Archive | October, 2010

DAY 61: Cooking seafood

31 Oct

Totally cooking those scallops.

IF Helen’s hamming it up, she’s doing a marvellous job. “Fantastic,” she says, tucking into scallops and broccoli, delicately singed with chilli and garlic. “Really, really good.”

Upping the ante thrillingly from Day 11, in which I ate seafood, I’ve put out the call for suggestions for a seafood dish to cook myself, but since these suggestions ranged from “penguin” to “fish fingers” to the bloody impossible ” bouillabaisse”, I’ve decided to go down the scallop route. I’m pleased to be broadening my practical skills, although I’m mortified when I complain to Helen about the toxic garlic and chilli fumes infiltrating the house, and she pleasantly offers, “That’s why I always shut the kitchen door.”

I reckon there’s a ways to go before I think of things like that off my own bat.

Keeper? Yes! Will try mussel broth next time, and laugh in the face of food poisoning.

DAY 60: Making curtainszzzzz…

30 Oct

ADMITTEDLY, this is a doona cover threaded through a curtain rod, but I thought of that myself.

How did that one get in there?

 

Keeper? Not if someone else can do it.

DAY 59: Mugging for a magazine cover

29 Oct

A bit like this.

OH, the number of times I’ve had to put fey ne’er-do-wells on covers of magazines and slap superlatives all over their chins. It’s about time the boot was on the other foot.

So far pretty much everyone in the office has been roped in to lounge around on the cover of this weekly, but I’ve resisted – when I’m not flaying my innards raw for a blog I’m actually intensely private, you know. But in the spirit of getting oneself out there, I go along to a top secret location and throw my best ‘come hither… no wait… where are you going?’ pose.

I’m not saying which mag it is, but if you see it do bear in mind that the bendy lens required to fit a wide scene in is bound to make my legs look a bit bandy.

Keeper? No.

DAY 58: Learning The Secret

28 Oct

“Everything happens for a reason.” OOF.

“It is what it is.” OOH-YAY.

I’m as vague as the next old dear, but even I need a bit more direction than “throw it out to the universe” as a roadmap to run my life.

Still, according to the Oprah-endorsed The Secret by Australian Rhonda Byrne, everyone from Plato to Shakespeare to Beethoven to your next-door celebrity Scientologist is in on a magical formula to get everything you want, so I’d better jump onboard quick-smart.

The Secret is essentially the law of attraction: visualise brilliant things happening to you and those brilliant things will be helpless to resist speeding towards you, like “iron filings to a magnet”.

A quick email around the office instantly conjures up three copies of The Secret, although everyone groaningly insists their copy was pressed upon them by some chump. Sure. I take one down to the beach for a peruse – not for an extra spiritual experience, but so nobody catches me reading it.

Opening the book at random, P59 explains how to visualise yourself thin. Even though you may have stuffed yourself stupid on a Greek fatfest the night before (see Day 57), “food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you THINK it can.”

You can also think yourself well and think yourself a million bucks. Don’t be anti-something, be pro- its positive opposite. And don’t resist! I’m confused, though… how does ‘visualising’ what you want differ from ‘fantasising’, which I’m already doing every waking minute? All that’s brought me is a tendency to not hear a word you’re saying.

Look, maybe there’s something in this. A ‘positivity can’t hurt, and people around you seem to prefer it’ sort of something. When I was a child, home life was a cacophony of tuts: Dad’d get started and Mum would fall in, and now we’re all at it. On trips away, tension would do a Mexican wave around the car at the bloody unfairness of it all, whatever that was.

“Are you sure?” Mum had a tendency to ask doubtfully of any great idea, before forecasting impending doom. Hence my current constitution: C’mon life, you bastard, give it to me with both barrels – you know you want to.

So anyway, let’s see what we have here.

Funny – I’ve always been told I’m NOT the centre of the universe, yet here on p46, within a jolly metaphor about Aladdin’s lamp, it clearly says: “You are the Master of the Universe, and the Genie (that’s the law of attraction, or the Universe) is there to serve you.”

I’m advised to “place an order” to the Universe by writing it out on a piece of paper in the present tense.

Step two is to believe that it’s already mine. I guess I already do this when I go shopping. I look at a dress and imagine myself parading down the street wearing it, looking fine, with my hair bouncing around. Talking of which, this afternoon at the hairdresser I plan to visualise my hair looking glossy and brown, despite having previously bleached the fuck out of it.

Of course, The Secret does have itself a get-out clause. You’re to believe with “complete and utter faith”. So I guess if you don’t get the hair you wanted, your faith was lacking. You infidel.

That’s essentially it, although there are about 200 other pages. It’s pretty repetitive. I’ve written my thingo down, so I’ll let you know how I fare.

Keeper? Can I really expect positive results when my fingers are itching to type out cynicisms for your delight? (“Come on, you fucker,” I snap, when my predictive text turns “fuck” to “duck” while writing this entry on my phone.) I am doubting my commitment, which means I’m doomed to fail. How convenient.

I come from here, Rhonda. Do you really think the universe can be arsed?

DAY 57: Getting a rebetika education

27 Oct

REBETIKA is like the blues of Greek music, with seamy, underbelly connotations. A band plays every Wednesday at Spitiko in South Melbourne so I went along with Clare to see them.

Earlier in the day I leapt out of the car upon passing a big watermelon. I’ve got a hankering to visit all the big things in Australia (avocado, prawn and banana are already under the belt), so if anyone fancies doing a heeeey-I’m-sure-that’s-been-done-before road trip… well, let’s do it.

Keeper? Yes, and yes.

DAY 56: Taking other ladies’ clothes

26 Oct

Goodbye, old friend.

THE Clothing Exchange promotes sustainable fashion, encouraging recycling, donating and buying clothing that are ethically produced. At their Federation Square clothes swap, ladies bring up to six garments and accessories, which are sorted and hung on rails. You’re given the same number of buttons in return as currency.

Esther calls me at the last minute with a spare ticket, so all I have to offer is my Deniliquin Ute Muster singlet. It’s blue with a comical bull’s face ironed on it. It’s tops.

When I hand it over to one of the volunteers she looks at me like she just knows I’m going to hone in on some Gucci suit, then holds it with outstretched arm to show a colleague. It’s eventually accepted after a certain amount of discussion, but really, I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.

The organisers are piping soothing music into the hall, so when it’s time to get foraging I’m expecting a squall. As it turns out, it’s all pretty civilised – although the rise in cortisol levels is palpable. And is that someone grunting? A current affairs program is filming proceedings, bullishly running over their allotted time as the gimlet-eyed host leads her burly bovver boys through the throng. I zero in on a Stussy v-neck. Outta the way, moll.

As the minutes tick by, I keep casting an anxious eye over at the Deni singlet. Nobody’s taken it yet. “You must be emotionally detached,” the Clothing Exchange website warned us of our donations, but seeing it neglected on the shelf, I feel the same way I did at school fetes when Mum’s wholemeal walnut loaf would be the only baked goods left standing at five o’clock; probably because the povo mums just sent along packets of Jammy Dodgers, which is unfair.

Finally, I run over and grab it, to a loud tut from Esther. But this was always going to happen – I can never emotionally detach from the misunderstood and maligned. And they just follow me around anyway.

Keeper? On a matey scale, I reckon.

DAY 55: Being a good neighbour

25 Oct

The country pile.

 

IT’S taken me a year to get my head around what it means to live in the country, other than a farking long commute.

Mine is a starter country town for city castaways, really — nothing hardcore — but still, there are certain laws one needs to adhere to.

* Your vehicle will be a ute
* Your ute will be white
* Your humour, black
* Your wheels will issue smoke
* Your youth will congregate outside the one fast food franchise in town (don’t piss ’em off — they all own guns)
* Your accent will be vowelly
* Your pubs will be shit, not rustic
* You will feel obliged to impart to treechangers the myriad ways in which you can murder a rabbit
* You will soon learn no one’s going to magically come along and mow your grass for you

For a year now, my grassy knoll has let the whole street down with its furry fringes and great yelps of shrubbery. To be fair, it seems to be a street of old dears who probably have strapping young grandsons to keep their lawns neatly manicured, but still, it’s time I did the neighbourly thing and kept up with appearances.

After some help from the local youths with getting my mower roaring, I tackle the jungle outside my house, swerving around bunches of orange and yellow blooms. Once shorn it looks slightly impotent, Samson style, but look — it’s the done thing, and I’ve done it.

On the way to work, I grab a bin bag and take the long route down the railway tracks, scooping up discarded meat trays and VB bottles. Verily, my halo is shining and I look like the local nutjob. Still, every town needs one.

Keeper? Better do.

Can't quite face the back garden yet.

DAY 54: Building a fire pit

24 Oct

The fire pit.

THIS magnificent fire pit stands in the centre of my former chicken coop (now an open plan rumpus room), which, the architect has assured me, will not catch fire, or fall down, despite the removal of a structural post. Looks good, huh?

It was a task fraught with danger: the mangy carpet in the chicken coop was the perfect hidey-hole for slumbering snakes, who get right arsey when awoken in spring, and a spider bit the architect on the finger.

Keeper? Yeah! Next up: LIGHTING the fire pit.

The fuel.

DAY 53: Learning to drive without bursting into flames

23 Oct

“I’M 35,” I confirm to instructor Rob, as he sizes me up in that inexpert way chaps have.

I run through the excuses for him: I was a passenger in a drink-driving crash; I moved to London for 13 years; I was drunk all the time; I was one of those people who “just shouldn’t drive”…

None of those apply anymore, which just leaves: “I’ve put it off for so long I’ll probably be really shit at it.”

At 17 and 4 months I was the sort of knockabout scallywag who’d put their hands over your eyes for a hoot when you were barrelling down the freeway, cider bottles rolling under your seat.

By 17 and 5 months I was dreaming of tree trunks crashing down from the sky, plummeting into crackling pits of fire, reaching out an arm for help, sickening crunching noises and darkly revving engines.

The net was cast wider during waking hours. I cringed when walking under scaffolding, expected a knife in my ribs from passers by, waited for someone to plant their hands in my back and shove me under a tube train. It’s safe to say I’d lost that dumb fearlessness teenagers are equipped with to get them through rote hi-jinks and humiliations.

Eighteen years on I was comfortable playing the leaden passenger, only weak pulses of electricity flickering through my slumbering frontal lobe. It was only when I realised this had become a metaphor for my life that I dreadingly, slowly, pulled that finger out.

“Shall I get in on that side?” I ask Rob reluctantly, nodding at the driver’s seat. I get the sort of response you’d expect from a condescending old bugger, but quickly we warm to each other. Whereas I’d feared my trouble would be driving with my foot on the brake till we both felt sick with a coat-hanger under my shirt, turns out my only problem is staying under the speed limit and not circling roundabouts with gay abandon — and Rob bloody loves it.

“It appears we had the same French teacher,” he says, as I relax so much I fail to notice the car in front of me is braking and I let rip with a few profanities.

Rob’s looking to buy a house in the area, so we go hooning around the neighbouring village checking out likely spots as he swoons over the scenery. We overtake the local steam train ad nauseum so that he can reminisce over his old days as a train driver, and choose whichever unidentified roads look more beautiful.

What a lovely day out, we both agree.

Keeper? Lemme attit!

DAY 52: Introducing conker fighting to Strayans

22 Oct

THIS is a noble British tradition that has been having children’s eyes out for centuries. I got Mum to send me a few deadly specimens without customs noticing.

Wow!

← Older Entries