Category: being

Current status: all of my fingernails are shorter than I would like them to be.

Or, in other words: nothing to see here. Move along please.

Nah, really, the gym didn’t kill me. In fact, I went back this morning and almost enjoyed myself. Plus, I went to Sydney for a couple of days, had a meeting, saw a submarine and two whales in the harbour, used the hotel gym and got chatted up. I jest not. Along the lines of ‘haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ Good grief.

My mind has been occupied with such questions as ‘how many more people are going to write letters to the editor talking about how we shouldn’t have maternity leave because not everyone will use it’? It is true that not everyone will use it. But thankfully, not everyone uses workcover either. Not everyone needs an unemployment benefit. Also, howcome our arts minister is making weird comments about art, but our sports minister sees no need to comment on poor attitudes to women (in my opinion, bordering on violence against women) as displayed on certain television shows.

Geese, the world is full of geese. And whales.

Am also very busy trying to act like an adult all the while feeling that certain elements of my existence are being given no respect and that particular important relationships are being given no oxygen. Life is complicated, no?

My boys are absolutely gorgeous at the moment. They give me spontaneous hugs and kisses and make up jokes to make me laugh.

The dog is slightly better trained, though he is still getting on the table to look for food scraps (of which there is a great many, this being one of those houses where the dishes do not get taken straight to the sink).

I am considering taking up golf though the mister feels that I will feel myself out of place.

I got a speeding ticket – the first one I have ever had. Nearly two hundred dollars. It made the twenty dollar parking ticket hurt less.

The mister rocks. He is also a rock. From time to time his rock-ness gives me the shits. But more often than not, his rock-ness keeps me keep-on keeping-on.

It is not a good time to be trying to sell a house. It is never a good time to be selling a house on someone else’s behalf.

And all the while, I am madly trying to write putting the finishing touches on my first solo show for its debut in August.

The colour-coded books are beginning to look most ace. Photos to come, hopefully after this weekend when I get them all finished.

Morning: join gym

Afternoon: die

I was just wondering, and it’s no use asking the mister because he’s on the couch watching footy, so thought I’d ask you: do I need a Second Life? It’s tempting, because this one, the First One with which I was gifted, is a teensy bit exhausting right now, and likely to remain so for some time. Would it be any different with a Second one? Or does it just make things twice as worser?

There’s no need to answer. It’s all rhetorical. Isn’t it?

So I spent Wednesday afternoon on a bench at the beach, sometimes sobbing, mostly staring. Nothing that the rest of you don’t have going on in your lives, but sometimes it does all catch up, doesn’t it?

I find the beach recuperative on one level, and yet it always leaves me yearning.

I had a baguette for lunch.

Then yesterday I went and delivered (this is the technical term) my manuscript which is slowly but surely transforming itself into a novel. So, yay. Like totally, awesomely, yay.

I had a baguette for lunch.

With a glass of wine. In celebration.

It left me nodding off in the school assembly.

blah blah blah Monday nights blah blah rhythm of my life blah blah my night to read to children, introduce them to new book, they always complain but by the end are snuggled around me blah blah blah dreaming of evening to self blah blah blah bake lunchbox muffins or cake thinking lovely thoughts of completeness of life all the while going to the kitchen door every now and then to yell down the passage ‘if I have to come down there’ later reinforced with ‘if I have to say this one more time’ blah blah wipe down table blah blah blah thinking of knitting or cross stitch to be done blah blah bladedy blah

when I get to 9.30, sit down with piece of aforementioned muffin or cake, cup of tea (and can I just say that last night’s allspice muffins washed down with chai went down a treat) and watch Enough Rope. Unless he is doing a ‘celebrity’ interview – such as Antonio Banderas, Rod Stewart, certain cricketers, Russell Crowe – all those and more were totally shit interviews where he seems to get starstruck or something and I just channell surf idly until it is time for Boston Legal to begin (I love James Spader, did I mention that?).

When he is at his best, Denton’s interviews are excellent. I very often cry. And last night’s footballer interview surely made me do that. There were positives, and there is hope woven in and out of that family. There has to be. But it’s all the unsaid stuff that’s stayed with me. So much sadness across so many lives. And all of last night, and into this morning, and probably into this afternoon, I am being followed around by the mother’s story and of how it is to watch your baby’s life unfold.

In truth, it is not my trousers that are losing their shape.

Although, and as I would say to the mister were I not about to write it here, I like to think not that I am losing an old shape, but that I am gaining a new.

Because of reasons, I have been having a little to do with Centrelink of late.

The woman said ‘no, you don’t need to inform us of that, it will happen automatically through the Department for this and because of the Regulations for That’.

If that is the truth, then it will be convenient.

But I just can’t shake this feeling that at some point (when I’m busy and stressed with other things and probably have a cold) I will discover that automatically actually meant a little more proactive involvement on my behalf. Even though I was very careful to ask (politely): ‘are you sure?’

On the weekend, I:

• moved my grandfather. I’ve grappled with that sentence a bit. Should I say ‘moved’ or ‘helped to move’;
• drank a bottle of red wine, despite best intentions to have a week of alcohol-free days;
• watched the last episode of series two of the West Wing and felt a bit lost at the thought of no West Wing for at least a week until I get a chance to get back into the ABC shop, and forced the mister to apologise for making rude comments about the amount of money I spent on that DVD set, because isn’t it a brilliant way of watching television shows;
• went on a tour of the West Terrace Cemetery with my Dad;
• helped the mister to hang a load of washing out;
• hid behind the fridge and cupboard doors to scoff the last of the large Easter Rabbit the mister bought me for a present on Saturday night which was so enormous I couldn’t eat it all in one night, and that’s why I had to hide to eat the rest, so no one else would see me and want to ‘taste a bit’;
• grappled a bit more with my upstART set while the mister took the boys to a birthday party;
• read the reviews a few more times, because…well, because it’s exciting and fun, and because I don’t expect I’ll be getting reviewed all that often and I would never be one of those people to say ‘I don’t read reviews’;
• went to see Ross Noble – there was a great many of us running across Grote Street (or is it Gouger) to get to the car park before it closed. See, now, how Adelaide is that…not staying until the end of the encore, because you have to get your car out of the carpark (even if you did catch the tram in to meet the mister because he had taken the boys from the party straight to my babysitting Dad’s);
• went to pick up my boys from my Dad’s house very late at night, then facilitated an interesting and complex manouvre involving taxis so that all of us could get home even though we were all going different places;
• went to see Hot Pink Bits which was really, really good – with just the perfect amount of rude;
• fell into bed at midnight and dreamed frightening dreams about not getting my set finished on time.

So, you know, the usual gamut of emotions.

Next year.

Next year will be filled with more middle ground.

Oh, and yes, there was a car race. Not my can of bourbon, but plenty of people loved it.

The dog’s had a successful day what with the block of the cheese, the two tomatoes, and the half-bowl of rice bubbles siphoned up around the shards of broken bowl from when he knocked said bowl off the table.

Unlike my own day which, despite hours with a rhyming dictionary, a thesaurus, a dictionary, a whiteboard, a packet of textas, and some A2 paper conveniently packaged in a flip chart type arrangement, has resulted in just one funny sentence. And I think funny is a generous descriptor. Mildly amusing. Witty perhaps. But funny? Anyway, that sentence takes my total amount of funnies up to about three minutes. I need twenty. Minutes. In only another four weeks.

I am out of my depth, unable to breathe, because I’ve got a mouth full of whatever it is of which I bit too much off of. I hope Pavlov’s Cat looked away before she read that sentence. The shock of it would of killed her.

The Audreys’ version of Don’t Change is gorgeous. In my opinion. Makes me love Michael Hutchence all over again. Don’t act all surprised and ‘but you seem so sophisticated, how could you have liked the band that everyone else liked’. I already told you my music tastes were pretty standard. And anyway, I only like their early stuff. You know, before they sold out.

Youngest Boy just came out to get a band aid and saw the plums. ‘Why did you melt them?’ ‘Because they were about to go rotten, so I put them in the oven with sugar on them, and you can have them with ice cream tomorrow’.

Stares wide-eyed from me back to the melted plums.

‘Good job, Mum, now that’s just what a Mum would do’.

What the fuck does that mean?