11 sep
Spring fever
I get all muddled and out of sorts this time of year. The blast of early spring sunshine kicks me into the new season with anticipation and vigour — live! live now! pick your lazy feet up and live harder! smell the magnolia blooms before they fall! dance on them for god’s sake! hop! skip! jump! — but the dying weeks of winter maintain a hard-to-release grip.
Physically I can’t sit still for more than a few minutes (I don’t how many times I’ve wandered during the day and night, quoting something about cabin fever and caged hens and having to escape whatever walls are locking me in). Mentally I can’t concentrate on a thing. A pen and notebook are neglected saviours because I forget what I want to write before ink hits the page.
I’ve completed 38 annual cycles and think I should be able to skip through the immutable shifting of the seasons, but it seems not; there’s more winters lived to contemplate and fewer springs to look forward to in this life.
When I was living at home with the idiosyncrasies of a family unit while cultivating my own, my mum would complain of “spring fever” about this time of year and descend into a fog of malaise. Who was this strange woman who existed who looked unchanged but shuffled about like she was filled with lead? Some time in early October she would snap back to the eccentric self we could deal with, and all sighed with relief that spring fever was over for the year. The apple didn’t bounce when it fell from the tree.
An e-mail broadcast forced me back into winter to remember those who didn’t make it to spring. Someone I worked with died in a hang gliding accident almost two weeks ago but news only just filtered through of his funeral service today. He was interstate, his family is here and I suppose delays are natural when coroners need to be involved and the bush telegraph of communication is so large and branched these days.
Part of expecting the gift of life every day is forgetting the tenuous hold we have on it. And thinking about it doesn’t oblige me to feel grateful: contemplation and spring’s goading to live with more urgency create a great frothy whirlpool of turbulence and discontent. I have the luxuries of complaint and discontent because my lot in life isn’t that bad.
Crank-o-meter: ?
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Nicole Thank you, lila. I appreciate it. I’m allergic to a few things like dairy food and rye grass and some obscure form of cedar tree, so that’ll be dragging my immune system into the weeds. Good thinking. And I’m getting over this cold and have been too tired to exercise but not sleeping well because I’m not wearing myself out enough. Argh. Got any spare steroids?
lila Sincer condolences on the death of your friend, ms. cranky
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(Perhaps the fog of malaise is a low-level allergy? And age doesn’t inure you to the changing of the seasons. Perhaps you should be even more grateful that you’re not in the Top End, where according to the indigenous peoples, there are six seaons! Perhaps I should shut up now and get back to my steriods…)09 sep
Bearded ladies
The chappies in charge at work decided that participation in Movember would be a good thing. Unanimous decision. Grow a moustache, bond with workmates to create facial fuzz artistry and raise money for the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Beyond Blue.
At the meeting a lone voice chimed in with, “That’s all right for the men. Can we women grow out our pubes so we can be included?”
I don’t know why people stare at my evil twin with horror.
The calendar has barely flipped to September and I have already seen men sporting hideous patches of bum fluff on the lower halves of their faces. Come on, lads, it’s Movember, not Beardtember.
Practice runs are not needed to choose between the 1970s cop show handlebar or the aerodynamic and food-friendly Errol Flynn. Actually … start now and cultivate a circus ringleader twirly ‘mo — I can loan my wax to shape the twists because I’m going free range and won’t be needing it to depilate a thing.
I think I’ll grow and tease my down-unders into a stylin’ bouffant and donate the waxing money saved.
Crank-o-meter: very, very serious. I promise not to take photos. Does anyone want to sponsor me?
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Nicole Hi Miss T, oh how I wish you were my local evil twin! The town would never be the same *insert Dr Evil laugh*.
Miss T Hey what happened to MD?? And the back up?? Can someone let me know!! Are we off the air all together?
Miss T I don’t know why people stare at my evil twin with horror. They do this because apparently I am very bad and naughty?
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07 sep
I went shopping today to buy the newest book by Haruki Murakami, which has been reviewed as a quirky little non-fiction tome that marries his loves of writing and marathon running.
I’m dead curious to see how he has made the idea work for the length of a novel and what kind of job Jay Rubin has done with the Japanese to English translation, but I’ll have to wait because the shop didn’t have copies.
As I was chucking a hissy fit that my local independent shop had no bloody new Murakami but had every frigging sports memoir ever written in the universe on display for Father’s Day, a horde of wild book-throwing banshees started hurling novels at me, and would not let me out into the sunshine until I had an armful. Your honour, I had to grab a few in self defence or risk injury. Seriously.
I hope the supermarket takes IOUs tomorrow.
Crank-o-meter: what’s that saying? Believe only half of what you see and none of what you read?
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SSS Yes, I thought that too. We really don’t know how easy we have it.
Nicole I already have a favourite character in Isola! I breezed through part one, and now part two is more serious and pulling my heart strings. It’s a lovely reminder that our generation hasn’t had to survive the ravages of world war.
SSS Oh, you got the book!!!!!!! You’ll love it.
Foodycat I hope you love the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society! So charming. And the Eyre Affair.
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05 sep
We had a morning tea at work today. Yesterday afternoon I had the motivation to have a finished home-made treat but not do it properly like mess with the baking gods. See, I love baked goods on their own – it was haiku about them that got me shitty the other day.
Rocky road got me out of my fug!
Method and ingredients:
Hack a handful each of nuts, Maraschino or drained cherries and marshmallows into desired size and don’t eat too many quality assurance samples at this stage
Whack one block of good dark chocolate and one block of good milk chocolate into smallish bits and melt slowly in a double boiler. Or place in a bowl and melt on medium in the microwave. This is the most important step; treat your chocolate with love and check and stir often. You may taste test during this process. Add a few drops of vanilla extract if there’s some in the pantry and taste test again
Place hacked nuts, cherries and marshmallows into a large bowl. Don’t do what I did and put a mountain of desiccated coconut in because it devours the chocolate like crazed chocolate-stealing zombie
Don’t salivate in the bowl when you pour in the warm and sleek and shiny and smells oh so good and can I just accidentally tip some in my mouth chocolate.
Combine and remember to add some coconut until you’re pleased with the texture. Conduct a taste test
Slop into a tray lined with baking paper and level it to acceptable flatness. Lick the spatula
Sprinkle with some more coconut to get rid of the stuff
To clean the kitchen, place several spoons of vanilla ice cream into the bowl used to melt the chocolate. Scrape and add the chocolately tailings from the mixing bowl, because if you do something like gain a kilogram in a day, you may as well do it properly.
Eat a little further from bedtime than I did because too much sugar before beddie-byes makes for disrupted sleep and the weirdest dreams. Unlike the durian fruit, which I’m told tastes like heaven and smells like hell, this tasted like heaven but looked like hell after a demolition derby. The photos were deleted.
I haven’t a clue what the Rocky Road tasted like as I’m not touching it for a long, long time. The freeloaders ate the whole lot though *burp*.
Crank-o-meter: I didn’t feel too good. Yes, E, chocolate can be evil, I admit it
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Nicole Ooooh, Turkish delight is a nice twist. Have never thought of it, but now I have it seems the most natural substitute in the world.
Megs hmmmm rocky road….I always cut up turkish delight in mine in the place of cherries! But I agree, the work free loaders love it…bastards Nicole It was a tongue-in-cheek housewarming gift as the kitchen in the house is a god-awful Barbie doll pink Laminex. Funnily enough, it’s become a kitchen essential as it’s stiff enough to mix wet and dry ingredients, yet can wield itself with delicacy to fold muffin batter with respect. And it’s pink and doesn’t get lost in the second drawer ;-).
Foodycat I like the pink silicon spatula!
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03 sep
Who killed haiku?
I am grumpy as all hell because of the proliferation of spurious poetry littering the universe. I cracked after reading a haiku on the web about a less-than-tasty cupcake.
A three line, five/seven/five English-syllable witticism about a poor-tasting baked treat with chocolate icing is not a haiku. Haiku focuses on nature, a season and a moment in the present. Put the cupcake on a snow-capped ledge and admire the conflicting pull of beauty and sadness of the prisms of light escaping from the crystals of ice atop the corrugations of the paper cup and we’re starting to talk haiku.
Clever lamentations about last week’s crappy cake could be worked into a similarly-structured senryu, and there’s added pomposity points for gloating expertly about an ignored form of Japanese poetry.
Poetry hurts. It is based on rules that were made to be obeyed and only be broken after they’ve broken the nerves of those who dare to tinker. Allowing a completed verse into the world should feel like giving birth to a football studded with javelins, with none of this ‘oh no, my cupcake’s icing is too sweet,’ shit.
Have some respect for the pain of creating a poem. Poets are generally self-obsessed, deranged sorts because taking life and compressing its meanings into tiny and beautiful shapes is the stuff of mad people. I wrote[1] a sonnet for a university unit and spent 13 weeks on edge trying to sort my iambic pentameters from my quatrains and developed a new appreciation of Shakespeare very, very quickly. And then left it to the professionals.
[1] panicked, wrote, deleted, re-wrote, cried, panicked, researched, wrote, deleted, cried, cried, drank a lot, cried. And repeated. And submitted a hideous pile of crap and lived in fear of the tutor’s feedback. And drank a lot. And fell into an envy-based obsession with e e cummings. And somehow got a ‘credit’ and cried and drank. Does not make me a poet though.
Publish a sestina about a pancake with lemon and sugar that makes me weep and I’ll eat my words.
Crank-o-meter: there was once a baked treat called cupcake … oops, the limerick has already been murdered
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Nicole I don’t know about the haiku laws, but I’d love to see you in a debate against the cupcake poet!
lila You can mess with a cake recipe and still get a cake. If you break the laws of haiku, do you still have a haiku? Not quite a question worthy of meditation… I had to read The Cantos at uni. I spent most of my time with my head stuck in the “reader” trying to figure out wtf he was on about. Jeez, he carried on.
Nicole Come to think of it, lila, as much as I hated the cupcake haiku, baking and poetry share a bond. Try both without following their intrinsic laws (following the recipe and not fucking with syllables), bad stuff happens. Only when you’re good can you start messing with the laws of baking or haiku. Still don’t think they should be combined though ;).
Nicole Oh, that’s weird. Foodycat, I said I’d love a pancake with lemon and sugar, but my comment disappeared! lila, courage or my usual half-arsed stubborn streak?
lila Hmmm… food+poetry is difficult ground, but you show courage even by going there. I don’t think the haiku is dead, although it’s been tortured a bit by unfunny attempts at humour, and by it’s introduction to school children as an “easy” form of poetry (stupid assumption being that small is easy and short is simple). Unfunny haiku is just like any other bad joke. On the other hand, One Hundred Great Books in Haiku by David Bader is quite good. Yes, e e cummings is a bit envy-inducing. It could be worse. You could have chosen to envy Ezra Pound!
Foodycat Can’t I just make you a pancake with lemon and sugar? The only form of poetry I have ever got my head around is the limerick. Very strict rules, but at least I don’t have to make it art!
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I agree that short isn’t easy or simple. Packing a lot into a little is damn hard work indeed. Oh god, Ezra Pound. Check out this sestina! Follows all the rules and yet refers to a whoreson dog! Arggggggh, ya whoreson dog. *jumps out the nearest window in dramatic style*. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15423
01 sep
I’ve been following the career of Wei Tang for a couple of years and, finally, she’s had to give up her last day job.
She used to own a legal brothel and became the first person found guilty of anti-slavery laws introduced in Australia in 1999. Wei was sentenced to 10 years’ jail for enslaving five Thai women.
Wei ‘bought’ the women for $20,000 each according to transcripts, withheld their passports and forced them to work six days a week to work off ‘debts’ of up to $45,000 each – each client serviced reduced the debt by $50. If a woman worked seven days a week, she was allowed to keep $50 for each customer served on the seventh day.
The women knew they were being employed for sex work and weren’t physically locked up, but were told different stories about their living conditions, had limited English language skills, were not aware of the debts they carried when they travelled to Australia and were warned not to contact immigration authorities.
However, Wei’s appeal was upheld in the Victorian Court of Appeal last year so all bets were off when the court ordered a new trial.
The anti-slavery laws were also given a testing because one of the intents is to assert ownership over a slave — when two of the women were shown to have paid their debts and were free to move on, they elected to stay employed at the brothel.
The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions stepped in and appealed that decision in the High Court.
Wei cross-appealed the order for a new trial.
The legal process becomes a little hazy for me there but last week the High Court overturned the Court of Appeal’s order for a new trial and Wei’s greedy arse will be sitting in jail for the next six years.
The immediate nature of daily news means the afterstories tend to fall by the wayside. I wonder if the Thai women are still in Australia and if any of their withheld earnings were returned to them.
Crank-o-meter: if you can’t be sent to hell, then jail will have to do