lumps, crumbs and irony

So that little lump of sadness is dissolving in a fizz of urgency for life. However am very impatient with current lifestations. Probably because I’ve just returned from ten days jamful of friends, family, Dali, winter food, mushrooming, open fires, wine, wombat chasing and the wild woolly Prom. To desk. Which is currently proving very blah.

I like to think I have a high capacity for work and usually (at least after coffee) contribute something of value and substance – even if the terrain has seemed rather pointless at times. Now I’m on meaningful terrain, but for reasons largely beyond my control, contributing mere crumbs. I found out last week that a return to my communications perch seems likely, since the seat I’m warming will shortly be reclaimed.

My former boss (the one who I love – I think – for keeping me on a yo-yo string and letting me explore it's furthermost limits) asked me to come work with her (again) in a super stealthy strategic area of the new mega-department. Whispers are the Army has too many spin doctors, so the team is being scattered to the winds. Including super stealthy strategic areas of the department.

I need to go back a few years to explain why this is so ironic it makes me want to puke. I was basically minding my own business at the old desk (thrice removed) when I got lured by an agency to go work in a flashy role in the old human services department, ie, the same department which earlier this year sucked up my department along with several others and became one mega human services department, ie the one I work for now. Follow? After working like an absolute dog on high-profile social marketing campaigns under stupid amounts of pressure, I choked on a hairball and took a rather spectacular nosedive (and watched in horror, mid-freefall, as my ‘superiors’ ran away with their safety net). Whereupon I found myself back at my little old desk batting away flies and self-loathing. Grrr. Shortly thereafter, I renounced my field of ‘expertise’ (bah), put a hex on life at desk, packed up the nest and flew the government coop altogether.

In hindsight, one of the best things that ever happened to me.

So. In effect, my old boss (the one who has me on the string), has asked me to join her in roughly the same place I was when I made that spectacular nosedive.

$#@#%%%$ huh…?

Could this be some rude circuitous groundhog plot, designed perhaps to remind me why I left in the first place? HTF could I end up back in the SAME place which cured me of my desk ambition and sent me packing to the northernmost tip of Australia (which btw is not Cape York but Boigu Island, where the crocs have names and you can feast on mudcrab for all of $2).

There is one small ray of hope, in the form of another short-term position in the policy dynamic. Gah. Maybe I need to embrace the buddhist reality and accept that temporary is just the way things are.

dear universe

I barely know where to start. The past few weeks have been chockers. A three-week intravenous hit of culture and people I love. Between mud-camping at Woodford for the Dreaming Festival, Melbourne to see friends whilst dosing on food, Dali, design and high-street-retail love, and Binginwarri to gather wild mushrooms, chase wombats and get trounced by the relics in the Winter 2009 Pictionary Play Offs, I’ve barely been home.

Or alone.

And now that I am both, I’m feeling kinda sad.

I’ve been given a fair bit of prodding in recent months to think about the shortness of life. Today another good soul passed away. I am sending warm thoughts to his family and friends. And acknowledging life, the precarious privilege.

Dear universe, I am paying attention.

ho fan club

My mate Ren and I have started this thing on Friday nights. We do dinner. Actually we do Vietnamese. Actually we do Vietnamese in West End. Starting in Hardgrave Road, which has at least a long month’s worth of Vietnamese Friday dinners. Last week we gave ourselves a name – the Ho Fan Club, after one of the house specials at Quan Thanh. And too much red wine. And at the encouragement of Ren’s partner J who thought "ho fun" (in a 'chinglish' accent with good-time inflection) was the goods. We also adopted some house rules: one, we order to share; two we always order a tofu dish; three, we always mystery-select a chicken dish (ie, in ‘blindly point at the chicken section of the menu' fashion); and four, we never eat at the same establishment twice.

So we thought yeah, that’s pretty cool. An interesting start to our respective weekends. Maybe we should blog it. And then I was looking at The Age and see that one of their food writers has done the same thing! Except on Mondays along Victoria Street in Richmond. They call their little dinner club 'Good Evening Vietnam' (snooze). And they’ve been doing this for a whole year already!

WTF? Seriously! I mean if only we could come up with these ideas a little earlier. Anyway, I'm sure there's only one Ho Fan Club in Brisbane. And here it is...

material girl and the wealth of nations

Lately I’ve been single-handedly reversing the penny-pinching global trend. My dormant discretionary spending capacity has been unleashed and the industrious squirreling of acorns into a handsome mound has been suspended in the name of cultural participation. It started as a few dinners out, some music, books, wine. A movie here. A haircut there. New jeans. A festival ticket. A 1960s Danish leather chair!

When I moved into the Highgate Hill abode, I found it really difficult to unpack things. The psychological transition from impermanence/mobility to a more predictable, fixed life (with objets de stuff) is unfolding still. I'm still living out of a toiletries bag (old habits) and my pantry which still seems mildly gargantuan is in fact little more than a large shoe box. Now the end of my six-month lease is nigh. I have a new job and am enjoying the company of men-folk (one in particular). I've been coming round to the idea that maybe my view of this moment (the job, the city, the 100-metre dash for cash) being ultra temporary was kind of illusory. That doesn’t mean I have cast aside my self-sufficiency goals. It means that severe shortcuts which demand a reduced/fleeting experience are out. I will unpack the other four glasses in the set! I will get that print framed and I will invest in stereophonics!

Longevity is my new mantra. Temporary is out!

So in aid of making my current stations more comfortable, I spent Saturday trawling the net and visiting Video Pro to talk stereo. iPod speaker docks, in fact. I was completely ready to pounce on the B&W Zeppelin, supreme and lovely beast of speaker docks. Which would have been an immediate fix to my lack-of-decent-sound problem. But at the point of sale that longevity thing reared its persistent little mug. I took a walk and pondered the iPod lifecycle and the scalability of the Zeppelin for future stations in life. It has no tuner. It sounded difficult to hook up to dvd. It has kick-ass speakers, but whose ability to kick ass would probably diminish in larger environs. I pondered the final commitment to adulthood: the purchase of a grown-up stereo. The kind you keep forever.

I stood there on the brink of ideological redefinition, with the sales chump batting his free warranties at me. I hemmed. I hawed. I hedged. And drove away sans Zeppelin, resigning myself to the inevitable protracted trauma of researching amps, tuners and speakers.

When I got home I took out the sales chump's card.

Adam Smith. Indeed. The material girl is back.

good things

Two weeks ago I unshackled myself from the communications desk for a temporary stint at a remote Indigenous housing policy desk. After I had the week from hell doing my manager's job without recompense, she felt sufficiently guilt laden to let me go at a week's notice, for three months. I love karma.

However the desk is about to change again as half the remote Indigenous housing policy team unlatches from the program area and reattaches to the soon-to-be-portfolio-wide policy unit, which if you believe the hype, has a Far More Strategic Focus (aka softening the Rudd machine to dance to the beat of Bligh’s army). Call me tasky and unstrategic but I am quite enjoying shepherding through the first home ownership application on Aboriginal reserve land, despite the necessary proximity to know-it-all lawyers. I am also quite enjoying not having to dance an eight-hour, 300 beats-per-minute jig. And loving the lashings of time to read about policy stuff (which I secretly did anyway whilst dancing the 300bpm jig). And it looks like - thanks to a dearth of accommodation - we'll be moving to one of the plushest offices in Bligh's army, which is a hop away from the gleaming financial district (though even farther away from my faithful campos coffee house).

I also started a dinghy sailing course a couple of weeks ago. So the last two Sundays have been spent learning how to avert collisions (unintentionally), capsize (intentionally) and get very bruised knees scrabbling round in the back of the boat in a tangle of tiller. Anyway, things now make a lot more sense. And am v chuffed that (in a rare ongoing left brain victory) I Still Know My Knots. If I was more handy with html those last five words would be decked in a gaudy bells and whistles font.

Um. And. More small but happy developments in the realm of good things... stay tuned.

layers of crud(e)

You may have noticed. The whinge about Easter and repeated failed attempts to get out of the city. The tendency to bang on about work. And salivate over other people's travel. Yep. I've got cabin fever. Good and proper. Despite the hellish pace at work over the past few weeks - I have had novelty punching bags delivered to my desk by colleagues who appear above the partition sporting worried ‘appease the wildebeest’ faces... at day’s end I go into a coma on the couch at nana o’clock, waking like a drugged automaton amid mysterious puddles of drool - I've been rampantly bored at desk. Crafting the same old word widgets. Dancing the same old jigs for clients. I've become a very industrious, obedient, purposeful ant. Scurrying to and from the nest, busily occupied with nation building, in exchange for the daily dispense of crumbs. I've become one wired little wage zombie. With little space for much else.

Last weekend I finally let a little light in. I woke late, grabbed food, notebook and music and fled like a possessed survivalist, driving two hours to Alexandria Beach. Stunning blue day. Salt. Sun. Little breeze. I walked in the back way, through my favourite snatch of coastal heath. Womping great banksias, pale yellow, lime, amber, umber, bronze and char. Prostrate ‘birthday present’ plants with leaves clumped like birdsnests of finely spliced ribbon. Skirted grasstrees which shimmy amongst lush green drenchings of shade. Lolloping saw-toothed palms threaten to fold in on themselves. And all of it leaning landward, as if receiving a secret. Straining to hear above the din of the shore.

On the beach I sit. I eat. I want to swim but my body yawns so I lay in the dunes. Then walk. And walk. I breathe it all in and try and hold it. I think of the plant I keep on my desk who I call ‘Sol’ to remind me of mine. And marvel at why the forgetting always happens so quick.

Suddenly the sand beneath my feet is not white anymore, it’s black. Stained with oil. The shit of life has its claws on everything. Even this sunny little sweep of beach in all its unfettered nudie joy. A little tear appears in my renewal. Two young guys are sticking their toes into the slick, looking, maybe wondering. And I wonder too, how long it will take for this forgetting to happen, for the miles of beaches to forget. And recover. I'm sure it will be longer than it takes for Us, probably already coveting the next shiny (imported?) widget and jumping in cars for the next long weekend.

easter momentous

I have a history of eventful stuff happening over Easter. Easters of yore have variously been occasioned by relationship evolution/dissolution, the Cruising Division title in the Brisbane to Gladstone yacht race, gadding around Moreton Bay on a boat, and a towtruck ride into South Melbourne after breaking down in the city-bound middle lane of the Westgate Bridge at about 5pm on return-to-town Monday.

This Easter has so far been very un-momentous.

I had much-lusted plans to go camping with friends at Boonoo Boonoo National Park. My hairdresser - who skips to the beat of her own drummer - had told me about a trip there. Big waterfalls. Rockpools. Granite outcrops. Bush. No screaming kidlings. I called the NSW parks peeps. 15 campsites, no bookings required. “We’ve never turned anyone away.” Then friends discover a tragic double booking with a very expensive theatre performance. Gah! They assure their commitment to camping and try to sell tickets. In vain. Which is probably, in some mysterious realm not yet evident to me, for the best, since it has rained on and off the whole long weekend and looks set to continue thus.

In fact, the weather is very un-momentous too. It's that kind of still, grey, dove-warbling, nothing-much-happening-here weather. If there were tumbleweeds here, I'm sure one would roll by.

So instead of drinking wine beside a campfire under the stars in pleased exhaustion, I somehow got passively coerced at the last minute into driving all the way across town to check on a cat (the one who let me stay over while his mum was in Europe for six weeks over xmas) so his mum could spend four days in Byron with Ben Harper. Which no doubt has been planned since Blues and Roots tickets went on sale. Though it took her until THURSDAY to ask me.

Oh, and I also found out that my beloved local market has just been pimped to a fly-in/fly-out Sydney consortium which will glamourise them into just another expensive foodie market for stupid bourgeois Baby Boomers.

So. Instead of camping, instead of channelling Jesus and feeling the love (or whatever it is you're supposed to do at Easter), I battled traffic, seethed, scooped cat poo, and generally resented humankind.

The one very excellent thing that has happened this weekend was I finally worked out how to tweak the tv aerial to get full and unfettered reception for SBS. For the first time since plugging in the teev at its Gertrude St home. WOO! I am now complete.