Four years to 30

It's the eve of my birthday and shock, horror, I'm writing on my blog. I'm not sure why, but after innumerable conversations about the fallen status of the world and the equally post-lapsarian descent of my chest, sometimes I just need to untangle things on the screen, to write it out, as it were, in some sort of attempt to get my head into gear. While I do try and take the Gordian knot approach to some aspects of my life these days, this time it's just not working.

When you get to a certain age, say, 26, do things start to make sense? I had always assumed so, but as I currently have about 45 minutes or so for the lightbulb to appear, it seems less and less likely that age will confer wisdom within the hour. Or, is ageing just a process of accepting? Do you just 'come to terms' with things, try and understand that they never really will add up, and make your peace with a small corner of the world. I'm not sure, but right now neither is working as one might hope.

It's just, there's something precious in my life right now, but it's also something that seems slightly out of reach. I'm not sure what to do, we're getting so good at banging heads that I'm worried we'll forget how to enjoy each other, how to live well. I want to hang on, but every time we clutch at one another in the search for something solid, we both seem to come away puzzled, empty handed, like participants in a magic trick that's worked too well.

Like Peter Pan, I've found my shadow but can't quite sew it to my feet.

Blahdy blah blah

So.

Life.

Huh.

It's been awhile. How's things? I hadn't really forgotten about you, I swear, I was just saving you from myself, I promise. Having spent the better part of the last two months on seek.com, all I can really say is, no-one needs to see, hear about, or have anything to do with that shit. Really. I'm sure the only thing that could be more boring than being a jobseeker, is being the poor ear continually bent by said doleista.

Having said that, however, I'll give it a go, just because we've got so much to catch up on, and I figure my friends have suffered enough. Basically, K Rudd's been giving me the occasional bit of pocket money to tide things over, but it's pretty slow. I did, however, score a job today. It was, however, the job that I think I wrote about in an earlier post - the 'positive attitude to data entry one'. I feel vaguely distressed by this - a job that I have seen advertised for years, which seems to feature only poor conditions, a bad wage, and what seems to be limited career development (and, which I applied for in a flurry of Newstart-requirement desperation) seems to be the only thing that has turned up after 3 degrees, higher education lecturing and tutoring positions, and international work experience.

Sigh.

Anyway, I have a couple of days grace on deciding whether to accept it as I actually have a medical 'reason' not to take it up. I've developed cracking migraines derived from - you guessed it - excessive, close computer work. Thus a neurologist has recommended that I don't take up this kind of work and find something out in the fresh air... or something.

Anyhoo, even though I feel like my brain is atrophying these days, apparently it's not. I had to have an MRI scan, one of the stranger experiences of my life, and came out with some purdy pictures. While I couldn't get mine off the 3D CD they gave me, one of them looks quite like this:




For those of you who don't know me, it's true.

I am this hot.

Shh... it's a secret

I have a confession to make. It’s a big one; you might not like it. In fact, you might not like me—it’s that bad. You know how we’ve been hanging out for a while, spending some time together …? It’s just that, well, I’ve met someone else. And we’re in love. Well, I am. It was an accident, I never meant this to happen … really, you’ve got to believe me.


It’s not my fault, he’s just everything I’ve ever looked for in a man: charming, funny, erudite … rich. There’s just one problem.

His politics.

Dear reader, I have abandoned you and everything we stood for, because quite simply, I am in love. Rapturously, mind-blowingly, heart-thumpingly in love. With Malcolm Turnbull. I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I love Kevin. I do. I just don’t love him, if you know what I mean. But Malcolm; Malcolm leaves me breathless, giggling like a schoolgirl into my twinset and pearls.


There’s just something about Malcolm; maybe it’s the hair, maybe it’s those rounded vowels, maybe it’s the way he made even the word ‘battler’ sound like it’s dripping with luscious blue blood. I really don’t know, but what I do know is that if there’s any more TV coverage of this particular silver fox, I may have to toss out my leftist sympathies for good.


So what’s a girl to do? If the situation were reversed, I know exactly how things would go. Malcolm would burst through my study door. His hair would be tousled; he would look wretched, tormented. He would possibly be wearing breeches. He would look deep into my eyes and say, through gritted teeth, “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. You must allow me to tell you how much I ardently admire and … love you”.


Upon seeing his magnificent grounds at Double Bay, or wherever it is he lives, and after much ideological foreplay, I would relent. I would ascend to position of stratospheric power and influence to prove that class is no barrier to success in Australia. And he, under the influence of my socialist tendencies, would give away his money to the poor. Well, not all of it; or, at least, not enough to make a difference to us, anyway.


It'd make a great book, eh?


As things stand, however, I don’t have much ammunition on my side. I can’t afford my health insurance, see, so my bright eyes have a bit of a squint these days; with my ill-fitting clothes I’m probably not quite handsome enough to tempt him; I could perhaps get my maid to cook him a seductive meal of tofu, but it might be a little bland, as fresh veg is kind of costly right now. At the very least it will be by candlelight (this will help save on utilities, too).


It kills me to say this, Mal, but it’s just not meant to be. I love you, I do, but you’re living, as I once read in a particularly bad Tolstoy translation, ‘in cloud-cuckoo land’. This doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. I’d do anything for you, really, you have to believe me. You can have my heart, you can have my soul, you can have my body, you can even, tempter that you are, have my self-respect. But my life’s darling, heart of my heart, source of all meaning in my world; it pains me to say this, but you can never, ever, have my vote.

xox

And so we return

I’m back. Well, sort of. I’m currently out in the Dandenongs and staying with my grandparents. It’s beautiful up here: the air is clean and fresh, yet still weighty with the scent of eucalyptus, mud, and jonquils. It’s a good smell, an Australian smell, and a smell that I hadn’t realised I’d missed until now.


I really just transited through Melbourne for a couple of days, picked up a new phone, caught up with a couple of my close friends before heading out again. As the one thing I have right now is a flexible schedule, I decided before I arrived that I’d head out to see my family as soon as I could. Both my grandparents were hospitalised almost simultaneously while I was away, and I really needed to see for myself that they were actually back, that they were still mine.


My grandmother bared her wrists and showed me the red, puckering scar that ran up her forearms, a reminder of the time three months ago when they removed some arteries and inserted them into her heart. She opened her collar and showed me the seam that ran from the base of her throat to her stomach. She had a quintuple bypass and is still shocked that she feels tired, and that she has to nap sometimes in the afternoon. She still seems in awe of the fact that she, of all people, was for a while helpless and hurting and unable to maintain her sense of humour.


She is still here.


My grandfather was hospitalised on the day my grandmother went home. He was shunted into an isolation ward as they thought that the TB he contracted as a teenager may have resurfaced. Then they thought he had cancer. Today we found out that he will cough and hack until he dies, but it won’t be that which kills him. So we drank a bottle of champagne, of which he would only have half a glass. But he is skinny now, turtle-like, and his head extends more tentatively than it used to from his rounded shoulders. Now when I hug him, his vertebrae feel like dinosaur bones. My Omi tells him to go outside when he heaves and hacks, as the sound is not nice to eat with.


He is still here.


They live on a hillside block in an Austrian-style, A-Frame house in a town they moved to twenty years ago because it reminded them of their home in Slovenia. They live here alone, drive, do their garden as much they can, and, despite it all, still need to be convinced to substitute low-fat yoghurt for cream in their meals.


They are still here. It’s good to be home.

On being 'at one'

I love Bali. Until I came here, I never thought it would be quite my scene. I’d imagined a country resplendent with Bintang singlets and which boasted a 1000 Corbeys for every Corey. But I was absolutely and unequivocally wrong. Aside from the shit-scary feral dogs everywhere, Bali is a beautiful place, and, after fairly regular massages, great food, and some quality time with my mastercard, I’m about as zen as I’ll ever be this side of a lobotomy.

You know what I don’t love though? Hippies. I’m sorry; I know it’s wrong of me, but it’s true. Furthermore, not only do I not love them, I think I might hate them. Or perhaps it’s just the one. The one who sat next to me at dinner and insisted on ‘conversing’ in a language made up almost entirely of vacant glances into the middle distance. If you’ve never experienced hippie-speak in full flight, it can be a distracting and confusing linguistic mode to both the uninitiated and the uninterested. With its stream of dangling referents and nonsensical clauses and sub-clauses, hippie-speak has the power to dupe its recipient into thinking that a sentence has been completed, a meal can be consumed, and a conversation closed. Suffice to say, these will never occur. Ever.

It’s probably my fault, though. I should never have ordered dessert because as soon as he sat down, I knew I was in trouble. With Madonna-style arms, lustful glances at my tofu, and the slightly bugged-out eyes of someone who’s spent too much time contemplating the relation of their navel to the macrocosm, I knew a devotee of Guru Bullshit had entered my dharmic field.

Now, I think I’ve already discussed my particular gift for attracting strange, miserable men before, and tonight was a reassuring reminder that my madness mojo remains intact. And clearly, it’s a give and take relationship, as every time I encounter these people I seem to get one more stamp in my passport to Crazy Town. They stress me out with their need for me to deal with problems I know nothing about that involve people I have no connection with. And yet, despite the fact that they’re clearly a little bit on the strangeo-side, I’m always mystified by their continual and total inability to take a polite hint.

Why do some men think that a girl on her own automatically signals that she wants to talk to them? And why do attractive men who missed the headcase gene never possess this assumption? Furthermore, why do the crazy ones assume that, when they talk to me about their guru who channels Jesus (in Aramaic, no less), I have actually choked on my goreng, rather than being, as some more astute conversationalists may realise, on the verge of releasing both my inner child and my bladder?

I’m sorry, I do try to be a good person, but it’s not my fault: he told me to be “in trance with the dance”. The only reason I didn’t snort was because I had started to die on the inside.

But it never just stops there. In order to excuse the fact that they are sucking the life-juice from a total stranger, they must, in a token attempt to play by the rules of engagement, make a show of being interested in what I’m into. This is, of course, despite the evidence before them that what I’m clearly into IS MY BOOK. Furthermore, when it gets around to the fact that I worked in medieval literature, specifically on a rewriting of the Trojan War epic, rather than, say, accountancy, the explanations, plot outlines, and general defence of my existence become both excruciating and predictable.

‘Medieval literature, you say? Medeeyevaal … heh heh … like Harry Potter?’ For future reference, forty is never the appropriate age to try the ‘ignorance is cute’ hat on for size. Trust me, it will never, ever, fit, and will make you look like one of those bogans at the tennis who makes his headwear out of a VB carton. But it gets worse. Because after eliciting my ‘secret past’, they feel they have to make connections, show me how much they understand me, because we’re different, you know? And then, a hippie-style lightbulb moment occurs and they realise that they know of something similar that totally fits into their world-view, and if they’re lucky, might just fit into mine. Or my pants.

The horror.

Or, more precisely, The Ramayana. For your next dining experience, may I suggest an epic poem retold, explained, punctuated, and verbally footnoted by someone who

speaks

like

this.

After one hour, I wanted to vacuum my eyeballs out.

Lucky I’m having a full day-spa tomorrow; otherwise, I might just have to kill someone.

Homeward bound

When you plan to leave home, reactions are always mixed: excitement from friends, concern from parents, and, for the less geographically-inclined, puzzlement (or perhaps the last only applies when you move to Belgium; I had some questions about it too… like where it is). People ask if you’re nervous, if you’re worried about moving away, leaving family and friends, contending with another language and a new place. They’re full of tips on how to meet new people and how to ensure that you ‘really experience the culture’, all the while confiding different methods that will enable you to preserve a little bit of home. It’s all welcome, and provides a discordant medley to distract from that moment when the airport gates close, when you know that it’s going to be an awfully long time until you hear those voices again, face to face. With only two weeks to go, however, and excited about coming home, I suppose I’m also in a bit of a quandary. No-one dishes out tips on what to do when you return.

Looking back on the last year or so, I perhaps feel like I’ve been living in a bit of a vacuum. With ailing grandparents and other upheavals stemming from Melbourne-ways, all of a sudden my Belgian swaddling cloths are about to be, if not willingly shed, then well and truly stripped from me in about two weeks. Personally and professionally, life in rural Flanders was always going to be the equivalent of a rather bucolic black hole, and now, in my last port of call, Indonesia, the reality that this point in my life has ended is starting to hit: I’m going home. I don’t have a house. I don’t have a job. I don’t exactly, at the age of almost 26, have a discernible direction.

I also don’t have an excuse any more.

I know I want to write, but I’m not sure what, or for whom, or if anyone would take ‘what I do’, whatever that is. This blog was always a testing place, a space outside the academic context I’d been operating in for so long where I could produce work that I’m perhaps not rigorously able to defend, work that, being an anal, obsessive drafter, I’m frequently unhappy with, yet work that needs to stand up and, at the very least, be readable. I take comfort in cliches and tell myself ‘it’s all about the process’, all the while trying not to fiddle with posts too much, despite the fact that I find some incredibly flip, poorly expressed, or just, to be an articulate self-critic, plain dumb.

I realise this is a lot of angst to fit between beachside meanderings, but it’s the first time in the last few months that I’ve had time to think, and for the reality of home to be somewhat tangible. I’m here with one of my closest friends and we’re having a fabulous time, catching up, sounding things out, beaching, eating and drinking. But at the same time, it’s made me realise that while it’s true that nothing ever changes, equally apt is the notion that life goes on. My friends all have jobs, homes, and partners, whereas I feel almost like I’ll be setting up in a new place again, despite the fact that Melbourne contains so many of the people and places that I love.

So what to do? Find some form of gainful employ, a roof, and hopefully write, one would presume. But how will other things pan out? Will this blog have run its use-by date? Would I be better off channelling my energies into finding publications that will accept my miscellaneous wordy stuff? Shouldn’t I be working on a folio, gathering some examples of my communication skills that don’t involve a cocktail glass and a raised eyebrow? I just don’t know; it’s all a bit too hard.

Perhaps I’ll just work on getting out of my banana lounge first.

We meet again

So ... it's been a while. Having never had the foresight or the gumption to extricate myself from a relationship first, I've always wondered what it feels like to just stop calling someone. Now I know. You feel vaguely irritated, a little bit guilty, but not quite enough to actually do anything about it. After a while you stop thinking about the object of your erstwhile affections until you either walk past a particularly attractive form of statistician (and they, ladies, are definitely a rarity) or sit down at a keyboard that smells a little bit like hot chips and you think: shit. The blog.

It was never you though. I had some things going on, I wasn't really in a good 'place', you know. Maybe not now, but one day, perhaps, we could get it back together ...

Kidding!

I should be back on the wagon now.

I was just hanging out with one of my best friends in San Sebastian and Northern Spain for two weeks. In three words : Tapas tapas tapas. Well, that's really just one, so I'll add this: actual conversations with someone who's known me for longer than 2 days. It was so great.

What was less great was the return to Brussels in the midst of the baggage handlers' strike. Chaos has no meaning for me now. We're talking flights canceled, thousands of bags dumped anywhere, police bringing in emergency water for people, screaming, Linda Blair-style children. Adding to my crazy lady vibe, I lost my baggage receipt, and found my bag just by fluke 4 hours later. Because of the delay, I missed meeting up with one of my closest friends in Belgium, and didn't get to my hostel until after midnight. When I flew out to Frankfurt the next day I may, or may not, have flipped la Bruxelles the bird on my way up.

Furthermore, you'd never believe it, but the reason for the strike was that the baggage handlers find their workplace policies 'anti-social'.

The irony.

The Belgians.