Luckiness

From paris

…
So I took my boys to Paris for two weeks, and can I just say that if the mister had left me alone in the desert and sent me numerous texts along the lines of, ‘OMG, this is brilliant, this is really brilliant, this is fucking brilliant,’ then he would not have returned to a clean bathroom and a laundry basket cleared of its backlog. But there you go, some of us are born generous and some of us are not.

Because of reasons (not the least of which see above) it was an emotional couple of weeks. We followed our trip to The Louvre (Mona Lisa, check) with a walk through the rain (OMG, it’s raining, this rain is brilliant, you should see this rain) to The Orangerie where hang the waterlilies.

On walking into the first of Monet’s rooms, I cried, and not just eyes-watering with OMG-this-is-beautiful kind of crying. Proper tears streaming down my face crying. I suppose it’s a middle-class, middle-age cliché to stand in Paris crying at the beauty of it all, but rarely have I been so moved as I was when I was standing, sitting, standing, sitting, always crying in front of those paintings.

Eldest boy said, ‘This is because you can’t believe how lucky you are, isn’t it?’ which tells you something of the preceding days, because it wasn’t just the big things that made me cry, so many small things made me think and feel in ways that I think I had forgotten I used to think and feel.

As I, for example, looked away from the young man and his daughter on the metro; as I shared a smile with the woman who brought us our hot chocolates and asked the lads about their diaries; or as I watched the jeunes flirting on the footpath on Friday after school I felt…well, not one thing and not another. I just felt.

It felt good to feel.

At each of these (and at many more hundreds of) moments, I was thinking of the connections that we make with people we have never met and with whom we will share nothing more than a minute or two, and sometimes only a second.

For the longest time, that’s what my blog was about. Something, a seemingly simple something, would happen, and I would be struck by the depth of the simplicity in that something, and a feeling, a physical sensation would build, then a rhythm would start to form, and then words, and then voila. A blog post.

And that, I realised at some point in the last week or so (probably while I was on the metro, we spent a lot of time on the metro), is why I have been so alarmed at the loss of my blogging mojo over the last year or so. It is a sign or a symptom of my shallowness, of a superficiality of feeling. I didn’t blog, because I didn’t feel.

Not feeling is not good.

Or perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s sometimes what your body needs.

I don’t suppose you need to be all that smart to work out what’s at the bottom of this loss/lack of feeling. The grief, the move here…perhaps I will write more about that tomorrow. I did intend to write about it now, but I have to go and play mastermind or backgammon, because I’ve got a little lad who stayed home from school because he couldn’t wake up and now he is especially cuddleicious, so I am going to cuddle with him and play mastermind or backgammon. So for now, I will just say that I have missed feeling, and I have missed a sense of connection to the world around me.

Which I’m now fairly positive all sounds truly middle-class and middle-age cliché. I guess if it walks like a duck (which I sort of do on account of all that vin and fromage – OMG the cheese, you should taste this cheese) and so on and etcetera.

from youngest lad’s journal

From paris

It’s still hot

I’ve been writing a set of essays which I hope will one day be published either singularly or as the set that I am constructing them as.

Actually, I think they are more memoir than they are essays, but memoir sort of declares to the world that you are a fascinating person to whom fascinating things have happened, whereas I am a person who made a couple of extraordinarily stupid decisions, attempted to make up for them by making even more and increasingly stupid decisions, then thought that writing non-fiction would be a good (by which I mean, among other things, legitimate) way to further avoid the frightningness that is the second draft of my next piece of fiction and, lacking both the expertise and the gumption to investigate any other subject beyond myself in any depth, thought I may as well write about those stupid decisions.

I did wonder whether I would have anything to say that I haven’t already blogged about. I mean, goodness me, I’ve been rather revealing over these last couple of months. Perhaps, I thought to myself, blogging is a substitute for memoir. But the more I wrote offline, the more I realised that this was an issue barely worth a second thought. For one thing, there’s heaps I haven’t blogged about (for example, you don’t know what my grandmother said to the mister the day we told her we were getting married). But really, it’s not an issue, because as with all these questions, the answer is not an either/or. Blogging and memoir share some similarities, but they are different. Different processes, different results.

While the blog helps me to record things immediately and does provide an opportunity to think and reflect on the things that happen to me, it is altogether a different kind of thought and reflection than I have been doing while writing the essays.

Most of the differences come back to the same thing of course. The immediacy of blogging versus the ‘looking back’ of memoir. Because memoir demands a cohesive narrative beyond the simple chronological narrative of my blog, I feel that it is forcing me to explore situations and emotions more fully, to contextualise everything (for myself if not for the reader, at the moment, everything is done for myself because the reader is still a concept, a potential, rather than an actual).

My blog is a photo album, filled with snapshots where the essays, although potentially stand-alone, are a film.

And actually, that little analogy is bloody brilliant and has just helped me to fill in the gaps of one of the chapters essays I’ve been trying to write, so if you’ll excuse me I’m turning the interwebs off again and re-opening my increasingly large, but ever-more wieldy document.

PS One thing I’m surprised about is the amount of effort I have put into thinking about ego and narcissim and so forth. You’d think blogging would’ve moved me way past those worries. But no.
‘Do you think it’s too self-centred?’ I asked the mister of a piece I gave him to read the other night (this is unusual, I rarely let him read anything).
‘Well, didn’t you say it’s memoir?’ he asked in his engineering way.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I really don’t understand you.’

We interrupt this metaphorical flow…

I will never forget the night of the last election, and by the time my dad got to our place, they were already saying Bennelong was too close to call and what a night it was, and my children will always remember that they were allowed to stay up until midnight playing computer games, only we kept making them come and stand in front of the television because this is history and the next day I felt like this great veil of mean-spirited conservatism had lifted from us all.

We drank too much sparkling red, but the hangover was worth it.

We knew, we always knew, that this wouldn’t be a revolutionary government, that things would carry on much as before but we believed that now we would be led by people who, even if they were conservative, would lead with more generous spirits. We believed that the lines in the sand would shift (oh, a metaphor, how did that sneak in?).

That’s why this whole asylum seeker and ringing the Indonesian government and expanding the Christmas Island detention centre is utterly and absolutely depressing. There’s some actions on the Amnesty International website and doing them will make me feel better about myself, but not about much else.

And what I’m also remembering is the day my dad and I had another of our heated discussions, back when Latham let Howard set the agenda on refugees and asylum seekers once again, and I could not believe that Dad could still be a member of the ALP. One of those times when Latham didn’t just say, as he should have done, ‘No, enough is enough’. (It might have been the Tampa, but who knows, I mean there have been so many moments where I’ve thought, ‘Well, it can’t get worse’, but then it has). Surely, I said to Dad this, this is the tipping point, and he gave his old, once-relevant, but to my mind no-longer-so, speech about change from within. He remained loyal to the ALP, and he probably still would.

I feel let down.
(updated to add: as would he)

It’s that kind of skirt

So I was putting the fnishing touches to a skirt which fits but does not flatter, and my mind turned to other matters, like this, that and the other, and it occurred to me that if I were a word, I would not be eponymous.

For while eponymous does its job of being one word where otherwise there would need to be three most excellently, it is the kind of word which is only ever used when a person needs another person to know that they are the kind of person who knows the meaning of the word eponymous.

Good things

My, but I’m a sucker for a bunch of schoolkids singing. I am, you are…zippedee doo dah…der glumph went the little green frog, it really doesn’t matter. Kids sing, I cry. So, despite it all, I had a pretty awesome time in the school assembly this morning watching eldest boy singing Education Rocks and youngest boy reciting There was an Old Lady.

Wish I could be at the Adelaide Town Hall tonight (or maybe it’s tomorrow night by now).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQxHxloG854&hl=en&fs=1&]