The View from Elsewhere

bitten

Yesterday, I was most heinously bitten by a dog on the thigh while I was riding on a mountainbike path (n.b.: not a footpath or a bushwalking track).  It was some kind of whitish terrier thing, which first mouthed my feet on the pedals then leapt up and started biting me on the outer thigh.

I yelled at the girl who was walking the dog and another off the leash, asking her to curb and discipline her dog.  I felt a bit guilty about this, as I would love nothing more than to have a little dog running alongside me while I'm biking through the bush.  But it seems there's always some namby-pamby hippy chick tripping along the mountainbike trail with a semi-civilised dingo-cross, rescued from a remote community, singing out, 'Don't worry, he won't hurt you!'  I mean, don't people know the limits of their animals' personalities, their likely behaviour, and discipline accordingly? 

This woman was apologetic enough.  Other people have argued back and told me off for inciting their dog...one even refused to put the dog back on its leash after it had bitten me.  I've only actually ever been bitten by whitefella housedogs.   I've been chased and mouthed by camp dogs, but never bitten by one...However, I wouldn't put it past them: three people/corpses have been mauled by camp dogs here over the past couple of years.

I have been moved almost by this incident to put pen to paper and write to the Advocate, complaining about the romanticisation of the canine in central Australia.  All this could be a diversion from the writing I'm meant to be doing this weekend. Or the housework, come to think of it.

I tried to photograph my leg last night, but was unable to get quite the focus, the drama, the bruising, the puncture marks (the outer thigh's a bit difficult).  It just looks like a lump of meat, adorned with a few pin pricks:

 

None of my wounds (usually from bike stacks) have photographed that well. More happily, here's Lulu, trying to shoot the breeze.   

Now that the weather has cooled (i.e. to 36 C), the cats have joined me downstairs where it's cooler, whereas they preferred to be upstairs where it's stinking hot on 40 + C days.

There's been a lot of indignant purring and yowling.  I think they really do hold me responsible for the weather.

hot wind

And so, after about five days straight of 40 C-ish weather, it is still officially too hot to sit on the balcony in the evenings, without rivulets of sweat dripping off one’s being, so we are sitting inside downstairs, without the aircon going (tho the portable’s going upstairs for the cats). It's also too hot too work in my study, so I've been parked pretty much at the dining room table over the last week.  My lips are so permanently dried and chapped, it’s become a state of being, along with a kind of blistex reflex. My Anangu calendar describes it as uterne mpepe or middle summer: 

Hot wind begins to blow from the northwest, we call that the bad wind, making people tired and irritable.  It may bring rain clouds, thunder and lightning.

Otherwise, I have decided I don’t mind this time of year.  One of the good things about the extreme heat is that it gives you an excuse to withdraw inside and contemplate.  Added to this is the relative lack of people in town, quietness on the workfront and the sense that the year hasn’t booted up yet.  It seems fitting to have this regular cycle, the feeling of the sloughing off the old, especially after the craziness and busyness of the previous season.  I wonder how we would fare psychologically without some regular sense of beginning, middle and end to each year.

I feel the new year doesn’t really start until around Australia Day/Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Day, as people go back to work and kids to school.  There’s still a sense of reprieve, of hopeful foreboding about what the new year might bring: as in, please let it be better than 2009.  Most people I know seem united in having found the year of the ox or the water buffalo or whatever it was to be hard-going. 

Apart from being extremely turgid work and otherwise for me, it was the year of the crazy random encounter (you mean, the crazy drunken encounter - Ed).  Although this made for some entertaining dinner party stories later, to be honest, it’s not really my style, and the troughs could have been leavened by some more reliable plateaus and less erratic peaks.  So, I’m hoping for less craziness, less turgidity in 2010 (a rather well-rounded and even-looking number, after all).

But there’s bad news for some of us, acc to Mystic Medusa, if you want to go with Chinese astrology.  Apparently the Year of the Tigger is about to start soon, in keeping with my theory that the year doesn’t really begin until Feb:

If you are born in the year of the Monkey, Tiger or Snake or have them anywhere in your Four Pillars chart it is best to wear a pig pendant for the whole of 2010 as it will help to harmonise any challenges you may experience, as you may find 2010 more challenging than previous years. 

Jeepers, how does she come up with this stuff?  I love MM as the Thinking Woman’s Astrologer, but sometimes…(I mean, moi wearing a pig pendant?)

And new year's resolution: no more shoes.  I think I have enough of them.  I could go another pair of office trousers or a warm jumper for winter, but shoes I don't need.

Suddenly there’s wind tossing the tree-tops outside.  How appropriate, after several days of heat and stillness, and more to the point, consulting the Anangu calendar.  Hopefully, there’ll be thunder and rain soon as well.  Oh, now there's lightning, so time to stop blogging before I get electrocuted.  

location, location, location

  My sister persuaded me to bus on down with her to Waverley Cemetery for a quick deco at the ancestral plot before a swim at Clovelly.  We went there in the late hours of the afternoon, after a scorching humid Sydney day (I seem to have gotten burnt even through my clothes).  I have vague memories of taking a short cut through the top of the cemetery years ago with a friend who lived at Clovelly.

  However, the cemetery was far more appealing than I remembered it being, much less cluttered than most cemeteries and yes, it has a great ocean view.  It reminded me a little of the first cemetery past North Ramparts in New Orleans, as it has a series of mausoleums around the edges as you enter, and it's dotted with over-the-top angels and other Victorian monuments.  (Apparently it was once a hot Goth location, along with St Stephen's cemetery in Newtown.)  It also features a huge monument to the Irish Martyrs of 1867.  I was quite surprised to see so many Irish names in the general section where my relatives are buried, and not just the Catholic section: I'm guessing that pure Anglos were interred at Gore Hill or Anglican church cemeteries.

 The headstone on the family plot can be seen below.  It includes two of my great-grandfather's children from his second family, as well as his second wife, Julia.  Basically, it seems my g-g had a mid-life crisis in his forties and ran away with the 17 year old girl from next door, from Perth to Sydney (Americans: that's like going from SF to NY).  He left a wife and 10 children behind him, and started up a second family of nine in Sydney, from which I'm descended, re-inventing himself as a respectable Victorian.  I've always been quite fascinated by Julia, his second wife (whom he didn't make 'an honest woman' until towards the end of his life).  I've wondered why she decided to run with him -- was it boredom, isolation? -- and whether she was happy with her choice.  My father's eldest brother remembered her as being very pleasant and devout in her later years.  I suspect g-g was a nutter and something of an old-fashioned adventurer, as he went from Ireland to England to India to Australia to America and back to Australia in the span of his life.  Perhaps I've inherited something of his wanderlust.

  

My sister says that the lease on the plot can only be renewed for twenty-five years...although it may be a spot of bon marche at $714, unfortunately I don't have any plans to die before the age of 70.  I might have to hold my horses for a while. (Upon reflection, I've probably had more thoughts in my life about funerary arrangements than nuptials...I guess I'm that kind of girl or that it's a reflection of the Irish preference for thanatos over eros.)

<Plot with a view...below> 

<Irish Martyr's memorial>

 

 

a little conversation

I am at the point of my saga-some Xmas/NYE tour of the east coast where I become so paralytic with tiredness, I can hardly type.  I’ve just gone Katoomba-Melbourne-Sidders in a very short period of time.  I spent last night sleeping in a room the size of a cupboard last night: a cupboard is all I’m up to, at the moment.  I often have a preference for dives when travelling, as long as they’re clean.  I think the smallness of their rooms means less external stimulation so it’s easier to sleep.

As I commented in FB, I’ve been sitting in Potts Point next to a table with yummie-mummies in designer label tops, talking about life’s privations.  I’d forgotten these people existed.  They used to come out at a certain time (9-11 am) on the streets of Balmain when I lived there.  This pair has been talking about talking about the need for 'a safe space for women -- to work out while their kids are in childcare' – i.e. a kind of gym-cum-childcare centre (other forms of exercise – walking, cycling, swimming, etc – aren’t good enough, apparently).   I would have thought gyms with childcare facilities abounded in Sydney.  In Alice Springs, a safe place for women is one where they don’t get bashed.

God, I’m such an inverse snob.  It’s not that there aren’t women whose conversations are mainly about gymming and kids in Alice, tho they’re a lot less upwardly mobile.  This kind of stuff makes me wonder whether I’m going potty: which surreal reality –- Potts Pt mums or disenfranchised Aboriginal women -- is the more real.

Having just flitted between Sydney and Melbourne, a little surreal in itself, I’ve found myself drawn into the Sydney versus Melbourne game, of weighing up the various pro’s and con’s.  It’s a boring parlour game to be sure, which today goes something like this: Sydney – more raffish, more racy, yet more blatantly racist.  Melbourne – more cultural, more socially aware yet more parsimonious, etc.  Etc, etc, etc.  I’m sure Melbourne has its own soma-taking yummie-mummie brigade anyway.

But swayed me more towards Melbourne over the last couple of days is that they have the ‘little conversation’, a transaction in which totally strangers (e.g. vendors and customers) sometimes acknowledge each other’s existence. While I was trying to choose a slice at Melb airport (see FB post), a cleaner came up to me and said, ‘People often go for XX but I recommend YY.’ (No, nothing to do with Mendelian genetics.)  I reckon this would almost never happen in Sydney, tho I did used to have the little conversation with shopkeepers I came to know in Balmain.  People tend to glower at you if smile at them on public transport or swap pleasantries in exchange for service in Sydney. 

The upside of Sydney…high humidity.  My skin suddenly looks like it did 6 years ago, instead of something that would look more appropriate on one of the inmates of Eric Worrell’s Reptile Park.

forty and non-fabulous

So...time has passed and I need to keep up some semblance of blogging.  The other day I was in Booktown, Alice Springs, that literary metropolis, idling fifteen minutes away. I'd been sent there (well, not quite) by the jeweller, who was trying to work out what was happening with my watch.  The supposedly imperturbable Swatch was having some kind of neurotic hissy fit or maybe even PTSD from being taken mountainbiking in central Australia, stopping and starting regardless of whether it had a new battery.

An idle moment in a bookshop is a great one in which to read self-help books you wouldn't otherwise countenance, like browsing through Who Weeklies from 1990 in doctors' surgeries.  I have to say, with these publications I feel initially intrigued (like, there might be something in this, after all) then increasingly soiled.

As you can see, this is all just building up into an excuse.  I started flicking through a book with a title like 'How to be fabulous after forty', the subtext of which was you might think you're pretty good for 40, your friends might tell you you are, but you're not, so listen up.

I gleaned all sorts of pearls of wisdom from between its cover, like: 

• Within every relationship, there is a lover and a beloved.  True, in my house, there's one lover and three feline beloveds.
• Occasionally, an Extra-Special Person in her mid-40s gets married to the Envy of All Her Friends.  Like the author of this book.  Hmm, and my long-suffering and probably much more deserving friend Anna.  
• Men do notice what women wear. And they don't like city shorts.

Okay...wtf are city shorts, as opposed to country shorts or suburban shorts or stubbies? (Tailored, I'm guessing.)

Original readers of this blog will know that shorts-wearing is a sore point for me, after a dinner party that I attended in 2004 where shorts-wearing for women over the age of 30 was hotly debated.  (Doesn't look like it's an issue that's going away in a hurry -- Ed.)  I mean, I demand the right to show my varicose veins to the world'n'all that.  It doesn't seem to be a big issue for Aboriginal women in central Australia, either -- plenty of shorts-wearing there.

But otherwise, I'm surprised by how much of this fabulous and forty caper seems to be all about clothes, and indeed, many of the fashion accoutrements I hold near and dear to my heart were castigated by this book: shorts, chin-length bobs, leather jackets, leggings (what is more useful than a pair of knee-length leggings, I ask, for cycling and getting additional seasonal mileage out of a frock/skirt?)

I find this advice kind of depressing.  On the other hand, I fear that if I don't take it, I'm going to turn into my mother: an inappropriate, shorts-wearing eccentric at the age of 79.  On yet another hand, the book was written by a Pom and I tend to think Poms (even the women) are a bit frumpy...even (or especially) after Trinny and Susannah have descended on them and given them one of those make-overs involving cross-over floral tops.  And T & S have a lot to answer for:  they've heightened my knee consciousness, which means I keep on looking at my knees to see if they've dropped (hard to do from above) and whether they should be exposed.

So this middle age -- it's not a lot of fun.  It seems to be all about prohibitions, a time when you do things with impunity -- or maybe without impunity in fear of a time when you might not be able to do so.  I'm thinking it only gets worse.  Perhaps the 40s are about cosmetic loss and the 50s will be about more serious bodily  loss -- eek!  And if this is 40, what will 80 be like?  Or, more accurately, 88?

On another note: yesterday, I received a summons to TNT's terminal.  Two large boxes were waiting for me.  I said to the girl there (yes, I'm getting old enough to say 'girl'; people call me 'ma'am'): 'D'you mind if I open them here in case they explode?'

When I did, I realised it was the consignment of fifty books promised to me after writing three sentences on an ABC website.  There's some irony in being a competition winner of books, as I've just been having a prolonged mental debate with myself about whether I needed another bookcase and the principles for culling books -- when to turf and not to turf, etc. (The subject for yet another post.) So now I have 50 more books to sift through: at least I won't have to buy any for another year.  And what I am doing: reading the one of the pop-psychobabelish books That I Would Never Buy first: When My Bum Dropped (at the age of 45).

Yes, well, it seems that Middle Age is All About Things Dropping (yet another mindless aphorism).

Otherwise, I'm here drinking my no doubt breast-cancer causing 2 G & Ts or sauv-blancs-with-ice-cubes (yeah, hideous habit) on the balcony every evening.

And do I miss America?  Sigh, yes.  But America'll keep, unless they blow themselves up.  And I always have my HBO box sets to remind myself of American culture at its best.

(And I got a replacement Swatch, which was much nicer than the irreplaceable original.)

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.