Dear June:

You suck. Please be over already.
Sincerely, Ali

Dear July:
You don't have to try very hard, but please please be better than June. This isn't really asking much. I'm sure you can do it. I have faith in you.
Sincerely, Ali

Dear commuters on the 10:50pm to Lidcome:
PLEASE BE MORE CAREFUL. One passenger-in-my-carriage emergency per train trip ONLY, please. Two is just careless. The little-old-lady-falling-into-the-gap-at-Central routine can be forgiven (and ma'am, I'm glad you're alright), but the woman who passed out like a ton of bricks at my feet as I went to disembark, it was like she was just rubbing it in. I've been at work, have been commuting home for well over an hour, have already dealt with one passenger emergency (see: previous) and would rather not be yelling for the train guard while checking your pulse and trying to make sure your feet don't jam in the door. Again, I'm glad you seemed to be OK (by the time I had handed your possessions to the train guard, ascertained that you were conscious & seemed to have a safe friend with you), but you might want to get your head seen to before you go to sleep. That was a concussion-inducing thump you went down with. Next time, try falling off slightly lower high heels. Or not being so drunk that you're incapable of breaking your fall.
Sincerely, Random Fellow Commuter.

Danger: No Entry

These photos were taken on the same hot date succulent lover & I went on to the botanical gardens to take the photos below. That was the first day of June- sunny, bright & optimistic. The month went downhill at a knuckle-whitening, teeth-clenching speed. It's nice to revisit some sunshine and simple forms. I'd show you some sexy photos of my succulent lover frolicking and being silly on green-grass hillsides but that would be, as they say, an invasion of privacy, so you're stuck with a photo of me trying to pretend that my pink hair doesn't clash horribly with my red skirt.

Wet & Juicy Succulent Porn

Service

So cold- like a knife cutting through every layer of protective clothing. Appropriate, really. Queues of somber people shivering and making brief, strained eye-contact then looking away. Hordes of the facially-pierced and interestingly-haired mingling with the more usual-looking funeral crowd. An impossible mix, an impossibly huge crowd of people, impossible smiles at some moments, fragments of laughter, and muffled sobbing. Too many of us for one chapel, they opened up another. We watched on a TV screen and thank gods for that distance (I barely coped as it was). Cried and cried, clutched the hands of those around me, and at the end, to the closing bars of Jeff Buckley singing Hallelujah, made an odd tripod of us, staring at our feet, shoulders wedged together, tears dripping down our coats and catching the light oddly before sinking into thick wool and disappearing.

Miss her. God, we're going to miss her. Can't take too much more of this. My queer extended family has lost one member every six months since last Winter solstice. Three. That's enough (too much, it's too much). No more, universe. We can't take it.

Too much

Birthdays, gardening, free-flowing wine, moving, boxes, cables, drills, spray-n-wipe and a new garden rake: a thousand distractions. Wierd how it's possible to move around the world and do the things that need doing, have conversations that are about other things, make decisions about other things, and all the time underneath the glaring horrible truth (my friend died the other day) seems invisible (how could this be?). Until it comes back like a thump to the chest, like a burn of the eyes, like a fist in my throat, like having to decide if I can go to the service (like the manners of mourning are important, or is it just the time off work I can't get, or should I leave it for other, closer people?), and having to say things about the wake (which will be amazing and good but how can it be good when she's gone?).

Startling the ways we're negotiating around it. Not Talking About It but when the signal is given, permission granted, it's all we (I) can talk about. Needing a friend with me but not talking to her about it at all because I couldn't start and having the friend there was enough. The horrible role of being the messenger, of needing to tell people, of getting anxious because what if I did it the wrong way or could have been more gentle or should have made sure they were safe first or left it to someone closer... except that there's no good way to find out these things, so I shut off that train of thought and think instead about the last times I saw her, and try to figure out the best ways to go from here.

Scratches up both fore-arms are a trophy of a protracted battle to extract some feral jasmine from where it was trying to strangle some grevillea in my new front yard (a wealth of gardening-as-therapy opportunities in that scrubby mess). I've relocated the jasmine to a more domestic position against the porch and look forward to spring, and flowers, and a little sunshine.

Fast Dial

When I first moved out of home, to my lonely little apartment in a lonely little southern city (deliberately isolated from anything familiar) I used to call my parents all the time to ask questions like: "I have a pumpkin and half a bag of rice. How do I turn that into dinner?*" and "How do you clean slat blinds?" and "How do you make a TV aerial out of a coat hanger?"- the little entries in the Encyclopedia Of Being A Grown-Up that suddenly reveal themselves as glaring holes in the knowledge base of fledgling adults.

Then something happened, some fuzzy span of years that involved me Coming Out to a world of unexpected, unsuspecting trauma, then some extensive overseas travel (for them, then for me), and a gradual process of trying to heal the breach that has only recently succeeded in settling back into familiarity. I struggled along for a few years without ready access to the Encyclopedia Parentia, and it was tolerable- the internet, some experimentation, and phone-a-friend will invariably suffice. But it wasn't as good, because the secret value of dialing the Encyclopedia is that every question relates to something that's going on in my life: I don't ever really tell my parents how I'm going, I ask them questions that reveal the story. "How do I find a tax accountant?" translates to "I have lots of work, I feel successful, how do I manage all this big stuff?", while "How do I feed myself out of [insert extremely limited range of food]" generally means "I'm broke as anything right now, but surviving". The internet doesn't care to know these things, but my parents might.

I know we're back on decent terms now because I find myself at least twice a week picking up the phone: "How do you choose plants for an east-facing backyard?", "What's in your salt-and-pepper tofu recipe?", "What do I need to look for if I'm in the market for a cordless hand drill?", and "What do you do when your landlord won't pay waste management fees for your house?". It's how we keep in touch without getting into any of that still-scary "actually admitting I might want to spend time with you" territory, and it works pretty well.

*: The answer to this question was an experimental stuffed-pumpkin recipe that tasted about a million times better than the bare cupboard it originated in might have suggested.

How's this?

Nothing is quite right at the moment. That's a gentle way of saying it's all going quietly to hell. The forces of right & good will almost certainly prevail (I will almost certainly move house without major incident, I will almost certainly sort out what the fuck is going on in my work life, I will almost certainly not collapse of some highly inconvenient illness in the meanwhile) but jeebus fuck, this 'prevailing' business is hard work.

Everything I can't control feels like my enemy just now: the rain, my body, and most of the human race topping that list. I'm sick (feverish, exhausted, throbbing glands sick) and that makes the hundreds of phone calls and intrepid outings into the rain even less pleasant than they would otherwise be, when all logic dictates that I should be tucked up in bed thinking of nothing more pressing than when my girlfriend is likely to drop by for some invalid-pampering (hah!). But invalid-pampering won't get me moved, won't get my (casual, no sick-leave) wage paid, and as the fucking irritating slogan on the cold & flu medicine says, sometimes you gotta "soldier on". Even when all the Codral & elderflower tea in the world aren't fooling your body that it's well.

Oh well, as they say, oh well. It must be done, the world must turn, work must be gone to, pay must be accumulated, goods must be packed, leases must be signed, real estate agents must be wrangled, houses must be cleaned, plans must be made, and girls must endure. Eventually, we will prevail. Right?

Guaranteed Cranky

If there's anything to get a girl even crankier than she already is at the prospect of working every single day of a long weekend, it's cutting the rail service and replacing it with buses for the entire duration. Buses that can only be accessed from one station that isn't even on the connecting train line, that are located three blocks away from the station in the pouring, freezing rain, that add an exciting minimum of 40 minutes to an already gruelling journey.

Thanks CityRail, I can always count on you to make a barely-tolerable situation completely and utterly fucked!

Oh well. At least I don't live in Newcastle, I guess.

Conditional love

I joined freecycle yesterday and have already gotten rid of or assigned for departure the vast majority of Surplus Stuff that has been cluttering my surrounds. I've also aquired a wealth of excellent-condition moving boxes. Hurrah!

My feelings of joy are tempered a little, however, by the fact that all this neighbourly sharing required spending half an hour of my afternoon outside in the most ridiculously dramatic wind and heavy rain I've ever met outside of a tragic romance. Perfect weather for skulking moodily along hillsides and composing bleak poetry, extremely unpleasant weather for moving things (especially heavy, awkward-shaped things- if there was ever a perfect afternoon for skidding on slippery metal stairs and breaking my neck, this was it).

A warm cup of tea and a change of clothes should set me right, but I'm still not thrilled with the need to leave my cosy perch and head back out into the grim for a long night at work. I can't help but imagine that what is wild & dramatic at five in the afternoon is unlikely to have calmed to more pleasant levels by midnight. Ah well, a girl can hope.

Epiphany

The other night the succulent lover accused me of being a clothes nerd.

Me? ME? A clothes nerd? But- but- I don't even LIKE fashion! I hate fashion! I despair of trends and shirk all knowledge and familiarity of the bilge that churns forth in craptacular chain stores and designer emporiums across the country! I merely seek to clothe myself in a non-horrid, inexpensive way! How dare you call me a clothes-nerd!

To which she gently pointed out that a clothes nerd is rather different from a fashionista, briefly repeated an entire spiel I'd once given her on My Precious Coat Which Is Older Than I Am, pointed to the evidence of my ever-growing clothing & accessory construction corner (which is rapidly overtaking the space beneath the stairs), and made reference to my ridiculously sprawling wardrobe which, even divided between "costume pieces" and "every-day wear", threatens to eat my bedroom whole*. Perhaps the fact that I'd also already been rabbiting on about joyous recent purchases (100% silk pink paneled skirt: $12) for a solid twenty minutes might have contributed to the findings.

So, alright, maybe I am a clothes nerd. Maybe I do take an unholy joy from my treasure-cave of clothes and its miraculous expansions (see: recent op-shopping expeditions) and contractions (see: the fact that I give away about a milk-crate's worth of clothes every other month or so). Maybe I could go for months and months without wearing the same garment twice.

But is that so wrong, I ask you?

*: I have frequently been told by people entering my bedroom for the first time that I could easily open my own costume/second-hand clothes store. Why didn't I see the signs?

Winter morning

I woke up an hour before my alarm to thunder and rain falling so heavily on the metal roof that it seemed surprising it could take the force of it. Stayed in bed, curled up under my doona, and watched thick heavy sheets of water roar past my skylight. Still heavier rain came in bursts, eased off, came again, and lightning turned the rain from morning-grey to white.

Getting to work involves hop/skip/wading over the lake that forms outside our gate (crossed at points with upturned milk & bread crates), standing back from the surf-sized waves of water the buses send crashing up the footpath, breathing humid hothouse air on the bus and peeking through hand-shaped gaps in fogged-up windows to try to figure out where we are. Everyone's an umbrella-warrior, dripping, invading, brushing wetly past.

Garden adventures

A new home has been found. It has a backyard of considerable proportion*, two gorgeous big frangipani trees, and such modern conveniences as four walls and doors on both bedrooms (a feature missing from the sweet but substandard apartment I currently call home). It's only a few blocks away from the sweet but substandard apartment, so I won't have to go to all the trouble of getting used to a new neighbourhood, although I will have to take up with renewed vigour the Campaign To Get A Kebab Store On South King St (it's an outrage that we don't have one, a blasted outrage!).

The rent is a bit higher than what I currently pay, but whenever I have wallet-pangs I just think of the beauty of such things as being able to have sex with my girlfriend in my bedroom without sharing the happy event with the entire household, and suddenly it all seems so worthwhile.

Yesterday the sweet succulent lover and I went on an adventure to the botanical gardens, where we took lots and lots of semi-pornographic photos of succulents and got misty-eyed about arrays of flowering flapjacks. It was a beautiful fourth day of winter, bright and warm and quiet, all harbour-sparkling with blue skies and conversations about many adventures yet to be had.

*: I'm ridiculously excited about gardening. There are several badly-maintained garden beds that need rescuing and a half-dead bouganvillea just crying out for a second chance. It's at times like this that I realise I am turning into my mother.

Pretty shiny distractions

Today, while on a long & fruitless search through endless bland clothing stores for something else entirely, I came across one of the rare finds that almost make going into boring-normal-clothes-stores worthwhile- all by itself on a rack, surrounded in every direction by hideous 'jumper dresses' and shapeless, horrible sack-like tunics: a pink boned bustier, with black lace overlay and beaded trim. Size S, which means Size Too Small For Me, but the beauty of things that lace up is that lacing is endlessly adjustable. I ascertained that it would, with new lacing, accommodate all my curves quite nicely, that it was rather exceptionally priced ($10!) and went to pay. There on the counter, innocent as you please, was a rich royal blue bustier, with black lace overlay and beaded trim, Size M, also $10. I didn't even bother trying that one on, but snatched it up as fast as I could and walked out of the shop a mere $20 poorer and with two lovely new garments to my name.

Came home and re-laced them and yes, they both look fantastic- and very, very similar to things that cost more than ten times as much that I've seen on the racks of plenty of local goth/fetish shops.

Shopping karma. I make scores like this semi-frequently. They make me very, very happy. Happy enough that, writing about it, I have successfully distracted myself from my crappy, horrible evening and can go to bed feeling relatively pleased with the day.