firstperson thirdcat

Some things:

* I was going to tell you the story of the flowers (see below), but as it turns out, it is not at all what I thought it would be, and so it requires more work.

* I wrote you the excellent story of an encounter I had in the playground earlier today, but wordpress lost it - suffice to say it ended with me thinking ‘well, I hope my children teach your children to say f**k’

* This weekend, I will not be reading Philip Adams’ column in The Australian magazine thingo. No, really, I’m not. I hadn’t read it for months, and then I read the one he wrote about John Button. Doesn’t he bore himself with his constant ‘anyway getting back to me’s? And yes, I get the irony of a blogger accusing a journalist of being a narcissit. But, like, at least I let other people get a word in.

* Facebook has pretty much weirded me out. But what will I miss out on if I leave?

* I’m not going in the ABR reviewing competition. You can still do it if you like, but since I’m not in it, it means you might come second. Second seems to be the reserved spot for me. Actually, I’m not feeling too down on myself about it, I’m just marvelling at my consistency (of which I have been reminded twice in this week alone).

* I do not have to go and scrub the laundry or the kitchen floor or the bathroom this weekend. The house is on the market (I am not some kind of landed gentry, I’ve just been co-ordinating a real estate ‘project’ - not my specialty if you know what I mean).

* We went to Target to buy socks and undies for my boys. Have I ever told you how much I hate shopping. No? That’s because words fail me. Shops suck. Especially shops which drip synthetic onto your skin as soon as you walk in the door and which always seem to have all their stock strewn across the floor. Why is that? If I wanted to sort through shit strewn across the floor I’d stay at home.

* I considered applying for a job. A really interesting job being the Arts in Health co-ordinator at a hospital. I’m sort of qualified for it. Sort of. But it’s three days. I just can’t fit it in. What with one thing and another. Plus, I do have to spread my opportunities for rejection around carefully (see point about coming second).

* There is more, but it gets progressively more boring after this…

do have a good weekend, won’t youse?

So I was in my garrett, writing a new story that begins like this:

“If  he asks, she will tell him she grew the flowers. In the garden bed behind the shed. She’d planted them in May, forgotten she’d even put them in.”

But it turns out the daylight robber I thought I could hear in the kitchen (below me) was a pigeon. And it turns out beagles are good at catching pigeons.

And the story is unlikely to be what I thought it would be when I began.

So, we need to decide on a spelling.

Is it ‘yous’ or ‘youse’?

PS And don’t be smart - it isn’t ‘use’.

I would like to write a little about the relationship (or the contrasts or the comparisons between or whatever word you would use) between Helen Garner’s decision to use the name ‘Helen’ as the narrator of The Spare Room and the way bloggers decide to use their own names or synonyms or some combination of the two or sometimes change their minds (and what happens after that).

It is potentially very interesting, I think, to talk about such things. For example, I feel myself blogging very differently now that I am merely pseudonymous and no longer anonymous.

However, I can’t write about such things, because I have not read the book. It’s all a bit too close to home right now all of that about death and anger and so forth. I’ve picked the book up three or four times now - I almost know the first page by heart - but it’s not going to work. I won’t be reading for it a while.

Have you read Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado? You should. Let me know when you’ve read it, and I will tell you a little about how reading El Dorado kept making me thing about blogging.

And if you’ve got nothing to do, do feel free to come and help me conquer this Mountain of Washing.

This evening, I am watching Look Both Ways and drinking exactly the right amount of red.

It’s that kind of night, don’t you think?

Do you know why it’s one of my favourite films? Because of the train driver and his son. One of the most beautiful depictions of the fragility of it all. Ever.

PS This is the view from my the verandah at Kangaroo Island. I found it on my camera the other day.

PPS (sorry, Drew, I can’t remember what you said it was supposed to be the second time) I do not lust after William McInnes in the way that you probably expect me to - as previously discussed.

Because of reasons*, we stop on the way home so that I can buy a new toothbrush. We agree that I will collect a bottle of milk as well. The promised showers are much in evidence and it is getting late. So, it is definitely dark, but not exactly stormy. The mister sits in the car with the boys. I go in.

I have been to this supermarket many times before and so I find the aisle with the toothbrushes easily.

I stand, and I look at the array. I close my eyes for a moment and then I turn away.

I return to the car, open my door, poke my head in, which leaves my bottom in the rain.

I say: ‘which toothbrush do I want?’.

The mister says, after he has rubbed at his balding head and I have wondered to myself ‘when will balding no longer be a process, and become a state of being bald’: ‘you’re serious, aren’t you?’ and I reply.

‘Yes.’

He says ’stop wasting my time’ in the tone he very rarely applies to his words. I say ‘will you go and choose it for me?’

His silence - momentary though it is - is that particular parental silence which asks ‘what kind of precedent is this’.

‘All right,’ he says. He is gone longer than I expect him to be.

When he returns - with a toothbrush, milk and a packet of lollies which he shoves between his seat and his door before the children can see them - I say ‘you see, it was hard’ and he says ‘the toothbrush was easy, the lollies were hard’ and I say ‘why, they’re just all variations on a theme of compressed sugar’ and he says ‘oh, why didn’t I think of lolly bananas, that’s what I should have got’.

We are at the railway line by then. We are not stopped.

I say ‘time was, there was only soft, medium, hard, and the colours were only primary and maybe orange. Do you remember? They were all Tek. In the old days, choosing a toothbrush wasn’t hard.’

The mister says ‘next time, just go and pick the first one you see that says medium. There’s no difference after that.’

I say ‘yes there is’ he says ‘no, there’s not’ and by then we are home and all that is left to do is put the children to bed, eat the lollies and clean our teeth.

*oh, yes, every moment of my life is loaded with significance

Last night, I realised that it has now been several weeks (at least) since I sent ‘be my friend’ messages to the three or four people on facebook who share my name.

And not one of them seems to have accepted!

Why on earth not? Isn’t that what it’s all about? Obviously, I have misunderstood this social networking getup.

seaweed cliffs

Originally uploaded by adelaide writer

Amongst the seaweed cliffs, your feet are in the water, the wind is in your soul.

All that is hard is behind you.

Ahead, endless hope.

You are alone and on the edge because you want to be.

Why did you let yourself forget that you can feel like this?

Turn around again, you can do anything, be anyone.

Don’t forget the whispers.

Bring them home.

monopoly

Originally uploaded by adelaide writer

There’s lots of things I’ll miss about the holidays, but this isn’t one of them.

What was I thinking?

Also, as you may remember, I’ve been spending time cleaning up my computer so that it stops stopping and so that I can get some more photos on. But the wordpress photo uploader really isn’t working that well. Are there things I should know?

Not much to say, really. Deciding whether to watch Grey’s Anatomy or get an early night. Have to get up in the morning to make lunches for school.

Rock n roll.

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?

Is it just me and my house, or is it normal for children to go fucking bonkers when other children come for a play?

I’ve locked the dog in the laundry with a bone. There was no alternative.

So, in between all these bouts of backup madness, I was treated to ‘a show’. The ticket promised that it would be ‘the most halarias show in the world’.

It was called ‘The Disgusting and Rude Show’.

Before the lights went down, I was warned that it was ‘a bit PG’.

Which it was, featuring as it did, ‘the rude finger’ (all four of them) and farts live on stage.

I know I shouldn’t have laughed.

I’ve been doing a bit of an update of wordpress. Not to 2.5, because I’m using fantastico on cpanel, which hasn’t upgraded that far yet. Did I blind you with my science? You know I don’t have a clue about what I just said, don’t you?

Anyway, it’s going quite well so far. For example, my blog hasn’t totally disappeared. Though several draft posts are nowhere to be found. They were probably crap anyway.

The real thing I’m hoping to do is have better photo functionality. Do you like the way I used functionality? That’s my first time. I love the sound of it, even though I strongly oppose the use of such ridiculous words.

So, here’s a photo. I just found it while I was doing aforesaid backups. I went to London a couple of years ago. By myself. It rocked.

Are you impressed? I’ve said fantastico, functionality, and I’ve been to London.

At the moment, I am backing up my photos, so that I can delete some from my computer, so that my computer is no longer so close to full that it keeps breaking. Over the last few weeks, I’ve even deleted the acrobat reader programme, just to try and leave some space so that I didn’t have to attend to this awful job.

Part of the problem is that the photos are not organised. They’re just in dated folders. This seems no way to begin the long-term storage process. But if I wait for the day that I get around to organising them properly, then…well, as you know that day may never come.

Meantime, I have oodles of spiffy new photos taken with the spiffy new camera the mister gave me for Christmas (he is ace at presents, he really is). None of them have made it off the camera, because the computer doesn’t even have room for the software.

So, in the spirit of getting things off my to-do list, I am just doing things. Whether or not the pre-conditions are perfect.

‘At the moment, I am backing up my photos…’ it sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But it comes with all those messages with which I am sure you are familiar. Messages about ‘media’ ‘not recognised’ about ‘disk full’ and ‘windows is shutting down’ and this little yellow dinosaur icon which appears when my computer is thinking thoughts it apparently can not think.

I don’t need to tell you any more about my state of mind, do I? And yet, I feel the need to bore you with myself a little more. After all, I have nothing else to do, but wait for the next odd error message. So, just now, I said to my boys: ‘maybe you should play outside, because this job is giving me the ’sh’ word’. To which they could only say ‘do you mean the shits or the shut ups?’ And to think, we’ve got three invitations to play in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, we have taken the dog back to the vet to get his stitches removed. As the vet observed ‘castration hasn’t calmed him down yet, has it?’ And then, he looked, as my youngest boy hit my eldest boy with the door snake which I think is there for waiting dogs to play with. I wish I could tell you that he (the vet) looked at me, eyebrow raised significantly. It would give meaning (unkown, but meaning nonetheless) to an otherwise pointless post
But he did not.

Must away. Current project is burned. Apparently.

The problem with parties is not so much that, for the first time in several months, you must find, then extricate, the red bowl from the back of the corner cupboard in the laundry;

the problem is not that said red bowl reminds you of all that you no longer are and becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back which becomes a flood of two pm tears;

indeed, as the night goes on and your glass is not only half-full, but re-fullable, this reminder becomes one of the joys of parties;

and the problem is not even that the red bowl must be washed after sitting overnight with a particularly sticky dip stuck to it.

No.

The problem with parties is, that once found, extricated, cried over, used, laughed over, washed and dried, the red bowl must be put away. In the back of the corner cupboard in the laundry.

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.

You know that thing ‘don’t ask the question if you don’t already know the answer’? You do? Why didn’t you remind me of it?

Also, if you choose to wear orange nailpolish, I feel that you should wear it with irony. Just an opinion.

Grey’s Anatomy is not worth staying awake for. Which makes me wonder whether it ever was.

I thought of a much more random fact that I could have written:

last year, I was the only (living) member of my family (by which I mean, my original, highly nuclear family as it once was) who did not get married.