April 17th, 2010 Comments Off
I seem to be in the place where everything appears imperfect, unfinished. It is all in pieces.
But I’m at peace with that.
I found an old song I barely remember writing. It seems complete in its simplicity.
no man
no man
no man is an island
i am
woman
i drown like an island
here is
my sand
beach yourself on my shoreline
because i
will stand
though the water’s are rising
i’ll hold
your hand
your hand
when the tide becomes lightning
and then
i’ll dance
i’ll dance
ill dance
and it won’t be so frightening
because i’m
woman
and i drown like an island
and no man
no man
no man
is an island
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January 3rd, 2008 §
At the moment, I have the house to myself. Big Sis is away camping with her B and his kids and I was really looking forward to the time alone to get the house in order, among other things. The mini heatwave put paid to that idea for a couple of days because all I could do was sit with my feet in a bucket of water and sigh. During that time, Cas learned what dunking is and he enjoys it immensely.
I think I mentioned on the post I wrote when it was too hot for me to fill in the title field that I’ve been giving him a big bowl of water to play with. I put my head in it once to dampen my hair and he thought that was extremely funny. He then spent as long as he could (ie; the short length of time I indulged his 1 year old sense of humour) pushing my head back under.
But I digress. Today, the weather was perfect and I got a few dishes washed and took the recycling out but something else is interfering with my productivity. You see, the neighbour’s kids are here.
It is guaranteed when he has them, my door will be knocked on at least four times a day because one or both of them wants to hang out with me. (I really don’t understand the attraction. At first I thought it was Caspar, but apparently it’s me.) After turning them away several times yesterday I promised the youngest last night that I would make some time for her today.
At the first early morning knock I let her know that we could go to the park together at a particular time in the afternoon. Three knocks later I caved and got Cas all sunscreened and ready to go.
This isn’t an eventful post. Nor was it an eventful day. The weather was perfect, sunny with a cool breeze, and she was happy enough to tag along with me to the local shops because I needed milk. Without Big Sis’ car available, that takes over an hour or all by itself. Then we played in the park, something Cas seems to enjoy more and more everyday.
And now the day is over. But I have this simple post written and those few dishes done. That’s something.
I might just give myself the night off, not worry about the forum, not worry about reading all my feeds which have exploded once again, not worrying about tweaking every little this and that both here and on the other blog. (Yes, I just told you where it was.) I might just manage to do those things in my own time, without making them a source of pressure.
There just comes a point when you have to let everything go, mentally at least, in order to become productive again. It really isn’t that I have too much to do. Like most things, it’s how I think about it.
Tonight whatever I get done will be a walk in the park.
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January 2nd, 2008 §
I’m a little bit bombarded. There seems too much going on at once and although in the workplace I’m a thoroughly organised person, the rest of my life has always been chaotic. Maybe I should start reading Zen Habits. I need the same common sense advice pounded into my brain over and over again.
- In the kitchen, every single dish I own is piled up around the sink and covering the benches. (Muy hygenic!)
- In my bedroom, every single piece of clothing I haven’t packed away yet is strewn across the floor. (This doesn’t even make sense because most of them remain a little snug since having Caspar.)
- On my computer desktop, there are more files than can actually fit on the screen.(I have since dumped them randomly into yet another to-be-sorted folder.)
- I have a list of to-dos about a mile long. (Or I think it is. One of those to-dos is to actually write a to-do list.)
And even here there are a few things not functioning the way they should. It’s not an entirely peaceful place to write.
Add to that the boxes all around the house that keep getting reopened and repacked and the pile of papers which, if they could be stacked, would be as tall as me. (What’s that you say? Matches?)
I’m a bit of a shocker at throwing things away. Having worked as an archivist, I like to archive things. And that would be fine, if what once were systems hadn’t gone to hell in a handbasket and I was the archivist in life that I am when something actually restrains me and makes me do things. (Like a paycheck.) There is something to be said for working for The Man.
I need a good, hard talking to. I always have. I’m sure my mother gave one to me time and time again as I was growing up. It’s a wonder she’s not now a shadow of herself, pale, and defeated by her inability to make me register the sense of what she was saying.
My skull is thick. The power of my deafness is awe-inspiring. Nothing has changed since I was a child even though, in primary school, my Opa sent me “A Round Tuit”.
I still never get around to it.
Discipline. I need discipline. It would be nice if I could blame the lack of it in me on my mother but I’m afraid I know very well where the blame lies. I am easily distracted. I have grand ideas but my impetus stops at the idea as though someone else would be there to implement it. I move on to the next one too soon and hence…
My ducks do not swim in a row.
There is too much to understand, too many things to do, too much I want to give, too much time that I want to take.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” W.B. Yeats
Leaving aside the objectional usage of the word anarchy in that poem, I’m sure there is a reason these lines came into my head right now. Because I am standing amidst the ruins. Because I am not centred. I rebel at the notion that I need to be but, in truth, I need to be.
I need to be dogged, to sustain my efforts, to take on only what I can manage. And then manage it. There are no good fairies to complete my works; I am not Psyche and there are no ants to sort through all the grains of my life.
I need to change this.
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September 6th, 2007 Comments Off
I’m still struggling through packing up my house but after months of procrastination I’m finally on the move.
I’ve become ruthless. After laboriously sorting through every tiny item and trying to decide what to keep, what to recycle and what to toss, I’ve had enough. 12 industrial strength garbage bags of clothes for goodwill. That’s enough. I’m throwing it all out the window.
Literally.
There is a huge pile of garbage on my back patio just waiting to be bagged and binned. I may never quite be Zen, but how on earth – Why on earth? – did I amass all that stuff? No wonder I feel so weighed down by the whole process.
There is one small joy in stripping all that clutter away though. The memories. Those odd little scraps amidst all the debris that make you recall things you thought you had forgotten.
That film script I started but never finished, entitled Triptych: A Road Movie which is almost a cross between Female Perversions and The Wizard of Oz.
That poor, bedraggled porcelain doll I named Molly in primary school, which my Opa bought for me on his one and only visit to Australia, a country he swore he would never set foot in. But that’s another story. I had the most wonderful Opa.
The longneck beer coolers from the Grand Final Party at La La Land. I didn’t work that night, and I loathe football, but we hung out there all day, drinking and talking. A sunny afternoon in a dark bar, with musicians and cocktail waitresses, bartenders and actors, sprawled over the sofas and the floor, surrounded by red walls, passionate about everything.
A price list from Little Matchgirl Muffins, my tiny business selling baked goods to the cafe next to my office. Up at4am making chocolate éclairs and passionfruit tarts and caramel and almond fudge before settling in to do data entry for nine hours, my clothes smelling like cookies.
That fax with the phone number that just said, For things to do with Baileys after a car accident… And more recollections of life in bars after closing.
Those scribbled notes on the back of the Tranny Bingo list from my 30th birthday, especially the one that simply read, Happy Birthday Rayette…, a reference to Five Easy Pieces, one of my favourite movies, from one of my favourite boys who is now a man I respect so, so much.
And there is a box of love letters and trinkets still waiting to be explored. I haven’t opened it yet. There is only so much you can fit into a smile and mine will already last all day. It is slightly Mona Lisa but I can feel it.
In my eyes.
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August 23rd, 2007 §
I’m in the middle of moving house and it’s not an out- of-here into-there kind of deal. The house I own is already empty (of people, at least) and Cas and I are living in my sister’s spare room until it is renovated and sold. My things currently have no home so I have to pack everything away for what may continue to be months (renovating is a slow process with a ten month old) and scale down my three-bedroom, double-garage, outdoor-entertaining contents to suit a city-size apartment.
No problem there. I can’t wait to be living close to the people who know how to make coffee again. The problem is that when I said three-bedroom, it was slightly misleading. My master bedroom hasn’t been a master bedroom since I moved in. The first thing I did was rip out the built-in robes to make room for The Library.
I have books. I’m not sure how many. I stopped counting a while ago.
Now, there is no chance on this green earth that my (partially Dewey Decimal catalogued) book collections will be scaled down but I can’t keep them with me while I’m in the in-between. They have to be boxed up and put into storage. I’m not a particularly dependent person but this process seems to engender a great deal of anxiety in me. What if I need one of them?
I have the capacity to be a very efficient person (Yes, Mum. I do.) but this particular part of packing up my life has been trying.
Yesterday I packed three boxes. Three boxes should take, say, ten or fifteen minutes all up? Unless of course you’re me and each one takes over an hour. Surely I could justify holding on to just this one? And that one… And that one…
There were a few I had no problems boxing. The red velvet covered book of love potions someone gave me? Nope. Don’t need that. The Complete Family Guide to Natural Healing? A quick flick through it, just in case. Herbs for anorexia and and go smell a flower, it will make you feel better? Nope. Don’t need that. Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha? No, thank you. As a mum I get more than my fair share of scatological humour daily. Into the box with you.
But then there were the more obscure things like Back to Basics and the time it took me to convince myself I didn’t need to know how to pasteurise my own milk or build a self-composting dunny if I was moving back to the inner city.
Or there was my Asana Dialogue which, when abridged, went something like this:
Hatha Yoga?
=> No. You just joined a gym.
But it doesn’t have yoga classes.
=> You have a DVD.
But…
=> No.
I could feature a posture each week on my blog…
=> Your blog is not about yoga.
I could use the symbolism of each asana to discuss different aspects of…
=> No. No. No.
Pausing to consider the fat Genet biography I’ve yet to get around to reading was perhaps more reasonable. It didn’t smack quite so much of desperation. But why does not having all my books on hand or, at least, just around the corner, make me feel so desperate?
Well you see, right here is where I would mention a passage from a novel. The narrator grew up in a house where the all the walls were lined with books, as I did, and she remembers wondering as a child, when she visited bookless homes, what it was that held the walls up. And that is symbolism which resonates with me.
But I can’t share that passage (which I think is in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Truce) because the book is locked away in a cage made of cardboard and packaging tape.
You never know which book you might need.
There is a happy ending though. I kept aside three books while packing my three boxes. The Penguin Opera Guide and Prima Donna: A History, which I need as reference materials for my own novel, and Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems, a book I will be using to write a weekly feature on my blog, unlike the awful asana disaster.
I think three books for three boxes is fair. So I’ve made a deal with myself and tomorrow when I’m packing I get to hold on to fifteen extra books to make up for the boxes already lining the hallway.
The Camus doesn’t count of course. There can never be a cardboard cage for him.
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