A week in review

Because the year in review seems too fucking difficult in 40-degree heat.

Besides, anyone reading this thing already has a grasp on the majority of my banal ramblings for 2007, but which of you knows what I've been up to this week? Who participated a Pimm's/Campari orgy as the sun set over the last days of the year? Which of you surprised me with phone calls, gifts, and gossip? It's simply thrilling to guess, isn't it? The answer, of course, is no. But because you seem to still be reading this, here is the week in review. It contained:

- One partridge in a pear tree: not really but a family breakfast and general Christmas merriment (read: inebriation);

- One frightening and yet also tedious trip to the emergency ward (bonus points if you can guess which family member was writhing around on the floor in pain asking for morphine);

- One whistle-stop tour of Mt Eliza (and the relatives assembled therein) with a quick detour into Mt Martha for a goodbye beach trip with a very bestest buddy who is on her way to Washington right now (whose identity will be revealed when I link to her blog in the very next post);

- One Pimm's /dumpring orgy ;

- One completely delightful and unexpected breakfast date;

- One pizza packing night with aforementioned soon-to-be Washingtonian;

- Three seasons of Arrested Development;

- And some other stuff I just can't remember. Let me know if there's anything I've missed out. And Happy New Week!!

High on life. No, seriously.

So right now I am flailing around my room, dancing to Tokyo Police Club, folding pointy origami birds for Georgia (don't ask), and drawing picture of dinosaurs. I just thought I'd mention it because I realised that this thing has been fairly downcast recently... I was also reminded by the lovely Mary K (of course) that life is actually pretty fucking sweet right now. Hence the dancing. Hence the recording of said dancing on teh internets.

Somehow I didn't even realise the date until the last minute, so I popped out today to get some craft supplies and now I am making craft like a motherfucker. I'm a little too broke to buy everyone presents this year, although since two of my housemates work at this bookshop I managed to get a whole lotta books at what I think was a slightly under-the-table discount, but luckily I have friends who find origami monsters and slightly abstract portraits charmingly whimsical. At least to my fact, they do.

Anyway! Dancing around the room, whoo! It's a party for one! Would you believe that I'm stone-cold sober, too? Jober as a sudge! I'm high on life! Maybe also meth! Just kidding! But I am happy, because I get to make things for all my friends, and because this year, which has been stressful and a little wearing but also incredibly professionally and socially fulfilling (props to my student media darlings!), is nearly over, and a shiny new one is on the horizon waiting to be unwrapped. Because someone tried to pick me up at Kmart today. Because I got a job that lets me write things and because I won't have to work in hospitality for at least three months.

So yeah, kittens and rainbows and all that. I have to go now and construct an elaborate diorama for an unnamed housemate featuring an origami paedophile and its loving yet dangerously infantalising mother. I'm heading to the beach for a couple of days, but I'll see you after the break - I hope you get everything you ever wished for!

Ouch, part infinity.

Jesus Christ, can this year just be over? I don't think my liver can handle it anymore. I ended up leaving a party graced by my favourite Adelaide-dwelling people last night because my body just would not cooperate. And they're back to the city of churches tomorrow. Damn.

This morning, of course, hit me like a tonne of gift-wrapped gifts and I ended up lying very still in bed all morning until the room stopped spinning, then shuffled to the milk bar at three to indulge my craving for a white-trash breakfast. Lesson learned - from now on we will stock emergency cans of tinned spaghetti and a bag of liquorice alongside our more prosaic groceries. Oh God, the pain.

It's not even that I drank particularly much last night - or "binge drank", as the kids seem to be saying - more that a couple of weeks of accumulated liver abuse coalesced into one critical-mass style hangover. Can that happen? Apparently it can. I think the woman at the corner store thinks I lead a rather dissolute lifestyle, as she was full of matronly concern when I walked in looking anaemic and dressed like an Olsen twin by way of the Prada A/W collection from a few years back (ie. homeless but in rich, secondary tones). Plus, she probably thinks that all I ever eat is liquorice, flour, and tinned goods. If only either of those assumptions were further from the truth.

Cent choses

Today was a good day, a day of things turning around. It's midnight now and a storm is brewing over Brunswick. All the windows in the house are open and I'm sitting in front of the computer with a mojito, feeling antsy in a good way this time. A change in pressure always makes me antsy, as if all the little ions zapping around the atmosphere are playing ping pong off the table of my skin.

It's felt like an uncommonly long day, actually. Time is doing funny things at the moment, stretching and snapping and generally playing tricks. This morning we, we being my house and we being a cohesive unit at the moment rather than the fragmented mess of previous months, went to the bike sheds on an adventure. One of the nice things is a bike waiting for me, a plum-coloured beauty being rebuilt for the new year. Insert easy metaphor here, please.

According to Blogger, this is bewildered's one hundredth post. I don't particularly feel compelled to celebrate the occasion. When I first started this blog is was as a way of avoiding getting lazy, to write frequently if not consistently. I've succeeded on that count, I guess. I've set myself a year's minimum on this thing and we'll see if it keeps going after that, or whether this experiment has actually taught me brevity and structure. Oh, fuck. I just gave away the ending, didn't I?

Trois choses

1. In praise of sleazy dancing. Friday night was a spectacular night for dancing, with rhythm and motion being achieved at two separate venues. It was a sweltering night, and we danced so much that we felt almost purified, the way middle-aged women do after a sauna. I went to the bathroom and ran my head under the cold tap, and then continued to dance, my fringe slicked against my forehead in little wet clumps.

2. If my life were a movie it would have an indie soundtrack. Our barbecue got rained out yesterday so we converted the occasion to a pizza night on the sly. Various people attended and converged in a social manner. Two of them stayed over and we went out for breakfast and sat around talking about film, politics and etymology. I walked back from the bathroom and for a minute time blurred and they began talking in slow motion and laughing cinematically. The upended milk crates they were perched on and the studied bohemianism of the surrounding patrons precluded classical or popular music.

3. Christmas trees are the bee's knees. At my parents' in the afternoon a box was procured containing twenty years of homemade Christmas decorations. The smell of pine needles made me nostalgic. My dad made a joke about paedophilia and my mother confessed a fear of feral horses. I agreed that they would probably be more scary to confront in the street than feral dogs or cats but less likely to encounter in the inner suburbs. The sunburn on my shoulders from breakfast made me sleepy and I fell asleep on the couch. My mum drove me home, and in the car my sister told a story about witches' hats.

Stood up. And fatigued. But definitely not crying.

There are times in my life when I think I'm cracking up. And there are times in my life when I know I'm cracking up. Fortunately, at the moment I'm pretty sure I only feel like I'm coming apart at the seams.

There are a few stresses in my life at the moment - job hunting, family stuff, household stuff - that I'm managing to hold at bay with a combination of demented optimism and baking. I tend towards certain Pollyanna tendencies that keep me afloat where otherwise I might not be so buoyant. It's a rather grimly determined policy of looking on the bright side, and making a conscious decision not to worry about things I can't immediately change and to focus instead on the smell of gingerbread, or the feel of clean sheets, or figs finally ripening on the tree.

It takes an effort though, I guess, and occasionally that effort is just too much effort. Tonight it feels as though I'm leaking out everywhere. I know it's not polite to talk about one's mental health, but I might as well put it on the table that there have been periods in my life where I have been, well, not so well. I've been pretty stable for the last couple of years, and I can tell when I'm going to hit a bad patch and ride it out, but it's the reason that I couldn't get out of bed this morning until no-one else was in the house. It's the reason I go for long stretches without sleeping more than two hours a night, and why I bake banana bread at three in the morning. And it's the reason why, after a friend called an hour before he was supposed to come over for dinner tonight to cancel, I started to cry, discreetly, on the tram.

I do tend to do things discreetly - most people would never notice that I was going through a patch, because when I am going through a patch I would rather die than let on that I'm not coping. And people aren't all that perceptive, either. Anyway, I never really considered writing about it on the internet, either, except that I just read this and something in me broke a little bit. This was me two years ago, right down to the baking. It explains things better than I could, anyway, so maybe you should just read it.

And then you should go bake a batch of cookies, and then be thankful either that you're not of a depressive disposition (why is it so hard for me to write that I might "suffer depression"?) or if you are, quietly remind yourself that there are other people out there who know how it feels to spend every day in a haze - to have a great cloud of static hanging over your emotions, to not be able to make even trivial decisions, to find yourself despairing that nothing - no matter how dramatic or self-destructive - will ever shatter the bell jar.

Like I said, I know I'm not falling apart. At least, not tonight. I'm going to brush my hair and go to a friend's gig and maybe have a quiet sulk when I get home, and then I'm going to wake up tomorrow feeling better and berating myself for being a drama queen. I'm probably going to dump the food I bought to cook tonight in the fridge, because my housemates aren't home and cooking a feast for one seems kind of laughable, and eat pickles out of the jar and finish off the so-pathetic-it's-charming(?) Weight Watchers brand cottage cheese in the fridge. I'll be fine. And if not, the world could always use another batch of gingerbread.

Somebody employ me plz? Kthxbye.

The weekend passed in a haze of gin and animal masks and backyard-hanging-out, as Jono and I went to visit the lovely Caroline for birthday shenanigans. Caroline is based in Frankston, and Jono's parents have a place in Rosebud West, so we packed up the car with various bits and pieces and took a winding and scenic drive to the beach. It was a particularly pleasant weekend, commencing with Jono and I splitting a bottle of Aldi-brand gin and making increasingly crude jokes, and concluding with my being dropped of at my grandmother's house for the traditional Channukah overfeeding.

Unfortunately, delightful sojourns from the real world can't last forever, and so now I am back in the office, eating leftover bagels and looking for a job. There seems to be depressingly little out there involving writing/editing/subbing and I am afraid that I will have to return to hospitality in a few weeks' time. I don't really mind waitressing too much, but I would prefer a writing jo for obvious reasons, not least because cafe work is so notoriously badly-paid.

So, if anyone knows of any wordy-type positions out there, can you give me the heads up? I've done freelance technical writing for a dental imaging company before, as well as fooling around with student media and small press, so I'm game for any sort of technical writing as well as fiction and journalistic writing, editing, and proofing. A job truly would be the bestest Christmas present a friend/reader/anonymous commenter could give me... with gin coming in a close second. Just kidding! I am not a sleazy delinquent but fully employable! Seriously, someone hire me?

Shorts for summer

I met the delightful Mary K this evening for dinner in the city, starting and culminating with free drinks at her place of work. Along the way we stopped at Pellegrini's for $13 pasta, and met up with our friend Ben for a quick cocktail at Madame Brussels, whereupon the conversation took a turn for the smutty. Amongst the printable things discussed, prompted by one waiter's incredibly hot shorts and blazer combination, was Ben's intention to bring short shorts in for summer.

I tell you, I could not be more pleased with this decision. Long have I been an advocate of trunks, shorts, and their leg-revealing ilk. I was recently mourning the fact that a man's well-turned leg is no longer considered worthy of attention or adulation, but hopefully a revival of short shorts for summer may help turn the tide back towards a celebration of the muscular calves and shapely thighs of our masculine friends.

What do you think? Are Ben and I alone in wanting to see more man leg? Personally, I feel that woman have shouldered the burden of legginess for too long. All I'm asking for is equality here. A little pin parity. After all, the fundamental tenets of feminism demand that men and women be treated equally. And men's legs, recently, have not been displayed, objectified, and lusted after as frequently as women's have. So it's only fair that mans flash a little gams. Preferably whilst wearing seersucker shirts, hats, and/or spectacles. And carrying a jug of Pimm's. That would just about make me pass out from happiness, I think.

Gingerbread jihad

So recently I have been on an absolute baking spree, and I have to say I am enjoying every minute of it. Usually my compulsive baking is linked to nerves or stress (don't tell me I'm the only one who whipped up a batch of election cupcakes!) but lately I've just had itchy baking fingers.

Tonight I found myself at my parents' place, drinking Baileys with my mama and baking an army of gingerbread stars and hearts. I amused myself by imagining a star/heart gingerbread war, with each side attacking and devouring the other until they realised the devastating (and cannabalistic) gingerbread cost. Grief-stricken, many of the remaining soldiers offered up their lives in a ritual fire. This explains why there were half as many biscuits left in the kitchen an hour after I baked them as there should have been and why a few where looking a little charry around the edges. Well, actually, my sisters were probably responsible for some of the devastation...

We don't have that many holiday traditions in my family, as we tend to alternate Christmas and Channukah as the Big Deal holiday and thus get lazy about every-year kind of things. But one thing we've done consistently, without fail, is make gingerbread houses, decorated austerely with dustings of icing sugar or riotously with raspberries, mint leaves, smarties and liquorice all-sorts. Christmas is really one of the few times of the year that it's socially accptable to bake like a motherfucker, so I tend to take full advantage of people's willingness to eat tiny gingerbread soldiers and proceed accordingly.

Recently the whole gingerbread thing has gotten a bit out of hand, and I've found myself manning gingerbread house construction lines staffed with neighbourhood children, tiny cousins and tipsy best friends. Which is nice. Although, when I think about it, one of the warmest, fuzziest parts of the experience, for me, is remembering making the houses as a child with a twinkly old German woman named Sigrid. These poor neighbourhood children are going to remember some vintage-dress-wearing twenty-year-old, hepped up on sugar, swearing in French, and making up songs about the various stages of baking. Oh dear.

Anyway, I have such nice memories connected to the gingerbreading, and that's probably part of my deepseated baking fetish. The other part is probably pathological. But what the hell! We will let them eat cake, or at least gingerbread. And then let them lie down on the couch with a strange craving for gherkins wondering how it is possible to ingest that much molasses in one sitting as they fall into a hyperglycaemic swoon. Er, not that I would know anything about that...