The search for meaning

I feel the fragility of life more keenly these days than I ever have before. This is my age and the impact my parents’ deaths showing. But it’s being away from home as well. Living here, I am way outside my comfort zone on about a gazillion different levels (I know, you might not have noticed, I’ve been keeping it to myself).

If I were to tell you each of the reasons I feel uneasy here, for many of them you would scoff. No, really, you would. There’s the obvious reasons and one or two of them are big, important things, but mostly, it’s a never-ending succession of small, tiny, itsy-bitsy things that leave me, each day, flabbergasted, trying to understand, but increasingly certain that for me, the place is incomprehensible.

Look at this article for example. In the town where I grew up, lads, young blokes, however you describe them, would have done the same kind of thing. I’ve been in cars that were driven by boys doing dumb things. This is not a culturally-specific event.

Only where I grew up, it wouldn’t have been so…I don’t know, so in your face. And plus, we were a working class community, with not so much money to burn on the roads.

I don’t know what it is that I’m trying to say here, what conclusion I’m trying to draw. The mister drives along that road a couple of times each week, my mother died in a car accident, I have my own two young boys to guide, I like public transport…of course watching this makes my heart race, my breaths shallow, the shoulder muscles tense.

But there’s something more to it than that. Something about my powerlessness that re-awakens or, more precisely, reinforces, my uneasiness. Perhaps it’s just that all over the world, middle-aged women are invisible to young men in cars. And it worries me.

Interestingly, if we try to go directly to the clip on youtube from here, it seems to have been blocked, but we can view it through the newspaper just fine. I don’t understand.

Reality? Check.

I was looking on the updated Skilled Occupation list which is to do with Australian immigration, and who gets extra points on their immigration applications or who gets priority or something like that.

The mister and I have Australian passports, so we don’t actually have to prove our worth to the Australian government when we want to go home. They have to let us in. Nonetheless, I was looking at it, because I thought it would be interesting to see whether or not we hold skills that the Australian government thinks Australia needs.

Much as I would love to be considered ‘brain drain’ material, I am not shocked to find that Australia is not missing my skills. There’s a shitload of jobs there, and I, with a BA, an MA, two finished grad dips, one incomplete grad dip, and a not insubstantial number of jobs, could not even fudge myself as one of them.

The mister, on the other hand, with his CV composed of one degree and two employers, seems to be so highly valued that there’s about five terms there which could describe him, including the top three.

Everyone who said bad things about Malcolm Turnbull, look where it has got us…

Some things I have done instead of working on my short story:

1. put a beer in the freezer;
2. refereed a(nother fucking) pokemon dispute;
3. untwisted the cord connecting the computer to the internet (an aesthetic, not technical, issue);
4 listened to that interview Tony Abbott did on the 7.30 Report the other night;
5. felt father turning in his grave;
6. started worrying (again) about the state of the world and what if – I mean, really, what if the Libs win, because, quite apart from anything else, I will have to stay living here;
7. had sms conversation with friend;
8. got beer out of freezer, opened freezer-cold beer, downed freezer-cold beer;
9. worried some more about the Libs winning the next election
10. given eldest boy his piano lesson (on which situation I will tell you more tomorrow).

Tomorrow morning I am definitely getting up early

Okay, here’s the thing: I’m tired. Not emotionally exhausted or anything like that, just good old-fashioned, can-hardly-stay-awake tired. And I’ve been like it for about a week now. I’m eating well, getting exercise, not particularly stressed about anything, and don’t feel any lurking illnesses. So it’s prolly cos the temperature is hovering around forty degrees every day now, and when I’m not outside in searing degrees, I’m inside in air-conditioned air.

It’s weird though, because last night, I was still awake at 2 am, thinking to myself, just as I had been for the last four hours, ‘I wish I was asleep, why aren’t I asleep, all day long all I’ve wanted to do is sleep, and now I’ve got the chance and all I’m doing is thinking about sleeping.

The upshot of all this tiredness being that the short story which must soon be finished is still in the muddling stage and appears to be nothing more than a collection of words gathered together on one page for no apparent reason (despite that day when I had moment after moment of insight and clarity and couldn’t have been more sure that this short story was deftly-plotted, perfectly-paced, and oh-my-goodness so witty).

Some music for your Saturday eve

The mister and I were reliving our Edinburgh trip last night, listening to this, which is the song I used as the intro (and exit) to my show. The mister, being my tech crew, got to know it very well indeed, but never did he tire of it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUtUTvb5Qtk&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

Another one for my funeral list I reckon. (which you should not interpret in any morbid sense at all, because truthfully, it will represent one of the best months of my life, a time when I took my little family on a glorious adventure and we all had many larks).

Updates on the gold

Update one:
by last night, eldest boy had returned to form: ‘Why would I spend my money on gold? It doesn’t do anything.’

Update two:
the gold machine has sold out – at least of the cheap stuff. Sorry, you’ll have to wait until they refill it to read all about Adelaide in front of the Gold Machine.

When I were a girl, I spent my pocket money on redskins and choo choo bars

So we’re driving down to Marina Mall, because that’s where my knitting group meets, and we drive past the Emirates Palace and I tell the lads that there’s a gold machine inside, and the lads ask about the ins and outs of it as lads are wont to do. I tell them the smallest sliver costs 175 dirhams.

And youngest boy, who spends all of his pocket money the minute he gets it, (in fact why do we call it pocket money when as far as I can tell, not a cent has ever reached his pockets) says to eldest boy, who never ever spends a cent,

‘Oh my God, you could buy some gold!’

And eldest lad (who, remember, never spends a cent) says, ‘I could buy heaps.’

So then they start bouncing up and down, and youngest child is saying, ‘Can we go? Can we go? So he can buy some gold?’ And eldest lad is saying, ‘Gold! I could buy gold. Heaps of gold.’

And the mister looks at me, and I look at the mister, and neither of us know what we should say. Or even think.

farewell twitter

I have deactivated my twitter account. Again. The first time I did it, I thought I was deleting it, but then I managed to get it back, so I think it just sits in there waiting for me to change my mind. Again.

This isn’t some ‘the interwebs its all wack and woon’. For what it’s worth, I think you can spend a lot of time on the internet and still get your novel written; that you can be a switched on mother and tweet; and you can choose to tweet over choosing to do something else because tweeting is, for one reason or another, better for you than whatever else it is you were going to do.

I think twitter is fun, and I get its appeal.

For other people.

It’s just not for me.

Firstly, it’s the time thing. Not so much that it takes time away from other things. More that other things leave me with little online presence time these days and without putting in the time, twitter really is no fun.

I feel like I’ve always just missed something. Like I’m at a party, and I go into the kitchen, just when the action has moved to the hall, and I get to the hall only to find that everyone is on the patio. And so on. This is exacerbated by the time difference for me…by the time I get home, most people I know are either off to bed or not up yet. I log on and spend half an hour reading about what just happened in other people’s days, but never quite being able to get the thread.

Which leads me to the rather pathetic and tragic part of my story. The cool kids. When I’m on twitter, I feel like it’s full of cool kids, and I’m not one.

Now, I’m not saying that this is the case, that it really is cool kids and others. I’m not bagging twitter or the many brilliant twitterers around. Like I say, I get twitter’s appeal, I reckon it’s fun, and I in no way attribute the end of the world to twitter (not when we’ve got Tony Abbott running around in his budgie smugglers doing a better job of ending the world).

It’s just I’ve never, ever felt that way with blogging – and that’s not because I am one of the cool kids, that’s because I’m forty years old and I long ago gave up caring about shit like that. Didn’t I? I don’t know what the difference is, but with blogging, I’ve never felt, ‘what about me?’ On twitter, I was starting to feel that way and honestly? If you are forty years old and you’re worrying about shit like that, then there’s something going on, and you need to do something about it. Because that’s what’s good about being forty. You’re not twenty. And you’re certainly not sixteen.

For a while, when I realised I was getting weird about twitter, I decided to use it differently. I think probably the more you tailor it, concentrating on food tweets or writing tweets or knitting tweets, the better it is. So I tried that. I tried to use it as my source of news, following every news source and NGO and media outlet I could find. I did find out stuff, but then I realised my collection of news and facts and information was no less random than it was before. I was better off checking out The New Yorker website once a week than following the link to the article that someone else was telling me I should read. Sure, I found out about the crack in the aquarium at the Dubai Mall pretty much straight away. But actually, I already knew about it, because my friend’s husband had just phoned her.

Besides, I’ve only got so much to say, and I’m not sure I’ve got enough for twitter and facebook and my blog (and not to forget I need to save some things for any fiction or essays or memoir that I might one day write). There are different people in each of those forums, that’s true, and I am endlessly fascinating, what with the gold-dispensing ATMs and the many different ways I have to gripe about the sand and the heat, but all the same, I do hear myself get a bit repetitive. Like I’m the person at the dinner party retelling the same story she told at brunch last week and at coffee the week before.

I could have let it go dormant, just sit there gathering dust. But then it sits in the back of my mind saying, ‘You should oughtta be doing something about me.’ So, it’s better to deactivate it. It would be even better to delete it. If I thought that was in any way possible.

I’ll try to get there on Saturday

Just now on my way into work, I heard on the radio that Emirates Palace (which is not, in fact, a Palace, but rather a palatial hotel) has installed the world’s first gold dispensing machine. 175 dirhams will buy you one gram.

In the interests of good blogging, I shall go and check it out. There’s an embroidery exhibition I’ve been meaning to visit anyway.

There’s an article on the front page of the paper. You can read it here (I recommend it).