Sick days

I’m not sick but I’m not well.

What I’d dearly love to do is to take a sick day or two. For a sick day I’d have to phone work. I’d have to sound ill. I’d have to present some kind of medical certificate to prove that I’m ill because, of course, there are only two states of heath – well enough to go to work or so ill you have to go to the doctor.
I do not sound ill. I do not have a cold, my nose and throat are relatively clear, there are other kinds of illness but, for effect, colds really are best. If you were to check you would find that I have an elevated temperature but that’s no biggie, I get a temperature with PMS and headaches. My head kinda hurts but that means nothing. I kinda ache but, again, how do you prove? I am extremely tired despite the stacks of sleep I’ve had over the weekend. I am unusually emotionally fraught. Great, now I just sound depressed.
This is one of the things I hate about the modern world – having to ‘prove’ everything. There’s something wrong, I can feel it, I just can’t prove it. I keep asking why I should need to prove it and then I remember that it all comes back to work. You cannot just have days off. Being there, no matter what, is more important than your relative performance – this seems quite ironic to me as my workplace is obsessed with statistics. Technically, what I do is customer service. I feel ill in a way that is affecting my mood. On two counts I will not be able to do my job properly – I temporarily lack the temperament to work effectively and deal with the fuckwits and I’ll be doing it much slower [thus effecting my stats] as I do not have my usual concentration span. But since I’m not sick enough for a doctor I shall have to go to work. I’m sure this makes someone, somewhere happy.
Alas, I also sound like a complete whiner. For most of history people haven’t been able to just stay home and rest because they don’t feel well [think of the epidemics that might have been saved if they had] they’ve had work at whatever they did come what may. Why should I feel irritated because I can’t do what I think is best for me? Perhaps that’s it – the knowledge that with this, as with so many other things in life, my opinion seems hardly to matter. Actually, it doesn’t matter at all. And I am making mountains.
I could do it but I would be wracked with guilt. My boss would make me feel guilty though they could happily manage without me. Instead of resting justly and to feel better I’d spend the day worried and fretful about wasting my sick days. It would do me no good. So I shall spend about three hours tomorrow feeling ill on public transport, I’ll spend eight hours at work feeling funny, I shall get stressed at nothing, and I will be paranoid that I have made mistakes. I shall save my sick days for when I am really ill and I will become really ill through ignoring feeling ill and pushing myself and my health. Which, of course, is the modern way. People pride themselves on what they can work through, what they can cope with, how they have to be hospitalised to be stopped for want of just nipping it in the bud. I do love the way things work.

I’m going back to being melancholy and queasy.

More of nothing

I went to the hairdresser today. This means that my day was very long indeed. It also means that I’ve come to the end of the day looking absolutely beautiful. Okay, so my hair looks beautiful [and will right up until I touch it], no fuck it, I look fucking smashing. With a big fuck you to all who disagree.
I always find the hairdresser an absolutely uninteresting and exhausting business. Well, I like watching them work – it can be quite fascinating. The having to chit chat with the hairdresser kind of stinks and listening to the hairdresser comment on what a lot of hair I have is rather yawn making. I realise that I have rather a lot of hair. I’ve always had rather a lot of hair and I’ve yet to meet the hairdresser who didn’t feel the need to comment on it as they hacked and slashed at my locks. I very nearly broke my hairdresser today. First with the four hundred foils [half-head to the uninitiated] in three colours. That took rather a lot of time. Sitting and waiting for them to cook took rather a lot of time too. Time passes slow when you have a roll of foil messed up in your hair. The washing elicited another comment on what a lot of hair I had and forced some reply about how she, at least, didn’t have to do it all the time. She was surprisingly sympathetic which is how I knew that she wasn’t just bitching. The whole cutting thing wasn’t too bad for either of us, actually I think we both felt perverse joy at watching all those dead cells snip snip to the floor. The blow dry nearly made her cry. It takes about half an hour to blow dry my hair even when half of it has been removed. Correction, it takes about half an hour for someone else to blow dry my hair, I’ve long since given up the notion as a bad one. She was holding her arms in a strange manner after that and felt the need to flex them rather a lot. More hacking at this point in a not entirely vain attempt to make it less bouffy and just less. More hacking and more commentary about what a lot of hair I have. Finally, and with lashings of relief on both sides, she finishes and we have a really rather ravishing me with significantly less hair. Oh joy of joys and great relief. My head feels all light and it has nothing to do with the emptiness of my skull. Need I mention the banter about my hair that this great ending inspired? Thought not.
I have never seen anyone look more relieved to hand back my credit card and see my arse as I walked out the door.
There goes another three hours of my life.

La Triviata

I’ve just cracked the first bottle of Stoli for the six-month summer season. Today was, I thought, disturbingly unseasonable. Damn this more than two real or imagined seasons thing, it’s far too complex.
I am in a refreshingly mellow mood bought on by the innumerable beauties of grog, alone time, a three day weekend, and Belle and Sebastian [aka ‘what is that depressing shit’, it’s not depressing, cuntface, it’s music, and music with highly entertaining lyrics but since the dulcet tones of -- actually, last I recalled it was some top twenty shit or MMM that you were listening to..], and several hours spent giggling along to Yes Minister. You can tell I have no real plan for this entry. I may just ramble until I become inebriated. Go team drunk. Ugh, how American.

‘You say I’ve got another face, that’s not a fault of mine these days’

That’s really a nice tie in for the things that are shitting me [aside from me, of course, but there are only two ways to solve that problem one of which is exhausting and the other somewhat tacky]. Things, with particular emphasis, that are shitting me particularly are insincerity, pedantry [particularly from the woefully under/overeducated and pretentious], and that old standby the scary, scary inbreds of the world. I do not feel the need to elaborate on cretins and thus putting an end to my post…oh, no, wait – there could be some kind of rant in here somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, if I throw in a needle and dive in after it then I’ll find what I’m looking for...
I most particularly hate the pedantry of the Haitchers – look that up in the dictionary, fuckfaces, see what you find. Those who desire to quibble over the smallest thing [perhaps thinking themselves wits?] whilst making their own gross errors should, quite possibly, be lined up against a wall and shot. Really, what happened to the firing squad? Then there are those who are dismissive of those who do not pursue the same dizzying heights of education that they have. This is such a boring rant I can’t be fucked elaborating. Oh dear, my laziness astounds me. Which might well be a reason for my abbreviated university career – oh no, that’s right, I’m dumb as fuck. I must try to remember that. Oh to rant and rave now that spring is here.

Do ice cubes, if left in their tray in the freezer, evaporate? I really cannot believe that I under filled the trays to that extent, even drunk I am not that stupid [naysayers well know how to contact me]. They do evaporate! Great, now someone sciencey tell me why [Arts wanker, sorry, sorry, put it in really simple terms please].

There is one last, completely trivial and thus utterly unlike the rest of this post, thing that I’m after – music. I have become bored and need something mellow and marvellous for the summer. Suggestions welcome. Other commentary can get *yawn* whatevered.

High School Reunion

High School Reunion

The Bridget Jones Version: weight, let’s not go there; alcohol units, please; cigarettes, second-hand smoke but just from the one; calories, see weight; husbands, nil; children, nil; biological clock, tick tock; pets, one cat not in my custody; property, Sydney um no; houseplants, see calories; ghosts of high school past, just the one or two hundred…

High School Reunion

It’s a marvellous concept, isn’t it, the high school reunion? Indeed, high school is a fascinating concept – a holding pen for several hundreds of teens who have yet to become aware that they really do not have to be there and that there is infinitely more to life. Teens who are forced together by the proximity of their homes to a certain group of school buildings and whose solidarity is fostered by the intolerability of their situation, their own stupidity, and the halfwits with cattle prods elected to educate them. It is natural that in such a situation that the inmates, being unable to see beyond their multifarious prisons, would turn on each other. There was little else to do, we weren’t being educated or anything. Five years of high school, five years in each other’s company, five years of loves and hates, five years too long and then release. Those five years created some friendships that have lasted, that will last, as long as we do. Those five years created a world of enmity that nothing can overcome. Who forgets the slights of their formative years that are laughed off by the perpetrators as childish pranks? Who left school believing that those were mere pranks, that we weren’t playing it for real? Who believes that seeing those old buddies, those chums, those cunts who dumped you the moment they could, and those old buddies, chums and cunts that you dumped as soon as you could should be brought together to relive the joys of the old days when we were young and free and complete arseholes to each other? Who wouldn’t want to see the people who ignored you for five long years and in the insecurity of first year university were suddenly your best friends? People like that are pure gold and surely must be kept.

It’s a marvellous concept, isn’t it, the high school reunion? It is a wonderful way to herald the successes and failures of one’s life. It is a brilliant way to compare and contrast the progress of those deluded pilgrims of a high school hell ten years stale. Can’t imagine why anyone would be less than eager to attend. Gosh, think of the catching up that can be done. After ten years the oldest of us would be twenty-eight, life has succeeded or failed by the time one is twenty-eight, hasn’t it? Isn’t this why we congregate, to find out who the winners are and which of us predicted the losers? We’ve had ten years, plenty of time to have adapted to an adult world and adopted the accoutrements of adulthood. I, for one, am terribly eager to be tried and judged by the yardstick of ten years. Life has not, I’ll admit, been quite what I planned it. It’s funny how you actually have to work at things rather than just dream them into existence. You have to work at life, to make it what you want. I guess it all depends on what you want and how you judge.

High School Reunion

I’m superstitious about the number three. Life, unfortunately, has a tendency to follow patterns, these patterns may be real or they may be imagined. I imagine that for the little things three is significant.
So I heard about the high school reunion, the first time, via an email from the organiser [mother of two beautiful, wonderful children, wouldn’t you know] via some crappy school friends’ site that I joined because there were a couple of people I regretted losing contact with. We didn’t really lose contact, that was a definite choice, it almost always is. Joining the website did, in fact, put me in contact with one of those people as she emailed me and we began to tentatively reform our relationship. It also led me to hear about the school reunion for the second time. The third time was through my sister. Minding her business while shopping one day she was accosted by a girl from my year who just happened to be her checkout chick. ‘Tell Nails that there’s a school reunion and blah and blah and blah.’ Seems she really wanted me to go. They all wanted me to go. The question is why. I can see that for an organiser the success of the event is marked by participation. If you can call people back from interstate or, better yet, overseas then you have been truly successful. Isn’t it funny how capital outlay equates to success? Locals you never really lose contact with. They serve you in the shops, the see you in the food court, you attend the same movie session, you live in a fishbowl you’re bound to see the other fish every so often. Having someone dedicate a trip to your cause is worth bragging about having them turn up because they only live twenty minutes away and might as well is an achievement nothing. I can also see why the other two want to see me. I spent a lot of time in their company, a lot of forced time, a lot of teenaged time and I guess they thought they knew me quite well. They, of course, want to see if I’ve turned out like they thought I would. I have and I kinda haven’t but then, I don’t know what they were expecting.
I know what the general attitudes of the school and the town and the generation were. I grew up there, it’s hard not to know the people if you’re around them. There is a sloth in that town. I think it’s because of the heat, the deadening tropical heat. Heat that drives you insane because it’s too hot to move, the air is soupy with humidity, you can feel your brain softening and melting, you blame the heat but is better bestowed upon the apathy born of entrapment. It’s a small town so there isn’t much to do, lots of alcohol and sex with strangers in a way that isn’t replicated here, but little else that it isn’t too hot to do and nothing that you haven’t done before. Culture flees somewhere near the border despite the attempts to bring everything in mini doses, again ten years too late. There are drugs, of course, if you’re lucky. There is a certain sad inevitability to life, a small town expectation that is fulfilled one generation after the other.
The make-up of the town in a strange one. There are those for whom it is an awesomely big city, almost scarily so, they cannot imagine places that sprawl greater with millions of people. There are those for whom the town is small and incestuous, without even six degrees of separation. There are quite a lot who a forced there by posting and the money that some crap jobs entail. These are the ones who are filled with horror and leave shattered months and years later screaming never again. There are those who come as outsiders and quickly acclimatise – they find the tropics relaxed, the climate enjoyable, and don’t mind the parochialism. There are two choices for anyone really – go mad and leave or go mad and stay. For those who ingest the myth of the good life as it is taught by parents and by school there is really only the one option, staying and living the small town life. There are those who flee and are defeated and return with gruesome tales of big cities and interpersonal callousness but everyone knows their failure. Still, it’s a nice place to raise the kids. You don’t have to worry about the terrible things that go on in big cities, the abuses and the rapes; we’ll have none of that here. You don’t worry until the national news starts telling the nation of exactly what goes on at the barracks when the boys are at play. Tucked up in small town suburbia you go on ignoring and discuss how the media makes a meal of the slightest thing. Those who stay inevitably end up suburban. There is no city to speak of, no inner city life in fact or in style. The town itself is an amalgamation of suburbs that seem to have accidentally drifted together and have no grand unifying theme. Those in the suburbs always end up with children in fairly short order. Sometimes there are husbands or wives, sometimes defactos, sometimes the sex was too easy and there were moral considerations. Never mind, move on. The cycle that led to deadened suburbia turns again and creates a new generation.
Of course, there are those who flee never to return for longer than a week or two and then with nerves taut and valium at the ready. Careful, they might keep you. They are the few and are forced back, every so often, by family and friends or drawn back by notions of success and showing those bastards the who’s who. It is the majority that judge the minority. The minority judges and cling tight to that moral high ground but they just don’t have the numbers. You will be judged on how you look, but then you always were. You will be judged on your success. Ah, but what is success? Is it successity or necessity that forces you to work despite your screaming brats? Perhaps you are choosing to do something meaningful while mum minds the kids. The house is being paid for, slowly and surely, with your sweat while you uphold a society that is otherwise crumbling. Your norms, I stress your, are the norms of everyone, or so you tell yourself. You cannot understand what stops others from embracing the life you claim to cherish and you do not analyse your nebulous envy. You’re nearly thirty. This is what it is to be an adult. You have your whole life together and it will go on this way decade after decade after decade. You will work to keep what you have. You will work harder for the dreams of retirement when you will be free to roam the world and do what you want.
One day you will look back at how young you were ten years after school and you will wonder why you didn’t do more. Until then you will judge those who do not conform as freaks, hell, they were probably freaks at school, you always knew they’d be a bit strange as they got older. You will laugh at their lack of responsibility at twenty-six or twenty-seven or twenty-eight. You will congratulate yourself on how you’ve achieved so very much, on how wonderful your children are, you will leave the party early, at twenty-eight, because you have to tend your well ordered life. You will laugh up your sleeve at those untied who carry the night away and dance on through the hunting grounds of youth. Those who behave, at twenty-eight or seven or six, like they’re still so very young when you’ve left all of that behind. You will tell yourself that their independent lives are aimless and soulless that happiness lies in another and in serving others. You will tell yourself that it is the family that matters, that will always matter and that will go on mattering. You will tell yourself that they were unsuccessful and couldn’t find what you have but they want it, everybody wants it. You tell yourself that they’ve copped out, denied responsibility, live like children.
You go to your school reunion to show them all how successful you are, you go to laugh at the losers. It is a black and white world in this sense, there can be no going back, the school reunion is not to catch up with people it is there for you to rate yourself. You go in telling yourself I am successful look at what I have achieved and you come out successful because of your already determined measure. Before you go on you have decided success and failure, just as you did at school, just as you will always do, and you will leave knowing that the triumph is all yours just as you did at school.
Oh I know why they want to see me and it isn’t goodwill and friendship. We used those excuses up a decade ago and were glad to see the end. They want to take out their little yardsticks and measure me up. They want to tell me who I was then, who I am now, how I’ve changed, how I haven’t changed. They want to tell me who I am and they want to tell me who they are. They want us to all pretend at each other again. They want validation ten years on because it’s all changed so very much…

Darkness

I'm the kinda kid who likes a nice place to sleep. Think quiet. Think well ventilated. Think all kinds of coziness and comfortness. Think dark. Think very dark. Think of waking up and having to *know* where you’re going because all is dark that you cannot see anything to navigate by. That’s how dark I like it to be to sleep. No nasty little chinks of light creeping from under the door or any of those horrid gapes in curtains that let in just that smidgeon of light. I have venetians [very dusty, faintly decaying, belonging to the flat] on my bedroom window; I’ve never once opened them. I also have curtains – two sets, the first is to block the light [and hide those venetians] and the second cause they’re gold and they fucking rock. Let it be said that in sleep I hate the light. I will get out of bed and fix things if I see any light when I’m trying to go to sleep. I will even do this in the middle of winter when it’s freezing. I am rather dedicated to the eradication of light from my sleeping space.
This is one of those posts that relates directly to the one before.
So, I take myself to bed last night [there are so many things wrong with that statement], I climb in, I switch out the light and have my eyes open as I get myself comfortable and, ‘what’s that?’ that thing, that little green light thing on my goddamn ceiling? Ah yes, as if a fire-alarm in the bedroom when the only exit to the place is next to the kitchen and through the living room isn’t weird and annoying enough, I find out the hard way that said alarm has a permanent little green light which sweetly shines RIGHT ABOVE MY FUCKING BED. I am, oh so mildly, annoyed by this. This will annoy me on those nights where, for unknown reasons, I have become insomniac. It will shit me to tears when I’m drunk/hungover. For the moment though, it just annoys me.

Fucking realos

How can I put this…
It’s nine in the fucking morning on what is my Sunday morning because real estate agents in combination with tradesmen, perhaps that should be tradesmen in combination with real estate agents, suck. Whatever, it’s nine a.m. and I can barely find the right keys let alone type logically. Also, it’s morning and all my windows face east – I haven’t been up this early since I moved in, okay, maybe I have but it’s still painful and so very bright in here. Where was I? Oh yeah. Out of bed, crack of dawn, Sunday morning. There is a reason for this, I’m almost certain of it. Let me fit this puzzle together. I’m out of bed. It’s morning. Early morning. There was a strange man here. It’s something to do with the evil realo. There are very loud noises above and below me – buzzing, drilling noises – and that other noise, a high pitched piercing thing that would make a three day old corpse fall out of bed and stand to. Oh yeah, that’s it – fire alarm. My flat and those of my nine neighbours are being fitted with fire alarms. Fire alarms times ten, you know they have to test them, at nine a.m. – bastards. I hate tradies they keep the most peculiar hours and can’t understand why you’re standing there cursing them. I keep losing my threads as my teeth begin to ache from the drilling sound. I know I want to rant but it’s just too early and sunny and noisy. Plus I’ve taken the opportunity to play hausfrau. I am actually washing up, there are knives, I am half asleep, and it could get messy. I am doing other houseworky things like the washing – such a good drying day! [I’ve committed that to print. Oh no. Someone find me a baby to coo over. Oh my ovaries!] I have plans to [I can barely type this] clean. Ugh. I hate mornings, they make you do the weirdest things.

Sharing is caring

About a week ago I felt the need for pink toenails and went forth and purchased baby pink nail polish ever so charmingly named ‘Frolic’. Yeah, cute and cutesy. Just not me. Didn’t quite suit me [not my tiny toes anyway]. I subsequently decided that what I needed was a hotter pink. Yeah. It’s suddenly summer after all. So I went out today and looked and looked and looked – honestly, there never is the perfect shade of hot pink when you want it, next week will be fuchsia-fest with just the right colour everywhere – and found one that will suffice. A Barbie pink called ‘Wonder Melon’ – Barbie does seem to be the theme of the day, I woke to some Barbie thing on the telly [oh what nightmares]. So now I have toenails so dead sexy I could shag my own feet. Okay, no, not really, but I do feel like hitting a pub on a beach and flashing my toes in a flirtatious manner and drinking myself silly. Drinking myself silly and inventing names for nail polish colours – I’ve decided that that’s my ideal job. Colours that I presently own [you didn’t think it was just a name, now, did you?] include ‘Seascape’ [it almost matches my bed-linen, damned almost], ‘Pure Chrome’ [really, is anything cooler than looking like you’ve dipped your toes in molten metal?], ‘Speedfire’ [RED! And named after two of my favourite things], and ‘Zeitgeist’ [yeah, mostly bought for the name]. Theses should be written on the naming of nail polish and how it reflects our society. Probably it’s already been done, being done…
Ah frivolity! Where would life be without it?
Now I’m off to re-read ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ to settle an argument with my sister. Hell, what else are Sunday afternoons for? Oh yeah, beer.
Don’t worry though, I’m sure to keep looking at my ‘Wonder Melon’.

Pertinent petulance

“You cannot understand the weak,” said her lover. “He is not conscious of having done wrong, he did all he did to survive. That is the supreme argument with the weak. They think all mankind should do them homage because they survive. Can you understand that?”

My, how relevant this seems to some of the conversations I’ve had recently.

I find people fascinating, perhaps the most interesting things ever to be created or to have crawled and evolved out of steaming messes. If I have a hobby then people are it – really, how can you not watch? How can you not be fascinated by the foibles and habits of individuals? How can people’s visions of themselves fail to excite interest?

Ah but that last one is the killer. Don’t we all take ourselves too seriously and those who protest contrary even more than the rest? My target, aside from my precious wee self, is a particular group who rage rage rage about their own survival and expect credit for it. There is little honour in living through – or is there? Isn’t it what you make of yourself, your situation, your great trails and tribulations that counts? It’s what we choose to become, Harry. What is it to have been born? Not much, happens rather a lot, happens to rather a lot – one might say all – of us. Some things you just get over. None of us can help our families or our upbringing or the thousand abuses inadvertently or deliberately acted upon us. We can but mould ourselves with what we discover we are – and eventually, we ought to discover who and what we are. Then, though, those who don’t – what becomes of them? Oh I know what becomes of them. They tell us, she says – defying the gods of irony, of themselves. All the time. They have no other real topic of conversation. If they succeed in anything then they rest upon their pitiful laurels and expect the world to trot up to them and fall prone. When it doesn’t – oh! cry conspiracy! The dragged up cannot succeed. The heavy hands of the wealthy and fortunate hold them down – tall poppies everywhere. Always they have to prove themselves in tiny petty ways to those who intimidate them most: I’m smart, aren’t I smart, don’t you think I’m smart? aren’t I pretty, look at me I’m pretty, oh a boy, flirt, smile, seduce, run, I’m sexy they all think so, so pretty and sexy, so smart, why aren’t you looking at me? tell me I’m pretty, tell me I’m smart, I don’t have to prove myself to you, I worked so hard to be here, I overcame such obstacles the like of which you’ll never see or understand, oh how they criticised me for being smart/pretty/sexy but I am, you know, I am, I have been so abused, so unloved, everyone should love me for I am wonderful, aren’t I wonderful, tell me I’m wonderful - and so on and on. They always have to compete. They always have to share. The minutiae of their every experience revealed, shared, anguished over with the expectation of your approbation. Anything you say, any trauma you suffer, they trump you – for they have had it so much worse. Always. And they will go to great lengths to tell it to you. And the more you intimidate them the more they have to tell you. The more they have to tell you of your privilege as compared to theirs. On and on – and finally, one day, it occurs to you that they have suffered no distress but that of their own making. What they’ve chosen to focus their lives on is not betterment nor is it real living – they’ve chosen to focus on the petty and mundane, to turn molehills into mountainous feats, to almost half succeed in being totally miserable. Misery because that’s what they want, because it’s what they think their ordeals should create, because that is how they survive, because they don’t know how to live.

‘Oh I’ve got your number, taken notes, I know the way your minds work. I have studied. And your minds are just the same as mine except that you are clever swines:- You never let your mask slip, you never admit to it, you’re never hurried. Oh no no no. And every night I hone my plan – how I will get my satisfaction, how I will blow your paradise away. ‘Cos I spy.’

lol

The Birdman

Coming home from ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ earlier this evening I chanced to see the Birdman wandering down the street. Seeing the Birdman, all clean [for him] and shiny with fresh brushed hair bought something of a smile to my face. I like to know that Birdman’s all right. It makes it seem like there’s something right in the uncaring word. It appeals to my sense of justice, in a funny sort of way, and knowing that someone else is caring for him makes me feel less of a bitch.
Let me tell you about the Birdman.
He is something of a Newtown social feature, all unto his little self. The homeless man who, in a weird quirk, is not homeless at all. I know he’s not homeless because he used to be my next-door neighbour. Literally next-door. He had the bed-sit next to mine. My cockroaches were the descendants of his cockroaches. [Which explained why no matter how many I killed or how many mutants I created there were always new fresh unmutated ones. They obviously preferred my place because there was food to live on. I also think his place may have been a bit too grubby for them.] We shared stuff – like my complete avoidance and distant sympathy. We also shared a set of stairs where he would collect flotsam from Newtown’s wheelie bins. I discovered a lot about Newtown through him. The people round here throw out some weird shit which is understandable given what scrap it was. Less understandable is how and why they acquired it in the first place. His habit of collecting is one of the reasons I nicknamed him Birdman. Talking to him is, well, thoroughly frustrating and a mistake in case he remembers you, so I shunned all conversation and never learned his name – assuming, of course, that he’s know it to share it and was into that kind of formal exchange. So, anyway, Birdman for his Bower Bird ways and also for his habit of whistling, like a bird, to the birds and sundry persons who crossed his path. I used to wake of a morning not to the sounds of birds but to the sounds of Birdman. Twitter twitter. The other reason for calling him Birdman was the fact that he is off with the birds or possibly the pixies. His reality partly co-exists with ours and then moves on to something he evidently finds more palatable. A reality where he talks with the birds [or the pixies, whatever] and I think they probably respond in a mutually intelligible way. A reality where he chirps at people as they walk down the street and they smile because they know he is harmless.
He is harmless. He is also one of the many people who fall into the cracks of a city like this. He is incapable of looking after himself properly – by which I mean keeping sufficiently fed and clean. Not sufficient to my standards but to general health and well-being ones. He eats what he finds when he is hungry and finds it wherever. He has a room to live in but no real notion of keeping house. The electricity either baffles him or he doesn’t understand the need to change light bulbs or even buy them. I don’t think that they weren’t bought for want of money. He lived in a bed-sit, he had a key, this suggests ownership or rental. I doubt that he would be capable of being the rent payer, of getting money from the bank and handing it over. I’m not even sure that money greatly figures in his life. I’ve never seen him beg for it and I’ve never seen anyone give him any. I think it just doesn’t feature in his world. Much like the lights. If the light was switched on then all well and good, if not then not and not another thought about it. Someone, somewhere looks after at least some of his needs, perhaps underestimating what his needs are or perhaps his reality just shifted a little further away without them noticing. I know that he’s looked after because one day someone came and cleaned out his room – really cleaned. Truckloads of rubbish and muck removed. The place cleaned and fumigated. The cockroaches moving over by the droves and looking shinier than any of their predecessors. The Birdman disappearing for a few days before coming back freshly scrubbed and with a clean new jumper and pants that weren’t bordering on immodest. This happened after I’d lived there nearly a year. I had been known to wax lyrical about the fate of Birdman, the fate of Birdmen – especially while drunk at parties, his situation was analogous, I felt, to the state of the nation. Too many fall through the cracks. Dedicated policy to stop looking after those unable to look after themselves. An increase in people on the street, the closing of mental institutions to all but the dangerous or wealthy – and frequently letting the dangerous out for not being wealthy. The Birdman is one of those people, a person who needs care, who is not going to be rehabilitated because it simply isn’t possible. He has his world, and a right to it, but he does not have the right to be neglected and ignored because of the habits of our society. Yes, I preach. Hypocritically I do nothing about it but bitch and whine which is why seeing the Birdman all clean and shiny with fresh brushed hair makes me smile. Someone is doing something for somebody who needs it. I think that’s good to know.

Whingy little bitchy

I don't know if I'm over-reacting but I'm starting to suspect that there's going to be some serious conflict between me and my family regarding my immediate life plans. They seem to have come up, without any discussion with me, with a map of my future. One that suits their plans, correction, one that suits their needs. Actually, it's mostly just my mother and sister. They've been determined to hold on to me my whole life. Really hold on. So much so that I am starting to feel smothered. Smothered and a bit fucking annoyed.
I can accept that my sister needs always to live in close proximity to our parents. I can accept that she will follow them wherever they go - and I don't doubt that she will. I can accept that she will always feel the need to have her family all around even though I do not consent to be party to it. I can accept an awful lot of things about what she deems right and correct in her life. What I cannot accept is her underlying determination that I shall, eventually, accede to her wishes and her plans for me. She has a strong will. I would have thought that, by now, she might realise that I have one too. I am aware that she does not like my plans. She has not liked my plans for years. She did not like my moving away and she does not like my staying away. There is part of her, despite my constant refusal and protestations to the contrary, that still believes that I will move to small-town-land, to Hicksville, and be happy. To be happy in place where I dislike the climate, the people, the mentality, and the society in general. To be happy where I hate.
There's also my mother. She wants me to be wealthy and successful. These would reflect well on her. I do not doubt that she loves me, that either of them love me, but they want far more from me than I am willing to give. They want all of me and I want all of me. My mother wants me to compete in ways that she was unwilling to do so. She also wants me as an eternal child. There are contradictions. I am supposed to make up my own mind but also to do what is wanted from me. Perhaps I am supposed to make up my mind to do what they want? My mother wants my free time. Wants to know all of my business. All. Always. I thought about it recently and I realised that all the leave I'd taken from work in the last couple of years had been spent with my family. This means that I have either had them with me in Sydney or I have travelled to them. Almost as though there are no other options in life. Nowhere else to go, no other plans I could make, nothing else. I am made, because she is a master manipulator, my mother, to feel guilty for expressing so much as a want of anything else. 'But don't you want to see Mummy?' Well yes, and no, I'm nearly thirty, I may be your child but I am not a child. You need to let me go. You need to accept that what I want - no matter the holes you see in my plans, or the conflict it provokes, or the thousand things that could go wrong - is right for me.
What I want, and really, you should have seen this coming, is to go away again. Farther away. For quite a long time. Distance from them has, for me, been a necessity. I need to know that I do not need to be looked after, that I can make decisions. I need to know who I am and what I want. Not who they think I am and what they want for me. I need them to treat me as an adult but I don't know how to make them do so. I would like them to listen when I complain but I have stopped because they intervene in stupid and embarrassing ways. 'But Mummy was just trying to help.' No, Mummy was just trying to interfere. Not trying, succeeding.
I want to be oh-so-bloody-Australian and go to see the world, live in the world, escape this island for just a little bit. I want to know that it's really there. I want to know that it's really worth it. I do not want to live the life of my parents [I did for years, it's called childhood, it was a bit dull and full of created stresses that I do not want.]. I do not want o live the life of my sister. I will not live aimlessly until I accidentally fall pregnant and then live for my child. There has to be something else. There are quite a lot of something elses.
Alas, my plans are soon. Near future. Actual plans, not 'one day I'll'... One day is over. Time is passing, has passed. Some things have a limited shelf-life. Sometimes there is a now or never and I am rapidly approaching it. I know that, to a certain extent, the indefinite holding pattern that I have let myself fall into suits them. It has stopped suiting me. A brief check into reality has me earning nothing, paying to much rent, working in a pointless, dull, mind destroying job, spending far too much time alone, becoming a person that I really do not like. Too much nastiness, gossip, bitchiness. Too much aimlessness. To much ignoring of my own beliefs and truths. A belief that what I think, what I believe is invalid. That what I want is invalid. I want and plan to change. I plan to do what I want. I feel myself to be selfish for wanting to live my life on my terms. Why in hell should I feel selfish? Of course, I will be considered so despite the fact that they are all in good health and much as they think they might need me their need is a mere want. They are none of them dependent on me for money or care. They can live with my presence elsewhere as easily as here.
Oh well, guess I'll see.

In the news

*nailpolishblues selling soul to pursue dream*

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Somethings...

Some things ought not be done. I ought never to google Vietnam veterans and children together. It makes for depressing reading. It makes me depressed. Yet I feel compelled to read on.
Isn't it funny how certain realities do not connect until seen in bold black text?

Holy shit, I don't even know if my father came home by boat or plane.

Sydney Rain

Ten-thirty at night and the sky is pink with rainclouds. The streets are wet and all I can smell is rain and jasmine. How could you not love this city? How could you not write of it and adore it?

Why did nobody ever tell me to read Christina Stead? I've fallen in love.