ASK your mum.
Keeper? No.
DAY FOURTEEN: Baking muffins
14 Sep
IN my attempt to bake lovely muffins, run a soothing bath, have a fag outside AND start creating this entry, I have just flooded the bathroom floor. So you can bet I have no idea when to take the muffins out. Still, the house smells nice.
Keeper? They’re not about to win any rosettes in the Castlemaine State Fair, are they? So no.
DAY THIRTEEN: Becoming an organ donor
13 Sep
I REGISTERED to donate my bits and pieces, here
Keeper? Until I die. Then you can stake your claim.
DAY ELEVEN: Eating seafood
11 Sep
MY OLD landlord was teetering on senility, so when he invited me for dinner and I told him the only thing I didn’t eat was seafood, naturally he served me mussels. I kept sending him into the kitchen for more chianti, taking the opportunity to stuff molluscs and stray strands of spaghetti into the pockets of my jeans.
I’m a grown woman, though, and I suspect my seafood horror is merely a foolish childhood fear of creepy crawlies, goo and tentacles. I got over mushrooms, so surely I can get over this.
Down at the Espy, I opt for the Exposure Therapy approach and decide to order the most rubbery/crunchy plate of exoskeletons I can find. Squeal! “Eat the bit coming out of the end,” my comrade Clare advises of a bug’s bum, which is good advice, as I was about to tackle the shell. It’s surprisingly tasty.
Keeper? Sure! Only the calamari rings and pink squishy bits end up spat in the napkin.
DAY 10: Mopping my floors
10 Sep
WHILE I wait for something exciting like this to come to fruition:
I decide I might as well clean my house for the first time. I bought the mop last October when I moved in, but … you know … time flies.
So, Friday night, hey? Cleaning the house. When I bought this country retreat I had bosomy visions of baking scones, hemming floral curtains and knitting on the train (as do some of the local men, I fuck you not), but now I find I can’t even remember where I stashed the hoover.
I’ve been putting this off because a disordered house is the first sign of Can’t Copeism and I haven’t wanted to face the fact that every time you open a kitchen cupboard round these parts everything comes rushing out like so many inappropriate thoughts. So I’ve been letting Mr Thumpy the rabbit cavort amongst the dust bunnies, trusting that if I drop anything edible he’ll at least eat it.
In my defence, commuting four hours a day leaves you about ready for The Real Housewives of New York and very little else when you get in, although my daily calendar reminder “YOU’RE NOT TIRED!” is designed to briskly dismiss any fears of dropping the ball. Back when I was in the Brownies I used to get up at six in the morning and scrub the kitchen like a benevolent elf, as per the Brownie Guide Law. You’re supposed to do it anonymously and seek no reward, but even as a seven-year-old I knew Mum wasn’t going to buy the elf story, thus lashes of approval would be forthcoming.
There’s no immediately obvious reward here, but after some therapeutic slopping action (the lack of a bucket is a major inconvenience), I start to understand the meaning of ‘house proud’. The psychic from Day Eight told me I have a cranky former tenant in her eighties haunting my every slovenly move, and the old dear spurs me on with a snappy “Put your back into it!” What… even under the kitchen table? Oh, all right then.
I hope she doesn’t mind me smoking outside.
Keeper? Yep. I don’t think it’s really clean clean just yet.
DAY NINE: Acupuncture
9 Sep
This is NOT my back.
YOU know how sometimes you don’t want to run into the object of your desire because you suspect if you do things might not go so well, whereas if you don’t run into them you can surf on in blissful denial for a while? It’s like that with me and acupuncture. I’ve been viewing it with deranged optimism, as though it will right my wrongs, cure my ills, save my soul and buck up my ideas all at once — so I really should try it some day, yah.
Well, that day has come. After quizzing me on my relationship with my father (I give off that vibe), the practitioner massages my back excruciatingly with her nubby thumbs over soothing whale music, and then sets to tenderising my flesh further with some kind of scrapey ‘Gua Sha’ spoon. “You will have some marks for a few days,” she observes cheerfully.
She taps a needle into my freshly pulverised shoulder blade groove and immediately one kidney sings out in horror… followed a second later by the other. Oh god, it’s like last year’s kinesiology all over again, when I unexpectedly cried so hard that my ears filled up.
I start to experience that sense of dread and rising panic one feels in a screaming kidney hangover when one considers the prospect of getting up and going to work the next day, before one sensibly pushes the thought aside and flails pathetically for the pizza menu. There are also heady notes of childhood “don’t leave me” agitation and claustrophobic “what if I can’t get up off this table?” alarm.
After the needles are set on fire (or something — she’s a bit vague) I’m left alone to “get in the zone” and immediately the CD gets stuck on one warbly note, at which point I discover it really hurts when I laugh. I raise my head out of its towelly nook with difficulty, a thin strand of drool connecting us still, but decide that calling out feebly for assistance would just be too much to take.
“I don’t have my diary on me at the moment,” I bluff, once safely upright in reception. The practitioner looks at me sadly, as though she knows we are never going to see each other again, despite me executing my most sincere “sure, we’ll stay friends” smile.
Keeper? Not if I’m going to be such a wuss. Try again later.
DAY EIGHT: Getting tea leaves read
8 Sep
"Can you see the little man in the boat?"
THAT dickhead at the station owes me sixty bucks for sending me the wrong way and costing me half my appointment, and I’d go back and tell him too, but I’m too busy being given the flick by cab drivers who don’t like the cut of my jib or the look on my face as I shake my fist at Chapel Street and the world in general.
Finally I make it to ye little psychic shoppe half an hour late, after a quick duck into a 7/11 thanks to the intolerable stress of it all (I am always buying new packets of smokes at times like these, then leaving them half full in a drawer somewhere when I quit again the next day. I have about 15 open packs at home). The psychic shoots me an appraising — slightly mocking, I thought — look as the dreamcatchers jingle on the door behind me.
“Mercury retrograde, darl,” she cuts me short, flicking through some goddess cards and laughing merrily at the appearance of Lilith, goddess of pmt.
“Did you just say pmt?” I gasp. Still, she had a one in four chance.
I drink from my dainty white tea cup and then, under instruction, turn it upside down on its saucer and swizzle it anticlockwise three-and-a-half times. The psychic scoops it up and peers into it eagerly.
She makes a delighted noise. “You’re going to China,” she ejaculates, turning the cup this way and that. “For trade. I can see lots of junks.” She looks up at me for confirmation and I try to disguise “doubtful” on my dial.
“There’s a man in a boat,” she continues. “Possibly a Chinaman.” She guffaws. “Look at his brim hat and galoshes. He’s wearing a great big raincoat.
“He’s completely rudderless,” she lectures of the bandy-legged boatman. “Do not invest in this boat. He’s surrounded by driftwood and look — he’s got a geisha watching over him.” The psychic points out a face with Princess Leia-style side buns and I feel unreasonably jealous.
There’s more — “Do you live alone? (Sinisterly) You’re not alone” — but intuition tells me the reading is over when the psychic segues into a long soliloquy about Princess Diana.
Keeper? Well now I want corroboration from another psychic, of course.
DAY SEVEN: A Eureka moment
7 Sep
A TRIP up the Eureka Skydeck in Melbourne’s Southbank may sound pointless – and it is – but I felt it was righteously symbolic of my new quest. Being a dyed-in-the-wool navel gazer, I’ve come to realise that I need to develop a helicopter view of the world.
You can take that literally – for example, I am forever missing the bunnies and roos of Castlemaine as I meander around thinking about pashing (“Look there’s another one,” locals cry in frustration when something hops past after I’ve denied its existence) – or philosophically. My new manifesto? To see. To really see.
Today was a very bright day, allowing me to see once and for all that the Spirit of Tasmania is nowhere near St Kilda.
Keeper: Mayhaps. I manged to get absolutely no takers for this one and it was a bit lonely pointing out the West Gate Bridge to myself.
DAY SIX: A walk down Port Phillip Bay pier
6 SepNo starfish today, but a nice view.
Keeper: Hell yeah!
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Australia 2012. It's okay, we're friends.
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