This week...

I've been using Twitter to find new penpals. Well, not quite, but I did ask who would like a pretty card in the mail, and quite a lot of people took me up on it, avowing their love of letterbox surprises and pretty things in general.

 It tickles me that I'm using the fastest communication to support the slowest; I check my email and twitter several times a day (oh, the vagaries of an iphone) but nothing is quite the same as pulling a personally addressed envelope from the mail. It's grounding in a way that all this electronic communication is so much fairyfloss. Hit the delete button and it's gone, might never have existed. This envelope in my hands? Just to walk to the bin requires my active engagement, participation with measurable action.

Writing, like so many other things, is a luxury. Like slow food, like handmade gifts, like learning a new skill and practising it (not just going to a six week course and then forgetting the whole shebang) until it becomes familiar. How terribly ironic that in a world full of devices to make life easier and faster we have lost the time to go slow.

I'm struggling a little with the parameters of time while living by myself (although the pug's constant harassment for food means I can never fall too far off balance. I go to sleep too late, wake up untethered and not knowing whether I really have slept at all. I suspect I may be nocturnal and merely participating in this "let's all be awake during daylight" merely out of habit.

What do you do to ground yourself?

In which I think. Try not to fall over.

I’ve been reading. And thinking (dangerous combination, I know). Book that sparked the thoughts? Lionel Shriver’s So much for that.

If you’ve not read it, I’ll try not to spoil the ending; I started to get the shape of it in my head before it arrived, but it wasn’t so saccharine as it might have been. It has made me question the dollar value that, increasingly, western society places on life. I’d like to believe that life actually unto itself has no value; it is, after all, what we each make of it.

I can’t sell you days of my life for you to have and enjoy, I can’t buy more days for myself, but increasingly this seems to be the perception of our immortality-obsessed culture. Death has become something to be put off, an inconvenient appointment rather than an inevitable endstep in the process of living. All the platitudes of loss (how careless!) and passing (because we really, REALLY don’t like that D-word) and expressions of regret…

Yes. People die. It’s sad. It’s not, actually, a tragedy. It’s not the thing to fight and avoid. Certainly, it’s sometimes not fair, but then what in life is?

Lying on the couch last night, juggling my bony spine across my husband’s knees and picking up the pug so she could trek across us with her usual land-rover determination (hey, two people on a couch are rocky terrain when you have no legs to speak of), I announced, “So, I’m hearing all these ads about organ donation, and I just need you to know that if I’m hit by a car tomorrow and wind up braindead, my organs go places.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Sorry, I was thinking about the tournament. Your organs what?”

“If I get hit by a bus,” (obviously he needed a more dramatic picture) “My organs. Go. To other people. You know. They get my bits. Because you’re my husband, so you’d have to make the decision.”

“That’s a bit dangerous. You’re always braindead in the morning. Can I have your bits?”

(I didn’t point out that he’s the one who sinks back into a coma at the first available opportunity, starting awake again with “Wha-?” nine minutes later, while I grumble and threaten to kick him should he do it again.)

“No!”

“What if I need them?”

“You’re not even the same blood type as me. What blood type ARE you?” (Clearly idiotic, in light of what came next)

“Don’t know. What blood type are you?”

“Hm. Don’t know.” (See? I’m BRILLIANT. I should know, but I’ve forgotten.) “So, organs. You?”

“Yep. Other people can have your bits. I guess other people can have mine too. Yeah, take ‘em.”

“Buried or cremated?”

“I don’t care? What do I care? I’m gone! Whatever’s best for the environment.”

“So, you want tea?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Awesome. It’s so nice to know the really tough decisions can be made in about three minutes between Thai takeaway and Earl Gray.

Thunder and lightning, very very frightening...pug!

It's stormy weather above our place; really and truly right above us. Hearing strong winds, I panicked and ran out onto our porch to prune the gorgeous yellow rose standard beside our steps. The other one blew over while we were away one weekend and I didn't want to lose this one too. Got absolutely soaked and decided to abandon my frenzied pruning efforts when I realised I was directly below some massive (daylight quality) flashes of lightning holding metal pruning shears. Hm. Yes, they have handles, but is that something I really feel like testing tonight? No. 


Hilariously, the same pug which was skittering across the floorboards barking in a panicky fashion not ten minutes ago has now passed out in her bed, sweetly oblivious to the world and subsequent rumblings of thunder in the heavens above. The rain is pattering on our roof but there are warnings of hail up to 2cm in diameter; no doubt there'll be human interest stories of families with their roofs blown off and clutching golf-sized hail preserved in the freezer for our intrepid reporters over at the HeraldSun.

Dammit. Spoke too soon. She's squeaking again.
Hubs is lecturing me just a little on the pool of cards we saw in tonight's Magic draft. Then apologising for speaking so much while I'm attempting to type coherent sentences. Then pointing out that he had in fact done said apologising. Ok, it's a mobius loop, enough already.

I now have three sore toes.
I carved a chunk out of my right foot's second toe when I put a large plastic tub on - well, I thought it was the floor. It wasn't. So my left biggie is sore, by right biggie is throbbing, and I may die from the blood loss incurred from my second toe. That I probably won't is an irrelevance and shall not be mentioned in the interests of garnering sympathy. And it's ridiculously humid.

Hm. Is there anything else I can currently think of to complain about? Oh yeah, it's Halloween tomorrow. Which, in Australia, doesn't mean a great deal. When all your friends are arty people it means a little more. I suspect dressing up may be in the air. This is totally my own fault for bemoaning the lack of frocking up in my life. Universe, if you are listening, this is not what I meant.

Thanks!

Lovely Janie has awarded me the 

for my blog; I'm a bit chuffed, because she also gave it to some people I especially like: Mr London Street, Lora, Tennyson ee Hemingway. So that's nice. Very nice. Thank you, Janie!

I'm told that...

1) “The Honest Scrap” award is like a pint in a bar...better when shared with friends!

2) The recipient has to tell 10 true but unknown facts about themself.

3) The recipient has to buy a pint for 10 other bloggers.

4) Those 10 bloggers all have to be notified that they have a pint waiting to be enjoyed.

5) Those 10 bloggers should link back to the one who bought them the pint.

I don't think I've ever actually drunk a pint of anything. Oh well. (Hey, that's 1!)

ok. 2. I don't have a middle name. My parents said this was so I could choose my own. I think they just couldn't agree on one. 

3. Hubs and I have a pug. We call her Lucy, but her *real* name is Aurora. Fancy. That's CLEARLY where her princess attitude*** comes from. 

4. I have a thing about jeans. I collect them. Seriously. I don't really have the wardrobe space to cope with this, so I'm trying to come to terms with downsizing a little. 

5. I read the "Flowers in the Attic" series AVIDLY as a preteen. Twilight? Yeah, whatever. 

6. I don't barrack for a football team (practically unaustralian.)

7. I've lived with one leg slightly shorter than the other for YEARS. Until my clever osteopath worked out my pelvis had very intelligently twisted itself.

8. A girlfriend and I used to practice catwalking to Madonna's Vogue... on repeat. In front of a mirror. A full-length, 14-foot wide mirror. Yep. I'm crawling away now. 

9. We really did. Oh, okay, New thing. Ummm. I own a pair of AWESOME boots. They're bright blue over the knee leather and I love them. I also never wear them out of the house. You know how you can put something on four billion times and it just never looks quite... right?

10. OOH! This is actually really cool. I just twigged I could list it here because no-one knows... I stumbled across www.hopeREVO.com today and got ALL INSPIRED. I should post some photos but I'm too lazy. I used some really sweet little cards I ordered months ago from vistaprint for my students and wrote my messages on the blank side. I really ought to post some pics. Sigh.  But anyway, I wrote out HEAPS and then I tagged about twenty random cars today (in the parking lot, obviously) and left a few others at my favorite cafe, etc. I think I'm going to make them the new gum under the table; take blu-tack with me everywhere and stick them JUST under the edge.  

***Just in case you were in any doubt; the pug has now brought her bone inside (much hilarious sneaking and skulking culminating in a mad dash for the bedroom) and is eating it under the dining room table. On, variously, the table leg, my foot, and the hardwood floor. So my wonderful Cat Empire music is being punctuated by much steam-engine gnawing and scrabbling and clawing before the whole thing shoots across the floor and is retrieved and dragged back under the table. There be monsters. Of course, when I stick my head down to look at her she's all "ME? With a BONE? You MUST be kidding. Far too much hard work. You wanna feed me now?"

I think it's time for me to sit on the couch with a book and some tea. Currently reading: which I stumbled across in an opshop today. $5. Happy days.