One's Own Room

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . 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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.