboriginal kinship constellation. While we’re talking, a rough-looking young woman in pale blue sports clothes waves at her from further down on the lawn. ‘My daughter,’ says Tanika. ‘You look too young!’ I say. I thought she was in her early twenties. Her daughter looked the same age or older.

lichen

Last night, someone from Alice won the judge's vote on the New Inventors with a piece of canvas that converts into a tarp, a jacket or a swag.  She beat the two other male competitors in her heat. How exciting is that?

Vote for the 'lichen' in the People's Choice Awards.

cat butts ahoy!

I seem to remember a Christmas meme being propagated by Pavlov's Cat or some such personage last year.  One of the questions related to your best Christmas present, which went last year to the Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure given to me by the Coy Lurker's partner.

The year, the very same person is again responsible for the best present I received, which was the Cat Butts Mini-Kit.*  This includes a field guide, catt butt magnets and a cat butt surprise (I think that was the hair ball fridge magnet).  Page 6 of the Field Guide states: 'You'll find it surprisingly easy to get a good "view" of cat's butt.'  There are even sample images of cat butts and blank pages for drawing your own.

Other highpoints:

'To make a positive identification, you will need to push the fur aside for a look-see.'

'The Black cat anus is a deep, dark black--surrounded by a delicate circle of white fading into black.'

'Anal: Keeping meticulous notes and records regarding cat butts.'

'Busy Signal: When a ca can't be identified because he is using the cat box.'

'Dark Star: Cat that never exposes.'

'Eclipse: When a cat unexpectedly performs a spontaneous tail lift on your computer keyboard or book, blocking your view.'

'Hole in One: Quickly identifying a cat on the first try.'

You get the picture.  Amazon says that customers who bought this item also bought the Cat Butt Air Freshener and the Cat Butt 6-Pc Coaster Set.

* This is not a term I use myself; I would say poo-hole or arse-hole.