Pestilence

There can be no denying that a) I am sick and b) I am much sicker than I've been at any other point this winter (which seems from this vantage point to have been an endless wasteland of tissues, strepsils, Codral & honey-lemon tea). With the possible exception of the flu I had a few months ago when I was trying to move house (a time so bad that I think my brain has blocked it from my memory), this is a sickness to show up all the rest. One that takes the ever-present tissue and turns it into a staggering snowdrift of paper containing vile mucus of a fair rainbow of shades, turns the sweet escape of bed into a restless, tossing, turning, coughing, feverish hell that not even the most extreme medicines have helped, one that makes me vague and cranky and achy and incredibly, blindingly stupid.

Of course the plague arrives at the same time as spring bursts joyfully into the landscape, with ridiculously warm days showing off stunning arrays of blue skies and flowers. I even have a few days off at the same time as my lover, and nothing makes me stamp my feet in frustration more than wasting time with her. There are so many better things we could be doing out in the sunshine than huddling in here passing tissues and moaning. Ah well.

I'm at the point with this stupid flu that a return to the low-level sore-throat-runny-nose colds of the past three months would be a tremendous relief. I can't even remember what it feels like to be healthy.

Have I mentioned before how much I hate winter? Yeah. Hate.

Hey there little one

I was reduced practically to baby-speak yesterday when I saw this, my very first jasmine bloom. When the succulent one came around to pick me up she casually mentioned that there was a flower, and my resultant shrieking & capering might have seemed to sane people to be slightly out of proportion. I bolted for the camera, as one does, and here you go.

The jasmine is exciting every year, especially for someone who hates winter as much as I do- it's spring, you know? But this is even more exciting because it's my jasmine, on my vine- rescued from a half-dead tangled mess, pruned & loved & fed & watered & given a lovely fence to climb up. It's shot off happily in all directions- just look at all those pink buds waiting to burst! I know there'll be a dozen or more flowers when I go home today, but this one's still special for being the first to pop open (bravely into the chilly wet August day).

The rocket is peeking up a green haze and the garlic chives are unfurling, but no sign of the coriander just yet- it could be too cold still, I suppose. I'm scared of growing things from seed, I'll admit it- for a totally novice gardener the suspense, the multitude of things that could go wrong is intimidating. And there's no feedback. When you plant a plant it'll at least indicate when something's wrong, even if it is a guessing game to figure out just what (too much water? Too little? Needs fertiliser? More sun? Root-bound, you poor love?). But seeds, man, they could break your heart, just never doing anything. Still, I kind of get it now I think- there is a particular joy at the faint green haze of tiny leaves on top of the fresh dirt. Delayed gratification and all that.

Overflow

Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by my response to her that I am incapable of anything but sitting there and grinning like an idiot.

We're making plans, scary plans, for months rather than weeks into the future. I'd be happy with small adventures, small plans, the cautious shuffle-steps of well-trained commitment-phobia, but this nervous confidence is addictive too. Scary territory, all of it, euphoric and wierd. I'm a novice at anything beyond the starting-line of a partnership (I've started a lot of times, and ended soon after, and very rarely found myself out here in the middle with no end on the horizon) but as with the best things we make it up as we go along.

Saturday night at Dorothy's Dance Camp was foolishness like I haven't experienced in a long while. I suppose it was sort of inevitable given that I began drinking at two o'clock that afternoon (watching the footy down at Henson Park) and was bossy, giggly drunk by the time I was getting my outfit on for the evening ("Oh, that skirt looks hot on you- you have to wear it- but you can't keep it! It looks hot on me too!"). Add magic fairy dust, an interesting little space, plenty of hot queers and some awesome music, and we were destined for an over-the-top night. I haven't felt hussy-power quite that strongly in a little while, it was a bit dizzying, and hilarious and sexy all at once. I tried to make sure to gain permission wherever my rampant hussyness might bump into other people's comfort levels, because there's no point being a hussy if you can't make an effort to remain ethical about it, but I fear my enthusiasm may have overflowed & overwhelmed here or there. My apologies if that was the case.

Back in the real world, where I drift along wet, stubbornly still-winter streets and daydream about my garden, I have pots of the following quite well established: thyme, lemon-thyme, oregano & chives. I also have seeds of the following, which may or may not actually be germinating: rocket, garlic chives & coriander. My fingers are itching to sow some basil seeds but all the evidence suggests it needs to be just a little warmer, and I don't want to set myself up for disappointment. In exciting & slightly bizarre news, one of my prettiest catcuses has three little flower-buds pushing through the top. And in "SPRING IS SO NEARLY HERE I WISH IT WOULD JUST HURRY UP" news, the jasmine vine on my porch has buds on it so close to bursting open they look like they'd explode if you so much as breathed on them.

A tagging instance

Well, since Gaylourdes has graciously shared eight things about herself, I suppose I might as well rack my brain in response to being 'tagged' to do the same.

1. I've been keeping a regular on-line diary since I was 16- eight years ago- when the internet was much younger and the word blog had yet to be invented. Reading back on what I thought the dire issues of my life were at 17, 18, 19 & 20 is sort of wonderful, once I get over the stabbing pain of the evidence of my own pretentiousness.

2. I used to be an army cadet, and know how to dismantle, clean, reassemble and shoot several models of rifle (most of them of such antique vintage that they've been used in more than one world war). I'm pretty good at the nerdy parts of the gun thing- remembering which bits go where- but really, really bad the aiming & shooting part.

3. When I was 14, I found handling weapons to be thrilling, a way of holding power that did not seem commonly available to a small, odd, unathletic schoolgirl.

4. I used to keep pet yabbies. My first two were called Gigantor and Destructor. I quickly discovered that crustaceans make traumatic pets- it's hard to get emotionally attached to something that is involved in a constant Highlander-style fight to the death with everything else in it's tank.

5. I'm the second eldest of five children. Four girls, one boy. My parents aren't Catholic, except possibly in the 'recovering' sense.

6. I sometimes feel so certain that I'm going to have children one day that it seems like a fact I can take for granted, and plan for. Other times it seems like a ridiculously unlikely idea. I suppose I won't really know until it happens (or doesn't).

7. I am about 60% certain that an ex-boyfriend of mine from long lost highschool hetero days lives in Newtown, and that I see him occasionally on the street. The 40% uncertainty comes from the fact that he looked exactly the same as every one of the dark-haired, pale-skinned goth/rocker/indie boys who hang out around here, and I'm not at all motivated to look closely enough to ever see if it's actually him. I figure if I got a positive ID I'd have to react in some way, and I'd rather not.

8. I plan to celebrate Cephalopodmas this year on a beach somewhere in Queensland with my girlfriend. If I'm really, really lucky, I'll go snorkelling and manage to spot a real, live cephalopod in celebration of the big day- but it seems tragically much more likely that I'll encounter one on a barbeque.

I tag Infopimp.

Monday is Dress Like A Banker Day

For some reason, when I wake up on Mondays I seem to be completely unable to put together an outfit that doesn't involve pin-stripes, a waistcoat, and/or a button-down shirt. Today I'm combining all three, with the addition of a maroon tie. Exactly why the need to dress like an investment banker strikes on Mondays I'm not sure, but I suspect it's a wierd effect of Mondays being my day off, and also the day that most of the world returns to work after this thing called a "weekend", and so while the hive mind is turned towards dreary offices and commutes, I actually have the time to spend/waste coming up with my Day Off Outfit. The hive mind's preoccupations thus seep into mine, and I wind up expressing the collective angst by choosing to dress like an investment banker, or possibly one of those creepy two-story-tall real estate ad people with the photoshopped teeth.

I'm not sure today's outfit is going to work, given that I'm trying to combine silver pin-stripes with nice, staid grey ones, but I'm giving it til after my first coffee to convince me.

All-nighters

There are particular places in the world that I think are probably all spore of the same great, underground plant (like that fungus that can grow underground beneath entire hillsides and pop up anywhere). They're flourescently lit, open all night, usually feature long rows of hard plastic chairs and smell like the total despair of waiting, waiting, waiting. They're places where your fate, and the fate of all the hunched people around you, are in the hands of some bored-looking, probably underpaid people in uniform, who're generally considered to be so at risk from the people they're supposed to be serving that additional security is employed to keep the fate-deciders from those waiting.

Spending the night in places like this is a wierd universal. I've spent nights in bus stations in Los Angeles, departure lounges in Bangkok, train terminals in Zimbabwe, police stations in Sydney. And hospitals, of course- all parts of the hospital have areas like this, but the emergency room is the one with an especially close affinity with the airport departure lounge and the police station. We are watched with disapproving suspicion (people like us probably hurt ourselves on purpose outside of hours just to inconvenience people like the ladies behind the bullet-proof screens). We are shuffled from one person too unimportant to help us to the next, each promising that sometime soon, something will happen. Hours pass in a wierd rush that is inverse to the departure lounge, where they crawl. Here we realise that it's been four and a half hours without pain relief, three hours since it was promised, how can it have gone so fast when all this time we've been staring glazed at the floor and the late-night television?

When something finally happens, when some fragmented care is finally offered, it is much the same as when the airline staff offer you a ticket to fly some time three days later, after your twelve-hour wait by the departure gate. It's not good, it's not even adequate, but somehow after so long under those lights, on those seats, with those hours marching incongruously by, the numb relief at something happening is enough to grasp at whatever's offered and pretend that it's really OK.

Everyone involved in last night's emergency room jaunt is quite OK (and no, I wasn't the reason we were there). Really it wasn't so bad I suppose as it could have been. Interesting though, in a brain-deadening way.

Today I seriously appreciated being a grown-up

It was wierd, actually. Mostly I resent being a grown-up- so much to think about, so many details to everything, so much assumed knowledge that is inexplicably not included in any handbook, anywhere. Blah. But today I had a moment of shining, glorious appreciation of being a grown-up. I was sitting with my feet over the edge on the top deck of a three-level catamaran, watching a humpback whale push her weeks-old calf to the surface to breathe. I had a lap full of excited-overwrought-exhausted-ecstatic child (humming whale sounds to herself and yelling "BABY!" every time the surprisingly, impossibly adorable calf came up), and in my left hand I had an imported beer with a slice of lemon in it.

This is the shit that makes participating in capitalism worthwhile- moments of beautiful adventure available for purchase. Being able to share this with my niece, and do it with total confidence in her safety and comfort. I feel like a sell-out even saying it, but today cost a fuck of a lot of money, and every cent of it was well spent. For me, for my sister, for the kid- the limits of the world cracked right open and showed us more. It was beautiful.

If my conscience needed soothing (and it doesn't, not really- the reason I bother to turn up to work is to finance stuff like this) I could point out that the captain of the ship was female, and thus the adventure could be construed as all part of my plan to expose my niece to awesome women doing jobs that are thrilling to three-year-olds, but eh. Let's get real. It was just all about being on a boat, surrounded by water, looking at beautiful animals doing their thing. In a degree of human comfort that is only available for a price.

Warning: doting auntliness ahead

I'm on holiday, which is lovely. Staying with my big sister for a few days just outside of Brisbane, then getting something of a bachelorette pad going in town with Miss Y for the weekend. Flight was ridiculously easy (barely unplugged my ipod or looked up from That Book the whole time), but the first I knew that my sister had arrived at the airport to pick me up was being almost knocked down by a pink-tracksuit whirlwind in the shape of my nearly-four-year-old niece. Man, I can never get over how flattering it is to have kids be so overwhelmingly excited to see you. I rarely see the little one- she sees my other two younger sisters on an extremely regular basis, but I've been out of the country/state/loop for a while. So the fact that she remembers me at all is pretty awesome. The fact that she demanded the phone off my sister so she could ask me if I really was for real coming up for a visit was doubly awesome. The fact that she presented me with this gorgeous artist's rendition of me at the airport is just about the awesomest thing ever:

You can tell it's me because it has "spikally hair and five legs!".

Then we came home and had to dress up as fairy princesses for dinner (all my long-distance attempts to convert her to a pirate princess have failed, but at least she's gone for the 'karate-ninja-sumo-wrestler' style of fairy princessdom rather than the, you know, fussy, picky, action-phobic kind). Behold the fearsome fairy princess duo:

Not the best photo of me, but you try being hit at high speed repeatedly by the entire physical mass of a very small but very determined person, as she attempts to communicate over a course of hours just how very excited she is to see you. It's not good for your photo-face, I think you'll find.

I have been given kindy pick-up and drop-off duty for the next few days (a working mother has to take full advantage of any and all opportunities to foist the child off onto doting aunties, I am aware- signed that release form before I came) so it's entirely possible that I might decide she is only perhaps half as awesome as the entirety of human endeavour to date. But right now, nope, I'm convinced that she is brilliance. Sheer, tangle-haired, piercing-shrieked, "Auntie Ali you have to read me another story", "Tomorrow can we do a fairy dance?" brilliance.