Title here

Well, I’m back in Melbourne, listening to a lot of Cat Power and freezing various parts of my anatomy off. I think I picked up a bit of a cold in Sydney, or that my body just got accustomed to slightly more amenable temperatures. Either way, I’ve not really been up for much more than lying in bed reading and taking gentle stretching classes at the gym.

In fact, I’m not really even up to writing at the moment. I’m going to abort this attempt at making my life seem witty and interesting and go curl up in front of the heater with the cat. Sorry.

 

 

 

(If anyone wants me, you’ll have to drag me out of the house. I think I just officially went into hibernation.)

Sydney, slightly extended

Today was the first time I can remember in ages that the sun has felt good for something besides looking pretty in the sky. Waiting for the train I had to take my coat off. I could feel my cheeks get pink with the first kiss of sunburn, and then the train came, and the carriages were warm and stuffy, and I felt wrapped up in a big cotton-wool ball of love for this weather and this town.

I’m liking Sydney much more than I anticipated. I think I’m driving Lucas crazy with my starry-eyed appreciation of its novelties. There’s a monorail! And double-decker trains! And so on! And so forth! I don’t know whether he’s been worn down by my incessant prattling or whether he is genuinely in the grips of a climate-defying head cold, but today he elected to stay in bed with a novel while I bobbed along on the ferry to Cockatoo Island and then went to an artist’s bazaar. 

After a late dinner of giant beans, frittata and icecream, I’m mooching around trying to make sense of the whole thing. Not the Biennale, but my sudden and overwhelming attachment to a place I’ve never been before. I love Melbourne like only a black-wearing, coffee-swilling, fashion-editing floozy can, but I feel that my bones, which have been so jumpy and hollow-seeming recently, have settled over the last few days. Who knows. Skeletons are peculiar things. Maybe mine just needed a little sun shining into the cracks.

Sydney, brief

Despite my best intentions, there’s been no Biennale action so far. What there has been is opshopping and cafe breakfast; a Singaporean dinner; rhubarb and white chocolate muffins in the garden with a chubby, inquisitive baby; the Surrey Hills markets; and the Underbelly Arts Lab. The weather held today after a brief deluge and things are looking up.

Altered states

You know, I’m just going to keep on making the ‘changing states’ puns until somebody asks me to stop.

I’m in Sydney, and after a comedy of errors (flight delayed, ripped stockings, ripped hem, wrong bus) got to the place I needed to go only three minutes late and did the thing I came here to do, so it’s pure down-hill cruising from here, my friends. A lovely correspondent of mine has offered to put me up for the weekend, despite the fact that he has only met me (and my assorted neuroses) a few times in the flesh. No more hostels, whoo! And I’m meeting Miss Jelly for breakfast tomorrow in Surrey Hills. I think I’m going to hit up the Biennale after that, provided, of course, that I can even spell Biennale.

I spent the post-frazzled portion of the afternoon wandering aimlessly around the city centre, trying to get my head around the concept of ‘not a grid’. I ate a carrot cupcake with cream-cheese icing in a cupcake shop underneath the monorail. There’s a monorail! 

Eventually all the stimulus made me properly hungry and I went and ate a bowl of pho under the watchful eye of a bouffanted Vietnamese lady. Now I’m back at the hostel, after a brief detour into where-the-hell-am-I, and the bespectacled emo receptionist has hinted that he would find it pleasant to attend some sort of Levi’s-sponsored club night with me. I dunno, I’m thinking of just passing out in my bunk-bed. There’s something so comfortingly institutional about a painted metal frame. 

To the north!

So, it looks like I’m heading to Sydney on Thursday, for utterly nefarious reasons and also to get the hell out of Melbourne. I’ve been climbing the walls here recently, and was thinking that another trip to lil’ old sleeply Radelaide was due, but this will suffice. I feel certain that this will suffice.

One of the attractions of going to Sydney is that I can assume different personalities while I’m there and no-one will be the wiser. I love that aspect of travel. I’m working on a patchouli dropout character who carries around a copy of The Yoga Diet and talks about how much she loves Byron. Also a flinty graphic design type who wears lensless spectacles with an utterly straight face.

Of course, the no-one-will-know-me! aspect utterly falls to shit when I find out that The Terz will also be there. I guess one of the personas I assume will just have to be the magazine-editing, vintage-dress-wearing, gin-swilling one, as we hit up the Sydtown highlife in Melbourne writer-trash style.

Other than that: what shall I do? I haven’t been to Sydney ever as an adult, and only really saw the touristy bits as a kid. Kick in your suggestions and I’ll try to follow them, as ludicrous as they may be, and then I’ll blog about them here. Self-reflexive agenda-setting, yay!

Retarded healing

That burn on my arm hasn’t settled at all - in fact, it’s gotten redder and kind of angry-looking - so I got my dad to have a look while I was over at my parents’ place tonight. I’ve always been quick to scar, and have some doozies on my hands (baking, sewing, spiders) and legs (tables, ex-boyfriends). My Dad just looked my arm over, put on his best ‘medical professional’ face, and said: 

“I’m sorry to break it to you, honey, but you have what is known as ‘retarded healing’.”

This explains so much I don’t think there’s anything more I can say.

Lazy weekend

Right after writing about how clumsy I’ve been this weekend, I managed to burn my arm on a saucepan full of popcorn. The cat got under my feet, and now I am disfigured. Well, not really, but I do have a rather big and rather ugly mark. It looks like one of those strawberry birthmarks, except that it’s blistered a little because I didn’t get the ice on in time.

I was making popcorn in order to fully appreciate Wayne’s World, which turned out to be totally rad. Recently Toby came home with a big paper bag full of VHS cassettes, none of which I’d seen before, and we’ve been working our way through the bunch. So far I’ve seen Deconstructing Harry, one of the Indiana Jones movies, most of Shallow Grave and half of The Godfather. Toby was stunned that I’d never seen any of them, but really, it’s no surprise. I’ve never seen anything.

I also painted my fingernails, but not my toenails, and now I feel unbalanced. For some reason in my mind it’s okay to have painted toenails and naked fingernails, but not the other way around. I get the same goosebumpy reaction I get when I see women wearing strappy sandals with too-heavy dresses. I can’t really explain it. So now I think I’m going to have to paint my toenails, because I can’t find the nail polish remover, and because I’m unbalanced enough as it is. 

Mishaps and books

You know how some days just go wrong? I’ve been having one of those. Nothing too dramatic, it’s just been aggravating. I tried to buy a birthday present for my sister but it wasn’t in stock. On the train on the way to my parents’ place for her birthday lunch, I got pulled up by the Metgoons again, this time on an expensive technicality. Walking to my parents’ place I fell over and jarred my ankle walking down the wet street, and just now, bolting the gallery door so I could nick out to the loo, I managed to take half my left thumbnail off with a metal bar. I also took off some skin on my right wrist, and I have a neon-pink scrape down my inner right forearm.

I’m looking forward to heading home, where I’ll get hit by a bus, burn myself cooking dinner and fall into a doorknob. I don’t know why I’m so savagely accident-prone today, but if you see me on the street, run for your life.

In other news: can someone please recommend a good, short, small book or novella or poetry collection for me to read on the tram? I can’t fit big first-runs in my handbag, but slim, small volumes pack in pretty neatly. In previous weeks I’ve had La Vagabonde, The Four Quartets, and The Key nestled against my lipsticks and wallet. Suggestions - and loans - would be greatly appreciated.

The importance of not being earnest*

*JB, I would let you have this (awful) title if you updated your blog more than twice a year. Still available (and much better!) - The impotence of being earnest. 

 

During a raucous dinner involving three-quarters of The Tessellations tonight, the topic of earnestness came up, along with our spaghetti marinara. Earnestness has been much discussed on Jelly’s blog recently, and in effect on fourth-quarter Seb’s, re: the painfully po-faced state of much left-wing political writing. 

There’s not really much to add to Jelly’s concise analysis of the state of Kids Today, but it’s something that’s been on my mind recently, apropos of a few strangers (none of whom I have a particularly high regard for) accusing me of being cold and unfeeling because I have failed to immediately pour my heart out to them. Well, excuse me. Obviously I’m not the most painfully open person around. I like to maintain an ironic distance, partly because when everything falls to shit you can just have another gin and say “darling, what did you expect?” but mostly because - well - I just feel it’s polite.

I fucking hate it when someone I’m not particularly close to starts confiding it me, or asking advice, or generally being just a little bit emotionally slutty. You know - earnest. Constant, consistent sincerity always feels a little bit insincere, in that going-through-the-motions kind of way. It also has that drunk-in-pubs kind of quality, a little bit seedy, a little bit invasive, generally excruciatingly boring.

Moreover, earnestness - evangelistic, heartfelt, tear-wringing sincerity - always comes off as more than a little condescending to me. So backpacking in Nepal really made you see things clearly. So living an ‘activist’ lifestyle makes you feel morally superior to the rest of the plebs. So your soggy (and unmetrical) poetry expresses how you really feel. So the fuck what?

I get the impression with a lot of earnest people that they feel that being uncritically impassioned about something - a book or emotional state or social cause - is somehow morally superior to taking a critical and detached view of the world. It’s more emotionally honest, that honesty being weighted against the idea that all of us cynics are using our gin and irony as a way to, like, distance ourselves from really feeling. It’s a value system that privileges feeling over thinking, Dr Phil-style, and judges those who aren’t willing to wear their every emotional fluctuation on their sleeve as somehow missing out on the beauty of the world.

And you know what? It’s tiresome. It’s also extremely rude to foist your every over-sensitive reaction to the world on passers-by and expect them to have nothing better to do than pore over your own masturbatory - and fundamentally false - moment of self-realisation. People live in the world, they react to it, and not all of them need to announce their every moment’s sadness or joy. It’s basic manners, is what it is.

It’s polite to allow people live out their own value systems. It’s polite to refrain from bailing them up for long, boring conversations about how you intend to change the world with your totally radical politics. And sometimes manners, my friend, take precedence over self-righteousness. You’re not actually better than me because Kafka changed your life, you know. 

I might be undercutting my argument a little to mention that I’m typing this a little tipsy. After dinner we went downstairs to the bar, sat in a dimly-lit corner, and drank. We made revoltingly politically incorrect jokes and still told each other the real things, the things you (should) only tell your close friends. I’d like to think we were sincere without ever making each other want to vomit with dismay. And if that is the measure by which I live my life, so be it.

Domestic

I handed the last of my assessment in today, and suddenly I’ve gone all domestic. Perhaps it’s that I’ve been putting off things like cooking proper meals while shoulder-deep in words. Maybe it’s that it’s raining, bucketloads all over Melbourne, and rain always makes you feel cozy and like staying in. Anyway, I baked. 

Actually, firstly I made a minestrone, and then I baked. Sarinah came around for dinner and she curled up with some Lindt chocolate and the cat and directed my baking, which I like. I get annoyed having to pause and find my place in a recipe to find out what to do next, and it’s the height of luxury to have someone telling you as you go to add eggs now and stir the sugar until it turns gold and so on. I would like someday to have a kitchen assistant specifically for this purpose.

Anyway, I was baking because my lovely housemate Toby (the Pro-Swede) promised to take a rhubarb tarte tatin in to his old people tomorrow for morning tea. Toby works as an older-person support guy at the council flats, and morning tea is an important part of his job, but he had a date and anyway I felt like baking. Then I worried that tarte tatin might be too caramelised for dentures, so I made a chocolate ginger cake as well. So now the old people can choose. I like that. I like that almost as much as I like baking, soup and rain.