Author: ThirdCat

Computer says no

One of the resolves* I have made in an effort to be slightly less of a misery guts and slightly less self-absorbed and slightly more fun to be around is to slightly less often blame Abu Dhabi for my problems.

I think (though this is pure self-absorbed speculation) that it has been far too easy to blame everything on Abu Dhabi (and, by extension, the mister, though we won’t go into that right now, suffice to say, if you think your relationship needs a test, I can recommend a stint in Abu Dhabi…ahem…and moving on and so forth and etceteragh).

Sure, this is not my ideal location. Certainly, I am not well-suited to the Abu Dhabi life. Definitely, there are zillions of other places I would rather be. But that’s not Abu Dhabi’s problem. I do have a choice. I could leave. For sure, that choice, the choice to leave, would have its own limits and implications, but it is a choice I could make. I have more choices than ninety percent of the world’s population.

So, having decided that I will stay, I need to accept certain things. And I need to stop blaming Abu Dhabi for everything. Like tonight when I couldn’t remember the administrator password for the computer? A password so cunning, so mixed between capitals here, lower case letters here and numbers there that between the three of us – two sharp-minded lads and me – we could not remember exactly what went where. As I sat, fantasising again about a life lived elsewhere, as I sat, ready to cry with homesickness once again, I had one of those moments when you realise something.

I realised, that not living here would not solve this particular problem.

And the night got better from that point on.

*You know, I’m really not sure, are resolutions the same as resolves? Because what I mean here is that I am resolved to act in a certain way which seems to me is not entirely the same thing as making a resolution. Do you see what I mean?

Twenty days

It was extremely polite of youse not to say, ‘erm, Tracy, thought you were being grateful and there you are whingeing again’. Some of youse might have spelt whingeing without the ‘e’.* I think I should have written, ‘I am grateful for the hour each morning I get to spend alone’. I cracked myself up when I realised what I’d done, following my gratitude post with another whinge like that about ruined days. So I might suck at gratitude, but I do know how to laugh at myself. I think being able to laugh at myself makes my other flaws more manageable.

*by which I mean not to cast nasturtiums on your seplling, only that I don’t know how to spell it and I could go and check, but because of reasons, right now, I’m not going to.

A matter unexpected

One of the consequences of returning to work is that I never have the house to myself. It is no longer mine to roam around unhindered, moving from my desk to the sink, trailing and trialing my thoughts uninterrupted.

I have taken to getting up early. Earlier and earlier every day, greedy for every moment that I can spend alone. Knowing how deeply I love to sleep will give you some idea of just how much I value silence and solitude.

I sit at my desk, pen in hand, computer screen dimmed. I barely dare to write so fragile is the silence, so scared am I to lose it, so badly do I want the time to stop.

Even though I’m already awake, the sound of the first alarm still ruins my day.

That’s that then

I said to the mister the other day, ‘You know, I’m sick of taking up so much of this family’s oxygen. It’s too much, I’m tired of my tiredness dominating everything.’ It’s time, it really is, to move on, to be grateful for what life gives me instead of mad becuase of what it takes away. I know that. And I’m trying, I really am. If I knew a counsellor here, I would have gone to one, and I’m sure they’re out there, but honestly, I wouldn’t know where to look, and I don’t know the right questions to ask, and so I’m relying on books and the internet and lessons I’ve learned.

Now, all sorts of books and websites and people say you should keep a gratitude journal. Every day you should write down, three or four or ten of the things in your life that you feel grateful for. Honestly, that’s a bit…well, let’s just say, you couldn’t grow up with my mother and take such a thing seriously. Cynicism? We haz it. In bucketloads.

Don’t get me wrong. Lots of my favourite bloggers have done it, and I’ve always loved reading them, and I’ve sometimes thought, Maybe I should. But then, the blogger moves on and so have I. However, I’ve been lurking at Anita Heiss’s blog for a long time now, and she keeps posting post after post after post of the things she is grateful for. It is such a gloriously warm and generous blog…I challenge you to read it for a couple of days and not feel good about life, the universe and everything. So the idea of a gratitude journal has been growing on me.

And then, last night, I found myself with a random half an hour of nothingness and I thought, I shall sit and watch television and knit another few rows of this beautiful but mistake-prone silk, the first skein of silk I’ve ever bought.

And anyhoo, and moving on, it came to pass that what I watched was Scrubs, and I thought, What would I do without this show? And then I thought, There’s my Answer.

So here it is. My gratitude diaries. It’ll be a bit half-arsed, because I am my mother’s daughter and that’s something about myself I don’t want to change. Something considerably less than a gratitude diary then. A series of occasional posts about things in my life that rock.

Things that rock #1
ScrubsThe day after my father’s funeral, I lay on the lounge, a pillow, a quilt, cups of tea, glasses of wine, toast and cheese, and I watched an entire series of Scrubs. I chose it because it was simple, easy to watch and would help to pass the day. But it was more than that. There was something perfect about Scrubs.

Scrubs is funny. Hilarious. It always makes me laugh. To do that, it relies on silliness and character quirks. Now, myself, I’m not much into a quirk for the sake of a quirk. Quirks, in the wrong hands, can encourage lazy writing, readership and viewing. I blamed the late-nineties, when the quirk became everything. But Scrubs takes quirks and uses them to give the characters depth. I have tried to write ‘my favourite character is…’ but I can’t. Perry of course, because he has the best lines and because of his humanity. Carla because she’s sassy and I like the way she twirls her hair. Janitor, though I wish they’d kept him imaginary. Elliot. JD. Turk. Kelso. Whoever I’m watching at the time, that’s my favourite character. These characters are flawed and they make mistakes (in my mind these are two separate things). Their lives do not go smoothly. But they keep on keeping on. With humour and empathy and humanity and grace.

Scrubs was the perfect choice for a day when, despite it all, life goes on.

And that is why I say, Scrubs rocks.

(PS And I know I should be grateful for skeins of silk, but I dropped a stitch and had to spend half an hour finding it, so I will have to write that another day or it will defeat the porpoise somewhat)

And tomorrow, back to work

We have no idea what the people upstairs are doing. We can only surmise that they have a lot of things to hang. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Today, we went to Marina Mall for the 2.30 3d showing of How to Train Your Dragon. We met some friends, the lads had cheese popcorn the bag of which they gave back to the mister at the end of the film more or less uneaten. Cheese popcorn is not ace, but our friends are. It’s one of those combinations that just work, for adults and children alike, with all of the children giggling and getting along, and the adults building a friendship you know will last through the years. We sat together afterwards, coffee, banana splits and magical mango drinks at Lips Cafe.

Me and the mister got lost on the way out of course, because I let myself be led by the mister when it is I who have the sense of which course we should take. Still, if we hadn’t got lost we never would have seen the grand glass piano which was playing itself.

Australians in Mexican stand-off in Abu Dhabi

So here’s something I did not know.

Nine year olds – even the ones who were even-keeled eight-year-olds – are extraordinarily emotional human beans.

So, right now, I am sitting here, determined not to respond to the sound of a ball banging against a bedroom door, a sound which is being made by a person equally determined that I will.

And another thing

So totally mad with myself now for that whole defense of myself as blogger…if I could, I would delete it, and of course, technically, I could delete it, but then I look like an even bigger goose than I already feel so, anyway and moving on…

I have a lovely new computer, but it is living just inside the loungeroom door which is just inside the front door which means that every time the front door is opened – which is a great many number of times in this family – the light glares onto the computer and I can’t see a thing, and I know I’m not Robinson Crusoe in asking this question, but how hard is it to shut the fucking door?

Lazy blogging? We haz it

Okay, so the other day, there was this article in the paper, and then James Bradley wrote about it on his blog, and I’m so cross with myself because I left the kind of comment I try so hard not to leave, but it’s that whole ‘aspire to print’ thing…it’s so much more complex than that, and it makes me feel so…well, so dimissed. Which says more about me than the person saying it, and exposes me for the insecure creature I really am and so on and etc – I know that, so feel free to think such things (but keep them to yourself, don’t leave them in the comments or I will cry and I’m trying not to cry so much these days).

Anyhoo, in preparation for some other posts I am planning (the ‘am’ being aspirational, because it would be more accurate to say, ‘have been’), and because I’m on this whole post-every-day kick, but oh my goodness, really, every day, what was I thinking…I am reposting a post I first posted three years ago which is vaguely related to the article and post and my comment in the way that things are when you try and discuss something by offering something you already said without modifying it in any way to address the thing the other person most recently said. Get it?

Should I blog
I ask this very specifically, for and about people like me who want to be a writer. I apologise in advance for the earnestness of what is to follow, but I’m preparing a couple of workshops that I’m giving over the next couple of months and as I’ve been trying to articulate how I see blogging as a form of writing, and its potential (or otherwise) for ‘new’ writers, I couldn’t think of any other way to think it through than to write myself a blog post (so I guess the simple answer is ‘yes’).

In asking this question I’m not saying that my blog and my blogging habit all stem from ‘wanting to be a writer’. My blog and my blogging habit are about…well, you’ve got a blog, you’ve read my blog…you know all the things that it’s about. And this question can be easily applied to the wider set of questions, ‘should I blog instead of’, and I’m sure you have your own range of neglected options to insert here knitting, playing with children, getting together with friends and so on.

I’m not going to define exactly who I mean by ‘writers’ or ‘want to be’. You can decide for yourself whether or not it applies to you, but I do think that the discussion is slightly different for ‘new’ and ‘established’ writers (as discussed in posts such as this and this at Sarsaparilla).

So, having apologised for this post, my blog, my writing and myself; having determined that we are simply addressing one very small part of blogging; having broken a most important blogging rule (get to the bloody point) I shall ask the question again (because by now you’ve probably forgotten what it even was).

Should people who want to be writers blog?

First up, the most obvious argument against blogging: blogging is a distraction from other writing. You already know what I’m going to say, don’t you? So is vacuuming the dust from the corners of the cutlery drawer. As is teaching myself to say the alphabet backwards (actually, I did that the night before my matric biology exam, but I offer it here in case you haven’t thought of it for yourself and need a new procastinatory activity). And reading The Advertiser, weeding the grevilleas, watching Grey’s Anatomy. The list goes on. It’s a spurious argument that one about distraction (do you know, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever used the word spurious in a written sentence), presupposing too many things: that every moment I have spent blogging might have been directly applied to some other project; that I haven’t also been writing other things; that other writing projects are all more worthy than this; and that blogging is only about writing.

Perhaps now is a useful time to recall the wise words of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: abstinence from all things bad, moderation in all things good.

There is a danger that blogging will swallow your best ideas. That once blogged, they can not be used in some other form. The scrape of the spoon on the bottom of the saucepan that led to this post isnt available to me any more, for example. But that doesn’t mean I’ve necessarily lost anything. I love that piece of writing. It works perfectly as a blog post and wouldn’t work so well anywhere else.

I’ve become less worried about it too since I began performing standup. In standup – though I’m a beginner there too, so speak only from a beginner’s perspective – it seems okay to repeat yourself on your way to getting it right. You should polish your pieces until you think they will work, but very often you (I) dont know whether they will work until they’ve been said outside the safety of your empty kitchen.

Blogging has sharpened my writing. I know, when I blog, that someone will read what I have written, and quite possibly that someone will read it only a few minutes after I’ve finished writing it (if I got hit by a bus, would I be happy for that to stand as my Last Post). I’ve been able to experiment with voice and with point of view and blogging has heightened my awareness of the every day. I might think, for example, of the colour lipstick I wear and the sentence I could use to describe that on a blog.

I could have learnt that from my other paper journal, perhaps, but a blog does not work in the same way that a private journal does. Because a blog is not private. Different bloggers deal with this differently, but deal with it they must. Anger, for example. I would never directly blog about my anger with important people in my life. Too hard to mop up. But I do blog about it every now and then. Like here. I cant tell you how pissed off I was that day. And I didn’t need to once I’d written it down that way. And it gave me an idea, and there’s a larger piece of writi ng that’s grown from that, and I’ll be able to use it one day (well, I hope so, you know, maybe).

Not only does a blog bring you readers, it brings readers you get to know a bit about. Because blogging can’t be only about the writing. It’s about reading too. Reading a lot. And somehow, I think that can’t help but give you an insight into your own writing that isnt available in any other form. You get told endlessly at workshops ”write for yourself first'”, but blogging teaches you quickly what that means. Not just how to do it, but the implications too.

On the relationship between your blog and your readers, there’s something to be said about learning how to ‘write what you know’ – direct experience – and transposing it to mean more than what just happened or what you immediately felt. But at the same time, you must be honest, because your blog readers (generally) expect that what you write in this form is true. I haven’t quite worked out how to articulate this point yet, but I know it is an important one. Do let me know if you think you know what I’m trying to say.

There’s a lot that blogging can teach you about other forms of writing. I imagine you could learn a lot about writing an open-ended narrative like a soap for example. And there are endless types of online writing which would blogging could introduce you to. I’m not sure about a novel though (and there’s an excellent discussion about that here). Though possibly if you were very good at forward planning and had a very particular kind of structural control. Maybe then.

That’s enough for now, isn’t it? I”ve spent far too long on this, havent I? Thanks for reading this far if indeed you have. Back to the shoes and coffee cups tomorrow. Promise.

PS – there’s a link or two in here that I couldn’t get to work this time around, a couple to Sarsparilla, and one to elsewhere’s blog which I can’t link to on account of typepad blogs not working here for whatever reason that might be

Rolling momentum

However hard I try, whichever techniques I use, I am finding the moment hard to live in. I have everything I could want, more than I could expect. Life is, as far as it ever could be, uncomplicated.

And yet, every morning, I wake to a heart that is beating slightly too fast, an itch in my mind that I cannot scratch. A sense, a knowing, that this is not how things should be.

I remind myself to breathe, slowly in, hold for a moment, slowly out. I listen, smell, feel and look.

It is thickly overcast today and I heard on the radio that in parts of the Emirates there will be rain. The wind is blowing in gusts and right now, out of my window, blowing past, bougainvillea petals, pink and white, and a green plastic bag.

Oh. It has. it really has started to rain.