The Fly-leaf

(One) Cent Postage

2010-11-15T20:16:00.007+10:30

If I were a poised vessel that held a small number of coloured marbles, then I'd have to say that about one month ago I finally tipped over (or was I laid gently on my side?) and those coloured marbles were finally freed and on they continue to roll, following easy and strong and interesting paths.

If this virtual space were a vessel sat upon my kitchen bench, it would be a large, chipped earthernware bowl in which I have, over time, placed a variety of ingredients in all number of combinations; savoury, sweet. Successful, weird. The use-by dates of these ingredients surprise me. 2006? Four years. One hundred posts. And 'posts' is a poignant word in this context; an unexpectedly personal context, for these entries are like letters, or notes really, posted more to oneself than anyone else in the end.

Allemande in the living room

2010-10-10T19:30:00.007+10:30

I was thinking about slow dancing last night, and how, in the past, as an observer and sometime participant, it never made sense to me. The moving cuddle. A bit awkward. But then I met someone and we would slow dance in our living room and with that, the moving cuddle then made all the sense in the world. So it occurred to me how rare it is: to find someone with whom you make slow dancing make sense.

Turning Corners

2010-09-30T14:05:00.002+09:30

Other signs of a new direction:

sliver's of a heart filling happiness - thinking acupuncture needles - tiny insertion points - larger dispersions of energy - sitting side by side on a slab of old wood, drinking tea, sun pressing our faces - my cat sipping water from the old tuna can - the animals lounging on the freshly mown grass - whisking home tended eggs into light and fragrant cake - being slipped two free organic bananas - clouds tossing and turning on the heat of a closer sun - from what I can tell, these tiny insertion points of happiness suggest a greater willingness to be happy. By which I mean, or I understand, happyness to be an alert contentment.

And I think the really significant moments of such a place are when you laugh alone, when you roll your eyes, alone. When you are in a gestural dialogue with your alone self. Enjoying your own company. Which is interesting because it is a very different alone space to the hours long, days long, aloneness of hermiting. I think one can become so retreated in such a space that you are not even in your own company.

(And of turning corners, does that actually suggest treading in circles?)

Stepping onto the Mat

2010-09-29T13:51:00.004+09:30

A few days ago I crossed the water, returning to a city that, when I think of it, I cup my hands as if I were holding a moth or a butterfly. I don't want to damage those dusty wings as I transport it from the house to the garden.

I was born in that city yet never lived in it until last year. And whilst there, for nearly nine months, I think some little parts of me died and some other parts seeded.

This trip had quiet intentions. The outward expression was a three day yoga workshop. Some thoughts on yoga: how private and individual and bizarre one's relationship is to yoga practice. How my own practice of this moving meditation is an undulating passage. I now understand it as a creative practice that will frequently shift over my lifetime like cello practice, writing practice and walking my dog practice. Like all of those, it will dip and snare and run amok and yet, regardless of absence, will always be present. For, what I learn and re-learn, is that it doesn't matter. More often than not, persisting with doing what you will with some kind of intention, when you can and will and desire, causes something to happen. More often than not, the something is intangible. And yet, with enough frequency to keep you interested, whilst you're walking from one room to the next, from a glass of water to the shower, rolling up your mat, wondering whether to eat bread with peanut butter and banana or a lone apple, your brain slips along a smooth patch of thought - you reflect. Something is different. You thought your practice-head was all full of clutter and weird ordinary thoughts and yet, now that you have finished, and you are off the mat, you realise, shit, I was actually in whilst on the mat, more than I ever knew.

At the moment I am thinking of sitting meditation as a step into the core of one's mind, whilst yoga is the stepping back into one's body, head and brain included.

So, there I stepped, back onto the mat, back into my body, my brain shut up for awhile, and amongst other things, I ate salted soya beans and drank green tea on Smith Street, peeled prawns with my pal Scott, drank unfolding tea with Richard in Little Collins, and sat alone and happy in busy restaurant on a Friday night, reading whilst I stuffed my face with brown rice and tamari.

Two Tears Tip

2010-09-04T10:05:00.002+09:30

I had an effortless swimming/flying dream this morning and then woke with an incredibly sore spine which I am pressing against a column heater. I decided to meditate in this position and curiously, in the middle of the meditation, one of the ridges of the heater located a block in the middle of the pain. When I massaged the muscle against this ridge, kind of exploring the sensation, I was startled by a kind of gaseous ball of emotion coming out of the muscle. Two tears tipped out.

Sabbath

2010-08-17T18:56:00.003+09:30

Further transference. I have returned, in part, to an aspect of my childhood. Back then, a regular drive for our family was two hours on the highway to the capital. We would spend the weekend visiting family and friends. Visit about a hundred galleries. We often stayed with a particular couple. Friends of my parents forever.

Memories, mostly food and scent: B&H's smoked inside the house. Massive jars full of roasted cashews. She is Sri Lankan. Curries. Rice with cashews and sultanas and spices. A large bowl brimming with nuts and a nutcracker. Hazelnuts. Brazil nuts. Almonds. Walnuts. My nut-love suddenly explained.

So, twenty years later I have returned. I am staying with her again and am startled to find these icons of memory remain, although these days, she sits on her tiny back porch amongst the potted herbs to smoke her B&H in the sun. The door open so she can continue our conversations. The smoke drifts in. The nuts. A pantry with armageddon-preparation quantities of food. She has an elaborate collection of chocolate. She is also a diabetic. And conversation. Strange overlaps of experience. She advises. Philosophises. Observes.

The sabbatical continues. And I am so grateful for where it is taking me.

Flying and Landing

2010-06-05T18:15:00.002+09:30

Something a bit momentous happened to me whilst I was dismantling my parent's garden. It crept up on me how bizarre it actually was; I was initially more interested in the emotional/psychological metaphors inherent in gardening but anyway. The old mirror bush project. I had a certain grip on the bush/tree and was pulling on it. It had been partly dismembered and I was hoping that a good tug would pop it over the threshold. That was the idea. Instead, comedy and parrallell universe transference. The twiggery I held broke and because I had my whole body weight hanging off this twiggery and there was a bit of momentum going on, I did not land flat on my back. This would have meant landing on grass. No. Rather, I did a combination of running and falling backwards and there was the flash through me: 'fuck - pain - shit'. Just so you know, there were many obstacles behind me. A concrete step, a concrete path. Pot plants. Other weird debris of my parents. So, expecting pain, big pain was fairly logical of me, even at the speed I was travelling. However, next thing I know ('fuck - pain - shit'), I was sitting in a canvas director's chair. Which sounds as if I slipped dimensions. And actually, it was probably was something not far off that. I was safely sitting in a canvas director's chair, high as a kite on shock and pissing myself laughing.

Dismantling is good for you

2010-06-03T15:34:00.003+09:30

How funny, how unusual, and yet so pertinent:

I signed myself out of the 'dash' and then, this immediate internal voice, 'no no no, I have more to say, I have things to tell, the light is dipping over the valley, and I love this sunroom that is not mine, I love being a visitor in my childhood home, and this morning was an anger all confused and undirected and then I set to the garden with a pick axe, the pitch fork, the secateurs, the saw, my hands, and I dismantled! The main project was an old and filthy mirror bush that draped and slunk and was quite huge. So we took it out. It was heavy, dicey, brutal work and at the end, it felt as if we were unravelling a very complicated knot of old energy. Now, we open the back door and are startled by all the light in the backgarden, by the sharp edges of the studios, by the spaciousness. It's wonderful. I adore this kind of work. It feels healthy. Brain healthy. Cleansing. Brain cleansing. So I feel good now. I feel really good. When you are fulfilled by so little, life is pretty bloody satisfying!'

Tipsy or Straight?

2010-06-03T15:12:00.002+09:30

How facinating that there is a new diagnostic tool in the medical/psychiatric field: as patients take balance tests, they have a tiny probe placed in their ear to measure their brainwave fluctuations. The developers of this tool are working on the link between balance issues, depression and schizophrenia amongst other neural disorders.

It struck a distinct body memory within me of some very rocky years. Literally, rocky on my feet and rocky in my psyche. My place on the earth, when I walked, was precarious. I have a pair of shoes that I wore through this time and they exacerbated the problem immensely. They are a very narrow shoe and the sole does not meet the edge of the upper level, so the sensation is similar to walking on ice-skates. Except, the sole was thick enough to inspire trust and carelessness and it was fine to trust, until you rushed a foot step, your foot slid within the shoe and you realised how close your were to the edge of the sole: an unbearable tip into a twisted ankle. It's a pity. They are very pretty shoes.

Poor balance and depression - I know it - makes sense to me.

For the moment

2010-05-25T13:31:00.003+09:30

sitting in my parents sunroom, looking across the valley and hills that lie beyond a line of oak trees on the turn - am shuffling towards decision - it is so quiet here and still - for the moment

Mywholeself

2009-11-21T18:04:00.004+10:30

o it is raining. and in this house the rain falls out of the gutters and crashes onto the concrete path outside this room (the one with cello and piano and printer and spare mattress and filing cabinet and many unpacked cardboard boxes) and that acoustic plumps up my spirit. Mywholeself.

Listing and Listing

2009-11-10T10:50:00.004+10:30

One of the gauges in my life is the presence of 'listing'. And I was about to say, 'not that drifting to one side list', but actually . . .

Listing, the art of making a list, is present in my life when I am listing in other ways.

I pause, and imagine myself as a little boat on the ocean, try and feel where the weight is, what is creating the list (to one side) and I find that it is in two spaces of my little boat: beneath the mast, a deep pull down, from masthead to the ocean floor, and beyond that, to the core of the earth (that hot churny nucleus). It is gravity, it is skull to pelivis, it is beneficial to be aware of this weight. The other weight is in the stern of my little boat. It is the weight of sorrow and fear and confusion. It pulls the boat back deep into the waves and the prow tilts awkwardly out of the water, sniffing the heavens. A vision of a panicked and tethered horse; its neck outreaching as if it is freely galloping, flighting away.

Naturally, with time, this weight will shift to the prow and the little boat will plunge me into my future. But then there are the other unbidden currents. The life currents. The wave that shoves one's prow into the future regardless of bottom heavy-ness. Today for instance, a job interview.

So, I was talking of lists, because I was going to resort to managing this need to write by creating one, but actually, I didn't need to in the end.

Sleepers and the sleep

2009-09-17T11:57:00.004+09:30

The cat arranged itself on her lap and started up its motor, an uneven circular gurgle. It pressed its warm belly into her own and laid its head in the crook of her arm - her hands wrote at the table before them both. They settled in for a mornings work at the desk.

That night, their sleep was undermined by the sounds of a constant toil as new sleepers were laid on the railway tracks at the end of their street. It was not a nosiy undertaking. It was the murmuring work of the night. Some persistent, repetitive process that grazed through their dreams. Towards the end of the procedure a train must have used the adjacent tracks, and it and the vehicle used to re-place the sleepers, tooted at each other a formal work code or some dark morning joke between the drivers?

NB

2009-08-31T11:02:00.002+09:30

the traps that information technology/corporations will set
no pasting bills (on these walls!)
everything is afterthoughted at the moment
copying one's own writing, word for word, holding sentences by halves and quarters between one document screen to the next, is illuminating
and shadow-y
I am learning how to write again, in a new domestic setting and, unexpectedly, I think this virtual space, as unsatisfying as it is in many ways (decor, house rules etc), this space might be the motivator . . . as legitimised by the aviator.

Cetacea on Westgarth

2009-08-31T10:54:00.003+09:30

And then a woman on her bike, her small boy on his own and quite close to her right flank, and three pebbles dropped into my clear happy brain as I crossed the road with my dog ahead: 'whale and calf'. It took me some time to understand the association that threw those 'Woolfian' discs through my brain. At first I was a little mortified at my linking a woman with 'whale' (as big as a whale?), and with 'calf' (what a cow!), despite their correctness in zoological nomenclature, but then it occurred to me: the shape a body makes on a bike as seen from some hovering eye, the position and proximity of the boy to his mother, and also, more enigmatically, their motion: a slow glide through air (water) and wind resistance (current).

2009-08-31T10:37:00.003+09:30

experiment

Koan

2009-07-17T11:06:00.002+09:30

So I didn't burn the journals.
But it isn't off the cards.
And on the cards?
A house 75% packed.
A pause in proceedings.
A bathroom progressing.
A woman pottering at her own speed
doing her own (house) maintenance.
The cards are in the air - high - ozone level -
who knows how they shall land?
I am convinced that by the time the bathroom is completed
I will know the answer.
It is my koan. The whole bloody house is my koan.

Enlightening/lightening

2009-05-15T12:02:00.003+09:30

I am editing - again.

Yesterday, I filled up a recycling bin with my undergraduate degree, every boardmeeting note I made over 7 years and every bill I have paid since 2002.

My Dad gave me a kind of permission to arrange my photos so that the past does not hurt as much to look at, 'chuck em out if they make you feel like shit'. The relief!

Confessions: I have kept every letter that has ever been sent to me. I hoard ephemera. The strangest stuff.

And that pile of my journals going back fifteen years - to burn or not to burn? The catharsis urge is so strong at the moment I could just about do it without a qualm.

Do you dare me?

I dare myself.

Incidentally, I turned thirty a few days ago. I think it is a rare thing, but at this birth commemoration I feel like I fit my age.

Thirty feels like a blessed relief: exciting, funny, blessed relief.

Riches

2009-04-29T12:54:00.002+09:30

things that currently occupy me: lap top purchasing, house rebuilding, garden tidying, residency planning, birthday contemplating, second hand bathroom window, a winter jacket, travel insurance claim, italian revising, Patrick White, cello students, centrelink negotiations, masks, food, house paint, enormous recycling bins, impatience, impatience, impatience, and a new kind of loneliness.

it is a rich year this one.

Moss, Rocks and Rain

2009-03-17T08:33:00.003+10:30

Because it is persistently raining in Portland, Oregon, I am realising just how extremely parched Tasmania has become, not over one dry year but over many. Dry upon dry upon dry. Houses in suburban Portland are built a little above the street and that verdant drop to the footpath is usually edged by little rock walls. There are no front fences. But what quenches me, like a dry sponge dropped into a cold mineral bath, is that those little rock walls grow moss and in some crevices they grow ferns as well.

Pause.

Ponder.

It always comes back to childhood: damp, drippy, ferny, mossy, lushy, woody, rotty childhood walks, wanders, freedoms, imaginations.

All over the Tasmania I left behind, the moss that is knitted onto the rocks is dusty and shredded, as coarse and dry as string. Makes me feel parched just thinking about it; knitted as I am around that little rock in the southern seas.

Flux

2009-02-18T09:37:00.003+10:30

please excuse me, am caught in a rip, it's wonderful and very strange, it is all I can do to keep breathing and dreaming and not thinking too much, and it may deposit me on a yet-to-be-determined distant shoreline, but I just need you to know, that I feel very safe.

gloating and then sad

2009-02-09T09:21:00.004+10:30

you know, I spent Saturday wandering around Melbourne - pizza, hot water in plastic bottles, stumbling pigeons, a deserted market - and I was enjoying myself, I liked that furnace, the hot jets of wind, the comraderie of a city, the lion-pride dozing beneath a kaleidescope ceiling. I had a fabulous dress on that knew what to do with itself in the wind. So achingly pathetic now, that gloating, that luxuriating. As we walked to the NGV, I was reading the tone of the sky, a fire I said, that is all, a peripheral curiosity.

tanglations

2008-12-11T12:11:00.003+10:30

these days I am on a walking binge - but I keep on having these ridiculous hilarious tanglations that involve my sun hat, my sunglasses, my headphone chord and my bag strap - I sort of spring out of them all red faced and sweaty about five minutes later feeling very conspicuous.

my dog swam in Tamar mud yesterday chasing ducks that had mean streaks: they left the water in an easy flap as soon as she was within snapping distance.

speaking of ducks, I am slow roasting two of them for Christmas lunch.

i am also mourning a devoured zucchini seedling and having terrible bouts of procrastination cleaning and have recently discovered the joy of a few half hearted jumps on the trampoline followed by a longer rest period on its sun-hot surface.

and my little boy blushed when he met Father Christmas, fumbling with his Department Store sponsored Santa key tag and his cardboard antler headpiece as he tried to return FC's high five in good time. my heart broke a bit watching that.

asparagus

2008-11-11T09:59:00.002+10:30

my asparagus seeds have sprouted: miniature asparagus are very cute. Wee threads heading for the sun.

One's Own Room

2008-10-08T09:46:00.002+10:30

damn
where to start?
So it must be about 2 months without home internet access now, have not had a single missed heartbeat over this severance. That surprises me. I use my friend's computer. About once a fortnight. I have stopped writing emails to him because it feels too weird sitting at his computer writing emails to him. Sorry KPS. The other person who lives in this house doesn't actually know that I am currently in his house using their internet. He is in his own room in his own deep workbrain.

Some pretty major shifting has been going on.
I have a studio.
I have a room that has a window so low to the floor that it makes me feel like Alice.
It used to be my bedroom years ago. Then it became Q's when he started escaping out of his bedroom window. Then I brain flipped, retrieved my tape measurer and found that my bed could actually fit in my writing room - become quite literally a bed room. A den. I adore it so much.
And just as thrilling is this new room that now contains my creative arms - cellos, cello bows, computer, art work, art materials - all that crap that has been scattered all over the house, now in one room.
And meanwhile I am very slowly (killing DMB with my slowness) painting my living area white, stark, fresh white, white-out of brick arch, wooden window frames, the lot.
Damn I am having such a great time.
I am even going for runs/jogs again.
And doing yoga every week - yoga mat rolled out on studio floor. o that word. studio. totally delicious.
And the dormant seed of cello playing has recently begun to sprout. Playing for myself. Playing scales and exercises and thinking about ringing H to see if she would like to hook up for some practice.
So that is the synopsis. For now. And also, this morning I nearly fell over in the school yard because I recognised the new yardsman - he was the yardsman when I was at primary school. And my son's teacher: she taught my cousins nearly 30 years ago in a classroom beside my own pre-kinder class.

morning school run

2008-07-15T08:57:00.003+09:30

every week day, a short walk to deposit my son into the school system - there are two sets of lights to cross, a pack of children, a pack of parents, you get to know each other from the slightest pieces of information flicked into the air to keep the social momentum up.

This morning, J's mum was delighted because her pregnant belly has finally taken a definite pregnant shape. She was so happy. And on the way home, F's mum confesses she is really nervous because she is on her way to the airport to meet 'a man' for the first time, as in, she met him on the internet two months ago. He is an accountant from Melbourne. He would have come earlier if it weren't for the busyness of the end of the financial year. I told her she looked hot.

Sometimes this much is more than enough.

things to clip it all together with

2008-07-08T08:52:00.006+09:30

The children were playing a myriad ball games on the wet bitumen. Their admonishments and directions and exclamations were a kind of music: rhythmical, disjointed, sequenced, logical, patterned and always, an endless disintegration of sound into the wet air.

Am really tired, I slept on high alert last night, knowing that my car was unlocked but too apathetic to get out of bed and lock the damn thing - ridiculous scenario. Eventually woke from a dream where I rode an unwieldy bike along an arcade and into a crowded book shop and became stuck in the aisles. It was light hearted and comic though which was appreciated after a spate of dreams in which infant humans and animals were injured and I was implicated.

of sleep and mouse shit

2008-07-01T17:11:00.003+09:30

Further to space clearing, I have moved my bed twice in the past week. Apparently, beds must be as far away from the door as possible but also have a good view of it for optimum reaction time etc etc. To add to this delicate balance, it is a strange fact that I am really sensitive to which direction my head is pointing. Definitely cannot be pointing south, I feel so odd in that position, literally as if I am sleeping on my head. I like west or east for sleeping directions.

The first new site was a disaster. Even though I was the same distance from the window as the previous site of a couple of years, in which I slept both very well and very badly, I was especially wakeful and aware of my close position to the front of the house and thus, the street.

The second and current site is tucked into the back corner of the room, a position that I had always been wary of because of its proximity to the built-in wardrobe. However, is it indeed the site in which I have had the most consistent fulfilling sleep in a long time? Yes, it is.

Unfortunately, good sleep did not prevent me from rolling a mice poo over my tongue yesterday evening. I made myself the first hot chocolate I have had in many years. I drank it. I enjoyed it. I was probably a little smug about how much I was drinking it and enjoying it and in the last swig, a crumb caught on my tongue, and as I rolled it towards my fingers I thought to myself, please, please don't let that be a mouse poo on my tongue and unfortunately, it was.

No matter how much boiling water I drank, or how much raw carrot and celery that I energetically crunched immediately afterwards, I could not, actually, I cannot, forget the sensation, the shape, of that mouse poo on my tongue.

weekend squiggles

2008-06-23T15:36:00.006+09:30

This squiggle of light appeared on my writing room wall one morning earlier this year. It has never returned.

I have had: cold symptoms sequencing in reverse to the norm, a meeting with a lady who can teach me Reiki, a quiet weekend, unusual bedtime reading material; motivation to do yet another purge and sort of my belongings, space clearing, rearranging the placement of my bed etc. I watched Mansfield Park and liked some occasions of its cinematography, ate apples and pasta strewn with tabasco sauce, circuited the gorge and didn't go to meditation.

I'm It!

2008-06-20T10:41:00.003+09:30

Brita is my cousin. We talk well together. Have an understanding. And she tagged me.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Ten years ago I was living in North Hobart in a terribly old dark share house. Apparently it was once a notorious public house. It was on the corner of a major intersection. I had to bend my head to walk down a small tunnel to my bedroom. I had my 19^th birthday party there. My friend Scott climbed onto the roof of the lighting shop next door and plucked out the sequins of their gaudy signage. He spelt out LSD. Everyone used to comment on it for months after. In the end, I fell in love and hardly stayed there ever again. I was studying cello and english literature and drinking lots of red wine.

Five things to do today

Drive my son and a friend to St Peters Pass, retrieve my son’s bike from back of a friends car, print out a short story, keep warm warm and kick this cold’s arse, and later creep into the casino to hear Jeff Lang.

Three favourite snacks

Slice of pumpernickel with butter and jam

Bowl of pasta with parmesan and butter

An apple and a little brown paper bag of roasted mixed nuts

Four places you have lived

I have lived on two islands all of my life, I have lived in strange disjointed share houses each with one unusual, misplaced room that no one knew what to do with, I have lived in a four room cottage with four other people, a tiger snake and a rabbit, I have lived in a salubrious suburb in the only house that had a fire bath in the back garden made from tip-shop finds.

Five things you would purchase if you were a billionaire

I would buy a home with lots of remnant native vegetation and a separate studio, look after my loved ones and the balance would be divided into three: cultural, social and environmental donations.

Six people I want to know more about

This is the one where I seriously question my distinct lack of curiosity . . . the woman who has the wonderful pink sunroom with white chalk scribbles all over it and a wisteria vine drenching its window, the two sisters who walk this city incessantly, always in skirts, with matching vinyl handbags and wonderful wild hair, the story of the three men who have bought the house down the road and are renovating it as a group project, my great-grandmother who was born in England and adopted into a South African family, and the whereabouts and circumstances of my other great-grandmother’s disappearance with her only son c.1910.

And I shall tag: Danae Sinclair, Lingo Franko, Fuffenscheit, Idiom Zero

pleasant audible medium

2008-06-19T08:42:00.002+09:30

have to say that this medium is a bit dried up of late, everything getting channeled into other containers

went to watch Sex & The City with my sister last night, mild air as we walked in, sharp as we left, I didn't see that movie, I hovered in front of it, laughed a couple of times, got wet in the eyes a couple of times, robotic emotions, but actually quite pleasant

woke this morning without a voice, have oiled it into audible with coffee, garlic, last night's paella

Meditation makes me as high as a kite

2008-06-02T16:32:00.003+09:30

I had this dream a couple of nights ago, triggered I think by my drunken reading of Brida (I wasn't drunk but I read it so fast it made me feel sick) and then a meditation session.

I dreamed of meeting people who were travelling back through their past reincarnations. At one point I was in the round and tiny room of a tower and a woman was about to morph into the moment of her last death, mauled or suffocated by a lion. Myself and my unidentifiable companion glided onto the top of wardrobe to be out of the action. The physical point of reincarnation was the third eye and this could be identified by a small pus-y hole.

Meditation makes me as high as a kite.

And so I wonder at its addictiveness.

The architecture of writing is preoccupying me.

I am so looking forward to walking around a large city anonymously.

Wrioting

2008-05-23T14:01:00.002+09:30

is hard
sometimes

sometimes my brain feels like it has expanded to fit the room in which I write - all 3 metres x 2 metres of it (cubed) - so when I am sitting here, eyes hanging at about arms length, fingers jittery with indecision, I am sort of swimming in my own grey matter which is, you know, pretty gross.

my dog ate rat-sak and is still alive

2008-05-16T13:28:00.002+09:30

some things I saw this week:

blood in the hallway
a skip full of a cottage that I have loved forever
yellow vomit in my toilet
white ash in a perfect circle in my backgarden
an entire sodden lost cigarette in my lawn
the inside of a suburban buddhist temple
white mist in my eyes
the work space of the nearest vet
unconscious dogs
and bound up cats
a line of little children running cross country
and two others playing bug in a rug

When In Doubt

2008-04-07T13:11:00.003+09:30

I am a lass who is often in doubt.
I have a scribble on the wall immediately beside me.
It reads, 'when in doubt, write'.
I think I am in the process of creating a list.
A 'when in doubt' list.
So my second WID:

When in doubt, move.

Preferably out of the house, altho heavy garden work is regarded as out of the house. In this way, my heart quite literally remembers that it exists to pump blood around my body, that this enables momentum, which puts me in contact with the community that I live within. That sees me, for instance, stopping off at a local petrol station to borrow a spanner to tighten up my bike seat that sank gracefully as I rode down Charles Street. Possibly one of the odder sensations of my life.

Just Some Art

2008-03-20T11:12:00.005+10:30

Q produced this painting yesterday afternoon. Note the zucchini man aquadhered to its surface. Any preserving tips for yellow zucchini's out there?

And he got me good and proper when I carefully framed the question, 'So what is going on here?'.

And he said, 'Nothing, it's just some art.'

That rant I could go on, that one about watching children's loose casual creativity become tighter and tighter under the scholastic, peer, teacher, parent eye ball, I don't really need to go there. 'Nothing, its just some art' says it all I think.

(And it has to be clarified that I am as complicit in the tightening as much as as the next person. Unfortunate, but inevitably so.)

Cut it Out

2008-03-20T10:57:00.006+10:30

Further to previous hair/dressing discussion, just overheard news story of a new anti-domestic violence project: based on a successful program in America, hairdressers are being used as information dispensers, giving out domestic violence support information to their clients who are identified as at risk. Training is provided to the hairdressers and, importantly, they are not expected to behave as professional counselors or social workers.

One of the older hairdressers made an interesting point that she thought the opening up of confidence, of revelations, secrets came about because the hair dresser is so occupied with the hair of the client. That this distracted air was like non-direct eye contact and enabled the clients to talk without self-consciousness, she described the head tilted forward, a curtain of hair over the face, the ridiculousness of foils etc.

I found this quite surprising because a) if I am divulging anything I need that eye to eye contact and a fortified wall of privacy around myself and my listener. I can't think of anywhere more exposed than a hair dressing salon to shut my mouth entirely. And b) the bloody mirrors! They are confronting at the best of times, imagine confessing your soul whilst making eye contact with it?

Out of Whack

2008-03-19T12:07:00.002+10:30

. . . sounds like I am outing myself as an addict but am thinking 'whack' as in Dolly's.

I was so determined that my next 'post' was not going to be infiltrated by That maudlin tone of late, but fark, if it isn't a day where the gut is just going 'something ain't right in the world'. Focus and motivation are distinctly absent, my eyes are shifty, I can't remember my dreams, I feel edgy and even a walk, buried deep in music, has not put the whack back in place. It's dislodged and gone into the head and so at every tilt my brain emits a bleating, fading 'blaaaaaaah'. (Insert decrescendo sign)

And even this, this attempt to put it in front and away from me, is just making me realise that it is like some weird hay-fever, a brain-fever for which I need a strong anti-histamine that I cannot obtain. Or something, some more apt metaphor for which I don't have the patience to think up. I can't even tell if that is grammatically correct.

Prego prego

2008-03-09T13:18:00.002+10:30

I had my first Italian lesson a few days ago.
Something I had signed up for last year and it caught up with me.
It was great.
And at the end I thanked my teacher and she said those words,
'prego prego'
and it was all I could do not to burst into tears.
I knew then that absolutely, sitting in that little room with
her was the right place to be, once a week, for the rest of the year.

The Fine Toothed Comb

2008-01-16T18:05:00.000+10:30

An unexpected loneliness: nit-combing through one's own hair.

I thought it was a particularly bizarre moment of self-pity, and then I remembered the monkeys. Huddled up on ledges; one furtive and brisk with their tiny hands, attention flicking between the meta-environment of other monkey dynamics and the micro-environment of lice and hair and scalp, and the other, sprawled in a stupor of intimate practical touch and shut-eye.

And then I think of the confessional spaces of hairdressing salons and then I think of my mother brushing my hair and then I think, it is perhaps the most expected loneliness of all.

Meta/phor/morphosis

2007-12-10T20:25:00.000+10:30

Meta- : a prefix meaning 'among', 'together with', 'after', 'behind', 'along with'

One of my approaches to depression is to run away from it:
Today I ran and it was amongst, together with, after, behind, along with
thousands of cicadas emerging, mating and dying before my very eyes.
It was like being hit over the head with a sledge hammer
and I liked it very much.

A Pans Labrynth

2007-12-07T18:32:00.002+10:30

I heard a recording of a recital I participated in last year: I avoid listening to those things like the plague . . . but luckily the CD was chosen by the little buoy because little did I know that it was a listening experience where I sat up, got very confused, thought 'who the hell is that?', and then realised that it was myself. It was affirming and then, strangely enough, I had to get in my little car and drive into the country, through huge expanses of road works, down a little track into huddles of green valleys amongst incredibly straight-limbed forests to a burrowed in cabin that has the proportions of a dolls house. The house recently acquired a miniature grand piano which naturally required the entire house to roll over and make room and so, nudged in against its belly, the old piano trio got stuck into some Schubert. It was great. Even the patio filled with operatic canaries didn't deter, nor the outrageously loud and persistent chained up canine out the front. It is a great pity that our violinist has to return to Broome next week.

Nighttime is the exterior's private time, and makes the interior, with lights on, exposed and public.

2007-11-28T20:11:00.000+10:30

Such a snappy peppery day and bodily expressed by throat constriction (had trouble talking all day) and deep frown lines.

But, I have beside me a stack of travel photos newly printed up and again I am amazed at how visuals snap you back in space and time: a kind of soothing EST. Which brings to mind the EST Dick Cheney required for his heart murmur - that quivery buzz that he'd never noticed before - more numb soul. ("more" was meant to be "poor" - I like that either way.)

Sky looking nice and brooding outside my window, wind occasional through the next door neighbour's pear tree.

I swam for the first time this season and the water just kept streaming out of me afterwards and I have been reading of fairy tales and wolves and these make me read my things through a new type of rose-coloured lens. A type that aids the fine stitching required to hold it all together. Critics may dismiss palatable as evasive, but I disagree; I can hold my bundle more tenderly and calmly (the nearest state to objectivity perhaps?) if I am not in fear that I shall drop it.

The feeling is also, and assuredly, that this here and now, as sweet as it is, is not permanent and I have absolutely no idea what that will require of me in the near or distant future except that lessons in another language will be necessary.

a list of things that are good for me

2007-11-26T20:20:00.000+10:30

an evening yoga class in a park: salutes into an umbrella of oak tree.
a bike ride to and from the park: serenity on wheels.
evening bath with my child: we discuss body glue - lymphatic fluid.
when in doubt, write.
when in doubt, move.
when in doubt, be still.
share a pot of tea.
ignore the washing up.
but wash the cute white bra.
lounge beside the pool and read design magazines: child floats luxuriously about on his noodle.
read empathetic words that make your heart float a bit.
eat paternal poppy-seed cake.
listen to the rain watering your vegetable garden for you.
think about making the writing room into the smallest, loveliest bedroom in the entire world and find oneself an equally small lovely tenant
and when in doubt, write
and when in doubt, move - purposefully.

Bikes, Rose and Options

2007-11-15T17:34:00.000+10:30

Every available vase in my house is stuffed with roses. I love that.
It is evening here and I have a migraine creeping around the back of my eyes. However, I was so restless that I have ended up here, in my new favourite room of the house.

I can sit here and watch things like the neighbour's kids sneaking into the garden to retrieve their soccer ball, the washing draped in the sunshine, roses on fluffed up against the fence, broadbeans sagging, etc etc.

Am wondering about what this writing here is all about, what it is for? Because here, in this virtual space, I am really conscious that I have lost my goalposts: or rather, that I cannot judge how far away, or how close, I am too them. Quite an odd feeling.

There is a lot of tangibly good stuff going on in my immediate sphere and I am trying to consciously practice 'joyousness' (just been flicking through the old I Ching) but still feel suspension. Which, if I dredge the old Science class memory, is a beaker of clear liquid with mud/grit/substance on the bottom.

I remember sitting in Firenze and feeling the same way. That something was going to shift into go go go gear any day now but it just wasn't quite ready.

Stir it up?
Get earthed in garden and home?
Be patient?
Be impatient?

Or get on my bike?

ah, that would be it.

That beautiful aqua Repco number with one brake and a basket on the back.

Jet - Kick

2007-10-24T19:31:00.000+09:30

To tie up a loose thread: one that this space accidentally plotted.

Returned three mornings ago.

I sat on the planes that were taking us home (particularly the one from Milan - Dubai) and could not believe how wrong it felt. The strangest feeling. Mirrored again as we flew over the island. I was not ready to return but here we are and it is . . . motivated.

and my house, as D put it, feels like it has been on holiday as well, extremely distinct feeling. My dog is altered, calmer, low key. My street feels energetic, a house is being prepared for sale, a new baby is down the way, my neighbour returned my dog in the evening with a laugh, the kids down the road wandered in to say hello to Q because they hadn't seen him in ages. And I, I am ramped up on some bevy of emotion and hormones that sees me sleeping tiny bites, and re-arranging every room concurrently. Painting one of them, de-storing it in order to do so, filling up my car with huge bags of clothes and crrraapp, saying yes to The Greates Ute (I learnt to drive in a ute, always knew one day I would return), it is all over the shop.

And the month is October and the evenings hum with that peculiarly beautiful October vibe (poor tragic overused word).

latitude longitude attitude

2007-08-20T19:27:00.000+09:30

there is a touch of rain considering the kitchen window
some herbs simmering on the gas
exhaustion and a little bit of the ache of flu in my neck and shoulders
it will be an early night this one

we fly out next wednesday
the days ahead are full of the last chance chores

i alternate between atmospheres of long term farewells (yet never expressed as such), and those that feel temporary and unconditional.

and the catalogue of 'things i can leave behind awhile' grows ever longer.

so tired

Faux pas: History on Repeat

2007-07-24T15:34:00.000+09:30

I can be a very social mother when I choose to be so, also, I am directly on the school route.

I've had a couple of children over after school for extended play recently and have been reminded of what an interesting old thing that scoping out of the peer's homes is. I make a cup of tea or coffee for the accompanying mother and we sit at the table and have exhausting conversations. Exhausting for me because I can't abide the small talk and the big talk just ain't happening.

So far, I have been a bit too opinionated about the pulp mill and the mother suddenly felt extremely awkward and left soon after. And this week I did a cursory post-visit objective look at my kitchen table to see what exactly I had revealed. Ah yes. My recent photocopying effort of early 80's poetry/art including an image of the word "SEX" as bait on a set mouse trap. A poster for my brother in law's play "Zhombie Theatre presents THE BODY SNATCHERS". Tame stuff to me, perhaps even tame to these mothers, but the feeling is distinctly . . . odd.

It brings to mind numerous experiences from my childhood. The time a mum came to pick up her daughter from my birthday party (c. primary school). She took one look at my parent's living room, was visibly distressed by the print over the fireplace, became speechless and couldn't leave fast enough. And the print? It is called The Last Cigarette and features a landscape littered with severed heads.

I always get a naive shock with this stuff because I, and my parents, have never been driven by a desire to be confrontational, or 'out there'. And to most people we are not, don't even come close, but occasionally, these situations arise and the minutiae of your life suddenly feels exposed and weirdly, can have freak show impact.

ho hum

I Never Thought I'd Say This . . .

2007-07-15T20:12:00.000+09:30

I've always been a bit doggedly loyal to this island of ours, always argued that the criticisms about Tasmania were all the more reason that people like us (amorphous, thinking, creative, active bunch) should stick around.

But recently, I have found myself thinking, and I shock myself with how serious I am, that if a pulp mill is built in the Tamar River Valley, I will be gone. I won't stay. I physically could not bear the disappointment of watching a community having to get on with their lives after being so fucked over by the big fish in town. It's suddenly not (just) about air and water and good looking trees, it's about democracy and how we don't live in one in this state.

May they leap from the frying pan and into the fire. amen to that.

Twiggery and other jaunts

2007-07-15T19:43:00.000+09:30

went for a little jaunt today
down a ferny gully with my parents
lots of stag-trees and a forest that looks a bit bashed about and in the distance the gossiping of black cockatoos. They heard us and the flock came over to blatantly have a good look and heckle. It was so overwhelming that I didn't even take a photo. But it didn't feel aggressive, it felt comic and even a bit, as mum said, auspicious.

It has been a weekend to wash doona's,
to finish one side of the neck of the bloody vest
and to collect kindling with a friend, both of us competing to see who can create the neatest green bag of twiggery. (He always wins. He can't help it. He's a Virgo.)

And last night I dreamt of finally understanding a key bit of grammar logic when speaking Italian and was chanting verb conjugations. Very much a 'wish fulfillment' dream.

Fomentation

2007-07-12T11:17:00.000+09:30

random stuff includes:

We went to have tea at a friends place but she was running very late, wasn't home yet and so we postponed. We bought takeaway curry and DVD's instead, sat up and watched Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (which is being watched for the second time behind me) for Johnny's teeth.

I taught my first cello lesson in a school scenario and a private one at that. Very interesting little bubble of privilege that one. Everyone extremely uncomplicated and lovely. My cynicism scours the situation a bit but shall enjoy the novelty until departure.

Had a remedial massage to remind my body how to release itself a bit, fill in the gaps. I have been ridiculously sedentary of late, the muscles becoming soft and compressed all at once. Yucko!

People quip 'make sure you come back' to every explanation of travel. Ask after my return ticket details.

And I have been on the rental market hunt again: for an organisation I am attached to: finding myself in wacky CBD locations with agents in bad suits. It's been great to see different vistas of this city from various levels and buildings that are a part of the 'taken for granted' every day fabric.

Aqua(marine)

2007-07-08T20:45:00.001+09:30

As a child, my parents and I lived in a inconspicuous white house on a long road that led, naturally enough I thought later, to my primary school. But I wasn't at primary school at that point. I was in kindergarten.

The inconspicuous white house was a rental although it was never actually intended to be so. It was a solid brick number, an investment, that the owner had built next door to his own home, the intention being to sell up and still keep an eye on things, you know how it is. The story goes that the owner saw my dad's ad in the local newspaper's rental section. It said: 'Professional Couple Seek Rental House. Nothing Too Flash.' Intrigued, the owner made contact and we ended up living in this house with a round window in the front patio, a gum tree mural thing in the living room and wooden box cupboards either side of the fire place (where I once found hidden birthday treasures and felt sorely disappointed forever more.) In other words, pretty flash by some standards, but not, as it turned out, by the standards of myself at c. four.

You see, I had a real bad case of the grass in always greener. In fact, I had a house-crush. It was a house on the opposite side of the street, diagonally away from our own. And it was weatherboard. Aqua weatherboard. With white trim and loads of white pot plant holders and even (am I exaggerating? Unlikely.) white tyre swans. I was smitten. I can still even remember my parents rolling their eyes at my house crush. But I was reckless and didn't give a shit what they thought.

It was the colour that did it. Aqua. I have known the colour of aqua since then. It is now this weird type of eye candy for me and has morphed into the purpose of a bizarre hunt: for obscure colour references to this old legend of my childhood.

Sun Day

2007-07-08T20:30:00.000+09:30

and sunny it was up at the farm.

I am on a photo-shoot binge: am off the show at present as I haven't had a camera in a bloody long time and when armed with a digital snappy thing?

as I said, off the show.

we did lots of glomping about in gumboots

and it was all eating and watching wedge-tailed eagles overhead, listening to clink clink birds, constructing elaborate yabbie nets, rolling rainwater tanks around like tyres and losing borrowed dogs.

Banking

2007-07-06T21:54:00.000+09:30

at the bank today, the woman who served me noticed some of my travel documents and it was a little head turning because she was so interested and so wanted to engage . . . due to personal experience: it turns out that she was also setting off on a journey (same date and general destination).

Yet, what struck me the most was how excited she was, and how not-excited I was in comparison. Which isn't a negative, this observation not being about negatives or correctness, but it was obvious.

Because, altho I do feel little jets of excitement, more than anything, I feel resolute and peacefully so.

(But also, actually, I just can't fuckin wait)

Exit Stage Left

2007-07-04T13:25:00.000+09:30

Amazing what situations can be tolerated when the exit is neon in a dark room: the room might be smokey, claustrophobic and crowded with shadowy features, there might be an undercurrent of panic or confusion, but focus on the neon Exit sign and leaving the stage is like hot knife-slicing through butter (where did I read that?).

NB. Recent observation of the globalised organic food market (is that an oxymoron or what?) is that the organic butter that I have been a little obsessed with of late, is a bloody product of Denmark WTF???

Exit plans are escapism hatches. It's a mental flight yet felt physically as a body released from the everyday reality, a form of gravity release. Gravity, in both senses of the word.

At least, that is how I am finding it. Have found it my whole life. Used to read gratuitous amounts of books as a child which lead to a certain kind of absence from the moment as well as parents being driven spare by their daughter who was so mentally locked in a book that she seemingly refused to cooperate with domesticity. (I still get the heebyjeebies when someone asks me where the scissors are . . . random . . .long story: no blood.)

I don't read much anymore. Which perturbs me, but actually, I don't really miss it although I like the idea of it, but I find it really difficult to settle for that long. Which might also explain the other absence from my life: cello playing.

and later, after a little lateral thinking . . .

2007-06-26T16:53:00.000+09:30

including shameless consumerism (hot jeans)
some loud music
and time-shape wrangling with dear friend

I have solutions, a better feeling stomach
AND a hot pair of jeans.

I shall work less hours, leave town earlier and switch!
around the thumb tacks that I had driven far too deeply into the proverbial map on the wall . . .

It hopefully means no more childcare and a chance to knuckle down with my boy
on a happier medium of Life. You know, that old rag.

Fury on the rocks

2007-06-25T19:01:00.000+09:30

This afternoon I agreed to an 8 week extension of my current contract
and ever since I have been
irrationally, steamingly angry.

Which is pretty funny

and perhaps, just a little revealing.

I am so angry that my belly feels as if I have swallowed hot rocks.

Stuffed

2007-06-21T19:33:00.000+09:30

I LOVE anchovie-stuffed green olives.
(They are like a mouthwater (sic) of summer: sea water gulp)
I am eating them right now.
They taste damn great.
They make me stink.

I spent a day at my friend's house.
It was nice. Super relaxed and drifty and conversations
are easier when time is allowed to just be that system
we don't have to pay as much attention to as we do (I do)
Three kids doing laps around the house
lego, swords, maiming,
morning tea blends into lunch
blends into post-school
rush of snacks and tears and loud crazed excited voices.
Left-overs for tea and then four children slicking around
the spa
diving and snorkeling and loud loud screaming

Do you remember childhood baths with friends and cousins?
I was watching these kids and laughing and physically remembering
skin and skin and warm water and the laughter of it all.

Vessel:

2007-06-18T20:25:00.001+09:30

pod on the sea(ds)

Slow Cooking Here

2007-06-18T20:09:00.000+09:30

Yo Yo Ma Baching away
Heater doing its best
Osso bucco lingering
Hair is big: teased, and dreaded

and I'm having a Bloody Mary party
Everyone invited.

Attending the Details

2007-06-13T19:21:00.000+09:30

The last few days have been . . . interesting

I call it The Fear.
Dis-ease.
Translates into inertia ie. scared stiff.
I hate it!
Partly, mostly, because I cannot find the seed (kind of like extracting oxalis from your vegie patch, all those horrid, brown pellets to sift out) of this perturbation.

So, although I couldn't find the seed, I did find a kind of sieve for extracting the worst of the heavy brown pellets. This phrase that began to hum around my head: attend the details.

And so I turned to housework. The fine detail stuff. Tended the altars, lured cobwebs from the corners, blah blah.

Achieved simple things, widened the goal posts. God . . . tedious.

But I did have this very unexpected moment of realising that my work keeps me ticking: this bizarre work ethic thing. I was a little . . . exhilarated . . . (almost embarrassing!) to get dressed and to walk into town and the panic room therein. But how to turn this ethic onto my own, self-designated work?

And afterwards I got to play a newly completed violoncelle which is more than a little amazing in the scheme of creating things your own way.

Plunge

2007-06-09T20:50:00.000+09:30

Dead

2007-06-09T20:11:00.000+09:30

(The title was the word of my most recent 'dictionary reading'. Interestingly, prior to the reading I was about to title this entry Hibernation . . .)

Am coiling up a little these days. Taking thoughts and ideas very slowly,
walking a little slower around the house, writing lists and completing a task a day.

An energy saving spell before imminent upheavals that are BIGGER UP, literally into a different hemisphere.

Sometimes it seems that Things happen and with only the
slightest, most gentlest of nurturing touch.

Touch that neither shoves Things into place, nor becomes oily and complacent.

An I-Ching reading:

Hsien (wooing) . . . the influence shows itself in the big toe.

"A movement, before it is actually carried out, shows itself first in the toes."

My big toe twitched, arched and prepared so long ago it is hard to believe that this motion is nearing the movement of leg and arm. This journey, that begins in September or thereabouts, is like many journeys, and actually began long before departure.

Lunar Scorpio

2007-05-30T20:47:00.000+09:30

there is a lovely moon plumping up at the moment
am brooding away . . . peacefully it feels.

another journey is being kind of tacked into some framework:
a house to stay in Italy north.
We shall hire a car.
I am designated driver.
I have to get to Bilbao though,
and Grenada, and Madrid . . . Paris perhaps?

Pushing in thumbtacks into green shapes
on blue backgrounds.

I am also newly soley house responsible
I am seeking quotes for new bath rooms.

I am recently told that the elderly lady who lived in this house before us, died in the bath. Was found there by our neighbour. I go and stand at the door of the bathroom. The old claw foot has suddenly grown magisterial with death and solemnity. The toll of a dripping tap is imagined and sad and I am grateful that I have pressed my back into that old ghost many times without knowing. My next bath becomes an apprehensive first rite. I shall be gentle and not too curious.

The Pleasure Principle vs The Reality Principle

2007-05-29T19:23:00.000+09:30

It is ridiculous:

how much enjoyment I get out of sitting in a 'bar/restaurant"
by myself
with a glass of red wine
when it is raining and dark outside
while my child is at The Party of The Year
(for a whole hour and forty-five minutes)
when I can scribble and watch and read and Nada
is on my mind.

I am alone
I am utterly content
I am entertained
I am in a social sphere that I don't have to interact with.

The only words I say in that entire ninety-five minutes are:

- I'd like a glass of wine thanks
- shiraz
- cheers
and later, when an oblivious, self-absorbed suit doesn't adjust his body to allow me to exit
I touch his elbow and mumble, oddly and yet tellingly,
- sorry

(This is funny because much of my time spent in my corner was marvelling at those voices that can split through five scattered conversations, bar music, staffing requests and traffic noise in such places as this: the most notoriously noisy, slate floored establishment in town. Performers spend hours developing this skill and this suit who had such a voice, who I apologised to, this pompous opinionated shit, is probably an accountant. But I shall acquiesce and think, actually, it is a very unfortunate thing, because quite possibly his words are everyday humble words yet, via sheer projection, they appear as the full volume of arrogance.)

Anyway, I cannot adequately describe the bliss of that hour and a half.
And quite honestly, I think only a mother would understand.

Return

2007-05-26T14:05:00.000+09:30

phew. . .sorted.

it was a little unnerving to be 'locked out' of my blogslice.

my head isn't at all locking any ideas for the filling today:

all a bit full, and weary and (newly identified) low after the 'high'
that goes with High Intuition days.
I have a bunch in a row, enough to get hooked,
and then I use it up and am left a bit brain pregnant . . . and no, I am NOT clucky. Although I did have
a weird 'let down' reflex dream this morning but that is another story entirely.

I went and saw Macbeth last night (Bell Shakespeare Co).

I watch live theatre with the senses of a child: I catch myself sitting, crouching on my chair, with my mouth open and my eyes popping and I think my face might be expressing my emotions without me realising it . . . all that so-called adult self-control (impulse control anyone?) out the window YYAAAYYY

off to be shadow-ey around the house

Home and Contents Insurance

2007-03-01T19:27:00.000+10:30

Iconic Sensory Moment: feeling grounded as I peeled garlic for a meal.

To me it is natural that garlic should be in such a moment - the feeling of weight leaning into one hip socket, down to knee, down to foot and toes and floor and earth and just feeling Presence in the Moment. Frankly I don't know how better to explain it. Does it require it?

Q and I found treasure in our backgarden this afternoon: handfuls of sparkling green jewel beetles (not bugs I am firmly, 4 year oldly told) and another handful of yellow lichened pieces of walnut tree, dismantled months ago but still littering the yard.

Correction: today I spent time in this space and played house in it and by small clean ups in corners it transformed back into a Garden. If I was so inclined I could post a photograph of these small offerings that are now arranged on our table - vignettes, altars. I simultaneously cringe and love how this blog realm makes preciousness.

Apparently it is a corker of a full moon growing in our midst.

I have had sudden extreme feelings of loss in my life, and yet, have been driven to easily complete a multitude of chores that I have steadfastly ignored for weeks.

And have been enacting a different kind of nesting whereby things are Discarded, Sorted and Spaced rather than Collected, Hoarded, Snuggled.

This year, all two months of it, feels powerfully, positively stalked.

Momentum/Momentous

Today I discovered I have been driving la bomb for the past 12 months without any insurance

Last week a woman in another headspace/worldspace raced across a road to follow me at my shoulder and again, my weight swivelled in a socket to catch her front on: it was her breathing that caught me. In her face I could see that she was absent.

It turns out this was a reminder incident and dot points join. A phone call from a distant friend last Tuesday, this absent rushing woman and the spontaneous visit of other dear friends missed for a year. They all connect to one person and many people: a huge Catholic church in the south, The Beach Boys, a restless lady with flair, funeral and wake crashing . . .

God Only Knows Benjamin Rootes I know how to boil a pot of water orright?!

xxx

Attendance

2007-01-19T19:54:00.000+10:30

This week I -

attended two board meetings and could see the possibilities
blew a minor gasket at work that needed to be blown
walked quickly everywhere for long distances, sweating off inertia all the while
stood on a High Street with strangers in warm night air and scrawled over the sky looking for a comet. Found it. Watched it slip between earth and sky
sat in the corner of a large room and knitted and listened and nutted out stuff like anxiety and recovery
made basil pesto I am still thinking about
slept beneath a sheet and felt to be the perfect temperature
swam across a basin of water and back and plan to double the distance next week
perched on a rock and discussed panic attacks
made art that I like where its going
opened up an atlas and let the pages open to a country to aim two passports toward
watched planes depart for, and arrive from, an island I need to touch base upon
hatched ludicrous and delightful plans based upon buttery rolls of Romance that will never be consumed

The Modesty Swivel

2007-01-04T19:59:00.000+10:30

Today was a lesson in how from one hour to the next, a day can swivel from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Naturally, this swivel can take place upon a millisecond but I haven't the patience for millisecond analysis': the day has been long enough as it is.

So, the swivel was the moment that my son turned from baby to boy and I don't want to make a big deal of that so much because it happens and I'm in no mood to make nostalgic whimsies of it but still, holy fuck, did I witness something huge today. It was society and children and modesty and Lord of the Flies and a scenario where I truely did think, o fuck the lotta you . . . altho I had to gather myself to do it.

It was my favourite summer evening pastime. The 5 o'clock swim at the basin. I didn't have the head for a swim but the Q did and so my mum went to do her thing across the basin proper and Q and I went for the pool. A concrete, 50's homage to summer cut and run. So, I realised that we'd forgotten Q's bathers, and he wasn't wearing any undies, but what the hell, Q was in the water before that was an issue. And then I noticed: my darling boy, with that massive smile of bliss in the water was creating a scandal. He was nude. He wasn't just nude, he was Naked (nekkid) and boy, did he create a splash amongst the kiddies. They did double takes, they nudged each other and giggled, they pointed and gulped chlorine-wee in their excitement and I realised quicksmart (but always a little too late), that some slight shift in age had occured in the past twelve months. That lengthening out of my child's body had all these Modesty Ramifications.

So how does one deal with this scenario? For a while there I was feeling awful: guilt ridden and responsible for putting my child in this position of exposure, and I wasn't thinking Prying Eyes, I was thinking Hurting Words. But then something extraordinary happened, a swivel amidst a melee. I just thought Fuck It, and the reason I thought, Fuck It, was that Q, amazing little wonder who taught me a Big Lesson today, was completely and utterly oblivious to the Scandal that his joy was creating. And, (this is the killer) his joy forced me to stand my ground and stare down his would-be taunters with a beatific smile that dared them to think that this was weird. If I had reacted any differently, I would have simply reiterated what the little 'upholders' of social decorum were plonking on the water. And so we had to create this little bubble of dignity/bravery/glee where neither of us had to say a word to anyone and we were quickly left to do what we were there to do: cool down like everyone else.

This year is fast sorting a lotta shit out! I adore a Big Edit. (Can you tell I've recently read The God of Small Things?)

Duck Duck Goose

2006-12-17T19:37:00.000+10:30

An exercise of tag:

4 jobs i have had

1. blueberry picker
2. apple thinner
3. MS Readathon envelope licker
4. museum attendant

4 Movies I could watch over and over (or, movies that I remembered liking alot)

1. The English Patient
2. Pride and Prejudice (ditto Ms S-S)
3. Short Cuts
4. Struggling: I can't remember the movies that I have loved

4 places I have lived apart from where I live now

1. Melbourne
2. Flinders Island
3. Hobart
4. Devonport

4 tv shows that I love (or used to when I was still watching tv)

1. ummm
2. Spicks and Specks
3. Gardening Australia?
4. The Movie Show?

4 places I have been on hols (the glamorous sounding ones)

1. Beuamaris
2. Vietnam
3. Laos
4. Japan (but they didn't feel like a holiday, they felt like a mission)

4 websites I visit daily

1. hotmail
2. abc news
3. mystic medusa
4. justjared for the trashiest of the trash

4 favourite foods

1. lamb chops/stew/roast
2. rice in all its guises
3. yoghurt
4. muesli

4 places i would rather be at

1. Flinders Island: in my granny's living room
2. in a cold gallery in a far away country
3. in a tent with my head out the door and the rest of me in a sleeping bag at dusk in a 'wilderness' landscape
4. a restaurant eating food I can't afford to prepare for myself

4 people I am tagging

umm I have no friends. . .Colette? Micah? anyone?

la chambre

2006-11-22T20:34:00.000+10:30

Yesterday Q and I swapped bedrooms which I think is one of my all time favourite past-times. Room alteration!

As a child I would regularly undertake such a process. It would require documentation. I drew up room plans, to scale, each article of furniture accounted for. It would take me a weekend and the night it was completed, I slept the heavy, calm sleep of the rejuvenated and purged.

As I write, a moment of perfect timing: the choral music of Tavener (sic). It'll make you meditate no matter how hard you are fighting.

My bedrooms have become the most pared back spaces of my life.

But now I can rest a little easier on rubbish nights. Q had taken to climbing out of his bedroom window to meet the rubbish truck. I would be woken up by intuitive tugs: Q's voice outside at 5.30 am talking to the guys. A little unnerving to say the least.

On the weekend I stripped wallpaper in my hall way. In other words, maps of paper countries and continents flukily took shape and spread their boundaries. But, have finally done with the rank as shit salmon painted wallpaper that was offending my very soul.

s' aviser

2006-11-14T10:27:00.000+10:30

'to rumble'

ah, I think my life has begun to rumble again and, as a gorgeous friend of mine noted recently, the cues of fear are shared with that other emote-grip, excitement. I'm sure my nostrils are flaring and my eyes are darting even as I write.

The rumble is the sale of a dear little house with a whole lotta baggage! I am loving that I have absolutely no idea as to the shape, quality, or soundings of the future into which I and my loves are about to be dropped. Or, less abruptly, placed.

Mighty Q is obsessed with the world atlas. Every day, he asks me to draw him a map of a different country.

Se remettre en marche

2006-11-12T20:48:00.000+10:30

So time is waddling on and I am plumping myself up on a diet of ideas, phantasies and potentials. Sometimes, stones chink together, people-stones, and everythings sparks and fractures a bit and little idea-fires smoulder away, flame up, burn down, and then the re-gen starts to shoot green spikes. The last couple of months, this is what my bubble has been harbouring.

Quelle coincidence?

A couple of nights ago I had one of my rare, vivid and remembered dreams. My childhood home burnt down because a ladle in a pot had been left on the stove. My distress woke me up: I think I was yelling into my mobile, trying to go through the steps of an emergency call. Then, a conversation with my co-owner of this house, and I am suddenly gripped by the idea of selling this home, my home, and being a bit domesticity-vague for a while. The ironic emphasis being, that I have recently been organising myself loans for renovations - bigger gestures of nest-building and via a series of sparks:

un arret
l'arrivee
allons
la chance

some bridges may be burnt.

I recently came across this snippet, wired to the virtual ether:

. . . I was the only thing to break down on Monday, but I like to do that every once in a while - things always seem rebuild themselves on a more secure footing . . .

Recently the walnut tree in my garden had to be dismantled and it was a beautiful thing to watch. I am not sure if my own on-going process of dismantling has always been an attractive thing but, perhaps for once, I feel like I am about to become the active one in its initiation.

Just like Lego.

Hats Off!

2006-10-26T19:30:00.000+09:30

All done. . .and, as if to make up for all the last minute horrors of formatting stresses and printing chaos' that I endured (because I was slack - no doubt about it) throughout undergrad, today was surreal and easy and indeed, almost fucking nonchalant. Wonders will never cease.

It was so odd holding these bound up little things and thinking, is that what all that was about? What was it about again? oh yeah, some book. an old one.

So now. . .where is that list I constructed all those months ago as to what I was allowed to do post-essay?

See you all soon eh? Gin and tonic on the patio and all that. I might even be able to arrange a view.

Head Peace

2006-10-21T13:28:00.000+09:30

A nice off shoot of this current writing thing is that I can now categorise how I like to write. Ie the props that I need to sustain the flow/focus etc

For instance, I have just realised how dependent I am on:

The head covering. I suspect I may look a bit comic actually but I am completely addicted to either the hoody hunched over the keyboard or, as at present, the new sun hat, pulled low over my eyes. Thinking cap. Keeps my vision low and focused. Something.

And the music is just crucial at low times for energising: Alison Krause, Gillian Welch and Kimya Dawson.

And when it stalls and all locks up indefinately I go weild the hoe and smash it up a bit.

Lucida Grande

2006-10-12T19:18:00.000+09:30

Lucida grande is the name of this font.

I wish I was feeling lucidly grand, instead feeling a bit limbo-ed: just want to finish the damn thing but intertia cripples.

Today I left the front door open to let in the hot gusts of air because it felt so good! I picked up my dog from her morning run to Woolworths Kingsmeadows (which was full of people who looked the same, and I don't mean that in a negative way, just in a, they-all-looked-the-bloody-same way), I drank ginntonic outta can at my parents place (classy), I tiled the floor with A4 sheets of paper that constitute drafts and mourned some trees, spoke to my good friend and we each ranted about stuff.

Actually, there is a lot to be said about visiting 'new' supermarkets and checking out the demographics. . .and analysing the stock range.

word cleaning slow

2006-10-09T19:27:00.000+09:30

Cocktails on Full Moons should be outlawed

but I'm feeling much better now thank you

have cleaned my bedroom, bathroom, kitchen (again), and vacuumed house

wrote 100 more words of thesis

deleted about 1000

all good!

Brain-bergs

2006-10-06T14:00:00.000+09:30

News radio is strangely addictive: a chunk of Antartica, a state sized chunk, broke off from the continent and became an ice berg and floated off around the seas. A storm, 37, 000 kilometres distant, was found to have caused it to be ground down and chipped up. And a butterfly sneezed.

I've just cleaned the kitchen down to grouting level. Never mind that I don't have any tiles in the kitchen.

My writing is due in about twenty days. It is a major struggle today. I am hating my topic, my protagonist, my own inertia when faced with all those blah blah words.

Also, I am childless mother for a week, the longest we have been apart. I have been so focused that I have hardly noticed. But that is a product and a privilege of knowing that he is at the beach with his dad and having the most excellent time catching up.

The obsession is post-thesis life.

Mee grain

2006-09-22T20:08:00.000+09:30

The migraine is creeping around the aura of my body, which sounds wanky but that is where it is at. And I can feel its energy source. The locked in tension in my neck and back.

Weird poem below though. . .I just liked that it ended on the word tonic. Some people will read in some other stuff as well but. . .it's from a great word space. I have a theory of textual addiction. Whether it is a daily horoscope or a daily poem, some of us seek out text to hang our coats on. Rely on the hints/quelle coincidence/ideas that will, or will not, resonate or gesture us towards where we are at present.

More Tonic

2006-09-22T20:04:00.000+09:30

Wine Water

I shared a bed. Some man came and said

he hadn't slept all his life. I gave him some of my night

hours without

even thinking. Wish someone would have warned me.

Now I dream a man's blue-

shaven visions. I can't tell if I'm a woman

or a man in the dreams, but it doesn't matter.

What happens when they mix:

soil, Sister. That's all we've

become. Man plus Woman equals

Ditch Dirt. And this is supposed to be beautiful,

the strongest tonic.

Stephanie N. Johnson

/Beloit Poetry Journal/

Volume 57, Number 1

Fall 2006

Bikes Are Tonic

2006-09-16T18:06:00.000+09:30

Have just been sitting on my front step again. This time with my dog and a glass of G&T and in the dusk. . bliss. It's been an interesting day: a mammoth, bouyant rally and all the people bouncing off each other with that rare familiarity that can be bred at such things. But I feel a little guilty; the writing I was meant to do today didn't occur much. Is it self-indulgent to need an afternoon to absorb the synchronisities, the conversations, people glances, that the universe throws at you: the stars throw at you?

Q got a bike for his birthday which is hardly original but damn it is loved. And it was via this bike that I learnt, again, how becoming a parent has made me uberfrenetic. And, it was via this parental gift that I was reminded as to the art of lolling about in the sun in a park. It takes patience! After ten minutes I am bored, I could contentedly leave; after twenty, I'm finding a more comfy body position; after thirty, when I next look at my watch we've been in the park for over an hour and Q is proudly noting how sweaty his hair is.

Isn't tonic a lovely word?

Today

2006-09-13T19:57:00.000+09:30

Today I bought prosciutto and whilst I bought fruit and salad my dog ate it (the ham! Not the, ah whatever) in the car, I wrote at my new little desk that stares out my bedroom window, I wrote at my computer in complete silence, I wrote at my computer with the Beasties blaring, I weeded a small segment of the back vegetable bed and dreamed up zuchinni, beans and basil hedge, I walked my son in the sun up to creche, I made osso bucco and did the dishes twice, I declared to myself that I had to cut down my sugar intake, I built lego houses with my son and enjoyed it, I sat on the front step with my ex mother-in-law and smoked a rollie and just chatted. That's about all.

PS. I think this gal is worth reading: it took me a few reads to get her (a trawl through her archive) but she is great fun and clever clever.

PPS. Self congratulatory moment at first implant of link into blog!

Sharon Stone and I. . .

2006-09-03T19:29:00.000+09:30

Did you know that Sharon Stone and I have the same taste in children's names? I know, who would have thought. . .

Both her children are named from 'my list'
as in within the top 2. . .bizarre.

Secret Tags

2006-09-02T19:45:00.000+09:30

and I just remembered that I've been tagged by dear fuffenscheit. . .to tell a secret. . .but the funny thing is that I'm struggling. . .there's either the things that are way too secret or not secret enough. . .quite a dilemma. . . so I'll hang it in suspense, just like on Home & Away. I'll be back.

Ode to the Afternoon Nap

2006-09-02T19:07:00.000+09:30

Ode to the afternoon nap: splendid treats if you can luxuriate the time enough to foetal beneath the doona. Afternoon noises of the street sway, the dog snores. Loyal dog.

Have just eaten curry treats and am enjoying a cordial glass of beer.

In the Indian restaurant I bumped into some friends; a couple who were washed out with some unnamed trial of the day. They've given up alchohol, they haven't time for the pub anymore, perhaps if she was single still. . .we drift back off into our respective lives. I think about such declarations, so hard and fast. . .

Still, I've been similiar of late. Knocked back into a world of study, illness, recovery, study. But I am so contented in my bubble; my house and the figures within. Child, dog, garden, treasured food, word games over tea. It sounds revoltingly idyllic and sometimes my independence scares me: how much longer until the control freakery is cemented?

I am currently loving Vika and Linda. Ventured into the spectacle of the casino with my friends and we sat up like contestants on some obscure game show, or the muppets, and watched these incredible musicians effortlessly gift us with the best live entertainment I've seen in . . .a damn long time.

My current inability to frame text is freaking me out. Lots of paragraphs left isolated in white space. . .I will not panic.

oz, g, Kg, pt, fl oz

2006-08-21T19:21:00.000+09:30

Man, this flu is nasty. Really had to declare that, am vvv over it!

Am speechless/struggling, weighing up ideas. In my palms they all feel like weights, not quite ready to be tossed into the air with my attachments.

More later.

A week ago and never declared. . .

2006-08-14T16:08:00.000+09:30

There is a lovely snippet of sunshine on a hill that I'm staring at from my desk. If I wasn't aware that it was the winter dip of August, I'd be thinking that it was early evening mid January. Despite being tagged by a decent hacking cough, weird upset digestive system and the encroaching thesis due date, there is that lovely shift in the air of seasonal change and future possibilities.

Bon Nuit

2006-08-10T20:28:00.000+09:30

Sometimes
when it all feels too much
going to bed at 8.13pm makes all the difference

And sometimes
when it all feels too little
staying up with a bottle of red and late night radio
makes all the difference

Conflictions

2006-08-08T20:45:00.000+09:30

A very random, pre-full moon day.

Latest personification of random: the random blog button. . .very interesting. . .I luv chance and all that. I left a very random comment on a very random dude's blog. . .something about home deliveries as long as you know the post-codes of Singaporean districts. . .

Provided some bored techno-whiz-chic with her 3.15pm entertainment for the day:

Q - are you on dot.net or dot.com?
A - I have no fucking idea. . .sorry

Q - why didn't you call us earlier?
A - I was in denial. . .sorry

anyway, she had a good time, or had me on speaker phone. . .she kept on muting her side so she could piss herself laughing in comfort I suspect, and who could blame her with my unique ability to over-apologise at such moments. Modumb?

Just fed my parents and a delightful new friend: ate way too much beef and the two dogs (also each others delightful new friend) wrestled on the tradishnal rug. . .Lily aims for collar removal, Freya aims for a good ole rest. . .two meals a day of late and very little exercise. . .

Never ever watch the film Lord of War if you can help it: Nicholas Cage attempting to be ironic and clever about arms trafficking and failing awfully. A good example of how irony ups the requirements of skill; (in this medium) acting, script etc. A good example of what occurs when these requirements aren't met; that which is meant to be critiqued is instead condoned. Actually, watch it by all means, but my take is that it is a movie that really needs scrutiny. Just watch the profoundly political become eerily apolitical.

Did anyone else notice the war-ness of Sunday, obviously more so than any other day for it to warrant comment (debateable!). It was the anniversary of Hiroshima. The ABC was obsessing about atoms, Einstein, the attempts to co-exist the two theories of Gravity and EM2 (apparently the tension between those two is to be seen to be believed), mushroom clouds in grainy shades, 6.30 pm news, 7.00pm news, 9.30om news all focused with deadly accuracy and throughout, a phone call from a friend serving in Iraq and then the above movie. All too much, but who are we to bury our heads in our quaint worlds?

Rants aside. Am listening to something thunderous and jumpy on Classic Fm and debating bed and my left elbow is beginning to itch 'acutely'.

Machinations Apologis

2006-08-06T09:14:00.000+09:30

Apologies from techno-funk me. Just realised that I'd created some exclusive zone of "bloggers only" in the comments section. . . .ooops. And haven't worked out link-creation yet. . .but slowly slowly . . .

Recent Caperings

2006-08-05T20:15:00.000+09:30

Meal of the Week: as prepared by 3ish year old aspiring chef: Diced chorizo with caper sauce, elegantly arranged on large white plate with fork. Fantastic.

Today I enquired about Prada perfume, bought muted red gloves in shock, and had terrifyingly close encounter with ex-boyfriend. Actually that reads wrong. . .it was close but not that close, in fact I ran and there was no eye contact. It still made me drive home in a panic and forget to do required errands as planned for post-glove/perfume consumption.

I also drove part way down the Midlands Highway through a lovely fog and with music on the radio that made me feel as if I was part of something choreographed (Glenn Gould playing Chopin). The sheep, all blended with damp and low sun, made me nostalgic for a smaller island than this one. I drove back up the part way of the Midlands Highway into the sun and shreds of burnt up fog; my dog sleeping in the back until I start overtaking, at which point she leaps up to feel the acceleration head on, tongue to my ear.

And now I am exhausted and yawning fog into my computer screen: don't get me bitching about my damn wood supply and how long it takes to get my fire started! You don't want to know.

Also, black dog, has just devoured second lot of stitches and will not be sleeping in my room tonight if her current wound licking session continues thus far. You really don't want to know.

The Cinnamon Addiction

2006-08-01T15:52:00.000+09:30

I once bought a tiny little bottle of cinnamon oil for an astronomical price. I was trying to break away from the lavendar addiction; explore the scent possibilities. I was somewhat deterred by the incident in which I jumped into a car and a little way down the road, the driver said "mmm, who's bought along cinnamon scrolls?" Decided then that perhaps I didn't want to be associated with edible substances, particularly those so decidedly "Banjos".

Years ago, my mother prescribed for my 'depression', sage and turmeric which she would arrange delicately on a bed of ricotta cheese, itself spread on pumpernickel. She even pre-packaged tiny containers of it to carry with me whilst I travelled around South East Asia. (And fresh sage, when it is roasted upon potatos, manages a particular kind of crispyness.)

I will always remember my first experience of chai tea at a forest festival in Jackey's Marsh. And just today I have drawn the link between that comfort mug and my dad making hot milk with honey and cinnamon as an after-rainy-school-day treat.

Cinnamon is the happy comfort spice that they advocate for staving off mid-winter slumps and bumps and every morning I consider that as I powder my porridge with the soft brown spice.

How the Black Dog Got Gashed

2006-07-31T09:06:00.000+09:30

So far, for the majority of my life, I have been a snotty wheezer. I never breathed through my nose and smelt through my mouth. At school I used to love running but only the short distances because by the time the asthma had set in, it was the end of the race. Quite convenient really. Not surprisingly, cross country was a disaster. So drugs have progressed and I had stopped running many many years ago. And then, by various means, the two combined and I discovered running again which is actually a whole other story. The point is (the one that impacted the fate of my black dog Freya) is that I went for a run yesterday morning. First time in ten days, squirm out of bed to discover a glorious morning and the running urge upon me. So, we did and Freya, all Kelpie/Collie mutt of her, loves it, adores it. Makes lots of squeaky noises when she sees me in my skanky, haven't-been-washed-since-last-time-but-what-the-hell running clothes (so really it should be, when she smells me) .

We went down to the track that runs alongside the Tamar. It's an interesting track to me. It used to belong to the weekend family walks of my childhood. Back in the Aerobic Eighties when every available walking track included treated pine lunging posts, steps and other obscure constructions for your health. Whatever they were, they were also perfect horse jumps for a girl and her invisible (but so real!) pony. It's a strange atmospheric path in parts, winding its way amongst Melaleucas and tidal detritus from the river. Through the trees you can glimpse the semi-industrial remnants on the Invermay side. Fantastic old marine relics rusting away happily and, on the river, rowers being yelled at by hunched figures in tinnies.

For my ~6km run, Freya does about 12km. She quickly disappears into the distance, roaming back via various sniff points, bark points, wee points, touches base with me and then is off again. Highlights of this run were the close encounter with a duck, a therapeutic mud bath (black dog turns into grey, dredded dog) and then a mysterious failure to touch base. I didn't think much of it; she eventually returned refreshed after a swim in the Tamar and I was grateful for the bomb's interior. So it was a bit of a shock to get home and suddenly realise that the floorboards were being drenched in blood as well as river water. The gash was deep and long and looked like her foot should have been dangling. Instead of inertia, she had the shock madness and careened around the house in a frenzy. A massive contrast to the dog now crashed out on the rug, stiched up leg twitching nervously as she dozes.

The vet couldn't believe that it was Freya with a legitimate reason to visit the surgery. She is famous in the area that I live in for her self-lead runs. If she doesn't get far, she invariably ends up at the vet clinic because she adores them down there. If she has the appropriate window of opportunity (ie, the louvre window in the laundry being left ajar) she ends up in Kings Meadows or Punchbowl (more ducks).

Time to go and disrobe the Q from his Robot pj's.

The Fly-leaf makes tentative beginnings

2006-07-29T20:32:00.000+09:30

"Fly-leaf is a blank leaf forming part of something printed, especially one between the cover & the title page of a book, or at the end of a circular or leaflet; it is not another name for a leaflet, which is, however, sometimes called a fly-sheet." (From Fowler's Modern English Usage c. 1926. My copy of which has never been quite since I left it in the garden overnight, many years ago. I'm sure the snails tended its pages with love.)

I like the idea that this space is the blank leaf behind my surface; onto which I write my name and date and perhaps a little more over time. The title, I have yet to confirm.

And so I begin this new journal. A prod into this virtual world that I have become addicted to of late. It feels like a natural progression. An interesting leap from my addiction to page filling Moleskin journals with brown card covers. I have a particular friend who is loaded everyday with an email of Gillian-ness. This doesn't feel too different which surprises me. Actually, it worries me a little too. Who am I writing to here? Probably me and my ego at present! Yay for that. The other worry is that this will consume me. I am good at
being consumed and, come to think about it, consuming. But I have a thesis that I'm meant to be creating. Will this become the textual fix that should be being placed elsewhere on my computer or will it aid my old word-love to resurface? It will be interesting to see what unfolds.

It all brings to mind an exhibition that I visited recently at the Design Centre. Grainy blue photographs of divers tumbling off the King Bridge into the Tamar River. Gleeful. And so I leap. . .