Australia

I'm sitting, sweating, in a room in the house I used to live at in Sydney. It is like a homecoming that I am trying frantically to deny, or derail (this isn't home, although it is beautiful and familiar and filled with love). Tonight was spectacular, one of those surprisingly rare but so very iconic Sydney nights where the temperature stays at 32C until midnight, when a thunderstorm growls through and pushes the heat out with the anticipated southerly change. In this high-up little room at the back of the house, with all the windows open, I can smell the fat hot drops of rain meeting the cooked dirt, and feel the whisper of cooler breezes just beginning to supersede the hot, dry winds of the day. It is beautiful, and known, and sings to me of 26 years of remembered summers.

I am stirring to life again, sort-of, after being absolutely slaughtered by jet lag for the first week after I landed. I had no idea it could be so bad (last time I guess I sidestepped it by spending a week in Thailand halfway here). Worse again for a 12 hour delay in my flight, pushing transit-hell out to a 36 hour ordeal and 2 entire missed nights of sleep. I landed, hugged my friends, bolted for the beach, came home and collapsed into an 18 hour sleep. Then did essentially the same routine (beach, 18 hours of sleep, beach, 18 hours of sleep) for most of the week. It's a nice way to be, in this city, at this time of year.

Oh Sydney, you funny old town. I am not settled into being here. Half-holiday half-homecoming is a strange way to be somewhere. I offer some resistance to being swept up into the same life I had before I left, but that resistance is mostly brushed cheerfully aside. It's hard to hold a boundary in the face of a city that knows how to pick up my strings and play me along in one very particular dance of myself.

When I was in Berlin and I reached for moments of my Sydney self to keep me strong, I always came back to the marine experience: face-down in the ocean, breathing plastic-scented air through a tube, pushing hard off from the rocks and communing with darting fish and swirling kelp. Here, when I think of Berlin, I think of riding (of course), riding through the grey Autumn light, grinning fiercely, fingers frozen to the handlebars, feeling elated and alone with bare trees and brusque strangers. It is a shock to the system to go from one to the other so fast. There is something so brutal- brutal the way that surgery is brutal- about packaging yourself into a metal tube in the sky to swap one hemisphere and season for another in a matter of days. One or the other experience feels like a dream- Sydney or Berlin- I can't figure out which, though.

Berlin-London-Sydney

I've surprised the hell out of myself by just having a really lovely few days in London. Stayed at my friend's flat in Dalston for two nights, spent the days finishing up some work from Berlin and watching the rain stream down the windows, the nights hanging out. Then the last night with a different friend, who still had a suitcase of my things lurking in her loungeroom, so I spent a night packing, re-packing, taking the measure of the things that quantify my material reality.

Surprised because I hadn't even pictured enjoying London, hadn't projected it into any kind of expectation. It was just there, the necessary pit-stop between my beautiful, desolate desert-island existence in Berlin and the bright whirl & energy of my life in Sydney (that I am squinting away from and dreading, in advance). And then it was lovely, actually. Lovely to see those friends and have those conversations and curl up in grey apartments watching grey skies and grey squirrels and relentless rain.

Leaving Berlin is every bit as much of a headfuck as I had anticipated. From the outside, now, by contrast, I can see things, like: Berlin's incredible, comfortable, Eastern European daggyness. The lack of gloss, of style. London did my head in, so matched-up and immaculately dressed and expensively coiffed. Even the queers, even my people. And the thick lacquer of money everywhere in London, a shock after gritty-poor Berlin.

24 hours or so of transit hell, now, then Sydney. Where a beautiful little ginger-and-white cat is now buried under rocks in the backyard of my old house, which breaks my heart. I will buy a bottle of gin duty free & toast to his memory. He was a good cat. He will be missed.

Intercontinental

I am slowly coming out of denial about returning to Australia. About bloody time, too, since I will allegedly be there next Sunday.

I don't quite believe it, probably because I've made half a dozen firm plans to leave Berlin in the past 3 months and have remained here despite all of them. But, well. Going 'home' is different, I guess. You're not supposed to skip your flight back to the other side of the world. Probably, I'll go this time.

I don't want to. I don't want to go 'home'. I don't want to be back in Australia. I don't want to leave grim, grey Berlin for bright, hot Sydney. I don't particularly fancy trading icy bike rides and a thousand layers of coats for beaches & sunshine. My housemates, staring down the barrell of 3 months of cold and dark, think I'm completely fucking insane, of course. And yes, it is kind of insane. But the only thing that makes me happy about leaving here is the knowledge of returning (as fast as I possibly can).

There are so many things to look forward to in Australia. So many friends, so much love, the million beautiful things that made up my life there. But that's the point, really. I had such a good life in Sydney, and I was miserable. That's how I knew, how I know, that leaving was absolutely the right thing.

I had a life full of delight, full of joy: full of the explicit acts that bring joy into a life. Full of love and the best friends and the sparkliest nights and the most beautiful beaches. A garden that flourished and fed me, a creative, kinky, queer, progressive community around me, a family that I am loving getting to know as an adult. And I was fucking miserable.

What do I have here? I don't have my garden (and I ache with missing the act of growing things). I don't have my sprawling network of amazing friends, although I am (slowly) building one here. I don't get to go to the beach and snorkel whenever I want to. I don't get to stroll down King St and connect with a dozen people to brighten my day. I haven't found clubs that play the heavy, pounding music I really crave. I spend a lot of time alone. I have cold streets, early dark, icy winds. Isolation, introversion. And I am so fucking happy.

It has taken a while to rise to the surface, to clarify itself, but there you go. I am so fucking happy here, despite having none of the things that reliably brought joy into my life. I am living, finally, without that scratchy-tense-anxious need to escape that was so persistently a part of my life in Sydney, for so long, that I thought it was an indelible part of me. Perpetually dissatisfied. Wondering how I could be so miserable and maudlin in the face of so many good things (will I never be satisfied, comfortable, happy enough?).

Getting to know myself in the absence of that constant tension is a delight. Hey, look! I LIKE myself! I think I'm a good person! I really fucking enjoy my own company! I feel satisfied and comfortable in myself! I know that I can meet my own needs, take care of myself, go it alone, and it feels amazing. I disappoint myself sometimes, don't succeed at everything, and that's OK. I have empathy for myself, for my weaknesses and failings. I am proud of myself when I do well. I reward myself with the things that I really want, which turn out for the most part to be long bike rides alone, and really nice foods from the markets.

I have resisted adamantly setting up a life here that would mirror or replicate my life in Sydney. I have dodged commitments, people, social spaces, sex, projects, play, adventures. I say "no" a hell of a lot more than I say "yes". Life is austere, almost monastic. I wonder if I am exhibiting early signs of impending spinster-crazy-cat-ladyhood, and find that I don't actually care.

Not being involved is amazing. Not putting energy out into the world. Not dressing up, much. Not performing. Not sparkling. I feel like some tremendous weight has lifted off my shoulders, the pressure to all the time live up to myself, live up to my own self-image and the one other people have of me. It feels so good that I spend a lot of time dancing around my room singing loudly along to trashy songs, and humming out of tune as I hang out in the kitchen, and reciting poetry and laughing out loud as I ride my bike from somewhere beautiful to somewhere else beautiful.

So when I think about going back to Sydney, I feel some fear. I feel the gift to myself of these months to be absolutely myself, absolutely directed only by what I want, coming to an end. I have to forcefully remind myself that a few months of going to the beach all the time and being surrounded by people that I love is not actually a punishment, and could be considered a very nice thing.

And on the other side of a hot, fierce Australian summer: a slow and gentle European spring. I want to be back here in time to see the thaw, and watch the days lengthen. Find a patch of ground, maybe, and sow some seeds.

These are the thoughts that occupy me, just now:

Has my ginger beer exploded yet?
Oh look I made seitan and it's delicious!
I need to go to the wool shop and pick up some more yarn.
I wonder if it would take longer to migrate this design into a templated CMS or to hand-create, tag and build menus for every single one of the 95 pages?
Is having a bit more money in my life worth spending my last few weeks in Europe battling this project and client from hell?
I need to make some more seitan and marinate it like fake BBQ pork and make sticky-sweet pork buns and I just know that if I get the taste right I will feel like I have discovered my own new religion.
Maybe I will register myself a new domain name. Maybe I will spend a week installing a different CMS in 10 different sub-directories just to try them out. Maybe I will wish I could do this, but won't, because I'm too busy working on the project from hell.
Will I get stopped at the border when I leave?
Will I be allowed into the UK?
Will they let me come back in to the EU next year?
Will being in Australia make me itch with frustrated restlessness, again? Will I regret it? Will I be able to leave again, as fast as I want to?
Why can't leaving be forever: THE END and a nice sunset over water?
I wish I could get to sleep before dawn.
I wish I could wake up before the sun went down.
I wish I could have a beer with some people & talk about some things without having to go back to Australia to do it.
If I had known that I could be this happy alone, I would have been doing it all along. Consciously, not by accident.
I wonder if I can get the second level of this drop-down menu to populate automatically, or if I'll need to hand-code it?
Is it possible for my gender to go on hold for months at a time, sitting in a box on a shelf next to my sexuality? Not forgotten, but not in use?
I wonder if I can buy some of that excellent stringy Turkish cheese at the markets tomorrow?
I wonder if I will ever leave?
I wonder if I will ever stay?
I wonder if my ginger beer is alcoholic yet?

One night in the real world

The setting is relevant, I suppose, so here it is: a squat-bar, one of many in this city, but unlike most this one is attached to a specifically queer house. When I walk in (late in the night, stone cold sober, having decided to come here for a drink after finishing a marathon stint of coding), the room is full of writhing queers dancing to Bronski Beat. I order a drink that is served in a giant soup-mug- it's hard to dance with it without splashing gin all over myself, so I put it down. At some point I fancy I cigarette, so I sit down on the bench seat to roll one.

My friend comes up, and warns me that they're "keeping an eye" on the guy I've just sat down next to. He's been a bit of a problem all night.

Fuck it! I'm up like a shot. No patience for drunk macho men in my personal space on a night like this (my first night out in a long, hard week of work-jail). Warning appreciated. I relocate to somewhere else to finish rolling my cigarette, enjoy my beer, chat to my friends.

I've barely lit it before clumsy hands grope me around my ribs. I have fast reflexes, and I'm sober, so I knock him back fast and sharp, fix him with a glare. He gives me the goofy oblivious grin of every drunken fuckwit guy who knows, soul-deep, that they will never really be brought to task for behaviour like this. He moves onto my friend in a second, and her elbows are as sharp as mine. Our personal space is lined suddenly in razor wire. We say it silently and in words, both: Back the fuck off, right now, buddy. He backs off, shuffles into the crowd.

It's a few bars of a song later. I've had maybe one drag, maybe two, a sip of my drink. Another friend of mine is leaning up on the wall opposite me, and I go to give her a grin, but it's intercepted by- surprise!- the same drunken fuckwit, who wraps himself around her, one hand on her jaw, the other on her waist, faster than she can react. She's already stiffened and brought her hands up to push him away when I've got my arm on his elbow, snapping him away from her, a snarl in his face: "Do NOT touch her without asking".

He laughs. He sneers. His attention is on me now, not her, and in some part of me I am always glad for that: I know enough to stand up to this, not perfectly, but I know enough not to suffer it in silence, and I would always rather draw it to me than watch a friend cringe, and fade, and squirm.

Then his attention is on a squat resident, who has decided, apparently, that enough is enough, and it's his time to go. She tells him to leave. He stays put. She tells him to leave again. He digs his heels in. She grabs him by the elbow and pulls. He grips the floor tighter. My friend and I surge forward, put our weight behind him, and help her hoist him out the door. He struggles the whole way out, but finally he's out.

Except that's as far as he'll go. And he has friends, it turns out. Three of them, four including a girlfriend. And suddenly evicting one obnoxious, hands-everywhere, sexual-harassment-R-us straight guy out of the bar has turned into a fucking riot. He is throwing punches, then his friend is throwing punches, and his girlfriend is trying to hold him back, then they are linking arms and trying to surge back through the crowd of people who have come with us from the bar to ensure a successful ejection (the crowd is mostly my height, my build, some flavour of queer or other but mostly female-bodied). It is the most farcically pointless thing I have ever seen: what the fuck are they trying to achieve? Nobody, nobody at the party wants them there. There are a thousand other bars in this city, at least 10 within a few blocks. He keeps screaming at us that we are crazy, and I think you would fight to the death for your right to attend a party nobody wants you at? And WE'RE crazy?

Because it's turning into that. Fucking nasty. Terrifying. He gets my friend in a strange-hold, and I have to rescue her glasses from the ground before they're trampled. He lands heavy punches. He is bellowing like a wounded animal. The entire display is obscene, like the absolute essense of misogyny laid bare: I cannot, I WILL not, be told by women what to do. It injures some invisible but mighty part of me. I will fight beyond all reason, beyond all logic, to have done ANYTHING other than obey an instruction from a woman*. Or worse: a group of women who have physically overpowered me. I will beat them. I will kick them. I will punch and strangle them. I will shriek at them at the top of my lungs. But if they want me to leave, then by god, I WILL NOT LEAVE.

It calms, at some point. At some point, finally, they are heading the right way down the street and we, hands up, go home on our lips, are heading back inside. When suddenly back he comes, sprinting up the block like a drunken bullet, having shed his bag & his jacket for maximum fighting efficiency. Fists blazing, feet kicking, hurtling through us and seeking to hurt. He grabs at random, kicks at random, finally tumbles down in a dead-mass weight of drunken rage. His girlfriend is sobbing over him (and I can't silence the thought that a guy like that is going to make his girlfriend pay for these indignities at the hands of women, later).

And this is when it gets really dangerous, because this is when the cops show up.

I don't know what happened then, because I was hustled inside promptly with the rest of the party-goers, the doors barricaded behind us. But many of those left outside are arrested. Huddled inside we can hear yelling. Drunken macho-man and his friends are dismissed, told to go home by the cops (and finally, when it's the cops telling them, they go). The cops drive off with several of our number in their vans (we don't know yet if they are charged, if lives will be casually ruined by the refusal of a handful of drunken fuckwits to respect someone else's space).

And this is the price, always, in the end: it is the sharp, hard edge of the world that I am always brought to confront. That to stand up for my right not to be groped, my friend's right not be groped, my community's right not to endure harassment at the hands of fuckwits with a point to prove, is to invite police attention (because they will not leave, they WILL NOT LEAVE, despite a city full of other options for places to go). And that police attention will not fall on them, it will fall on us. Because we are queer, we are women, we are breaking the society-wide rules of putting up and shutting up. And for long minutes in the bar I am filled with regret, thinking is it worth it, to have put this community at risk, to stand up for my right, and my friend's right, to defend our bodily autonomy? If people go to jail, if this squat suffers even heavier police harassment: is it worth it?

Until my friend, the one I pulled him off, thanks me for it. Thanks me and hugs me close, for standing up for her, for telling her that her space and her right to exist in it safely is important.

Even then, I do not know that it's worth it. I am comforted by it, and comforted by the friend who mentions to me that these kinds of scenes are not so rare at this place. Comforted by the knowledge that I am not the one who decided to turn a polite request to leave into an all-out deathmatch. I don't want to regret standing up for us, but fuck, the devil's bargain of making a scene and attracting attention has never been so blatantly clear to me. But I wonder if we on this scene are supposed to learn in the end to swallow it down, and paste on a smile, because a drunken fuckwit with his hands on your body is a lesser harm than a squad of riot police outside your doors waiting to arrest you, evict you, deport you?

I finally finish my beer, a long time later, shaking with adrenaline afterschocks, my arm around my crying friend (she is bruised from the strangle-hold, but her glasses survived). I ride home on my own, hyper-alert, hyper-sensitive. My bike chain slips a few blocks into the ride and I stop to turn my bike upside down and enact a quick fix. A man comes out of the bar near where I have stopped, beer in hand, grin on face: "Bike problems?"

And I fucking snarl at him. "Not tonight, just- not tonight. Go away, leave me alone. Not. Tonight."

Later I will be able to tie this experience in with my long-running knowledge that it is at the point of declaring space, and space safety, that these confrontations always occur (I have had more punches thrown at my head for asserting that no, we don't need your company, random dude, we are just fine on our own than for any other reason, ever). Later I will be able metabolise this, incorporate it. But for now I am still fucking incoherant with it, with the ridiculousness of it, the futility of it, the fucking blatantness of it. I want to record the last hour of my life and show it as a film reel to anyone who wants to tell me that misogyny doesn't exist, that patriarchy is a fairy tale or a feminist invention.

I need to wallow a while longer in the surreal knowledge that I got into a mass punch-up tonight because I told a guy to stop touching me, and stop touching my friend.

Fuck.

*Not everyone there was female-identified, but I am going to guess with 99% certainty that drunken fuckwit dude would not be aware of that.

Sleep, now.

Hey would you look at that, there's a name for how & when I sleep!

"Delayed sleep-phase syndrome (DSPS), also known as delayed sleep-phase disorder (DSPD) or delayed sleep-phase type (DSPT), is a circadian rhythm sleep disorder, a chronic disorder of the timing of sleep, peak period of alertness, core body temperature, hormonal and other daily rhythms relative to societal norms. People with DSPS tend to fall asleep some hours after midnight and have difficulty waking up in the morning."

That's been me, my whole life. Forever. Since I was a little kid. My very earliest memories are of battling with my family about bed-times, and having to be physically, forcefully evicted from bed in the morning for school. Being really little- 4 or 5- and creeping downstairs to sit near the door of the livingroom to watch the television until my parents turned it off and went to bed, and then lurking around some more, and then finally, maybe, being able to sleep. Hoarding books in my bed to read for the hours when I couldn't sleep. Being exhausted, always, forever, at school- primary, then highschool. Having my family struggle for years to figure out a way to ever get me into bed on time, then out of bed on time. Spending entire weekends asleep to catch up on the hours that I lost in the week.

It has never changed. It has been absolutely constant in my life since I can remember. My exact sleeping hours DO change- 2am was pretty consistent for most of my teens, but 4am has been more common for the past few years- but I have never, ever been able to regularly sleep before midnight, or regularly rise before 9am without the application of brute force and the consequence of constant, all-day exhaustion.

It meant I sucked at school. I mean, I didn't objectively suck that much at the 'school' bit- I went to a selective school, and got a good mark when I graduated- but I was beyond appalling at 'turning up' bit. I was on time to school maybe two days a week, in the last few years of highschool. I nearly got thrown out of school for persistant lateness, and truancy (many were the days I'd stay home feigning illness rather than facing the humiliation of slinking in 3 hours late again). I'd fall asleep on the train on the way in and sleep til the end of the line. When I finally hauled myself in, I'd be braindead til some time in the afternoon, when I'd (usually, depending on how sleep-deprived I was) perk up and be able to pay attention.

It also means I have sucked at every 9-5 job I have ever attempted. With enough application of willpower, alarm-clock setting, making my housemates come rouse me, and the crippling sense of knowing that I will be fired if I don't, I can (kind of) turn up to work at 10am. But I'll be useless til 3pm, anyway, then probably stay back late to get work done in the hours from 3pm-9pm when I'm actually perky & focused.

It didn't mean that I sucked at university, however. Because at university, for almost every course I took, there was an evening class option. And I was sweet! I'd actually go, and actually be able to get involved! Except for the years when I was also trying to work a 9-5 job. Then it didn't really matter if the classes were running during my peak awakeness times, I was a fucking zombie anyhow from trying to make it through on 4 hours sleep per night.

It turns out that I fit every single one of the criteria on this list that doesn't involve laboratory measurements. Up to and including the "occasional non-circadian days". That was Monday of this week, when I had to be at a client office early in the day: it was easier to just stay awake and not sleep at all, that day, than to try to get a few hour's sleep beforehand.

At this point in my life, I have known myself & my sleep patterns for 26 years. I know how I operate. More importantly, I know the futility of trying to force myself to operate on a more socially acceptable schedule: I have thought myself lazy, castigated myself for being a shit employee, considered it a matter of willpower and discipline to sleep & wake earlier, have tried the most ridiculously involved and outlandish strategies to try to shift my sleep back a few hours, and it has never worked for more than a few days at a time, at the cost of any and all mental alertness.

So. These days, rather than trying to fix it, as much as possible, I structure my life around it. I know that I do better at, and try to seek out, night-shift jobs and work-from-home jobs. I try to maintain relatively regular sleeping & waking times, because even if you are sleeping from 4am-1pm, if you screw around with that too much you'll suffer. I try to make sure I get enough sunlight, because depression will hammer you into the ground if you have the double assault of (a) sleeping anti-social hours and (b) never seeing daylight (this one is a bit of a challenge in a late European Autumn: the sun sets at 4:30, and the afternoons are uniformly overcast).

It's a fairly recent thing, this coming to terms with my sleep patterns rather attempting to force myself into more normal ones. I've known it about myself forever, and suspected it was the case for some other people, but hadn't known it was any such thing as a recognised 'disorder' until about an hour ago. I suspect my coping & success (as defined by regular periods of sleep) will improve as I stop trying to artificially manipulate my sleep-times. It's a bit rough, though, knowing (accepting) that there are entire categories of employment that will never really be open to me- that attempting to take on regular-hours careers is never going to be any more successful than the unrelenting zombie-state failures of the past. That it's probably not a matter of just having a little more discipline, a little more willpower, a little more focus, and then being magically normal. A little bit rough, too, to accept that mornings (which are sometimes so beautiful) are probably not going to be a huge part of my life, except as experienced from the 'wrong end' of having been awake all night.

And to accept that I'm probably not lazy. It's probably not a personality defect or weakness of character. It's the way I am, and have forever been, and most likely forever will be. It sucks that the way I am happens not to co-incide with the way most of the world works, but like many other things about me that don't co-incide with the world's usual way of doing things, I guess I'll figure out my own way through it.

Further culinary strangeness

In the absence of a garden, I have taken to tending a glass jar full of a murky, milky, bubbling mush. I feed it daily with a spoonful of ginger and a spoonful of sugar, and keep it nestled warm & cosy beside the heating outlet in my bedroom.

It is a "ginger beer plant", a developing colony of little beasties that are in the business of turning sugar into alcohol. Well, it's mostly the yeast that's doing that, eating the sugar and shitting out carbon dioxide & alcohol, but my reading suggests that the addition of ginger means that there should be other beneficial bacterial and/or fungal life forms in there as well, getting in on the hot fermenting action.

I need to feed it for another few days before it'll be ready to strain out the liquid and bottle it up with sugar syrup to develop into either ginger beer or some kind of sugary explosive device (I have been extensively warned about the explosive possibilities if I get the bottling process wrong). I'm hoping to have a batch of ginger beer ready to consume before I leave in a couple of weeks- we'll see how THAT goes.

I'm specifically aiming for dry alcoholic ginger beer, which is why the long developing times. I think if you're aiming for low/non-alcohol varieties you can get it all done in a few days. There's a million different recipes out on the net, I've gone with a mish-mash of a bunch of them (so far, essentially: sugar, grated ginger, sachet of baking yeast, half a juiced lemon & a bit of lemon peel into a jar with some water, stir, continue to feed sugar & ginger daily).

I am quite taken with the evidence of life in my mysterious jar of gingery mush- it bubbles, it froths, it rearranges itself into funny strata of ginger, liquid & yeast gunk at the bottom of the jar. If this works, I think I'd like to take on brewing & fermenting as a regular old hobby: I mean first there's the fun of feeding it & watching it do it's thing, and then there's the PRACTICALLY FREE BOOZE. Just so long as the bottles don't detonate in the process, what's not to love?