Confession time.

I have a little secret: a compulsive addiction to fashion blogs. You know the Sartorialist?
I see a new post, I HAVE to click through. Ok, so I think the America Apparel ads are the weirdest clothes I've ever set eyes on (and I read a LOT of Vogue and Bazaar in my teenage years, and wore some incredibly peculiar stuff myself), but the photos that make their way onto this page are just... love. Or WTF bevelled with a little confusion and trying to understand exactly what was so attractive about THAT person at THAT moment in time.

Another sneaky addiction is more like having an ever-updated glossy on my dining table. I look, I explore related galleries, I get all wistful about the days when sewing a couple thousand copper paillettes was no biggie... but then I saw this and I now have to seriously reevaluate my commitment.

Apparently the couple are a couple, although their bony bodies conjure up little more than the idea of painfully colliding exoskeletons, and I can't say a guy who looks like David Bowie during his "Am I male? Am I female? Hell, let's aim at shemale and bleach everything to fairy floss while you're there!" is really working for me.

I haven't read any of the insanely popular Twilight series, but I'm aware there is a certain tension between Bella and Edward - something about vampirism, infection, blah blah, so on. Looking at this couple I can imagine the same kind of thing, except more of the "Oh, I want to make love to you, but the osteoporosis  might kill us both!" or "Sorry, baby, heroin's the only thing I can get it up for. Or get up for."

Actually, someone get me some heroin. Not for me. Let's just put the poor half-starved waifs out of their misery.

Oops.

Lessons I have learned today: you can have an old lady haircut and call it classic; an old lady dress - hello? It's vintage. You can even, with irony and grace, wear old lady shoes. But put all these things together and you simply look like a tragic twenty year-old who got lost in her nanna's wardrobe and didn't get lucky with Narnia.

I hate doctors.

I fell off the blogwagon.

Something about the concert post and how horribly it all went (the invasion more so than the actual concert) and my violent physical reaction to writing that post. Then it was school holidays, time to get my craft on and agonise over the quagmire that was our backyard (let me just stop here to thank my father for all his handyman wonderfulness).

Then I ran away to the ashram (Note: ran TO the ashram, because there is no running away from ANYTHING at the ashram) and that will take me another month to process. Or at least another bout of cathartic sickness, which seems to be what I'm currently enduring. Somewhere in there a baby was born (obviously not to me), a friend had a birthday, my husband cooked many dinners and term three began. Good grief.

Posting will return to normal. Just not today. Today I have to crawl away and mutter my ranting about incompetent doctors into my millionth cup of tea while I contemplate the horror of teaching tomorrow and getting enough brain cells together to participate meaningfully in a trivia night on Saturday. Yaarfgh.

I will be back. Read that as you will.

They said there would be ice.

Local paper: "Ice rink comes to Frankston!"

Cool! I love ice-skating. And they're going to set up the rink in front of the AMC cinemas (I pause here briefly to consider the logistics of this entrerprise, but visions of ICE! sweep them out of the way. Of course, this being Frankston, it's more likely they would set up an ice cafe where discerning consumers might purchase the recreational corrosive and soul-destroying substance of choice, but sometimes I like my rose-tinted glasses.

A few weeks later, the boy and I are haphazardly wandering through a sunny Frankston afternoon in search of Star Wars lego and blue bias binding, when we see an enclosed space with the heads of several children jerking about in some disturbing marionette-ice-addicted fashion. Closer inspection reveals several grimacing parents wearing rictused grins while manipulating children across "ice".

Funny. It's not very cold. Or slippery, or shiny, or any of the other traits usually associated with ice of the  gliding-across-variety.
And this is, in fact, because said surface is not ice.
It's plastic.

Sheets of opaque white plastic, laid under a small pavilioned roof and fenced off for bystander safety.
I scuff my foot experimentally on an exposed patch. "Be good for dancing on." (Well, better than the sheets of ply optimistically called a "Dance Floor!!!" laid unevenly and without the aid of levels for the recent "Latin Fiesta!!!"

The boy: "This is STUPID. It's not even slippery. And they're not even BLADES."
He's right. The "ice skates" have more plastic (what else?) wedged where metal should be. Plastic on plastic is creating an... interesting friction coefficient. If it was any stickier the attending parents could simply wedge their child in place and collect them after dinner and a movie.

I toy a little with the idea of purchasing several litres of vegetable oil and making the "Ice Rink!" a slipperier, happier place, but this is Frankston. Someone would be handing out bikinis and setting up a wrestling ring before you could say "Hey, where can I get some ice?"

Things that go "That's ASSAULT!" in the night.

So Saturday night was a concert night. My studio. That’s kids 3-16 and their families, primarily parents. Classical music in a local church, bring a plate for a little social time afterwards.

It was mostly good. Mostly.

Maybe because it’s a long term, or because this was our second concert of the term or it’s cold or there were only a couple of ensemble pieces or, or, or… 

I could keep making excuses, but truthfully I was reasonably devastated by the lack of turnout and the lack of flawless performances. Anyway.

We progress, me looking anxiously (and surreptitiously) at my watch every few seconds to see if we’re on track to stay within an hour running time. Child gets up, plays, stumbles, carries on valiantly, bows, receives applause, I make (positive) comment, etc, so forth. Fine. About to launch into most advanced solo piece of night (actually, can’t remember WHAT I was saying), but I suddenly become aware of a smell.

It’s the smell you whiff when you walk past a sheltered Melbourne laneway, and know that the people sleeping under cardboard beg to drink. They don’t get showers or prescription medicine, and their relatives don’t know when they’ll next turn up. The local cops know them by name, and their trolleys clatter along suburban streets as they bunk up for the night under the eaves of a church or hospital.

There’s a man three feet away from me, gesticulating wildly and shouting that he’s been assaulted. 

He wants us to call the police, he’s not leaving until we do.

A hundred people are looking at him, wondering if this moment is really happening.

I know I went toward him, told him there was a phone in the foyer and that we’d make the call out there. More shouting. “

Sir,- ” 

“Don’t TOUCH me!” and fathers, rising from the seats to cajole, repress, no-one quite sure what law prevails when dealing with madmen inside a church.

Nothing is easy with an audience, so I chose to shoo them out while my indomitable pianist decided to play a little light music. The men did manly things, like calling the police and making sure our intruder did leave the building. We returned and absolved our concert with a Veracini Gigue and a spook-busting Twinkle.

In the days following and subsequent lessons with students, I’ve found myself trying to force the situation into a humorous anecdote. We don’t actually know the truth of it.

He may have been assaulted. He may have been mentally unbalanced, or drunk. Perhaps all three. 

He could have been armed, or more violent, and the shadow of what might have occurred freaks me out more than I’d like to admit.

We’ll have to lock the front doors from now on. 

In which I complain.

Dear Herald Sun,

You suck.

I realise this isn’t a surprise.

However, you even suck at the things you should be good at. Being a tabloid-y, let’s-gawp-at-celebrities and have-a-lifestyle newspaper, you should at LEAST be good at the lifestyle parts.

Fail.

Massive fail.

Catherine Lambert, you’re not style police. Street smart? Give it a rest. You don’t even reach the bar of looking-moderately-put-together in any way, shape or form. I could have found you fifty people on Friday night in Northcote who looked better (for ANY given value of ‘better’) than Ilesha H. Hell, I could have found fifty people in Frankston who had some kind of ‘look’ pulled together tighter than the ruffly-in-all-the-wrong places red dress on Ms. H.

Stripper shoes might be fun, but not when you match “expensive items with less expensive items” because there is nothing that can be called matching going on here. Sweetheart, your shoes make your (white, fluffy, cropped-sleeve) jacket look like your pimp bought it. A blind pimp with tactile issues and really short arms.

And when you wear your little red dress with your really little white fluffy jacket and your stripper heels with contrasting silver peep-toes AND weird glittery ankle straps (lesson one in elongating legs: ankle straps are FAIL) refrain from bling.

Hang on. Refrain? Oh, that means do it again, right? Wrong. Teaming a clutch hewn out of Priscilla gunmetal-grey sequins with all this is disaster. However, why stop there? When you’ve gone this far, the only sensible option is to load on all the jewellery in your possession. (Possibly so innocent bystanders have time to run and hide.)

I can count (yes, even with one hand awkwardly-on-back-of-hip and partially concealed by the small Samoyed savaging Ms.H’s torso) a watch with a beaded bracelet with another beaded bracelet (big, chunky silver beads) WITH a heart dangling from said beads. Ok. Look, it’s been a confusing season for everyone, but why then mish a gold phoenix necklace to this mash?

If the phoenix was TRULY bringing you “spiritual guidance” it would have set fire to half the contents of your wardrobe (the stripper half) and we’d be left with an attractive brunette. Maybe not SO suitable for publication, since all she’d be wearing was a lovely phoenix necklace, but what a classy necklace.

I think the expert (Sesil Arzadian, of Anton Jewellery) said it best: “Certainly, this look has a lot happening.”

What the expert forgot to say: Catherine Lambert, you’re a knucklehead. Get some new glasses and a subscription to a magazine. Any magazine.

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.