Author: ThirdCat

A Quick Gen-X Quiz

All right, it’s 1 January 1980, and we are complete. Gen-X Represent!

  1. March 1985. Describe the clothes you’re wearing. What are you having for lunch? What’s your favourite song?
  2. Which one of those bitches is her mother?
  3. Name six of the artists who sang in ‘We are the World’
  4. Name an artist everyone would think sang in ‘We are the World’ but didn’t.
  5. Winona Ryder and Helena Bonham Carter were great in the 80s but are magnificent now. Discuss.
  6. Why did tuna mornay go out of fashion?

That’s all I’ve got for this morning, check back tomorrow for another list of quickly-compiled questions that may or not help you to pass the time.

Piqued

I think I’ve hit peak internet. I was looking at the search page of instagram the other day and my god, I truly feel like I am, ‘What has happened?’ I’m sure it’s happened gradually and this is another one of those things I haven’t noticed as it’s gone along, but it one hundred percent embodies the hustle of the influencer and I don’t think I can take it. And whatever reels are I do not know, but they make me dizzy.

What is making the algorithm think that I am interested in all those sculpted bodies doing all those weird ‘yoga’ poses? That I want to look at all those babies? I mean I like babies, I love babies, but what’s with all those manicured photographs of babies I’ve never met and will never know? I do feel a kind of nausea whenever I stray too far away from my own small feed of people I mostly know or whose work I know. As for facebook, except for wanting to be able to watch the COVID updates I wish I could logout and never go back in. It just shows me the same posts over and over again, and hardly anyone is writing much anymore anyway. It’s kind of overcrowded, but it’s all just noise and I can’t find the people I came there to see. Sigh. Do I sound like someone who isn’t making an effort to keep up? Who is dismissing things simply because she doesn’t understand them?

And twitter is doing to me what it has always done to me, and why, back in 2010 I deleted my original account. It’s like I’m at a party and I go into the kitchen, but the party has just moved into the hall. So I go into the hall but the party has just moved out to the back verandah. And when I get to the back verandah I’m too late to join any of the conversations so all I can do is stand on the edge and laugh at the right times, but I know I’m not part of it, not at all.

Why can’t everyone just realise that blogging is better and come back to the blogs? I suspect this is a somewhat Gen-X lament?

Colonoscopy: There’s no pretty way to say it

I am so proud of myself for crossing ‘have a colonoscopy’ off my to-do list. With a strong family history of bowel cancer (my dad was diagnosed at 60, died at 63), I have been surfing on a gentle wave of unscreened guilt for a few years now. I did tell myself that doing extra blood screening could fill that gap, but the further I move into my fifties, the more I know that it isn’t enough.

As it happened, the specialist told me that I was only a borderline case for using a colonoscopy as screening, because family history isn’t as much a predictor of contracting bowel cancer as I had assumed it to be. But I live in a time and a place where a borderline case for screening does lead to screening so screened I was.

The preparation was a disgusting as everyone says it is, and even now, three days later, the thought of that drink is still making me gag. But as for the procedure itself, well all I can say is that weirdly it was the best sleep I’ve had for months.

As I came out of that sleep I found myself in a strange place emotionally, and feeling extraordinarily sad. But as you probably know if you are human, sadness has many nuances. This was a very pure, uncomplicated sadness, and this is the loveliest of all sadnesses to experience because it is the sadness that rubs so closely alongside love. I’m sure this sounds incredibly cheesy, and I hope one day to come back and write this more fully. But for now, I simply want to record it so that I don’t forget it.

The nurses kept asking, ‘Are you okay?’ until the one who was a little older than the rest said, ‘Is it because of hospitals?’ And that seemed to be the most complete explanation I could give for now and I was grateful to her for giving it words.

I tried hard to take in the physical surroundings so that I could write more completely. Obviously I didn’t have a notebook, and I probably didn’t have the strength in my hands yet to write anyway. And I didn’t want to ask for my phone, which felt like something of an intrusion into the experience anyway. I thought I would try to remember things by going through the alphabet and assigning something to each letter. Firstly though I even had trouble fighting through the fog to think of a word that matched each letter. A for anesthetic was okay; b for blue because goodness me everything in that room really is blue; c for ceiling … then I would lose my place and when I went back over it, I’d lost half the words anyway.

So in the end, I let myself lie there, taking notice of where I was, but not berating myself for what I couldn’t do. The best part of the day was, of course, the white-bread sandwich and the cup of tea. Such comfort in such food, I did cry again.

As it happens the screening was justified because he did find, and remove, a polyp which was of medium size. (I was disappointed to read in the report, however, that the bowel prep was only judged as ‘good’ and given how carefully I followed the instructions I feel slightly aggrieved that it was not judged as ‘excellent’ or even ‘outstanding’.)

On discharge I was reminded once again that for the next 24 hours I should not drive, drink alcohol or make big decisions. So the next day as I was taking this as permission to take it very easy, I was processing this, that and the other and the profound impact of this procedure began to dawn on me.

Leading up to the day and the procedure I had felt a sense of sadness that my dad had not done the screening which meant that by the time the tumour was discovered it had had too much time to not only seed itself, but also to sprout and to send its runners through his body.

I felt like I had actually changed one potential outcome of my life. Not in a sliding doors or a road less taken kind of way, but in a much more concrete and tangible way. I am not overstating it to say that it felt profound.

So that’s a big tick on my to-do list. Unfortunately the results mean that I have to go back again in three years and not in the five or even ten that I was hoping for. But on the plus side, that sleep is something to look forward to.

Suburban mystery

I’ve been living in this house for four-and-a-half years and still I could not tell you what that sound is that floats regularly over the fence. A mechanical sound. Like a vacuum cleaner. But outside? I would say that it was something to do with a swimming pool except that they don’t have a pool (or if they do it’s only ever used by people who swim extremely quietly). There’s no way of looking over their fence and into their yard without it seeming extremely rude. And since we are far noisier than they are I would hate to think that they think there is any implied criticism. Still, I’d like to know what the noise is. I suppose it’s the kind of noise that will one day disappear without me noticing and I will never think of it again. (Although now I’ve written it down I guess I’ll never forget it, and it will plague me until my final days, haunting my old-age dreams).

Blog and roll

Blogging for me did always involve a fair amount of navigating the whys and wherefores of what blogging is and is not. And one of the things it is, is a connection to other people who are doing the same thing, recording and writing in this shape and form. Truly one of the best parts of the early days of blogging was the following of links back and forth between blogs and finding new people and writing your first comment and feeling the spark when a new person commented on your own or you saw yourself in their blogroll.

For the longest time, the blogging world was more-or-less self-contained. Few of my irl friends had blogs and through blogging I met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends. Facebook did bring blogging and irl friends together in a new way, but it has never allowed for the discovery of new friendships in the way that blogging does.

What I like especially is the deliberate disconnect from facebook that blogging allows (especially because I’m not linking from facebook to here), the way it’s helping me to create a physical space between me and the zuckerberg juggernaut. There’s all the dreadful politics and manipulations of course, but more importantly, facebook has long since stopped being a place of connection for me. Rather than spark connections, it feels more and more like facebook dampens and dulls them. Compounding this, there’s just too much background chatter. Like a cafe with concrete floors and aluminium chairs where you have to talk louder and louder to be heard and the louder you talk, the louder everyone else must talk, so the louder you must talk and so on.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying I’ve added a blogroll today.

Retaining memories

My memory is extraordinarily frustrating to me at the moment. I mean, you don’t want to write too much about your foibles and frailties because who knows what insurance company is trawling through your online footprint or whatever. So for the record, no I don’t think I’ve got some memory problem. Not some diagnosable issue, anyway. But I’ve absolutely got that hormonal fuzziness that is so widely talked about.

I’ve always had a diary, but that’s more to give myself a sense of the doing of things. I’ve never needed it to act as a reminder before. Now though, I forget things to the point that I’ve even left a friend waiting for me. Twice.

But it’s not only the specifics that I’m fuzzy on, it’s the more generalised and global as well. Looking back on the last 18 months or even two years, I don’t have a visceral attachment to any of it. Even though I’ve done some big memory-worthy things–travelled to Japan, put on new shows, renovated my house–none of them are really sticking. I know the rona has muddied our senses of time, but this is something a little beyond that as well. ‘It’s as if,’ I said to a friend (have said to any friend who will listen), ‘I’ve been out for a night and had a few drinks, and I didn’t get completely blindingly shitfaced, but I did have enough that there are pieces of the night that I only remember once people tell me about them.’

My frustration is that I feel as if I’m not getting the full potential benefit of my experiences. Like I’m not experiencing them as fully as I might. And then there are the many little flashes where I think, ‘I should write about that,’ but then, when I sit down to write I find that those moments have disappeared. I can feel the scorch marks in my mind where a thought was sparked, but the flame and the light of the idea has disappeared.

These two facets of this experience coalesced yesterday. I was driving to Middleton and I was listening to an episode or two of Backlisted and in one of the episodes they were talking about a book about insomnia and the piece they read included snatches of poems. I’ve been more strongly drawn to poetry–to reading poetry–lately than I ever have before. And at the time I heard those quotes I thought how interesting it was that I seemed to be drawn to the way in which when I think about poetry I feel it more lightly. Not that it is any less sensual than the way I used to feel my experiences, with that kind of magnification and amplification. But that it works on me from the outside in, whereas the writing I used to do worked on me from the inside out. This is a complex sensation, or series of sensations, that I need to give some more thought to. I need to push this thinking and this idea and to examine it more closely. And here is the benefit of blogging, and the reason that I’m so excited to have this space back. Because I’ve captured this thinking now. I have come, I have recorded the thoughts, and because it’s public (as public as a hidden blog can be) I have written it articulately enough that I’ve teased out at least some of what it is I want to say.

This particular thought won’t be lost to the ether as are so many of my thoughts because I simply don’t remember them anymore.

A Cafe, Melbourne Cup

I spent all of last week doomscrolling twitter, wishing for it all to be over. Even though it was finally made clear at 3.30, I was up to watch at least some of it while it was unfolding. What a thing. What a relief. There’s still a lot of damage to be done on the way out of course, but it does feel like we’ve made a big step forward.

I am not quite back in the rhythm of blogging like I was. For example, I have not written about the woman I saw in the cafe on the day of the Melbourne Cup. The table was a long one–three small tables pushed together to make–twelve women in all, six down one side, six down the other and each of the ends unset.

It’s one of those cafes where no noise is muffled, and so the people shout louder and louder in order to be heard, and the louder they shout the louder they must shout, and why don’t cafes take as much care with their acoustics as they do with their menu? A conversation for another day, for now, I am focussed on the woman I saw.

This woman–the one I noticed–sat at the end of one row, her chair pulled slightly away. Everything at an angle: her body, her fascinator, her mood.

Her scowl morphed back and forth into a frown, the veil of the fascinator it seemed magnifying everything. The wrinkles of her frown, her eyeshadow, the crooked eyebrow crayon. Sometime before I got there, she had built a wall of silence, defensiveness and anger and now I had no way of knowing what it might have been.

If she were twelve, you would say that she was sulking. But this was something deeper than sulk. Invisible, but clear. I tried to think at what conversation might have happened to leave her sitting here past dessert and into coffee. Why had she stayed? Why didn’t she leave?

Around her, the other women talked. At some point they had accepted this behaviour and moved on. So alone, this fascinating woman walked along the path of no return.

Lunchboxes

Valedictory Day weekend … and school has finished. I have to draw a line through the dot point on my internal to-do list, ‘Become amazing at lunchboxes.’ I started out with a bang. We had laptop lunchboxes and each morning I took great joy in filling the pots with popcorn, strawberries and sandwiches cut into neat soldiers.

Then year by year, my work diminished, the lunchboxes broke, I started to sleep in, the mister made lunches with no thought of aesthetics, the lads stopped eating their lunch anyway.

When we moved back to Australia, I tried to rekindle the magic. I made the lunches, established a muffin routine, making the muffins on Sunday night so they were fresh fro Monday morning. But somehow, control over the lunches always felt elusive. It still does. As I write I feel the physical manifestation of my ineffectiveness in the top of my right shoulder spreading down my arm.

And now I can never be that mother, the one who sent her kids to school with perfect lunches. I know it sounds ridiculous, but saying goodbye to that idea makes my body ache.

Magic thoughts

I’ve never got a handle on this feeling I sometimes have that writing is coming. It feels both exciting and reassuring. My writing is about to pour forth. And it will be as good, as recognised, as I my mind has always imagined it would be.

It’s really happening, I think. But the evidence is that it is not. I’m 51 years old, nearly 52 and this feeling has never been transformed into anything more tangible than this thought. I have finished very little that I’ve begun and those things that I have finished have been good–some very good–but no one has described them as great.

I can explain why this has happened, why I’ve had the feeling but never the result that it has promised. It’s because the feeling itself is dopamine enough, so I am never compelled to go that instant to my notebook and my pen. Rather, that sense of reassurance that I mentioned? It tells me that it is going to happen and so there is no urgency. And without urgency I do not act.

If I had gone that very moment to create, who knows what magic I might have made?

I read only recently–perhaps in those Daily Stoic emails I have subscribed to–that the only thing that stands between us and success is our inability to work through the temporary discomfort. This had deep resonance for me. I recognised myself in it. (Strange then that I don’t remember exactly where I read it, only that I did).

Over time, I’ve come to see these moments as the manifestation of something that is almost magical. Like a fairy, it existed only in that moment and because I didn’t catch it then, it disappeared.

They are gone, those stories I was meant to tell.

Ruts and rhythms and routines

New routines are evolving. Routines have evolved before, and I’m trying to remember whether I was conscious of that at the time or whether I simply let them evolve. Unfold.

I sometimes think about ruts, and I wonder how people get into one and I think to myself, ‘I’d love to find a rut, to know what was happening one day, one week, one year to the next.’

Is it part of getting older this searching for rust and rhythms? Looking for the softness that rhythms brings, the gentleness, the ease. If I were in a rut, I think to myself, I would be able to write the reams that I dream of writing. I would sit for hours and lose myself in words. If I were in a rhythm, I would know when it was time to write.

But that’s just something I tell myself. It’s another, ‘I would be a great writer, if only …’

After four years, nearly five, back in Australia, living in this one place, I do feel the rhythms and routines of the year becoming more sharply defined. Winter leaving, the spring winds springing up behind. Finding my momentum to write my next fringe show, knowing that October is too late to start, but knowing I’ve done it twice before and it all worked out okay.

Most of the rhythms and routines I’ve had in my life have come by accident, just one thing happens and then it happens again and there you are. Going to the market. Watching Insiders. Sewing trips on the Queen’s Birthday weekend (but not this COVID year). And now that I Made an Adult, all I can feel is the spaces where I didn’t get the routines working. The annual trips to this beach. The weekly pizza night. The lunchboxes. And of course, I’m thinking of all the ones I didn’t appreciate enough, didn’t put myself in the moment. How much I hated Saturday sports. Well, all sports really. How bored I was with it.

And as my children grow older, get ready to leave, spend less time with me all the time, I know that my routines will be more clearly mine. That is, unshaped by their needs or wants. I’m looking forward to the things I will be able to do now. The creative projects I will be able to finish. But I’m sad about all of the times we will no longer share. I thought of trying to introduce a routine where we all got together for Saturday breakfast, but then I thought of the cracks in my heart I would have to mend when I was the only one there.