loudly, relentlessly

I wrote this post in the thick of winter, from a boundless marsh of illness, with a clingy baby and a moody not-quite four-year-old who whose daily meltdowns sucked most joy from our waking hours. Things have evolved, somewhat, but much still applies.

There is so much I feel I need to say about life right now. But life speaks for itself. Loudly, relentlessly.

Our days overflow. There is no stopping until we are dizzy with exhaustion. I feel in a state of constant drowning, often swallowed by screaming kids and mess and chaos. Unable to attend to the demands of work, because needy kids. Unable to meet the needs of kids, because work.

We've had weeks and months brimful of moments so calamitous and trying they are best put behind us. The dance between two houses continues to wreak a toll. I cannot fathom how we have been doing this for four years. The equivalent (in travel time, in packing/unpacking, in fullness of itinerary) of an interstate trip every fortnight, with two small humans in tow. It's unsettling to say the least. We have so little downtime. We have aged at warp-speed. I realise it's probably a thing among mothers of (multiple) small humans, but I have lost a lot of my bliss.

This island, these four years have been beautiful and astounding and we are ever grateful to have landed here. We've laid down memories steeped in saltwater and sunsets. Childhoods begun in the sand. Eyes drinking in the exquisite ocean-bound world. And there is all the bliss to be found here in these moments.

I think I am allowed to say, we have reached a place of in-between. We are dreaming up changes, mentally readying ourselves for life beyond the lighthouse. It's impossible to know what will evolve, but we are ready and willing and offering our best selves up to what the future may hold.

* Small point, but hat nappy up there belies the fact that I was cloth nappying until recently because nappy changes have become the penultimate screamfest.

a life less ordinary // keeping it real

I have just arrived home, nerves afire, wide-eyed and bone-shaking after the scariest drive of my life.

Up the Eastern Beach, in the seaspray dark, on a rapidly incoming tide, the black ocean licking our wheels, invisible drop-offs at our side, the creeks surging around us and the soft, wet sand dissolving beneath us, threatening to swallow us if we don't keep moving. 

Me at the wheel, my first real dark, dark night drive, because I missed a boat (but got lucky - there was an extra return today!) and need to get home.

And in the dark, it's an inexact science of tide heights, times, beach and weather conditions and a fair thwhack of guesswork.

I was lucky to have K on the radio at home talking me through it.

When we finally arrived home, there were chunks of sand in the wheels.

Nobody really gets the impossibility of living in this beautiful, crazy outpost.

What it takes.

A 12-hour return trip for a blood test (me today) // emergency physio (K yesterday). With little down time, because it's also a chance to replace the number plates that were stolen. And find screws to fit. After you call the RACQ to get the car-that-won't-start going, and convince them you're legit despite the lack of number plates and our failure to update our details when we replaced the plates six months ago - oops. Throw in a police chase because you're driving (without number plates) to catch a boat. Add some serious pain. Yep, K is having a really awful birthday week.

Can you tell we've had two really crap days involving two separate, trying, perilous pilgrimages to the mainland? 

We're lucky, so lucky to live where we do.

But sometimes, it just bloody does our heads in.

We watch sunsets soak their watercolour glow into complete horizons.
There is sand through our house and often in the bed.

Our small boy chases pelicans and dabbles on the shoreline.
Our cars are being eaten alive by rust.

We don't come within a credit card zap zone of a shop for a month.
But then spend several whole days doing nothing but.

We don't have to deal with traffic or pollution - except after a storm when we get half of south-east-Asia's rubbish on our eastern shore.
But don't have playgroups or playgrounds, doctors or libraries, supermarkets or swimming lessons.

I am so lucky to be able to mix paid work and child-raising comparatively seamlessly, mostly without commute and with the flexibility to be there when I am needed.
Did I mention there is often sand in my bed?

I yearn for a simpler life, yet this life less ordinary is complicated.

And I am so, so happy to be home.

the trouble with ruts

After not knowing what to do with the other blog, I have kind of just given up without giving up. If you know what I mean. Too hard basket.

Sadly, I don't feel the love for the food blog thing anymore. I wish I did. But I mostly struggle to stay enthused with making beautiful nourishing food, let alone the all-consuming documenting of it. Probably because by the end of the day I am done, though the making of the adult dinner lies ahead. Also I think I spend too long making dinner (I have not really downgraded my standard of what is worthy of the 'dinner' descriptor since the boy arrived) and therein have grown to not really enjoy the process, because all I really want to do is sit down, spend some time with my beau and pour quantities of wine all over myself.

There are moments of spark though.

In the past fortnight I have made pumpkin and lentil burgers, vegie pasties (first time I have made shortcrust pastry since high school!), and a rad roasted beetroot salad with panfried beans, fetta and homegrown purslane. I recently made sourdough after a long lull (including making a new starter after our last au pair inadvertently binned my several-years-old starter >..<). And I smell meals with tomatoes in our future, courtesy our homegrown tomato glut.

When the householders urge me to get thy camera out, I dwell on the bad light and the prospect of picking up where I left off. You know that feeling that once you've let too much water go under the bridge?

Oh, and that brings me to thy camera. Has not seen light of day for many moons. My all-purpose lens is infirm. And it all got too much to carry a heavy baby, baby paraphernalia and a heavy camera when we went anywhere. And it is just so much easier to use the phone... thank goodness for the phone! Though I have been loving these posts and this (and her photography generally) and wanting to do so much more.

Reading, there is no time energy time mental coherence. I have a small stack of books and magazines purchased in quiet city-induced flurries of internal sunshine and hope. These get picked up intermittently and held for about three minutes and thirty seconds (including time spent discerning where I was up to after toddler has dislodged bookmark).
 
My hands miss knitting. My most 'recent' project - the boy's baby blanket (ho!) - is scrumpled somewhere in a dark cupboard after I backed myself into a corner I could not see clear of. And yet I have bought wool for future projects.

When I do get a moment, I either seize it for some physio exercises / yoga, get some chores done, or fluff around aimlessly because I don't have a project-that-I'm-not-totally-overwhelmed-by to get on with.

The trouble with ruts is that they are self-fulfilling.

I have high hopes though. I dream about blogging about creative stuff I am doing, without the technical difficulties that go along with creating stuff and blogging. Oh, utopian me!

I have resolved that rather than getting sucked into the nightly vaccuum of the lovely interwebs (but not actually doing anything productive on them because I'm exhausted, and going to bed way too late and waking up feeling hungover despite aforementioned quantities of wine being more occasional nowadays) I will spend my evenings creating, or if I'm too tired to create, relax. Seems simple. And obvious.

I have wondered whether I could morph the foodie blog into new terrain. You know, make it more about life generally. It seems like such a shame to let it lapse. I still occasionally get amazing emails and comments. Someone even offered to buy it! And did I mention the thing about being invited to have a few recipes featured in the ABC's Foodi iPad app? 

Perhaps I need to climb out of the food rut, and the photography rut, before I can get any traction on the blog rut. And probably, more generally, just start. I love this post about getting your creative spark back. 

Yes, I know this space is temporary. And this here, is my start.

big

So I've mentioned before that E is big for his age. Even for his birth (not gestational) age. He's a few days shy of eight months old - so six months gestationally. I thought he was about the size of a twelve month old, going by clothes sizes - he's in zeros and ones now. Until we were accosted in our travels in Brisbane yesterday by a chatty three-year old, his two-year old sister and Mum. E was the same size as the two-year old!

Fast forward a few hours. We're at our GP who did a measure and weigh and checked his percentiles. He's now above the 97th percentile for weight. The chart ends at the 97th percentile. And he's somewhere around 75th percentile for length. She then proceeded to tell me he is obese. Her words. I was gobsmacked. Incredulous. And mad. Are you kidding me? How can a baby be considered obese? Sure, maybe if I was plying him with sugary snacks and letting him watch TV all day instead of having physical play.

We still do a combination of breastmilk and formula. In the past few weeks, we've tried the occasional bite of fruit or veg, but his gag reflex is still strong. Yes, he is fed on demand. Yes, he eats a lot. No, I do not blindly stick a bottle in his mouth every time he cries. If he won't be settled, I try milk and usually discover that yes, he was hungry.

Behind a number of suggestions given to me by the GP was the inference that I feed him too much. I know formula-fed babies don't regulate their milk intake as well as those exclusively breastfed. And they are generally bigger. But I refuse to let him go hungry because he doesn't fit a norm. She also suggested his reflux might settle with less milk. After coming back down to a simmer over the past 24 hours, I can see why this makes sense. But what he drinks is more problematic than how much he drinks. I know this because he'll vomit his first small formula feed of the day when he is eating on an empty stomach. I give him smaller feeds because of the reflux. (I've also tried fewer larger feeds, out of desperation that something might help). The reflux and feeding is a vicious cycle - the more he vomits, the more he wants to feed to soothe himself and replace the milk he lost. 

She also suggested that maybe I am making more milk than I think. I can put a ballpark figure on how much milk I think my body makes, with 95% certainty. Assuming he gets more than I think, he is still choosing to drink the amount he does because he is hungry or needs comforting!

It's not the first time our GP has commented on his weight and how much we feed him. Despite it making me fume, it also makes me second-guess myself. I came home and googled obesity in babies, and read some interesting but inconclusive studies. But I keep coming back to this. He is appropriately chubby - no one comments on his size until they know his age. He is also very long - but then so are his parents. And hey, we are also both pretty slim and eat very healthily, so I think his chances for turning out the same are pretty good. Call me old-fashioned, but babies are meant to have fat. It fuels their awesome growth. Some will have more, some less. This article has influenced my thinking a lot. I have tried holding off feeds for as long as I can and it just makes us both grumpy and stressed. He is - apart from the reflux - healthy, and has been trending upwards on both weight and length charts since his birth. He started life so small that gaining weight was a good thing! (And no, I am not overcompensating for that.) We are grateful that he is happy and thriving.

I get the wider social context with rampant childhood obesity, but I really resent her judgement. And the term 'obese' in the case of a healthy baby is pretty severe judgement. I resent that Western medicine ideologies have to fit everything into a box of known proportions, rather than assess an individual holistically. Am I being overly sensitive? Perhaps. I'm reassured by K, who is there when E is ravenous and knows what it's like. Who counteracts my niggly self-doubts about this and many other little things and tells me what a great job we are doing as parents. Perhaps she never had a difficult baby. A very hungry baby. Would she make these judgements if she had?

Sadly, after this and a few other things rubbing us up the wrong way, we are on the hunt for a new GP.

The only way is up - or life in the land of vomit and depression

My aspiration to write here more regularly (dare I declare, weekly) has wafted into the babyland ether. Then there was an app without a 'save' function (wtf?) which wafted away my draft, leading to large clumps of hair being pulled*. At least I am holding on to my other new year aspirations - yoga and walking - thus far. I even did a solo walk to the beach, followed by yoga on the shore as the sun set and a rainbow fell upon our house! Has to be some sort of omen! (Bigtime thanks to K for the suggestion, and for baby wrangling.) Anyway, all those blog posts I quasi write in my head... poof, gone. So here's a list of sorts. Just a warning, what follows is not exactly bathed in positivity. Hint: look away now if this is likely to upset. The next one will be positive, I promise.

1. Sometimes I just long to put the boy in the pram and go for a long fast walk. Or even a short fast walk. Alas, we have one 'sealed' (and I'm being VERY generous) road, and that's our driveway. We do a bumpity cross-country meander down to the heli-pad most days, but oh, to burn off some energy with a proper walk. (The kind of walk I'm talking about is not the kind that can be accomplished with an almost-10-kilogram baby in the Ergo, though I do need to figure out how to put him on my back in it so he can look around.)

2. When I lament like this, I make myself look out the window. It's easy to become blase about where we live. Especially when some days it's hard to leave the house. For explanation, refer to roads issue (see point one), add vomity, heavy baby, stupendous heat and non-stop rain. 

3. Still frustrated by milk issues. And time issues, while we're at it. And just getting-to-grips-with-babyland issues generally. I badly need - and want - to get over it. I am booked in to see a postnatal counsellor.

4. Mothers' groups. After much fruitless trawling, I've concluded that being more active in the blogosphere is the only way I'll get to share with other mums of similar ilk. Unless I want to haul myself off to the city for this purpose, which is such an exercise in stress and anxiety that I would much rather put up with my existing stress and anxiety in the comfort of my own home. See point five. Also on this theme, wondering how to reconcile my two online selves, as I feel the pull back to this blog...

5. Trips to the mainland do my head in and deplete my already-thin reserves of calm. With all the appointments and extensive provisioning for The Life Remote, these trips usually result in a non-sleeping baby, stress and anxiety for us and a generally unpleasant vibe. I would much rather stay at home. See point four.

6. Our first date in six months, which I'd teed up a week in advance, evaporated due to a non-sleeping baby - and therefore, non-sleeping us - and general feelings of crankiness. Also see point five. 

7. Somehow, despite knowing all this, and having just returned from Brisbane, I'm going again tomorrow. Just me and the boy. For a flurry of appointments. I have no idea how I am going to carry all our stuff, drive the car and juggle a vomity baby. It will either harden me up for future solo-travels-with-a-baby, or turn me into a blathering hermit.

8. Maybe this should have been point one. Poor E still suffers quite badly from reflux and on a hot day, will vomit after each feed, in between feeds and just randomly - so pretty much all day. It is SO frustrating and depressing seeing him in distress. And spending vast lumps of time endless days forever feeding. We took him to see a craniosacral therapist who instantly helped his neck stiffness - he'd been almost unable to look left. Hoping this will also fix his now-very flat-on-one-side head. And of course the reflux, which we were told is exacerbated or possibly even caused by his spine being slightly twisted from his birth. Which impinges on the vagus nerve which has something to do with digestion. Anyway. It feels good to be doing something about it.

9. eBay! Oh joyous rapture! See - a positive! I'm sure the rangers all think I'm holed up here at the Cape whiling away the man's hard-earned. (Our mail comes via the ranger station - and luckily I have my own hard-earned for another six months.) Latest purchases: a happy hangup for the boy (I live in denial naive desperation of prolonging the daytime catnaps), three wooden Manhattan Toy things, some books and a fancy sleep-bag.

10. I'm not sure this list even makes sense. It's late, my thoughts are mud but I'm pressing publish anyway.

*Sorry if you got an email with a blank post... I'll spare you the tribulations of useless Blogger apps.

a general malaise

Perhaps not quite the headline you'd expect after the preceding tales of love and seaside holidays. If, in fact, you were expecting anything at all, following an entirely silent September here. Life's been roaring along. But something's amiss. I've not been able to quite put my finger on it til today. Self-diagnosis: a delayed bout of post-holiday blues. Fuelled along by an unusually rainy and grey Spring. I've never seen it rain like this... nor missed the sun so much in Queensland.

As usual, work is the nub of my irk. The return from holidays was not so bad... in fact, work was entirely reasonable for a couple of weeks. In the post-holiday glow, I conceded that I would never be entirely on top of it all. Seven peeps to manage, a shirtload of work and an information environment that makes my multi-tab webtrawling a playground. Nevermind that it is kind of a playground. Anyhoo. So the work is amping up. And I've come to a disturbing realisation. Sheepishly, kind of late in the piece. After most of this year warming this particular roost, I've realised that perhaps I don't really like it so much. I don't want to be responsible for other people any more. I don't want to continuously struggle to stay on top of the ridiculous information flow. I'm sick of churning out god-damn widgets. And I hate having to always be 'on', no matter how crap I feel. There's no checking the news, attending to personal errands or taking time for lunch. Sure, I was happy to give it a whirl, and hang about for a bit while they needed me. But now, on the cusp of potentially yet another extension, I feel very much backed into a corner. Like I've been stealthily groomed for it. Maybe I'm naive. I should have anticipated. It gets worse. Next week I am being the Director (bah!) and have to go to Sydney to represent Queensland at a national thingy. Sheesh. I do not feel the love.

Anyway, it all still hangs. Perhaps I'll get to go back to my policy post. I'm trying to remember why I latched the desk shackles back on, chill out a bit and enjoy all the great stuff outside work. But still. I went to the fabulous Women of Letters last week (my cousin said go, then K's sister invited me: fated?). The premise is that a bunch of talented writerly folk read letters they have penned to their most treasured posession. It was funny, inspiring and revealing, and totally worth it even though it made me feel old. (Especially so when I heard the next day that, after I'd bailed, K's sister who is an editor partied on into the eve with the booky-cool crowd, performing a karaoke duet with Marieke Hardy!) Anyway, moving on. Reflecting on the evening's monologues, I realised... I could write like that! I can write like that! I did write like that, once! What has happened to my writing?! Of course, thus ensued my own monologue, along the lines of 'what am I doing with my life, I'm creatively driven, why am I still chained to this god-boring public service desk? Gah! Double gah!! Holy GAH!!!'.

And that's where I'll end this little rant. It's way past my bedtime. And I'm 'on' first thing tomorrow. Any advice about what to take for a general malaise would be much appreciated.

the remaining daylight hours

The cold has arrived. And it's mostly dark. Though it's light when I walk to work, before I close myself off from the world for the remaining daylight hours. The managerial gig has been given legs til October. And we've just clocked into what is being billed as The Most Hideous Month of the year. Oh joy. It's official: I have no life. I'm wracked with tiredness. Food-ism is gone. Lunches are coffee, and whatever I have scavenged in the morning (thank goodness for muesli bars and leftovers). I realised last weekend, after a much-needed massage from the musculoskeletal guru, that my back has been a crunchy Rubik's cube of stress for who-knows-how-long. I could barely turn my neck and didn't even realise it until I left with big arse cupping bruises on my nape and a slightly new feeling of movement. Ick. Mostly I don't see, hear or read any news (or any cultural communicado, for that matter), aside from my new fascination for TweetDeck. Which I hook myself up to in the evenings like an information junkie. (I have a theory about that - in a nutshell it's about how my twelve thousand emails a day is changing my brain to need to respond to stuff. Which I get barely the slightest chance to skim over.)

Ho-diddly-hum. I'm aware I'm whinging. But this lifestyle SUCKS. I am so terribly frustrated at the lack of balance. I work my arse off for solid hours daily. Meanwhile my whole body falls apart and I have no time to enjoy life. Weekends are catch up and attempted recuperation.

I realised (as did the mindful observer) that I'm probably approaching burnout. And that it's situation 'dissolve into a molten pool of angst', or take a break. So we've cancelled work for August. All of it! We are thinking of selling my little car, getting a second-hand four-wheel drive and camping the east coast, starting or ending up in Gippsland. We would've liked to go west and central, but thought four weeks might be cutting it fine. And I would be the happiest little camper if all I did is hang out at the beach (probably in my thermals with current weather, but that's completely fine), read, do morning yoga and just walk and potter with camera and pen. Maybe revisit Hat Head National Park, Ben Boyd and others a bit more off the trail. I have whole-body cravings for horizons and shorebreaks and salt air. Which I realised last weekend when we escaped down to Burleigh for half a day, which is where the above was snapped.

So, this week I came home to a present: a swag! Now, to survive the month from hell. I'm afraid I'm not going to want to go back. Again...

creativity angst

Have found myself mired in extreme creativity angst of late. Weekends seem to expire with the list of boring chores mostly knocked over, while the (wish)list of arts, crafts and higher pursuits remains untouched. I simply cannot work out how other desk-hounds tweak their schedules to maintain creative dabblings.

I have been wondering whether it is just a time thing, whether I just have too many interests to maintain, or whether something more sinister might also be going on.

Was recently beavering away on a piece for dumbo feather (and have two pieces in the Spring issue – saving me from complete creative woe), for which I was leafing through blog posts from about mid-last year, retracing some of the anarchic thoughts I was having back in drop-outsville. And was sort of astounded at the writerly zest I (me?) seemed to wield back then. And appalled that said zest seems to have leaked from my brain. Though sadly, not onto the page. Or into anything remotely creative.

Back in the Life After Desk days I seemed to have some sort of vague insight into Stuff. And seemed to be able to relay it with some sort of mild humour and zing. Now, I aim words at a target with functional intent. Unpretty, linear information widgets…

Just like a…

Ministerial brief...

Gah! GAH!

The desk. Desk, desk, desk. Sounds like a reprimand. Thief of creative expression, abstract thinking and sweet unproductive time. I have found this year much harder than any other stint in my working life. My current mission: to make more room for creative play. Hmmm.

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.

acronym-phomania (is a disease of people in offices)

Here is a list summarising the first week back in life and desk. Seems I can only think in lists and dot points this week. Strange. Hmmph. Think I need one of those website counters - the ones that count down the days til some important event – in my case, the end of my ‘gap’ year back behind the desk.

1. Freaking acronyms. They should all be hogtied, painted with honey and stuffed in a small cage with a hungry brown bear. Except TOIL and ATL, which are quite dandy acronyms which I hope to become better aquainted with. So far I’ve acquainted myself with lots of zzzzzzzzzzs and gotten friendly with a few G&Ts. I would also like to retain the many-purposed WTF in my arsenal. It’s come in handy several times this week.

2. WTF is with the sudden profusion of white – yes, WHITE – hairs????? Mysteriously this little jab to the jugular coincided with my return to a lifestyle I deem to be in contempt of life. Maybe it's not the profusion but my noticing that is sudden. Perhaps my renewed compulsion to preen after a lull has afforded me a fast-forward from ‘before’ to ‘after’, otherwise denied by continual attendance to mirrors. Either way, WTF??

3. Sports shoes that pretend they’re office shoes: it is my week’s mission to find some. After three blisters on day one in my formerly comfortable flats, I am starting a homy-peds facebook fan club.

4. Quietly freaking out after re-reading points two and three in succession. Moving quickly to convince myself it is not a sign I’m upon old lady days, merely an indication of my slide even further to the left… and, well… I can’t think of any positive reinterpretation whatsoever for WHITE HAIR.

5. Ah Brisvegas. You have Campos coffee. You have Avid Reader and the awesome West End markets. You have cute Queenslander houses (albeit now totally unaffordable) and mango trees and sunshine. You even have a smattering of decent cultural institutions and events. But you are also painfully thin on the ground with the good stuff. Why do I always forget how small and unsophisticated you are? I am bemoaning the demise of your cheap-ass Dendy, which is clearly a ploy to get us to drive to the upmarket one in a posh suburb in a bling retail development on the river and pay more. Pfff.

6. Had also forgotten how small Bligh’s Army is. And how postively miniscule is Bligh’s Army of Spin. I like the sound of that, we could almost be a cricket team. Except I don't like cricket. Almost made it through one week without an urgent request for speech notes from the Office of the Lesser Grand Poo-bah. Am taking rehydration salts to work tomorrow after spending a week dying of thirst in the stupid airconditioning. WHINGE.

7. Someone asked if I’d planted the herbs and black russian tomato seedlings I brought with me from Vic. Let's see... arrived Friday PM, spent weekend getting self into new lodgings/retreiving work things from storage, started work Monday... When would I have done that? I’d forgotten how close to impossible it is for a desk hound to have time for much else other than work during the week. Sob.

8. A couple of points in opposition to my general brooding cynicism: I am secretly amazed by the little ripples we unknowingly make. I am also running away with Leunig this week.

9. Back to the brooding. I sense that with my return to desk-bindings, the part of my brain disposed to ideas and deep thinking is involuntarily shutting down. It – which thrives on idle time – is being usurped by the (still sluggish) part that has been called into action to juggle multiple compact chunks of information. Like lists and bullet points. I want to scream that these little information snacks are useless to me, they are merely functional, inconsequential snippets of trivia, unrelated and meaningless to my place in the world. But no one is listening. So I am running away with Leunig, he understands.

10. A concentration of sympathy and wellness vibes to all the poorly kitties and all their mums and dads. I fear it will be my turn soon and the little blighter’s in a different state.

the poverty of affluence

Today is Blog Action Day, a day where bloggers of conscience are encouraged to talk about issues of poverty.

Poverty, by definition, is a lack of the necessities of life. As well as the pressing forms of poverty caused by war and the failure of government policy and global markets, there’s a growing form of poverty that is so sneaky as not to be immediately recognisable as poverty. It is the poverty of affluence, now pervasive in Western society. In exchange for our material wealth, we have a diminished freedom of choice in how to live – freedom of choice being an assumed given in this culture. We are shoe-horned into wage slavery, into bondage to the markets, and sold the illusion of choice, convenience, status, mobility – all things that are certainly not poverty.

Since we no longer have free access to land, we must obtain the provisions for life within a market economy, where our wants – which we mistake for needs – grow in proportion to our ability to meet them. The lure of 'more' is reinforced at every turn. And so we experience life as the perpetual tension of desire.

Robert Dessaix wrote in the recent Weekend Australian magazine that “cacophonous emptiness is the postmodern condition”. Emptiness usually stems from a lack of purpose and meaningful human connection. It manifests as anxiety, frustration, depression – all normal responses to loss of control. These symptoms are never attributed to the all-powerful capitalist-democratic culture; the link between symptom and disease is so heavily obfuscated by glitz, and the power to change one’s circumstances so limited, that ignorance and denial succeed. Besides, to question the foundational assumptions of your own culture is anarchic.

These thoughts are not new. Leunig has despaired the “fake mass wellbeing and prosperity” and identified a “Western deprivation – a new kind of famine”. Bill McKibben in Deep Economy argues the need to pursue a broader prosperity – one that values community, environment and human happiness and chooses localism over globalism and ‘hyper-individualism’. Buckminster Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Bill Mollison, Daniel Quinn, Tom Hodgkinson, Carlo Petrini and Derrick Jensen are a few others.

Every time I return to a city after time spent in uncluttered landscapes, I’m struck by the busy purposelessness, the excess of consumption and waste and the denial of community that defines the urban lifestyle. The more I become removed from this way of life, the more keenly I sense its artifice. Its smells are always the first thing I notice. The deodorants and perfumes, laundry powders, handwashes and hair products. We are masters at disguising reality, dressing up the truth til we no longer recognise it.

I am happy to be bumping along the road out. Real freedom, real choice in how to live, to be able to use one’s skills and interests in a way that is self-sustaining and not harmful, to live in a community… these are the necessities of life. And necessary not just for an ethical existence, but for existence. For biodiversity. It is not a cultural imperative, but an environmental one.

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“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it…” Henry David Thoreau

prorogue

(pro-ROHG) verb tr.: 1. To discontinue a session of something, for example, a parliament. 2. To defer or to postpone.

Sometimes new words come along at just the right time.

Spring has sprung and we are into our second week of continuous sunshine! Those of you living beyond the reach of proper winter will probably not understand my unfettered crazy-woman bliss. Suffice to say, it is like falling into a very deep mire of fetid baby-poo-like sludge while you’re sleeping and wondering, when you wake up, why everything is suddenly rank and it’s difficult to move without clenching inwardly against the tide of crap… until five months* later you’re miraculously hauled out of the baby-poo-like sludge, whisked to a day spa and washed, pummelled and spruced back to life, whereupon robed courtiers who look very much like Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords escort you to a candy-striped sunchair where a glass of bubbles awaits your pleasure as wardrobe, hair and nail attendants get to work on further sprucing.

Well, it is very much like this. Of course it isn't actually this. That would be stupid. Or very amazing.

But back to my main reason for posting. Tomorrow I leave the country. (Not Australia, Gippsland, aka the country. Ha!) For Cape York, via Cooktown, via Cairns, via Melbourne, via bus, train, J's place, train, skybus, plane, car, boat, etc.

I can almost smell the salt air! Yippee! does not even come close. Business as usual (winter, under-employment, everything in my life that doubles for baby-poo-like sludge, etc) is hereby prorogued for a month.

Spring has also returned my kitchen mojo, courtesy a genius creation of barley, mushroom and mozzarella burgers. Which are so meaty that I’m toying with getting the kids (the ones I’ll be working with, who only eat meat – and then only the lips-n-a$$holes kind) to make and eat!

Hehehehe. I am pure evil.

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*because that is how long a real winter lasts.

one

Today is special. It may lack the ring of 080808, but today is my one year anniversary of Life After Desk. Woohoo! I have survived a WHOLE YEAR unrestrained by desk shackles! Before I march off to knitting class - it is also 'd' day for the beanie - I thought I'd share a few kernels about the quest for meaning, purpose (and income)* beyond the desk. Forgive me, this is about five different shades of nerdy. But I am in high celebration mode.

1. Do what you love (but don’t plan too much!). Never before has the universe responded so well to my lack of life direction and planning. I leapt into the fresh unknown with the unshaped idea to do what I enjoy. There were vague dreams of star-lit skies and open spaces. I bought a guidebook to Western Australia. Then mysterious planetary stuff happened and I stumbled onto Pelican. Literally. I spent almost the rest of the year at sea. Sailing. Travelling. Working for Indigenous and environmental issues. And of course, cooking. Kooky! All I did was fire off an email and two weeks later stepped aboard. The important lesson was to take the leap. You need to make room before new things can grow, etc.

2. Amazing starts are just that: starts. Equilibrium is nature’s genius. It's not all croquet and cloudwatching. I guess the past few months’ battles to gain a toehold in the freelance world were inevitable after such an effortless start.

3. It’s difficult to turn a lone cog. Come with me on this journey: we’re all cogs, we were born to turn. As a lone cog, you can no longer just turn up and submit your jagged little edges to the wheels of the great machinery. No. Like all cogs, you must turn, but you must find a way to turn yourself. And in the depths of winter, when you’re bogged in philosophical quandries about the purpose of cogs, when there are no other cogs for miles around, when you’ve been rejected by the big cogs, when you’ve exhausted your self-turn talk and even your cog-mojo gets disgusted and leaves… being a solo cog is No Bloody Fun.

4. Prosperity has little to do with numbers. (Beyond a certain point.) My income is a sliver of its former self. As is my consumption. Not to mention my ‘productive output’ aka the number of widgets I have birthed in the past year. But I have become so much more rounded, I am the essence of BALL.

5. I’ll have the …………………………………….. ? Too much choice confounds decision-making. For me, anyway, who can barely decide what to order for dinner (when I used to go out for dinner). Choice is like money (see above): you only need so much to be happy; the surplus conspires to remove your happiness. (It’s like we got smitten by money and choice and suddenly forgot about the law of diminishing returns.) Anyway, removing myself from a widget job was cake. Compared, that is, with choosing an alternative… and pursuing it with intent to attain self-sufficiency. Though I've narrowed it down a whack, I’ve been bogged of late in philosophical quandries about the purpose of work. Sometimes I think the answer is lurking at the other end of the sentence: what the world needs now is…

6. The nomadic thing sucks. Unless of course you have your own yurt, which would be cool, though not without its troubles if you wanted to pitch it in, say, Collingwood. After 18 months of living in other people’s spaces, what I miss most is my own. Life After Independent Habitation (I started cohabiting again six months before the desk divorce, for anyone paying attention) has flung a latent dream to the fore: to build my own house. Out of reclaimed materials. With my own hands. Where I will sustain myself by the freelance life and the bounty of the land. There is a bit more to it, but that’s the nutshell version. This is the oft alluded to Grande Plann.

So there you have it. That's what I learnt loosing the desk shackles. Maybe it doesn't look like much. But it's more than I had a year ago. And this is just the start. Now, where are those bubbles?

*My first learning should have been: 'Never Put Income in Parentheses', it is alphabetic feng shui. Or was my lack of income a result of my giving away my jade (aka money) plants when I purged myself of accumulated material crud?

blog and a hard place

I find myself in an awkward position. And not just because I’ve forced myself to resume pilates – after a lull – against the every scream of my wintering body. There are roughly four weeks until the next Pelican job begins. And my need for purpose (or in its absence, something to do next) grows kind of desperate. You will heed my desperation when I say...

I’ve been reconsidering a temporary return to The Desk.

I know. I know.

I could not have planned this to be any more ironic than it is. Next week is the first year anniversary since Life After Desk began (timekeepers can be assured the desk-shackles were shed after the first week in August 2007, I was just a bit tardy setting up the blog). And what do people usually mark first year anniversaries with? Paper! Which, to the desk hound, is as nails are to the chippy. I am sitting amidst so much irony I could be a laundry-wench.

There is no question that I will still be liberating bubbles to mark the occasion. Even though it is not bubble drinking weather. And even though I may will have to drink them on my own, since no one here is fond of bubbles, and this could will be messy.

And I will still be sailing with Pelican. (For as long as they'll have me.)

I am not giving up the quest for an alternative existence. This is just me rationalising my need to squirrel away a few more acorns for Le Grande Plann (I will share very soon), by submitting to a temporary return to that forgotten shiny world where you can wear a dress and order coffee. Where you have somewhere to be and people expect stuff from you. Where it is not OK to wear ugg boots every day.

Maybe it will be called Life And Desk. Hehe!

ding! dong!

The orchids are out, the wood ducks are a-nesting, the mornings are lighter. This can only mean that winter is on its way out. Ding dong to that! Both rain tanks are full and I harvested my first handfuls of coriander – planted from seed aeons ago – for a bowl of pho ga. Small things worth celebrating. I thought I would do so by sharing some recent finds/surprises:

1. Cousin J’s home-made bircher muesli, replicated by me but not as good as the original. Oats, dried fruit, water, fridge. Genius!

2. Yacon: like a crunchy, super-sweet potato. Perfect for my fave fast food: bowl of steamed veg.

3. Kangaroo simmered in a dashi-soy-mirin-sake combo with stir fried vegies and brown rice. How did I get into my fourth decade (ARGH!) before tasting dashi?? Probably the same way I left it until my second last day in Vietnam to discover jackfruit.

4. A 100% Shetland wool jumper in the throw-out bin at the opp shop, 50 cents. Hooray for the regions.

5. A sheath of dusky meringue light falling on the peak of St Paul's Cathedral with the boldest, thickest rainbow I have ever seen arcing over the building's side. Lines of people taking photos. Me? No camera! One of those 'I don't have my camera so I'll just have to appreciate the moment' moments.

6. The tax office rocks. These words are a meaty surprise, no? They have just rescued me from taking another slice off the top of my acorn stash. Never before have I witnessed the heaving cogs of bureaucracy work so swiftly in my favour. Never.

7. Someone I used to work with has packed up his family for instalment two of We Do Love to Sail Around the Med. Their modus operandi seems to be work for six months; sail for six. I do like it very muchly!

8. Natasha Pincus interview in the winter issue of Dumbo Feather (call me a nerd if you will, I'm rationing my reading to prolong the joy) which has made me think even more deeply about callings and creativity. Anyone seeking Purpose Angst resolution should read it. Though it may cause further angst. But you’ll be much better informed. Or something like that.

9. Always smile when there are cameras around. You never know when a previous employer will stick your mug on a website banner.

10. Who the? What the? Gggghhh! Mwow. I was dreaming about moths and celery stalks...



How cute is he with his face all twisted like that? And I am posting this after cleaning two puddles in one day... one of which I unwittingly pushed a broom through and walked in. Ick! Either I am extremely forgiving... or I find this photo highly amusing.

on justice and coffee

I have just ploughed through The Tall Man - intelligent and restrained reportage of the 2004 Palm Island death in custody and resulting inquest and trial. The telling of these events is a small victory against the heavy sadness of their fact. It is an important book. I won't critique it for fear of doing it injustice, except to say that it is a must-read for anyone interested in the state of this country. Now, before you start imagining me in long socks and sandals hoisting a flag in my yard, I will segue into a little lounge-room boogie to mark another national triumph: this one of local culture over global corporate blandness. Goodbye Starbucks, you don't make sense here. Thanks be to little victories.

a-ha!

It’s been an a-ha! kind of weekend. Revealing. Satisfying. And not.

A-ha moment #1... Like someone with a rare disease who finally stumbles upon a name for it, I can finally, belatedly, satisfyingly, explain my current bent for baking, knitting, herb-growing, etc. (Today’s etc being learning, sort of, to prune fruit trees at the Toora Heritage Pear Orchard.) I owe this one to Michael Pollan, whose food ethics titles I’m working my way through, but specifically, to the account of his experience building his own writing studio. With his own hands. Pollan being about as tool-handy and buildery as … well, my 19-year-old arthritic cat. As a writer, Pollan mused, he is invested to his armpits in thoughts and words and purposeless abstraction. Often not even creating new purposeless abstraction, but reconditioning other people’s purposeless abstraction so it better serves its purposeless... purpose (aka editing). So when he needed a work-from-home space, he decided to build it himself. With his own hands. He explained the impulse as a lust for something grounded in reality. Like wood and hammers and chisels and sweat. (Or flour and seeds and wool and pear trees.) To create something with his own hands that he could touch and walk into. (Or eat or wear or grow.)

A-ha. As you can probably guess, after spending years writing and reconditioning purposeless puff that often as not ended up in recycling bins, many bells did ring in my general vicinity.

A-ha moment #2... Yesterday was unbelievably sunny and warm. It registered 22 degrees outside. (About ten more than usual.) I read in the sun all morning. I thawed out. I even took off my socks and rolled up my jeans. Then I went for a walk (after failing miserably for weeks to goad myself into a decent forest tramp). I walked and sang. I felt light inside. What was this strange sensation? Oh dear. Or should I say, a-ha.

You see, for months now I've been denying the significant influence the cold weather is having on me. (But this is my home state!) A little swab of sunshine and I'm able to function without internally bracing. Frolic instead of waddle (it's the 13,001 layers). Smile. I guess this is what a real winter, after six years without one, feels like. So I’ve realised – belatedly, grudgingly – I cannot function in this part of the world in winter. A far less satisfying realisation than the first. And one I must do something about. Grrr. Maybe I'll do my tax first...

cousins rock*

Oh. My. Lordy.

You know your whinings about cultural/financial states have reached a new kind of pathetic when your cousin who has just returned to Melbourne after a long expat stint and is living with one of her relics and her lifelong housemate who she left back in Queensland send you a care package. With really expensive wine and six ‘every day’ wine glasses (one for every day of the week minus one dry day), Ethiopian organic fair trade chocolate, fluffy polka-dotty bed socks, Full Terry socks – exactly who is this Full Terry? – latest editions of Grass Roots and other “vego-leso”** reading material and incense specially brewed to ward off depression!

The booty came in a big box, masquerading as a water-saving shower-head. Naturally I paused to consider last week’s flurry of internet trawling but couldn’t recall ordering any shower-heads. Come to think of it, I can’t recall ordering anything online since Operation Tightwad kicked in.

My reaction upon knifing open the box went from befuddlement to glee to guilt: "This is not a shower head. This is wine and chocolate! I am not worthy!"

You see, I, dubious cousin that I am, have not called J to support her through the return to Melbourne in winter and moving in with a relic phase. I, dubious cousin that I am, even got a twitchy lip when she called last week to chat to Mum and not me... it was amidst the swathes of bubble wrap that I realised she had called Mum to check our postal address.

[pause for emphasis]

I feel like someone who drank an awful lot, made a right ass of themselves, forgot what an ass they were because they drank so much, then got a really bad hangover and whined loudly about it til someone bought them a year’s supply of Berocca to shut them up.

I love the care pack. I am so not worthy. J and L: you can ride on this for a very long time.

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It’s been cousin-central around here. We just spent a lovely weekend with my Long Lost Cousin, her boat-building beau, their cute little z and my uncle. There was food. There was wine. The Wombles theme song even made an appearance. Read about it on boat-building beau’s blog or b's blog... (exactly how did two people with a small child beat me to blog it?).

Well that’s it for a bit… I’m wambling off to Melbourne for a few days to imbibe by a fireside amongst fellow editors, stalk the Slow Guides publisher, drink wine with old friends, run amok at festivals and trawl op shops and bookshops.

*housemates, partners and babies of cousins rock too, it just didn't fit so well in the title.

**kudos to J and L, this is their genius catch-all for minority groups like vegetarians and lesbians.

de way forward

It’s been like a dirt bike buzzing up behind me for a while now. (An actual scenario happening with irksome regularity during forest walks of late.) The realisation, that is, that I have far too many interests to keep a proper handle on any of them. Now, I know that’s probably a very slow realisation since for the past year I have been making a conscious effort to de-specialise and diversify… that is, in a way, the whole point of Life After Desk. A few income spinners, more de-light, less boredom, greater durability.

Eggs in baskets, fingers in pies, irons in fires... I got ‘em all: blogging here, blogging there, pitching saleable writing, spreading the freelance word, doing stuff for free, filing rejection notes, photo shoots, photoshopping, card-making, notebook crafting, keeping an eye on job ads, playing Bingi help desk, keeping fires going (actual ones), tutoring, reading the gazillions of emails I subscribe to, dreaming of new ways to sustain Life AD, etc. And I haven’t even mentioned food yet. Or the other secret squirrel Grande Planne which I’m yet to commit to the page here but am squandering hours on nonetheless.

I’m not sure how I managed it all whilst chained to desk. (Though I’ll admit to doing a bit of blogging here and a bit of online banking there. During lunch breaks of course.) This diversification bizzo is also a bit scattered. Whole days get de-railed. (Though I guess that’s not so different to a morning email from the Minister’s office requesting a parliamentary statement on the reforms to social housing in discrete Indigenous communities by COB along with dot points on something else and figures on a third thing… but at least then I had someone else to blame for my day going skewiff).

It's also kind of de-pressing. But if I light enough little fires, and run in circles fanning flames... and hope and beg and PLEEEAAAD and hope and cross all crossable body parts and sing to the moon… that one will eventually catch.

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Since I’m on the topic, has anyone been watching the Passionate Apprentices doco on SBS? I was completely transfixed by the baker on tonight’s ep who makes all his stuff by hand, built his own masonry woodstove and supplies his own garlic/parsley/eggs etc from his garden and whose dream is to grow his own grain, mill his own flour and bake it by hand...

De-specialisation. De-lovely. De way forward.

newspaper neck

Monday morning. Still a free woman. (By the skin of my teeth.) I should be more impressed than I am. But I’ve arisen with newspaper neck after spending a very large part of yesterday hunched with my snout in the papers. (With any luck, there won’t be much call to look/turn/swivel to the right today.) And I’ve got no idea what to do about the competition (possibly the worst idea I’ve ever had, along with drawing in black pastel on the carpet in Prep*) since one MOTH has started pretending that the rest of the household does not exist. Oh the extreme joy of living with one’s parents. Those stores of positivity I boasted are threatening to leave the building. And I, too. For it’s high time to get cracking on something new. Somewhere new.

But let me recount the MANY reasons to be positive: 1. I’ve started tutoring. 2. Dumbo Feather winter issue is out, featuring two small pieces by moi. 3. Surprise gift in the mail from Ren – knitting needles and wool! 4. Op shop thermals from M. 5. Wangling myself a coffee introduction with the Slow Guides publisher. 6. Upcoming trek to the city for the Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing and Melbourne Design Market, on the same weekend... I may need an oxygen supplement. 7. Anticipating the ONE year anniversary since Life After Desk began (not to mention the fancy bottle of fizz that’s been patiently waiting in the back fridge for an occasion).

I’ve been very much admiring Leunig’s meanderings of late. Especially since he meanders so well about frustrations with modern life and the interminable depths of a southern winter. I marvel at his ability to muse so gently and endearingly about the stupidity of contemporary social conventions and the impossibility of human relations and the bristling cold, etc. And sound deeply sensitive and intelligent while getting his gripe on. At the risk of adding envy to the list of unbecoming traits I’m airing… I want to be him!

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*Dear Mrs Walker. That big black mark on the carpet in your Prep year in 1980 was my fault. I don’t know what came over me but I do recall feeling kind of demeaned by being asked to get on my hands and knees and pretend to be a vacuum cleaner and pick up craft litter from the carpet. And the pastel remnant was just there. Apologies to Donald (can’t remember your last name), the snot-licking class clown who copped the blame for it. But you are now probably some hot software entrepreneur with a little off-the-grid pad up in the Daintree where you grow mangoes with your woman while I envy from so very, very far away. (For international readers: the ‘preparatory’ year is in between kindergarten/pre-school and school.)