Category: being

view from the pont

From paris

leaf shower

From paris

after dark

From paris

untitled

From paris

From paris

…
So I took my boys to Paris for two weeks, and can I just say that if the mister had left me alone in the desert and sent me numerous texts along the lines of, ‘OMG, this is brilliant, this is really brilliant, this is fucking brilliant,’ then he would not have returned to a clean bathroom and a laundry basket cleared of its backlog. But there you go, some of us are born generous and some of us are not.

Because of reasons (not the least of which see above) it was an emotional couple of weeks. We followed our trip to The Louvre (Mona Lisa, check) with a walk through the rain (OMG, it’s raining, this rain is brilliant, you should see this rain) to The Orangerie where hang the waterlilies.

On walking into the first of Monet’s rooms, I cried, and not just eyes-watering with OMG-this-is-beautiful kind of crying. Proper tears streaming down my face crying. I suppose it’s a middle-class, middle-age cliché to stand in Paris crying at the beauty of it all, but rarely have I been so moved as I was when I was standing, sitting, standing, sitting, always crying in front of those paintings.

Eldest boy said, ‘This is because you can’t believe how lucky you are, isn’t it?’ which tells you something of the preceding days, because it wasn’t just the big things that made me cry, so many small things made me think and feel in ways that I think I had forgotten I used to think and feel.

As I, for example, looked away from the young man and his daughter on the metro; as I shared a smile with the woman who brought us our hot chocolates and asked the lads about their diaries; or as I watched the jeunes flirting on the footpath on Friday after school I felt…well, not one thing and not another. I just felt.

It felt good to feel.

At each of these (and at many more hundreds of) moments, I was thinking of the connections that we make with people we have never met and with whom we will share nothing more than a minute or two, and sometimes only a second.

For the longest time, that’s what my blog was about. Something, a seemingly simple something, would happen, and I would be struck by the depth of the simplicity in that something, and a feeling, a physical sensation would build, then a rhythm would start to form, and then words, and then voila. A blog post.

And that, I realised at some point in the last week or so (probably while I was on the metro, we spent a lot of time on the metro), is why I have been so alarmed at the loss of my blogging mojo over the last year or so. It is a sign or a symptom of my shallowness, of a superficiality of feeling. I didn’t blog, because I didn’t feel.

Not feeling is not good.

Or perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s sometimes what your body needs.

I don’t suppose you need to be all that smart to work out what’s at the bottom of this loss/lack of feeling. The grief, the move here…perhaps I will write more about that tomorrow. I did intend to write about it now, but I have to go and play mastermind or backgammon, because I’ve got a little lad who stayed home from school because he couldn’t wake up and now he is especially cuddleicious, so I am going to cuddle with him and play mastermind or backgammon. So for now, I will just say that I have missed feeling, and I have missed a sense of connection to the world around me.

Which I’m now fairly positive all sounds truly middle-class and middle-age cliché. I guess if it walks like a duck (which I sort of do on account of all that vin and fromage – OMG the cheese, you should taste this cheese) and so on and etcetera.

from youngest lad’s journal

From paris

Even when you’ve got the moral high ground, chucking the shits still looks mighty undignified.

Moral of the story: if it’s dark, close the curtains so you don’t accidentally catch sight of a reflection of yourself in the window.

Or don’t chuck the shits.

Cakes are less easily redrafted.

So I was halfway down the third seam of my second skirt when I remembered I was sewing trousers.

So I was putting the fnishing touches to a skirt which fits but does not flatter, and my mind turned to other matters, like this, that and the other, and it occurred to me that if I were a word, I would not be eponymous.

For while eponymous does its job of being one word where otherwise there would need to be three most excellently, it is the kind of word which is only ever used when a person needs another person to know that they are the kind of person who knows the meaning of the word eponymous.

My, but I’m a sucker for a bunch of schoolkids singing. I am, you are…zippedee doo dah…der glumph went the little green frog, it really doesn’t matter. Kids sing, I cry. So, despite it all, I had a pretty awesome time in the school assembly this morning watching eldest boy singing Education Rocks and youngest boy reciting There was an Old Lady.

Wish I could be at the Adelaide Town Hall tonight (or maybe it’s tomorrow night by now).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQxHxloG854&hl=en&fs=1&]

The problem with tryng to make rational, reasoned decisions is that all rational, reasonable arguments have perfectly rational, reasonable flip-sides. There are just as many reasonable reasons that I should stay as there are reasonable reasons that I should leave.

It’s a big decision, and I’ve more or less made it, but all the same, I keep looking around and thinking, But if other people can make it work, why can’t I?

The other day, the mister said, ‘You know, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. You don’t have to justify that to anyone. You don’t even have to justify it to yourself if you don’t want to.’

Maybe he just said it because he’s sick of the circular conversations (fuck knows I am), but I tell you that man is wasted as an engineer.

On the phone to his granny, eldest boy describes his last week thusly:

On Monday, I go to Spanish club after school, and I’m learning the Spanish alphabet, so now I know four alphabets, English, Greek, Arabic and Spanish…on Thursdays I go to soccer club with my friend, and he’s partly from Egypt and partly from America and he’s so funny, you should hear his jokes and he’s definitely coming for a sleepover next week…and last night, we went to our friends’ house for Happy Diwali…what? Diwali is Indian celebration – yes, they’re Indian, but they live here now – and all of the house has beautiful lights hanging from the ceiling and also this special coloured sand in patterns outside their doors…younger brother? No he’s not home, because he’s gone to the beach with his friend…hmmm? Oh, she’s from Australia, but not our part of Australia. Have you heard of Sydney?

Because of reasons, I’ve been looking for a job. Which leads me back to the old ‘work-life’ balance issues that you’ve all discussed and thought about, and how many days I want to work (in order to be at an interesting, challenging job that lets me sink my teeth into it) in relation to how many I need to work (in order to pay bills as well as buy books and so on) in relation to how much time I need to do other things (possibly finish my second novel, bake muffins with youngest boy, trip over the vacuum cleaner and so on and etcetera).

People, I think the week as we know it is broken. This seven day structure might have been just tickety-boo and dandy for the Gregorians, but it does not suit our modern times. It is time for a revolution in time. It’s time.

For myself, I can see an eight day week working very well indeed. Take our house, for example.

I could work four days and have four days off. Four days in the workplace allows me to find an interesting, challenging job that I can sink my teeth into without feeling that I’m picking it up and putting it down all the time and never quite immersing myself in it. I still have four days for writing a bit, baking muffins and constructing cubbies with youngest boy, tripping over the vacuum cleaner and so on.

The mister, the type of person who likes to spend more time in the workplace, can do his five days, but with three days off, has time to go swimming with his boys and put the next load of washing on.

Not being awesome at numbers, there could be some flaws in my adding up, and maybe the week should be nine days. Whatever. I think the general idea is one of my best. It does rely on the minimum wage being enough that four days work per week provides enough to live on, so that’s an issue, and I don’t have a solution to that. But potentially, workplaces could become more productive – say if the week was nine days, they could have two people doing one job at four days each, which is eight productive days instead of five. And when workplaces become more productive, they make more money and when they make more money they can pay employees more and/or employ more people. That’s how it works, right?

The mister says that changing the calender is impossible and that my thinking on this issue is not clear enough. Which, again, with the vision.