Author: ThirdCat

On Friday

In which I remain distracted, but am finally focused on the task at hand

I’ve spent way too much time this week distracted by the horrifying spectacle out of Canberra, culminating in the previously unthinkable relief that our prime minister is Scott Morrison. I’m not actually relieved about that because along with the deplorable human rights abuses committed by him, he abstained from voting for the marriage equality legislation despite his own electorate voting in fovour of it. Still, I guess overall it’s situation unchanged for someone with my politics so the week has ended as it began only I’m a little more despairing about the state of politics generally. I fear that the ‘they’re all the same narrative’ is set like concrete in our psyche now and that cannot be good news for civil debate. Oh, and the planet is still on fire and the Australian government certainly won’t be rocking up with a hose to fight it.

Anyway and anyhoo, the mister did ring me only moments after the results of the vote were announced to say that our new puppy will be arriving on Wednesday so life does go on for now at least and I’m fairly certain the sun will rise tomorrow as they say.

As a result of my distraction this week, it’s now 8pm on Friday night and I am in front of my computer, a toasted sandwich for my dinner and a shitload of work to do. I’ve finally switched ABC News 24 off and am listening to Double J’s playlist of greatest women on their spotify playlist. It is ace. And to be fair, even working is better than sitting down in front of the television watching my team who promised so much so early in the season lose the final game of the season.

I did have a much more interesting post underway for today but then I ran out of time to polish it off, because I was too busy writing even more emails to politicians, so it’s this mish-mash of nothingness instead. Until tomorrow.

PS I’ve tagged this Friyay. It’s a word I learnt from instagram. I’m using it ironically just in case you were wondering. I’d never use it for real.

PPS As well as getting my blog back on track, I’ve started a tinyletter, you cant sign up for it over here over here

On distraction

In which I spend the day attending to work as best I can

I can’t look away from the ABC and the news about the Liberal party eating itself. And trying to stay logged out of twitter. But I’m not sure what to say. And although it’s my dad’s birthday today I don’t want to write about grief or even about relationships…

…so today I’ve been getting some of my writing projects tidied up a bit, and as well as getting to work on my blog I’ve been doing some tinyletter work lately. So far, I’ve only posted them to myself but I’m getting on top of things now, so if you want to subscribe, the link is on this page over here

On leadership

In which I am utterly despondent about politics and turn to television

Utterly despondent about politics right now. Malcolm Turnbull has been an absolute disappointment. I mean I was never going to love the leader of the Liberal party, but his continual capitulation of anything he believed in–most particularly same sex marriage and climate change–was unedifying at best. The idea that we might have Peter Dutton has left me, quite literally, in tears. We are locking kids up in offshore detention, and our planet is on fire, and our solution is Peter Dutton.

But I hate, just hate this constant trashing of our democracy by the guardians of our democracy. I think I should write about something different because honestly I am finding this really upsetting and stupidly I engaged on twitter which is something I never usually do because it’s entirely toxic…I should just stay on the instas…

so, quick, what else can I write about? I can’t think of anything much and the only reason I’m writing at all is because it’s only day three of my renewed commitment to my blog.

I know! Over the weekend I watched the loveliest series on netflix–The Dectectorists. I’m a bit sad the last series isn’t there, but I highly recommend. It has that perfect blend of comedy (well, more humour really than comedy) blended with characters who walk on the edge of loneliness because humans and their friendships are always fragile but never quite fall in because friendships win. Writing that sentence has cheered me up a bit and if you need cheering up go and watch The Dectectorists.

On exercise

In which I discover the daggy world of the fitbit

I’ve been wearing a fit bit. I think this is a. quite daggy; b. slightly too focussed on weight and body image; and c. so late to the party that all that’s really left to do is pick up the glasses, tip the dregs down the sink and clean out the ashtrays (and that’s how late I truly am to this party because this party was held so long ago that it was full of smokers).

I have been feeling my fitness shift significantly downwards ever since I moved back from Abu Dhabi and while I’ve never been especially fit, over the last ten years I’ve been slightly above average and I do like the energy and strength that comes from a bit of added fitness. And if I’m honest, I do identify now as someone who has above average fitness and at nearly fifty I’ve got enough identity rediscovery going on without adding another element into the mix.

The main issue is that I haven’t found my exercise groove since I moved back from Abu Dhabi. This is a slightly good development because it means my life has been filled with things other than getting to the gym every day, but at the aforementioned nearly fifty it’s become an issue of ‘what do I do?’ Even when I was working full time, I did still have more time in Abu Dhabi for getting to the gym, and on top of that, the class structures meant that getting to classes with people of about my level of fitness was much easier. Here, I’m a bit out of synch with the school-mum routine so the school-mum classes start a bit too late in the morning; I’m not going to even try to pretend to be someone who can get to an early-morning class; and the evening classes are filled with people who are often twenty years younger than I am. It’s not that I mind being older, it’s just that it’s not all that much fun being in a class of people who are naturally so much fitter and also … well, it’s not that they are actually rude, but it’s true what they say about middle aged women and invisibility.

So I’ve been trying to do fitness without the classes, and when done well, time on the gym floor is more effective than classes but the thing about classes is that the thinking and the motivation is done for a person and all a person has to do is move. I’ve had a personal trainer for the last maybe two years, but I broke up with him a few months ago. There were two things underlying this decision. First, I wasn’t convinced it was doing me any good after a while. It’s that thing where doing one thing convinces you that you don’t have to do another, so all I was doing was rocking up, doing what I was told for 45 minutes a week but without properly constructing a routine around that.

Second, having a trainer is extremely expensive and I was conscious that I wasn’t getting the benefit I needed to justify the expense. Especially in the context of our current household economy which has seen an unexpected expense, the ongoing general expenses of teenagers about to go to university, and a more fine-grained understanding that retirement will come sooner than we realise.

My decision not to see my trainer anymore has been retrospectively justified in his attitude towards me since which has, in truth, been kind of hurtful as, even after a long absence from the gym, he has barely looked at me let alone asked how I’m going on. Not that he owes me anything, but after two years in what is a reasonably intimate relationship (you do have to let your guard down a bit if a trainer is really going to do their work) I don’t think the odd ‘hey, how’s it?’ is too much to ask.

Anyhoo, the point is that I realised that even with the trainer I wasn’t sure what exercise I was really, truly doing. Hence why (a phrase I do hope is going out of fashion as quickly as ‘ace’ because while I love ‘ace’, ‘hence why’ is weird) the fitbit. So I can understand what each exercise session is truly about in terms of heart-rate-raised and time-spent-ways.

The results are in: I am shocked at how little exercise I really do. As I suspected my time at the gym was not especially strenuous. But not only that I am way more inactive during the day than I had realised. I mean, I sit at a desk writing or on the couch knitting for most of my time so obviously I knew I was at least moderately inactive. But honestly, I can see now that there are days when I did almost nothing beyond breathing. I’ve also been shocked to understand how little sleep I’ve been getting. I do go to bed a bit too late, but even allowing for the fitbit’s inaccuracies I don’t spend much time in deep sleep.

As daggy as the fitbit is, it does suck you in with all it’s little progress measures (have you done 250 steps this hour? don’t you think it’s time you had something to eat?), and I’ve been walking a lot more since I got it (on which I will write more tomorrow, because how good is walking) and now that I’ve had it for a couple of weeks it’s cheaper than a trainer.

Perhaps the least interesting blog post ever written but it’s helped to distract me for another hour from the idea that Peter Dutton is likely to be our next prime minister. This is extraordinarily alarming and who will save us? (Julie Bishop? I bet she wears a fitbit–of no relevance to whether she can run a country of course. I can’t abide her politics but I do love her wardrobe–again of no relevance to whether she can run a country).

On tulips

In which I discover that tulips aren’t the only flowers

Tulips seem to have gone out of fashion, which is a pity because they’re my favourites. I buy a bunch of flowers every Friday with my market shopping. It’s my last stop on the way, and this final thing, a bunch of flowers pushed jauntily into my basket carries me through the week. Except less so because they’re no longer tulips.

When my dad was sick, flowers were my treat to myself. They were an anchor to the living. Which I guess is weird given that they had been cut off from life and now were dying. But I brought the deep orange tulips home and watched them open, their stems growing longer so that the tulips looked like spiders spreading out of the vase.

These days when I do find a bunch of tulips they sit in the vase, limp and pale, many of them never opening.

I keep buying the flowers, but each week now, it’s as if another part of my father has died. The world moves on.

Adelaide Central Market

In which I take hours to do my shopping but it’s worth it

I’ve been lurching from one thing to another lately and was starting to feel really ground down. And the more ground down I felt the more grumpy I was getting myself because all in all my life is pretty straightforward right now and then I was getting more ground down by being grumpy and so on and etcerearrrgh … looking at what I was doing there wasn’t a lot I could change in relation to my actual activities because it’s all fairly standard has-to-be-done kind of stuff: get the lads back and forth to things, go to work, do the shopping, fit some writing in … so I thought I had better try to build some breathing space in. That’s why I’ve gone back to doing my shopping at the Central Market every week. It’s been part of my routine for over twenty years, in fact whenever I’ve been living in Adelaide I’ve done most of my food shopping there. The foundations of the habit were really laid when the boys were little and it was an easy thing to do with littles. On Saturday mornings we would meet my dad for breakfast and then he would take the lads for a wander around while the mister and I did the shopping. We would often walk there from school and kindy so that we could stock up on apples (there was a time when the floppy adolescent would eat twenty apples each week). And when we were living in Abu Dhabi the market was one of the touchstones I used. After sausage rolls at our aunty’s a lasagne at Lucia’s was our first point of call whenever we came back for a visit. Walking into the market is like taking a breath of my whole adult life. It was a good decision to build it back into my week.

Running

In which I wonder who I even am

From 1981 to maybe 1983, at around 10am every morning, as students at Risdon Park High School (now demolished), we had to go out onto the oval in our (somewhat inappropriately named for this moment) ‘care group’ and spend what seemed like one hour but I think was fifteen minutes doing DPA. Daily Physical Activity. I cannot describe to you how excruciating each of those single minutes was for me as an entirely uncoordinated teenager with a dreadful fringe perm (why was I only allowed to get my fringe permed? That makes no sense to me) and in increasing understanding about how my hips did not conform to the Dolly standard. All of the activities were dreadful, but the most dreadful of all was the ten-minute run an activity whereby you ran in a square marked out by cones (or, more often, rubbish bins dragged across the oval by year eleven boys) for a total of ten minutes.

‘Stop being a dickhead,’ my dad said to me one day after school. In that first year at high school, he was at the same school I was and he had noticed my many and varied attempts to get out of the dreaded DPA. ‘It’s good for you to do things you’re bad at. Helps you understand that’s how some people are feeling in maths.’ Why he chose maths as an example I will never know, because I think it’s safe to say I rarely turned in a stunning performance there either.

Anyhoo, for many and varied reasons (including avoiding my master’s thesis) I did begin exercising in my adult life and I’ve maintained a surprisingly consistent gym attendance record for many years. And I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to running. No idea why, can’t even begin to speculate. But drawn I have been. Except not really able to follow through and for about three years now, I’ve had the Cto5 app on my phone. For a while I diligently follow the programme, three minutes running, five minutes walking, five minutes running, three minutes walking … I get my playlist increasingly hardcore (Rawhide!). I keep getting to the point where she chirpily says, ‘Congratulations! You are halfway through the programme! People who make it halfway complete the programme!’ And then I stop.

I haven’t really been at the gym for the last few weeks because I’ve been a bit consumed by my show and also I’ve been drinking too much so I’ve been pretty sluggish, and also I have had terrible insomnia. But it was time to get back into it this week, so after catching up on Barnaby Joyce’s latest dickheadery, I went down to the gym. I didn’t have a plan of what I was going to do, so I got on the treadmill for a warmup then thought, ‘Well, I’ll do Week 6 Day 1 on the C25 app again,’ and I did the warm up, then I did the first five minutes running block. At about one minute in, I thought, ‘Fuck this shit, I’ll do the five then I’ll go and do a few leg curls or whatever, I’ll start back properly tomorrow.’ But then when I’d finished those five minutes and she said, ‘Start walking,’ I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just run these three minutes, then at least that’s eight minutes and that’s not too bad,’ and then at the end of those three minutes I thought, ‘If I do another 200 metres that’s two kilometres,’ and the next thing I knew I HAD RUN THE FULL FIVE KILOMETRES. WITHOUT STOPPING.

Now, in truth, five kilometres is not a very long run for runners, but for people such as myself who fall off stationary bikes and punch themselves in the face at pilates, this is something of an achievement. When I looked around the gym there was no one there I knew well enough to say, ‘Look! I just ran five ks.’ So now I have had a shower, a cup of coffee and the last of the Florentines and I am still filled with the endorphins and I have to tell someone so I am telling you.

And people this is why those ‘letters to my teenage self’ make no sense to me. There is absolutely no point telling the 12-year-old me, ‘One day, you will be so very grateful to be alive that you will WANT to run five kilometres.’ She doesn’t need that shit filling her mind. She’s too busy just making it through to recess, she doesn’t need to try and understand how she is going to get to be forty-nine and wanting to run.
THE END

Adelaide Fringe: Louise Reay, Eraserhead

In which I see Louise Reay’s Eraserhead at Tuxedo Cat’s Broadcast Bar

I am going to interrupt my chronological narrative of shows I have seen at the fringe to tell you about the most unique show I am likely to see. Monday is one night when I can sneak in an unexpected show or two. There isn’t much fringe on on Monday nights (again, read it twice and it will make sense I promise), but I haven’t been to anything at Tuxedo Cat’s Broadcast Bar yet and they do indeed run their programme on Mondays. So yay. I know this is going to sound very, ‘Yeah, nah, I liked their early stuff,’ but thank goodness for the Tuxedo Cat. The large fringe hubs like The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Gluttony are brilliant fun, and they have added a dynamism to the fringe and opened it up to audiences that might not otherwise have existed. But the danger is that their emphasis on carnivale and big-name stand-ups can suck the life from other smaller, quieter events and shows. Through the many evolutions of Tuxedo Cat (and it does sound a little like a Pokemon so perhaps I should call that ‘evolves’ instead of ‘evolutions’) Cass Tombs and Bryan Lynagh have been fighting the good fight to provide a venue that is more than a little bit left of centre. I’m not sure about the idea of ‘real fringe’, but definitely we need a range of different spaces and venues that allow audiences and artists of all types and flavours to see and be seen.

So now I’ve got that off my chest, by happy happenstance, the Tuxedo Cat Monday lineup included a show that I especially wanted to see, Louise Reay’s Eraserhead. The few comedians/artists facey groups that I’m part of have all had at least one post talking about Louise Reay, a comedian from England who is being sued by her (ex)partner for defamation. This goes far beyond the midnight tangles I’ve got myself into wondering about whether I should or should not say this or that about my mother, will people get the wrong idea, will they think I’m making fun when really I’m trying to demonstrate my love? Mine have been usual worries any one who writes any kind of memoir struggles with from time to time.

Being sued for defamation takes things to a whole new level. I can’t comment much on the whys or wherefores because, as explained in the many articles around the place such as this one the comments for which she is being sued weren’t in the show for very long. But I will say, as have many other comedians and artists (such as this one), I find its potential precedent a truly troubling one. And speaking feministically, I would also point to the issues of control. And just so you know where I stand (in case I need to spell it out), I will certainly be contributing to her crowdfunding fund to help pay for legal costs.

As to the show? Under the advice of lawyers, the original show has been scrapped and this has been written and put together in a matter of days and that does show. It is not seamless, and it is clear that she is sometimes still finding her timing. She holds a script in her hand for much of the time, reads directly from it for some of the time. But where that is often an unforgivable weakness, I saw that as a true strength. Sometimes ‘the show must go on’ is more than a simple cliche, it is a call to arms. A celebration of solidarity.

There are moments of palpable vulnerability and rawness that give us a glimpse of how deeply she feels the impact of being sued and the subsequent silencing of her work. We meet her mother through pre-recorded skype calls and her own sense of humour and her love for her daughter shine through. I was the oldest person in the audience by some way, and the closest in age and experience to her mother. Seeing the calls with her mother in combination with the aforementioned vulnerability it was all I could do last night to stop myself stalking Reay’s mother and sending her a note to say, ‘It’s okay, we’ll look after her while she’s over here, she’ll be okay.’

Reay is a truly unique performer, willing to take risks and to push her art. She has previously performed shows for English audiences in Chinese and mime as demonstration of the truth that communication is only seven percent words (and I was pretty pleased to find that my own rather basic and rusty Chinese allowed me to understand nearly all of the dating scene). She isn’t only unique, she is talented too. She writes beautifully, her delivery is disarmingly precise, and she has an oddly unassuming but charismatic presence on the stage. I have no doubt that she will one day soon be filling the tents down at The Garden of Unearthly Delights and I for one will be happy to buy a ticket in advance so that I can skip the huge queue to get into the GOUD.

In the meantime you should go and see this show, not only because it needs to be seen, but because you won’t see anything else quite like it this fringe.

Adelaide Fringe: Love Letters to the Public Transport System

In which I see Molly Taylor’s Love Letters to the Public Transport System.

The second day of the fringe, Saturday, I was reminded how truly wonderful it is that the mister is now living permanently back in Adelaide. For the last two years, the first term has been a blur of school cricket, district cricket, cricket training, cricket coaching (one on one), early morning swimming training, late night band rehearsals and a brazillion other adolescent activities all requiring my support in some way. This is the first first-term (read it again slowly and it will make sense I promise) that the mister has been back in Adelaide and he is like, ‘Woah! For real?’ and I am like, ‘Yep,’ and then I roll over and go back to sleep and let him get up to take the floppy adolescent to swimming training and the future prime minister to one of the two cricket games he plays on Saturday and could he please stop at the supermarket on the way home because we’re out of milk again. So anyhoo, while the mister left home at 6.30 am and did his final pick up parenting duty at midnight, I was left to tidy the house a bit (which mostly involves shifting the tsunami of school bags and sports equipment that builds up at the front door of the house during the week), do an hour of work, a quick rehearsal and then take in two pieces of excellent theatre, again at Holden Street Theatres.

To be honest, if you want to be sure that you are taking in the best theatre that the fringe has to offer, you can pick up a copy of Holden Street’s programme and just work your way through that. Of course, then you would be missing the quiet, hidden gems like my little show, but I’ve told you about it, and given you the details an embarrassing number of times so you won’t miss that one at least.

I decided to do a quick Saturday binge to try and get a few shows in before the intensity of my week began and I bought tickets for Love Letters to the Public Transport System for 4.30 pm to be followed by Henry Naylor’s Borders at 6 pm. I was not the only person who had this idea so I shared my afternoon’s theatre experience with a bunch of people I didn’t know, although I did recognise a few because this is Adelaide and there’s always someone you were in a meeting with as a graduate thirty years ago, or someone you were just cursing quietly under your breath as they loaded forty-two items onto the ten-items-or-less conveyor belt.

Love Letters to the Public Transport System is a monologue written and performed by Molly Taylor. Without a car, Molly has long relied on public transport and this is the story of her attempts to thank you the people who have taken her back and forth to her destined encounters. The spark to write is ignited after Molly falls in love and, living in the glow and wonder of that time, wants to share her gratitude. It is a potentially naff premise. But she writes so beautifully and she is so genuine in her wish to share the joy of love’s first flourish that even if you do think, ‘this is potentially naff’, you will soon be telling yourself off for not just giving in right from the start. Her face is full of expression that drew me in within seconds and the simple staging helps bring a focus to the storytelling so that it wasn’t until I was thinking about it afterwards that I realised she hardly even left her seat (if at all). Plus, she delivers it all in her Liverpudlian accent giving it a lilt and a poetry that my drawl-tuned self lost herself in. It is a celebration of the joy of life, our inter-connectedness, our duty to each other to share life’s goodness.

I went along to this by myself, and perhaps because it was 4.30 pm on a Saturday afternoon when so many of my compadres are at the U16s cricket, I was among the youngest in the audience. Except the woman next to me who was drinking a Cooper’s Ale which was a little enticing, but she was too cool to speak to me, whatevs. Mind you, she was a better theatre companion than the woman to my right who dragged an A5 pad out of her bag and began taking notes–which is fine, I often take notes myself–only her pad was one of those ultra-crinkly black and gold ones so whenever she finished a page and folded it back I couldn’t hear anything except crinkling. And the crinkling went for a long time, because in an acknowledgment of how loud the crinkling might be she did it veeeeery slowly so as not to disturb the rest of us. Humans, eh? Oh, also, the man in the row in front of us who, when asked if he could move along by one seat because there was just one seat between him and the next person and the theatre was getting full and if he moved along one seat then two people who had come together could sit together at the end of the row, said, ‘But I was told it’s General Admission and I can sit anywhere and I’m sitting here.’ Srsly, WTF, my friend, you looked like a goose and you embarrassed your friends. I’ve just read over this paragraph and it’s made me laugh that up there I’m telling you about our duty to share life’s goodness and now all I’ve done is bitch and whinge. I did love at the end how we all kind of sighed collectively and the gentle chatter as we left all knowing that we had shared beautiful, funny, moving theatre.

Love Letters is a well-tested work that’s been showing since 2012 and comes to Adelaide after seasons in Edinburgh, a tour of Scotland, and time at the Royal Court Theatre, London. I only mention this because watching it did indeed freak me out in a, ‘Gah! What was I thinking? Why should I ask anyone to spend time on my show when they can come to this?’ And I had to give myself a stern, ‘It’s okay, everyone starts somewhere, everyone’s art is legitimate …’. Also, Molly Taylor was running a workshop on writing monologues that I would love to have gone to (to which I would love to have gone), but it was on right in the middle of my season (‘my season’ ha!) and I thought I would do myself more harm than good by thinking, ‘Oh, that’s how you do it, oh, if only I’d known.’

So if you’ve read this far you’re probably thinking, ‘Didn’t she say she went to two things?’ Well, yes, I did, but I will write about Borders in the next post. In the meantime, you should one hundred percent go to see this show.

Adelaide Fringe: John Hinton, Origin of Species

In which we watch John Hinton’s Origin of Species from his Scientrilogy (highly recommended)

I wasn’t sure how putting on my own show would affect how many shows I would see at the fringe. I wasn’t sure first, how much energy I would have for getting out and about; and second, whether seeing other people’s productions would spook me and shake my confidence (foreshadowing). As it turns out, I’m exhausted and easily spooked, but couldn’t bear the thought of missing the great shows I knew were out there so I’ve been to quite a number. Not as many as I would normally get to, but a decent amount nonetheless.

I began on opening night of the fringe by getting myself, the youngest lad and our German exchange student down to Holden Street Theatres by 6pm to see one part of John Hinton’s Scientrilogy. This is a trio of pieces, each focussing on a great person of science, The Element in the Room (Marie Curie); Origin of the Species (Charles Darwin); and Relatively Speaking (Albert Einstein). The lads and I had seen The Element in the Room the year we first moved back from Abu Dhabi and it was one of our highlights, so when I saw that he was bringing all three back to Adelaide I was keen to get to see the other two. The one playing this Friday night was Origin of the Species.

Getting us all there by 6pm involved some after-school contortions that probably would have won me a place in a burlesque show at the Garden of Unearthly Delights, but we got there with enough time for the hungry adolescents to buy an overpriced sausage in a less-than-fresh bun. Now, I’m as happy as the next person to buy an overpriced sausage as part of a fundraising exercise for the arts but the unfreshness of the bun was a bit of let down. All the same and nonetheless, it was extremely pleasant to sit under the trees of the HST grounds waiting to be called in for the show.

The show itself was an absolute delight. John Hinton’s physical theatre is captivating, his singing is on-point, and his jokes are delivered with precision. We all had a pretty good idea what Darwin was on about, but through this piece of musical, comical theatre, John Hinton gives us something to think about, something to laugh about, something to talk about afterwards. This show is perfect for people looking for a fringe experience to share with a group of people of many ages, interests and tastes.

Okay, I was going to write about my whole week’s watchings in this post, but we are already at 500 words and I still have quite a few shows to tell you about so we will take a break and reconvene in the following post.