Syrupy & dark

It's a weekly chore, the trip down to the hospital. I've had blood taken there more often in the past two months than I've managed to go grocery shopping. It's my regular stop, more regular than any local pub or any friends house or anywhere except work, home and the dojo. I know the routine, roll my sleeve up without being asked, direct them to the best vein, barely flinch at the needle, become more and more fascinated each time with the thick, dark slosh of venous blood in the official little vials. I used to do nice things for myself after these sessions, go get a milkshake or buy myself lunch, but it's so routine now it doesn't even register as worth rewarding.

The ladies in the pathology clinic crack jokes about my name, ask about my piercings, and know me well enough by now to ask me when I'm going to make them all scarves and hats.

My file is a huge fat thing, bulging and bloated with paper and blood test reports. I picture my recalcitrant metabolic hormone levels in a cluttered little chart, jagging up and down and all over the place without any apparent regard for how they're supposed to be reacting to the treatments that work precisely the same for everyone in the world except for me.

It's precisely no fun at all to sit as an outlier statistically of a disease that is, for most of the population, incredibly easily managed. I am beginning to understand that when I am told that there is a 'very minor chance' of such-and-such a complication occurring, the chances are good my body's going to bless me with it (since it has, after all, every single other time). It's so hard to maintain the necessary momentum to push through this, to keep going, to stay on top of it, to do the hours of work it takes to be actively managing and moving towards the elusive promise of definitive treatment, when I constantly doubt whether this can ever really be resolved.

Oh, the plodding out of this period of crisis. On and on and on. Unresolved, potentially unresolvable. I may never have housing stability, I am unlikely to ever have a body that functions without extensive medical management, and evidence suggests that romantic and sexual partnerships are only ever a short-lived possibility. I know (I know I know I know) I just need to Accept It, and Deal With It, and Get Over It, and somehow manage to live a life amongst and between these facts, but it's so tiring, so draining, so bare of joy or inspiration.

Not really such a bad thing after all

Nanna-ish I might decry it as but I had a lovely gardening day with my family. I came home with an ivy-leafed geranium, two tiny citrus trees, some tillandsias and a cutting of mint from my grandma's garden. All things I've thought of, and wanted, but not found to my liking elsewhere (except for the mint, which I already had, but which was devoured by the ravenous backyard slugs at this house).

The open garden was a beautiful example of garden forms I have no connection with- huge and formal, time consuming and elaborate, with very little by way of edible plants but a lot by way of artful arrangements of foliage and light. The plant fair was bustling and fascinating, full of hidden treasures. And in the course of the day, on tea-breaks around the place, I managed to more than half finish the fine-hook scarf I've been laboring away on.

It was lovely to get out of the ghetto for a moment. And I think the process is freaking me out more than a little, but it was lovely (in a scary way) to reaffirm how much I do have in common with the older generation of women in my family (gardeners and craftspeople all).

It's OK (through clenched teeth). It's really OK.

Tomorrow I have arranged to spend with my mum, my aunt and my grandma touring the open gardens of the west (with a rare plant fair thrown in for variety). I spent most of today, the public holiday, madly crocheting a hat for a friend in cold climes so that her head doesn't get cold. Usually this strangely nanna-ish bent of mine is funny, and ironic, and I have enough else going on that I can laugh about it. Sometimes, though, it makes me feel bare and vulnerable for real. Sometimes I feel like I could fade back into a pastel blur of adorable, celibate eccentricity and it would be a bit of a relief to everyone not to have to deal with my over-sharp, over-intense attempts to actually engage with the world around me.

I often get the impression that I scare people, and the people who aren't scared are mystified. It's not an especially comfortable way to be.

I feel like the prizes are saved for the easier people, the ones who make an easier kind of sense, the ones with fewer sharp edges and a whole lot less risk associated. That girls like me make great friends, and ought to be thrilled with that (over and over and over again), while the other girls, softer-edged, get to be lovers.

There are a lot of platitudes around to comfort me right now but they are all as hollow as each other in the end.

White belt + +

It was three of the most exhausting hours of my life. I walked out pinging with buzz and electricity, walked in the door of my house, and started eating whatever food was within arm's reach before I'd even said "hi". My arms were so tired they might've fallen off and I wouldn't have noticed, and the next day my stomach muscles (and thigh muscles and shoulders) were so sore I felt like every single muscle strand was making itself known to me. And I was so happy, I still haven't stopped smiling.

I got my Advanced stripe tonight after doing my grading on Saturday, and fuck it all if going from absolute-newbie-beginner to merely newbie-beginner isn't the most sporting success I've ever achieved in my life. I've never stuck with it, never persevered, never found anything that made me aspire to more and higher and better before. I lap it up, the beaming pride of my instructor ("Well done, white belts!"), the challenge of the next belt (the next syllabus, the next grading, the next time some genial man with a broad Manhattan accent will nearly kill me with creative push-ups), the idea of a future full of this.

The night before grading I was so nervous I woke up multipl.e times, convinced at 4am that I was running late (halfway out of bed before I realised it was still dark). To care so much is alien to me.

I go down into a front-leaning stance and there's a muscle along the top of my thigh that cuts straight out, with shadow underneath (I can slip my fingers in there and grip if I want to, but I don't). I catch sight of this strange phenomenon of muscle definition in my upper arms. When I bend double, my hands can tuck under my feet so that my toes meet my wrists. It's all so unfamiliar, so unincorporated into how I see myself, how I know my body, but there it is. It's not why I'm doing this but it's a visceral physical reminder of what I'm gaining.

Growing Something

It's house meeting after house meeting, crisis after crisis, huddled tea in the mornings with the latest grim news shared, late night after late night after late night trying to sort it out (whatever that even means anymore). It's my days off spent not gardening but hauling, lugging, sorting, disposing, the neverending, self-replicating junk, crap, shit that piles up everywhere then piles up again as soon as a space is clear. It's doing the work I need to do to keep my life functional, then doing the work I need to do to keep the house functional, then doing the work I need to do excavate the previous decade of household entropy. Then looking around after a solid three days of this, day after day of not doing what I'd like to do with my time but doing what I feel I must do with my time, and feeling like I've barely made a dent. Like what dent I made will be filled, almost instantly, with another layer of junk and grime. Like I'm pushing shit uphill with a broom, scooping water with a sieve, pushing a giant boulder to the top of the same fucking hill over and over again.

Like looking around and realising, heartbroken, that in a space this dysfunctional, my beautiful plants aren't beautiful at all but are just part of the mess, and the junk.

And then it's a warm kitchen full of good food and beer late into the night, a vase full of pink radishes pulled from the garden, it's us all curled on a pile of cushions watching Tales Of The City like a family, friends to put the kettle on for me, friends to share a cup of tea, friends who come up to my room and, opening the door, walk straight in to sit on the couch because they feel, and are, welcome. It's sitting on the balcony commiserating over the crisis, showing housemates how to raid the herb garden and veggie patch for food, finding the perfect lounge suite to fit my new, ridiculously large room just sitting out in the backyard, and two housemates on hand to help me bring it up here. It's seedlings shooting up in soil I've worked hard to improve, it's annexing extra space for the veggie patch and knowing we have space to spare, it's the sheer overwhelming insane volume of the potential of this place. The potential for something beautiful, if we work for it. The potential for hellish disaster, if we falter.

Mostly we don't falter. Mostly we do well, and I'm proud. I can feel the sharp edge of disaster behind us but it's not gaining on us as fast as it was, and we're propelling ourselves beyond it. And in the process becoming something I treasure: a household, for real.

The grace of what's discarded

I've hung around people who dumpster for a long time, and have joined in on the occasional run in the past, but moving into this house is the first time it's been any kind of reliable, regular part of how and what I eat.

I think I used to think it was a bit gross, was turned off by the imperfect produce, felt too much pride in working and earning money to see eating food scavenged out of a bin as a legitimate option. It wasn't clean, perfect, shiny or expensive enough. It wasn't of the real, grown-up world I was trying so hard to be part of.

I think it was gardening than changed that. I know what food is now, where it comes from. I put the shit of animals into my garden beds, fertilise the seedlings with the ground-up corpses of pest fish, spray the tomatoes with milk gone bad, and regularly churn a compost bin that sometimes looks and smells like nothing I thought I'd ever voluntarily spend time around. The food I grow has bug holes in the leaves, often, splits in the skin, wobbles in the stalk- it's not necessarily always grocery-store perfect. It's real food, and real food isn't perfect. Grocery store food looks perfect only because it's plastic-wrapped, pesticide-sprayed, preserved and additived beyond all recognition.

So the food out of the dumpsters is the same pesticide-sprayed grocery store stuff but without the indignity of having to pay for it, or walk into a grocery store (I realised tonight that I'd rather be elbow-deep in a garbage bin than wandering lost and disoriented in a big supermarket any day of the week). Bring it home, scrub it clean, sort the usable from the unusable. Marvel at the way fortune and luck runs a dumpster-diet, the same way it runs a garden-diet: so many zucchinis this week (kilos and kilos of them, perfect and unblemished), so many capsicums (red green and gleaming yellow), but none of last week's avocadoes. Same excellent-quality grapes, a few tomatoes, eggplant, odds and bobs. None of it in any worse shape than the condition of any vegetables left in a sharehouse fridge for a couple of days. Being open to the bounty of what's around, rather than expecting the same thing every week, is what gardening and dumpstering are all about. We've spent the past week living it up on our last trip's wealth of cheeses.

As well as the veg-store places we live from a remarkably reliable bakery up the road (fresh daily bread, yes thank you, in all sorts of excellent varieties- olive, seeded, multigrain, rye!). It occurs to me that although my rent appears to be surging out of my control, a reliable free supply of essential staples, supplemented by what comes out of my garden- well, that's got to count for something.

Necessity, invention, and intriguing flavour combinations

I had about a half can of guinness left over from the night before, and it seemed such a shame to waste it, so I decided to make chocolate guinness cupcakes (recipes for which abound on the net- only a slight variation on the ever-popular chocolate guinness cake we made for cake festivities at Camp Camp). Only horrors! There was not quite enough guinness to make up the 350 ml of liquid required! What to do? Too early in the day to open another can of guinness (and that would defeat the purpose of using the left-overs), so I grabbed a pot of cold coffee and added about 100 ml of espresso to the mix.

Coffee, beer and chocolate: why didn't I think of it before? These are totally delicious cupcakes, possibly even more compelling (in a not-too-sweet grown up cupcake way) than the already exciting chocolate-guinness combination. In addition to the flavours, the texture of these is nice and moist without being too dense.

Beer & Coffee Cupcakes
250 ml guinness or other stout
100 ml espresso coffee
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 eggs, whisked
3/4 cup sour cream
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
2 cups raw sugar
2 1/2 cups plain flour
11/2 tsp. baking soda

Mix the wet things up in a big bowl, sift the dry things together in a medium bowl, add the wet gradually to the dry and mix to combine. Distribute into oiled or paper-lined cupcake or muffin trays and depending on the size of the cups, bake for 20-25 minutes (20 minutes for wee little one-bite cupcakes, 25 for the size up, 30 if you decide to go all out to muffin size) at 180C.

I got 24 medium cupcakes and 12 little bite-sized cupcakes out of this. The mix doesn't rise heaps, so you can afford to fill the cups up most of the way to the top.

I didn't have time to frost these yesterday but today I intend to make a mascarpone frosting (dark brown sugar & mascarpone combined) and I imagine it will go quite well.

Baking (like planting new seeds) feels a bit like a protest of domesticity against the uncertainty of the future of my house. I'm training myself to be able to look at my little snow pea sprouts (8 centimetres high already!) without wondering reflexively if I'll even be here when they flower and set fruit. It's a challenge.

Frosting Update: As requested. I used two sachets of mascarpone (for a total of 400g), two tablespoons of dark brown sugar, and about a tablespoon of cold espresso coffee. Mixed it up and spread it on top of the cupcakes. The result was so popular I sadly don't have any photos to share. I'm very keen to hear of anyone who decides to make these cupcakes, though, and their outcomes- I'm a lil bit excited about spreading a new recipe!

Crisis

I feel like I'm buckling underneath it all. Physically, even, hunching downwards with my shoulders trying to close around me for shelter. I'm all despair and catastrophising, angry and lost and panicking.

I know this game of endurance. I've forced my feet forward on these grim paths before. I've grit my teeth til I could feel the strain down my neck, down my arms, in the tips of my fingers. I've spent the weeks on end unable to release a full breath because a bare momentary pause will make it impossible to get back up and continue enduring. I've been stripped and plucked, a bare and incoherent little hominid squirming defenseless without a place to be- homeless, home-chaos, unwelcome, a mess- without territory, without a protective shell, without ready access to the accumulations of possessions and habits that make me who I think I am. I've survived it before, and rebuilt, and I know I will survive it again.

But I am so over a life that is lurching from one game of crisis, survival and endurance to the next. I am so sick of being vulnerable to these whims of the world, to things outside of my control. I am so tired of things being OK, barely, for a little while, enough to begin to relax a little at least, only to be upturned yet again.

I'm sick of the answer to 'how are you' being a flood of over-honest disaster, a catalogue of crisis, or else a pinched, bitten out lie: 'fine'. I'm sick of being surrounded by grim, and grey, and sad. I wonder when struggling and unhappy became normal, for me and everyone around me. I wonder why it is that between us we never seem to be able to find another way.

Dumped

Two hours in the rain, up to our elbows in half-rotted custard apples then knee deep in a drift of lettuce leaves, fossicking out the treasures from the trash. We are rich in perfect grapes and only slightly-past-good avocadoes, apples that are fine and tomatoes with a few spots, but the second dumpster provides the big scores: a two-kilo bag of ground coffee and a rich vein of cheese that goes on past where we can reach. When we get it all home and sorted there is a mountain of brie wedges and goats cheese in the fridge- more cheese than i've ever seen outside a supermarket- and in the dish rack the grapes glisten purple and lovely. We tried the bread place too as our last stop but got only a few sweet croissants. We ran into another girl coming in to rummage while we were there and had to tell her that she, like us, was too late for the good stuff.

I keep waiting for the struggle to be worth it and at odd various moments it is, or at least glimpses of a household shine through (on dumpster runs together or sharing breakfast and tea in the morning or scattered through a backyard that now functions, after a lot of hard work, on a sunny afternoon). But for it to be really worth it there needs to be some longevity- there needs to be a reason why I work so hard to get this space to function, to clean up forgotten corners, to instill new good habits, to fix broken things, to refuse to allow rubbish and apathy to pile up once more. That reason is supposed to be this final household that will work, where we will live and the people will matter more than the junk and spaces will be free of decrepit & abandoned good intentions.

Only I don't think that household is ever going to exist, now. I think we're going to have to leave. I think I will be moving again for the third time in a year. I think our big, beautiful, ramshackle house will be cleaned and polished and rented out for a whole lot more money to someone who will, down the track, whinge about how all the local colour is disappearing from Newtown (we meanwhile, the local colour, will be scattered by rent surges to the four winds).

And so I am left with this bitter hard rock in my throat when I think of all the work I've done to create a house I will never get to enjoy, and all the work that has been left for us to do by previous tenants who moved out and on and left us holding so many loose ends. The next months of our lives will be all of this effort for nothing, and the effort required will only increase as we are forced to clean up after seven years of previous tenants, seven years of history, and that work will gain us nothing but homelessness. I will leave a garden again, I will give away my plants because I just can't move them again so soon, I will probably give away my seeds because it doesn't feel like there's much point anymore.

And I will be sick, and recovering from surgery, who knows where, and it will be OK (I'm sure) because my friends are sweet kind people who will find somewhere for me to be but it's not the same, is it?

This grim vision of my life for the foreseeable future was delivered before breakfast this morning, a breakfast that I didn't even get to eat despite the profusion of food in the house. My day has not been going so well.

I got the skillz, they're multiplying...

I made myself a hat to match my scarf & arm warmers- a complete My First Crochet set! I think I'm more excited about hats than I've been about any other crochet discovery as yet, possibly because I have on occasion fantasized about becoming a milliner (my hat collection is quite vast, and learning how to put together fascinators and little hat things out of rubber and felt and small toys and netting was one of the most exciting developments of last year). The idea of having a whole collection of hats, all colours, shapes and decoration (Miss Y & I are going to learn how to crochet flowers!), with matching scarves if I choose, makes winter a far less daunting prospect.

And today Miss Y, Mr M, puppy Z and I went for an afternoon bike ride! Well, sort of. We pushed the bike to somewhere large, flat and open ("So I have time to correct before I smack into a wall") and took turns, and I RODE! For real! Upright, kick off, straight lines, navigating speed bumps, gravel, drains, pot holes- turning corners, stopping, starting, coasting, and laughing and ringing the bell! It was amazing, the sense of getting it, and now my brain craves new skills to do with it. I want to learn how to ride these scary, narrow, car-filled streets, to get from my house to friends houses in a few minutes rather than halves of hours. I want a bike. I am realising that this means I will have to learn how to put one together from the mountain of spare parts outside- more skills, mechanical rather than physical.

I went to karate this morning, then came home and spent a few hours putting together a karate study guide. I am such an incredible nerd, but honestly, a martial art taught in Japanese involves learning a new language, only the language education lags well behind the physical education, so when I'm asked to perform a gedan barai I am utterly lost, although my body knows exactly how to execute a lower block. My nerd brain came to the rescue, and hence the study guide (with diagrams!).

I've been wondering what it is about this time in my life that makes my brain so wide-open and hungry for new information and new skills, and I've formulated all kinds of wild theories- but today I realised that probably it's just because this is the first time in my life that I've not been involved in some sort of formal education. So rather than being occupied with assignments and classes and readings, my brain is open and grasping for life skills. I went through a cooking phase, then a costume-making phase, then there was gardening, and karate and yoga, and bike-riding, and crochet. All of those passions have stuck with me as I surge into the next one, this big rolling accumulation of Things To Do And How To Do Them, and it's exciting. All this knowledge, about the small things that make the world and my life a far more interesting place to be.

I called my parents house to say Happy Birthday to a couple of siblings and told them I'd been on a bike ride, and was greeted with loud exclamations (the news was relayed to the whole household and I could hear the cheers in the background). It's been so long, 20 years of being the child who couldn't do it, and now I can. It feels... really good.

Not on a dance floor

It's been so long since I've been out dancing (I don't think I've been on an actual dance floor since the last Kooky, in February). It's fallen off my priority list somehow, edged aside by karate and moving house and going away to farms and quieter nights in quieter spaces. I'm restless and eager for it but somehow keep missing out on the opportunities as they come up- I could very well have gone out last Saturday (there were a wealth of options available) but chose otherwise. And tonight is Neotokyo, a club I used to approach with an enthusiasm bordering on fanatical (some nights on that dance floor I've been so captured by a driving dark beat that the experience was practically out-of-body), and I'm not even sure I'll go because I need to make it to karate tomorrow morning. Well. I prioritise making it to karate over the potential of those hours on a dance floor, even despite the sharp, keen energy bottled up inside that wants to escape into music.

And when I think about the weekend I might fantasize briefly about a dance floor but it's the footy, and the markets, and dub club in the park that I'm more excited about. Daytime things, community things. Gurlesque on Sunday of course and maybe I'll have a go at a dance there, between the benches and the bar, but it hardly counts, does it? Not by my old standards, anyway.

I'm not sad about my life rearranging this way, I just feel like it's worth noting. That's what I used to do with my time, overwhelmingly, and now- not. From an all-weekend, every-weekend clubber to someone who might dance at this or that special event, once a month or less, and be satisfied.

Three nice things

1. Going by a half-held idea that to define or measure something could well be to alter it, I have held off defining, or measuring, or committing to words a thing in my life that makes me happy. But it feels like it's worth recording, however obliquely, that it's there, and makes me smile, in a half-dazed kind of way.

2. It was a challenge to get to karate this week but so worth the effort. I like feeling the information begin to slot into place in my head, so that I am struggling up against new boundaries of what I don't know, knowing that this is only possible because the basics are beginning to coalesce enough to reveal gaps. We were quite a mixed class tonight, lots of different levels of experience for a white belt group, and it was great to get a feel for where I'm at- not in a competitive way, not judging myself against the others, but getting a sense that for how long I've been going and how non-existent my martial arts background is, I'm doing pretty well.

3. I've inherited responsibility for a cat since I moved into my new house. He doesn't really belong to anyone but is a noble old alley cat who has chosen to retire to our kitchen in his twilight years. He's a chunky, handsome, soft-furred boy, and it's nice to have feline company again. He sleeps for long stretches on the softest seat in the kitchen, the heart of the house, and we the household sort of coalesce around him and make our plans and become the household entity we are slowly becoming.