Looming....

My one hundredth post. (Doncha just love the word hundredth? No-one ever says it correctly, we all slur "hundreth" and leave out that critical "d" but I seriously have a soft spot for words that require a little more effort. Prepossessing. That's another favorite, like preposterous.)

It's really quite amazing that I'm anywhere near one hundred posts, given the way I blather so effortlessly. Then again, borderline OCD has it's advantages...

Have a little stream of semi-consciousness:

The guilty pleasure of hearing "No other woman could hold a candle to you,"
and thinking Damn straight. It was your own fricking narcissism that burned the house down.
Followed by "You're the most intensely YOU person I've ever known. You're unchanging. And in five years you'll be exactly the same. And at fifty you'll be exactly the same."
That I heard inflexible, stagnant, stubborn, resistant when he apparently meant constant, evolving, true to yourself, and other positive, affirming traits is a measure of the chasm between our lexicons of existence. My, how they grow.

And now for some poetry (discussion welcome encouraged; I like interrogation), because this is my blog and I will put up here anything I like. And right now that is.....

Al jabr w'al mugabala


I have you 
without possessing you


Al jabr w'al mugabala


Taste you 
beneath my tongue
without consuming


Al jabr w'al mugabala


We are
an algebraic equation
single letters of representation
in circular transaction


Al jabr w'al mugabala


Discuss.


For my next trick I'm going to rip off Extranjera, because she's cool. No further correspondence shall be entered into over this contentious statement. Post 100 = answers to questions. Get asking. You've got... ooh, three days?

P.S. My toe still hurts. And my butt. Falling over is bad.
I'd like to thank the sparklemunchkins for distracting me from my achy painy clumsy body very successfully.
And leaving me sweet artwork.
And locking me out of my house (see, Linda's husband, I bet you thought you'd gotten away with that, but HA HA! I am the master mistress ultimate ruler of subterfuge cunningness inertia! Hmmm. Could be time to learn how to work a thesaurus.) Yah.

Get your roller derby on!

I am SO incredibly in touch with my inner child. So much that there may not exist an outer adult.

Ten thirty: roller skating rink
Twelve thirty: hot dog break
Three thirty: leave to get haircut.

Yes, I'm a speed freak. Not the stuff you brew up in a spoon with a lighter, but the whoosh-whoosh kind. Roller blades are my kind of thing. They're even better when you can stunt just enough to look decent. It only took three hundred laps for me to remember that I know another way to go around corners (crossing one foot over the other)!

The excitingness of clever, speedy cornering kept me entertained for a few more laps, UNTIL I remembered that I can crisscross my feet while traversing the straight, right over left...ooh, AND left over right (though I think my pelvis is retwisting and I should probably start sucking up to my osteopath for a remedial massage or fifty).

Oh! The joy of turning and then skating backwards (continuing in the same direction) cannot be underestimated. And the funky move where you crouch, one leg extended in front, and just navigate with your rearmost wheel. If you understand that at all from my description, you're psychic!
(Dear hubs, we TOTALLY have to find another abandoned carpark and get our skate on.)

Substitute hubs and I gained a little fan club begging us to teach backward skating and the funky heel manouvre, which was sweet.
I'm only missing two patches of skin (wheeee! Wristguards are the best when you plant and skid on them!): one elbow and most of my right hip (tights+friction= holey tights & missing skin). Ow.

At least I earned my battle scars in a fairly spectacular wipeout speed skating. Tripping and splattering to avoid a kid twisted my right shoulder quite nicely. I should have hit them. Hey, kids BOUNCE! I went splat, sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide CLUNK.

And then got up very quickly, because when you spring enthusiastically to your treacherously wheeled feet, IT DOESN'T HURT. Yeh. Uh-huh. Whoever thought THAT was a liar.

Total activity today: rollerskating approx 4 hours, dashing to bookshop and haircutter, swing class 1.5 hours, Matt Rooney gig about 2 hours.
If I don't sleep for more than four hours tonight (this morning) someone is going to die. Possibly me. OOh, and I have one more injury to add to the list (acquired while dancing): one very gory big toe. I guess I flicked the nail back quite a long way against the sole of someone's shoe. It's throbbing gently now. Throb. Throb. Throb. Throb. I think it's time to sleep. Who wants another piece of poetry tomorrow? (Well, it's that or my inane, sleep-deprived rambling... although I suppose I could post both.)

I dream I am living

I dream I have got to know you

(quite suddenly, quite - unexpectedly, as if that were possible.)

I dream that we love each other

I dream we still love each other

I dream you meet another man

I dream you love him

   but tell him you still want to love me too

I dream he says he understands and we can go on loving each other

(as if that were possible)

I dream he says he finds it difficult

(not quite suddenly and not quite unexpectedly)

I dream you say you will try

   to turn our love into mere friendship

  but that you want still to have that friendship

I dream he says he understands

(as if that were possible)

I dream I have come to terms with this

I dream life goes on, and work

I dream you speak to him about everything

    and he to you about everything

   the way you wanted

I dream he puts up with our friendship

   and that if we are not all dead today

   we still go on living

   happily ever after

(as if that were possible)

It's a little awkward, waiting in a bar to meet someone. It's an arranged meeting and all, don't get me wrong. I don't do loitering to pick up.

Order? Wait? Tonight I'm choosing to wait. We left the time a little ambiguous. The lovely barista has the same haircut as me, but I'm choosing to believe mine looks better. Hers is the color of a latte and I'm espresso, she is dead-straight and fluttering submissively, I'm... kinky and a little subverted.

Strictly talking hair, you realise.

I spent most of today throwing out.

Three years ago hubs and I moved from our parental homes into a mortgage of our own.

Shamefully, the boxes of books (and clothes, and uni papers, and more random crap) in the back room have been whimpering our names all that time. I've finally thrown them (and then some) out into the cold. They're shivering on our verandah awaiting collection by the lovely people at Diabetes Australia. Lots of clothes in garbage bags, too.

All that unpacking and discriminating (chuck? keep? categorise?) was a little scary; I've chosen to relinquish books that linked me to uni; not just class notes and texts, but BOOKS, like A Rebours and Venus in Furs; others I've just accepted I'll never read again, like Red Dragon, and all the old Anne McCafferty and Anne Rices. And then my evening took a strange twist which still has me a little flipped out. It's closure, loud and clear, and a little massage to my ego, and very, very sad all at once.

The horror...

No, the hubs' plane did not go down. Although that would be an event of epic magnitude, it wouldn't rock my world in quite the same way as this jawdroppingly awful event.

In Australia, EVERYONE follows a footy team. Not me, uhuh, no way. And every year we host a ceremony to reward the biggest fathead best player. Or something. It may actually be the guy who drank the most beer last weekend/assaulted the most girlfriends/sent the most obscene text messages. (Oh, sorry, that's cricket. Oops.) It's hard to be sure.

But SOMEONE (actually, many someones) makes quite a living exploiting the conniving I was born to marry a footballer lovely innocent girlfriends of these players by putting the ruffliest crap on their body without actually covering anything up and then parading them in front of said fatheads footy's noblest and finest. (Before you scream in outrage, yes, there ARE morons people out there whose life aspiration was/is to marry a footballer. Not a PARTICULAR footballer. A footballer. More than one of these very strange people have I known - you should picture me nodding sagely in a Yoda-like fashion at this point.)

The only way that dress got out of the store was by the 'designer' giving random people $50 (or a slab) to come in and gush "AWMIGAAWD! That's fantasssssstic, you don't look like a slapper at all!" (I'd do it for $20, but I'd know I could blog about it later.)
Look, honestly, I've been accused of leaving little to the imagination (full skirt +spinning on dance floor = drawer full of sensible knickers, and I did mention that jeans collection, which comes in varying degrees of tight) but there's something very wrong about wearing a sheer black bejewelled dipping-to-the-navel kaftan over a sequinned bra top (two cups sizes too small) no matter what size, age, or color you are. Extra demerit points for being oompa loompa orange.

That just made me think of The Chaser. How great would it have been to have Julian handing out Fashion Police tickets. As long as they read
"one free drink"  no-one would notice the
  "and you're a bloody idiot" printed underneath.

I know, I'm so cynical. But it's a game where winning scores are routinely in the hundreds.
Soccer's so difficult sometimes NO-ONE gets a goal. Perhaps it's a uniquely Australian thing; we can't fund our science departments well, schools are losing desperately needed teaching spaces (aka all the portables are playing silly buggers), we don't have national arts operating in the maroon, let alone black, and our leading politicians can barely string two words together. Oh, wait, that would be all the concussions they incurred back at Scotch and Melbourne Grammar playing football.

Anyway, we have this massive misallocation of funds. Football clubs can pay their stars a couple million per season, but local ovals are being closed because drought has made the playing surface dangerously hard. Someone wears a dress covered in diamonds, but the rest of it looks like Nanna's ruffled navy valance tucked and pinned in a few strategic spots. Uuuuuuugly.

I just don't know how to make it better.

bye bye hubs...

After days of packing (he's a very *thorough* person) hubs has boarded a plane to America and gone to talk to people about the many interesting things he does with code. (He's probably going to read this tomorrow, so I have to be nice!)

I was going to reply to suzukisinger and Linda in the comments section before I realised I'd probab;y go over the character maximum. Or maybe not. 

I get so frustrated seeing people trying to balance it all (family, work, keeping up with the Joneses) because they've bought into the deluded myth that we can have it all. You know what? We really can't. And that's fine as long as we accept that we don't have to. The happiest people I know are the ones who have made their choice. They've cut back on work & spending so they can have family time. They've decided not to have a family because they're workaholics who like being able to purchase what they want when they want. You get the picture. I'm DAMN human and feel my limitations keenly. 

Sisterhood. Yah. Definitely a few choice words I could spew. Having been to an all girls' school, a lot of things don't change. (To all those femmes out there who find themselves sharing the camraderie of guys happily, HI! You are not alone....and Linda, that made me laugh with great joy on Sunday!)

More honesty would be a nice thing. I think I've found a lot of it online, but it seems to be leaking out here BECAUSE we're largely too afraid to say it out loud. Actually, THIS isn't fair. Actually, my brain has liquified due to lack of sleep. Actually, YOU clean up this and pick up that and hang up this and prepare that... and THEN tell me what a sexbomb you are. Yeah. (Just to clarify: no targeted 'you's or 'we's... I'm just generalising and ranting.)

I have a habit of sitting a little outside myself and then summing up what's going on inside my head. Often this goes very wrong, as I return to earth a bit too quickly (AS I'm saying something quite ill-considered, mostly) or everyone thinks "Erk, look at the ice queen bitch....What did I do to HER?!"

I think that my brain should be labelled "Dangerous, do not open!" I'm sure I could get a very finely written tattoo right up close to my hairline...

The pug wants to sit on my lap. As long as she doesn't try typing, we should all be fine. She's starting quite intently at the cursor at the moment, so if I keep typing steadily, she might fall asleep. Or something.

Sleeping in? Dammit, you are PERFECTLY justified to rant about the absence of sleep-ins. 

I understand perfectly why I stayed every Saturday night at my grandparents' place; if I hadn't I may not have survived my infancy. I do remember that my mother very rarely got up before eight (I'm SURE that'll be hotly disputed!) and I'm pretty sure I was homeschooled so she didn't have to make a school run (ha!).  

Pffft. I wore a fairy dress to my 16th birthday party. Actually, that's not true. I campaigned enthusiastically for a costumed party SO I could wear this particular dress. I still have it. 

I think. 

I probably still have it. 

Ok. 

Hubs will tell you (no, I will!) that I have been known to change clothes four or five times before leaving the house. I have ballet clothes, dance clothes (very important distinction), boring teacher clothes, slightly eccentric teacher clothes, COMPLETELY eccentric teacher clothes and clothes I should never wear teaching. The only reason I can always wear (and that's CAN, not DO) vaguely relevant/complementary outfits is by having vast amounts of clothing at my disposal. Savers and I have happy, happy times. 

 I completely understand wearing a skirt that feels like heaven with a tee that's not only new and a birthday present, but ineffably COOL. I wish I'd brought you fairy wings. 

Oh, You're talking to someone who wears legwarmers with ballroom shoes and a full skirt (and gets told... can you hear it? "Hey, hey, wait! (thinking: No-one's ever said THIS before): "Oh, that is SO out of Fame.") and then laughs. And stamps on people's feet. 

Am I allowed to snigger at someone who says "Hey, you're heavier than you look"? I feel that's a LITTLE rude. I'm going to wear fat pants dancing tonight. MC Hammer-style pants. Bite me!

Tis the season to celebrate birthdays.

Last night was the 60th birthday celebration of a yoga friend, today the 38th of a woman I like and admire very, very much.

I'm struck by how old and how young we are simultaneously.
On thursday at dinner, I came away feeling so old. Somehow we're all nearly thirty, working our butts off and fatigued by ten pm. Pathetic!

Talking last night I had the feeling of being the "littlie" in the room, all these people around me having been here, done that. Wearing the battle scars and looking hopefully into the future.

And then today, with the parents? A bit not quite grownup. It worries me that having children equates to being an adult in some settings. Is there anything wrong per se with living irresponsibly?

Perhaps, if you choose to have children and still make immature choices. But if you consciously say you don't want kids because of your lifestyle? It's much less selfish than having them anyway.

I think I need to realise that I am no less an adult for being childless; it's a considered decision for us at this stage in our life together not to have children right now. Yes, they're in the five-year plan.
I don't see having children and having fun as mutually exclusive. Hence my resentment of "Oh, make the most of it!"

People, if I wanted to "make the most of it" I would have a hysterectomy,(no I wouldn't, hubs could have a vasectomy) because that would certainly maximize the number of hours in the day I could devote to self-adulation.
But don't put your issues on me. I'm sure I will have days of wanting my own space, the time to read a book, and I've never been an early-morning person.

Thanks to all my childful friends, I know the joys and rewards of devoting so much time to the formation of a little person's character.
And yep, allow me to just cut you off mid-head-shake there. I know about the nappies, the nappy rash, the not-sleeping, mastitis, teething, tantrums, intolerances and allergies, vomiting, reflux, throwing food, spilling, ear and nose and throat infections...
And then we celebrate birthday number one.

You're female? Resist the brainwashing and the popular expectations. You don't want children, don't have them. You do? Do it. Damn straight I'm pro-choice.

Somehow this turned into a rant. I'm in a funny position: wife but not a mother, not a child but not a parent, just a teacher and quasi-aunt.

Tomorrow I'll just try to be myself; better make the most of it, after all.