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. 

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.

Sundays in the park...

"How you liking it?"
"Oh yeah, it'd be great if I could see anything,"
says the woman spilling over the edges of her seat
behind my (rather tall, it must be admitted) beloved.
I endure a few more of her snipy, pointed (and loud) comments before casually glancing over my shoulder to put a face to the snark.

(Retrospectively, I should have taken one of the vacant seats to her left post-interval. Then I could have made loud complaints about the crushing claustrophobia her bulk imposed on me. And no, I realise there are plenty of fat people who are not that way by choice. Trust me, he doesn't always love towering over people either. If you would like him to only purchase end-of-row or back-row seats in the future, maybe you should consider seating only dead centre of the row and taking your seat before everyone else so you don't crush them as you attempt to tippy-toe past.) Ahem. Sorry.

Aside from the ranting of the bitter twisted moron behind us who could easily have moved to sit in the vacant seats behind me (much more average stature), Jersey Boys was brilliant. Utterly awesome and great. I don't even like musicals.

The evening of wonderful continued into dinner. "That pho place on Swanston? Chinatown?"
Beloved smiles, considers. "Blue train? Because then I can order anything, like pizza or steak, or..."
"Sure."
I like blue train. Over on Southbank, it's been our favorite after-theatre place for years. So we walk on over. Of course, it's packed. We wait for twenty minutes for a table, we scan the menu and wait for our orders to go through.

"Wouldn't it be funny if we walked all the way over here and waited and I wound up ordering the Singapore noodles?"
He's grinning goofily, hamming it up. He's serious.
"Not so much, no. I'm going to have the tandoori chicken."
He performs another finger scan down the menu.
"Yeah, uh... I think I'll have the steak."
See? Simple. The waitress arrives and I triumphantly order my tandoori. His turn.
"I'll have... The Singapore noodles. And some flatbreads to start."

Argg.

I miss frocking up.

In a discussion about class times for next year, I pointed out that finishing class at 8.45 on a Friday night really wasn't all that grand for me. I work 9-5 on Saturday, so do the math on that and let me know how my social life is going to fare. My mother pointed out (not unreasonably) that she'd done it for plenty of years.

Hm.

Yes.

Hang on. Me too, because when YOU started teaching Friday nights my class was the last class on Friday night... so I would sit at the desk and deal with the griping and the moaning and the rude parents and the snotty teenagers and do my classes... and go home and go to work for a 9.00-5.00 day at ballet dealing with the griping and the moaning and the rude parents and the snotty teenagers and do my classes...
I actually think I have it easier being the teacher than the desk slave.

BUT, my point is that I have been doing this for years too. Yeah. Take that. And I don't think it's going to suck any less this time around.  Today is one of those days where I think I could quite enjoy living in a cave. With wireless, and meals delivered on a tray. I've devolved to my ground-base state of jeans and top, although I'm incongruously typing this wearing black pointe shoes. Well, they needed some kind of breaking in, and I figured that we have floorboards for a reason. Plus, it's funny watching the pug go into high alert every time the box knocks against the floor.
OOH! Post!
If there's one thing I like more than toast (although maybe not as much as caramel popcorn) it's getting stuff in the mail. This is why online retailers are simultaneously my greatest joy and very, very dangerous.

[one letterbox expedition later...]

Wow. Now my new across-the-road neighbors think I'm certifiable too. Let me set the scene:

It's a beautiful sunny day. A council truck idles on the side of the road. The yellow rose bush beside the house is in full, glorious bloom. A girl comes out of the house with a pug under her arm. She is wearing a grey top, jeans, and carelessly-painted-black pointe shoes. She tiptoes across the driveway and then walks on pointe up the sidewalk to the letterbox. 


At this point she realises that the discussion between a couple of burly council workers and her neighbor has ceased. She looks around curiously. They're looking at her in a very puzzled way. She waves and nearly drops the pug, recovers, stomps up to the letterbox and finds it empty. She's tempted for a moment to put the pug inside the letterbox, just to really give them something to look at, but that's probably not a nice thing to do. Besides, the pug's a little too rotund.  Frick. 


Oh, and that's before I get started on the next-door neighbor, who has a WEIRD obsession with his nature strip. What are your neighbors like?

Apparently it's Friday.

And what a Friday it's been.
Today I've realised that one of the seven-year-olds I teach is in fact no ordinary child, but my nemesis. This epiphany was compounded by her cheery "Look, Miss Chelsea, I have hair cut the same as you now!"

Yes, yes you do. I generally don't have issues with challenging kids. I have rules, there are consequences. I'm happy to be the responsible adult that doles out tough love and kicks them into some kind of understanding about group activity, cooperation, participation, personal space, respect, manners, grammar, grooming, musicality, deportment, and oh yeah, ballet. Nearly forgot that one.
It's a little hard to get onto sometimes when it's October and eight months on parents haven't taken the hint about writing R and L inside school shoes so their child sees this information five days a week. I wrote R and L on the feet of three girls today.

It's not that they're slow kids, or "too young" (HA!), it's that their parents have failed to provide consistent opportunities for this information to be assimilated and integrated. This gets me a little tetchy, as you might have noticed.

Evidence of their capability to learn and retain information: over the last ten weeks my littlies (predominantly six and seven year-olds) have learnt two ballet routines. They have not only learned the dances and spatial information (where to start, order to line up in, direction to travel and formation/pattern changes) but can sing the music. Yeah. Forty-five minutes once per week.

So, what's wrong with their parents/teachers/every other adult in their world? Is it just that the kids live down to their (the adults') amazingly low expectations?

In other news, celebrated six years of coupledom with my lovely hubs tonight. Yep, six years ago he decided that perhaps I was actually the girl for him and proposed some kind of going out arrangement to my skeletal and pathetic post-glandular self. The rest is history.
He's remarkably able to view the world with a child's perspective. While sometimes this kills me, I'm reassured by his idealism and sunny disposition.

He's certainly a much nicer and more deliberate person than I will ever be, and I'm quite sure he will be a parent who teaches shoe-tying with infinite, graceful patience. (From my earlier ranting, the attentive reader will deduce this to be a compliment of the highest order.) uhnm, yeh. He's awesome.

Now, if only I could sneak him into ballet to deal with my nemesis.

Oh, such fun!

M husband and my pug have a new game.
He turfs her out the laundry door, closes said door, then runs excitedly through the house to the back door (the one that opens out onto the decking I fell through) and waits for her to realise she can run across the backyard, up the stairs and through THAT door.
By this time she is very excited ("WOW! I just took this awesome trip through a jungle! ANd now here you are again! And I'm back inside! YEEHA!") and he exclaims "Oh, such fun!".
Is anyone else surprised I'm feeling a little left of centred?