DAY 95: Getting electrocuted by reiki

4 Dec

I’LL draw up a couple of DON’T TOUCH stickers to put on the two inexplicably intense points on my body that people should steer clear of, because even when I warn a New Ager not to go anywhere near them for risk of a knee to the nose, they do.

I’ve never explored reiki before. I’m given crystals to hold and there’s some touching and waving going on. The practitioner has very warm fingers and it feels kind of nice. Then she sends me shooting 10ft in the air by craftily going for one of the verboten points while I’m lulled into a false, floppy sense of security by the Native Indian chanting and wafty smell of jasmine. It’s like Luke Skywalker being electrocuted by The Emperor.

“How’d you go?” I ask her after, when I’ve climbed back off the table and regained my composure. “Can you feel anything when you’re working on someone?”

“You can feel blockages of energy,” she replies… And there’s a bit of a pause.

“Did I have a blockage, then?”

“You actually had a guardian child standing at your Sacral Centre,” she chuckles. “She had her arms folded and she was saying, ‘Nup,’ so I couldn’t get to it. I thought I’d just sneak around the side, but she wouldn’t let me. That’s when you jumped.”

I respond with, “Mm, that makes sense,” which is my default thing to say in these situations.

“It wasn’t like she was sitting in the corner crying,” the practitioner says. “She was quite feisty. In the end I persuaded her to take down your natural shield, and together we put up a pink shield with gold sparkles in it. You’ll find that it protects you, but it will get a bit ragged if you have too much emotional stress – and that’s when you’ll find you need another session.”

Keeper? I thought it was a touch manipulative. Still, having someone gently touch your head is always nice. I’d pay for that.

DAY 94: Taking the Fed Square tour

3 Dec

I KNOW I loved fortune cookies yesterday, but I want to start today by saying I love tour guides. A tour guide’s eyes won’t light up at every part of their spiel – in fact, sometimes it’s the least expected bit – but then: dink! They’re lit.

Of all the wobbly weirdness Federation Square has to offer, my guide’s eyes light up largest over this hidden bit of architecture around by a little used set of toilets, that you won’t even notice unless you look up…

…which is a great example of how London architects Don Bates and Peter Davidson, and Melbourne firm Bates Smart, who jointly built the precinct between 1997 and 2002, thought everything through to the tiniest detail. From the entries and exits designed to mimic the local hidden laneways, to the words engraved into the sandstone tiles of the plaza, to the use itself of ancient sandstone from the Kimberley (often with fossils embedded), they folded meaning and significance into every last inch of the structure.

Over-egging their own pudding (ooh-yay!) are the earnest schoolboys we unearth in the BMW Edge, who are attempting a particularly complicated Muse cover. They’re not representative of the level of entertainment Federation Square has to offer… but they are entertaining.

My favourite part of any tour is hearing about old rogues, though – there’s always one. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image is in the Alfred Deakin Centre beneath Fed Square, and our guide has a chortle about how Alf was an anonymous commentator on Australian politics for a British newspaper (apologies if you knew this – I am an English). He’s like the first undercover media blogger – before the days of Twitter disclaimers.

Keeper? Yes! Already been for a feed.

Day 93: Living my life at the mercy of fortune cookies

2 Dec

My first cookie.

I LOVE fortune cookies – they’re like a tasty I-Ching, but less complicated.

I buy a whole box of cookies from Chinatown to ask it a bunch of questions. Because I’m hungry, I scarf the first one down without asking a question, and it says:

“A helping hand is no farther than at the end of your sleeve”…

That’s amazing. Because I’ve just come home from work to find my FATHER has totally overhauled my garden. Wow, that’s one smart cookie. Okay, here goes.

*

Q. What will I do about that email I forwarded where I thought I’d removed some of the earlier conversation, but actually hadn’t?

A. Your popularity increases once you express your desires.

Interpretation: They’ll find it really endearing and I’m not in trouble.

*

Q. Should I take on this new work project?

A. Not to risk loving is the greatest risk of all.

Interpretation: Yes; I’ll be able to look back on it when I’m old and reminisce about how life-affirmingly difficult it was.

*

Q. Will I die horribly?

A. You will always get what you want through your charm and personality.

Interpretation: Only if I want to. Which is my biggest fear – thanks, fortune cookie.

*

Keeper? Feel a bit sick now, but could just do one each day for breakfast. I’ve still got loads left, so let me know if you want me to ask one a question and eat it for you.

DAY 92: Being at the business end of a baby

1 Dec

Hup.

“HE’S had two Weetbix, a banana, some avocado and stewed fruit,” beams Jenni, determined to make my induction into nappy changing a painful one. “More than me!”
And STILL she feeds him.

The joke’s on her though, as young Thomas hasn’t quite got around to offloading the morning’s haul, yet my job is done.

Champion.

Keeper? No.

DAY 91: Giving my house a grown woman’s touch

30 Nov

MY teenage bedroom screamed: “I am not like you, and I assure you I never will be.” The shelves were piled pointedly with books on sex and aggressive art, while my most repugnant records (Rektum, Revolting Cocks, erm, Ratt) were always at the fore. Cuttings about angry young men and slutty young girls papered the walls – around a shrine to Gaye Bykers On Acid – and I was trying to start a line in acrylic-painted cigarette cases adorned with sickly babies, long before the government health warnings caught on. The eagle-eyed might spot some snot-nosed, middle-class rebellion going on here. Otherwise, why would Hanoi Rocks’ ‘Dead By Xmas’ be blared out on repeat every December?

I was always desperate to prove myself by going one harder than anyone else, which left me deflated and baffled when there was no approval forthcoming. But as a result, it was not a warm room. I was working on becoming warm and likeable, watching girls at school closely for the way they crinkled their eyes when they laughed, or touched your hand in sympathy. It’s taken a couple more decades but I’ve nearly nailed it.

It strikes me not a lot has changed in my decorating skills though. I’ve got the explosive styling of an angry teenager – gender undetermined – and the paint job of a child. I decide the place needs a woman’s touch, and so set about tarting up my unfathomably-purchased chandelier (because every chandelier needs further adornment, right?) and making a medical box, like a grown-up would do. Um, THERE.

Keeper? How about you just suspend your judgment if you come round? If your eyes hurt I can apply first aid.

Yikes.

DAY 90: Going to the cops

29 Nov

John Christie, a master of many disguises. Chair dancer among them?

HOW fitting, to mark day 90 – three months into my buck-your-ideas-up (TM Dad) scheme – by really breaking out the bunting and sounding those bells and whistles.

Unfortunately, it’s a Monday – got things to do, people to see – and so I wind up going to the Victoria Police Museum on Flinders: To miss it would be a crime!

The museum’s small, but a nice addendum to a Melbourne Gaol visit. There are plenty of pictures of handsome bushrangers and ne’er-do-wells; some Kelly armour (it’s 45kg, you know) and an exhibition dedicated to the collapse of the Westgate Bridge.

My favourite part was about dapper detective John Christie, who served in the late 1800s, “described as the idol of the Victorian public because of his astounding feats of athletics, his many hair-breadth escapes, extraordinary ruses and tricks, and his ingenuity and resourcefulness.” Pretty easy on the eye, too.

Keeper? I’ll keep John in mind when I get around to that novel. (As opposed to the ‘novel’.)

DAY 89: Giving my libido a right flogging

28 Nov

MY wholesome task is rained off today, so I’m forced to go undercover and explore Melbourne’s seamy underbelly, where women wear open-toed PVC heels whatever the weather, and men wear roomy pants.

First stop, Sexpo: a peculiarly unarousing emporium of bare buttocks, sparkly lubes, spankings, floggings, sour-faced porn stars, strip lights and novelty penis paraphernalia — not so much Melbourne’s underbelly as its flaccid cock.

Held at the MCEC, it’s right next door to a lifestyle expo for retirees, who won’t want to be getting their show bags muddled up. Or maybe they will. “Pink or purple vibrator?” I’m asked on arrival.

Being the day of rest, there’s not much sauciness going on, other than a trapeze act and Michelle ‘Bombshell’ McGee (best known for gazumping Sandra Bullock), who’s manning a stand with no takers. Off in one corner is The Gerbil — a ghost train converted into a rolling rompercoaster of knockers, but I’m sidetracked by getting my photo taken with a giant penis, which I can’t bring myself to publish.

I have to leave when some pervert cranks up the public tannoy. Why is it the Sex Crazed insist on putting on such revolting ‘naughty’ voices?

Next up is a strip club on King Street, as it seems I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t experienced over-priced drinks and buttocks set to vibrate, despite having grown up listening to the teachings of Vince Neil. I take along Nicole and Layna, and the strippers love us. No really — they love us for who we are. Each dancer that joins us seems hugely relieved that I’ve been to Sexpo, as she gets a conversation starter of how tacky it is and how she never goes anymore — and I get to say I had my photo taken with a giant cock. Blam, everyone’s happy.

The action on the pole’s less acrobatic than I expected. The first girl does some languid, slo-mo undulations that I could easily pull off, given a gram of ketamine, while the next chick, by contrast, looks like she’s going to fly off at great speed to a dance rendition of ‘Run to Paradise’ — not ideal when you’re a couple of months pregnant. The third strips off completely and straddles some dude’s face which, quite frankly, my mum could do.

I don’t know what the men are thinking in these circumstances, but I can tell you definitively that the girls in the audience are weighing up their own qualifications. There’s a hierarchy of talent here, and I reckon I could awkwardly gyrate my way in on a lower-lower-middle rung, as do Nic and Layna — or Lulu and Mercedes, as they’d now like to be known.

By the time Roxanne has come over to spin us some bullshit yarn about how she had a lap dance from a gorgeous girl one night and — whaddayaknow — she signed up to be a stripper the next day, we’re all sparkly eyed thinking about being long-limbed lolitas (give or take a couple of decades), like little girls fantasizing about being princesses.

Keeper? Yep — discussing the costumes was a pleasing way to accompany a drink.

DAY 88: Working on a chain gang

27 Nov

Keith.

IT’S my first day volunteering with the local steam railway and I’ve asked for something physical to do, so I’m sent out to work on the tracks in torrential rain.

Turns out it’s just me and the chief ganger, Keith – a hyper, wiry chap who leaps around hitting things and explaining what’s what. For the first hour we can hardly understand a word the other’s saying, but roughly speaking we’re having fun comparing notes on what we think a bloke from Mount Isa and a journalist from England should be like. Keith expresses astonishment that I am not haughty, frail or pale.

“I’ve never seen anyone turn up to work on the railway in lipstick and nail polish though,” he says as we trundle off to Muckleford in his high-rail Mitsubishi that travels along the train tracks.

“The general consensus was that you were going to be a truck,” he continues. I pose for a photo for his phone, splattered in mud and wielding a pickaxe, so he can show the fellas. What can I say – I’m a good sport.

I’d been hoping to impress Keith with my newly learned railway slang (a track worker, like me, is a hairy-leg), but it turns out he’s far more interested in tracks than trains. “They’re all mad,” he scoffs of train workers. “When they’re not working on trains they watch videos about trains and listen to tapes of train noises.”

Our task today is to replace old sleepers with new ones. We jack up the rails, pickaxe the shit out of the rotten sleepers, then dig the trough clear before sliding a new sleeper in with giant tongs and securing it with four dog spikes, which I’ve heard as “dog’s bollocks” for the first hour Keith’s been saying it. Out here, that seems completely reasonable.

Quite regularly, Keith’ll hoist a sleeper off the back of the truck straight into my path, sending a tsunami of mud over me from head to already-saturated buttcrack, but I get my revenge when he skids on a rail and falls flat on his arse.

I admire Keith greatly. Every obstacle we face – trying to jack the rail by hand having forgotten the man-sized spanner; having the sleepers suckered firmly by the mud – I’d have wanted to put in the Too Hard box, but he sees it as an interesting conundrum.

Keith shares his tomatoes and tells me his life story on cigarette breaks, which are for my benefit, as he can quite capably smoke and swing a sledgehammer at the same time. For my part, I’ve assured him I’ll practise swinging one at home, to avoid bringing it down into sludgy puddles in front of our faces.

“Next time you can race me on the pump bike,” he promises mysteriously as we squidge back to the truck. “Race the ganger. No one’s ever beaten me yet.”

My rattle gun's most likely bigger than yours.

Keeper? Yargh! Great fun, and Keith’s a trooper. Will have to track down suitable clothing and new back muscles first.

DAY 87: Running my driving instructor’s car off the road

26 Nov

I’VE been wondering what the hell I’m going to do for today’s task, so thank god this happens.

It’s been raining so long and so hard it feels like the world’s ending, and so my driving lesson involves snorkelling through brand new rivers that have formed over roads around Guildford and Daylesford. One bloke’s looking miserably at the top half of his tractor floating in a field on our way through, and on the way back it’s gone altogether.

It’s around this point I merely tickle the crumbly gutter with one wheel when suddenly we’re locked into it at speed, like a bicycle tyre in a tram track, before I correct the manoeuvre by steering us into incoming traffic. I correct again and we hurtle off 100m into the bush.

“Brake! Brake!” the instructor screams, even though he’s got a brake as well. “I AM,” I snap, pointing at my foot. And it’s true – it’s on the brake, we’re just having a bit of a prolonged skid.

“What would you have to do to get them to stop, roll the bloody car?” he tuts of the other tittering drivers after checking he still has all his wheels.

We giggle for the next 10 kays… but seriously, I’m well impressed by my reaction skills. I reckon if the tester saw that he’d pass me immediately.

Keeper? I wanted to do it again straight away.

The tractor. I didn't hit it.

DAY 86: Pillion-no-more

25 Nov

My bike, Roger.

I’VE been doing a lot of pillion riding lately and I reckon I’ve earned those stripes. My balance rivals that of a Russian gymnast and it’s all I can do not to scream “wooh” and throw my arms in the air when we go round tight corners, just to prove my point. No more headbutting helmets whatsoever, nor helping drivers steer.

So I’m starting to plot about my own bike. It’s a Harley ‘Hardly Drivable’ Davidson I’ve got my eye on, thanks to a recent FHM article, which is basically the only thing that has informed me. But by fuckery, those Harley Sportsters look neat. I’ve decided that by the time my 365 days of tomfoolery are over, I must have my driver’s licence, my pilot’s licence and my motorcycle licence…  something tangible to come out of this venture, other than the shits and giggles.

I approach a creepy dude manning the Harley stand at the MCEC’s Motorcycle Expo and ask him if I can sit astride my chosen model.

“You can sit on whatever you like,” he shoots back.

Er, touché. But very well, if we’re playing this game…  “You can make me win, can’t you?” I simper, as I fill out the competition form to bag one such beast.

He simpers back, folds my form up and puts it in his pocket.

Game ON. Surely?

Keeper? I’m getting there. Haven’t chosen my outfit yet.

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