Random....

Those of you who know me will no doubt remember my horror sojourn at a particular private girls' school.

My life may finally be catching up with me, as (seemingly countless) of my students are trying for and receiving scholarships to said school. This has provoked a horrible (and irrational) fear that I may have to teach there. No such correspondence has been entered into... until today, when I arrived home to the following: (summarised for convenience)

Speech Night is coming up. We plan to play X. We want you to join us (translation: We have overreached the skill level of our students and are recruiting to make them look better than they really are) for MINIMUM two rehearsals and the concert. 


Rehearsal times, contact details, yada yada yada. 

Um.

Let's be clear. Not only do I NOT identify as a "past student", I left the school under openly hostile terms. There may have been threats to "set the education department onto [us]" and there was acrimony brewing for some time prior to my eventual exit.  And frankly, if I'm one of the "few other musicians" you're inviting, this would be a JOB and you could OFFER to PAY me. NOT a community orchestra, effective casual employment to "augment certain sections of the orchestra" (read: instrumental tutor to violins).

Surprise, surprise, I've very nicely refused the opportunity to perform, since you know, I don't get enough of those with my own studio, and even resisted the furious outburst of "You goons ruined my adolescence and now you want me to give up hours of PAID work to sit in your substandard orchestra and make it sound better than it really is so hundreds of fleeced parents think they're getting value for money?" in my polite email reply.

Lucky I have this blog.

Dear Student,

You are late. Again. I would not be so fussed by this except that you're never late for any discernible reason. It just happened. I would also not be terribly fussed by this, except that you then linger into the next student's lesson, taking your time removing your presence (let me be clear, you're welcome to stay as long as you like, but no-one should notice you) and generally hanging about. I'm beginning to understand why you were late.

What I would like to tell you: It's rude. Please stop. Schedule a later lesson time, plan to leave your home five minutes earlier, pack your stuff in the morning before you leave the house. Pack it on Sunday night, since I know you're not a morning person and you don't practice before school. If I was your parent I would ask you to pay for every minute of lesson time you DON'T receive because you found something more important to do on the way. Ooh, you're here. That'll be $10.

I think the universe is sabotaging me.

No, really. It's cold, wet, I spend a disproportionate amount of time sleeping (the pug has taken to gazing at me suspiciously on the rare occasions that I am in the house and awake, as if I might suddenly fall upon her in a dead slumber).

Clearly there's something very wrong when your PET believes your normal state is one of repose. It's been a dead week, shot down by general malaise and the tendency of my life to roll along juggernaut-like regardless of my participation. Take this morning: Chai will make EVERYTHING better, thinks brilliant little me. Ah, no, it really won't when its BLAZING hot and in an effort to drown the bitter, foul taste of a vile herbal tonic I burn my mouth - thoroughly. Gah.

About the only thing I CAN do is tell you all to read Steve Toltz's A fraction of the whole, which was just as good on my second read, and Justin Cronin's The Passage, which I THOUGHT was going to be a godawful Stephanie-Meyer-esque vampire saga but thankfully took a post-apocalyptic turn for the better. Despite his unwieldy name (JustIN CronIN? What WERE his parents thinking?) the prose is good. One humorous spelling error: twice the word "wretch" for "retch" (as in, about to throw up). Incongruous where it occurred and still has me wondering about the general English skills of most editors (oh, I've found some SUBLIME errors lately). So.

Go and buy yourself two very different books and cuddle up.

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.