A beautiful clumsy day.

Just book me a show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival already, because my morning was a comedy of errors.

It's my dad's birthday today, a fact which I had completely neglected last night when I was madly sewing buttons onto a canvas. Shit shit shit, thought I. My dad never makes a fuss over birthdays and if it were up to him they would probably just slip by unnoticed, which is an attitude I've inherited. I mean, it's nice to acknowledge the fact that someone's alive, but isn't it nicer to just be generous and thoughtful on a daily basis instead of concentrating all that attention into praise for the fact that someone was born? Congratulations - you successfully escaped the womb? I digress because I am loopy and tired, but the point is that I had nothing to offer the man who raised me until I had a fuzzy moment of illumination in the shower and decided to take him out to see Carlton lose one night. I mean play. Where am I going with this?

Oh right, he was coming over this morning to drop off a dress that Mum had made for me to wear to Lily and Ryan's wedding*, and so we sat down for a cup of tea and had a chat. It's funny how much I sometimes miss the little things about living at home - snuggling up on the couch, racing my dad for the nine letter word, drinking cups of tea, silly running jokes that don't really go anywhere. I think also in the last years my parents have started to treat my like an adult - a vague, occasionally petulant adult - to the point where I was having coffee with my mum the other day and she said, 'It's so good to take a break from parenting!' Which was nice, but at the same time, I'm still not really used to being an adult yet so if you want to adore and protect me a little while longer that would be fine.

I am wandering all over the place here! Anyway, after my dad left, I went to wrap the watercolour I had done for Lily and Ryan - I'm a bit broke and making things is always a good way to say "it's the thought that counts" - and what did I do but SPILL WATER ALL OVER IT. I spent the next fifteen minutes betwixt stages of dress, trying frantically to dry my hair while simultaneously drying the canvas. In the end I just had to add more purple, so Lily and Ryan, that is why there is so much goddamed purple at the bottom of the painting. Man, I hate purple. I can't think why I even included it except to even out all the yellow. Which is now unbalanced. By all the purple.

Because I didn't have time to dry my hair properly I threw the curling iron on, and promptly burned myself with it. Burning myself reminded me that I had left the kettle on, which had pretty much boiled dry by that stage. Oops! I finished my hair and put on the dress, which turned out to be too short for the slip I had borrowed, and fortunately it was Housemate Bec and her super-fantastic lingerie collection to the rescue. Thanks, Bec. Feeling somewhat calmer I went to touch up my make-up, putting on concealer in the steamed-up bathroom without realising that I still had paint all over my fingers. I had a purple chin. Thank God I had a second look before leaving the house.

Getting dressed I laddered my stockings. Somehow, I cut my foot. And my hand. But then none of that mattered, because I went and met Tilly on the corner and walked to the wedding and the clumsy clumsy day became a beautiful clumsy day.






*I kind of feel a bit uncomfortable writing about the wedding as it was so intimately Ryan's and Lily's that it feels like theirs alone to tell. So I will just mention briefly that it was beautiful - funny and unpretentious and charming, and full of a quiet grace. It made me feel temporarily less cynical. I think everyone felt that way - warmed pehaps; melted slightly by being in the presence of two people who are so genuinely and steadfastly in love - and it felt like their little house was throbbing like a golden heart, illuminated against the eggs-and-bacon ordinariness of a Saturday morning in Brunswick. It made me wonder how many small fragments of beauty play out every day, unseen by most but cherished by a few. It made me feel optimistic about the inherent goodness of the world, but maybe that's just the champagne talking.