Letters from Newcastle

This is a very quick check in, written from the basement of a backpacker's, on a glorious, sunny day. I had to check my email this afternoon but so far I've spent a staggering 24 hours unplugged from the internet (which is more unnerving than I care to admit). And now I'm back here, sometimes. Never say I don't do anything for you people.

In a couple of minutes I'm going to buy a generic lemonade icy pole and wade into the ocean. It's warm here - my legs are bare for the first time in forever. My legs really get a short shift sometimes, constantly covered in stockings. I had some funny-looking scars for a couple of years and I guess I was a bit self-conscious about them, and then wearing stocking just became part of the routine, but this afternoon I took them off and rolled them up and put them in my handbag and now my petticoat is brushing against them in the wind and I'd forgotten how that felt. It's nice.

I think I might sit down in a park and read for a while, too. Take my shoes off, even. Just relax. I'm wearing the prettiest dress today, that I found in an op-shop, home-made, fits perfectly. We decided to hit up the op-shops before the hardocore TINA hipsters came and ravaged them, and in the second one we went to I saw this dress and fell in love. It's cream with green polka dots and piping and small puffed sleeves, which sounds not so appealing, actually, but it is. So it will please me aesthetically to go lie in a park in my pretty dress and wiggle my feet in the grass and just read.

Then tonight is ginger beer and readings; tomorrow panels and the ocean; and a long stretch of weekend filled by I don't know what. At the moment all I want to do is curl up like a lizard in the sunshine, so that perhaps. That and lots of lemonade icy poles.

Sun rise, sunglass...

I've been wearing one-armed sunglasses for quite a while, now. Usually I am pretty good with keeping sunnies intact, but a few months ago I happened to leave my handbag in the vicinity of several small children, who had no compuction about borrowing my possessions for dress-ups (or writing all over my arms in permanant marker, which I admit I could have stopped but these were very charming small children. Sigh).

Anyway, I was in the city this morning so I decided to buy some new sunnies. I tried some white wayfarer-esque ones on recently, and they really suited me, and then I saw every fucking baby hipster north of the Yarra wearing them, so I did not go back and actually buy them. Which, really - it doesn't matter if they're trendy, right? I needed sunglasses and they looked good on me. I decided to buy them anyway.

The shop where I had originally tried them on was out - of course - so I did a quick browse of the chain-stores. Sportsgirl had a really fantastic shape, but in pale lemon - uck. Just Jeans had the right white but fairly crappy frames. Portmans had some hot pink ones, which were tempting as fuck, but I do tend to draw the line at neon. Eventually I ventured into the den of mindfuckery that is the Myer Basement, where some bright spark had labelled the house-brand faux-wayfarers as 'Dunsts'. Please, someone give that woman a raise!

Since I was in Myer anyway, I headed up to the toy department (shut up), where all thoughts of sunnies were knocked out of my head... because where once toys occupied every inch of the floor, one corner now was given over to Christmas decorations. Fucking Christmas decorations, rows and rows of them, and thin tinny carols being piped over the loudspeaker, and I think I swore out loud at the obscenity of Christmas in September. And then I felt incredibly guilty, because every time you swear in the Myer toy department, Santa anally rapes an elf - or something.

Anyway, I think that's it for me and Myer. After the Basement experience I wasn't too keen to actually patronise them (remind me to go on a rant about the Myer Basement in more detail next time we have a drink), but Christmas decorations? Really? Also, I started to veer off into a big mind fuck about conspicuous consumption and began equating my desire for new, unbroken sunglasses with the kind of mindless, disposable culture that big, corporate Christmas trees in September perpetuates. But then I realised that my broken sunnies were about to fall apart, and popped into Episode, that haven of all things hipster, and bought the fucking glasses. Because you know what? They suit me, and I like them, and I'll keep them long after the hipsters have discarded them for the next big thing.

Or until an adorable child rummages through my bag and breaks them. You know. Either way.

Hair today...

So I had my first stint as a hair model the other day. On the upside, I got a ten dollar haircut from the most competent stylist at my salon. On the downside, I had to sit excruciatingly still for an hour and forty-five minutes while a dozen hairdressing students scrutinised me intently and discussed my height, posture, head shape, jawline, skin tone and personal style.

I came away from it with a shit-hot haircut and also a new respect for people who do appearance for a living. I guess you lose that self-consciousness quite quickly if being scrutinised is your job, but I've never felt so tired and plain and puffy in my life. It didn't help that I was massively hungover, undercaffeinated and had just rolled out of bed, I guess... or that I wasn't wearing make-up, or that the lights in the salon were rather glaringly bright. Or that because appearance kind of is a hairdresser's job, all of the students were perky and bright-eyed and perfectly groomed.

Anyway. I had the haircut, and then we had the party, which was fun (in retrospect... I was totally, utterly unable to be objective at the time, but there were balloons and cheese biscuits and the like), and the magazine should be in shops soon, so look out for it. And on Wednesday I am getting up at an obscenely early hour to catch a cheap flight to Newcastle, where I will be attending this festival and no doubt behaving rather rowdily when I am not sitting on panels and organising roundtables and the like. They want me to talk about getting started in the writing industry. Ha!

Also, notice how I have not mentioned my fortnight-long hiatus from this blog at all? Smooth, hey. Life has been rather hectic and frown-inducing recently, but it seems as though I am destined for sunshine and kittens and gin for the next little while, so life is good. Yup.

Nothing more to say, really.

Hooray! (plus shameless pimping)

So finally, finally we've sent the magazine to the printers. No more coming in to the office on the weekend. No more freaking out over late content or wrongly-formatted illustrations or chasing ad artwork and getting nowhere. Hooray! We can all breathe out.

We have the proofs lying over a chair in the office as I type. They are beautiful. By next week they will be bound up into magazines, ready to send to boutiques and bookshops, so they can be sold to real live people who will read them and hopefully like them.

I can't believe that Jelly and I sitting around drinking gin and saying "you know, we should really make a fashion magazine" has eventuated in... a fashion magazine. I'm still not sure that we can afford to do this but it seems like we're doing it anyway. We're going to try to get the website up in the next week or so, with a bit of content and contributor bios and the like, so you should go check that out. By the way, when I say "fashion magazine", I don't mean something you won't enjoy, you nerdy, hyperliterate reader, you. We've got heaps of good stuff, like an etymology of jeans, an analysis of op-shop economics and a reflection on fashion's place in a post-surrealist art world. And lots of pretty pictures. And some hot design. And its all by hot young Melbournites, too.

You should definately buy a copy, but you should also come to our launch party and have some free beer, and watch me become a happy goopy mess without the girdle of stress pinching at my waist. Or something. Propping me up? I don't know. All I know is that I am so, so relieved to have this thing out of my hands.

Thus endeth the pimping. Oh, and also I landed an internship this morning that I'm pretty pleased about, so I have many a reason to celebrate. Let the period of stress be gone! Let the drinking begin!

Actually, I wouldn't mind a gin right now. Anyone? Bueller?... Bueller?

Blogging for Christ

Not much new to report. New batch of cupcakes, lemon and rosewater, sitting on a trestle tale ready for sale. New not-at-all-what-I-asked-for-but-people-seem-to-like-it hair colour. New daffodils poking through the earth in the backyard.

I've been getting itchy feet, and have to fight the temptation at the moment to drop out of uni and get a credit card and pick up my backpack again. Since it's not likely that that will actually happen, why don't we both just pretend that I am not actually sitting in an office in Parkville but rambling all over India? Yes, it's lazy, but nothing I write today will be as entertaining as travel stories and also, the second comment over here still cracks me up. Okay?

God bless u 2, will pray for your safety and well being,

GBU

LOV jess.

Tired

God, I'm tired. I was working in the office this afternoon when a great wave of fatigue came crashing down on my shoulders. The kind of fatigue that makes you feel physically sick. The kind that makes you feel tired in your bones. It was a battle not to crawl under my desk and sob, a battle that I think I would have lost had I stayed in the office much longer.

Yesterday I took a day off work to go to my grandfather's consecration. Unlike at his funeral, the sun was out, and it wasn't too cold. It was bitter when they buried him. Yesterday the sun was out and people barely cried, although I did get a lump in my throat when my father read the eulogy. We thought the rabbi was going to do it, but he didn't, just motioned to my father, who took a prayer out of the wrong pocket and got flustered and had to start again.

It was a nice ceremony. The rabbi talked about the symbolism of the tombstone, and translated the inscription from the Hebrew, and mentioned that we could keep Papa's memory alive by emulating his good qualities. That was nice. I hadn't thought of it that way before.

It's been a year since he died, and I miss him, but it was his time. What got me the most was seeing the blank stone beside his, and my nagyi's skinny little legs sticking out of her skirt. She always wears slacks, but you can't, not for a ceremony like this. My father renounced Judaism at seventeen, but he made sure my sisters and I wore skirts. My grandfather was a devout man.

The consecration, in Judaism, puts the cap on the mourning process. You sit shiva, do the kaddish, and eleven months later, cease to mourn. It's considered a sin not to get on with your life, because otherwise you're wasting your time on the physical earth, and God's not letting you stay here forever, you know. But deep down, I don't think you ever stop mourning. I'm not sure I believe in souls, and I certainly don't believe in the afterworld, but yesterday I was mourning for a man whose quiet dignity and strength of conviction often blinded him to the potential joy in the world, but whose life experiences made the joy he found extraordinary. That's schmaltzy, but it's true. I was mourning for my grandmother, who, after fifty-eight years of marriage to the decent man she married after her first love was lost in the war, has lost another love. I was mourning, most of all, for my dad, who, on Father's Day, a holiday he disdains, stood at his own father's grave and read the euology, saying, "these words were not written for me to speak - but I will say them."

Anyway. It's not the weight of grief on my shoulders, I know that. It's just a momentary fatigue that's probably come from too many days in the office, too many late nights, too few vegetables, and making countless cups of tea for the extended family who descended on my parents' house and didn't leave 'til dusk. Probably a good nights' sleep is all I need, but also a quiet sob, maybe - a quiet sob, not a sinful one, for the people left behind.

And then maybe I can put the cap on these last few months, and get on with my life.