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?

Imbecilic behaviour pt.II

Dear Guy in Gloria Jean’s.

You’re inside. Thoroughly inside, esconced in ‘mood lighting’ and an ambient, ‘warm’ color scheme of latte and burgundy. Outside it is overcast and has been raining heavily. You may have needed the leather jacket out there, but in here nothing can excuse the pretentious git sunglasses covering half your face.

P.S. I hate spammers. Particularly when they leave irrelevant and moronic advertisements on every post I’ve put up in the last, oh, month?

Removed now, after much whinging, moaning, and tabbing back and forth on my part. Bastards.

P.P.S. What I DO love is finding this season’s shoes in Savers. For 12.99. And then discovering that despite their tagged size (8) and my nominal shoe size (9) they FIT. Happy Cinderella moment, or it would have been had the two blue-rinse ladies behind me been bluebirds, the said shoes glass slippers instead of wooden-soled wedges…and my baby-blue Levis  a ballgown. There’s just something so inescapably WHOLESOME about faded Levis. I’ll probably cry a little when they get to the stage of whorishly threadbare as opposed to pleasantly scuffed and washed to flannelette softness, but for now they’re perfect.  

No, you don’t get photos. We’ve been over this.

(a) I have no idea about lighting, composition, and generally what makes a ‘good’ photo

(b) With only myself around and no tripod, it’s freaking difficult to take a photo of anything on my body, and I assure you it’s far, FAR too cold to remove any clothing just so it can be photographed and added to a blog five people a month read.

(c) I’m lazy. 

Just go and stroke your favorite flannelette pj pants (DON'T try to tell me you're too cool to own any, I won't believe you and will laugh uproariously) while picturing the best jeans you've ever owned. Yeah. Feels like that. See? Much better than a photo of some random patch of denim. 

Hello, I'm an imbecile, aka Australian.

It’s gotten to the stage where I take great pleasure in reading the Herald Sun just to rant about the moronic content/commentary/drivel passing for articles/lack of style/you get the picture.

On Sunday I was blessed (and this was after a cursory glance) with two golden opportunities.

Not only was Catherine Lambert’s usual laughably pathetic attempt at finding a vaguely fashionable person to photograph and deconstruct up (or down) to par, but Eddie MacGuire chose to address the Victorian public with no little disregard for the coventions of written English. Sentence 1: incomplete. Sentence 2: incomplete. Sentence 3: punctuation would have helped. Sentence 4: I forget, but there was something wrong with it, because my outrage was squarely centred on the fact that a Year 9 student should (although given the state of our education system, may not) be able to produce four coherent sentences.

Fair enough, Eddie’s an everyman, so maybe it’s to his benefit to be semi-illiterate. I wouldn’t know, being one of the minority holding a postgraduate qualification. I’m not even meant to be reading the Herald-Sun; I should be supporting The Age or The Australian along with my university-educated peers.

It’s distressingly easy to see why people are becoming dumber; the public sphere expects so little of us – and so we get condescension ladled out in spoonfuls; SHOCK! Our weekly shopping is getting more expensive! A. Buy home brands (because that solves the problem of raw material and production costs rising, DER.) SHOCK! Our kids are getting fatter! A. Boost their self-esteem, because all that emotional eating is destroying them (not what you put in your trolley or what they’re bullied into wanting by advertising, another dissertation altogether). SHOCK! Australian public growing more stupid! A. Yeah, no, like really?

On a more distressing note, this is my 200th blog post. Two hundred posts and I've still got things to gripe about. Wow. I suppose I should come up with some fantastic giveaway or way of compelling people to come out of the woodwork, leave comments, pander to my ego, etc, but this requires more thought than I'm capable of on a Monday night, hacking and sneezing my way toward bedtime. Help me. 

Open letter to the patrons of the pub. Sorry, ONE patron of the pub.

Dear girl wearing a maxidress,

The dance floor is for dancing. The bar is for drinking. So are all those tables.

There is a reason people with full glasses lurk at said tables and not upon the dance floor, let alone attempt any movement which may be construed as dancing.

The reason is in your hand, and is rapidly getting emptier. I am rapidly getting wetter.
Not in a good way.

The guy you are 'dancing' with (where dancing may be read as lunging back and forth toward each other in some vague attempt at rhythmic coordination) is correct. Put down the beer glass and then, sure, continue to endanger your own wellbeing by gyrating/lunging/mashing other people's toes in your determined pursuit of "I'm the cool girl who can drink a beer AND dance".

Flinging your hair around will not help. You will only scare off your potential boyfriend by lashing him violently across the face, first with your hair and then your spilt beer.

Oh.
Oh, well done.
No, really.
I mean, it takes skill to drop a glass of beer among enthusiastically dancing people in a pub, in FRANKSTON, and NOT get punched in the face. Did you have to drop the actual glass as well? Next time? Just the beer, thanks. At least that evaporates.

Bronchitis is fun when you...

Loves: a quiet night at home where I can bust out my sewing machine and the stash from the cupboard and get all crafty. Last time I did this I wound up sewing darts in the back of a dress at 1a.m., (Cue my mother: "Will anyone REALLY notice if they're a centimetre off?" Me: "I will.") but it was TOTALLY worth it.

A couple metres of sunshiny red poplin became a sweet A-line dress courtesy of a 1979 Vogue pattern, a lot of cursing (a good quick-unpick is the BEST investment the would-be seamstress will EVER make), and a patient boy trying hard to understand why THAT shade of blue bias binding was not exactly the right shade of cerulean.

Tonight I've been a bit more snippy than sewy, but now I have a decadent watermelony scarf which fringes and drapes like no-one's business. Best color EVER. You have to close your eyes and imagine the coral-ly pink of fresh watermelon at this point, because I'm too lazy to find my camera and post a photo. I'm just not into all that visual biz.  (And thanks, Lady Smaggle, for the inspiration!)

I have used up some of my stash of metal-toothed zips with happy results; my good ol' Sass & Bides are now skinny Zipporas with zippity-doo-dah awesome. (I've got to stop eating choc-chip cookies, they're making me a LITTLE loopy.) Should really go and tidy up now... entirely the boring part. Perhaps I could just sew one more thing first....

P.S. All you people reading this and giggling at my sugar-fuelled hysteria (oh god, Jonathan Coulton's version of "Baby Got Back" just hit out stereo. Don't even ask.) ... what? Oh yeah. All you people reading this and snickering are complete bastards. Unless you leave me a little something in the comments box. Then you're wonderful.

The cold, the neti pot and the wardrobe.

Sick again. After the joys of gastro and an enlarged spleen, everyone should try a nasty cold. Radioactive sinus secretions and a hacking cough? BAGS of fun. 

At the same time my wardrobe has decided to fall apart. Literally. Being a girl, I have too many clothes. I’m sure this has been mentioned before, but I inhabit half the walk-in (it’s a really TINY walk-in, ok?) plus a freestanding wardrobe in our bedroom, plus another freestanding wardrobe in the spare room (where it fights for space with lego boxes and MTG cards).

There may or may not be yet another wardrobe holding costumes and fabric for my optimistically titled ‘spare time’ when I interact with my sewing machine. Part of my brain would quite like to try out the idea of a capsule wardrobe. Probably the same part which thinks I should start every morning with a litre of warm water spiked with lemon before eating half a cup of porridge and practising neti.

(For the uninitiated, neti is the practice of rinsing your sinuses with warm salty water. You get a neti pot, laugh at it’s penis-shaped spout for a bit, fill it up with warm water and salt as per directions, then stick spout into one nostril and try to remember to block the back of your throat so the water flows THROUGH your sinuses and out the other nostril (instead of down your throat, which will probably induce vomiting). Great thing to do, not something you want to do with an audience. )

Anyway, wardrobe. Yes. Unfortunately, the boy has acquired a nasty habit (from me, who am I kidding) of draping clothes to be dealt with later above all the rest. This is giving his side of the wardrobe the appearance of a large clothes heap while causing me to fear for my life when the whole shebang landslides onto my head. 

Really, he mastered the art of the capsule wardrobe years ago, whereas my attitude to clothing is much more like a ridiculously comprehensive multivitamin; I probably DON’T need it, but what if I suddenly die (sartorially) of an acute shortage of grey marle? Or boyfriend track pants (even though my rule is in-house or ballet and THAT IS IT)? No. There’s only one solution. More wardrobe space. 

Manic Monday

Today was meant to look like this:
9-12 teach.
drive madly in car to... (God. Seriously. Drive madly IN CAR? What ELSE would I DRIVE in? Gah.)
1-3 meet to discuss next year's Autumn festival
drive madly home to...
4-6.30 teach.
eat something (possibly after cooking madly)
7.30 - falling over: attend class to make up for missing weekend class due to Book Club and bloggeratti meetup.

Instead, my 11.00 student failed to turn up. They also failed to (a) call my home (b) call/text my mobile (c) email me. This would not ordinarily bother me, EXCEPT that they were attending an 11.00 lesson because they requested a time change. So I shoehorned my existing 11.00 student into 9.30, confirmed swap, well done, everyone happy, yes yes.... No show. FAIL.

So I run late with my 10.30 and head upstairs at 11.30, satisfied that I can grab a snack and head out to this meeting. I'll just grab directions from whereis. And while I do that, why don't I just check my email? Where there happens to be a message advising that the 1pm meeting has been moved... forward... to 12.00 midday. Bastards.

Ok. That's ok. I can at least call the teacher who I'm deputising and apologise (living an hour away from meeting location makes attendance pretty moot). Dial number (helpfully provided on email signature).

"Hello?"
Crap. This guy has a brick in each hand and thinks I'm a plumbing contractor (or SOMETHING, you get the picture).
"Sorry. Wrong number."
I rechecked, of course, but either I have a permanent glitch in my brain whereby I read all '8's as '6' which is only just manifesting NOW after twenty-seven years, or the contact number on the email signature is wrong.

Leave apologetic message at home number. Drum fingers maniacally. No mobile number on teacher listing either.

Ok. Call the office! That's where the meeting IS. Heck, I could probably attend via skype. Or teleconference! Excellent.

"Due to meetings at the office today, no-one is available to take your call..."
This is NOT my day.
Leave apologetic message no.2.

Randomly google teacher and scroll through several irrelevant mentions before hitting a community advertisement. With mobile number. Oh baby.
Apologise and explain trying to get onto... but... yeah. Fail on my part.
(Win: shhhh. Don't have to drive to meeting.)