so far

In the first two and a half months of 2015, I have:

Been to four different countries
Learned to sew
Gone to a therapist
Switched to a different therapist who doesn't tell me to solve my problems by bothering strangers in Tesco
Taken up kickboxing
Made a birthday present
Started seeing an osteopath
Cleared most of the extraneous crap out of my bedroom
Made a couple of hard but sensible decisions
Organised a birthday party
Accidentally found myself in a beginner pole dancing class and been hilariously awful at it
Booked onto an acrobatics course
Booked onto a dressmaking course
Not freaked out on being served a plateful of fish with heads (there is much more to be written about this one)
Been to various dinners, shows, and dances in a variety of company

(It's easy, at the moment, for me to convince myself I'm not doing very much, not being productive enough, not learning enough, letting life pass me by. I'm writing this down to show myself that I've actually done a hell of a lot and really don't need to speed up or try to cram more stuff in. I'm doing OK and don't need to keep endlessly asking more of myself.)

people watching: mindfulness

The man in front of me stepped off the escalator and approached the ticket barrier. He stopped in front of it, and took a moment. Here he was. Here the ticket barrier was.

He took out his Oyster card. Another moment.

He laid it, with slow, assured precision, on the card reader.

The machine beeped and the gates swung open. He took another moment and nodded to the machine. Not a gesture of thanks; just an acknowledgement that all was as it should be in the world. He strode through, fully satisfied with his experience.

I wanted to be charmed, but mostly I was just irritated that he'd made me fifteen seconds later than I otherwise would have been.

there is no justice

...THERE'S JUST ME.

Terry Pratchett has died, and I feel like I ought to say something.

Celebrity deaths don't generally have much of an impact on me, even if I liked what they did and what they said. I feel sadness, but it's sadness about death as a concept, sadness because people have lost someone they love. I don't feel sadness for myself, as if I've lost something. The one exception to this was Linda Smith, who I still miss as strongly as though I actually knew her.

But now Terry Pratchett has died. And it kind of hurts. I can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound monumentally dorky, so I'm just going to go ahead and sound monumentally dorky.

Terry Pratchett was my very favourite author, as he is for many people. He occupied that space where so many people loved him that it wasn't considered the thing to write positive reviews. The ones I remember reading all said "oh, this silly little piece of genre fiction is very silly, isn't it? There is absolutely nothing to criticise so I shall praise it with all the condescension I can muster, because despite being excellent, it's not a real book. It's not literature."

Susan hated literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

I don't write fantasy. I've tried, and I can cobble together something OK-ish, but it's not what I'm good at. Where Pratchett influenced me most was in my general philosophy of life (I KNOW I KNOW I AM SUCH A DORK I'M SORRY).

I read the Witches books as a teenage baby Wiccan who had read many books on the subject of being a Wiccan and knew that one was supposed to have a large supply of ceremonial tools that one used solely for ritual and spellcasting purposes. I had two or three boxes full of supplies that I'd put together from the lists I'd read; most of it had never been used, but I'd done my research and I knew that this was the way to do things right. Pratchett's Witches were not this kind of witch.

She took the breadknife. It did all the things the other knife could do, plus you could cut bread with it.

Pratchett's Witches changed me. I stopped accumulating stuff and following stupid complicated spells (spell recipes? Spell instructions? There must be a word for this, surely), stopped having weird rules about what could be used for which thing, and after not too long a time stopped calling myself Wiccan entirely. I decided that spirituality and common sense weren't incompatible. I changed my approach to reading Tarot cards and started treating them as a focal point for a problem-solving session.

Cardboard isn't very bright.

I'd spent a lot of time in unhelpful corners of the internet, reading about life and religion and philosophy and things that were right or wrong from the perspective of other inexperienced teenagers and getting thoroughly confused by it all, when I read Carpe Jugulum and had a lightbulb moment.

"And sin, young man, is when you treats other people as things. That's it. That's all sin is."
"Surely there are worse crimes."
"But they starts with thinking of people as things..."

Life made so much more sense after reading that (YES I WAS AM AND SHALL ALWAYS REMAIN A DORK). I am a different person for Pratchett's Witches, and I feel a loss in my life now that the mind which created them has gone.

I met Pratchett once. He signed my book and said something polite. I had a mild freak-out and babbled something about Primark. He nodded patiently and waited for me to get out of the way of the queue. I was touched. And also a dork.

So thank you, Sir Terry, for everything you wrote. You changed me. I hope Death was as you pictured him.

seven

I've been struggling to write lately, so in the hope of brute-forcing my way through it, I intend to do a seven-week stretch of daily blogging taking me to the end of April. I am not expecting length or quality of myself, just words on a page to remind myself how words on a page work.

The fact that I haven't been able to write fiction for so long bothers me. All I managed last year was eight straight pages of incidental dialogue, and I had a similar problem the year before. My creative energy is all being channelled into increasingly stupid schemes, imagining a webcomic I have no way of actually drawing because I suck at it, and rewriting I Will Survive to be about whatever the last sentence someone just said to me was (I have landlord I Will Survive, ketchup I Will Survive, Satan's minions I Will Survive. It's getting really hard to do now that I've buried the actual lyrics under all my stupid rewritten versions). I want to have a story this year. Even if it's not all written down, even if the words I write don't quite add up to the story in my head, I want a story. I want characters and a plot and at least one page that doesn't make me want to break the nearest three objects with my head. So I hope that somewhere in the next seven weeks, I'm able to post something I made up. Two sentences, a paragraph, whatever. Just... something.

I will also probably invent some kind of ongoing project or series, in case I get stuck.

storybook

I was the weird kid who liked books. I came to school already knowing how to read, and I read everything. Everything we were assigned, anything I was given, anything I might have found myself next to in a quiet moment. When I was about seven years old, I spent many an instructive hour lying on my nan’s bed reading her Bible, having exhausted all the kids’ books in her house.

[several years later]
Mum: We all thought you were finding religion.
Me: What? Have you read that thing? Everyone is horrible to everyone and everyone dies. And God is an arsehole.
Mum: Why did you read the whole book, then?
Me: It was a book.

I knew exactly how stories worked. The structures, patterns and flow became second nature to me, and I started to think in stories, silently narrating mundane things that happened to me and wondering at what point in the book this particular mundane thing would occur if my life were a story that others might read. I understood adventure and mystery and romance, at least as they related to storytelling. I didn’t really understand romance. Boys were weird and they picked on me. As I hit my teens and started reading a few contemporary romance novels, I concluded that romance was a slightly unpleasant thing that existed between an annoying woman and an arrogant man who didn’t like each other very much. But it was still something I wanted, because it seemed as though I ought to want it, such was the importance given to it by everyone and everything around me.

When I was seventeen, my storybook came along. I met a boy at my Saturday job in the supermarket, and after a few months of talking bollocks and very definitely not flirting, we were a couple. We went from ‘friends’ to ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ almost immediately. It wasn’t long before he bought me a ring and we planned to get married.

It didn’t work out, and the reasons for it not working out are the kind that make it very difficult to tell this story from the perspective I’m about to tell it. It’s difficult to tell this story from any perspective other than “Here is a list of six years’ worth of horrible things”. I’ve written that story before, and thousands of other people have written it too. It’s a common, unpalatable and necessary story. But I haven’t seen much of the story I’m about to tell: our relationship was a storybook, even though it didn’t follow the patterns and flow that I knew from what I’d read, because he seemed to be genuinely convinced that that’s what it was. The story of him, playing Man, and me, playing Woman, Falling in Love and living Happily Ever After.

When we fought, which was a lot, he would reach for the script of Man and Woman Fall in Love and flip to “Fight Scene”. Man would cast his eyes downward mournfully (Man did a lot of things mournfully). Man would speak slowly, evenly, in a voice suffused by grief that he and Woman were fighting. Man would respond to tearful complaints with “I know”, and launch into a grave, melodramatic speech about how Woman’s love was everything to him, and of course if she wanted to leave that was up to her, and he would simply live out the rest of his life as a lonely, shattered man, wouldn’t he? He would never find anyone else, just grieve for their love for ever and ever.

I want to be clear here: he said every last one of these things to me on a regular basis. There were times when pretty much this exact Fight Scene would happen multiple times a week. I don’t think we ever went longer than a month without it. Sometimes he would recite it even when we weren’t fighting. “Hey, Jen. Here’s what I’d be doing now if you left me.” There was manipulative intent, I’m sure, but I also think part of him really believed it, that he really thought this was what you were supposed to do. He would sometimes comment on what passers-by would think his income was based on his being with me, always viewing us from the outside and not the inside.

He came to realise that I didn’t really know the characters of Man and Woman, and would quite often attempt to educate me. The characters of Man and Woman are constant, and played by everyone. All men are Man, and all women are Woman. Their traits do not change. He would tell me stories about Man’s slavery to his own uselessness, his inherent inferiority to the emotionally strong Woman and his gratitude that she would put up with the terrible Man-behaviour that he knew was carved into his soul.

My favourite of these was during my second year of university, when he announced to me that my then-flatmate and sole good male friend (Woman does not have male friends) was in love with me.

“What are you basing that on?”
“Just trust me.”
“No.”
“Alright.” He sighed the sigh of a reluctant martyr. “There’s an unwritten code among men. When you’re introduced to another man and he’s with his girlfriend, you have to nod to him and take a step back. That shows you respect his territory, you’re not going to try and make a move on his girl.”
“Um.”
“When we met your friend from school that time, that’s what I did to her boyfriend, nodded and stepped back. It’s a sign of respect.”
“It’s – huh.”
“And when you introduced me to your flatmate, he didn’t do that. He folded his arms. He looked at me with folded arms. And that’s a challenge. That’s how I know he’s in love with you.”
“Because he folded his arms?”
“All men know this code. It’s just how it works. He didn’t show me that respect.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. Women just don’t understand men.”

This conversation happened nine years ago, and sometimes I’m still compelled to turn to men I know and say, “Hey, so when you meet another guy, do you take a deliberate step back from his girlfriend to show that you respect his ownership?” I have many male friends these days and I know that men are not Man, that Man was just that one specific weird guy, but I keep asking. Just in case.

As we got closer to the endgame of Happily Ever After, when I’d graduated and we could be openly engaged instead of hiding it from my mother (who had Views on people being engaged before they’d finished educating themselves), when he could see marriage and mortgage and babies within touching distance, when my reticence on the last two points didn’t make a dent in him, he began to see me as Woman rather than me more and more often. He was confused as to why I wasn’t playing it correctly, why I didn’t say or do or want the right things, and that’s where I stop being able to tell the story this way.

We broke up over the phone one day in mid-August, after previous attempts to break up in person had led to him listing the overwhelming amount of work I’d have to do to extricate myself from the relationship. I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, and tried to explain, again, what was wrong with us. He cut me off.

“It doesn’t matter. Nope, nope, no need to discuss it, you’ve made your decision. I’ll go now and you’ll never hear from me again. Goodbye.”

At that point we were almost breaking up every week. We almost broke up every time we spoke to each other. I was ill at the time, so ill that I barely left the house, and sometimes I pretended I was too ill to take any of his five daily phone calls (Every. Single. Day. For nearly six goddamn years) so that I didn’t have to almost break up with him again. Every time he made a speech like this, and every time he was expecting what normally happened, which was for me to phone back five minutes later yelling about how he never listened to me, to which he could whisper, “I know,” and with that out of my system we could get on with the happy business of having completely opposing life goals.

But this time, it was the last thing I ever heard him say. That low, whispered, dramatic “Goodbye” that he didn’t mean and I knew even at the time he didn’t mean. It was an empty threat, a babysitter closing the book with his finger on the right page, telling his misbehaving charge that if she was going to cry and say she didn’t like the story anymore, then he was just going to put the book away for good and then she’d never find out what happens, would she? I never found out what would have happened, though I can probably guess.

I expected this story to look different when I wrote it down. From the inside it looked like light absurdity, funny things that happened in a situation that wasn’t so funny, with the situation mostly excised. I was expecting it to read like the time I wrote about my wine-diluting landlord. But it doesn’t. Written down it’s still absurd, but sad and harsh. I’ve written elsewhere about the more destructive dynamics between my ex and me, and it’s not a fun read, but it at least makes some kind of sense. Anger is a motivator we’re all familiar with, even if we don’t experience it, so while it felt transgressive at the time to write publicly about scary experiences I’d had, that story – where I emerged triumphant from adversity – is a much more comfortable narrative than this one, which reads like two people having a relationship with nothing (and that’s not a reading I could reasonably dispute). But my storybook is long closed, and I don’t need to follow those conventions anymore. This is a story about a story, one that consumed everything while not ever really existing at all. It’s a sad, weird story that I needed to tell, despite its lack of Happily Ever After. There was an ending, and that’s enough.

hair logic

If right side = ringlets, then left side = frizz explosion
If left side = ringlets, then right side = flat to the ear then sticking out perpendicular to head
If left side = wavy, then right side = strange figure of eight shape
If right side = wavy, then left side = totally lank with weird kink halfway down
If left side = straight, then right side = frizz explosion
If right side = straight, then left side = unknown quantity THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED

the best pun ever

I'm trying to write more often so that I stop attaching enormous importance to everything I post. This is not a blog of wider readership or influence or cultural impact, so I'm allowed to post stupid shit if I want to. That said, here is a story about a pun.

Two years ago I responded to a mundane message on OkCupid which led to him flying me out to Tuscany for the weekend two days after meeting me, and then again to Paris for a night a couple of weeks later. This is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds, but I can't say it wasn't fun. However, along the way, this exchange happened.

[Scene: we are out for dinner in Paris. He is eating the frog's legs I goaded him into ordering and complaining about the quality of the food in his hometown, a suburb off Melbourne somewhere]

Him: I went into this pub near my house, and I ordered a pie. I wasn't expecting much, but how badly can you fuck up a pie? Anyway, this thing turned up, and it was so watery inside it was more like soup. It was shocking.
Me: Well, at least they managed to organise a pie soup in a brewery.
Him: [blank stare]
Me: That was a pun.
Him: Was it?
Me: You know the expression, "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery"?
Him: ...no.
Me: Oh. Do you guys not say that?
Him: Nope.
Me: Oh. Dammit. I am NEVER going to get to say "pie soup in a brewery" ever again.
Him: ...I'm going to get more wine.

This still annoys the shit out of me. I mean, PIE SOUP IN A BREWERY. That is an AMAZING pun. And it actually happened, in conversation, without my having to twist anything to make a joke out of it. This sort of thing just doesn't happen. And then it did, and bastard Australians don't even SAY "piss-up in a brewery". To cap it off, we were in France, surrounded by French people who also don't say "piss-up in a brewery". The universe came together in this beautiful way and I was surrounded by people who didn't even see that anything at all had happened beyond some English girl making Pun Dog face for no apparent reason.

I don't think I've ever needed to speak to my dad so urgently in my life. It was the first thing I did when I got home the next day.

Me: Dad. Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad.
Dad: What's the matter?
Me: Listen. You listen to this.
[pun is explained]
Dad: Hah! That is WONDERFUL.
Me: I know! The Aussie didn't get it.
Dad: What??
Me: I KNOW. PIE SOUP IN A BREWERY.

It is entirely possible that my father has never been quite so proud of me.